William had not planned to go to St Ives over the May bank holiday. But four nights earlier, out of the blue, his wife, Helena, had announced that she was going to Paris with her friend, Dotty Blaine, adding casually that it would be ‘all right about the dog and the cats’ as William would be there ‘to see to them’.
I’ll be damned if I will, William had said to himself. As those who feel wronged will tend to, he searched about in his mind for something that would demonstrate his difference from his wife. He had never yet visited the Tate Gallery in St Ives and had been promising himself that pleasure for years. Helena didn’t share his enthusiasm for modern art.
‘I’m afraid I shall not be here,’ he said, more belligerently than he felt, for the truth was he felt rather scared. ‘I’m going to St Ives.’
If Helena, who was used to her husband’s mute acquiescence in her suddenly announced but often long-brooded plans, was surprised to hear of this proposal she didn’t allow it to show. She was a woman who had worked to make efficiency her hallmark and she was not to be put out because her husband had taken it into his head to be mulish and awkward. She organised a neighbour to see to the cats and for Wanda, their cleaner, to walk Daisy the dachshund.
‘I’ve given Wanda the number of the burglar alarm in case it goes off while we are away,’ was all Helena said as she swept a carmine streak across William’s cheek on her way out of the door to the taxi which was waiting to take her to Heathrow. She smelled, as always, delightful and William felt a flash of regret. But as his small act of rebellion seemed really not to trouble Helena he did not allow compunction to lessen his excitement.
So now he was on the train to Penzance, inwardly mouthing the Robert Louis Stevenson rhyme for children, Faster than fairies, faster than witches as they rushed through a countryside all green and white and yellow and alive with fields hopping with sturdy-looking lambs.
William had booked a room at a hotel he had found via the Internet. Privately he abhorred the Internet, perhaps because Helena had become such a mistress of it. Their aged copy of The Good Hotel Guide had disappeared (no doubt considered by Helena redundant it had been passed on to a charity shop) and he was reluctant to give his wife rope by asking for her help. She would be sure to ‘know’ somewhere he ‘must’ stay. This trip, he had determined, was to be strictly his enterprise.
Arriving at Penzance, an almost violent smell of sea assaulted his nostrils. Above him a chaos of seagulls wheeled, white as angels, noisy and obstreperous as alley-cats. The hotel, painted a maritime blue, was easy to spot on the nearby rise. William was breathing hard by the time he had hauled himself and his suitcase up the cobbled incline. Not that he was a heavy man; on the contrary, he was slenderly built and fighting fit, he liked to think, for his years.
He was reassured by the hotel’s peaceful interior: no sign of brass-work or Cornish piskies, a pleasing smell of wood smoke, elderly, well-polished furniture and white china jugs of pretty wild flowers. The young hotel manager showed him to his room.
‘You’re lucky, we had a cancellation so I put you in our best room. There’s a view front and back, and you can see the weather from your bed.’ The manager drew back the curtain to a chorus of screeching gulls. ‘It looks set fair for the whole weekend.’
William hoped this was an omen and unpacked his clothes. Unsure what to do next, he went out to explore Penzance.
It was the inconvenient time of day when – unless one is an alcoholic – it is too early for a drink and too late for tea. William bought a vanilla ice cream, licking it rather dubiously as he walked by the old harbour. It was one of those enjoyments, he decided, which are better in recollection. He had forgotten how ice cream will always drip down the cone and on to the wrist and sleeve, and was relieved when he finally polished the thing off.
What to do now? Had Helena been with him there would have been no problem filling the time. Already, she would have formulated plans for the day ahead and his part would have been merely to agree with or, less likely, dispute them. Over the long years of their marriage, the initiative had passed lock, stock and barrel to Helena. Suddenly a free man, he felt, as old recidivists are said to feel, nostalgic for familiar constraints.
He walked past a café which displayed in its window a timetable of the local bus service. Here was the chance to make some sort of plan. The bus to St Ives, he calculated, ran every forty minutes and took as long to get there. Well, that was good. He could set out tomorrow after breakfast and be in St Ives by ten.
There was a couple already in the hotel lounge when, after several consultations of his watch, William felt it was decently possible to go down for a drink. The couple, expensively dressed, were sitting knit together on the more comfortable and capacious of the sofas. The girl had with her a vast patent leather handbag which she had placed on the coffee table so that it obscured William’s view. Helena would have asked her to move it. Instead, William wished the couple good evening and asked if they had had a pleasant day.
