Page 16 of The Honeymoon Affair

‘I can’t do this any more.’ He puts the pages on the table and this time weighs them down with a large stone. ‘I thought I could, but I can’t.’

‘Do what?’

He doesn’t answer, but instead puts his head in his hands and then rests both on the table.

‘Are you all right?’ I ask.

He remains silent.

To be honest, I’m a bit worried about him now. And about me. I wouldn’t have put him down as some kind of crazed killer or anything, but you never do know, do you? Women and girls trust men all the time before realising they shouldn’t have.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’ll be off. Ouch.’ The ouch is because a sharp twang of pain has shot through my ankle. ‘Um, I’ll be off in a minute.’ I sit on a nearby tuft of grass and rotate my ankle gently. It isn’t even swollen, so I know it’ll be fine, but it obviously needs a little more TLC before I take it walking again.

‘What part of Ireland are you from?’ he asks suddenly.

‘Dublin. Marino. And you?’

‘The south side.’ He gives me a half-smile when I tell him I won’t hold that against him.

‘Do you ever get stuck?’ His tone is far more conciliatory now, mellow and actually quite soothing.

‘Stuck where? How?’ I’m wondering if he’s talking about Dublin’s notorious traffic, or about Northsiders and Southsiders preferring to stay on their respective sides of the river, but he tells me he means work. He wants to know if I ever don’t know what I should be doing.

‘Not really,’ I reply. ‘I follow procedures and the outcome is inevitable.’

‘Do you think about work all the time?’

‘My line of work is all about a single day. Of course repercussions can happen later, but basically I go in, do my job and go home. It’s why I love it.’

From his original pose of seeming to look past me, he now removes his sunglasses and stares straight at me.

‘What do you do?’ he asks.

He looks startled when I tell him. People often are. In the same way they’d be startled, I think, if I said I was a tax inspector. Because everyone has a moment where they’ve brought home too many cigarettes or too much booze from a holiday, or made a slightly suspect claim on their tax return. Minor things that nobody gets too exercised about, to be honest. It wasn’t the job I expected to get when I was transferred from Agriculture to Revenue, but when the opportunity came up, I thought it might be interesting. Besides, I don’t like being stuck behind a desk. I like being out and about.

‘I can’t see you in Dublin Airport calling stressed passengers to one side,’ he says.

‘I don’t work at the airport,’ I tell him. ‘I’m based in the docks. I check maritime traffic, not people coming home from their jollies.’

‘You mean freight?’

‘Mostly,’ I say. ‘Lorries coming in from everywhere. It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.’ I smile at this. I love my job, even if I do get a bit grubby from time to time. But you know how it is, you say things to people to keep the conversational ball rolling. Not that I’m entirely sure I want a conversation with him.

‘I see.’ He’s looking at me appraisingly now.

‘And you?’ I ask. ‘What do you do that has you working when you should be on your holidays? Because don’t tell me you’ve come to the White Sands to work. It’s a place for total relaxation.’

‘Not for all of us.’

I wait. He waits. I think he’s expecting me to say something, but I’m not sure what it is. And then I realise that I thought he was familiar before and he’s definitely familiar now. It’s his mid-Atlantic accent that’s ringing a bell. But he’s not a movie star, crap as I am at recognising them. I know most of the older ones and I can’t place him in anything. A singer, perhaps? One of those tenor trios that were all the rage years ago? Something like that?

‘I’m working on my novel,’ he tells me. ‘I came here for peace and quiet.’

‘Your novel?’

‘Charles Miller,’ he says.

And now I remember. He was on The Late Late Show a while back, talking about the movie of his bestselling book.