Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant

copying out what she had written before. He knew the scene by heart. Although he wasn’t supposed to listen to their dialogue, it was almost impossible, at such close proximity, not to; and he remembered that the last time, when he had made little grunts of disgust, or given a snort of laughter, there had been a grinding feeling in his chest at the succeeding, inevitable deletion and painting over of the typing error with a brush covered in white paint. Despite his dislike of the sensation—and if he spoke he imagined the rows of black xxxs that would come down on him—he determined to suggest escape to Johnny and Melinda, and a speedy revenge on their creator. He despised them, but had to remind himself that their unpleasantcharacters were Mrs Houghton’s fault, and not theirs. Accordingly, he looked up at just the moment when his closed, concentrated expression was being described, his medieval face and uncomprehending silences extolled, and directed a large wink at his fellow victims. They looked back at him, evidently startled. Johnny moved uneasily on his seat. Then Cridge saw a knife—a kitchen knife, plain one side of the blade and serrated the other, lying on the seat under his raincoat. Melinda was looking down at it too. Thoughtful, he rowed on in silence.
    The day, as Mrs Houghton had gone to lengths to point out in the first volume, had started bright and fresh with an easterly wind tugging at the wallflowers in the garden of the hotel where Johnny and Melinda were staying, tiny scraps of white cloud sailing across the eggshell-blue sky, the tide out and the sea lying like a carpet at the far edge of the brown waterless creeks and estuaries. The sea had come in slowly, poking fingers into the waiting channels, gathering volume in the creek outside the hotel and nudging the boats of the weekend sailors upright as it grew in mass. Cridge (only briefly described so far in the old boathouse where he sat mending ropes and waiting for custom) bumped up alongside the quay in his yellow boat and Johnny and Melinda climbed in. The boat nearly sank at Mrs Houghton’s weight, but she had insisted on coming with them, and sat in the bows with a preoccupied expression—directing their every move and thought, Cridge later realised—although she asked Melinda and Johnny where they wanted to go and nodded to him when they suggested the treacherous promontory.
    As he rowed out, the wind blew stronger and even in the sheltered creek a fair swell rose and fell under them. The open sea looked hard and grey as corrugated iron, and foam from the waves flew at them like spittle. With difficulty Cridge nosed the boat in to the side of the bank they had pointed out to him. It was shaped like a camel’s back, andhe remembered they would make love in the dip between the two humps, oblivious to the encroaching sea. He heard himself say, as he had the first time:
    â€œYe’ll watch for the tide, then? I canna wait here for ye.” (For some reason Mrs Houghton had given him a Scottish accent; perhaps she was unfamiliar with the Norfolk brogue.)
    â€œCome back in an hour,” Melinda said. “We’ll be careful. But don’t forget us!”
    As the lovers disembarked with their constant companion and voyeur—Cridge remembered feeling a fleeting pity for them: he would not have found it easy to be natural with a woman like that overlooking—he tugged at his forelock and bent over the oars again. A fine rain was beginning to fall, and Melinda and Johnny and Mrs Houghton disappeared into the dip in the camel’s back. He rowed out into the creek, and then doubled back the other side of the spit of land thus securing himself a good vantage point for the receiving of the signal when it came. He thought it was a good idea of Johnny’s to kill Mrs Houghton in this isolated place. The sea would come up and swallow her body. The writer’s death would be seen as a tragic accident,