The couple, who turned out to be Austrian, admitted that their day had passed well. But their demeanour indicated that this concession was to be the extent of their intimacy with him. They were there, their healthy young bodies suggested, for serious pleasure and were not about to squander their time in dull conversation with elderly men.
William took refuge in the dinner menu. Had Helena been there she would, by now, have been suggesting what he might like to order, forbidding certain dishes on health grounds and urging others on him for similar reasons. She herself would have chosen what was most likely to keep her figure the trim size 10 it had been since they had first met. Dover sole, probably, or perhaps the sea bass. William found it was easier to guess what Helena might have eaten than to choose for himself.
Dinner was just himself and the amorous Austrian couple, who had taken off their shoes and were playing footsie under the table. William ate his lamb in silence. He thought wistfully of Daisy and felt envious of Wanda walking her in the park.
Over coffee, he chatted to the young hotel manager, more for a need to demonstrate to the Austrians that he was capable of being good company than for any inclination to talk. He confided his project of visiting St Ives. The manager said that it was possible to hire a car from Dave’s down the road but that if he were William he would take the local bus; the parking in St Ives was dreadful and the traffic tomorrow would, he could guarantee, be nobody’s business.
William, in fact, had already decided on the bus, but he was grateful for the manager’s advice. His wish to oblige was such that he might have felt compelled to hire one of Dave’s cars had the manager recommended it. Politeness, as Helena never tired of assuring him, was William’s bane.
Despite the large dimensions and even larger softness of the bed, William slept poorly. He dreamed and woke with a start but with no recollection of the dream. Getting out of bed, he went to the window and drew back the curtains. Moonlight was playing in a trembling dance over black water. The masts of the boats made a stack of black spillikins topped with an occasional white blur of resting birds.
William got back into bed, turned on the sidelight and tried to read his book. But it was no good. For the life of him he couldn’t take in what he was reading. He switched off the light and lay in the sea-lit darkness, wondering about Helena. Was she sharing a room in Paris with Dotty Blaine and if so did they lie and chat together at night, as he and Helena had done in the past? He remembered a time when they were students, lying in someone’s loft in sleeping bags, side by side but with their cocooned bodies touching, talking through the night till the birds rang in the morning. He would not be sure what to talk to her about now.
He was very early at the bus stop, a habit for which Helena mocked him and he felt the relief of being allowed to indulge his anxiety free of any critical comment. Over the years, he could not help having noticed, his wife had grown to the opinion that her husband was a poor fish. Well, perhaps she was right, he thought, stepping on to the bus which had now pulled up and was letting aboard a queue of impatient passengers.
William found a seat towards the back of the bus. Behind him, two American women seated themselves and, as they got underway, became enthusiastic and voluble about the Cornish countryside.
‘See there, Janie, those lambs. They might be out of a nursery rhyme.’
Janie, it seemed, was made of sterner stuff than her companion. She remarked that the same lambs were very likely bound for the butcher’s block, adding that the lamb they had had last evening at the restaurant had been as sweet as butter.
Her travelling companion was silent on this topic but kept her end up by trying to recall a children’s rhyme. ‘As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives … but I can not remember how it goes on, Janie.’
William turned around. ‘Seven wives had seven cats, seven cats had seven kits, kits, cats, men, wives, how many were going to St Ives?’ he quoted.
The woman who was not Janie beamed. ‘That’s it. How very kind of you.’
Janie had been calculating. ‘Twenty-two.’
Her companion laughed, exalted but nervous that she was about to best her friend. ‘No, the answer’s one. You see he met the man with all the wives. He, the man with the wives, I mean, was coming from St Ives, it’s the speaker who is going there.’
But Janie was not to be contradicted. ‘Why shouldn’t he meet them on the way? He might be overtaking the guy if he had all those blessed creatures to drag along with him.’
It was the sort of remark Helena might have made. William turned back to observe the countryside. The fields were not, as they had seemed from the window of the train, merely yellow and white but pink and blue besides. He wished he knew more about wild flowers. He had picked up a little about the garden ones over the years from Helena. Helena, as she liked to say, was ‘dedicated’ to her garden.
Reaching St Ives, the bus came to a faltering halt on the brow of the hill. Fearful that Janie and her companion might latch on to him, William set off purposefully down the crowded streets towards the wide curved sandy bay where the St Ives Tate stands.
