by Edna O'Brien
Soon there were only two people left, herself and the Lesbian. She was certain now that the woman in black was a Lesbian because of the way she kept holding the lorgnette and looking intense. Rather than have to talk to her Ellen left.
It was too early for dinner so she went back to her room and ordered tea. The same waiter as had brought the Perrier came and after she had tipped him he still stood there, beaming.
‘Parlez-vous français?’ he said.
‘English,’ she said.
‘Anglaise…?’ he said: She nodded.
‘Ah Anglaise…’ he said triumphant.‘ I fear I have mislaid my bus ticket.’ He said it excitedly and laughed. They both laughed. The foolish laughter of strangers. She had to make it clear when she wanted him to leave.
Chapter Six
THE DINING-ROOM HAD A terrace. White tables stretched from one end to the other, and beyond the tables the palm trees were visible. Yellow floodlights flared on the trunks of those suave trees and on the tables there were candles alight. The grease of seasons had thickened on the sides of the candlesticks. Every colour candle had burnt in those thick bottles, every colour grease had encrusted itself. She thought of his story about the cochineal and wondered if they would be friends at Christmas time and could she give him a present? She sat with an American doctor who had marginal diabetes. It meant he had to pick his diet most carefully.
‘You come from?’
‘England,’ she said. She was tired of saying it and anyhow it was not true. But saying one came from Ireland resulted in tedious stories about fairies and grandmothers. He was a family man himself on a medical course. He was lonely.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said, ‘I’m a happy man.’
The kids and the hamburgers meant everything.
‘What about you?’ he asked.
‘I’m happy too,’ she said and looked down at her wedding ring to hint. Might they go gambling later?
‘Be my guest,’ he said. She shook her head and tried to reply but a fish-bone had got in her throat. He gave her a crust and told her to chew it hard.
‘Chew it,’ he said, very loud. He chewed fiercely to show what he meant. He was extremely coarse.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I just take the little lady out for the evening and we have fun.’
She looked at him with distaste.
‘I’d hate to think you were getting the wrong impression. If I thought that I’d never speak to a strange woman again.’ His eyes were beginning to anger. She kept looking down at her napkin where it had been darned. The darn was old and from various washings the thread was almost the same white as the linen.
‘Let’s see if you’ll like it?’ he said.
‘Stop asking me,’ she said suddenly. He snapped his hand then and called the waiter. A young boy came over and the American told him to cancel the order for dessert. The boy did not understand. The American repeated the command and left.
She kept her eyes on her plate for a while in case anyone else should engage her. But by nine o’clock everyone was seated and most people were half-way through. There was a feeling of agitation: pancakes burnt theatrically over flaming stoves, waiters talked angrily among themselves, overfull plates of soup just missed being bumped against, young boys knelt reverently to pick up a piece of cutlery that had fallen; and the diners talked and chewed with the savagery possible only in a strange public place where everyone else is talking and chewing as fiercely.
And as surely as they had all come, and debated over what to eat, and eaten it, so they all filed out again, sluggish now that they had been replenished. The main lights were turned down and the fever of the room began to subside. Waiters pushed trolleys of used dishes towards the kitchen and other waiters carried clean white cloths under their arms and set about restoring the tables. She was last.
It had fallen dark beyond the region of the dining-room. The light changed to ink without a dusk to forestall it. She’d eaten well. A raspberry seed had got caught in her tooth. Sitting there trying to worm it out, her eye fell on a man’s jacket. It lay over a chair with the sleeves hanging down empty of arms. She longed to touch it because it was a dark velvet, the colour of plums in autumn. The colour of softness like the night, softness into which she longed to drown as into a pool or the pupils of large dark eyes. For some reason she recalled the velvet of soot at the back of a fireplace and her father singing ‘Red River Valley,’ singing it affectedly in a nasal tone, and the neighbours listening politely and looking at the flames of the fire. It must have been Christmas, one of the few nice times. Her father was sober, her mother passed around plates of jelly and custard. The custard was thick. Then. Now the trees were stark. The night and the jacket were softness. But the trees still rose supreme, their trunks tall, the old palms whittled down to form a base around the new leaves and next year these new leaves would be whittled away too and the trees would be stronger still. She moved across and touched the jacket. She had many superstitions like that. As a child she had to touch certain stones in the walls on her way to school, and get to certain spots before counting twenty. The jacket felt nice and the smell of tobacco recalled being in the fierce embrace of a man. She stroked it slowly, the way she would stroke a curtain or a cat. The texture was soft and it smelt nice. Then she became aware of someone behind her. She turned sharply to apologize.
