He was left alone with this. He went on standing in the hall, too centrally for simply standing. The maid came in to ring the gong. He threw out a hand, giving the barometer a great thud, nearly knocking it from the wall. Simultaneously as he went on pounding that thing, the old brass gong rang out. The house echoed with huge sudden noise. And for once, all at once, all the girls seemed to pile out of their rooms together. They came tripping down the stairs at him.
He was cornered with greetings. He could not opt but to go into dinner with them.
Miss Great-Belt nearly forced Miss Sauerkraut out of her chair in order to sit next to him. And of all others her smile was the most welcoming, throughout dinner she was charming.
Naturally, he made himself most gracious to her in return. But he distrusted her, he distrusted every flutter of her lovely eyelids. It must all be a cover for something terrible to come.
And after dinner, after all valedictory speeches had been made, Miss Great-Belt went so far as to suggest that he take her our for some coffee, perhaps even to dance. ‘But I know dancing must be a sore question between us,’ she went on to say, ‘I know it was uncivil of me to go dancing that night you invited me to the theatre. But I do apologize. Let’s say bygones are bygones? Shall we?’
At that moment Fred Morley could easily have excused himself. His better judgment advised him to. But two other voices spoke inside him. One said that a dance-floor in a hotel was public and therefore safe; the second whispered that perhaps she really was, after all, making her peace with him. The latter voice, though in a whisper, spoke the louder. In fact, engaged again by her charms and never at a loss for respect of his own, he had already begun to believe that she was finally expressing a real attraction towards him.
They took coffee together at Morley’s favourite hotel—the very terrace, glass-shaded, where once he had foreseen himself with the Misses Rotterdam and Clermont-Ferrand—and later went in to dance. He took care to act with the greatest propriety and even introduced her to his friend the head-waiter as a professional lady from Denmark, who, with her colleagues, had been billeted by the Town Hall on his house. This would put to rest any wilder speculations as to the nature of his strange and beautiful guest. The bush-telegraph would tap round the room a rational and respectable tune.
As for Miss Great-Belt, she continued to be soft, sweet, charming. All her past animosity had vanished. She seemed to throw open that invisible veil that had hitherto made her so unattainable, so much the woman of ‘process’, and now welcomed him without question into the privacy of her composure. A woman so self-contained is ordinarily an uneasy companion. But when such a woman decides to invite one into her private sympathies, to give exactly her laughter and her confidence in the measure one knows it is withheld from others—then she becomes overwhelming. Without indulgence, with no condescension, but purely and simply, Miss Great Belt welcomed Morley to herself. He was bowled over.
Quite early in the evening she made one point clear. ‘Now I do want to say once and for all,’ she said, opening her great eyes wide for frankness, leaning towards him like a large dark red cat, ‘that I congratulate you on your decision this afternoon. In my view you were absolutely right. That sweet Dutch girl was obviously the winner. I can see that one of the prizes had to go to an English girl—politics are politics. And there was every reason for poor Nuremburg—she looks so pale, doesn’t she? A sick woman, yes she needs encouragement, it was very kind—taking third prize. Who wants to be third anyhow? No, I know you’ll suspect I’m jealous—but honestly I’m not. With me justice counts before—whatever is the word?—self.’
She said this with great content, purring over her sacrifice, her frank good nature. He did not notice this. His instinct rose to protect a lady in distress. He began instantly to lie that he himself had voted for her for first prize—but what could he do against so many others?
He was surprised to notice that this was not received well. She looked, he thought, even a trifle offended. Why? Ah! … And he went straight on to point out that it was exactly because of this out-voting that, momentarily piqued, he simply could not bear to mention so much as her name in his presidential address.
As he stumbled through these paces, Miss Great-Belt watched him keenly. She saw that he was lying, and was satisfied. They finished the evening in high spirit with each other.
