August Is a Wicked Month (16 page)

‘Is there an after-life?’ she said, quite ordinarily.

‘There’s half a glass each,’ he said, holding the wine bottle firmly and taking the cobweb in his grasp. Afterwards she thought the cobweb got on his face because he wiped his jaw from time to time of some nuisance.

‘Is there?’ she said, looking towards the sea, made vaster by the darkness.

‘What about the snails that have their heads cut off and grow new heads, what about that?’

‘What about it?’ she said. Had her fearfulness disappointed him? He wound a corner of the napkin round his finger and removed castor sugar from the valley at one side of her mouth. Detaining his hand with her cheek she looked at his arm in the white shirt and then at the tiny rim of dirt in the fold of the cuff.

‘Dis…gusting,’ he said. She was never to forget how he said that.

He booked a room in her hotel, to be there for the morning for her first swimming lesson. The biggest compliment anyone could have paid her.

‘I’ll be down in the lobby,’ he said, ‘so don’t worry.’ They were on the threshold of her bedroom, the door half open but the light in the room not on.

‘Bobby, Robert,’ she said. She wanted to kiss him, thank him, make known to him with all of her five senses how perfectly the day had gone.

‘Get sleep,’ he said, whispering because it was late, and then, as she lingered, he took out a tiny silver pen and wrote on her neck where the new dress had a diamond opening. She looked down to read, but the scroll was too close under her chin to see.

‘See ya,’ he said, and put the pen as a token in her new purse. In the bedroom mirror she saw what he had written:

QUEEN OF HEARTS

It was still there in the morning.

Early next morning she had her first lesson. He bought rubbers for her arms and while he was blowing them out he told her to go and make herself known to the sea. The beaches all around were empty except for the sounds of children. She hated the sounds of children now and put her hands to her ears instinctively.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘baptism by water…’ It looked so simple to walk in. There were no clouds written on the water. It was still cool, and a mist shrouded the places all around and as far as she knew there was only him and her. Coming into the sea he took her hands and forced them both to duck down and douche their bodies, then rise up and shake the water off their faces. He said she must first get used to the water going in her eyes. ‘Your hands,’ he said again, taking hold of her and he moved away until they were at arm’s length. It took a lot of persuasion before she risked raising her legs from the sea-bed, but when she did, she clung tenaciously to his hands, and declared the most extraordinary trust in him. She could live like that for the whole of her life, his hands holding her, his beautiful happy eyes beholding her, her legs and body lost, but safe.

‘Kick, kick, kick,’ he would say as she moved towards him and he moved an equal distance away.

‘Kick as if you were kicking a man,’ he said. They laughed and stood for a while, and in the water he embraced her, a thing he had not done on land.

‘We’ll stay here for ever,’ she said. But he said no. The first day she couldn’t overdo it because her limbs would tire. True enough when they did come in and lie on the mattresses her legs ached and her stomach felt as if it had just been put to the first use in its whole life. They swam a couple of times more, and once they dried off with the sea water on them and another time they stood under the tap and he washed her all over and washed her hair even though she didn’t wish that. Then he swam out alone and she kept looking for him but lost him among all the other swimmers. They lunched on the beach and afterwards he got the driver to take them up to the mountains. They went to a town where the shops sold only pottery. Vacant lots were strewn with yellow rubble, stone dust got in the back of the throat, and looking at some dying broom in front of houses she yearned again for rain, and the sight of cold violets overwhelmed by strong rain. They walked up and down the streets comparing the different pots in the different windows and with so much to choose from they ended up buying nothing.

He came every day then to give her a swimming lesson and afterwards they would lie side by side, hardly talking. Sometimes he would ask if she wanted anything and she’d reply with, ‘We’re lucky, aren’t we?’

‘We’re sneaky,’ he’d say, or smile or wink or just turn her hat around so that the back ribbons dipped over her face.

‘And it’s not over yet,’ she’d say, and to that he always said, ‘Shush,’ and they’d cease talking and lie for several more hours of inaction until dinner.

Once they came out of the water quickly due to the fact that she panicked when he tried letting go of her hands, and standing on the beach he stretched himself restlessly. All the strength and rest of days bunched in his shoulders. A fierce lustre in his green eyes. She thought she was about to lose him.

