by Edna O'Brien
Chapter Four
HE LOOKED AT HER twice but conveyed no emotion. He reminded her of certain men who played extras in French films; in that his face was long and thin and sharp featured. She purposely sat in the outside seat across the aisle from him because he was the best-looking man. She noticed him the minute they got in the aeroplane, while other people were settling down, fretting about the view, putting their hands up to control the air, pretending to be concerned about these things when in fact they were mainly terrified about being killed. They’d been flying for over an hour now and he’d stopped reading France Soir. He was looking around, mildly curious: at her, at the girl beside her with long hair and sloe eyes who had her sunhat placed on her lap like an ornament. Should she thank him? Say her ears were all right? When they took off she had developed a pain in them and panicked in case her swallow was going to cease, and the darts of pain through her ears were as if needles were being pushed through. He was the one to advise her to suck a sweet.
Could she discuss her ears – blobs of wax on the end of a hair-clip, deafness, the stink of bacteria? She looked through the window and tried to think of something subtle. The horizon was like a sandbank, only blue, with hollows in between the long blue crests and snow beyond that, or white sky. Pockets of cloud like phantom cloud moved over the fields; green fields and ploughed fields that were a dull, pinkish brown and the road was a river because of the way it wound in and out between the fields.
‘The road is like a river,’ she said, turning suddenly and catching his eye as he hitched up the leather belt around his waist. She could make love to him there and then, lie down and love this total stranger. She’d always wanted to. He had intelligent eyes. She was going to make overtures to every good-looking man she met. This trip was her jaunt into iniquity.
‘Pardon,’ he said. Oh God, to have to repeat it and be overheard by the girl with the sloe eyes.
‘Just the road,’ she said nervously. ‘It reminds me of a river.’
‘Good, good,’ he said, smiling as if it were funny. She told him how she’d never been to France before and he predicted that she would find it mostly good.
‘I don’t even speak French,’ she said.
‘Many don’t, but it still is mostly good.’
‘I won’t know what to do.’
‘You will swim and sunbathe and eat good and perhaps gamble at night.’ Was he proposing to do any of these things with her?
‘You make it attractive,’ she said, in a low voice.
‘Yes, you will do all of these things for your holiday,’ he said. He would have a holiday later in Italy, but now he must work. She told him where she was going and took out her diary to check on the name of her hotel.
‘You know it?’ she asked.
‘No, I live many miles into the mountains. With my family.’
‘Mountains,’ she said lovingly, speculating not on their calm ineluctable beauty but on his life. There would be a wife and one or two small children and they would sit out of doors on a wall, waiting for him, the children drawing patterns in the dust with the sharp edge of a stone or a slate that had come off the roof in winter, and there would be hens lazying around and perhaps a dog. The wife would knit, and her eyes would be calm, the calm contented eyes of a wife on a mountain with a husband coming home to love her.
‘How do you get there?’ she asked.
‘I drive. I have my car at the airport since yesterday.’
‘And there are buses also? ‘
‘Buses. Yes.’ He could see she was worried.
‘I show you. I go the opposite way, otherwise I drop you, with pleasure.’
‘Not at all,’ she said, and looked away in case he should see the light go out of her face, her round face quenched in disappointment. She looked through the window again. They had passed the fields and were going over a mountain of grey stone. She stared down at the figurations of stone coiled together the way corpses would be and thought of death and how once as a child with her sister she lay in bed on a Saturday morning thinking of the day of general judgement and rehearsing the two possible alternatives that God would say: ‘Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting flames which were prepared for the Devil and his angels,’ or, ‘Come ye blessed for my Father possesseth the Kingdom prepared for you,’ and while they rattled off the words she was conscious of her father forcing her mother to submit and drawing the mother’s face towards his with his hand under her chin and his thumb and forefinger dug into her, hurting her swallow and his other hand out of sight, doing something under the covers, and her mother resisting and saying ‘Stop,‘ while the children had first an argument and then a bet as to whether God would be up on a rostrum or not. At that time she approved her mother’s resistance and now she felt differently: her mother should not have been mean, and she thought of making love again and turning to the stranger said, ‘Perhaps you can come and eat with me one evening.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it will be possible,’ and he smiled a sweet patient smile. Perhaps. Another silence.
Her first sight of the sea was of a saucer of deepest blue with patches around the edges. The patches were a turquoise and they looked as if they’d been put there specially. Like decoration. She gasped.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said, as if he were responsible for it.
‘I get the same answer from two ladies last week,’ he said. He travelled over and back each week and she thought that if meeting him in France were impossible then she might still be able to meet him in London.
People began to gather themselves together, the dish of sweets came round again, more needles in her ears, the girl next to her putting on the sunhat and he opening a brief case and taking out a tie.
‘I show you,’ he said when she looked and wondered if he were about to vanish.
In fact he was vital at the air terminal because her suitcase was lost. He spoke to officials and gave her name and the name and telephone number of her hotel.
