The Best of Fiona Kidman's Short Stories (30 page)

He put his hand on her phrasebook. ‘Don't worry about it so much.'

The train stopped often in the French countryside. The small towns all seemed to have rubbish tips for backyards. Their conversation became erratic. It was still raining.

‘You must be privileged if you play tennis in England,' she mused, and aware already that he was. But she had been thinking of Eccleston Square.

His head was slipping sideways towards her shoulder. She could smell him. He smelled like a new racquet, gutsy and clean.

‘Probably. Tell me some more about New Zealand,' he said drowsily, without minding whether she did or not. She watched him. She thought of something special she would do for him.

The lock in the bedroom door worked by a number of turns in either direction. She could not work out the sequence. Not only could she not get in, but once in she could not get out either. She had to call reception three times before she had mastered it, and on the last occasion she was near to hysteria. The young man on the desk came upstairs on his own to explain it to her the first two times. His English was bad. The third time he brought another man, who spoke good English. He explained the lock in a slow and patient way as if she were simple. She considered leaving the hotel and going to another, but night had fallen and she did not know where to go.

When it seemed as if she understood the mechanism of the lock she sat in the room and shook. Several hours had passed since the tennis player had last bought her food, and the hotel had no restaurant. Even if it had, she was afraid to leave the room.

Still, at least she liked it. After Eccleston Square it was like a return to some other life where ease and comfort were again possible. The king-sized bed was covered with a frilled quilt with a pattern of pink and green peacocks, and there were rose-coloured lights on the wall. There were gold-coloured taps in the bathroom and a deep bath.

The louvre doors led out on to a wrought iron balcony overlooking Rue Pasquier. The life of the city stretched below her had she chosen to walk out on to the balcony, though for the moment the sound of traffic had caused her to close the doors so that she could hear herself think.

She knew she would not sleep if she did not eat, and maybe drink as well, and that the longer she left it the more difficult it would be to set out.

Carefully she tried the lock and this time the combination worked to perfection. Emboldened, she left the hotel and walked quickly along the boulevard in the direction of St Augustin. Her handbag was comfortably full of francs. ‘You'll be all right now, wont you?' he had said when he left her at the counter of the
bureau
de
change.
‘I'm sorry I can't see you to a taxi.' He had become tense and athletic, fretting with his tennis racquets. He had explained on the first train, in England, that his game was on the other side of
Paris. As it was, he would be cutting things fine to get there on time.

Traffic swirled past her. She could not see where the centre line of the road was, or indeed, if there were any true sides to the roads, as a car mounted the pavement and ran its left-hand tyres alongside her ankles. She leapt out of its path and watched it subside into the path of an oncoming car, which swerved in its turn.

Right up until the last moment she knew that she had been shamefully hoping. Even in the taxi, re-counting her money, which she had been
short-changed
the first time it was given to her, and she had had to demand in a loud high voice that it be counted again, she wondered if he had heard her tell him the name of the hotel, and regretted that she had not had the courage to repeat it when he was leaving.

It was after the second time that the lock on the door would not open that she admitted his expression. It was, she remembered, decent and perfectly nice, marred by a slight but growing sense of impatience.

She found a restaurant. The waiter was young. He did not speak any English at all. She pointed out a phrase in her small blue book.
Je
ne
parle
pas
bien
le
français.
Je
viens
de
Nouvelle
Zélande.
He brought her a carafe of wine without being asked. When she drank it thirstily he brought her another, and indicated to her what he had decided it would be best for her to eat.

Vous
êtes
très
aimable,
she wrote on her paper napkin when she left. She felt undone by such simple kindness.

Like the kindness of the tennis player. They had not talked about his aunts, but she knew without such a conversation taking place, that he was kind to them. He would be good to them if they were ever foolish enough to go to Paris alone. He might even try to dissuade them from going.

Inside the room she felt free, with a sudden odd delight that she was alone. She leaned against the door with her back to it. It was April, and she was in Paris. She had come from the other side of the world for this. She had
transacted
money. She knew the combination of her lock. She had bought a meal. In a minute or so she would run a large hot bath.

She had not drawn the curtains yet, and outside the night sky shone with reflected light.

Ellen walked to the doors leading out on to the balcony and opened them, breathing deeply and calmly. She stepped outside, and a fine rain was falling. She gripped the edge of the wrought iron balcony, and was happy.

As she stood there, a curious thing happened. The astonishing traffic began to grind to a halt beneath her. Two cars hit each other with a sickening thud.
The drivers leapt out of the cars, and without looking at each other, raised their fists in her direction, as if it was she who was responsible for their misfortune.

