However, the pilot seemed unconcerned, his bony forehead exposed above his goggles, long hair tied in a brigand’s knot. Forrester waited, hands gripping the rail in a confusion of emotions — he wanted to see this reclusive and standoffish doctor plunge on to the rocks, but at the same time his complicated rivalry with Gould made him shout out a warning.
At the last moment, with a bare twenty feet of runway left, Gould sat back sharply in his seat, almost pulling the aircraft into the air. It rose steeply over the broken concrete causeway, banked and made a low circuit of the sea before setting off inland.
Forrester looked up as it crossed their heads. Sometimes he thought that Gould was deliberately trying to provoke him — or Judith, more likely. There was some kind of unstated bond that linked them.
‘Did you watch the take-off?’ he asked. ‘There won’t be many more of those.’
Judith lay back in her sun-seat, staring vaguely at the now silent airstrip. At one time Forrester had played up the element of danger in these take-offs, hoping to distract her during the last tedious months of the pregnancy. But the pantomime was no longer necessary, even today, when they were waiting for the practicante to bring the results of the amniotic scan from Figueras. After the next summer storm had done its worst to the crumbling runway, Gould was certain to crash. Curiously, he could have avoided all this by clearing a section of any one of a hundred abandoned roads.
‘It’s almost too quiet now,’ Judith said. ‘Have you seen the practicante?
He was supposed to come this morning.’
‘He’ll be here — the clinic is only open one day a week.’ Forrester took his wife’s small foot and held it between his hands, openly admiring her pale legs without any guile or calculation. ‘Don’t worry, this time it’s going to be good news.’
‘I know. It’s strange, but I’m absolutely certain of it too. I’ve never had any doubts, all these months.’
Forrester listened to the drone of the light aircraft as it disappeared above the hills behind the resort. In the street below him the sand blown up from the beach formed a series of encroaching dunes that had buried many of the cars to their windows. Fittingly, the few tyre-tracks that led to the hotel entrance all belonged to the practicante’s Honda. The clacking engine of this serious-faced male nurse sounded its melancholy tocsin across the town. He had tended Judith since their arrival two months earlier, with elaborate care but a total lack of emotional tone, as if he were certain already of the pregnancy’s ultimate outcome.
None the less, Forrester found himself still clinging to hope. Once he had feared these fruitless pregnancies, the enforced trips from Geneva, and the endless circuit of empty Mediterranean resorts as they waited for yet another seriously deformed foetus to make its appearance. But he had looked forward to this last pregnancy, seeing it almost as a challenge, a game played against enormous odds for the greatest possible prize. When Judith had first told him, six months earlier, that she had conceived again he had immediately made arrangements for their drive to Spain. Judith conceived so easily — the paradox was bitter, this vigorous and unquenched sexuality, this enormous fertility, even if of a questionable kind, at full flood in an almost depopulated world.
‘Richard — come on. You look dead. Let’s drink a toast to me.’ Judith pulled the trolley over to her chair. She sat up, animating herself like a toy. Seeing their reflections in the bedroom mirror, Forrester thought of their resemblance to a pair of latter-day Scott Fitzgeralds, two handsome and glamorous bodies harbouring their guilty secret.
‘Do you realize that we’ll know the results of the scan by this evening? Richard, we’ll have to celebrate! Perhaps we should have gone to Benidorm.’
‘It’s a huge place,’ Forrester pointed out. ‘There might be fifteen or twenty people there for the summer.’
‘That’s what I mean. We ought to meet other people, share the good news with them.’
‘Well…’ They had come to this quiet resort at the northern end of the Costa Brava specifically to get away from everyone — in fact, Forrester had resented finding Gould here, this hippified doctor who lived in one of the abandoned hotels on the playa and unexpectedly turned up in his aircraft after a weekend’s absence.
Forrester surveyed the lines of deserted hotels and apartment houses, the long-shuttered rotisseries and supermarkets. There was something reassuring about the emptiness. He felt more at ease here, almost alone in this forgotten town.
