THE HOUSE AT SEA’S END

earlier on had confessed to Ruth that she ‘never wanted to get bloody married anyway’, suddenly had a second wind and dragged the others out onto the dance floor where they scandalised the cooler clubbers by dancing round their handbags and demanding Abba songs.
    Tatjana is in the middle of them, her hips, in skin-tight jeans, gyrating like a teenager. ‘Tatjana’s
fab
,’ pronounced Judy. Ruth, sitting alone at the tiger-skin table, knows that
she
isn’t fab, that she’s forty, that she has a five-month old baby who’ll be awake in four hours, that her shoes hurt and the waistband of her best trousers is digging into her skin. She’s too old for all this and she’s just remembered that she never liked clubbing anyway
    Should she ring Shona again? She decides against it. She has already rung four times, and the last time Kate had finally gone to sleep and Shona said that she was about to follow. Shona has kindly offered to stay the night (she will sleep in Ruth’s bed and Ruth will have the sofa) so that Ruth and Tatjana can ‘let their hair down’. Ruth’s hair, unpleasantly sticky from Tatjana’s application of hairspray, feels as if, metaphorically, it is in a tight little bun. She doesn’t want to let her hair down and do wild things: she wants to be in bed with her baby beside her and Flint purring on the duvet. Still it was kind of Shona to offer. She hadoriginally asked Clara but she said apologetically that she couldn’t do Saturday. Probably out with Dieter, thinks Ruth, remembering the embracing figures in the snow.
    She seeks out Judy and asks if she wants another drink. Judy appears to be in a trance, her hair across her face, her limbs twitching randomly. Glancing around, Ruth sees that everyone else is in the same state. Except Tatjana, who is dancing abandonedly with an exceptionally handsome black man.
    ‘What?’ says Judy.
    Ruth repeats her question.
    ‘No,’ says Judy vaguely. ‘You’re all right.’
    Ruth approaches Tatjana, who is now draped around the man’s neck. His hands are firmly clenched on her bottom.
    ‘I might go soon,’ says Ruth, trying not to look.
    ‘Go?’ repeats Tatjana, eyes shut.
    ‘Home. Check on Kate.’
    ‘Kate?’
    Ruth gives up. She decides against another drink. Instead, she takes her gold lottery ticket and goes to retrieve her coat. She’ll send Tatjana a text to say that she’s left.
    Outside, it is freezing. There is already frost on the ground and on the nearby parked cars, none of which seem to be taxis. Ruth decides to walk to the station, to see if there are any cabs there. Her feet are blocks of ice in her unaccustomed high heels and she finds it impossible to walk fast. Some passing youths shout at her but she ignores them, head down. She wishes she’d brought a woolly hat, gloves, her trusty wellingtons …
    ‘You want a lift?’
    A car has come to a halt beside her and she looks down at a smiling, toothy face. The car is a dark saloon, slightly battered.
    ‘Are you a taxi?’ she asks.
    ‘Sure. Minicab.’
    For a moment she is tempted to get in beside the sinister smiling man. At least she’d be warm in his car. Before he murders her, that is.
    ‘It’s okay,’ says Ruth, trying to walk faster. ‘I’m meeting someone.’
    The car glides along beside her for a few minutes then, to Ruth’s relief, it veers away. She has reached the reassuring lights of the station. Here, thank God, are other people – a few disconsolate football fans clutching lager bottles, a bemused-looking man with a briefcase and a mother holding a baby. What can she be doing at King’s Lynn station at two in the morning? Ruth tries to give the woman a reassuring mother-to-mother smile but she looks away, clasping the sleeping child against her shoulder. Should Ruth offer them a room for the night?
    The taxi drivers do not want to go as far as the Saltmarsh.
    ‘New Road? That’s miles.’
    ‘No can do, love. It’s out of my zone.’
    Ruth is desperate. She almost considers going back to look for the smiling man in the minicab. But, eventually, someone takes pity on her.
    ‘All right,’ says a fat man in a Ford Cavalier. ‘Sunday rates, mind.’
    It is Sunday, thinks Ruth as the taxi shoots through the deserted streets. In a few hours, people will be getting up, going to church, buying the papers. For the first time in awhile, she thinks of her parents. Sunday is the most important day of the week for them; church, elders’ meetings, Bible