More cars began to stop. Within moments Rue Pasquier was clogged with cars askew where their owners had abandoned them with their motors running. Behind the cars that had stopped, drivers in the oncoming wave who could not see what was happening began to sound their horns.

Ellen was increasingly bewildered by the commotion. But it was surely a phenomenon which, if studied, must give insight and meaning to the character of the French. She prided herself in a lively curiosity. The men who had first waved their fists at her were now shouting at each other. But other drivers, less hapless, still appeared transfixed by something at the point where she stood. She thought that it must be above her and looked upwards, putting her hand on the wall over her head.

A man headed towards the balcony then, laughing and shouting at the same time. She drew back, afraid. She was not so far above the street that a man could not scale the wall to where she stood.

She caught a word. She was sure it was not in her phrase book.

But she understood.

When the door to the balcony was double locked behind her she ran her bath. She took off all her clothes. She looked at herself in the steamed-up glass.

The wife who might pass for a maiden aunt or a missionary who might pass for a whore looked back though it was difficult to say whether she looked any more like one of these than the other.

Most likely, she thought, she resembled the cello.

S
HE WAS HAVING DINNER
at The Sugar Club. The walls were bleak, the tables bare, and the bentwood chairs reminded her of an earlier home than the one she lived in now. The music crunched like gravel underfoot. She was dining with clever women. The food was excellent. They drank expensive wine.

At the table next to them an actor and an actress who were said to be in love and were both well known stared at each other with stony faces. They ate their meal quickly and left.

She stood up and walked through the restaurant and out the door marked Toilets. There was a passage beyond painted brick red. At the end of the passage there was the promised lavatory. There was a bowl of daffodils on the cistern. The floor was painted turquoise blue.

When she came out of the lavatory again she was confused in the brick red passage. She couldn't see the door through which she had come from the restaurant. The passage ahead ended in an alleyway that opened directly on to the street. A bicycle stood propped against the wall at the end of the alleyway. A gust of stars appeared to pass in the distant sky above the bicycle. She thought of riding the bicycle away into the night but she knew she would fall off it. Not just tonight, but any night. She had been able to freewheel once but it was a long time ago.

She opened the only door that she could see. It opened into the kitchen. It was completely white and three chefs wearing hats were sitting down talking. They looked frightened and disturbed by her entrance.

A fourth person stood with her back to the door and did not see her. It was a woman, judging by the voice, for she sang a sweet thin tune.

‘… She wears red feathers and a hooley hooley skirt …' sang the woman.

She retreated without closing the door. It was banged shut behind her.

Feeling foolish now, in the alleyway, she looked for a way to escape. Beside her, merging with the brick red paint, she saw the outline of a door. She tried
it and it opened to reveal the interior of The Sugar Club.

She walked through the restaurant with her usual air of assurance. At the table she sat down with the clever women who were pleased to see her return.

‘Oh God,' she said, leaning her head on her hand for a moment. ‘Oh sugar.'

Bloody sugar.

‘Oh bloody sugar,' she said.

F
ROM TIME TO TIME
I need to go away in order to write in peace. This is not to say that I am not surrounded by a great deal of peace of other people's making. People, meaning family and friends, have great respect for my need for peace and quiet these days. ‘Ellen is working,' they say to each other, ‘she must be left in peace.' I am grateful and sometimes overwhelmed by this consideration. So overwhelmed that I have to go away.

I go to a variety of places, but most particularly to a motel a long way from where I live. I think it is best if I do not tell you where the motel is, for the motel-keeper's wife figures slightly in this story, and I do not think she would appreciate being identified. Her role is not significant, in that it could be filled by another person, and I have thought of cutting her out altogether, but I find that difficult, simply because she was there. Instead, I will tell you that the motel is perched on the edge of sand dunes on one of those bays that stretch limitlessly around the eastern coast of the north of New Zealand, the sand so blazingly white by day, that it makes the eyes reel in their sockets when you look at it, and in the moonlight makes you think of Peter O'Toole playing Lawrence of Arabia. Which leads one on to thinking about going to the movies and sitting in the back stalls of picture theatres of which there are, or were, countless replicas of each other, in every little town that anyone has ever lived in in this country of ours, in the days before we all had television. Oh, if you want to be exact, some had television when O'Toole played Lawrence. Like I said, not all of us.

