After he had taken his pills and done a stiff and dedicated three quarters of an hour on his stretching-and-exercising machine—both the pills and the machine were guaranteed to increase your height by several inches, expand your chest and make you live longer—Sydney Palmer took a deck-chair out of the tool-shed and went into the back-garden to dream about women. Sydney was eighteen, short, soft-eyed and sandy-haired and looked not at all unlike a dormouse waking from the long sleep of winter.
Sometimes he dreamt about women much older than himself: healthy mature women like Mrs. Fortescue, who ran the tea-trolley at the printing works where he was serving his apprenticeship. Mrs. Fortescue seemed to him a sensational person. For several weeks she had exercised over him an influence that was nothing less than grand hypnosis. She was a big but beautifully proportioned woman, with light fluffy golden hair and splendid, promiscuous indigo-coloured eyes. Her body was as rich as a side of beef and she carried with her, always, the deep and searching perfume of clove carnations.
Although he had hardly ever spoken more than a dozen words to her he had managed, dreaming away in the deck-chair in the back-garden, to persuade Mrs. Fortescue to leave her husband and run away with him to the South Pacific, where they had lived together for some time on a deserted atoll.
It had been a fevered, paradisiacal, tormenting affair. They had lived like Adam and Eve. Unclothed and unashamed, Mrs. Fortescue had taught him things about love that were utterly sensational. It was at this time, when he was climbing a coconut palm one day, that he decided to get the stretching machine. The way Mrs. Fortescue stood and gazed up at him from the foot of the palm, quite naked, her breasts so like splendid halved coconuts themselves, suddenly opened up all the delights of being taller. He was truly grateful to that palm.
Already he was sure he had put on an inch and a quarter in height. His muscles as he flexed them in front of the bathroom mirror popped in and out like knotted snakes and he felt singularly virile in every way. Unhappily Mrs. Fortescue had suddenly left the printing works and the effect of these striking changes in him were lost on her.
But this no longer mattered. Today he had decided he was going to dream about someone else. This time it was Miss Sumpter, the girl who served in the fruit shop round the corner. Miss Sumpter was an aloof, brown-haired girl with prominent high breasts and lovely soft gooseberry-coloured eyes. He liked her long bare arms too and her hands that were always as white and shining as strips of new-washed celery.
She was altogether younger than Mrs. Fortescue and quite different in every way. Mrs. Fortescue oozed all the richness of the flesh; the South Pacific itself became voluptuous when she swam in it. But the thing that struck him most about Miss Sumpter was a kind of vestal purity. It was sort of Grecian, he told himself. Her very aloofness flowered, making her even more exciting than the bolder Mrs. Fortescue.
He had never spoken more than a few dozen words to Miss Sumpter either, and then only to ask for a pound of grapes, a hand of bananas or things of that sort, but nevertheless he had decided to take her to Athens today. That was where she belonged, he thought: to Greece and the Greek Islands, the classical landscapes of long ago.
It was happily Saturday afternoon and soon, in his dream, they were on the afternoon plane. It was the champagne flight, of course—this wasn’t the reckless abandoned affair that had borne naked fruit under South Sea palms—and he was determined that for Miss Sumpter, everything should be the absolute tops.
‘I thought three or four days in Athens would be nice. And then we could go out to one of the islands. What about that?’
‘You know so much more about these things than I do.’
‘Well, it’s just that Athens may be very hot. And then we’d be more alone on one of the islands.’
He held Miss Sumpter by the hand; the gooseberry-green eyes glanced away and quivered. He looked swiftly at the high pronounced breasts perfectly shaped under her blouse of yellow silk and felt his body tingle.
‘One of the islands then?’
‘If that’s what you want.’
He squeezed Miss Sumpter’s cool celery-like fingers with rising enthusiasm; things were going splendidly.
‘Of course I do.’ A leading question suddenly occurred to him. ‘Have you brought your swimming costume?’
‘Two.’
‘We’ll swim all day,’ he said, the words molten in his throat, ‘and perhaps all night too.’
Athens itself was molten; the city and its surrounding gold-brown crust of hills quivered and sizzled under a barbarous sun. The Acropolis was a crown of melting candles.
He was glad when Miss Sumpter confessed that she couldn’t sleep at night for the heat, the sound of traffic and the torment of flies. There was a little boat, he told her, that round-tripped the islands, just a sort of local bus service. They could take it tomorrow and hop off where and when the fancy took them.
Fancy took them, the following day, to an island whose water-front seemed to have been built by the hands of children, with bricks of blue and peppermint-green and salt-white and sugar-pink. Great cochineal oleanders clothed the rocks, with cypress in black columns above them, with many vines and occasional vast mulberry trees dark with ripening fruit.
They stayed at a little hotel some way along the coast, its wooden framework locked on a precipice, fifty feet above the sea. Vermilion strings of geranium and skeins of blue morning-glory twined everywhere on walls and fences. Musing donkeys, straddled by even more musing women, climbed the hot mountain road. The sea was vaporous with great heat and the white sand of the shore, though shaded here and there by vast brooding olives, scalded the feet of Miss Sumpter and himself as they ran down to swim.
