Collected Stories

by Beryl Bainbridge

  When at last Pinkerton’s flight was called it was fearfully late. He arrived on Corfu in the middle of the night and was persuaded to share a cab with a large woman who wore white trousers and an immense quantity of costume jewellery. She was booked into the Chandros Hotel, which, she assured him, was in the general direction of Nisaki, and it would be a saving for both of them. It was pitch dark inside the car save for a red bulb above the dashboard illuminating a small cardboard grotto containing a plastic saint with horribly black eyebrows. The woman sat excessively close to Pinkerton, though in all fairness he thought that at the pace they were travelling, and bearing in mind the villainous turns in the road, she had little choice. He himself clung to the side of the window and tried not to think of death. Now and then, in response to something he said, his companion slapped him playfully on the knee.

  At first, when she enquired his name and what part of London he hailed from, he answered cagily; after all, he was supposed to be in Ireland, coarse-fishing with Pitt Rivers. But then, well-nigh drunk with fatigue, and dreadfully anxious as to what he was doing driving through foreign parts in the small hours, he found himself confiding in her. Talking to a stranger, he told himself, as long as it was in darkness, was almost as private as praying and hardly counted. With any luck he would never set eyes on his confessor again. ‘I’m meeting a lady friend,’ he said. ‘She gave me a sort of ultimatum. I’m married, of course, though I’m not proud of it.’

  ‘Of course you’re not,’ the woman said.

  ‘Either I came out and joined her for a few days, or it was all off between us.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said the woman.

  ‘Half of me rather wants it to be all off.’

  ‘But not your other half,’ said the woman. ‘Your worst half,’ and they both laughed.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘I should be sitting in the damp grass at the side of a river.’

  ‘Of course you should,’ she said. ‘You’ve been chosen.’ And she slapped him again, and he heard her bracelets tinkling as they slid on her wrist.

  She was quite inventive. When he admitted that he was worried about being out in the sun – it always rained in Ireland in July – she said why didn’t he come up with some allergy. One that brought him out in bumps.

  He agreed it was a jolly good idea. ‘I tan very easily,’ he explained. ‘On account of Spanish blood some way back.’

  ‘You’d be best under an umbrella,’ advised the woman. ‘You can hire them by the day for a couple of roubles. Failing that, if you want to economise you can always hide in your room.’

  They both laughed louder than ever because it was very droll, her confusing the currency like that. He would have told her about the allegorical creature outside the aeroplane window but he didn’t want her to find him too memorable.

  Upon arrival at the hotel it became evident that the woman was a bit of an expert on economy. She kept her handbag firmly tucked under her arm and appeared to have altogether forgotten her suggestion that she should contribute to the cost of the journey. He carried her luggage into the lobby, hoping that the sight of his perspiring face would remind her, but it didn’t. She merely thanked him for his gallantry and urged him to get in touch should he and his lady friend fall out before the end of the week.

  Pinkerton didn’t think much of the hotel. The fellow behind the reception desk had a mouth full of gold teeth, and there was a display of dying geraniums in a concrete tub set in front of the lifts. If he had not been so exhausted he would have insisted on their being watered immediately.

  ‘I really must be off,’ he said, and he and the woman pecked each other on the cheek. It was natural, he felt, seeing they were abroad.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ she said. ‘You know where I am. We don’t want you coming up in bumps all on your own, do we?’ And winked, and this time, his knee being out of reach, slapped his hand.

  All the same, he was sorry to lose her. The moment he was again seated behind the silent driver his worries returned. What if there was an emergency at home and Gloria was compelled to telephone Ireland? Supposing one of the children had an accident and he was required at a moment’s notice to donate a kidney? And what if Pitt Rivers’s wife ran into Gloria in town and was asked a direct question? Pitt Rivers had boasted that though he himself, if called upon, would lie until hell froze over, he couldn’t possibly speak for his wife, not with her Methodist background. How absurd in this day and age, thought Pinkerton, to be troubled with religious scruples, and he peered anxiously out of the window into the impenetrable blackness and watched, in his mind’s eye, the roof of his half-timbered house outside Crawley engulfed in forty-foot flames. In the squeal of the tyres on the road he heard the cracking of glass in his new greenhouse as the structure buckled in the heat and his pampered tomatoes bubbled on their stems. It was so warm in the car that he struggled out of his jacket and rolled up his shirt-sleeves.