‘Have a drink with me,’ she said, really grateful.
‘I make one telephone and I have a drink,’ he said. She waited in the bar but he did not come back. Maybe she missed him when she went to do her face, or maybe it was the wrong bar. Anyhow she missed him. By the time she came down the bus had left for her destination and she decided to taxi. The price was posted up plain to see. Thirty New Francs. The driver was chatty, wide awake and merry. The merry eyes of an assassin. She felt light in the head, wide awake and ravenous to see. The palm trees were not trees at all but great green quills set into well-shorn barks, hardly swaying. No moss. No ivy. Nothing cluttered the bareness of the place. Pink and white houses of stone fast asleep in the afternoon sun with their shutters folded over and towels on balconies and water sprinklers wetting lawns. He drove very fast. Sometimes he spoke but she just shook her head or said something in English that caused him to shake his head, in turn. The light was dazzling. They came to a town and he pointed to an hotel with two flags overhead. It was on a hill with a series of steps and grass terraces running down from it. Like a fairy tale house to which she was returning as in a dream. They drove right up the slope and under an open porch where he delivered her at the swing doors that were motionless. The agency had booked her safely, the assassin wished her well and by some extraordinary piece of mismanagement the air company had already delivered her lost case. She knew then that things were going to be all right. She signed the book and was given a key. She took the lift and then walked behind a bellboy who was carrying her heavy case down a corridor. She saw a naked man regarding her from a room. He held a door open a few inches and propositioned her not with a smile but with a look. He was in his thirties she estimated, and well built and the light in his room was dusk as if he had drawn the blinds and slept a bit and was now refreshed and ready for love. She looked at him and then hurried on for fear of losing the boy with the case. Her room was about ten doors farther down and on the opposite side to that of the naked man. It did not face the oce
an. The brass bed was bigger than a single bed but nothing like a double. The bellboy put her bag on a straw stool and looked at her with a curious dazed expression and did not smile. The smell was strange. The clean, unfamiliar smell of linen and scouring powder and wood baked by the heat. The wood of the window-frame had many small cracks. It was a shabby room but nice. She unpacked straight away and hung her clothes up carefully, a dress for each hanger. She laid her muslin-light nightdress on the bed and said the word ‘honeymoon.’ There was a wash-basin and a bidet with a brownish stain around the faucet. A sign nailed above the wash-basin warned her about not drinking tap water. She picked up the telephone and very effusively asked for a bottle of Perrier.
‘I’ve just arrived,’ she said, partly as an apology and also to instigate a little welcome for herself.
The Perrier came in a tub of ice, like champagne. The boy who brought it was very affable. She over-tipped.
‘Your name?’ she asked.
‘Hugo,’ he said.
‘Hugo.’ He poured her drink, bowed, and left.
Out on the little balcony, wooed by the newness of the place, the town just beneath her, the silence, the sea somewhere, she stood sipping the drink, held by the sweet pressure of her thoughts, remembering vaguely: other smells, white frost on a road in Ireland, face powder in a glass bowl with a huge puff laid into it, the delicate mauve of a pigeon’s breast; and comparing all these things with this new place that bore no resemblance to any other place she’d ever been to. The light was shattering. Her skin empty of colour. The dazzle on houses like metal. She stayed for over an hour. She thought of the man on the plane hitching up his leather belt and the naked one in the doorway, and the others everywhere about, waiting. She did not think of her son.
Chapter Five
BY THE TIME SHE got down to the hotel beach most of the mattresses were deserted. A few had the blemish of water where a wet body had recently lain, but mostly they looked like row upon row of dry, white, hospital beds. Beyond a railing was another beach and the mattresses there were striped. In the white sand all the footprints had effaced one another. She moved very cautiously and slunk on to a mattress when she thought the beach boy was not looking. Not meanness – she simply did not know how to ask for one. He was busy folding umbrellas and carrying them in bundles to a shed. He carried them like spears, their points forward, and stacked in the shed they looked like armour too. When he crossed over to talk to her she felt it an attack.
‘Anglais,’ she said, and started changing money in her head, setting herself quick sums so that she would be prepared no matter what amount he asked for. All he did was say the name of the hotel and then go off again. He was a dark, rich tan like everybody else in that place except herself and the English group a few mattresses away.
‘Look at Arthur, he’s turning,’ a woman was saying, while her friends joined her in looking at an unfortunate specimen of a man who was raging pink.
‘You’ll have to wear shorts in the garden when you go home,’ his wife said as she helped him to dress under a robe. She opened each leg of his underpants while he stepped into it and then she drew it up above his stomach and smoothed the cotton legs so that they did not bulge.
‘All right, Arthur?’ she said. He looked grumpy. Then he sat down while she put on his canvas shoes, worming each one over his swollen ankles with the help of a shoehorn.