‘How you know about these marvellous places I simply can’t think—’
‘Ah! well. Experience—’
He had in fact read all of it up in a travel magazine; he was great on travel magazines.
‘Shall we swim? or shall we lie in the shade?’
In the molten core of the white afternoon the shade of a big black-limbed olive seemed a blissful dark oasis.
‘Let’s lie in the shade.’
They lay together on the sand, eating mulberries they had gathered on the way to the shore. The mulberries were delicious and turned Miss Sumpter’s lips an urgent purple. He was glad to see that Miss Sumpter was wearing a white swim-suit. It seemed to heighten all the vestal nature of her body. He watched with mounting eagerness the rise and fall of her young breasts as she breathed and presently he started stroking the smooth bow of her shoulder.
‘Are you glad we came?’
‘Terribly.’
As the gooseberry-green eyes gazed up at him with their own absorbed dreaminess he kissed her full on her empurpled lips, at the same time slipping one hand into the warm crook of her arm-pit.
Soon they were locked together in restless torment. This, he thought, was paradise. This was greater than Mrs. Fortescue. He felt twenty feet taller as his hand made gentle explorations of Miss Sumpter’s body and Miss Sumpter, in return, gave out frequent sighs, low and soft in appeal, that were somewhere between modest protest and exquisite acceptance.
‘Have you ever had an experience like this before?’
‘Never,’ she said. ‘Have you?’
‘Well—’ He was half-tempted to tell her of Mrs. Fortescue and then said: ‘Not exactly. But every time I used to see you in the shop I’d go home and imagine this was how it would be.’
‘You did? I didn’t dream you thought about me like that—’
‘Oh! yes, for ages.’
And to think, she said, that all the time she was thinking like that about him. His heart leapt as she told him this and he said:
‘You mean you thought of us lying here like this? Kissing. Perhaps even—you know—’
‘Lots and lots of times. Especially in bed at night.’
A flaming desire to touch her even more intimately whipped through him fiercely and he slipped a hand under the curve of her breasts. She stirred restlessly and made an uneasy appeal:
‘Please. You mustn’t do that. At least not here. People will see—’
‘Nobody will see.’
‘But not now. Not here.’
‘Where then?’ he said. Her body, though not so rich and mature as Mrs. Fortescue’s, was far more exquisite. It was as soft and delicate as a rose and he wanted to bury himself deep in the heart of it. ‘Where then? When?’
‘There’s always a night, isn’t there?’ she said. ‘You said we could swim at night.’
When it was night he lay entwined with Miss Sumpter on the sand. Her breasts were golden in the moonlight and warm to his lips as he kissed them. The sea was glassy and calm. Farther down the bay, in the hot windless night, the lights of the little town quivered like so many fire-flies.
He was about to come to the supreme moment of his companionship with Miss Sumpter when she suddenly gave a quick mischievous laugh and wriggled out of his arms and started to run for the sea. Even that was a pretty wonderful moment, he thought—to see that white figure, half-naked, lightly dancing into the thin phosphorescent line of little breaking waves.
He laughed too and ran after her. Nowhere were the waves more than an inch or two in height and they broke like a lapping of warm milk on his feet. In breathless excitement he saw Miss Sumpter swimming fast out to sea and suddenly something made him shout:
‘Watch out! There are sharks!’
She gave a cry as she heard this and turned at once and came swimming swiftly back.
‘You didn’t mean that. You were just trying to frighten me.’
‘No, no, no.’ He was quite serious. There were indeed sharks; he had read about them too in an article somewhere. ‘A man lost a leg only last year over in Corfu. In full view of people promenading—’
‘Oh! my goodness.’
Miss Sumpter confessed to feeling a little sick. It was almost as if he had saved her life, she said.
At this he felt ten feet tall again and recklessly clasped Miss Sumpter in his arms, as if in splendid protection, thrusting his chest strongly against her bosom. To his delight she accepted this demonstration of male protectiveness with a great sigh, looking at him beseechingly with the soft gooseberry-green eyes. She was so thankful, she said. His concern for her safety had opened her eyes to the fact that he didn’t merely covet her for her body’s sake and all the complex desires and thrills that went with it. It wasn’t merely passion driving him on. He really loved her actual existence. He was really frightened she might be taken away.
‘Oh! you’re so nice,’ she said. She looked with admiration at his figure, god-like in the moonlight. ‘So wonderful.’
He laughed and kissed her mouth, salty and wet from the sea. She looked such a glorious creature standing there half-naked in the moonlight, hair and face and shoulders still dripping with water, that he actually felt pretty god-like. By heaven, he was in great shape, he told himself. The stretching machine had done wonders. He could feel manhood pulsating through him like a brave hammer. The gleam of moonlight on his face might have been striking down on the brass of some tall and splendid helmet.
‘Let’s swim out together,’ Miss Sumpter said. ‘I shan’t mind about the sharks if you swim with me.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s lie on the beach. Let’s just let the sea break over us. All night long.’
In that brilliant and somehow solemn moonlight they were god and goddess lying side by side. Their bodies might have been made of gold and when at last another supreme moment arrived and Miss Sumpter leaned over to kiss him the young breast that touched his face was a golden apple beaded all over with the pearls of a divine and ancient sea.