I was thinking especially along these lines when I went to this motel to write a film script. I had taken a copy of William Goldman's
Adventures
in
the
Screen
Trade
with me, and my portable electronic typewriter, a tin of lambs' tongues in jelly, which I find a delicacy of unparalleled delight, a number of avocados, and several bottles of wine cooler. Everything was in its place, and I had already been in residence for three days. On the night of which I write,
I had spent a great deal of time walking up and down the beach
thinking
visually.
It was mid-week and the motel was almost empty, even though it was early summer. Sensibly, I had come just before the school holidays. Next week it would be different. For now, I had the motel, built to simulate a Spanish hacienda, more or less to myself. The beach to myself. My splendid panoramic thoughts all to myself. To tell the truth, it could get a little boring; I often long, in these periods of controlled peacefulness, for the phone, to which nobody except my nearest relatives has access to the number, to be rung in case of emergency, to ring (well, hardly anyone, my agent always rings long distance, it pleases him that I have so much discipline) or that it be time to decently call it a day and turn on television.

Hence the hours between late afternoon, when it feels as if I should be at home preparing a meal, and the time when it is dark can be difficult to navigate. I walk along the beach then, watching with a certain wonder the growing accumulation of footprints which turn outwards at the toes,
threading
backwards and forwards along the sand, tracing and retracing the way they have come; these splay-footed feet wearing sneakers are my feet.

It is relevant here to give a little of the layout of this motel and its
surroundings
. The setting is a lonely landscape with only two or three houses to be seen in the far distance. They are of the very large cedarwood variety, and their owners are rarely seen, if indeed they are in them at all. These brooding livery-looking houses may well be the cottages of the rich for all I know.

The motel units run parallel to the beach, separated from the sand by a narrow strip of kikuyu grass and then a band of very tall grass which is quite impenetrable. You would cut yourself on the whiplike grass if you were to attempt to walk through it. The only route from the motel to the sea, then, is down a narrow track in the dunes at the far end of the units. If one stays in any but the end unit it is necessary to pass the windows of all the other units in the row in order to reach the track. The windows are all floor-to-
ceiling-length
glass. Essential of course; the view is magnificent. As they say in the guidebooks. Straight out from the window of my unit (I always have the same one, its window is angled best for morning light where I have my typewriter) there is a barbecue area. I have never seen anyone using it, but then, as I said, I do not come in the season.

That is the time and the location. Add to this, the cast. So far, there is only me, and a suggestion, as you will have noted, that the motel-keeper's wife is to have a walk-on part. There is also about to be a guest appearance by a thin woman of indeterminate years and pale grey hair. She arrived at lunchtime, driving a sedate and well-cared-for Austin, gleaming with fresh polish. She struck me as the kind of woman who would not buy a Japanese car on
principle. I, unfortunately, am the kind of woman who cannot afford to have principles. Not in this business anyway.

I had seen the thin woman sitting in a deck chair on the balcony of the unit at the farthest end away from the track. Twice she had got up and picked her way past my window, but when she came to the track it seemed to
intimidate
her. She looked round furtively to see whether I was watching this failure of nerve, and when she observed that I had my head down and wasn't looking, or at least, that I wasn't going to show that I was looking, she returned the way she had come, passing close by me, her head shaded by a large sunhat tied in place by a scarf knotted under her chin, and her hands encased in fingerless gloves made of white muslin. I thought of giving her a fright and saying hullo, but that seemed silly, like breaking the rules on the beach at Brighton. For I suspected her of Englishness. Or an escapee from the Raj. Oh the far, the far far pavilions.

By five o'clock she had given up all pretence of going to the beach and was sitting quietly in her deck chair. She looked pensive and refined.

Another carload of people arrived, and this car told me a great deal about the people who rode in it, a sharp white Cordia Turbo. Middle-range young executive, I thought. Or a computer salesman (maybe both). Doing well anyway. Consumer goodies. If I were putting a young upwardly mobile executive and his wife in my film I would appoint them a Cordia Turbo. Unfortunately this was not possible. My film was to be period history.

Having, as I thought, summed up the man and the woman in the car, and suspecting momentarily that they might not be married to each other, I did not think much more about them. I was restless and it was time to go to the beach again.

I walked for a long time. I wanted to get away from the motel for it was beginning to feel crowded. I realised that I had been short-changing the virtue of solitude. I didn't have the beach to myself either. Several people passed me, and then a boy on a trail-bike. In the distance there was a truck parked on the sand, and a man and a woman and a child were gathering driftwood and stacking it on the back of the truck. I could see that they looked poor, and the woman wore a scarf knotted under her chin, though not in the manner of the pensive English woman. Rather like a peasant in jeans. This was a new scenario, and as set pieces went, quite perfect in its way. Vintage Bergman.