His visit to the gallery took up most of the morning. He was looking at a drawing of roof-tops by Ben Nicholson when he noticed a tall young woman, dressed in jeans and boots, entering the room. She was not particularly good-looking but her face was interesting. It was long and pale and bony, the sort of face, William speculated, that an artist might like to draw.
The girl came across and stood beside William, looking at the clean line of the roof-tops until he half thought of addressing her. But as he was considering what he might say she wandered off and out of the room.
William, watching her leave the room, found that he was hungry. He walked downstairs and out of the gallery and went in search of lunch. He followed the narrow road till he found a small place, not too crowded, advertising homemade soups and salads. He was eating a ham salad when the tall girl with the bony face came into the café. Involuntarily, he smiled at her.
The girl looked at him, frowning slightly. The tables were crammed together and he expected her to take a distant one but she came and sat at the table nearest his, almost touching his arm. ‘You were in the Tate this morning.’
‘That’s right,’ William said, pleased at having been noticed.
‘You were looking at the Ben Nicholson.’
‘Yes,’ William agreed. And, ‘I like Nicholson,’ he offered.
The girl nodded as if that were an accepted fact between them. ‘Looking at pictures makes me hungry. You too?’ Her voice was deepish with an accent, hard to place, but he guessed from somewhere North.
‘I suppose it does. I’d not thought.’
‘Well,’ the girl said, ‘me, I’m ravenous.’
‘Where are you from?’ William risked after she had ordered.
‘Derbyshire. The Peak District.’
‘Like Joseph Wright. You’ve come a long way.’
‘Too right,’ said the girl. She was eating bread ferociously, tearing it into chunks and cramming it into her mouth. She spoke now through the bread, ‘How about you?’
‘Oh, nowhere interesting,’ William apologised. ‘London.’ He wondered whether to offer her the contents of his own, still full, breadbasket.
‘London’s good,’ the girl said, ripping into more bread. ‘You shouldn’t knock London.’
William, who had meant to be reassuring, felt put in his place. The girl turned her attention to her chicken salad. This too she wolfed down, eating so fast that by the time William was ready to order coffee her plate was clean and she was ordering coffee with him. ‘You having a sweet?’
William who never ate cake and rarely pudding said, ‘Maybe I’ll try a flapjack.’
‘Go on. A little of what you fancy …’
I fancy you, William thought to himself and all but blushed. ‘I try to watch my calories,’ he explained.
‘Don’t look as if you need to,’ the girl said, sinking her teeth into the slice of walnut cake the waitress had brought. The girl’s teeth were large and even. She reminded William of a hungry horse.
He said, for something to say, ‘Do you know the rhyme about St Ives?’
‘Don’t think so. Tell me.’
When he’d recited it she thought a moment and frowned again and said, ‘It’s one, isn’t it?’
‘It’s not very difficult,’ he apologised, and told her about the bus and Janey.
‘Yeah, well, you know those old American girls.’
Pleased to be exempted from the category of being ‘old’, when the bills arrived he asked, summoning courage, ‘May I give you lunch?’
‘You mean pay for mine?’
There was no other way of putting it. ‘Yes.’
‘Ta. That’s kind.’
‘Not at all,’ William said, relieved to have done the right thing. She might be a feminist and object to being patronised.
They walked back together up the steep cobbles towards the Tate. William, looking down at the girl’s sturdy boots and his own neatly polished brogues, wondered how he could keep her at his side. Suddenly she said, ‘Let’s go to Trewyn Studio, shall we?’ and when he turned to her a surprised face, explained, misconstruing his expression, ‘You know, Barbara Hepworth’s place.’
‘Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic.’ William read aloud the words from the informative leaflet provided by her studio. They had passed out of the buildings and through into the garden and were standing under the shade of trees through which the clear May sunlight was dappling the dead sculptor’s monumental creations of stone and wood and bronze.
‘It is magic,’ said the girl. ‘Like an enchanted place.’ She swayed a little and William took her arm.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Never better. It’s just, all this …’ She swept out a large, almost mannish hand, to indicate the vista before them. The hand, he couldn’t help noticing, bore the marks of several cuts. ‘It’s too much.’ There were tears in her voice and, turning his gaze, he saw the visible counterparts glimmering in her eyes.