He opened his eyes and suddenly leapt up out of the deck-chair, all sweat, unable to bear it any longer. So real were the rays of Grecian moonlight, Miss Sumpter’s body and the phosphorescence of the sea that when he stared about him it was the back-garden that swayed, unreal in the afternoon sun.
There was nothing for it, he told himself; he had to go round to the fruit shop. He had somehow to see Miss Sumpter, perhaps even talk to her, before the brilliant reality of the dream faded away. It was inconceivable that that realistic episode could have failed to get through to her.
Perhaps, he asked himself as he half-ran into the house, he ought to do another ten minutes on the stretching-machine before he went? and then decided against it. It was clearly imperative to see her while the potency of the dream was so brilliant and so powerful.
He paused to look at himself in the bathroom mirror, brushing his sweaty hair. He looked uncommonly pale and hot after all the exertions of making love with Miss Sumpter and his eyes had in them a moist and dilated glow. Several times he expanded his chest and tautened the muscles of his arms and once, just before departing for the shop, he stood immovably at attention, drawing up his figure to its full height.
The fruit shop was crowded with customers. Miss Sumpter, lost in the heart of the crowd, was serving several pounds of onions to an elderly lady wearing a purple hat. The rustle of onion skins fell on his ears like the tormenting echo of many little waves breaking on a distant shore.
‘No hurry,’ he said several times to other assistants. The lady in the purple hat was buying peas now, fussily cracking open a pod or two in order to test their tenderness. ‘No hurry. Thank you, I’ll wait.’
‘Yes? What for you, please?’
It was the aloof, vestal Miss Sumpter, free at last. He stood impotently before her, trying desperately to feel god-like again, hardly able to look at her. Her face, with its lovely gooseberry-green eyes, swam mistily in a frame of bananas and flowers, apples and cucumbers, apricots and onions. As these dissolved even more mistily into a background of Grecian waves gently lapping under a golden moon Miss Sumpter said, rather tartly:
‘Well? We’re awfully busy.’
His whole body made a stammering effort at control and in the most ungod-like of voices he said:
‘A pound of apples, please.’
‘Jonathans? Cox’s? Cookers?’
It was the shortest word of the three but it seemed to take a whole aeon of time to pronounce it.
‘Something else?’
‘Bananas.’
‘How many would you like?’
‘Two pounds, please.’
She was immensely aloof, dreadfully distant. He was unable even to look at her hands, let alone the breast that had touched his face like a golden apple. She had become infinitely more than a stranger: she simply didn’t belong to his world.
‘Anything more?’
‘Well, I must just think.’
He tried to think. His mind hovered like a cowering bat in a suspense of cavernous gloom.
‘Any celery today?’
‘Not today. Hasn’t started to come in. Hasn’t had a frost on it yet.’
If there had been no frost on the celery there was a sering and darkening frost on the voice of Miss Sumpter. It seemed to cut down his stature by several inches. He stared helplessly this way and that and then said at last:
‘I think that’ll be all, then, thank you.’
‘Three and nine. Pay at the desk.’
That final impersonal note wiped every remaining image of the dream from his mind. He wavered briefly on the point of departure and then in a courageously desperate moment decided there was something else he wanted to ask for.
‘Do you happen to have mulberries at all?’
She would surely, he thought, remember the mulberries.
‘Do we have what?’
‘Mulberries. You know—’
‘Oh! mulberries. Yes. Three and six a tin.’
‘Didn’t know they ever came fresh.’ She actually laughed, cutting him deeply, and turned away.
‘Yes, madam? Watercress?’
Cooled and impotent, he went home to the back-garden and the deck-chair. He knew he never wanted to dream of Miss Sumpter again. She had crushed the dream under her feet like the shell of a snail. Her cold and impersonal nature wrapped him about like a fog. He started slowly to peel a banana and then shut his eyes in a grim and calculated effort to shut her image out.
Presently he was dreaming instead of a girl named Shirley Chalmers, a typist, who worked in the office at the printing works. She, like Miss Sumpter and Mrs. Fortescue, was rather taller than himself but she had, he was sure, both a nicer and more sympathetic nature. Her figure was very beautiful and her hair, which she wore rather long, was an exotic deep bluish-black, with a clear shine on it like that of ripe elderberries in September.
He had a strange idea too that Miss Chalmers wore black underwear; he had once caught a brief glimpse of shadowy lace under the hem of her skirt as she ran upstairs, her legs meltingly seductive. For some reason he thought that girls who wore black underwear were exceptionally passionate. Warm, friendly blood, he was sure, flowed through Miss Chalmers’ veins. She was also, he felt certain, a person of great understanding. You could tell that by the fine depth of stillness in her eyes.
She was just the sort of girl, he now decided, to take to Morocco. Ah! the bougainvilleas and the palms, the markets and the Kasbah, the mystery, the heat and the mountains—what a wonderful thing it would be to have a companion like Miss Chalmers there, the exotic, passionate, understanding Miss Chalmers.
He needed a companion like Miss Chalmers. He needed her very, very much.