  He had fallen into a doze when the car stopped outside a taverna set in a clearing of olive trees at the side of the road. For the moment he feared that he had arrived at the hotel, and was shocked at its dilapidated appearance. Not even Agnes, who was capable of much deception, would have described it as three-star accommodation.

  A young woman sat at a rickety table, holding an infant on her lap. The driver left the car and approached her; Pinkerton imagined that she was his wife and that he was explaining why he was so late home.

  In any event the young woman was dissatisfied. An argument ensued.

  Pinkerton grimaced and smiled through the window, conveying what he hoped was the right mixture of apologetic sympathy. ‘The plane was delayed,’ he called. ‘It was quite beyond our control.’

  The young woman rose to her feet and she and the driver, both shouting equally violently, began to stalk one another round the tables.

  ‘Look here,’ called Pinkerton. ‘I’m terribly tired.’

  They took no notice of him.

  Presently, he got out of the car and joined them under the canopy of tattered plastic. Yawning exaggeratedly, pointing first at his watch and then at the road, he attempted to communicate with the driver. For all the notice that was taken of him he might not have been there. Wandering away, he inspected with disgust various petrol tins planted with withered begonias.

  He was just thinking that it bordered on the criminal, this wanton and widespread neglect of anything that grew, when the young woman broke off her perambulation of the tables and darting towards him thrust the child into his arms.

  Taken by surprise he held it awkwardly against his shoulder and felt its tiny fingers plucking at the skin of his arm. ‘Look here,’ he said again, and clumsily jogged up and down, for the child had begun a thin wailing. ‘There, there,’ he crooned, and guided by some memory in the past he tucked its head under his chin, as though he held a violin, and swayed on his feet.

  He was looking up, ready to receive smiles of approbation from the parents – after all, he was coping frightfully well considering he had been on the go for almost a day and a half – when to his consternation he saw that the man was walking back to the car. As gently as was possible in the circumstances he dumped the child on the ground, propping it against a petrol drum, and ran in pursuit.

  The driver handled the car as if it had done him a personal injury. He beat at the driving wheel with his fists and drove erratically, continuing to shout for several miles. At last his voice fell to an irritated muttering, and then, just as Pinkerton had leant back in his seat and settled into a more relaxed position, the car veered sickeningly to the right, almost jerking him to the floor, and stopped.

  Pinkerton tried to reason with the driver, but it was no use. The domestic crisis had evidently unsettled him; he refused adamantly to go any further. Jumping out of the car he opened the side door and dragged Pinkerton on to the road.

  ‘I’ll pay you anything you want,’ cried Pinkerton, foolishly.

  Three thousand drachmas were extorted from
him before his suitcase was flung out into the darkness, and the driver, taking advantage of his stumbling search for it on the stony verge, leapt back into the car, reversed, swung round and drove off at speed in the direction from which they had just come. Pinkerton was left alone, stranded in the middle of nowhere.

  It was another hour, perhaps two, before he reached his destination. If he had understood the driver correctly, the track leading to the hotel was unsuitable for vehicles and dangerous for pedestrians to walk down at night, being nothing more substantial than a treacherous path between two chasms cut by the Ionian Sea. Remembering his days as a Boy Scout he had sat for a while on his suitcase, which he had retrieved from a clump of bushes so densely studded with thorns as to resemble a bundle of barbed wire, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. In time he saw the sky threaded with stars, but the earth remained hidden. He had wasted previous matches lighting his pipe and, puffing on it furiously, held the bowl out in front of him like a torch; to no avail. He had jumped to his feet and bellowed unashamedly, ‘Help, help, I am Inglesi’, and fallen over a boulder, bruising his shin. Finally he had sat on his bottom and dragging his suitcase behind him, begun laboriously to descend. Now and then, as the breeze shifted the branches of the olive trees below him, he caught a glimpse of a glittering ship on the horizon, and heard a roll of thunder as an unseen plane approached the airstrip of the distant town.

