by George Sims
At first it seemed as if they might be going straight out but then the boat swung left from the Golfe de Revellata, round the point and sped due south past the Grotte les Veaux Marins, running parallel with the corniche to Porto and Piana. The boy leaning over the back of the boat had been watching Bunty while he was fooling about and now he called out to the other youth, pointing in to one of the little bays which dotted the coast. The boat made a tight turn, swinging the skiers out in a wide arc. When they were in easy swimming distance of the rocks Balfour shouted, ‘Let go, Bunty, just let go,’ raising one hand to show his intention. After the tension of the previous ten minutes, to drop the rope and ski in, slowly sinking as he lost momentum, was like falling back into an armchair.
They dog-paddled slowly in to the shore, laboriously pushing their skis in front of them, then lay side by side on a smooth white rock which looked in profile like a man’s head with a prognathous jaw and a low forehead; their backs were arched over this simian brow and their rib cases pumped up and down like twin engines on a bench.
The motor-boat turned once more and the boys waved and shouted—their words did not carry but the jubilance did. Last night Balfour had intruded into their special, enclosed world because he had thought they were frightening a girl and in the ensuing fight he had hurt them—now they had marooned him perhaps three miles from Calvi on a rock ledge with a seemingly impenetrable barrier of bushes and briars which stretched right to the cliff top.
Bunty spoke for the first time since the hectic ride began: ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’ Her voice was slightly shaky but she began to laugh. ‘Your face when you realized. Such frustration. I thought you might go off pop!’ She laughed again and Balfour joined in even though it hurt his ribs to do so. There was indeed something farcical about their situation and certainly the image of himself trying to be intimidating while being dragged along balanced on two small pieces of wood was ludicrous. Their laughter became unrestrained and went on until it became really painful.
When Balfour got up he felt quite weak. The boat was out of sight and the cove so silent that his voice sounded self-conscious and slightly theatrical.
‘God, what a nut I was to interfere like that last night. That girl I “rescued” was there this afternoon you know. And the little bitch was laughing as we shot off. What a great idiot I am…’
‘Well you see she was probably enjoying being pulled about. I mean, in sight of the club there was no real danger. All the thrill of being ravished without any of the pain. Just screams of pleasurable excitement I suppose. Still, at the time I thought you were right to stop them. They were quite drunk and it could have become nasty.’
Balfour was mentally kicking himself all the way back to Calvi. It was nice of Bunty to try and defend his behaviour but he had handled the affair all wrong: Max Weber could have dealt with it in a commanding fashion, Sammy Weiss with a joking word, but he had acted at the youths’ own level, pushing in and then punching hard as soon as they hit out at him. It seemed as if he would never grow up.
When he got up from the rock and looked down at the girl who was staring pensively up at the sky, he realized with a little jolt of surprise how similar her mouth was to Barbara’s—the top lip was exactly the same, sharply outlined and not full but with a hint of sensitivity—the slight tremulousness which he had often seen much magnified on the cinema screen in close-ups of Julie Harris. And similar eyes, too, large and Aegean blue. He thought that perhaps he was always searching for the romantic, unworldly personality which should be mirrored by such eyes and that kind of mouth, but then some detached judicial part of his brain intervened to object—absurd self-delusion! Yet there was something about her expression which appealed deeply to him.
The sea was so clear and still momentarily that he could survey it far out like a giant aquarium until a breeze broke the glass-like surface into innumerable fragments. A ledge of rock extended from the point where he stood and there the water was only five or six feet deep, dropping at its edge to perhaps twenty. He searched the gently waving banks of light green weed and tempting channels of clear water above white sand; in the penumbra of the rock ledge he saw some corbes and dorades hugging clumps of darker weed. He had become absorbed in his search and oblivious of his surroundings. He turned to explain to Bunty: ‘I must have a dip to cool off. Untie these knots of frustration.’