When the other ladies left during the next days, Miss Great-Belt stayed on. For propriety’s sake she removed to the near-by hotel but she stayed on in the town. She and Morely saw each other every day. They went to the theatre, they dined together, they took motor-trips into the country and they went sailing on the sea.
The weather continued fine, it was a memorable month. Miss Great-Belt wrote to her father and begged permission to remain a few weeks more. Morley was in heaven. Now he avoided the Yacht Club altogether: he spent all his time with his new and lovely companion in places where they might be admired by more discriminating eyes.
It was for him a flirtation de luxe. It complimented his years, it redounded satisfactorily to his prowess. Finally, he told himself, he had won the day. Trust an old bachelor! Sometimes, when he thought of it all, he remembered with a reproving chuckle the first days, the very first days when he had unfolded every charm to entice her, when he had sacrificed every self-respect. How had he not realized that it was the exact opposite which would win her? Why—in a dozen musical shows this very process nightly comprised the whole plot! He had played it out himself night after night, year after year—it was the very stuff of life? Why had he never realized …? But then why, damn our eyes, do we all spend our lives delighting in the wisdom of paradox—yet hesitate to apply the risks to ourselves?
He laughed and wagged his doggy head. Silly old fool! But then—hadn’t that same silly old fool come through with flying colours? In the end? It took perseverance. He smiled, a little in love with her and himself and with everything else. ‘He who laughs last,’ he chuckled.
But then she married him.
An Interlude
‘COÑAC?’
‘Coñac.’
‘Coñac?’
‘Coñac.’
‘Coñac?’
‘Coñac.’
‘Four coñacs please.’
Silence.
Then:
‘Why, there’s Peter!’
‘What’s your poison, Pete?’
‘What the doctor ordered, Gon and sif.’
This last a reference to the brandy made by Gonzalez and the sifón that goes with it.
A nondescript group, distinguishable as tourists, and as tourists undistinguished one from the other. All young. All malely jocular. Some with moustaches, some without, some in shorts, some in longs. And they sat now drinking the morning away in the café under the eucalyptus trees, saying little, watching. Alert to each strange shape and habit, their eyes stared shifty shameless disbelief; or laughed as at a monkey-zoo; or narrowed with the nausea of an Englishman noting a five-button cuff. They were English.
There was not, one might at first suppose, so much to see in this one street in a small town on a small Mediterranean island. Not yet opened up to the tourist, it seemed scarcely opened up to itself. But as with all small communities, the eye gradually reduces its focus and little reveals itself as much indeed. The street of white near-Moorish houses, with closed bead-doors and blinded windows, began to look over-shut; and soon, in this very shutness, peopled itself—the houses felt near to bursting. A priest asleep, a cigarette fraying his underlip, was so covered with sleeping flies that his long black habit seemed in the eucalyptus light to be covered with sequins: a black-bosomed baroness after the orgy. The green Civil Guard, and the old woman carrying the pigeon upside down, and soon all other solitary passers-by, became, as the eye settled its monotony, a successive crowd: a small traffic of carts and the eruption of a dust-greyed car made up a busy road. A few hens and their long-legged breed of chicks, emus all, and a goat, and long dogs and a turkey with the s
hape of a cassowary and the soul of a ghost-ship—these peopled the lower ground with their own complicated life. Blue-black bees big as birds banged by; and a frog gabbled like a shrill old man with false teeth from the irrigation stream that fed, along the paseo to the sea, a high feathering of peaceful rose oleanders.
On a slowly ruminant level, then, the place was crowded. But in ordinary terms the slow sun-shadowed street was shut and empty. With one exception. One shop-door stood wide open opposite where the tourists drank. One could just make out a dim life of dead machines in the white-washed gloom inside. Above this shop hung a notice oddly progressive for so slow-living a place:
BICICLETAS DE ALQUILER.
