by Francis King
‘Do you think that we might get on with the game?’ Bibi said. ‘Yuki, behave yourself.’
‘He kicks me first,’ Yuki protested, still grinning.
Sasha was looking at me sleepily from under lowered lids, his body sunk low in his chair and his chin supported in one hand. He had drunk an astonishing amount both during dinner and subsequently, but it was only now that he was showing any signs of being affected. Then, suddenly, I felt a pressure against my leg. I thought at first that it must be accidental; but it was renewed, his calf moving more and more heavily up and down against my own. Again our eyes met and this time he smiled slowly, the hand at his chin almost concealing his parted lips from anyone but me. If I had drunk less perhaps I should not have responded; but slowly I pressed back.
‘Mary!’ Bibi’s voice had a curiously rough yet cutting edge. ‘ It’s you to play. I hope you’re not going to take as long as Tom.’
I fumbled and played a card, which Bibi’s trump at once showed to be the wrong one.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘That was foolish.’
‘You oughtn’t to have let Bibi put you off your stroke,’ Tom grinned, delighted by my mistake. ‘That’s part of her technique. Isn’t it, Bibi?’
Bibi did not reply as she gazed out of the window into the night, the nail of one forefinger tapping her teeth and on her face an expression at once bored and tense.
Eventually, after another long spell of deliberation, Tom produced a card. ‘What wretched hands I’ve been having! No luck at all!’
The next time that Tom had to play, Yuki maliciousiy pointed out that he had revoked, I was surprised that the boy had understood enough of the game to have noticed.
‘Oh, no, I haven’t!’ Tom protested stubbornly.
‘I rather think you have,’ Sasha said, turning up the last trick but one.
Tom turned on Yuki, who was sniggering with delight. ‘It’s not for you to point it out. My opponents might never have noticed. It’s none of your business.’
‘If you cheat …’ Yuki said, shrugging his shoulders and giving me a wink.
‘I was not cheating. I made a mistake that anyone might have made. And if you hadn’t.…’
‘I noticed it too,’ Sasha said mildly. ‘ But never mind. Let’s go on.’
‘Go away, Yuki! Go and sit somewhere else! Go on!’ Yuki remained where he was, still grinning with malicious pleasure.
‘Oh, don’t be such a bore,’ Bibi said. ‘Both of you.’
‘You to play, Tom,’ Sasha said.
‘I will not play another card until Yuki moves.’
‘Yuki, go and sit somewhere else,’ Bibi said.
Yuki laughed and picking up Tom’s glass sipped from. it
‘Yuki, go away!’ Tom shouted. He stared at Yuki, who stared insolently back. ‘Very well. Then that’s that!’ Tom rose from his chair, his face flushed.
‘Oh. don’t be silly, Tom. Sit down.’
‘No, Bibi, I’m sorry.’ I could see that Tom, now swaying beside the table, was drunker than I had imagined while he was sitting down. ‘Unless Yuki goes, I’m not prepared to continue. I made that quite clear.’
Bibi threw down her cards. ‘Really, you’re an absurd couple!’
Tom scowled at her: then he said with tipsy truculence: ‘ I don’t think that we’re anymore absurd as a couple than you and Sasha.’
Bibi turned her head away. ‘We’d better pack it in,’ she said to me. ‘ Sorry.’
‘It’s all right. I’ve had about enough anyway.’
Tom continued to sway beside the table. ‘How about our winnings?’ he said. ‘We won. How about our winnings?’
‘I’m working it out,’ Sasha said.
After Sasha and I had paid up, Tom stuffed his share into his pocket and then caught Yuki by one ear. Yuki let out a little squeal. ‘Come on, Yuki. Time for bed. Come!’
Yuki said goodnight politely to each of us in turn; Tom merely waved from the door: ‘ Night all!’
Bibi, who was putting the cards away into their boxes, responded to neither greeting.
I got up. ‘I suppose I ought to be going to bed too.’
‘Nonsense,’ Bibi said. ‘It’s not yet midnight. And you’ve nothing to do tomorrow. Have another drink?’
‘Thanks.… I’ve had more than enough.’
But Bibi refilled my glass with brandy before refilling her own.
‘Put something on the gramophone,’ she said to Sasha.
