The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  Quite soon, while Minksie seemed to drift upwards, dreamy, capturing her long-wanted mood of pure swing-high, Connie started to think of meadows deep with flowering grasses and she lying with Frobisher among them, somewhere far out of sight. Almost as if reading her thoughts Frobisher sprang up, slightly unsteady, and took off his jacket and flung it over the back of his chair.

  ‘By God, it’s hot. I’ve only just realised how awfully hot it is.’

  ‘I wonder you didn’t do that before,’ Connie said.

  ‘I really didn’t like to, you know,’ Frobisher said, ‘but by God this heat’s sort of bewildering.’

  He actually started to roll up his shirt sleeves, revealing unexpectedly muscular fore-arms covered with strong gingerish hair. A strange hot leap went through Connie’s veins as she saw them and in a momentary daze she heard Minksie urging Phil Weston to take off his jacket too and she said:

  ‘Do you swim, Mr. Frobisher?’

  No, he didn’t swim, he confessed. Not all that well anyway.

  Reduced to disappointed silence by this she thought of Minksie wanting to swim in the nude and found herself suddenly longing to drop her clothes, fall lazily into deep cool water and float away with her breasts to the sun.

  ‘Oh! let’s all go swimming,’ she said. ‘What say? Minksie swims like a seal. She’s got the figure for it too.’

  ‘Hardly wise, surely?’ Frobisher said, ‘after this big meal? Delicious though it is.’ With something like abandon he threw a piece of burnt chicken skin over his shoulder to the waiting swans. ‘I feel replete. Marvellously replete.’

  ‘What’s wisdom got to do with an afternoon like this?’ Minksie said. She gazed with dreamy disbelief at the carafe, now almost empty for the second time. ‘These carafes have holes in the bottom. They must have. We’ll get some more.’

  ‘Oh! no, no,’ Frobisher started saying. ‘You think we should? I’m honestly replete—’

  ‘Replete my foot,’ Minksie said. ‘With four people at it you hardly get a taste at all.’

  ‘If I can’t swim,’ Connie said, ‘I’d like to lie down somewhere in green, green pastures.’

  ‘Me too.’ the dark boy said.

  ‘Oh?’ Minksie said, ‘really?’

  A pink frosty circle waved over the luncheon table, making a repeated bow to the glasses. Beyond it the dark boy could have sworn, for the first time, that he saw four separate flowery hats. For a second or two they floated independently in air. Then they merged again, settling uneasily above the pellucid beauty of Minksie’s eyes and the brown bird’s egg of Connie’s laughing face.

  Connie, it seemed, was laughing at nothing, nothing at all: simply for the pure joy of it, he supposed. Frobisher too began laughing, tossing another and yet another piece of chicken skin to the swans. In the middle of it all he was caught once again by the melting beam of Minksie’s sunflower smile. He was held completely entranced by the crocheted reflection of swan necks. A reed cracked sharply under the swift turn of a swan’s wing and in an incredulous moment he heard Minksie saying:

  ‘Wouldn’t you really like to swim? I know a place where we could go.’

  Before he could respond to this low-voiced invitation of hers he was aware of the arrival of two waiters. They were clearly twins. Speaking in one voice they said:

  ‘Dessert, ladies and gentlemen? What about dessert?’

  ‘Oh! ice-cream,’ Minksie said. ‘Lashings of ice-cream.’

  ‘We have very nice iced champagne trifle,’ the waiter said. ‘Speciality of the house.’

  ‘Sounds delicious,’ Connie said.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit extravagant?’ Frobisher said. ‘I’m replete.’

  ‘Light as love,’ the waiter said.

  ‘Oh! replete my foot,’ Minksie said. ‘Let’s all have it. It’s just the thing for this sort of Sunday.’

  The intense frigidity of the champagne trifle presently took a biting grip on Frobisher’s bowels. He was aware of it slipping down in freezing streams to his legs. A desire to lean his head on Connie’s shoulder was so irresistible that his head actually gave a sideways jerk, as if about to fall off, and Connie laughed uproariously. He laughed too, without point, his spoon shaking so much that a large lump of chilling trifle fell down on to his middle trouser buttons, with an effect so startling that he gasped aloud.