‘I’m not a pickpocket,’ she said.
A man stood before her in shirt sleeves. A tall man with dusky skin, and the smile of a baby. The whites of his eyes were immaculate like the clean table-cloths.
‘I have not seen you before,’ he said.
‘I only arrived today,’ she said, withdrawing from the jacket.
You like it?’
‘Yes, I like corduroy,’ she said, and moved away. He put his hand out to detain her.
‘You dance?’
‘A little.’ She should have taken a course in everything before coming to this place.
‘I play the violin for you to dance.’ He belonged to the orchestra that played for hotel visitors. He asked her to come in but explained that he would not be able to dance with her. She foresaw herself sitting by the wall, ignored, and the magic falling away from her like fake frosting or gold dust. She’d better not.
‘A drink perhaps, later,’ he said. How late? He did not finish until after midnight. She explained that she had just arrived and felt tired. No more impetuousness. There were ten long days to fill in.
‘Tomorrow?’ he said then.
‘In the afternoon,’ she said, conveying a certain morality. He had picked up her left hand and stared down at the ring on her marriage finger.
‘ Married?’ he said.
‘Once upon a time,’ she said, trying to give the impression that a ring made no difference. They made a date for the following afternoon.
When he’d gone she went out and decided to take a stroll along the beach. Out in the lobby she had a slight moment of satisfaction. The perfect couple who had made the assignation on the beach were already at the disenchanted stage. The girl walked towards the lift, her head down. She looked totally different in clothes. Pert and secretarial, with her hair in an absurd bouffant. The fat man who had issued the invitation to her was behind, pleading, saying, ‘You have some suspicion that is not so,’ and the sultan was at the bar biting his thumb-nail. She looked at him now with reproach. Two men stared as she walked through the bar. The nursemaid outfit was effective and she looked like someone destined for the most poignant moment of the evening. In the garden the massed leaves made a fabric against the sky and there was a wind.
Among the palms were other trees that were taller and more feathery and these gave out a perfume. In the wind the perfume carried and got lost again and the sounds carried and faded like that too: foreign voices, arguments, a laugh, the syrup music of his violin trickling out. She went back to the beach where the mattresses were, not knowing any other walk just yet. It was totally empty, the mattresses like corps
es. It was not lit up, but all around the lights of other hotels, and of the town and of nearby towns gleamed steadfast. The holiday night was happening. Under those lights people danced and walked and held on to each other, their senses heightened by the fairy-tale prettiness of the towns and the dark water with its withheld sea-sob : ‘Ah…Ah… Ahh.’ A feeling of waste took hold of her. She ought to be seeing this with someone. No longer consecrated to loneliness, she was impatient to reach her destiny.
She moved to the water’s edge. Then she bent down and washed her hands and her wedding-ring-which was loose anyhow – began to slip off. She removed it, looked at it, put it to her lips, kissed it tenderly, and then threw it violently into the water. The last unwitnessed act of flinging her husband away. She stayed there for a while, not regretting it, lost in a patch of darkness, and then she decided to retire early so that she would look well the following day.