She nodded and he took a deep breath before plunging in. He kept his dive shallow over the ledge and then swam down strongly with a sensation of complete freedom, usually only found in dreams. The lure of the sea, indeed of any water, for Balfour was an atavistic thing, a yearning for the immeasurable and unknowable. Also there was the illusion he had in its depths of making a fresh start, of becoming someone with a purpose in life instead of being merely trapped in the flimsy webs of vanity and sexuality.
He held himself stationary by grasping strands of dark red seaweed in both hands and then somersaulted so that his feet, looking enormous, stood momentarily on the white sand of the sea-floor and slimy yellow weed clung to his legs like a perverted embrace. With lungs bursting he jumped and propelled himself with kicking legs to the surface. As he broke through to the sunlight and took in air he experienced a marvellous sense of well-being, a feeling of having shed the heavy though unformulated sense of guilt he toted round like a pack. This would not last—it would be brief, he knew himself well enough for that, but for the time being it was like drinking several glasses of champagne.
He pushed the skis as far as possible under a bush and arranged them so that the ends were hidden by a clump of mesembryanthemum. He pointed to the cliff top: ‘We’ll soon be up there. I’ve been to lots of these coves with Roger du Cros and there is always a crisscross path. Yes, you see! It starts there. What do you think?’
Bunty grinned weakly: ‘Quite smashing.’ It was a phrase they had taken over secretly from a Junoesque German girl who held court at the Café du Golfe, using her own brand of British slang. She shook her head nervously from side to side as the Berliner did and mimicked again: ‘Some bit of a drag.’
After only a few steps Balfour was sweating and dirty. The refreshing effect of his swim was soon lost as he struggled to climb the badly overgrown path. The maquis which covered the cliffs seemed to be mainly composed of briars and thorn bushes, and the recent rainstorm had left it slippery underfoot without dispersing a black dust which clung to the intractable branches. Cluster-flies, brown bees and other insects hovered along the path, descending on his head when he needed both hands to break off giant thistles or push a briar into a position from which it would not spring out at Bunty. There was one point where he had to climb a section as the path had fallen away, and he could do this only by gripping whin bushes. He remembered ascending similar paths with Roger du Cros after under-water swimming expeditions and thinking nothing of them, but with feet, arms and chest bare this ascent was as unpleasant as the youths had intended it should be.
When they reached the top they slumped down by the side of the road. Balfour put a grubby, badly scratched hand round Bunty’s shoulders. ‘Thanks for not grumbling. You’re a good sport.’ Then he laughed: ‘Terribly clipped and British that praise. But seeing you’ve had to go all through this and you were only a bystander last night, I really mean it.’ It struck him that the caress had been one that a father or uncle might make.
‘Sounds like high praise in fact. And when I’ve got cleaned up I shan’t mind…It was rather an adventure. Once I’ve had a shower…But I hope there won’t be any more chapters. So no retaliation now!’
Balfour shook his head firmly. ‘No—I was tempted—particularly when one briar went right inside my nose. But I was in the wrong the other evening, handled it badly. My friend Sammy, the one I told you about, who sent me that cable, is fond of quoting an Italian saying to me: “It’s easy to travel and change your skies: to change yourself you have to be wise.” I think
it’s about time I made a real effort to change. So there will be no revenge…There’s a café about a quarter of a mile along this road and I’ve been there with my friend du Cros—they’ll give us a couple of beers on credit and we can wait there for a lift. Then back to Calvi, showers, and a dinner wherever you choose.’
Bunty sighed: ‘Sounds good. Your friend Sammy sounds rather nice too. So wise.’
‘He is. Very nice, wise, kind, calm and tolerant. All the mature virtues I lack. But wouldn’t have been much use to you on that cliff. He’s an acrophobe, has a morbid fear of heights, suffers terribly from vertigo.’
Chapter IV
Hiss of petrol lamps, flutterings of moths and other faint night-sounds, a few words of Corse or Italian floating up to Balfour from another level of the village. Standing quite still and listening intently he could hear a snatch of a song, a serenata perhaps, and the distant lamenting sigh of the wind. Perched high in the hills Calenzana had a mysterious, secretive atmosphere at night, as if it was conforming to an unknown curfew, and Balfour was glad that they had stopped there for a drink even though the glasses of pastis had looked badly smeared.