  ‘Oh! the flowers on your hats are fading,’ the dark boy said. ‘I don’t want them to fade.’

  ‘We’ll sprinkle them with water when we swim this afternoon,’ Minksie said and once again held him in that imprisoning pellucid stare.

  It suddenly occurred to the dark boy that they were all talking nonsense.

  ‘Swim? We can’t swim. We’ve got no trunks or anything.’

  ‘In this place I told you about,’ Minksie said, ‘you don’t need any.’

  Frobisher, rising with groping astonishment from trying to spoon trifle from his trouser buttons, expressed the alarmed opinion that they must all be mad. On Sunday too.

  ‘They’re fading,’ Phil Weston said. ‘The roses are going first.’

  ‘Are they?’ Frobisher said, ‘are they? Where? Let’s see,’ and tried gropingly but unsuccessfully to get up. A certain glassiness sat on his eyes. He licked his lips uncertainly several times and asked at last what time it was. ‘Ought to be trotting along, don’t you think? Pretty soon?’

  ‘Fading, all fading,’ Phil Weston said.

  ‘Oh! coffee first,’ Minksie said.

  ‘That’s it,’ Frobisher said, ‘lashings and lashings of coffee. Best idea yet.’

  ‘You were talking about Proust,’ Minksie said. ‘When can I have the book?’

  It was a real lovely swing-high of a day, she thought. She felt absolutely great. First the hats and then she like a girl in a book and then the vin rosé and the champagne trifle and the thought of swimming in the nude.

  ‘Was I? Proust?’

  ‘All those girls, you said.’

  ‘Lots of girls in Proust,’ he confided deeply. ‘Always lots of girls.’

  ‘I’ll bet you’re great with them too.’

  ‘Me?’ The flowers were fading rapidly and it made it all the worse because there were so many of them to fade. Acres and acres of them. All fading. ‘Me?’

  This monosyllabic pronouncement was all his lips could manage. By contrast the tones of Connie’s voice were distinct and clear and untroubled as she said:

  ‘The swans have gone. It’s no use trying to feed them now.’

  Frobisher, pausing in the act of whisking a spoonful of trifle riverwards, murmured in a stuttering, directionless sort of way that he’d be damned. She didn’t mean it? They’d been there a moment ago.

  ‘Well, they’ve gone now. Wise things. For a nice cool swim.’ The champagne trifle had stimulated once again the more amorous of her thoughts. She actually laid a hand on Frobisher’s shoulder, whispering, ‘Got a car?’

  ‘We walked. Morning was so delicious.’

  ‘You’re a pet anyway,’ she said and kissed him lightly on the ear.

  It was half past three before the coffee came. By now most of the tables were empty but whenever the dark boy could focus them they seemed to be populated afresh. Strange figures wandered between them and one of these, he suddenly realised, was Frobisher. With flailing arms he was navigating a spiral course towards the pub.

  ‘I ought to pay a visit too,’ the dark boy tried to say and sat in remote surprise at the inarticulate nature of the sentence that emerged. It had nothing whatever to do with what he wanted to say. ‘All faded yet? Yes? Didn’t want them to fade.’

  ‘One thing I’d adore,’ Minksie said, ‘would be a nice cold Kirsch.’

  But presently when the waiter came again it was to say, first, that the bar was closed for the afternoon and then, in the perkiest and most natural of voices, that he’d taken the liberty of ordering a taxi.

  ‘Taxi?’ Minksie said. ‘What taxi?’

  ‘What on earth for?’ Connie sai
d.

  ‘For the gentleman,’ the waiter said, ‘what just fell down. He went a terrible bang.’

  No swim, Connie thought, no meadows.

  The dark boy, with a tremendous, earnest lurch, staggered to his feet.

  ‘Poor old Frobisher—’

  ‘I’ve got you, sir,’ the waiter said, catching the drooping dark boy, and at the same time with the calmest of glances at Minksie laid the bill on the table. ‘May I leave it with you, dear? I don’t think the two gents—’

  Minksie took off her fading crown of marigolds and laid it on the table. Connie took off her hat too. The dark boy was borne like a lurching dummy into the distance. A brief chorus of small sharp croaks showed that the swans were back again and in a moment their entangled white necks were dancing in Minksie’s eyes.