Chapter Seven
THE VIOLINIST WAS LOCATED at the top of the building and next afternoon she set out for there. Along the quiet and empty corridor she walked, like a shadow, stealthily, and close to the wall. He had warned her not to be seen by guests. On the sixth landing she rested. He had warned her too about not taking the lift in case the lift operator might see her and watch where she went. By the time she got to his door she was out of breath. She tapped nervously and he opened it a little and drew her in. The first effect was of clutter and not much light. Musical instruments were strewn about and the feeling of constriction was terrible. It was an attic room, and compared with the majestic ballroom where he played each night, this was absurd.
His clothes were hung in an alcove and she saw the jacket that had first introduced her to him. Not sumptuous now but a best jacket carefully hung up so that it would be perfect for its evening’s outing.
She said ‘Bonjour,’ but said it badly. All the way up the stairs she had practised saying it casually. He scratched idly at the hair on his chest, smiling at her, stretching his other arm to show the difference in their colouring. They were like people from different orbits. There was a smell of ozone from under his armpits. Then in his shorts, he stood before her and kissed her and positioned his legs so that they coincided with hers exactly. When she made a small change of position he moved his limbs too and she thought, ‘He’s hurrying everything, he’s rushing it.’ Over his bare, bronze shoulder she saw a camera on a tripod, like an eye spying on her, and she drew back quickly and asked what it was. She really meant, ‘Why is it there spying on me?’
‘For photograph,’ he said, and then remembering his duties as a host he offered her apple juice.
‘Have you whisky?’ she said. She felt nervous. The small room was suffocating and insects came in hordes through the window space. He had taken the glass out completely. She breathed out through her parted lips to try and cool herself. The morning’s heat had murdered her. Sun got in the folds of her arms and legs, and she gasped when she went out and saw the cars cooking on the roadside and the brown bodies glistening with jelly and not even a twilight under the trees where she ran to escape.
‘Spirits no gud,’ he said handing her the half glass of apple juice.
‘Christ, I always pick the puritans,’ she said, hoping he would not know what she meant. He told her to sit on the bed and then he got behind the camera and asked if he could take a picture.
‘I’m not very pretty,’ she said, sitting all the same. She saw him stoop down and heard something click and knew that the picture when it was developed would show an apprehensive woman, with a glass midway between her chest and her open mouth. He crossed over and drew down one strap of her dress so that it fell on her arm. The white sagging top of one breast came into view. Above it was a line of raw pink where she had boiled in the sun that morning in an effort to get a tan for him. He photographed her like that and then with both straps down so that the sag of both breasts was in view and then he brought her dress down around her waist and photographed her naked top. It had been too hot to put on a brassière. From his position, stooped behind the camera, he indicated that she hold one breast, perkily, as if she enjoyed showing it off.
‘I’m not well formed,’ she said stupidly, and remembered, stupidly again, that breasts ought to be the shape of champagne glasses. Then she asked him to talk. Desire had snapped since the previous night, and she thought of elastic snapping and the ugly pimply look it got. She felt ugly like that.
‘Take your dress…’ and then he frowned. ‘Your name?’ he asked.
‘Ellen,’ she said, flatly.
‘Ellen,’ he said, and dwelt on it for a second, to please her. ‘Ellen, take your dress right off, show the body,’ he said. He pulled an imaginary dress down the length of his own body.
‘I can’t,’ she said, her voice strangled with embarrassment.
‘You are a holy woman,’ he said.
‘I am not a holy woman,’ she said, although it would have been simpler to say yes.
‘I want to talk,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell me about you and where you’re from and who taught you the violin and why you do this.’ She pointed to the camera and then looked for the other camera on the wash-stand. It was a small one with a treacherous little eye. Beside it a bundle of new towels in a Cellophane wrapping. On the Cellophane there was printed an English name. Her eye rested there, as if by looking at the English name she would escape the indignity happening to her.
‘A gift,’ he said, ‘from Englishwoman.’
‘Nice,’ she said.
‘They are nice,’ he said. ‘They are thought to be cold.’ He repeated the word cold as if to confirm its meaning.
‘You mean frigid,’ she said, but he didn’t seem to understand.