Instead of waiting for Bunty by the Citroen, he walked across to the parapet from which they had previously watched a sunset like a firework display in which each set-piece eclipsed the one before and in rapid succession the sky had been painted duck-egg blue, pale violet and greenish-orange. Now the moon gilded clumps of olive and fig trees on the statuary hills, and stars flashed enigmatic messages from a vast expanse of gentian sky.
Balfour looked round slowly, trying to imprint on his mind all that he could see and hear: it was one of those rare moments when he felt fully alive. The words ‘Lost in the wonder of why we’re here’ from the song ‘Dancing in the Dark’ came to him, and he was reminded of how closely his memories were linked with the world of the cinema and popular songs. At forty-two he had reached the stage where people he met for the first time reminded him of other people he had known and new situations were very like others he had experienced, but films and songs gave him an additional background, one which asserted its existence more often than he would care to acknowledge. Even on that terrible evening when Barbara had raged at him and they had decided to split up, behind her denunciation he could hear faint overtones of Bette Davis spitting out ‘Self, self, self’. Now faced with a beautiful night-sky, he was reminded first of a song and then of the gaiety and insouciance of Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in an absurd film he had seen when he was about eleven—life at second-hand had as much reality for him as his own. He wondered if this showed an essential triviality in his character, perhaps an emotional incapacity or bankruptcy which led to his ‘perpetual immature behaviour’.
The night air was heavy with mimosa but Balfour was aware of another, earthier smell—the odd, pepperish one of anis. If you broke the jointed stems you smelt aniseed, but from a distance the plant’s aroma was like a mixture of pepper and curry, a quite distinct pungent penetration of the throat and nose, which immediately evoked memories of other holidays he had spent on the Mediterranean.
A few hundred miles away, on Ischia, perhaps looking at this same moonlit sea, Prudence was spending her first holiday away from the family: fast on this thought came the irony of it; he had broken up his family in a cavalier fashion and now he was being sentimental about it. But as he thought of Prudence, her puzzled, guarded yet hurt expression on the day he removed his things from the Orme Square house, Balfour was aware of unaccustomed sensations, an unpleasant one in the throat which made him swallow repeatedly and a pricking at the back of his eyes. He had forgotten that one could really have ‘a lump in the throat’, and it was so long since he had cried (perhaps thirty years) that it was like a new experience. Tears continued to well up and roll down his cheeks. It seemed that, for some unknown reason, he was at last learning the lesson which Sam Weiss had tried to impress on him some weeks before. Oscar Wilde had written: ‘Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.’ For a moment he contemplated writing to Prudence and asking her to suspend judgement, then dismissed the impulse—the verdict was in.
‘Ned?’ Balfour heard his name being called and a rather nervous summoning whistle. He turned to see Bunty standing near a petrol lamp, apparently loath to venture into the shadows of the cobbled lane. He hastened to her, using both hands in a furtive movement to brush the moisture from his face.
‘What a weird old place! That man with the mask of blue-black whiskers and the odd tooth or so—he looked just like a bandit. Then when I came out from spending a penny there was an old girl all in black, with skirts down to her ankles, who held my arms and kept trying to tell me something though I couldn’t understand a word.’
‘It used to be known as the village of gangsters,’ Balfour said, ‘and I doubt if the police get much co-operation up here even now. I know a few phrases of Corse but it’s so clipped that I can’t understand anything when they gabble.’
‘Oh look!’ Bunty bent down at the edge of the lamp’s fitful light. ‘It’s crushed but still alive.’
Balfour crouched beside her and saw a small lizard with its tail and back legs squashed into a groove between two stones. It looked like a heraldic emblem, a miniature dragon caught forever in a position of defiant despair. He examined it carefully and experienced a second’s illogical surprise that it should be in a position of such torture without making a sound. No doubt it had been run over by the Citroen when he jockeyed back and forth in parking near the lamp. He gently pushed the girl away and then stamped on the lizard, meeting her protestations with a shrug. ‘Nothing else I could do apart from leaving it there to die slowly.’