‘I want white peaches that are imperishable,’ she said, shivering. He looked down at her. He mistook her trembling for fear. He knelt and stroked her back in a round-and-round slow movement and said, ‘The water won’t harm you, baby.’

‘It’s not the water,’ she said, and then he said, very thoughtfully, ‘If I don’t make you happy it’s a waste of time.’

‘But you do make me happy,’ she said, leaning back on him. The rise and fall of his breathing deciding her own breaths. At times she thought her heart had gone behind his skin and his had entered her own, magically.

That night they went to another restaurant along the port at Cannes and she tasted another new fish.

‘Twelve new fishes,’ she said.

‘Even Christ didn’t have that variety,’ he said. He looked at her laughing face, loose hair, honey-sweet glow on her neck, except where a gold chain kept a hair-line of white, a pendant between her fingers, the lips parted.

‘You know something?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’m going to save you for Sundays and Holy Days…’

‘And I’ll save you for weekdays,’ she said. Her muscles ached from the swimming. Soon it would not be enough to sit opposite and lie near and feel his heart beats through her own. She wanted to die in him. He knew but hung back from it. He kissed her each night at the bedroom door and left until morning. Not in so many words but with a look she would try to ensnare him.

‘See ya…’ he always said and went away. At times she wanted him so badly she would have grovelled. On these occasions she felt possessed by deep and agonizing humiliation. She must not degrade him. And yet he liked her and it seemed so unnatural that he should not want to consummate his liking. He, the notable philanderer. The idea that he might love her did not take grip because in some ways she was not devoid of common sense. She had a constant ache to be close to him. Under cover. The way they were in the sea. But he always drew back. A resentment slipped in between them when she tried to prolong his kiss. Was she merely unattractive? He had loved Denise. Ripe now and rosy all over with a heart like a breaking rose, she wanted to lie under him and get from him a child, quickly. She said it next night when they were in a swish bar in Cannes. Always after dinner they went to various bars for drinks. People looked at him, waved, and sent drinks over, and still he gave everything to her. He might look jokingly at the girls on stools poised for discovery, but never long enough to alarm. She lived in the world of his light-green eyes and his sudden madness and his equally sudden spasms of torture. Sometimes he looked as if his body was being sawn through. She thought he had a pain but he said no.

‘I wouldn’t want to hurt you,’ he said, ‘getting back to the sleeping bit.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘I won’t plague you tomorrow or the next day, I’ll leave you alone.’ She believed this as she spoke it, because since her son she thought the only valuable thing in the world is the gift of life. She could cope with loss now, and a broken heart, and aloneness; she could cope with longing except when he sat opposite her and trained the searchlight of his being on hers. Her legs would automatically curve out and her knees fall apart, surrendering. Her legs and the thighs above them were like tree trunks frozen throughout a winter until he had come, the God of Thaw, to flow through the tree trunks of her legs and make it spring again.

‘But
I
might plague you,’ he said.

‘You won’t.’ He was going shortly, to make a picture, and she was going home. Their paths, as she said half jokingly, half solemnly, might never cross again.

‘Drink up,’ he said. They went to the next bar. They liked to go to several each night. They were energetic and wild and they loved to hustle into these quiet bars and liven them for a bit, and also to revive themselves by the newness of each place and the different sets of faces with their very similar expressions, expressions hungry for fresh adventures. He met up with friends whom he could not ignore. Whole chains of people converged and put their arms round his neck. He seemed to be a prodigal to them; He drank a lot, and his eyes got quickly bloodshot. Again she longed to bathe them with a little eye bath of soothing, lukewarm liquid.

‘Show ya…’ a man said to him and took out a list of telephone numbers. They were all girls’ numbers. He wanted Bobby to take a copy of the list. After each girl’s name there was a dossier:

‘Mary, Mary must not be touched above knee.’

‘Stella schoolteacher likes to come first.’

‘Denise back from Austria on the 12th.’

But Bobby had these numbers. He took out his own diary, read a telephone number, then another, and smiled! They were the same numbers. Ellen walked out into the lobby, she could not bear to listen. She kept walking up and down looking at scarves and blouses in the hotel display windows.

