by Brian Moore
“What about tomorrow?”
She looked at him. “There’s a sandy beach at Cap Ferrat. We could go over there by boat. I could get us a picnic lunch from the hotel here.”
“Sounds great. What time?”
“Let’s go right after breakfast,” she said. “I want to get burned red.”
“Why don’t we have breakfast together. Say at eight, out there on the terrace?”
“All right.”
And then, all at once, she felt she must be the one to do it. She stood and said, “I’m going up now. Thanks for a great evening.”
“Do you have to go?”
“Yes,” she said, and abruptly turned and walked to the lift. The lift cabin was already waiting, and as she went into it, she still felt that elation. She looked back through the little window of the lift and saw him standing by the table, watching her. Oh, God, I want to go back to him. She pressed the button and the lift went up, wiping out his image like a shutter click.
Chapter 4
• At seven next morning she woke and suddenly knew where she was and what had happened. She got up, excited, and went to the window to open the wooden shutters. There, in the cold morning sunlight, the millionaire’s yacht rode at anchor in the bay. She stood in her cotton nightgown, her hand on the shutter latch, gripped by the mysterious silence of those decks. Once, in Galway, she and Kevin were walking in a narrow country road when a huge Rolls-Royce came up behind them, forcing them into the ditch as it inched past. At that moment she noticed an old woman peering out of a cottage door at the great silver motorcar and the thought came to her that the old woman’s husband in all the years and all the labor of his life had probably earned less than the price of that Rolls. As now, she knew that Kevin in all his years of surgery and sutures and knives and blood had not earned as much as the price of that yacht. Why do some people lead such special lives? Remember Villa Cara, Groothaesebroekseweg, Wassenaar, Den Haag, Uncle Dan’s splendid place, where Owen and I went on that holiday when we were children: the Italianate gardens, the chauffeured Mercedes, the menservants in white gloves? We children having lunch with Uncle Dan and Aunt Meg in the big dining room, white Dutch double tulips as the centerpiece: the first secretary, Brogan, so short that even at twelve I came up to his shoulder, arriving to play tennis with me. That Irish embassy in Holland, was it the closest I will ever be to the existence of the people on that yacht? Will they wake up this morning to a steward in white gloves bringing a breakfast tray on which sits one red rose? Will they order the captain to sail for Formentor after lunch? Imagine going down now to the quay, a private motorboat coming for us, taking Tom and me out to that yacht, the anchor up, stewards pouring champagne, us dancing on deck under the stars, sailing down to the Azores and on to the South Seas. Is there really a life like that?
The clock, which she thought she had set for seven, shrilled loud and late in the room. Hurrying, she pulled off her nightgown and sat naked at the dressing table, beginning a long, careful job of doing her face. Before leaving home she had consulted Madge Stewart at McElvey’s. Madge had been trained at Elizabeth Arden in London, and now she put on the base in the way Madge had shown her and took out the new terra-cotta makeup Madge said would be just right in the sun. First she did her eyes, not too much eyeliner, trying for the natural look Madge talked about. She rubbed the blusher in high on her cheekbones, with a touch of it across her forehead along the hairline to give the beginnings of a tan. She was pleased with the result. She took out her yellow sundress, gave it a touch with the traveling iron, unpacked her blue swimsuit, put it with a towel and the suntan cream in her little traveling bag, adding the blue sun hat as an afterthought. Then went into the bathroom, still naked, and began to comb her hair. The sunglasses she mustn’t forget, brand new with very big rims, all the rage in Vogue this year. At the last minute she put on lipstick and faced the mirror.
Awful. Too much. Why did I trust Madge, why didn’t I have a trial run at home, the one day I want to look my best and it’s awful, too much eyeliner, take a bit off, oh, God, I should have got up at six, too much blusher, put on powder, start all over, but it’s too late, I must go down and order the picnics. She felt like weeping, but if she wept it would make her eyes even worse. She was shocked at herself for caring so much. But there it was. She did.
So, giving up, she put on her underthings and the yellow sundress and went down and managed to order the lunches and be on the terrace before nine. But he was there already: he must have come early. He jumped up, smiling at her. “Hey, you look terrific. Good morning.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. What a great dress.”
You would wait a long time before an Irishman would tell you you had on a great dress. “Thank you,” she said.
•
At ten they caught the boat for Cap Ferrât. The beach there was sheltered, smart and private with real sand, brought in by truck and laid over the pebble stones. In the rear were a restaurant and changing rooms, and when the boat let them off at the small jetty, they paid their admissions and went straight up to change. A few minutes later Mrs. Redden emerged, wearing her blue sun hat and the big new sunglasses, feeling naked, white, and conspicuous in the swimsuit, which was also blue and new. As she came down the steps to the beach, instinctively she hunched her shoulders, trying to make herself’ smaller, peering out uncertainly at the blue-tinted world revealed through her new sunglasses.
Two teen-aged girls, sleek, tanned to an even cocoa brown, flashed by like a reproach. Then a man and his wife, wearing the most minimal of cache-sexe, both stringily muscled in a way that reminded her of racehorses, came parading past, as in a paddock. She moved a few awkward steps in the sand, pausing blindly before a platoon of beach mattresses.
