Perhaps they were not in love. Perhaps he was not in love. Perhaps … and his mind went back to long evenings as a boy when he had sat, his eyes fixed on his plate, hearing to either side his parents eating slowly through the long meal, never talking, lost to each other, graveyard meals in the lamplight when the air drummed and he was bored, bored, bored, yet never raised his eyes for fear of meeting an eye, nowhere to go and nothing to see but the enemy, and his boredom had drummed like a bat inside him screaming like night to be out.
Now could they be in for this? He looked over at her and saw how absurd the comparison was—but still suspected. He knew one thing, he knew he dared not open his mouth for fear of the words dying of disinterest. She might nod, or smile even, and that would be that, nothing would have passed between them.
Oh, they were just tired. But then—why today? The day had begun as usual. Down from the hotel early, to breakfast in the half-washed, half-open café. The sun already high, but here in the busy grey breakfast square it was shaded by tall office buildings and the fourth-storey leaves of enormous plane-trees; the sun could gear itself up golden somewhere above and beyond, but here it was still fresh and life was lived in bright shadow by the light of flowerstalls and carshine and white morning papers; water streamed the gutters gleaming in the freckled underlight of planes, the first traffic spat its blue, and to a smell of coffee and a well-slept stretch the morning was as all others in big southern towns, a hopeful fresh time before the huge arc of the day weighed in. Nothing wrong with the morning. The long blue and white buses streamed off as usual: to Bompard, to Endoume.
The day out on the rocks? Rocks white as marble washed by a sea swilling all the filth of a great port, but blue to look at and good to get into after the heat of the inner quays. So the day; the afternoon swimming among flotsam but also in a golden haze of wide-rocked magnificence, the fine blue sweep of classic Marseilles. Was there then too much sun—or too many people? Too many girls nearly naked, navel and buttock bare and the points of breasts just covered, so many, so much of it, most of it beautiful—but did the bikini, like the old brothels where so often one sat and drank and quietly left, become a prophylactic against desire? Too much fish out on the slab? And well, if so, then what has that to do with Grace? I’m not marrying womankind, I’ve chosen one woman and presumably for other than bodily reasons, though I thank God she has one.
Wives are like fish, he suddenly savagely stupidly thought, and they should be kept on ice. Kept fresh. Not exposed to bloat in the sun all day…. But he gave up that line of thought wearily, it simply led back to the sun, the heat, the long hot after-day of bathing when tired rope-soles tramp the hotel stairs to fresh themselves from sand, when stomachs call for ice. And still he knew that this had nothing to do with what really was the matter.
It had more to do with those long, long buses, Endoume and Bompard, swinging on their electric rods always up the same hills, round the same corners, and always with their quiet rubber swish, like the sound of compressed air escaping, that further defined the endless circle of their routine. And to do perhaps also with the smile he now gave her, a smile he had seen himself give only to mirrors and whose conformation he now could feel on his face as if that face were no longer flesh but only dark mercury and thin glass, as she yawned and said:
‘Well, shall we go?’
She put her hand up to that yawn, gulped it, raised her eyebrows in apology and smiled a bit brighter: ‘But what do you think, shall we get along? We might walk a bit.’
‘Let’s,’ he said, also smiling, pleasantly as it must look, back at her. ‘I’ll get the bill.’
While he paid he watched her and wondered: Well, there’s nothing in a yawn. She even joked it off with her eyes. And now look, she’s gathering cigarettes and lighter and bag together and straightening her back, brushing away crumbs. You’d think it was all over. But is it?
And then it occurred to him that for all she knew he had been content with the casual night, the fullness of food, the warm air and this electric-lit quay of restaurants, sea-food, rigging and people about. Nevertheless she had interrupted without thinking, at least at first; her first words had been a yawned command. What was this, then, a taste of the future? Part of the long measure of Give-and-Take?