Sasha put on a record of Callas in Norma and for a while we all sat silent, Bibi and I on the sofa and Sasha on the floor beside us, his back against Bibi’s knees. We ought to have been relaxed, but I was not, and I sensed that the others were not. Each of us wanted to move, each of us wanted to say something; but we remained in these attitudes of apparent repose, until all at once Bibi jumped up. ‘Enough of that screeching!’ She jerked the arm of the player so violently off the record that it gave a sound as of tearing silk.
‘Screeching! Really Bibi!’ Sasha said.
Bibi leafed through some records and eventually found one which seemed to satisfy her.
‘Do you know these? They’re Japanese. They call themselves ‘‘The Blackbirds’’. I can’t think why, as all of them have their hair dyed orange and paint their faces white. They sometimes play at Bel Ami in Kyoto. You must have heard them.’
‘Oh, Bill never takes me to night-clubs.’
‘What about that time we met you?’
‘We were the guests of Nishimura. That was different.’
‘Let’s dance,’ Sasha said suddenly. He turned round, one elbow resting on my knee.
I pulled a face. ‘But I dance so badly.’
‘Nonsense!’
Bibi, I realised, was watching us, a pile of records still in her hands. The light from the standard lamp behind her threw part of her face into shadow, making it look suddenly much older, fuller and sterner.
‘And besides I’m far too tired.’
‘Come!’ He pulled me to my feet with unusual forcefulness and then drew me out into the open space between the sofa and the window.
‘But I don’t know how to twist.’
‘You don’t have to twist.’
He held me very close to him, his cheek touching mine, as he hummed to the music. Neither of us said a word. Bibi had gone back to the sofa, where she had stretched herself out, a cigarette, clamped in the small gold tongs which she sometimes used, wreathing its smoke before her face.
We must have danced for a long time: the backs of my legs and my shoulders began to ache, I felt heavy and slightly giddy. ‘Let’s sit,’ I said at last. I walked over to the sofa and Bibi held out a hand to me, pulling me down beside her.
‘I’m drunk,’ I said. ‘I ought to be in bed instead of dancing.’
She kept my hand in hers, her thumb along mine, as she held out the tongs with the fat cigarette on the end. ‘ Have a puff?’ she said dreamily.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Forget it! Have a puff.’
I drew inexpertly on the cigarette, blowing out the smoke as soon as it entered my mouth. It tasted unpleasantly bitter.
Sasha, whom I had seldom seen smoking, now took a cigarette himself from the flat gold box on the coffee table under the window. He breathed the smoke in deeply several times, his lungs rising as his stomach contracted and his eyes always on mine. He remained standing there, Bibi’s hand continuing to hold mine, the thumb gently massaging it. We none of us spoke; again all of us seemed to be waiting.
Bibi removed the end of her cigarette from her holder. ‘Come!’ It was the same gesture with which Sasha had drawn me to my feet to dance with him. ‘A tango. That’s the kind of old-fashioned dance which suits me.’ I hesitated. ‘Come on! It’s too boring to dance with Sasha.’
She too held me extraordinarily close to her, her hair brushing my cheek and her breasts pressing against my own through her white crêpe-de-chine dress.
‘I—I fee
l giddy,’ I murmured.‘ Let’s stop.’
But she gripped me to her, until I felt that my whole weight was in her arms and that if she let go of me I should collapse on to the floor.
Near the door there was a huge mirror in an elaborate gilded frame (Sasha had told me that it was a Regency one, which he had bought at a country sale the last time he had visited England) towards which Bibi now propelled me. As we moved gently back and forth before it, I realised, from the way in which her cheek was no longer close to mine, that she was watching our reflection. Now we were almost motionless; yet her breathing was coming faster and faster against my ear. I, too, looked into the mirror.
I suppose that it was because I was drunk, but for a moment I imagined, in my confusion, that the reflection which looked back at me from the dim recesses of the mirror was not my own but Bibi’s. But that was Bibi’s shoulder on which my arm was resting, and that was the back of Bibi’s neck. So it was not Bibi’s, that face with its curiously startled and rapacious expression, but my own! For some reason that realisation frightened me, as I suddenly remembered how once, when we had first met, Bibi had remarked on how like we were to each other.
I began to push her away from me. ‘I’m too hot. Exhausted. Let’s rest a moment.’
