AND THEN A STRANGE thing happened. She entered the false lull that sometimes follows upon shock. She did not go home. She did not want to go home. By staying there she did not have to face calamity. She neither thought her son was dead nor was alive. She thought nothing. ‘I’ll stay one more day,’ she would say, and mean it, but next day she was uttering the same thing. It was like being another person. She did not struggle. In the numbness of her flesh she could feel no reaction except a new and fanatic urgency to get sunburnt. She was the first out each morning, hurrying through the twilight of trees to sink on to the mattress which she had permanently booked. A few feet from the water. She had only to stretch her toe for the water to curl over it. An Arab with treacherous black-eyed cunning went by selling goat-skins, but never troubled her; another man came with dampened red roses in tight bunches of probably a dozen, and a third carried English papers and called out their names, but she bought nothing. She said nothing. When the English group smiled at her she looked abstracted. The woman with the lorgnette had grown tired of propositioning. They were merely living ghosts to Ellen. She’d bought new sunglasses with deep-blue tinted lenses and the effect was like being enclosed and swimming in an underground grotto with the soft noise of eddying water to lull the senses. No trouble from people. Once the glasses slipped down on her nose and she caught sight of a Scottish girl with a black crescent on her pink and freckled arm where teeth had sunk in. She’d seen the girl hover around the violinist in the lobby at night and heard her address him in garbled French. When Ellen saw that bite she felt distaste and, recalling the crudeness of day-to-day encounters, she quickly restored her glasses, retreating back to the safety of her grotto. The sun, the numbing sun was all she craved. Stretching her legs full length she would close her eyes and let it soak into her and pray for it to get stronger and stronger so that all the other people would flee and it would focus on her alone. She believed other people’s presence was taking some of the fire from her. It was not enough that her outer skin should be burnt, she wanted it to penetrate right through her, to flow into her limbs as pure fire and become part of her energy. She talked to no one now, she looked at no one; sometimes through her lenses she would see people going by, shadows that came between her and the sun, and she never even speculated whether they were men or women. Gradually she altered. Her skin changed to red-gold, the colour deepening each day and at night she would go to sleep thinking only of the morning and the next day’s baptism of fire. She ought to be feeling sad. She ought to be going home. She ought to be weeping. But she refused to think outside the environment of white, wan, listless-making heat.
Sometimes of course thoughts forced through, like damp seeping through stone walls or weeds bursting out of a slate roof. Then it hit her. She saw him, felt him, heard his voice:
‘The most bloodthirsty animal is one and a half inches long. It is the common shrew.’
This and many scraps of knowledge like confetti fluttering around in his busy scatter-brain. They all spoke to her. A succession of his voices as they changed through the years: when he couldn’t pronounce R, the lisp when he lost a tooth, the big, portmanteau words he loved, whispers of little feats to George in bed at night. The time he’d said, ‘George is having a high and mighty piss contest,’ and checked her face to find traces of anger, and seeing none went on repeating the word ‘piss’ with the jubilance possible only to the very innocent. She had horror images of his body in pieces all over the road and his arms wrenched off and thrown there. Then in her mind she would try screwing the arms back on as if they were dolls’ arms. Piecing him together.
But that was to be expected.
On the whole she managed. She ate quite well and did not over-drink.
One late afternoon as she lay on the mattress, she felt, though her eyes were closed, that the someone standing over her was not one of the passing people. She stiffened. Her husband. Catching her out. How could she sit up and say, ‘I am not malingering, I am getting some streng before I come face to face with it,’ and looking through her lenses she saw that the man’s face looming over her appeared to be smiling.
‘So there you are,’ it said. She recognized Bobby’s drawl.
‘Oh you,’ she said, and sat up, neither pleased nor displeased.
‘Thought you were in a…?’ she didn’t finish the sentence.
‘Full o’ fairies,’ he said; sitting next to her.
‘You look all right.’ He pushed the straw hat back on her head so that he could see her face clearly.
‘I feel all right.’ She was grateful to him for not asking why she hadn’t gone home.
‘Nice place,’ he said. He looked around and made faces at the bored, expectant girls, glistening with brown come-hither jelly. One stood up when she saw him and walked slowly past. He looked her up and down and said as she went by, loud enough for her to hear:
‘ Hail, the performance of the arse. Seats in all parts…’ She strolled to the sea and perched herself on the neck of the white gondola that was a few yards out. As if riding the neck of a swan.
