Mira. Mare. Miramare. A pencil traced words in a pocket diary. The blue suède covers were worn, the pages were headed with inept dates; it was a pocket-diary she had discarded as one does discard pocket-diaries, post-dated three years. Then she had scraped it up from somewhere, scratched out an ancient laundry-list, jotted down train time. The volume had been spared for that pencil. The pencil, almost virgin, still fitted beautifully. The tiny pencil fitted, with clean minute bevelled edge, into the suède loop. The loosened pages fluttered now, broken gilt, as Alex shut the volume. The pages were gilt-edged. Gilt-edged securities. She wanted this security.
The place smelt of paint. The boy said, “no, madame. Yes, but madame, the apartments run from 13,000 francs.” He repeated the 13,000. The girl had already written it in the note book. Alex fluttered open the post-dated pages to be sure again the girl had written it. The girl was standing; she said, “we’d better call him up now.” The boy said, “no, it’s the 14th. He won’t be in the office.” Alex said, “yes, July 14th. I am here on visit. Monsieur is now waiting for me. If you will give me the—the thing, I will go. I will come back. I will come back to-morrow—” “At eleven,” the girl said. The boy said, “at ten.” Alex noted the boy wore a perforated white pull-on, punctured regularly like a sieve. His dark hair stood up on separate wires, his eyes were not blue enough in his pale face. Yet she saw his point. He was, in a small way, another of what Christian called, “beach-bums.” The padrone and herself and a hypothetical monsieur and a conference at eleven, that might be late, would spoil his day. Her flat wide eyes caught blue in his, none too blue. She said, “at ten. Monsieur cannot be later. To-morrow is our last day.” Her smile was for the boy who jerked up loose trousers about thin flanks.
Paddy said the French tried for places like this, would take anything, these Bretons. The boy was ill, was janitor. There were three doors, Alex noted as she passed through the middle one. She flicked open the flat suède covers to read again, Monsieur le Colonel Darso. It sounded more Italian than French, a bastard tongue, this Monagesque. She read Miramar, Bd. des Moulins from 13,000 francs. The girl had spelt it Miramar. But the letters carved on the stone coping at the stairs’ foot, read Mira-Mare. Alex turned to stare at them. M-i-r-a she spelt, to make certain; the Wonderful. She ran her fingers, Braille fashion round the letters. The Wonderful; she read M-a-r-e. It was obvious you must pronounce that last e, a Italian, though the way the girl wrote it, was French. Miramar didn’t mean anything, it must be Mira-Mare. But French or Italian, it was much the same thing here in Monte Carlo. She thought of Monaco as a bastard little principality, stuck like a beauty-patch, on the face of Europe. Europe wore its Monte Carlo like a beauty patch, humourously and out of fashion. Mira the beautiful, Mare the Sea, obviously.
She hunched the “thing” under her right arm. This “chose” was an exaggerated towel, rolled tight, containing shoes, cap, swimming suit. The cap was slate blue, the shoes were cobalt, shining paint-box blue. The cap fitted like a Lindburgh helmet. She stepped carefully in sandals that had loosened at the heel, in five days. Five days ago, the low-heeled, wicker-work, Deauville sandals had been snug, had fitted. In a few days, if she could have stayed, she would have managed without stockings. The trouble was keeping them up. Stockings, half way up the thigh, clipped tight with four garter straps, were a sort of obscenity. In the whole world, there was nothing obscene she felt, but her garter belt, an anomaly.
Alex slid forward with slightly racing movement. She should almost float down these steep stairs; each step shelved into a low sloping separate platform; each stone required one or two steps or three mincing steps. Her feet moved differently. Every movement of foot, hand, thigh, body, was a fresh invention. She had not felt feet curl under, this way, in years. She thought, “I haven’t used my feet like this since I was—since I was a child.” She remembered that she hadn’t been happy like this since childhood. And remembering back, she remembered that, then, she had not been too happy. A child is not too happy. She had never been happy, she thought, equally in spirit and body like this. She had been happy with one, with the other, not both. She had never been happy like this, in her life. Happiness was a new garment, fitted her like her Lingburgh helmet. It was snug, fitted her like her paint-box blue rubber beach shoes. She said under her breath, “I am perfectly happy.”