‘As you like.’
She returned to the sofa, but I went to a chair some distance from it.
‘Come! Come here!’
I shook my head. ‘Thank you. It’s cooler here.’ I took a handkerchief from the belt of my dress and mopped at my forehead and chin. Then I looked round for Sasha. He had gone.
‘Where’s Sasha?’
‘I expect he’s gone to the loo.’
‘Isn’t he coming back?’
‘Of course.… Would it upset you if he didn’t?’
I did not reply.
We sat in silence until, a few minutes later, Sasha returned. There were drops of water on his eyebrows, and on the ridge of his nose, gleaming in the light of the standard lamp as he passed in front of it.
‘Mary was getting worried. She thought you’d gone for good.’
Sasha came over to my chair and sat on the arm. I felt a touch on my bare shoulder; then his body was leaning against mine. Bibi got up and put another record on the gramophone.
‘I want to d-dance with you again,’ Sasha said.
This time his body felt curiously clumsy and stiff. He put his mouth to my ear: ‘I’m mad about you,’ he whispered. ‘ Isn’t that the funniest thing? It’s so long … so long since.… What is it about you? … No, don’t move away. Listen to me.’ Suddenly I realised that he was no longer stammering; and at that time, drunk as I was, I was so astonished by this that it seemed far more important than anything he was saying to me.
‘You’ve.… You’re.…’ But my tongue felt dry and heavy; my throat ached as though with a weight of unshed tears. I put both my arms around his neck and hung there as though I was drowning.
Suddenly, without my noticing that she had got up, Bibi had joined us. She was behind me, her arms around both me and Sasha and her cheek against mine. I had the sensation that I was being suffocated between the two of them, Bibi and Sasha fighting, as it then seemed, to reach each other with my half-fainting body interposed. Both of them gripped at me; I felt myself trying to slither between the two opposing weights. Uselessly. ‘ Mary, Mary. Dear Mary.’ But was it Bibi who was saying that in a curiously harsh voice at my ear, or her brother? And whose were the lips at my neck, the hand which …?
I ducked and at last broke free; rushed over to the sofa and picked up my bag; then turned to face them.
But they were dancing serenely with each other, as though that confused, confusing tussle of our three bodies had never taken place. I watched them, feeling suddenly forlorn and excluded in the realisation that I could never dance as well with either of them or indeed with anyone else as they danced with each other. They did not even glance in my direction.
Bibi’s abandoned cigarette was burning away on the edge of a huge crystal ash-tray. Soon it would topple off on to the highly polished veneer of the coffee table. Automatically I picked it up, feeling a slight recoil at the lipstick stain at the end, and then, instead of stubbing it out as I had intended, I took three rapid puffs at it on an impulse which I could not have explained to myself, though I have often attempted to analyse it since. Furtively I held it, turning away from them in the hope that neither would see. Then, putting out the stub, I walked softly over to the door.
‘Goodnight,’ I said. ‘ I think I must go to bed.’
They were now rocking slowly before the mirror, their eyes distant and blank and their cheeks flushed, as though both of them had just woken from a deep sleep. They were very close to each other, Sasha’s arm thrown around Bibi’s shoulder and then hanging heavily from it, as though she was drawing him out of the sea, an inert weight.
‘I’m going to bed,’ I repeated.
‘Goodnight,’ Bibi said without looking round. ‘ Sleep well.’
‘Goodnight, B-Bibi,’ Sasha murmured.
It was only as I made my way down the passage to my room that I realised his slip of the tongue.
6
My breakfast was brought to me, as usual, in my room, by the tall, dignified maid who was the mother of Chieko. As I dressed I heard voices outside the window and there, making their way down to the beach, were Tom and Yuki, the American’s arm thrown round the shoulder of the diminutive Japanese, so that as they walked the disparity in their height caused them to sway from side to side across each other’s path, scuffing up the sand.
Downstairs the house seemed to be deserted; Sasha was often late but Bibi, who complained of being a bad sleeper, usually rose at daybreak to have a swim before her breakfast of a glass of iced milk and some fruit. In the heat I should have preferred to have a similar breakfast myself; but she always insisted that what I really liked was an ‘English’ breakfast, however much. I protested to the contrary, and in consequence I was obliged to make a show of eating my way through cereal, toast and marmalade and a boiled egg.