Bicycles for Hire! To the five young tourists, as they sat watching the street, this one shop provided a kind of balm. It was a link with the homeland, and with life lived logically. Though they had travelled a thousand miles to be on this remote island, though they had suffered a hundred inconveniences and a dozen impositions to arrive here, they somehow preferred in their eye’s mind this bicycle-hire shop to all the strange and exotic sights they had spent a year’s savings to see.
The owner lived and worked alone inside the bicycle-hire shop, a pale man sucked white by his machines. Rubber solution and thin-veined spokes had bled him as the multiple lens and the shutter bleeds the camera-man, the dark-oiled chassis the whole white race bred in black garages. Loving their machines, which are voracious as female spiders, they are drawn by a dark love to be sucked dry, to eschew the sun, to tinker red-eyed in the beloved grit.
That was Miguel’s precise, spiritual, particularly male passion. His greater and more general love he hung out in the sun: and this was for Conchita, the round-faced brown-skinned girl in the red skirt who sewed the dusk away with her white-bloused back to him across the street. Lace on her lap, she sewed, as was the custom, with her chair turned in towards the doorway of her home. But this was only the custom; every evening her face would turn to him over her shoulder, and smile, or call a word across the quiet street, and these smiles became a bank of smiles massing through the months like the pesetas he drew in each day from his bicycles, pesetas he saved to mass for the day, next year, the year after, when they could be married.
During the day Conchita served buns, sweets, and her turn of postal duty in the sweet-shop-post-office. Both she and Miguel had been born in this village by the sea, they had grown up knowing each other, and now that they had ceased to be children, and looked about for love and for someone to share and complete their lives—they felt the urgency for each other, and a marriage was ordained. The old, strict customs of island courtship had been abandoned by now—they were betrothed more easily in modern, though still formal, terms.
To the group of young Englishmen, who thought of their fair moustaches and their blistered pink arms as normal, this man Miguel and his woman were the strangers: Miguel’s white body ran with long dark hairs, his hair was cropped short like a clothes-brush, his teeth smiled too white to be true; and Conchita, though young and fresh and charming, was nevertheless short, and round-faced as the next islander, and for all her lashes and dark-drooping eyes by alien standards a little coarse. Never to be taken too seriously.
But of course Miguel and Conchita were the real people of that small paradise whose red earth stretched its rich carpet to the blue sea’s very edge: whose fig-trees gloved their deep green leaves against the same sapphiric blue: whose corn rose high and windless, like buff fur, among grey olives and green carob-trees; whose river ran fertile through reeds and oleanders to the sea, meeting it, spring water to the salt, in mysterious estuary. A rich land, a flat well-watered stretch of orchard and flower larded with white farms, feathered with palms and scented with jasmin. Rich and fertile, calm, where there was no hurry, and love might be expected to find its slow fruition undisturbed.
Rich and fertile the tourists, too.
‘Hi—Peter!’
‘Come on in, old Peter.’
‘Sit down!’
‘Pew for Pete!’
Now we have got to know our five young English better, it becomes apparent that after all they are not all the same. It was their way to call each other at every turn by their Christian names, for reasons not only of affection but it seemed also of self-assertion—as dogs urinate to convince themselves of identity. And of all the Christian names one heard, ‘Peter’ came loudest and most often. It seemed that Peter must be a leader or hero. Looking more closely, it was plain Peter’s shoulders were so much straighter and broader, his moustache so much longer, and his smile that much larger than the others. He now came shambling over easily in his extraordinary holiday clothes—a shirt covered with drawings of the Eiffel Tower, long khaki shorts, long white plimsolls, and a long red-peaked cap on his head, stopped by the café table, stood there and laughed; and the others laughed too, five strong men echoing deep chuckles like the giggling of girls, as girls giggle simply because they are there.