I’m being unreasonable, he argued, it is well known that people state things as a question and put questions as a statement. Yet … and back it all came to him, more indeed as question than anger, as to what was the position of a husband these days, where could he go without Mrs Bright-Smile palling along, where were the clubs of yesteryear—or the habit of staying in them—and what about the pubs, and everywhere else, and how could two normally complicated people hope to remain in sanity with each other in a three-room flat? Where had yesterday’s long baize corridor, with its double-baize door and study at the end, wandered off to? There seemed only two alternatives left: to sit in the Office, or the Gentlemen’s. And was that not already sometimes a synonym?
And quite apart from Give-and-Take, what had happened to the one-sided myth of the bride being Given Away? Wasn’t there nowadays anyone to give the poor old husband away, a practical equivalent? Or did he just do that himself?
But, said the mercury-smiler to himself as he took the brown bare arm of Miss Ponzone, you do really like your own Miss Bright Smile, don’t you? And as he looked down to her, his smile broke for a moment through its mirror and became a look of love. For you do apply love, whatever that is, to Miss Bright Smile? You feel yourself in love with her, you feel it so much that this could not be questioned even by yourself, let alone by anyone else, whom you would simply scoff off? Yes. But even so.
Was it—face it—worth the Sacrifice?
You know that you could not think of doing without Miss Ponzone? But do you know who in future will always be there, throughout the years, every day, everywhere, summer, winter, autumn, spring, without fail, every minute with you and by your side, never failing to be there, never, never, never? Miss Ponzone.
A bus travelling to Endoume narrowly missed them as in the half-lit night they stepped off a pavement. ‘Narrowly’ only because the bus squeezed its great brakes, and compressed air brought it efficiently to a lesser speed so that they just got by. But a bus to Endoume, he thought, would scarcely hit one: probably, also, a bus to Bompard had braked somewhere or other in sympathy.
Just then they were passing from the more affluent side of the Vieux Port to the other side, the Quai du Port. They were passing the pleasure-steamers, drawn up like sea-born house-boats, that invite you to the Château d’If; they were passing the more luxurious cafes like Basso’s on the Beiges, and now once past the open end of the Canebière they had crossed a dividing line and were approaching poorer and more notorious streets.
Something, that man thought to himself, must happen here. Something, at least, to break our—what can it be called, placidity? And something did.
They were entering then the tougher, brighter but darker quay, and passing the fun-fair stood for a moment in the full yellow glare of a large restaurant. This was again a sea-food restaurant—but it was bigger, noisier, brasher, browner, brassier and probably better than those on the other side. Its walls inside were mirrored, its paint and its furniture were of a good weatherbeaten brown, its lights were weak-bulbed and so the yellower, though there were many of them: whereas on the other side of the port carefully printed menus were displayed, here great black slates had been scraped with a brio of chalk, as if something special had that very moment been cooked or come in: in fact it was a more old-fashioned engine altogether, its yellow glare on to the dark street was more like the light of a naphtha flare than electric, and it was full, full, full of people crammed together inside among its mirrors and outside under its huge awning, all eating fast among waitresses yelling, running and sometimes if there was time laughing. Plenty of gold in the teeth of these waitresses, and dark strain beneath their eyes—they touted for customers, beckoning the street at top-voice, an
d then had to rush back and serve them, both making work and doing it. And two dark moons of another kind of strain bruised round the eyes of a middle-aged woman dressed like a pink fringed lampshade who then passed jabbering to the street that she’d do him in for what he’d done: and more jabbering as three black soldiers in dull khaki swung by: and, after them, all the other soldiers, sailors, Algerians, Corsicans, whores and pimps, as well as the greater mass of the more respectable citizenry resident in that quarter; someone in a café along the way was tinning a mandolin, gritty as the gutter, and a steamer boomed and the fun-fair blazed jazz, a scooter backfired and suddenly all the rigging crowded ahead was alight with the wide flash of headlamps turning.
Yet in all that lively, night-lit crowd what they stopped to look at was not people or lights or some event, but fish.
Even with their two stomachs full of aïoli and all it brings, snails, eggs, prawns, potatoes, carrots, beans and the great white scented fish itself mashed up with so rich a golden garlic cream—even so they stood to look at the magnificence of dead fish this restaurant offered as its centrepiece.