The gates, at the railway crossing, were, as usual, slammed tight. The first one could be pushed open with automatic knee. She picked her way across the track, looking right, left. She had not yet seen a train pass. She supposed trains did pass or there would not be these gates. Safe against the second gate, her eyes drugged themselves on more blue; a glorified morning-glory made a burnt tree blossom. The burnt tree, with unfamiliar spider leaves, was drenched with a new variant on blue, this very dark blue, “paint-box blue,” she said again; her mind would seek no new word, would not forfeit privilege. For the first time now in years (ten?) her mind was subservient to her. She realised that her mind was subservient; she let thought stand separate from her, like steel barred sluice-gates. Thought was steel, was platinum, was silver-coloured sluice-gates. Those gates stood wide open. Through her mind, sensation poured, drowning. Pressed away from the rails against the second railway gate, she felt it give before her. She let the gate slam back, with its own weight. Her feet were crunching tobacco-shaped, dried magnolia leaves. Christian said that they were not magnolia. She turned the corner where palms made Egyptian pattern on a wall. The road that made exact perpendicular with this wall, was a dusty common-place engineer’s perfection. The new walls, the tunnel, the whole length of magnificent boulevard was punctuated now and again with date, epigraph, such and such a stone and the arms of the Princelet. The wall, the outer wall, the tunnel, appeared scrubbed, new stone. Below the new wall, there were heaps of builders’ rubbish; beyond, patches of apparent refuse, dumps. The sea came in, in low even breakers, like the Atlantic. The tunnel was cool. Alex overtook the three girls in the new unfaded kimonos and the paper sunshades. They were earlier to-day, rather it was she, delayed at Miramare, who was later. She passed them, bending slightly forward to catch up the few minutes she had lost.
The usual cars stood outside the shaded huts of the garden pavilion, Larvotto. She and Christian had decided that the Larvotto people were not really “snobs” like the exaggerated types that drove restless cars disdainfully past them, toward the Monte Carlo (ipse) Plage, another half mile distant. By “snobs” they meant something mildly different. The Larvottos were not haughty people. They skipped ropes, swung weights, browsed in the private shade of their private palm trees or did intricate dance steps on the sun-lit raised platform. Larvotto people even slid through the chicken wire that vaguely separated goats and sheep. Larvotto patronized their breakers. They were on good terms with Larvotto whose sea-rosemary hedges perfumed their stretch of boulders. Larvotto with sea-rosemary and skeleton eucalyptus was at their right; beyond them, the Plage line, at their backs, the high wall of the villa, “the villa, in excelsis,” Christian called it.
Christian was not yet here. A sea-pirate was doing physical jerks behind their rocks. His bathing drawers hung loose, his one-two-three-four was limp, his bare feet slithered as he did fragile knee-bends, his naked shoulders, baked adequately, served only as bone-rim for the basin shape between them. He was lava-baked mummy from Pompeii, doing one-two-three-four, slithering with weak feet on their stones. Now why had he chosen their rock? It occurred to Alex, immediately, that probably his was the prior claim. In less than a week, she and Christian had become ownerful, arrogant. Now that people couldn’t really tell them from the others (they flattered themselves unduly) they belonged here. The palm shadows on the villa-in-excelsis wall moved perfunctorily, like paper cut-out shadows. Christian said, “hello.”
She said, “hello, Chris, did you get the money at the bank?” He nodded, his towel already slung across their rock. She said, drawing nearer, “there’s—someone—” and Christian said loudly, “damn.” The head of the sea-pirate emerged, jack-in-the-box, and trembled as he balanced on weak toes, then the sea-pirate sunk back. Christian jerked off his coat. The pocket bulged. “You can’t leave all our hotel money in your pocket.” He fumbled, handed her the packet. Now what good did that do? She jerked open her zip-bag and stuffed the thing in there. Now why had she screamed at Christian, “did you get the money at the bank?” He was already in his knitted pull-on, the shoulder straps tucked in at the waist.
She regarded the beach, resenting the zip-bag and the roll of bank-notes. The usual bronze was perched on the usual rock-peak that divided their stretch. It was a bit sandier at and beyond the rock, there were fewer boulders that end, but this side was wilder, as a rule, less crowded. The habitués were already stretched out, a shoal of brown seals; here and there, one young herd-leader, perched on an outstanding pinnacle. She squinted, drew together wide blue to make out that one. Yes, it was their favourite, hardly to be distinguished, at this distance, save for his electric blue waist band. He wore nothing, a platinum-coloured rubber cap and that blue strip at his waist, and sometimes, his beach-sandals, his “winged sandals,” Christian called them. He sat, ran, dived, swam, each a separate entity. Their “favourite” was seen through prism glasses, never one, a varigated gallery. He sat, one of his pet poses, regarding nothing, far to lee.
