The Carousel by Rosamunde Pilcher

next time we met, it was on the beach. I'd got a surfboard, a Malibu, from Australia. A friend had brought it for me from Sydney. There was a north wind that day, and the rollers were pouring in from miles out. I surfed until the tide changed, and when I came in, blue with cold because I couldn't afford a wet suit, I saw Annabelle sitting up on the dunes, watching me. I had no idea how long she'd been there. She wore a red skirt and her hair was loose and black and blowing in the wind. There wasn't anyone else on the beach that grey day, and I knew that she was waiting for me. So I climbed up to where she sat, and we talked and smoked her cigarettes, and the rushes all around us were flattened by the gale. I remember thinking that they looked like stroked fur. And later we walked home, and the golf links smelled of wild thyme. And a couple of men, golfers, passed us, and I saw them looking at Annabelle and then at me, and there was envy in their faces. It made me feel good. And that's the way it always was; going into a pub with her, or sitting beside her in the car, with the roof down and the sun on our faces. We'd stop at traffic lights, and people on the pavements would turn their heads, and stare, and smile."
    "They were probably thinking what a good-looking couple you made."
    "More likely asking themselves what a sensational creature like Annabelle was doing with a callow, gangling boy."
    "How long did this go on for?"
    "Two months. Three months. It was a very hot summer. She said it was too hot to take her little boy back to London. So she stayed at Penmarron. She was always there."
    "Did she talk about her husband?"
    "Leslie Collis? Not much. Rumour had it that she'd married him for his money, and she certainly didn't talk of him with much obvious affection. That didn't bother me. I didn't want to know about him. I didn't want to think about him. I didn't want to feel guilty. If you're really determined, it's quite possible to stuff an uneasy conscience out of sight. I'd never realised that I had that ability. It made things much easier."
    "Perhaps, at twenty, that's the way you're meant to live life."
    He smiled. "You sound old and wise. Like Phoebe." "I wish I were."
    He was still pacing, a caged tiger, up and down the charming, pretty room. He said, "It was about this time of the year, the middle of September. Only it wasn't raining like it is now. They went on and on, the sunshine and the warmth. So that I was taken unawares when Annabelle suddenly announced that she was going back to London. We were on the beach again. We'd been swimming. It was a flood tide, one late afternoon. The tide had come in over the warm sand, and the sea was the colour of jade and very warm. We were sitting having a cigarette, and she told me about going back to London, and I waited for utter desolation, and then realised that I wasn't desolate. In a funny way, I was relieved. I wanted it to stop now, while we were still having fun. I didn't want it to get stale. Besides, I knew that I had to get back to work. Painting has always been the most important thing in my life, and it had started tugging at me. I wanted to turn my back on everything else and concentrate on my painting, drown myself in it. My year with Chips was just about over. I wanted to travel, to learn. I planned to go to America.
    "I started to say something trivial, but Annabelle interrupted me. It was then that she told me she was having a baby. She said, 'It's your child, Daniel.'
    "You know, when I was young, growing up, I used to scare the pants off myself by imagining just such a situation. A girl, pregnant by me. A girl I didn't want to marry. Paternity suits, furious fathers, shotgun weddings. Nightmarish. And now it had happened, only it wasn't happening that way. She went on talking, and it gradually sank into my paralysed brain that she wanted nothing of me. She didn't want me to act as corespondent for a divorce; didn't want me to elope; didn't want me to marry