A sloping slab the width of half a dozen tables lay green with lettuce and fern beneath a brightly shaded electrolier—and in the downglare there glared deadly back a wilder and fatter assortment of deep-sea and rock creatures than could be at first believed, even on those quays, even from those markets. It was not only fantasy, it was wealth. It was not only wealth, it was art, or art plus wealth, or rich art. Scarlet, pink, grey, brown, blue, violet, green and all mixed iridescences lay piled or fatly placed on that bed of thick wet green. Giant crayfish caught the eye in a first scarlet glance, but soon it moved to thin fish with long snouts, to immense fat fish with small sad faces, to fish armoured and spiked as oriental warriors, to fan-finned fish with snaking bodies and to snaking finless bellowing eels, to old-men fish with a single long scrag of beard, to thoughtful cuttle-fish resting their tentacles forward like the feet of salivary dogs on the green lettuce mat, to furious octopuses, to brick-burnt crabs playing dead cards with their hairy front feelers held near their mouths, and cheating—in fact, to loup, saupe, dorade, rouget, langouste and all the other glum, angry, radiant swimmers of the near-by sea. And all fresh, all dripping their last wet salt on the fresh-water lettuce and all dead.
All dead—and it was with no added life that those two, Grace and her man, paused to glance at this display. They were hardly to be caught so easily by colour, light, magnificence. And they had eaten. Perhaps they rather paused because this seemed a climax to all other plenitudes of the day—as in a theatre one might be rising to go, but pause to hear for finality’s sake alone the final rising richening bars of a musical finale. Or perhaps even something of the deadness had appealed to the mood between them, or even the very glum look on all those fishes’ faces themselves, for those fish were certainly fed-up, washed-up, they had lived getting glummer and glummer the hardest and riskiest life there is to be had on this earth, and now they had had it, and it had been so awful their faces had not even the strength to smile relief.
However it was, they stood there for some moments observing this still, dead, beautiful, unhappy scene. Neither said a word.
Then suddenly, as if a light breath of wind had touched a lettuce leaf, or as if the lettuce itself was a sea and a deep swell had momentarily risen, something moved.
Both of them saw it.
He saw Grace glance quickly at a waitress hurrying by—black skirts may have caused a draught; yet why then did not this occur all the time, why was not the whole green lettuce bed trembling?
For certainly there was movement now, and the waitress had passed long ago: he glanced up for an electric fan, there was none, and then looked down again to see that particular leaf of lettuce give a low heave and fall aside to reveal something dark and big and swelling beneath.
Although he had no place in the restaurant he moved forward into it, he was so startled. But then as he bent to peer closer another leaf fell away, a dead crayfish moved a moment upwards like an earth-moving grab, an eel slid coiling lower away, and all these moving apart at last showed clear in the light what was underneath. He jerked his head back in disgust. But Grace, who had come enquiring at his side, never moved.
It looked like three or four kilos of live pig’s liver swelling and wrestling inside itself. It was thick as a parcel, and if it was liver it was liver dyed purple. It was wet and it breathed, oozing and dribbling a froth of wet slow bubbles. It had neither face nor fins nor legs nor feelers nor suckers, it was just a roundish wet blob of skinless purple flesh swelling and breathing. Yet after all it did have one thing, it had what looked like a big dark hole—mouth, anus, womb?—which seemed to form itself by a muscular rolling back of flesh, then to exude those long slow-blown bubbles.
‘Eh! Bouillabaisse! You like to eat—’ came the voice of that brass-haired, gold-toothed waitress laughing up to them ‘—good rich bouillabaisse? All the fish of the … all the …’ And the voice stopped.
Neither Grace nor her man had moved. Now the waitress edged close beside them, her mouth still stuck open on her last words. Thus the three peered—and the fat purple thing slowly contracted its muscle and blew out another long bubble.
‘Foi!’ the waitress breathed. ‘Eugh!’ And then took a step carefully back, her lower lip squaring to bare its teeth as though she had tasted something sick.
Grace said nothing, but the man found his voice:
‘You should know.’