  ‘How much are we sunk for?’ Connie said.

  Minksie lowered her swan-filled eyes, laughing loudly, and looked at the bill.

  ‘It’ll break us for the week. Both of us.’

  ‘I told you we were a couple of fools.’

  Minksie picked up her golden hat, stared with dancing eyes at the fading flowers and laughed again.

  ‘Lovely to be a fool,’ she said. ‘Marvellous. Just to be all swing-high and a fool. The others miss so much.’

  A moment later she threw her hat of fading flowers into the water. Connie threw hers in too and presently the swans were pecking inquisitively at the crowns of marigold and honeysuckle and cornflower and rose as they floated away.

  ‘See what a good hat can do.’ Minksie said. ‘Well, better see if they’ll take a cheque.’

  The Ginger-Lily Girl

  I hardly know why I always thought of her as the ginger-lily girl, except that it might have been because the flowers and flower-buds of the ginger-lily make big strenuous plaits in their thick stems exactly like the long coarse plaits of her hair.

  Her feet were enormous, with the polished dark underskin and massive breadth that comes of never wearing shoes. Her legs were of even thickness all the way up, shining and equally massive, like stilts of golden mahogany. Her pareu, like those of all other Tahitian girls, was red and white, with a brilliant fresh design of pineapples repeated all over it, but in her case it seemed to cover the body of a mare. Her hands seemed even larger than her feet: great golden-brown scoops which she seemed to use mostly for plaiting and tugging at the two vast blue-black coils of her hair, which in turn reached well below the huge round hips and thighs. The top of the pareu wound itself across her body beneath the arm-pits, making it really seem as if she carried two enormous solid pineapples underneath it, leaving the broad golden shoulders naked.

  The face that went with all this had dull smoky brown eyes that had the slightest cast in them. The nose was flattened. It squared off, more like a snout, with two wide deep nostrils that looked like the tops of a twin-necked bottle without its corks. The brow was so low that her hair, parted in the middle and swept away, gave it a depressed and triangular look, the base of the triangle being the single charcoal line of her brows.

  At some time or other the mouth, with its thick lips heavily curled and pouching, appeared to have received a blow from something swung with great force: the spar of a fishing-boat perhaps, but more likely the shell of a coconut or a stick of sugar-cane. The wound, badly stitched or probably not even stitched at all, had healed in a scar that stretched half way to the cheek, looking like the red lace-holes of a shoe. She might just as well, in fact, have been born with a hare-lip, except that even that would have been kinder and less fearsome than a scar that gave her face the appearance of being perpetually stiffened in a sneer.

  Every morning, when she brought us breakfast on the terrace facing the long lagoon, across which the mountains of the island of Moorea rose like brown-green chimney stacks, she always wore a flower in her hair: generally a large single hibiscus of pure yellow fixed flat to the side of her head, so that the long central stamen stuck out like a snake tongue.

  Even the fresh wide flower did nothing to lessen her ugliness. She was extraordinarily clumsy too. She set down cups and saucers with a crash, as if they were iron pots. She let bread slip from plates to the floor. Morning after morning she forgot the milk, the sugar or the coffee and had to stamp away to the kitchens, rolling her wide cart-horse hips, to fetch them, and even then, sometimes, forgot them altogether.

  ‘Do you notice,’ my wife said, ‘how she never looks at you? She’s always looking out to sea.’

  ‘She reminds me of someone.’

  ‘I can’t think who,’ my wife said. ‘She’s so ugly I can’t even look at her for more than a second or two together.’

  ‘She reminds me,’ I said, ‘of the women in Gauguin’s Nevermore.’

  One morning there was something rather different about her. She seemed less clumsy; she seemed almost light and gay. It was only after she had forgotten the coffee twice and then had brought it cold that I realised what it was.

  It was the flower in her hair. Instead of the customary big yellow hibiscus she was wearing a cluster of small soft mauve orchids bunched tightly together to give the appearance of a single wheel of flower.

  This flower gave her a curious touch of enchantment. With her scar hidden from me I thought she looked quite handsome as she stood for a moment staring out to sea. Between the terrace and the sky-line the great waves beating on reef made a perpetual leaping snow-drift in the sun. Inside the reef the sea was glittering, low and calm.