  He was perhaps half way down the mountain when a curious light appeared above his left shoulder, illuminating the path ahead. Startled, he looked round and saw nothing. As he later tried to explain to a sceptical Agnes, it was as though someone was following him, someone rather tall, carrying a lantern. He was too relieved to have found what he took to be the means of his salvation to be frightened at such a phenomenon.

  Soon the darkness melted altogether and he stood bathed in the electric lights of the car park of the Nisaki Beach Hotel. He climbed the shallow steps up to the reception area and only then did he look back. In the instant before the hotel was plunged into darkness he thought he saw a man dressed all in white, whose shadowy brow was flecked with blood.

  The woman at the reception desk mercifully spoke English. She assured Pinkerton that the power cut was temporary and that it was not an unusual occurrence. She also said that it wasn’t allowed for him to enter Mrs Lowther’s room. It had nothing to do with the hour. Mrs Lowther was a package holiday and he wasn’t included. She would rent him a room on the same floor, with twin beds, shower and use of cot. The latter convenience would be two thousand drachmas extra. Too tired to argue, and aware that the seat of his trousers was threadbare and his jacket torn at the elbow, he paid what was asked and, the lifts being out of order, borrowed a torch and toiled up the eight flights of stairs to his room on the fourth floor.

  He was awakened during the night by a severe tingling in his arm. Finding that he was still in his clothes, he sat wearily on the edge of the bed and began to undress. The sensation in his arm had now become one of irritation; he scratched himself vigorously, imagining that he had been attacked on the mountainside by mosquitoes. Looking down, he was astonished to see a patch of skin on his forearm fan-shaped and topped by a pattern of dots so pale in contrast to the rest of his skin as to appear luminous. He tried to find the light switch so that he could examine his arm more closely. It was not inconceivable that he had been bitten by a snake, or even by a series of snakes, for he counted six puncture marks, though his flesh was perfectly smooth to the touch. Unable to locate the bedside lamp and not suffering from either pain or nausea, he fell back on to the pillow and slept.

  Agnes telephoned his room the next morning. ‘So you’ve turned up,’ she said. She made it sound like an accusation, as if he was pestering her rather than that he was here at her insistence.

  ‘I’ve had a terrible time,’ he told her. ‘You wouldn’t believe it. First of all there was the plane journey, travelling all that way alone.’

  ‘You mean you flew in an empty aeroplane?’ she asked.

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ he said crossly. ‘And there was a five-hour delay at Athens.’

  ‘Stop moaning,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at breakfast.’

  He shaved and showered and put on a clean shirt and the only other pair of trousers he had brought with him. He hid the woollen socks and jumpers, packed by his wife, inside the wardrobe and bundled his Wellington boots under the bed. He hoped Agnes wouldn’t spot them.

  In spite of his experiences of the night before he felt amazingly fit, almost a new man. True, his hands were covered in cuts and scratches and his shin somewhat grazed and tender, but in every other respect he had never felt so healthy, so carefree. The view from his balcony – the green lawns, the flowering shrubs, the gravel paths leading to bowers roofed with straw and overhung with bougainvillaea, the glimpse of swimming pool – delighted him. Beyond the pool he could see striped umbrellas on a pebbled beach beside a stretch of water that sparkled to a horizon edged with purple mountains. It was all so pretty, so picturesque. The whole world was drenched in sunshine. A tiny figure, suspended beneath a scarlet parachute, drifted between the blue heavens and the bright blue sea.

  Even Agnes sensed the change in him. ‘I thought you said you’d had an awful time.’