As I came back level with the motel, I saw that the couple whom I identified as the pair in the Cordia Turbo had come down to the beach. The man had taken off his tie, and was swinging the jacket of his three-piece suit in one hand. He was a heavily built man, perhaps in his forties, certainly older than his companion, a woman whom I took to be thirty or so. She had
taken off her high-heeled sandals, and was drawing a pattern in the sand with one varnished little toe. Her legs were the colour of pale buffed teak, shown off to good advantage by a white linen suit. If she was fractionally plump it was not to her discredit, for everything about her shone with health and an attention to the details of her appearance. I could not help but admire her, and the tilt of her head as she looked up at her companion and smiled at him, with all her bright white teeth surrounded by a glossy smile. Still, they looked awkward on the sand, in their expensive clothing, and I saw them turn back to the motel. Relieved, I decided to wait a few minutes until they were back inside. I had noted that they were in the end unit, facing the track. Soon I too would go inside and eat the food out of the tins, and expensive fruit, have a drink, ring home, and prepare to listen to the sea all night long. For I find it hard to sleep when I am at the beach.

The sun was dropping over the sea. If you looked out over the water it was blinding, but the air was still tremendously yellow and bright. I made my way towards the motel. When I was half-way across the grass I stopped, embarrassed.

There, in front of the window of the end unit, was a man bending over with his back towards me. I thought he was' taking off his socks. He had taken off everything else. I was confronted by what, in our vulgar New Zealand way, we describe as a brown-eye.

I would agree, if it were suggested to me, that my imagination was
overheated
, but I swear, at that moment, the man's arsehole looked as big as a saucer. I looked away, afraid that he would stand up and catch me looking. Anyone can get caught with their pants down. So I have often heard it said. But something about the way he moved drew my eye back again.

The man was not taking off his socks at all. He was bending over the woman in white who was lying on the end of the bed. The polished brown legs flicked up around his waist, and I caught, out of the corner of my eye, the action of a deep diver taking the plunge.

Again, I have to admit to a certain admiration for their style.

I moved around inside my unit with exaggerated care. I found that my hands were shaking. I felt a deep consternation for the couple from the Cordia Turbo. How desperate they must have been to make love that they had not pulled the curtains, I thought. How terrible they will feel if they look out and find someone peering in.

Of course there is no one to peer in at them except me, I told myself. The people on the beach do not come up here. The motel-keeper and his wife will not look; they are used to such impatience, hands which shake when they sign the register, such a surfeit of civility and normalcy from people who will
pay with cash instead of cheques or credit cards in the morning; they have been trained to look the other way. And the woman from the Raj will have already locked her door and hidden the key even from herself.

So why should I, so full of concern and love for them (for overwhelming passion is attractive, you must admit, it is the stuff of movies after all), be so undone?

I opened a tin of meat, and cut open some tomatoes. Ritualistically, I set the table. But I was not hungry. I opened a wine cooler. When I am at the beach it is my habit to sit on the balcony and drink something light, and watch the setting sun. Tonight I realised that this was not possible, if the couple did not close their curtains. The balcony looked across to their window and while, in fact, I could not see into their unit from my balcony, they could see me if they looked up and not be certain whether or not they were within my range of vision. I drank some of the wine beverage rather quickly, standing at the sink, looking through the window that faced the back of the motel complex, trying to take pleasure from the assortment of debris I had collected from the beach and the grass outside and placed on the windowsill: half a thrush egg, its turquoise colour like pure light on the dark wood; another piece of eggshell, which I could not identify, white with pale brown speckling and a soft matt finish; a piece of wood with a regular even grain worn smooth; the skeleton of a fish with a stone in its eye; the thrown head of a spinifex; and a handful of goose barnacles.

I cannot stay in here, I thought. The place was driving me crazy. I was certain they must be finished by now. Long enough had elapsed for the act to be completed, certainly given the urgency I had witnessed, and now they must realise that the curtains were open.

Feeling resolute, as if it required a significant act of courage on my part, I walked outside, and back towards the sea. When I came level with the end unit I kept my head down, but with a quick neighbourly concern to ensure that everything was now in order, I flicked my eyes sideways.

The curtains were open.

The brown eye was disappearing in and out of the folds of its own cheeks with increasing rapidity, and the bright petal-pointed toes were twinkling in the air a very considerable distance from each other.

I walked on down to the beach. I felt I was being watched, but dared not look over my shoulder. I sat down on the sand and my heart was pounding. I was gripped by a quite extraordinary agitation, as if I had been caught in some discreditable act. I put my head down on my knees and tried to think. Now that I had come back to the beach I had placed myself in a terrible position.