They got into the car and drove off in silence. They were practically at the bottom of the tortuous twisting hill road when he asked: ‘Did you really think I was cruel to do that? In a situation like that what else can you do apart from give the coup de grâce? Sammy Weiss, the man I told you about this afternoon, was in a concentration camp before the war and he told me that in there they said that death was a good friend, bringing an end to suffering and pain.’
‘Concentration camp before the war?’
‘Oh yes, they had them then. Sammy’s an Austrian Jew but he’s also a socialist. The local Nazis must have had a list prepared of people they wanted out of the way because he was arrested on the 15th March 1938, just after Hitler marched into Vienna, and he was in Wollersdorf and Dachau till January 1939. Then his brother arranged for him to be released, and he came to England. But before that he’d been hung in chains. Even now his fingernails…But I’d better not go on. I forget that you weren’t even born in ’39. Must sound like ancient history to you.’
‘It’s not that—but it doesn’t seem real somehow, I mean possible. Why should a whole nation agree to sadists and lunatics running things—were all the Germans mad at that time?’
‘I know what you mean. Even when I first saw newsreels of the camps in 1945 I was trying to find an explanation, make sense of them. In fact I can remember telling a friend that the camps must have been prisons which got out of hand, that the food supplies had run out, that kind of thing. But since the war I’ve met a dozen or so people who were actually in camps, mostly through Sammy, and now I know a fair amount about them. Too much I think sometimes. Another good friend of mine, Max Weber the art-dealer, ended up in Buchenwald and he’s not a Jew—just a Bavarian Catholic who supported the “White Cross” peace movement. Perhaps you can see why it’s rather an obsession with me. That’s why the telegram from Sammy has me worried—he says that any häftling, camp prisoner, had to become independent or he didn’t survive. I don’t know anyone more independent than him—so how can my advice be “vital” to him?’
‘Have you known him long?’
‘Since 1952, about as long as I’ve known Max Weber. I told you I deal in manuscripts and autograph letters; wel
l, Max is a very successful dealer in paintings. At first Sammy was just a customer to both of us—he doesn’t have a lot of money to spend but he’s extremely knowledgeable and astute in collecting.’
‘He wouldn’t be wanting your advice before lashing out a particularly large sum?’
‘I don’t think so. And I’m sure he would not call any decision of that kind “terrible”. He has no taste for dramatics. It certainly puzzles me…’
‘Why can’t you phone him tonight?’
‘He’s not on the phone at home. He asked me to phone him at the Burlington Arcade where he has a shop, and presumably he wasn’t going to be there today. So I must wait.’
‘Well, tomorrow you’ll probably find you’ve been worrying unnecessarily. But is there a phone in Calvi? I haven’t seen one.’
‘Oh yes, two or three booths in the post office.’
Balfour stopped the car, pulling over on to the narrow road’s sandy shoulder. He had no faith in the girl’s optimistic prophecy, but it was time to stop talking of concentration camps and cables. In the moonlight, with her long straight flaxen hair, she looked touchingly young and beautiful, rather like Tenniel’s ‘Alice’ though this impression was contradicted by her dark grey crew-neck pullover and white cotton trousers.
When they got out of the car he twirled her round by the shoulders so that she had a panoramic view. The old farmhouse known as ‘Le Coucou’ stood in an isolated spot in the valley of the Bartasca river, a few hundred feet off the road from Calenzana—there were no other buildings within sight and apart from the vines and an occasional cork oak they had an uninterrupted view on every side. The limpid night sky seemed at once immeasurably far off and yet close enough to step into; the air was soft and faintly scented with tamarisk; there was just a slight breeze ruffling the vine leaves, occasionally flashing their silver undersides. Balfour whispered into Bunty’s ear: ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses…’