‘Give him vinegar,’ another woman said. She’d discovered its soothing properties the previous summer. She waved a bottle that seemed to contain a chocolate-coloured lotion.
‘In a fancy bottle like that – vinegar?’ Arthur’s wife said. The woman had changed it into one of those sun-lotion bottles so that she wouldn’t look foolish.
‘Got it in Hull, on a beach. We went to Hull for our anniversary,’ she said, proud of the bottle.
‘Gladys is nothing if she’s not economical,’ a second man said and looked at her with bitterness. Once or twice they tried to engage Ellen by a word, or a mention of sunburn or what it said in the English paper that day but she pretended not to notice. She sat upright and had her first view of the Mediterranean and thought it odd that it should mean nothing to her, nothing at all. She had more interest in looking at the beach boy as he swept the mattresses with the long, soft twig, but every time she looked in her direction the woman with the lorgnette had the eyeglass fixed on her. She was dressed in black and had a thick white snood over her hair. Between trying to avoid this woman and having to ignore the English group she found she had to keep looking in the direction of the sea. It was hazed over and she could not see to the far side. Then a young girl came and temporarily everything was changed.
They all stared because she moved so perfectly. She was in bare feet and her toes painted silver had the effect of having just had candle grease poured over them. They were so light compared with the rich, polished hues of her body. Like mahogany. The beach boy saluted her with the broom as she went by but she did not smile, her presence was its own reward. She came and sat two mattresses away from Ellen and lay right back trailing her hands in the warm sand: The woman with the lorgnette left Ellen abruptly and began staring at the new arrival. And then the man appeared. Almost on cue he stood on the balcony and looked down at the three people who were left. The English crowd had gone. He was like an advertisement for vigour. Gold-skinned with blond hair, and the spots of sand on his body gave him the glisten of stone. She thought he might be the one who propositioned her, naked, in the corridor but she could not be sure. In strange surroundings she could never identify faces and already the lift boy, the beach boy and the porter looked indistinguishable. He talked idly to another man but mainly he looked towards the beach. He looked at her and her heart machined as she saw his companion come down the steps and walk towards her. He was a fat man and he walked over daintily, treating the ground as a tightrope.
‘Mademoiselle?’ he said as he stood over her. She pretended to be puzzled. Then a sharp whistle from the balcony alerted them both and the golden sultan up above indicated to the fat man that he had made a mistake. Excusing himself, the fat man crossed over the bridge of mattresses to where the young girl lay.
‘Mademoiselle’ he said. She must have been dozing because he had to say it twice and then she sat up somewhat startled.
‘I hope you will forgive my intrusion but my friend would like to invite you to a party.’
‘Your friend ‘she said coldly. He pointed to the balcony and her eyes followed his finger. The man up above did not look at her for confirmation, but stared out to sea in the direction of a white fortress that was across the water. His castle.
‘This evening, we are having a beach party,’ the man said, over-humbly.
‘I have another engagement,’ the girl said. Ellen wished she could give answers like that instead of rushing to assignations with open arms.
‘Je suis désolé,’ the man said, and in English the girl asked why he had come.
‘We are having a party on the beach, our biggest party,’ he said.
‘What time?’
‘At nine, but we could have it later if you wish that.’
She said nothing for a minute and in the interval he took the opportunity to kneel on the sand. What tactics.
‘You have another appointment?’ he said again. She thought about it and said very realistically, ‘I am going to the beauty parlour at eight.’ Her hair was obscured by a green kerchief and she wore dark glasses that had rhinestones on their horn frames. There was no telling what effect the invitation had on her.
‘Perhaps you could come after,’ he said. She looked again at the man who was to be her escort and then she said that she would try to change her hair appointment. The fat man gave a slight nod towards the balcony and the sultan walked away, over-slowly. He walked well. He and the girl would make a perfect couple. Ellen felt the humiliation one feels in the presence of perfectly formed people and she had a moment’s apprehension about having come at all. A child was laughing a
nd saying ‘Encore, encore,’ and she thought of her son.
‘You are Swedish?’ the man said, relaxing now with the girl and asking what she did for a living. She translated textbooks, which was why she spoke English, and then he asked how long she had been there.
‘Three weeks,’ she said.
‘A beautiful girl like you and I haven’t seen you before now.’ His tone was flirtatious, but the girl retained her distance.
‘Perhaps you have been on another beach?’
‘No, this beach.’ She was quite brisk. The sun, the opponent of dreams, had no place for subtlety, deceit, and the countless little looks that denote a passing attraction. A cauldron of honesty. Only the perfection people triumphed. The fat, the lame, the slobs, even the slightly blemished like Ellen would find it hard to pass as eligible. Unless of course she settled for the people in her own category. But who is willing to?
‘I must be blind,’ he said. The girl picked up her beach bag and rose to leave. She would see him later. He kissed her hand in an elaborate and theatrical way. Then he watched her walk away and when she had gone out of sight he caught Ellen’s eye. He did not smile.