Rafe had been in the sea for forty minutes when Dina arrived wearing her walking boots.
They were her own boots. The guest connection copied what she was wearing, including a red lace in the left one and the pale mark where she had cleaned mud from the right. Rafe had sent her an invitation with a picture of the beach. She had come prepared for a different beach altogether.
“Is it deep?” she called.
“Not here.”
She walked to the edge of the water and stopped. The small waves reached her toes. They were just high enough to break white around his knees, and the water held the warmth of late afternoon although the sun was still high.
“You can change those,” he said.
“I know.”
She had a bag over one shoulder. He had forgotten how she stood with a bag, leaning slightly away from it, as if it contained an animal which might wake.
Rafe came out of the water. The sand did not stick to his feet. He had chosen that on the second day.
They embraced. Her coat was rough against his bare chest. He could have made the room warmer for her, or the sea cooler, but she had told him when she accepted the invitation not to alter things on her account.
“You look well,” she said.
He did. Here he wore his own face at thirty-nine, with the scar above the lip and without the deep marks beside his nose. He had tried twenty-five first. He could not bear the confidence of it.
“Come and see the hotel.”
The Blue Lantern stood where it had stood the summer they met, on a low rise above the beach. The terraces were white. The awnings were striped green. Rafe had spent weeks correcting the shade of green; the service’s first version had looked like a dentist’s waiting room.
He had been the breakfast cook. Dina had cleaned the bedrooms. In the afternoons she sometimes brought him a stolen hour beside the water, though both of them remembered those hours as longer than they could possibly have been. They had remained friends through jobs, marriages and three cities in which neither wanted to live anymore.
Now he was retired. His pension covered the modest flat where his body lay in a comfortable chair and the subscription which put him here. He left for meals, sleep, errands. For the past month he had spent most of his waking day in this one afternoon.
He had not been bored.
Dina ran her hand over the terrace wall. At the far end a waiter cleared two glasses. He was a made-up waiter, with no troublesome resemblance to anyone who had actually worked there. The other guests were made up too. Rafe had declined the option to give them stories. They were shapes moving through light, no more insistent than the striped awnings.
“You got the tiles,” she said.
“I had a photograph.”
“The broken one too.”
“I put that in.”
She touched it with her boot. He had been proud of the broken tile. A completely new hotel would have been much cheaper.
They went inside. The lobby smelled of furniture polish and the small cakes that had once been set beside the reception bell. Dina took one. She ate it in two bites and licked a crumb from her thumb.
“Those were horrible.”
“I’ve improved them.”
“Good.”
She took another.
He showed her the dining room, empty between meals, and the view through its long windows. The kitchen door stood open. Beyond it was a clean room with no heat rising from the stoves. He had kept his old bench but removed the bell by which guests used to announce that they were still waiting.
Dina looked through the doorway.
“I don’t blame you for that.”
He laughed. He had not known he was waiting for her to say it.
Then she went toward the stairs.
“Where’s the top flight?”
The guest staircase curved up to a landing with three doors. It ended there. Above the landing was a tall window full of blue sky.
“I didn’t need the rest,” he said.
“Our rooms were up there.”
“I know.”
She stood at the turn, one hand on the rail. In the real hotel another narrow flight had led to the staff rooms beneath the roof. Rafe’s was at the back, above the extractor. He had slept to the sound of it even on his day off.
“I thought you’d want to see the beach,” he said.
“I did. I do.”
She looked at the window where the stairs should have gone.
“Can you put it back?”
“There’s nothing to put back. I didn’t build it.”
He heard how that sounded. He opened the room controls and offered her the guest pencil, a thin white line she could move with a finger.
“We can make it.”
They began with the landing. Rafe remembered bare boards and a bucket under a leak. Dina remembered the window over the town, which he had never looked through because his room faced the other way.
They made both.
The service filled in spaces between their descriptions. When it placed a vase on the landing, they removed it together. Nobody would have wasted flowers upstairs. Dina put a striped towel over the rail. Rafe remembered the towel so clearly that he had to sit on the top step.
“That was yours.”
“I still have it.”
“You stole it?”
“It was always mine.”
She opened a door. Inside appeared two narrow beds with a space between them scarcely wider than her boots. She moved the beds apart, then closer again.
“That’s it.”
“You shared with Mart?”
“Lena. Mart was next door.”
He had remembered it wrong for thirty years. Dina made a small shelf beside the window. On it she placed a record player with a lid that would not stay up. She propped it with a hairbrush.
“You had that here?”
“Where did you think we danced?”
“You went out.”
“After. We got ready up here.”
She found a song in her own library and let it play. The little room filled with a voice Rafe knew without remembering when he had first heard it. Dina moved one foot, then the other. Her boots made a heavy sound against the boards.
“You used to bang on the wall,” she said.
“I started at five.”
“I know.”
She did not turn it down. He had given her control of the room.
Rafe sat on the bed which had belonged to Lena. Outside the window, the service was inventing a town from Dina’s account: a cinema, a yellow roof, washing which would never have been visible from so far away. He liked watching it appear. He disliked the thought of that music following him downstairs.
“We can leave this here,” he said. “I’ll just keep the sound off downstairs.”
“Of course.”
She sat beside him. The mattress dipped under her weight. That had cost extra, the small responses that kept another person’s presence from feeling like a picture.
For a while they listened.
Their train was at nine the next morning. Dina had booked two rooms in a guesthouse beyond the old hotel. They meant to walk the coast, see the Blue Lantern before it was pulled down, and eat somewhere that had no reason to remember them.
Rafe had agreed in August. In August this room had been a list of options on a sales page.
“Is your bag done?” Dina asked.
“Nearly.”
It was not begun. There was a bag under his real bed. He had not taken it out.
“The forecast’s better,” she said. “We might get sun on Sunday.”
He watched a gull pass the window. It did not cry. He had kept gulls but removed their voices.
“I looked at the trains back.”
“We’re coming back Monday.”
“I could come for the first day.”
She turned toward him.
“You could. We’d miss the headland walk.”
“We could do that first.”
“Not between arriving and your train. It’s a six-hour walk.”
He had looked at the map. She knew he had.
“It’s going to be full of building work,” he said.
“The hotel, yes.”
“And the promenade’s all different.”
“It is.”
She took her bag from the floor. She had carried it up every flight. He could have made it disappear, but it belonged to her guest settings.
“I’m not going to tell you the real sea is better,” she said. “This one’s lovely.”
He waited.
“But I can’t walk beside you there if you don’t come.”
He stood and went to the window. The yellow roof caught the light. He had never known it was visible from the staff rooms; he would not have known what to look for if he went back now.
“I’m not coming,” he said.
Dina fastened her bag. One catch stuck. She pressed it with her thumb until it clicked.
“All right. I’ll cancel your room.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
He could have asked her to stay for a swim. He opened his mouth, then shut it.
She stood up. “Show me the way out.”
“You can leave from anywhere.”
“I know. Walk down with me.”
They went down both flights. At the bottom Dina touched the broken tile with her boot again.
“Send me a picture,” Rafe said.
“If I take one.”
Then she was gone. No fading, no door. He had selected a simple end to guest sessions because he disliked farewells staged by software.
The song was still playing upstairs.
He stood in the lobby through the rest of it. When it began again, he opened the controls and muted the upper floor. He kept the room. He kept the towel on the rail, though he could not see it from below.
Outside, the waiter was taking the two glasses away. Rafe went past him to the beach. He entered the water slowly, waiting for the small waves to reach the scar on his shin.
It was exactly as warm as before. He stayed until his dinner alarm sounded.
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