They were there, right enough. And Peter’s eye was already on the little Conchita who sewed away the evening on the kerb. He had already, between bathes and drinks and long pensión meals, found time to have a word with her in the bun-shop. On a matter of poste restante letters. He expected none, but he had established contact, with bad French and worse Spanish, on this point. The smile and the first trembling slyness had been effected. Innocently, idly, playful—with perhaps a distant darker thought, no more than a thought put quick aside. Anyway, wasn’t he on holiday? And she wasn’t exactly anyone particular’s sister?
To be a hero is never light work. A high level must be maintained, worshippers must not be kept waiting for action. Thus it had occurred quite naturally to Peter that he ought to ‘get off’ with someone. ‘There’s old Peter at it again!’ If Conchita was a bit hairy about the calves, a bit low in the shanks—nevertheless she was material. But how to manage it? He knew quite well that Spanish propriety would forbid her to come and sit in the café with him: and there was no dancing until the following week: and it would be dull and not a little embarrassing to walk up and down the street with her at their paseo time, the way they did it.
But now it suddenly occurred to him—what better than to hire bicycles, disappear with her along the road, way out of sight and around the corner, whisked! It would look fine—and of the end he could make a suitable mystery.
He rose casually, with a casual wink, and rolled his big northern body back across the road to the bun-shop. There he bought a bun. And put the question straight at her, he believed in going straight in. She refused. He appealed: he was the ignorant and lonely foreigner who wanted to be shown her lovely country. She refused.
Two hours later he was back again. He had the idea of buying some sweets, explaining how he liked to give them to children in the street. Then he asked her again. And she agreed! She agreed with no coyness, but directly, brusquely, as if she were about to iron a dress or feed a chicken. He imagined the sweets had done the trick. He was wrong. She had simply had two hours to think and talk it over with another girl, and allow herself to be talked into it. It was daring of her: but it was daylight, the main road was not lonely, and she was quite decided not to leave it. There was no danger.
Naturally though, it was important that he hired the bicycles otherwise than at Miguel’s. It was so important that she forgot to speak slowly and distinctly when she pointed up the village street to another small cycle-shop. Big affable Peter did not care what she was saying and thought perhaps she was pointing the direction in which they would ride. They parted on this misunderstanding, she pointing to the time on her watch when she would be free, he proud of his lucky stars.
At the appointed time he went to Miguel’s and ordered bicycles. Miguel wheeled them out, one male, one female—‘for the Señora’ with a big wink from Peter. Peter took them both along the street. And a moment later Miguel saw Conchita come out of the shop. He was about to call her when to his amazement and deep horror he saw her mount the machine and ride off i
n the company of this strange man. She never glanced back.
It is well known how a woman, or a man, can be transported by what may seem the most outlandish kind of foreigner. The solid Englishman is amazed, and honestly amazed, when one of his countrywomen shows admiration for what seem the all too feminine graces of a Latin gentleman smelling of pomades and distrust. Reverse this—and one may understand the disbelief of Miguel when he saw his Conchita with the big Englishman in his plimsolls and long red peak, smelling of pink and mad energies.
Disbelief. Amazement. But when she at length returned, and he asked her about it, and he saw the look in her eyes and a petulance of lip—he found he had to believe. He realized that here was something from which he was being excluded: and that somehow his Conchita had been swayed by this monstrous figure from the north. Why? What had he done? Could it be possible? He felt outraged: and curiously frightened.
He went back into his shop, and there among the cold machines fumed hot in his pale body. He looked at the two bicycles the Englishman had returned, and which he had taken back impassively, and cursed them. His hot blood rose at the sight of those saddles a short while ago so warm.
He saw not two patched and dusty machines, but people. Not for a moment did it cross his mind that anything drastic might have occurred. He was simply jealous of a moment’s preference: and that, since no worse was imagined, was quite bad enough.
*
‘Ah! Who’s this I see? Don Peter hath returned! How wenteth it?’
‘You old scoundrel!’
‘Come clean, Pete!’
Big wink. No word.
‘Come on. Out with it!’
‘Quick off the mark, eh, Peter-boy?’
The Stories of William Sansom Page 37