‘But I don’t, I don’t,’ the waitress gasped, shaking her hard brass hair. ‘I don’t,’ her work-shaded eyes, a moment before as tough as her trade, appealed in horror. How she must have worked for those teeth, the man thought, glad to be looking away from the slab—but already the waitress was in action calling ‘Madame! Madame!’ and the great black bulk of the manageress came hurrying through the tables.
The creature heaved again, contracting and expanding within itself in a last eyeless search for whatever it needed, water or air; it seemed to be pumping some kind of last blubbering sigh. But it still lived, and suddenly the man thought: Do they keep them beneath to keep the dead fish fresh? One look at the manageress’s face told him not. Her huge old eyelids had dropped half-closed as if she had seen a snake. Now she too bent forward, carefully holding herself in readiness for retreat, stretched out a hand—and then quickly drew it back. It was a hard thick red hand on the muscled arm of a fisherman: and the man suddenly thought, that is what even a fisherman might feel like, he had seen their disgust at sea-cucumbers or fish they hated.
She pretended only to be pointing with that hand, shrugged her huge shoulders in a roll of disdain. ‘That,’ she said scornfully, plainly thinking of the good name of her dead fish, ‘is an escargot-de-mer.’
‘Escargot?’ Grace suddenly said. ‘Without shell? It’s more a slug.’ And she reached forward and prodded her small brown finger with its thin red nail gently into the purple fish. The pulp gave easily, her nail disappeared. But, disturbed, the creature began to heave the more.
‘See,’ she said, ‘no shell.’
Then: ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘Me?’ The manageress looked startled. Then quickly stiffened her jaw: ‘Why, nothing. It’s quite—quite clean. Later, later. Besides, I’m busy.’ And she looked angrily to left and right, catching a hundred non-paying customers. Already the waitress, fearing to be called upon, had found a large china tureen to carry.
‘Well, let me,’ Grace said, reaching forward.
She got the thing in one hand, but her hand was too small, it slithered on its own weight through her fingers, so she put both palms underneath and lifted it like a careful cushion.
To be able to do this she had carelessly handed her cigarette to her man, and now he stood struck stiff with wonder holding a cigarette in either hand and seeing this small figure in smart trousers bearing in her palms the giant sea-slug as if it were a crown on sacred velvet. She stayed there a moment, look
ing to right and left, not knowing quite what to do.
Mighty hell, he thought, and I thought I was bored! What kind of a woman is this? How will I ever know what to do with a woman like this? Or what she’ll do? What is she—callous or sensible? Insensible or over-sensitive? How could a woman like that ever need help? Or do I need hers? … And suddenly his mind went back to two others, a woman whose cat had brought in a dead sparrow and the woman had plucked and cooked the sparrow for the cat’s dinner; and another, a girl in a night-club whom he had asked, to make conversation. ‘What-would-you-like-best-in-all-the-world—best-of-everything?’ ‘I’d like to be sea-sick,’ she had said, after long and serious thought. Of course, that had simply been envy, she had never been on a liner. But she had nevertheless said it, it the unpredictable. And that was the whole point, you never knew what they were going to do next, you could guess but you could never be sure, or nearly sure as with a man, and it was useless to deduce a state of common boredom from the faces of other people’s wives and woman seen as they are on their best behaviour, it was what they did at home, or on the quiet, it was what your own inexpressible, unpredictable, ineluctable question-mark of a slip of a trouble-and-strife did that knocks the even keel into a cocked hat….
Meanwhile Grace was carrying her sea-slug across the road to where the edge of the quay lay in the shadow of boats. He followed her, raving to himself and excitement growing as he marvelled: Endoume my Aunt Fanny, Bompard my foot. What do I know of Bompard and Endoume? Suburbs open up new cities, none is the same…. Cardiff’s got a bus to Gabalfa, Edinburgh to Joppa … and I used to laugh. I could kick myself, he thought savagely—as then Miss Grace Ponzone dropped her sea-slug slopping, slithering down into dark water among anchor-chains and the iron keels of ships.
Neither saw it sink. But the light cf a ship’s lantern caught the slime on her hands. She made to rub them on her trousers, stopped herself in time, then just stood holding her hands out helplessly before her.
The Stories of William Sansom Page 39