They looked much like most of the other couples: loose ageing skin, thinning hair, slightly overweight and at the far end of middle age, a fate that they had long predicted for everyone else but themselves, but they were healthy and happy, with a patience that was not going to be defeated by the long queue stretching back from the silent young man who stood across the departure gate checking the passports. It was a crowd of Hermès scarfs and Panama hats, leather holdalls, loafers and espadrilles, chinos – lots of chinos – and frequent bursts of laughter every time someone said something mildly witty, for they were determined to have a good time and were not going to let the impudent man who tried to match the old photograph in the passport to the face in front of him dampen their spirits. Was that a smirk on his face? He was young. He was ignorant. He did not have to repeat to himself again and again, like a mantra, almost every day, that true beauty was the beauty from within.

 

Here and there among their rowdy elders a few young couples stood quietly and listened with shy smiles. Sarah could see no children in the queue, not real little ones, but then she remembered that, of course, it was the end of September and children ought to have been in hibernation in a classroom somewhere. It was many years since Adam and she had had to refer to the school calendar, with the grudging reverence of a guilt-ridden sinner seeking advice in the Scriptures, before booking a holiday. These days they could go away whenever the fancy took them, and so here they were on that anaemic morning at Southampton docks about to sail to the Caribbean.

 

When Adam had first suggested the cruise she had been surprised at the price, not cheap but quite reasonable for a fifty day holiday: he had calculated that it came out cheaper per day than a stay in Margate. But there was a caveat: they would be going during hurricane season. He had said, ‘It would be fine. As long as we are prepared for the worst.’ The worst? She had baulked for a moment as images had flashed through her mind of giant waves and lashing winds and the ship veering round wildly. Mayday! Mayday! What was that film Adam had taken her to on their first date? They had kissed when the lights had dimmed. She had been twenty-four and he a couple of years older… A long time ago. Somewhere between that cinema and this cruise terminal they had been mugged of their youth. Time had run away with it. Thief! Thief! She had said, ‘I’m not sure it’s a great idea, dear.’ But Adam had convinced her that in the age of satellites and turbine engines the chances of actually being caught in a storm were slim. The worst that could happen was a slight change to their itinerary.

 

She looked at her husband. He wore his glasses and read the paper, his hair rumpled, his shoulders drooping, his belly pushing against his loose untucked shirt. He used to be very thin for many years. The change had come suddenly when he had begun not to care about the way he looked. She combed his hair with her fingers and he grunted a thank you while keeping his eyes on the paper. Then her eyes travelled along the queue and again she marvelling at how much the men looked alike, more than the women who had a more adventurous sense of clothing – even their faces were not all that different. Like, like – the Terracotta Army. She imagined them buried in a tomb, row upon row of them, dressed not in stone armour but in wide-brimmed hats and chinos and espadrilles from Marks & Spencer.

 

Her own reflection in a nearby window did not arouse as much pity as disappointment in her even though all their friends said that she had aged well. Still, she took great pride in the way he looked after herself. As soon as she had noticed the first signs of, well, decay (she was not a woman to mince her words) in her late thirties, she had made a solemn vow never to let herself go, and by God, staring at her reflection now, thousands of grapefruit later, she had been as good as her word. It was vanity, yes, to an extent, but also, she told herself, one of the ways that she resisted the torpor of growing old. She did not spend all day in front of the mirror working on her face with the diligence of a restorer bent over the Dead Sea scrolls. She did other things, too: she walked the dog in the Common every morning, swam twice a week, looked after the garden, went to the theatre, helped in a local hospice. In fact she was busier than ever. The queue moved forward. She called at Adam, who tucked the paper under his arm and followed her the desk, searching his pockets for their passports. She braced herself for the smirk, but the young man only gave their passports a quick glance and waved them on. They walked through the door and joined the rest of the passengers crowding the gangway.

 

It was not like her to sleep badly. Adam was the one who tossed and turned all night while she lay on her back with the serenity of a funerary statue in some cold cathedral. Cold – that was it. She got off the bed and turned the air conditioning down, then lay down and put the eye mask back on, convinced that she had solved the problem, but her mind ignored the commands of the winged daemon of dreams until, half an hour later, she took off the mask and lay staring out of the glass door to the balcony of their cabin, thinking of Autumn (their golden retriever), her friends from pilates, the tulips that she would plant when they got back. Then, after these harmless meanderings, her mind found its way back to what she had been thinking of since last weekend: one of these days she would become a grandmother.

The previous weekend they had driven to the country to take Autumn to Michael, who would be dog-sitting during their holiday. While her son had lived in the city, they used to have him over one Sunday a month, a tradition that Michael had remarkably kept even after getting married to Kate until, at the end of one of those long lunches, over their last sips of wine, he had taken hold of Kate’s hand on the table and announced that they would be leaving the city. Adam had raised his eyebrows and then, bringing them together, had looked at his wife demanding to know why she had not warned him, but it had been the first she was hearing about it, too. She had dreaded to think where the boy would move to: Paris, Frankfurt, New York, Hong Kong – Ulan Bator? It could have been anywhere. The world needed patent law the way it once needed vaccines. Then Michael had said that he had resigned his job and the couple would be moving to the country to start their own business. ‘And what business is that?’ Adam had asked. Artisanal cheese, apparently. Her husband had spent a week making a spreadsheet to calculate how much their son’s education had cost them, going as far as calling his old private school to dig out what fees he had paid, and had sent an invoice to Michael with bitter humour, not expecting that two days later he would receive a cheque in the post for the full amount. He did not cash it, but never spoke about their son’s choice again. Sarah did not share her husband’s disapproval. In fact she preferred Michael in wellies and cloth cap to having him sit at a desk twelve hours a day, and besides there was no reason why cheesemaking could not be as rewarding as the protection of intellectual property.