‘I don’t know your name,’ he said, embarrassed. Helena would never have cried in a public place like that.
‘Hazel. What’s yours?’
‘William. Like your eyes,’ he added.
But this she chose to ignore. Perhaps he had offended her. I must be careful, he thought. Me an old man with this young thing.
‘You know how Hepworth died?’ the girl asked. They had returned to the studio and were looking at a naked torso carved in stone. It might, William thought, resemble the girl’s. Although he did know of the tragedy that had killed the famous sculptor, he let the girl explain. ‘She burned to death in her own studio. They think it must have been a faulty wire.’
‘Horrible.’ He shook his head, unable to begin to imagine anything so awful. The terror of it, the pain.
‘But at least her work survived. She would have been glad about that.’
He had a sudden inspiration about the cuts on her hands. ‘You’re a sculptor, too?’
‘I try.’
‘But that’s marvellous.’
‘It doesn’t really keep the wolf from the door. But it’s what I want to do.’
‘Oh, always do what you want to do, my dear.’ In his admiration for what he saw as her brave choice of life, he slapped his new companion on the shoulder harder than he had intended. Once more she swayed and seemed almost to crumple. ‘Look,’ he asked, concerned now, ‘are you really all right?’
‘I’m just tired. I slept on a bench last night. Lucky it was warm.’
‘You had nowhere to go?’
She laughed, showing the strong teeth untarnished by age. ‘I hadn’t the money, guv.’
‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to be so tactless.’
‘You couldn’t know. I was saving it for this – and for a decent lunch, as a treat. So, thanks to you buying me lunch I’ve got some extra now to spend.’
Walking down the hill towards the bus stop William wondered how he could put to her what was in his mind. He had a horror of seeming to patronise such vivid independence. And he was aware of his own neediness, the loneliness and the attendant wish to extend the time spent with her, which might not – almost certainly wouldn’t – be to her liking. Nearing the bus stop, he asked, ‘Where are you going?’ and was relieved when she said, ‘Penzance.’ So they could travel together and he could postpone what he wanted to say – what he thought, at least, he wanted to say. On the bus, he could reconsider if he wanted to make his bold suggestion – that the girl take a room for the night at the hotel, at his expense, of course. An image assailed him of the amused ironical smile Helena would give if she were privy to this proposition.
The bus was already revving up to leave when they reached the bus stop. A green bus, almost full up with its complement of passengers. One seat only was free as if it were waiting especially for them.
The bus started off as soon as they had boarded and began to make a brisk progress through St Ives. William sat, rather more upright than was quite comfortable, conscious of the girl’s body beside him. In his mind’s eye he couldn’t help seeing again the Hepworth torso, beautiful in its lean grace. All of a sudden, the bus lurched violently and then took off at a terrific lick. They drove through the outskirts of the small town, careering around corners as the passengers were tossed wantonly about in their seats. Reaching, finally, the freedom of the wider main road the driver accelerated wildly.
No one on the bus seemed to make anything of this but William and the girl. Surely, though, they asked each other, ruminating cattle and quietly grazing sheep must have recognised, as they rattled past, a madman? At first bemused, then entertained and finally laughing fit to bust William and the girl clutched each other as they were jolted back and forth. There was no question now of William avoiding the girl’s body. For safety’s sake, they clung together for dear life.
The strange thing was, they agreed, finally alighting at Penzance, arm in arm like drunks with tears of laughter still in their eyes – yes, the strange thing was how the other passengers sat quite placidly through it all. As if they were quite accustomed to being driven by a maniac.
‘My God,’ she said. ‘What was that about? What was he about, the driver?’
They were walking along the harbour front, still laughing, still a little shocked and excited. ‘Look,’ William said, ‘I’m staying up there, at that hotel, see.’ He waved towards the beacon of blue on the rise. ‘How about a drink to celebrate our survival?’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
William felt proud as he escorted the girl into the hotel lounge. The Austrians had taken up position on the larger, deeper sofa, so William and Hazel had no option but the smaller, less accommodating one. But in their recent escapade William’s anxiety over physical proximity had evaporated. His shoulder now touched the girl’s companionably as side by side, like colleagues, they drank their gin and tonics. They were still under the enchantment of their adventure – a fact which William presently saw was making the Austrians suspect that it was they who were being laughed at.
