Low Tide

The arrangement, if you could call it that, had never been made.

That was the part Ruth found difficult to explain to people, on the rare occasions she tried. There had been no conversation. Nobody had said let's do this again next year. It had simply happened, the first August, and then it had happened the second August, and by the fourth it had acquired the quality of a law of physics.

The first Saturday in August. Low tide. The stretch of sand below the old lifeboat station at Colwith, where the beach ran out flat for half a mile and the water went so far away that it stopped being a sea and became a rumour.

She had been thirty-four the first time. Ivo had been thirty-nine.

They had both been at Colwith for entirely unrelated and fairly miserable reasons — she was scattering her father, he was avoiding a wedding — and they had ended up walking the same tide line in opposite directions and had passed each other, and nodded, and then twenty minutes later passed each other again coming back, and the second nod had been so absurd that she had laughed.

They had walked for four hours. She had not asked what he did. He had not asked why she was carrying a tin.

At the end he had said, "Well," and she had said, "Yes," and they had gone.

The second August she had come back because the first had been the only four hours of that year in which she had not felt like a person being slowly disassembled. She had not expected him. She had told herself very firmly on the train that she did not expect him.

He was there. He was standing exactly where the sand went hard, with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the rumour of the sea, and when she came up beside him he said, without turning: "You're late."

That was the second year.

By the sixth they had established the rules, none of which had ever been spoken aloud.

They did not exchange numbers. They did not know each other's surnames — she had worked his out once, from a hotel receipt she glimpsed, and had felt so guilty that she had deliberately forgotten it again. They did not meet at any other time. They did not write.

And they told each other everything.

This was the strange bargain of it. Ivo knew things about Ruth that her sister did not know. He knew about the year she had stolen money. He knew what she had actually thought, standing at the water's edge with the tin. She knew that he had a daughter he had not seen since she was six, and that he had made three separate plans to change that, and had executed none of them, and that this was the central fact of his life and he had never said it to another living soul.

You could do that with someone you would not see for another twelve months. It cost nothing. It was the confessional principle: absolution is easier from a stranger, and Ivo was the most familiar stranger she had.

The ninth year he was not there.

She walked the whole beach twice. She stayed until the tide turned and came in over her shoes. She got the last train back and did not cry until Bristol.

There was no way to find out. That was the price of the rules, and she had helped set them, and she thought about that for a long time that winter — about how she had built, very carefully, over nine years, a friendship with no handles on it. Nothing to hold. No number, no surname, no address. A person made entirely of one afternoon a year, who could vanish and leave no evidence that he had ever been anywhere at all.

She went back the tenth year anyway.

He was there.

He was thinner and he had a stick and he was standing where the sand went hard, and when she came up beside him he said, without turning: "You're late."

She hit him on the arm. It was the first time in ten years that either of them had touched the other.

"Where were you?"

"Hospital," he said. "August the whole month. I did think about it, you know. Kept working out how far it was."

"You could have—"

She stopped. Because he couldn't. That was the arrangement. That was the entire arrangement, and it had been perfect for nine years, and she was only now beginning to see the shape of what it cost.

They walked. It took longer than it used to. He talked about the daughter, who was thirty-one now and lived in Leeds, and who had written to him in the spring — actually written, on paper, because she had found the address somehow — and he had read the letter forty times and had not replied.

"Why not?"

"Because if I reply, then it's real. Then it's a thing that can go wrong." He looked out at the water. "Whereas at the minute it's a letter in a drawer and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me."

Ruth thought about a tin. Thought about nine years of not knowing his surname.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," she said. "And I've thought it myself about four thousand times."

He laughed. The drain-unblocking laugh, older now.

They got to the end of the beach and turned, and the tide was a long way out and the light was doing the thing it does at Colwith in August, going gold and low and generous across the wet sand so that the whole half mile looks like something poured.

At the top of the beach, where they usually said well and yes and went, Ivo stopped.

He took out a piece of paper and held it out to her.

"That's my phone number," he said. "You don't have to take it. It might ruin it."

Ruth looked at it for a long moment.

Eleven years of a friendship with no handles on it. A person made of one afternoon a year. It had been the safest thing she had ever had, and safe was another word for cannot be lost, and she was fifty-five years old and had spent an enormous amount of her life keeping things where they could not be lost by never really having them.

"It'll ruin it," she agreed.

She took it.

They stood there a bit longer, both slightly appalled at themselves.

"Same time next year?" he said.

"Ivo," she said, "I'm going to ring you on Tuesday."

And she did.