Her narrowed squint widened like a camera shutter. Light filtered in; she saw the far beach. They had kicked out their “store” shoes, as she called them, that first day, curious to see what lay beyond the familiar stretch. They were rewarded, for lack of faith in the herd instinct, with broken shins, cactus scratches, the fact that the further beach was more or less dedicated to a row of squalid bungalow huts, concealed this end and from the distant fashionable “plage” ipse, by flowerless oleander, dusty sea-rosemary and thorn-like bundles of dried gorse. There seemed to be a dead stream runnel. One fisherman was perched on the dividing wall that possibly ran, for some sordid purpose, on out toward deep sea. They decided the seals had already pegged out the best ground. They would follow from now on, herd instinct. They imagined a mild chuckle from the seals, on their return, though none spoke. No seal looked at them for some days. Then, seals looked. She had plunged to the nearest of the far rocks and had meant to sun herself nonchalantly on the furthest to-day, but here was that packet.
Christian wouldn’t come with her out to the far rock. He was afraid of arms, not so brown as those arms, of back not so bronze and muscular. Incandescent mind, too, had gone from Christian. He was young male among other young males, many of whom, indeed most of whom, were browner. Why, just as they were being formally received into this herd, must they go back?
Damn the damn packet. She tied her dress round her square bag, stuffed the two into her hat, weighed down the hat, either side, with shoes. This, she carefully perched on the flat top of the rock. If anyone tried to get at the packet (though who would?) the dress would flutter like a signal. She visualised herself far out. She would leave Christian and his silly inhibitions and get to that rock. The roué in green waist belt had smiled at her, their favourite had deigned yesterday to see that she was there. She had given a hand up to the tall adolescent girl, who talked what seemed to her, might be a Sardinian variant on Italian. She wasn’t going to stay back because of Christian and his inhibitions of being too thin. She waded out to tell him.
Christian, naked to the waist, was tea-party talking to what, at the moment, could not be distinguished, save as false teeth in a yellow mask. Shoulders naked as a screen beauty, rose from new Derry & Toms saxe-blue. Saxe-blue had gone duck-egg where the sun got it. Those variants of blue, made Parthenon frieze carving of wet folds across a torso, no Phidias yet carved. The two Miss Thistlethwaites bathed twice daily. This one, the elder, was telling Christian, in a church social accent, “but you should go to the ‘plage’ just once to see it. They dance, they have cocktails, champagne, everything. They throw money away. It costs eight francs to get in and then you must pay for a bathing tent.” Christian said the usual right thing, “O” or “no” with inflection and she went on, “and the waiters bring out yellow mattresses for you to lie on.” Alex knew that Christian had turned his flawless manner on her, like a searchlight. She splashed to let him know she was there. The other Miss Thistlethwaite emerged. Alex saw Chris bow to another set of teeth in another yellow mask, “my sister.”
She swam slowly out from them, forgetting.
Forgetting-remembering . . . she remembered Atlantic breakers on miles of virgin sand and sand dimes and behind dunes, American sea-grass. She remembered the European scene, old, old remembrance, steel blue within lotus-blue of lilies. She remembered, as passing from blue-lit to blue-lit window, one places candles on altars, in a cathedral where all is already too-bright. The flame of the sun was so many million candles, burning to its own glory. In it, she was submerged, rising, dropping to straddle the middle of the three land marks. Seated astride, her back to Christian and the Miss Thistlethwaites, she remembered Paestum. Then she remembered Philae. She could not remember further.
Her wide eyes stared, hypnotist eyes, past the final goal, the slippery “last” rock, as she and Christian called it. Christian, who always pretended not to see her, would tell her, three days later, just what she had been doing, how at a given moment, she had risen from sea-water, how at a given instant, she had sunk back, had turned her face to the sun, or had parted sea from sea with arms, so much more adept at this than, he confessed, he would have credited. Christian would pilot Christian around his given boulder; he still took orders from this Christian. She herself had walked out of herself, simply kicking garter belt and Deauville sandals to one side and with Deauville sandals and somewhat weathered satin garter belt, the odd thing that went with them, trappings, the double sluice gate that had let her slide past; the twin barred double gate was open.
Remembering in that grand sense, she had found, had nothing to do with those platinum gates of shining intellect. Mnemoseyne, the Mother of the Muses . . . was this sort of thing; remembering.
Christian said the great coral branched cactus trees in the Casino garden were sub-conscious plant life. She had said, “sub-aqueous.” The things she thought, were under the water, for all she sat so perched there. Flippantly turning over the pages of the hotel guide book, she had chanced to read to Christian, “Eze. The Phoenicians set up their first temple here, to Isis.” Blue. She gathered the blue-impression, like a cloak, about her.