  ‘I did,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Absolutely dreadful.’ And he helped himself to yoghurt and slices of peach and didn’t once grumble at the absence of bacon and eggs.

  He wasn’t quite sure how much he dare tell her: and yet he longed to confide in someone. Agnes could be very cruel on occasions. Omitting only the words You’ve been chosen, he told her about the nun at the airport at Gatwick.

  Agnes listened earnestly, and when he had finished remarked that she herself had often understood foreign languages, even when she didn’t know any of the words. She’d met a Russian once at a party and she’d known, really known, exactly what he was saying. She thought it had probably something to do with telepathy. ‘Mind you,’ she admitted, ‘the vodka was coming out of my ears.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said doubtfully, ‘but I answered her. In Dutch as far as I know.’

  Agnes agreed that it was odd; she looked at him with interest. She was frowning and he was pleased because he recognised her expression of intense concentration as one of sexual arousal. As far as he remembered she had never been excited by nuns before. Encouraged, he recounted the episode on the mountainside and his terrible descent.

  ‘There’s a perfectly good road higher up,’ she said. ‘It’s sign-posted. It’s only a hundred yards further along from that track.’

  ‘How was I to know,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that I had no choice.’ He described the guide dressed in white.

  ‘No,’ said Agnes. ‘I can’t buy that. It’s almost blasphemous.’

  ‘I’m only telling you what I saw,’ he protested.

  ‘But a crown of thorns,’ she cried. ‘How can you say such a thing? It’s far more likely that you saw a fisherman in his nightshirt and one of those straw hats they all wear.’

  ‘I know a hat when I see one,’ he argued. ‘I’m not blind.’

  ‘It had probably been chewed by a goat,’ she said. ‘Or a donkey. You just saw the chewed bits, damn it.’

  He attempted to change the subject and tell her about the baby at the taverna. Agnes was still aroused, though no longer in a way that would be beneficial to him. If he didn’t watch his step she would lock him out of her room for days. ‘It was a dear little soul,’ he said. ‘Quite enchanting, if a little pale.’

  ‘Why the hell,’ interrupted Agnes, ‘would Jesus want to guide you to the Nisaki Beach Hotel? You’re an adulterer.’

  ‘An unwilling one,’ he snapped, and fell into an offended silence.

  He apologised to her that afternoon. She forgave him and consented to come to his room. When he closed the shutters the bars of the cot lay in striped shadows across her thighs. Her body was so dark after a week in the sun that it was like making ad
vances to a stranger. He wasn’t sure that the experience was enjoyable.

  ‘Why have you kept your shirt on?’ she asked him later, and he explained that he was perspiring so copiously with the heat that he was afraid she’d find him unpleasant.

  ‘You are a bit sweaty,’ she said, and wrapped the sheet round her like a shroud.

  After three days he decided that he ought to go home. Agnes was behaving badly. He had run out of excuses for keeping out of reach of the sun and was tired of being insulted. When he lay in the shade of the olive trees Agnes snatched the newspaper from his face and complained that he could be mistaken for an old dosser. ‘For God’s sake,’ she ordered, ‘take off those woollen socks’, and for his own sake he fought her off as she clawed at the laces of his shoes. All the same, he couldn’t make up his mind when to leave, and lingered, dozing in his room or in one of those fragrant bowers in the pleasant garden. He still felt well, he still felt that absence of care which he now realised he had last known as a child. At night he put his pillow at the foot of the bed and fell asleep with his hand clutching the bars of the cot.

  Towards the end of the week they went on an excursion into Corfu Town. Pinkerton said he wanted to buy Agnes a piece of jewellery. They both knew that it was his farewell gift to her. She pretended that it was kind of him. When she returned to England he would telephone her once or twice to ask how she was, perhaps even take her out to lunch, and then the relationship would be over. Something had changed in him; he no longer needed her to berate him, and she was too old to change her ways. He could tell that she was uneasy with him, and wondered if his wife would feel the same.