‘The unmarried girls they only want cuddle, no business,’ he said. ‘No juice.’
‘No juice,’ she said, and asked about the Englishwoman who had sent him the gift. He said a nice lady she had been, and handsome. Ellen thought of some woman – bound to be in her thirties – going home to her husband with a guarded look, and having to keep the violinist’s address in the toecap of her shoe and have the towels posted directly from the shop. Sadness began to wash over her, and thinking of lying in a sea of sadness she saw the waves as patient, painless and unceasing.
‘You are from where ‘she said, seriously trying to get on to another plane of friendship with him. He was from Vienna and had a flat separate from his parents. He had a sweetheart too, who sewed all her own dresses and looked smarter than any of the girls who spent fortunes in shops. He was engaged, and hoped to be married at the end of the summer, which was why he had to save and could not buy spirits for Englishwomen, not even nice Englishwomen.
‘And how would you feel if your sweetheart was unfaithful?’ she said trying to stir his conscience so that he would make no scene when she drew her dress up.
‘Sad,’ he said. ‘Très, très sad.’ And she wished that she had never come and the jacket had been something she saw and stroked without knowing its owner.
‘We not talk about such things, I think it a little beet un-natural,’ he said.
‘Un-natural,’ she said, sitting there with the top of her dress bagging around her middle. She tried to hold her breasts up but the effort was extreme. Then she fanned herself with her silk purse and said,
‘You and I will be special friends and not make love.’
‘Oh yes, yes.’ He rushed over.
If she resisted and screamed, would she be heard? Did other rapists occupy the attic rooms around? He drew her up by the hand and opened her zip, at snail’s pace, and then looked at her in her half-slip. She stood there with the middle of her body death-white – a body that had never faced sunshine in its life – the ridiculous crescent of pink on her chest and two patches of pink on her thighs where the sun had hit them when she pulled her dress above her knees. He drew back the white cotton bedspread and the one worn blanket underneath, and the top sheet. He rolled them back together and left the roll like a bolster at t
he end of the bed. Over the bottom sheet he spread a large bath towel. He did it thoroughly so that no inch of sheet was uncovered; she thought of the Englishwoman and why she sent him towels and she knew she could never lie down with him and make love.
‘Come on,’ he said, waiting for her to take off the frilled pants that she’d bought along with all the other honeymoon clothes.
He tried to help her with this and she knew that she had to say something to stop him.
‘I think I’m going to bleed,’ she said. The only thing that came to her lips.
‘Bleed?’ he said, not understanding.
‘Blood,’ she said, very clearly, and he frowned and said he did not like that very much.
‘I do not like it very much either,’ she said. He looked at her now with alarm, in case she might do the room an injury. He began to take the towel off the bed and fold it very carefully, first in two, then in four, then he put it on the towel rack near the wash-basin.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Too bat,’ he said and suddenly he got very industrious and took up a small notebook and asked her to spell the ugly word she had used. She wrote it down for him and thought if her husband ever needed evidence of her infidelity there was a half-naked, shivering picture of her on film and a word in her handwriting in his home-made phrase book. She said it was a verb and the infinitive was ‘to bleed.’
‘You are educated,’ he said, surprised.
‘I know about words,’ she said, stepping into her dress, relieved, safe again.
‘And this,’ he asked, pointing to where her nipple lay, flat, under the flowered dress.
‘Nipple.’
‘Hot word,’ he said. It took her a minute to understand that he wanted not ordinary words, but erotic ones for wooing Englishwomen.
‘Just nipple,’ she said.
‘And you are a frigid woman,’ he said, flicking the pages to F, where he could enter this new, unwelcome word. He was not as slow as she’d thought him to be. Then he lowered his hand between his legs and asked the juice words for there. He did not touch her any more, but kept looking suspiciously as if she were about to sully the place. When she sat down again – she did not feel nervous now – he rushed over with a plastic beach cushion and had her stand up so that he could put it under her.