  ‘Today,’ she said, ‘the flying-boat comes.’

  In Tahiti the coming of the flying-boat, once a fortnight, was like the advent of an eclipse of the sun. Everybody had to go down to see it, just in case it never happened again in their life-time.

  ‘I think I have a friend on the flying-boat today,’ she said.

  There was nothing very surprising in her saying this. In Tahiti everybody thinks, or hopes, that there will be a friend in the flying-boat. In consequence the quayside is always a mass of shouting, laughing, waving figures, brilliant with waiting leis of flower.

  ‘Did your friend,’ I said to her next morning, ‘arrive on the flying-boat?’

  Once again she stood gazing out to sea.

  ‘Not this time.’

  In her hair she was wearing her ordinary yellow hibiscus. Once again she looked coarse and heavy, her eyes depressive under the low dark brows. The slight effect of enchantment given by the little orchid of the previous day had vanished. The boot-lace of her scar was raw.

  ‘Perhaps next time,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he is sure to come next time.’

  She stared for a time at the calmer reaches inside the reef, where a few wading fishermen with spears were wandering in shallow water.

  ‘I am going to be married,’ she said. On the whole her English was correct, formal and rather good. But sometimes, and it seemed to indicate, I thought, a touch of shyness, she would add a word in French or two. ‘Bientôt.’

  ‘That’s very nice,’ I said. ‘A man from here? From Papeete?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘From New York. I shall be married in New York. Un pilote. He flies the plane from San Francisco.’

  Before I had time to check myself I said:

  ‘But there’s no plane that comes here from San Francisco.’

  ‘C’est vrai. C’est ça,’ she said. ‘But he is changing soon to the flying-boats. He likes the flying-boats. He used to be with them.’

  The flying-boat runs from Tahiti to Samoa, and then from Samoa to Aitutaki, with its great lagoon, and then on to Fiji, from which New York is still seven thousand miles away. I did not say anything and once more she stood like a big contemplative beast of burden, staring seaward against the sun.

  ‘Do you like New York?’ she said.

  ‘It is a remarkable city.’

  ‘Do you think I shall like it?’

  ‘Most people like it.’

  With her big sombre hands she started pulling at the blue-black rop
es of her hair, twisting them against her hips. Then she turned to me and smiled. She did not smile so often, I thought, as other Tahitian girls and when she did so the scar across her cheek gave her mouth a touch of stiff and mocking sadness.

  ‘Will you fly back to San Francisco?’ she said.

  Yes, I said, we should fly back to San Francisco.

  ‘Would you mind if I asked you to do something for me?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Perhaps you could take a letter for me as far as Nandi,’ she said.

  I said I would be glad to take the letter and for a second time she smiled.

  ‘You might even be able to give it to him there. You might even do that,’ she said. ‘Oui? C’est possible?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said. ‘It’s possible we might even fly with him. What is his name?’

  ‘John.’

  Far out on the reef a wave hit the coral barrier with explosive thunder and across the inner shallow waters a man raised a spear.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but his other name?’

  Once again she contemplated the sea, the reef and the distant smouldering peaks with the eyes of a beast of burden, her hands twisting at her hair.

  ‘Everyone calls him John.’

  ‘It would be easier if I knew his other name.’

  ‘It would be easier,’ she said. ‘But if you ask for John everyone will know. Vraiment. Anyone will know.’

  When we departed, a fortnight later, there were many leis about our necks, as there always are in Tahiti. A too heavy, sick-sweet scent of frangipani, jasmine and tiare filled the air. The quayside was brilliant with garlands of crimson, purple, flame and pure white flower.

  At the last moment she arrived with a little couronne of soft mauve orchids for my wife, and for myself a lei of smallest pink hibiscus blooms.

  ‘Do you still wish me to take the letter?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Non, merci. Pas maintenant. I did not finish it. There was so much to say.’

  Just before we embarked we threw our flowers into the water. They floated about the lagoon like pretty, empty abandoned birds’ nests from which the young have flown. On the quayside there was a great deal of shouting, tears, waving of hands and laughter.