‘Waiting for a squitter,’ he said, waving out to her. She did not wave back.
‘You have a one-track mind,’ Ellen said, but she was glad of a little conversation all the same.
‘Who?’ he said, and laughed. Then in an effeminate mincing voice he recited :
But I do like to pee beside the seaside
I do like to pee beside the sea,
And I do love to pee inside the seaside
With someone peeing in me…’
The English group manned by Arthur heard this and rose huffily, to leave. It was early for them.
‘You’re driving people away,’ Ellen said. The English wife dressed her husband as Ellen had seen her do each day. She helped him into his shoes, his underpants and then his shorts. He’d graduated to wearing shorts.
‘Jesus, man, where’s your genital pride?’ Bobby said, aiming the pistol of his finger at the helpless husband.
‘You haven’t told me about Tangier,’ Ellen tried to engage Bobby, ‘and Denise.’
‘Fuck Denise,’ he said, and rested his head on the floor of the beach to have an under view of the man who was being dressed.
‘It’s there,’ he said, gripping her arm but looking in the direction of the English group. It was as if he had set himself a bet over it. ‘The member is present all right,’ he said, and then in a downcast voice, ‘but not waiting to strike,’ and burying his face in the sand he groaned and wallowed there.
‘You’re gone,’ she said. When he sat up his eyes were closed and his sand-encrusted face a mask of what it once was. Sad and pained now, he held her hand and asked again how she was.
‘Did you come to see me?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Why?’ But she knew why.
‘They didn’t tell me…I didn’t hear about it for three days, then someone said…well someone said it.’
‘Sometimes I don’t…believe it,’ Ellen said. He squeezed her hand and told her to talk or not to talk whichever she preferred and they sat like that, looking out to sea, and there was not a puff of wind. He brushed the sand away from the corners of his eyes but left the grainy mask over his face.
‘Someone called it azure snot,’ he said, ‘Rimbaud, I guess. Only poet there was.’
‘Called what?’
‘The sea, you goose,’ and then, very alertly, he flicked his fingers and asked, ‘Goose, what do you think of, quick?’
‘Potato stuffing,’ she said.
‘Jesus, women have no logic,’ he said. ‘Ask me one.’
‘The colour of a road?’ She flicked her fingers as he had done.
‘All colours, ma’am, but I liked them gold.’
‘What do you remember from when you were small?’ she asked.
Something about his voice had put that golden road in a childhood sequence.
‘Little sister gettin’ done, saw it through a keyhole.’ He closed one eye again and screwed up the other. The English group had departed.
‘And peaches,’ she said, ‘falling apart.’ The thought of anything falling apart now put it back in her head, the image of the way her son died. He put an arm around her.
‘I have kids,’ he said. ‘Never see them.’
‘Why?’ she said, accusing.
‘Their mother thinks I’m a wolf.’
‘Are you a wolf?’ She knew she was going to cry.
‘I’m a wolf, I’m a wolf,’ he said and snapped at her with his strong white teeth and then he cradled her in his arm and let her cry. Sometimes he made a joke about people going by and said she was missing a ball because corruptions were quickening all over the place. Sometimes he just patted her and then again he’d say,
‘Wow, if people on the set could cry like you.’
She cried and spoke in senseless bursts and blew her nose into a towel. One minute she was saying: ‘He put his clothes in a paper bag at night to save them from the moths,’ and then she was describing how he cut his own hair and got sorry and tried to stick it back on with Sello-tape before she saw it and that made her cry worse, and when she remembered, she apologized for blowing her nose so much. For no reason at all she began to talk about turtles on an island in the South Pacific. She said: ‘Their mothers lay eggs in the sand and then they can’t find their way back to sea and they wander all over the sand delirious and crying – turtles cry – and the children are born and they wander too, and they never know one another and they’re all crazed and wandering.’ There was some point to the story but she forgot it.
‘The century of hell,’ he said, in a low, even voice and for a minute she gave a thought to his children and asked how many they were and what sex.
‘You’ll have another kid,’ he said. ‘Or you’ll have something?’