‘You’re full of shit,’ she said when he came out. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Did I ever say otherwise?’ He linked her. They were going on to other night-clubs. Better spots.

‘Where?’

‘On…’ His voice was very loud. She had a feeling that she should not go, that their days and nights were going to be fouled upon.

‘I’ll go back to the hotel,’ she said.

‘Don’t do that.’ He looked hurt. He was asking her to stay. She said she felt out of place. He cursed furiously. A whole string of ill-matching swear words flew from his lips, and above and beyond their resonant foulness she knew that he had called her a ‘goodie-goodie.’ She resented that and swore bitterly that she had never tried to thwart him in any way. One of his men friends came and asked what was going on, and shrugging it off Ellen followed them to the cars outside.

‘We won’t be too late,’ she said. Bobby didn’t answer. They went to a gambling place but she never got past the bar. Bobby and two other men disappeared for about an hour. She was among women who talked about the celebrities they knew and men who bought numerous drinks. Beautiful girls sat along the walls, patiently waiting for their gambling partners. If he didn’t come within the hour she would go. Her mind was boiling over with vexation, but she tried to keep calm and centred her attention on a man who was contemplating a plate of sandwiches and who suddenly wrenched the beef from between the slices of bread and ate it with venom.

‘Hello nurse.’ Bobby came back to say he had lost a lot of money and would she mind waiting for a while until he retrieved some of it.

‘You stay, I must go, I must go,’ she said. She was tired and had drunk too much. The place frightened her. The people behaving like people in a slaughter-house, intent on only one thing: massacre.

‘You won’t stay?’ He had collected an audience.

‘I’m going.’ She got off the high stool and moved shamefully towards the door.

‘Okay, big nurse, you’ve been trying to bull it for weeks.’ He followed her. His friends sniggered as they watched him catch hold of Ellen’s shoulder. Out on the street he became contrite.

‘I must stop it, I really must,’ he said. ‘I must get a shit detector.’ She agreed. Such stupid people! Talking about celebrities and Thunderbird motor cars and jewelled watches.

‘Even you,’ she said.

‘Even what?’ he asked. He had the edginess of the drunk.

‘Boasting about your wine cellar.’

‘Don’t even have one,’ he said and brought her to the car. That night he did not conduct her to her own room but to the suite he had booked for himself in her hotel. She’d never set foot in it.

‘My nurse,’ he said and put his face to hers and kissed her as he had not kissed her before. They made love, of course. The sun that had passed into her limbs and through her old, bereaved bones came to life in her then and as they loved and struggled and fought and re-united she begged for him to thrust higher and higher and deeper and deeper because this time there was to be no mistake and nothing was to leak out of her. Afterwards she clung to him with her thighs and, extracting himself, it was as though he was now the breaking rose and his strength had fallen away inside her, like petals.

‘Jesus,’ he said. She could not understand him saying it.

‘Are you shocked?’ she said. He turned over and went to sleep. It was morning. Dawn glimmered through the half-shut blinds and light coldly entered the strange room. Unaccustomed as she was to a man she could not sleep with him beside her.

He wakened very soon after and got up. He was quite a while in the bathroom. Then he emerged, dressed.

‘Where are you going?’ she said, half out of bed now.

‘To get a toothbrush,’ he said.

‘Use mine.’ She would run down the corridor in his silk bathrobe and get one.

‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘My mouth’s full of shit.’ He went out.

She put it down to the remorse of the puritan, to hangover, to moodiness, to exhaustion, but an hour later when he was not back she began to fret. She got up and went out and searched for him on the beach and along the other beaches and in the bars and she asked barmen but none of them had seen him.

‘Last night, widtha lady,’ one man said.

‘I know,’ she said. He obviously didn’t recognize her as the white-frocked creature of sanctity from the night before. At noon when she learnt that Bobby had settled his hotel bill, she took a car to Sidney’s house. It was well into the mountains and the car got covered in dust. She kept looking at the dusty yellow chrome, as she stood at the hall door and waited. Antonio came and told her that Mr Bobby was not there and neither were any of the other guests. She asked where Mr Bobby might be. Antonio did not know. He asked if she would like coffee but she said no.