Then she saw him coming toward her. He was wearing white swimming trunks. “I’ve got us two lilos,” he said. “This way.”
“Which way?” She stared into the sun.
As though it were the most natural thing in the world, he put his arm around her waist, his hand resting on her hip. She hesitated, then went on down the beach, his arm still around her waist, walking in step with him.
When they came to the lilo mattresses, she put her traveling bag on one and sat, her legs tucked under her. “I look like a corpse in this crowd.”
“You won’t for long. That sun’s very strong. Have you got some suntan oil?”
She nodded and took out the crème solaire bronzante. “Great,” he said. “You put some on my back, then I’ll do yours.”
He turned, presenting her his back. Obedient, she squeezed cream into her palm, and began to rub it across his shoulders, kneading it in. He had a long straight back and a deep chest, a boy’s body, more like Danny’s than Kevin’s. She put more cream on her palm and began to rub it in just above the top of his swimming trunks.
“Good,” he said. He turned, holding out his hand, and she squeezed cream into it. He rubbed the cream over his chest and forearms, then took the tube from her.
“Your turn. Lie down. Relax.”
Careful of her makeup, she spread her towel on the lilo and lay with her head turned to one side, watching the quiet Mediterranean waves fold on the sand like the turning pages of a book, thinking of the wild bays of home, the long cold breakers, the deserted dunes, the rainy beauty of Gorteen strand. He began to knead her shoulders and neck, skillful and slow, his hands moving down her back to her waist, and up again. Mrs. Redden pressed her body into the mattress, aroused, the stranger behind her, his hands on her, strong, sure, caressing her. And then, all at once, he took his hands away.
“What about your legs?”
“Oh, I can do that myself,” she said. She twisted around and sat up on the lilo. He had been kneeling by her mattress, and when she turned abruptly, he dropped his hands as though to hide his genitals. She felt her face go hot. She began to cream her legs, stretching her toes out toward the warm quiet waves. He said, “I wonder if Debbie got away yester
day. You met her, didn’t you, that first day you arrived?”
It was as though he had slapped her. “How did you know I met her?”
“She mentioned it.”
“Is she your girl?”
“Debbie?” He laughed. “God, no. She’s my sister’s friend.”
“She’s pretty.”
“Do you think so? I think she’s a pain. I have to be nice to her for Martha’s sake, but she’s heavy going, Debbie. Wow!”
“How old is your sister?”
“She’s twenty-four.” He pulled a wallet from the waistband of his trunks and passed a snapshot over. “That’s her. Martha.”
Mrs. Redden looked at a girl, dark-haired, carrying a tennis racquet, smiling.
“My parents,” he said, handing her a second snapshot. “At our summer place in Springs.”
A man and a woman sitting in white wicker chairs on the sundeck of a house, woods in the background, the man in a rollneck sweater looked a little older than Kevin; the woman, thank goodness, looked much older. “Your father is young.”
“He’s in great shape. He’s fifty-six, though.”
She handed back the photograph. Twelve years older than Kevin.
“My grandmother.” An old lady in a curved, high-backed chair, the sort of chair Mrs. Redden associated with films about the South Seas. The old lady glared at the camera; intent dark eyes like her grandson’s. “Gran’s a disciple of Teddy Roosevelt. Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
“I never heard that expression.”
“Didn’t you? Well, her big stick is the purse strings. Grandpa left money in a trust fund for our education and Grandma administers it. A few years ago I had a big run-in with her when she wanted me to become a doctor like Dad. Which is why I wound up in Ireland getting my Ph.D. at Trinity instead of some place like Princeton.”
“And who paid for your education?”
“Oh, my father paid the first two years. But then Gran came around. Actually, she was nice about it. For instance, this year when I got my degree she sent me the rest of the trust money that was due to me from the education fund. Just gave it to me as a gift.”
Behind, in the beach restaurant, a girl began to sing in Spanish, accompanying herself on a guitar. “What about you?” he asked. “Were you a big family?”
“No. Four. My oldest brother, Ned, is a dentist in Cork. I have a brother, Owen, who’s a doctor in Belfast, and a sister, Eily, who’s married to an engineer and lives near Dublin.”
“And your parents, are they both alive?”
“No, my father died years ago. My mother died just last spring.”
“I suppose you still miss her?”
“I don’t know. We fought a lot. She once called me a born liar. I don’t think I ever forgave her for that.”
He laughed. “Why did she say it?”
“Oh, when I was small I was always making up stories about myself. That I was an explorer’s daughter, or related to some famous person. Anything but the truth—that I was Sheila Deane of 18 Chichester Terrace, Belfast, a very ordinary little girl.”
“And for that she called you a born liar?”
“Yes. I suppose she wasn’t too bad, really. Poor Kitty. Funny, when I think of her now, it’s always with a cigarette in her mouth, the cigarette bobbing up and down as she talks. She was a great storyteller and people loved to hear her yarns. Trouble was, she’d do anything to get a laugh. Even if it meant telling a story against us, or even against herself. She died of cancer.”