For once there was a breeze blowing off the sea and the air was fresh. There was a terrace outside the upstairs sitting-room and I decided to sit up there, in the shade of the awning which covered one end. The newspapers were laid out on the sitting-room table, and as I passed through the room I took the English Mainichi. The records, I noticed, had already been replaced; the ash-trays emptied, and the cushions on which Sasha had sprawled at the foot of the sofa tidied away. I noticed the golden tongs through which Bibi sometimes smoked nestling between one side of the sofa and a damask-covered cushion; otherwise everything was in order. I found myself envying this smooth apparatus which automatically cleared away all the debris which day-to-day living leaves behind it: removing dirty glasses and out-dated papers, straightening furniture, sweeping up ash and dust, arid exchanging new flowers for those which gave signs of dying.
I did not read the paper; I placed it on my lap and gazed out to the sea. Some fishermen, their trousers rolled up to their knees, had dragged a boat down into the waves, which were flinging it from side to side; then they clambered aboard, Yuki watching them, his hands on his hips and his head covered in a white linen sun-hat. I could not see Tom.
I had slept badly the previous night, my body now hot and now cold and my mouth filling with an acid liquid. I had got out of bed repeatedly, to adjust and re-adjust the air-conditioning, to swallow some Alka-seitzer and finally to read a novel at the window while the green dawn broke. But now I felt wonderfully clear-headed and well.
Someone was moving round in the sitting-room; then the door on to the terrace was pushed slightly open. At last Sasha’s head appeared. ‘Oh, it’s you. Good morning.’ He came out, his face pale except for a red crease down one cheek, his eyes sleepily bloodshot.
‘Good morning.’ Suddenly I felt disagreeably excited, as though before a viva voce examination which I felt sure that I would fail.
He slumped himse
lf down in the rattan chair opposite mine, and clutched his head with one hand. ‘God, what a hangover!’ he exclaimed. ‘I feel ghastly. D-don’t you?’
‘No. I felt ghastly all night. But now I feel fine.’
‘Of course you d-drank l-less than we did. And you went to bed earlier. Christ!’
The maid appeared with a glass of orange juice on a tray. She was going to put the tray on a table but Sasha jumped up and grabbed the glass to drain it in a matter of seconds. ‘Another,’ he said in Japanese, replacing the glass on the tray. The maid gave a small smile, and an inclination of the head; deference and a faint contempt seemed to be compounded.
‘Is Bibi still asleep? It’s so unlike her not to be up before any of us.’
‘I l-looked in on her. She wasn’t asleep but she has an even worse hangover than I have I think she’ll stay in bed this morning.’ He got up and went to the parapet on the terrace, leaning on it as he surveyed me. ‘Tell me, Mary,’ he said suddenly, ‘d-do you very much d-despise this way of l-life of ours?’
‘Despise it?’
‘Well, you know what I mean. Bibi and I l-lead pretty useless kinds of l-lives when you come to think of it. Don’t we?’
‘I should lead the same kind of life if I could afford it,’ I said.
‘Would you? I wonder. Your husband certainly wouldn’t. Would he?’
It struck me as odd that he should refer to Bill as ‘your husband’. It was as if he were talking of someone he had either never met or had met for only a moment.
‘Bill has a puritan amscience. He believes in the salvation that comes through work.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘I’m not sure I believe in salvation at all.’
‘There was a short time, you know, after my father’s d-death, when I was eager to work myself. I used to go to our office every d-day—I’d spend six of seven hours there. But while I’d been away at school in Switzerland and my father had been busy d-dying, a cousin of ours, a d-distant cousin, had been running the company. He’s an old man, a bachelor, you’d think him entirely unremarkable and uninteresting. He d-doesn’t care about money, he d-doesn’t even care about success or power. But l-like your husband he believes in—in salvation through work. I slowly came to realise that the firm could be run far better if. I didn’t interfere with the way he handled things. And whether I was there or not made no difference to our income. Then Bibi was—was going through a d-difficult time and wanted me to be with her—and we started to build this house for ourselves—and then—in one way and another.…’ His voice trailed off as he raised a hand and began to smooth back the fine golden hair that was sticking to his forehead.