‘How do you mean?’ she said. Had he come with the intention of sleeping with her?
‘You know,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen things – pretty things – come out of slums and slag heaps and manure heaps; you see those big, indiscreet trees?’ He pointed to the palms behind the dressing rooms.
‘They are indiscreet,’ she said, through her tears.
‘Something will come,’ he said. ‘Some sort of…You might get to be a gipsy like me.’
‘I’ll never get over it,’ she said, affronted.
‘No one’s asking you,’ he said, and then he rose and pulled her up by the hand and said,
‘We need some liquor and fortification after all this high-powered talk and stuff…’
Going up under the trees towards the hotel she blew gently to get the last traces of sand off his face, and then she asked if she could change into another dress. She really wanted to bathe his eyes, because they looked bloodshot.
‘We’ll buy you a dress,’ he said, and grinned. In the hotel boutique he bought her a costly white dress with a purse to match. The dress was made of linen, with big sleeves in which her hands could nestle. Like the saints that appear in the liturgy of the Church: white and limbless and very still.
‘It’s chastity day,’ he said as they sat in the hotel, drinking a white frothy drink that he’d had specially made. He ordered four drinks each time because it took the barman some time to make them. In that way they were never without a drink. They were called daiquiris and there was rum in them, but because of their froth-like appearance they looked harmless. Sometimes he reached out and touched her hand or let his fingers travel up her arm under the mantle of white, but the touch was delicate, like the ineffable touch of winds. Suddenly she missed the wind and wished she could hear it blow.
‘You cheer me up,’ she said.
‘Eye-wash.’
‘You do.’
‘I carry pessaries around,’ he said, ‘pessaries to cheer women up.’
‘You’re never serious,’ she said.
‘Serious!’ he said as if she had just uttered an obscene word. ‘Jesuses and Virgins, who wants to be that?’
He would not entertain any talk about his wife, his children, his friends, pictures he’d been in or pictures he was going to be in. Now and then he concentrated for long enough to tell her the exact taste and texture of a melon he’d had in the Arabian desert, its name and the superstitions attached to it. The melons he described had long, descriptive names like the names of Chinese poems. He talked about the light on the stones in Greece and how it changed as one drove by, and what it was like to be one thousand leagues inside the world’s most sinful woman.
A little blurred from the drinks, mesmerized by his voice and his way of touching her thin arms under the wide, sacramental sleeves, she heard everything he said and did not question it, even when he said preposterous things. It fell dark outside, people passed through to dinner, and still he did not show signs of moving. The waiter brought almonds with the fresh drinks. Bobby gave big tips. Like her he wanted to be thought generous, and yet he insulted people.
‘Are you the Bobby So-and-So?’ asked a man going by.
‘I am a Bobby so-and-so,’ he said, and nodded to the waiter to take the man away. She stirred her drink nervously with a rod. There was a thin wooden rod for stirring, and a heart-shaped ashtray with three gold hollows on the rim for three cigarettes, though there were only two of them. Sometimes she looked in the wall mirror to see him talk to her, and his talking and her listening became half-dream, half-happening because of the awful silence of five days, the strong rum drinks, the love he shed on her. They were at a table near the window, the light outside a dark impenetrable blue. It did not seem like the same hotel where she’d met the violinist. He just went by and stared at her in an unseemly way. She felt triumphant that he had seen her with a man. A display of flowers at her back worried her hair and, leaning over, Bobby plucked one and put it under her armpit. The violinist saw that too. She held it tight, tighter, crushing it under her arm, thinking that perhaps its red dye might harm her new pure dress, thinking, but not over-worried.
‘Your turn, ma’am,’ he would say and look at her. She could say anything she liked. So long as she didn’t talk serious or ask questions about his life.
‘My knickers getting wet in a field of barley,’ she said. Sensation for sensation. He’d given her the white peaches.
‘A holy hour in a lavatory with a strumpet,’ he said.
‘Chamber pots never rinsed,’ she said, and thought again of her home, the two bedrooms, wet clothes slung across the indoor line, the table never fully cleared off, relish bottles, relish stains, the garden as the lavatory.
‘Keep it clean,’ he said, and feigned anger by raising his fist.