“The cigarettes?”
“I suppose. There’s a lot of cancer in our family. Both sides. My father’s brother died of it, too.”
They lay for a while without talking. In the warm sun she began to feel drowsy. She thought of home. I left a big cooked ham for Mrs. Milligan and told her to make sure they eat lettuce and lots of vegetables and to buy a roast next week, but will she? All she knows how to cook is fried stuff, Danny and his father will live off fried stuff and cake until I’m home again. Well, at least Kevin gets a good lunch at the hospital three days a week.
Kitty dead. And my father, long ago. I remember that morning, Owen coming into our room in his pajamas to tell Eily and me to go downstairs to the big bedroom. Kitty weeping, Daddy dead in the bed: he died in his sleep in the middle of the night, Kitty asleep beside him. That was one time I was sorry for you, poor Mama, to wake like that in the morning and find your man cold beside you.
The Spanish guitar music stopped, and behind them, the girl started to sing a song; the lyric was French and familiar, yet Mrs. Redden could not remember the song’s title. She turned to Tom to ask if he knew, but he was not there. She sat up, alarmed.
There he was down by the water’s edge, talking to the boat boys. She called his name. He turned and beckoned her to join him.
“I rented a pédalo,” he said. “Come on, let’s try it out.”
She laughed. Kevin would never have done that.
Leaning back, bicycling, their legs moved the absurd little boating machine out into the bay, chuffering along under the rose and white façades of the big villas up on the cliffs, the smell of the sea in their nostrils, lolling under an azure sky, seeing small sailboats, the distant frieze of seafront at Villefranche and, farther down, a haze of heat over Nice. She no longer thought of her makeup, or even that she was getting red. She offered her face to the sun, as to a host on an altar, this boy beside her, holiday, holiday, holiday, never end.
And, later, after she had gone back to the changing room, showered, and put on her yellow sundress, she joined him, carrying the picnic basket the hotel had made up. He waited at a table under a Cinzano umbrella of bright red, white, and blue stripes, a bottle of local white wine in an ice bucket beside him. Kevin would have ordered beer. She opened the waxed-paper picnic packages and laid it out, all colors—white chicken breasts, two kinds of yellow cheese, fresh black figs, dull-red tomatoes, green grapes, and brown crusty bread—and they ate it all up like greedy children and drank off all the wine, which went to her head.
“Let’s go for a swim,” he suggested.
“So soon after eating?”
“It will cool us off.”
In the sea he swam, and swam well. She lingered in the shallows, not wanting to wet her hair. Afterward, they lay on the lilos under a cloudless sky. The beach was quieter now, as most of the bathers had gone home for lunch. In the stillness she turned her head to look at him. His eyes were closed, and so, cautiously, she raised herself up and, leaning on one elbow, examined his face. Asleep, he looked so young. He opened his eyes and smiled at her. She lay back on the lilo and, after a while, felt him take her hand. She pulled her hand away.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He tried to take her hand again.
“Don’t.” Embarrassed, she sat up, hugging her knees. “Listen, let’s go up to the restaurant and get a cup of coffee.”
On the restaurant terrace they passed the stringily muscled couple, who sat at a corner table sipping orangeade and staring at a strange board with little black and white stones on it. Tom said it was a Japanese game called go. Now that they were no longer on dangerous ground, Mrs. Redden became lighthearted again. “What should we do tonight? What about going into Nice and wandering around and having dinner some place?”
“Fine,” he said. They ordered coffee, and for a moment she felt tense when he leaned across the table and touched his fingers to her cheek. “Your face is burned,” he said. “You’ve had too much sun. How do you feel?”
“All right.”
But, later in the changing room, she felt a stinging pain along the top of her shoulders. Her face was hot, and with the sun, the sea air, and the wine, she felt sleepy as they waited on the jetty for the boat to take them back to Ville-franche, a sleepiness that increased as the boat crossed the bay and let them off on the dock, directly below her hotel. She thought of taking a shower, to wake her up. “What should we do?” she asked. �
��Should we meet here again around five and take a bus into Nice?”
“All right.” He was looking up at the façade of the Welcome. “Which is your room, by the way?”
“It’s on the fourth floor. I think it’s the third from the left over there.”
“You have a balcony?”
“Yes.”
He walked her up to the front entrance. “I think I’ll go for a stroll,” he said. “I don’t feel like sitting in my cell.”
“It’s that bad, is it?”
“It’s no hell. Listen, do you have anything to read?”
“I have some paperbacks.”
“What kind?”
“Some mysteries, and a Muriel Spark and a Doris Lessing. Look, I’ll bring them down and you can take your pick.”
“Good.”
When they entered the hotel lobby, there was no clerk at the desk, so she took her own key down from the rack. Tom had already pressed the lift button.
“Should I go up with you?” he asked, and she saw he was embarrassed as soon as he’d said it.
“No, it’s all right, I won’t be a moment.” She heard the lift coming. The hotel seemed empty: most of the guests were probably still out at the beach. I could let him come up to my floor, at least. Nobody’s seen us together. I could bring out the books and let him pick one. It would save having to make two trips up and down.