Concerned not to seem rude, he attempted explanation. ‘We’re laughing because we’ve just had a most extraordinary nightmare ride.’
‘Excuse me. Nightmare ride?’ the man of the couple solemnly enquired, which set Hazel off again into great whoops of laughter.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said when the Austrians, with a marked Prussian stiffness, had made their way out of the lounge and through to the dining room and she and William were alone. ‘But they looked so offended and it was nothing to do with them.’
‘It takes a large heart not to take things personally,’ William said, surprising himself, for he had not known that he knew this.
‘Oh, I do agree.’ The hazel eyes were looking levelly at his. He thought, She has candid eyes.
‘Listen,’ he said, touching her sinewy forearm. How well he could envisage it welding steel or sawing wood. ‘Would you do me the honour of accepting my hospitality? If there’s a room free here tonight, will you let me give it you? A kind of –’ he hesitated, he didn’t want to seem to be offering to thank her for her company exactly – ‘acknowledgement’, he alighted on, ‘of our shared experience of the green bus from St Ives.’ For all his newfound confidence he was careful to make it clear that it was a room separate from his own one that he was offering her.
She continued to look at him, not warily but with the same frank look in her eyes.
‘You know what,’ she said at last. ‘That’s kind. Very kind. I accept.’
‘Really?’ Now he had pulled it off he felt the risk he had taken with his odd gesture – the risk of offending her, of clouding the immense fun they had had, were still having.
‘Really.’ She nodded, smiling at him, her eyes still quite at ease.
‘And dinner?’
‘Yeah, dinner too. But not here. That would make me feel guilty. Too pricey.’ She took his arm. ‘Come on. Let’s find the local chippy.’
‘Let’s get you that room first.’ He would have gone with her to McDonald’s had she suggested it.
He was sleeping dreamlessly when he was woken by the tapping at his door. ‘What is it?’ For a moment, he could not recall where in the world he was.
‘It’s me. Can I come in?’
He was out of bed in a trice and putting on the light and his dressing gown. ‘What time is it? Are you all right?’
‘You keep asking that,’ she said. ‘I thought it would be nice to talk.’
‘Of course, but where …?’ He looked round the room vaguely as if the hotel might have made some special provision for this unlooked for event.
‘In bed, stupid.’
‘Oh. Right ho, then.’
He got back into bed, still in his dressing gown.
‘Aren’t you going to be hot in that?’ She was wearing a long cotton T-shirt. Nothing more.
‘I thought you would rather …’
‘Don’t be silly.’ By now she was in the bed beside him. ‘I would have been happy to share. I thought that’s what you had in mind.’
But at this he protested. ‘Oh no. I never thought you’d …’
‘Don’t worry, it’s not for ever and ever amen. Just tonight. So we remember the bus ride.’
In the morning she said, ‘I’m catching an early train. Don’t argue, the ticket’s booked and I can’t change it. But this here –’ handing him a leaflet – ‘is about an exhibition I’m showing some work at soon. Come and visit me if you fancy seeing it.’
William was back home and reading in the sitting room with the larger tortoiseshell cat on his knee when Helena returned from Paris. She sailed in, bearing a flat white box which when opened revealed some exquisite cherry tarts.
‘How was your arty trip?’ She kissed him graciously, still smelling gorgeous, not, in truth, wanting to know.
‘Immense fun.’
‘Really?’ Helena raised her perfectly symmetrical eyebrows. William could usually be counted on to have a dull time.
‘Really. I found a pleasant hotel. Next time you go off on one of your jaunts I might go away again.’
Helena’s scarlet mouth made the slightest movement of resistance. ‘If the hotel’s that good, then perhaps I’ll come too.’
‘I don’t think it’s your cup of tea. I had to have supper in the local fish and chip shop and there was a traumatic bus ride from St Ives. I doubt I shall ever recover.’ He hoped he never would.
‘Food in the hotel no good?’
‘Not in the circs, no.’
‘Doesn’t sound much fun to me.’ She glanced at the book. ‘What are you reading?’ She never usually asked.
‘It’s about modern sculpture.’ He closed the book, marking his place with a leaflet. He nodded down at it. ‘There’s an interesting exhibition coming on in Derbyshire. I might go.’
Helena gave a dramatic shiver. ‘Derbyshire? Brrrr. Chilly.’
‘Yes,’ said William, comfortably. ‘I know. That wouldn’t be your cup of tea either.’