‘Wild garlic sweet on the breath,’ she said quickly. They were playing a child’s game and to miss one’s turn was to fall out of the game. There was garlic in the hedges that boundaried the barley fields. And ‘Please do not trespass’ signs. And she herself not much higher than the high swaying barley ears. The landlords responsible for the ‘Please do not trespass‘ signs could hardly distinguish her. She was blonde, also. It was later in life her hair darkened to red-gold.
‘Good,’ he said and rose and stretched himself. She put the pressed flower in her new purse, and left a drink untouched.
‘Look,’ she said, showing the satin inside of the purse, ‘it’s clean.’
There was a car waiting for him outside. The driver handed him a telegram, but he didn’t open it.
‘Open it,’ she wanted to say, ‘in case you have to go,’ but as they got into the back seat he stuffed it in his pocket. His tie billowed out from the draught caused by the open windows and she saw the label of a Paris fashion house.
‘Grandeur,’ she said. He took the penknife, the same one that he had used to cut the hairs off the artichoke, and sawed the label off and tossed it through the window.
‘Someone else will find it and stitch it on,’ she said.
‘I don’t care, I really don’t care.’ It was a thing he said often as if he had to assure himself of his indifference. They drove to a castle that was also a restaurant and he asked the driver to come back at midnight. The stone entrance arch was covered with vine and bell wistaria and there were a few flowers still in bloom, their light mauve phalloids hung limply over the green soft leaves. Like a man and a woman after loving. It was well known for its pictures, he told her, and very solemnly he walked her through the stone passage and from room to room to see the various paintings hung in dark gilt frames with tubular lights above each one. The rooms were dark but she could see the pictures quite clearly. Her favourite was of a drunk but thoughtful woman at a café table. Not joking now, not saying anything except a surprised and marvelling ‘Christ’ from time to time when he saw something that staggered him.
They ate out of doors and a huge black dog rested at their feet.
‘It’s the devil,’ she said, ‘keeping us apart.’ The dog was between them under the stone table.
‘You got the story wrong, ma’am, the devil is the guy who brings us together, it’s mean old…’ He looked up. The sky was vast and calm, its deep-blue light protective over them, and over all the holiday sinners. His mouth full of wine, he gluggled up at it and it seemed as if his laughter and his happiness vibrated on the leaves he looked through. In a seizure of happiness, she said:
‘It’s the nicest night I’ve ever had.’
And for that little minute she did not feel guilty for being happy so soon after her son died. Even when he was alive she was only a mother some of the time. She doted and hovered over him for months and then of a night she would have a wild longing to go through the town and do delirious things and not bear the responsibility of being a mother, for hours, or days, or weeks.
They had crudités du pays to start with. They were brought on a huge dish, and were of so many kinds of vegetable that she giggled about a garden having been wheeled through. There were two eggs also on the dish, their brown shells glistening, where they’d been buttered. He cracked one deftly on the stone table, held it over his mouth and swallowed it whole. She burped over-genteelly into the sleeve of her new dress. She could not stand eggs.
‘Come on, eat,’ he said. He knew the best sauce to dip each separate vegetable in and he chewed untíl he had robbed each mouthful of its flavour.
Afterwards they had a Châteaubriant steak and the wine that came was in a very old bottle with a cobweb round it.
‘We never swam,’ he said, as they recalled the day and how they’d passed it. ‘We’ll swim tonight.’
‘I can’t.’ Better tell him than have to stand shivering in a bathing suit and disappoint him.
‘You can’t swim!‘ he said. She nodded. He would teach her the next day. She touched his hand lightly in gratitude. She thought again of the young priest that had once saved her from drowning and now, looking at Bobby, she thought of his greater gift to her. He’d given her forgetfulness, a day’s distraction, a day’s healing. When she remembered her son at all it was a sweet memory of his living another life, with real children, in a place she called Limbo. In a sense she inhabited Limbo too, a place of almost-painless, patient consciousness through which other thoughts from her other world wandered. But her son was in a happiness place. She’d had him secretly baptized as a baby and she had a sneaking relief about that now. Not that she believed or disbelieved, she simply did not know.
‘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.
‘Back to the hotel,’ she said to the driver. It took about half an hour. They had an argument over the fare when they got back. He had quoted one price and asked for another.
‘Crook,’ she said. Luckily he didn’t understand.