Nurse in the Sun

by Claire Rayner

  “How long? I - well, ever since college, I guess - ” he said and now the embarrassment that was usually in his voice whenever he talked of his work was back again, and she looked at him curiously.

  “Well, I would have thought that someone with the ability to produce a development that looks like this ought to be able to work for anyone he wants to - if this boss of yours is so nasty and stupid, why don’t you tell him what he can do with his job? I would!”

  He looked down at her and smiled, a little awkwardly. “Would you, Isabel? Well, maybe you would at that - though sometimes, circumstances - I - oh, well. I’ll tell you all about it some time. Not now. It’s getting a bit late and it’ll be too hot soon even to swim. We’ll go to the bay, shall we? There’s all day to talk, after all.”

  They parked the car high on a cliff road a few miles along the coast from Andraitx and then he led her to a narrow path that led down through a gap in the scree at the edge of the cliff to a winding footpath that made its way between overhanging bushes and cactus to suddenly plunge into darkness as it went into what appeared to be a tunnel, and she gasped with surprise and hesitated. But he laughed and took her hand warmly into his grip and led her onwards, and after a while the darkness thinned and opened out and they were standing in a sandy-floored shallow cave that was little more than a small rock-encircled gap in the cliff foot, cool and dim against the blaze of light that came from the beach and sea beyond.

  “It’s like something out of a child’s story!” she cried delightedly, running to the rim of the cave and staring up at the towering cliffs. “Is this the only way to get down here?”

  “It surely is! That’s why it’s so peaceful, I guess. No one spots the path at the top - you have to be told about it by someone who was told by someone else - your actual oral tradition, that’s what it is! I thought you’d like it. I was shown the way by one of the children of the foreman of our building gang - ”

  “A compliment that - I can’t imagine any child showing a grown-up person such a gem of a place unless that grown-up was very special and very nice.” She smiled then as he reddened. “Come on, Biff! Admit it! The child thinks the sun shines out of your ears - isn’t that it?”

  “Ah, kids - you know how they are - they take notions - ”

  “But it isn’t a notion! You are nice! And particularly nice to have brought me here, too. It’s beautiful - can we swim?”

  “But of course we can! The beach shelves perfectly here - deep enough to dive out there at the point - ” he indicated the rocks that marked the eastern end of the little bay - “but shallow enough to lie in the water and fall safely asleep at the edge. Look, there’s a little pile of rocks over there where I can change - you change here. Last one in’s a rotten egg!”

  She undressed quickly, shrugging into her newest bikini, and raced across the clean white sand of the beach, feeling the heat burning her skin, but he was already in the water by the time she got there. She saw him make a perfect skimming dive from the farthest of the rocks as she reached the edge, and then he was swimming towards her with powerful easy strokes, blowing water ahead of him like a great brown porpoise.

  They played and splashed and laughed for all the world like children for whom sand and water was all they ever needed, all heaven in one place, chased each other across the beach, in and out of the rocks and back into the clear blue water until they were breathless, and then lay flat on their backs at the edge, letting the minute wavelets lap around their hot skin while they squinted up at the harshly blue sky with its metallic midday glare. And then, lazily and easily they walked up the beach to the welcome shadows of their little cave.

  He made her lie down on a towel and rest while he put out their picnic, adding his own bottle of wine and little jars of olives and nuts to the chicken pieces and hardboiled eggs and fruit and cheese that Felipe had supplied. They ate in a companionable silence, until the sharpness of their exercise-created hunger had lost its edge, and then pushed the food remains back in her beach bag before stretching out side by side on the cool, shadowed sand, protected by the overhang of the cliff from the heavy beat of the sun that was now giving the sea a glitter of tinsel brightness, and garnishing the beach with sparks of light as grains of quartz in the sand reflected the sun.

  Inevitably, she fell asleep, lying there on the yielding softness of the cave floor, comfortably replete with food, softened by the wine they had taken, gently fatigued by the swimming and running.

  And woke an hour or so later, languorous and peaceful, to find Biff at her side, his head turned so that he could look at her. He was resting his head on one hand, his elbow planted in the sand, and his face seemed so attractive, so warm and brown and affectionate that she felt a sudden lift of simple desire rise in her, and put up one hand to touch his cheek.

  They stayed so for a very long moment, she touching him, and staring very directly into his eyes, and then, knowing exactly what she was doing, she raised her head and parted her lips, and shifted her gaze slowly and sensuously until she was looking not at his eyes but his mouth. It seemed to her that for one brief moment he resisted, and she lifted her chin a little higher and softened her mouth even more, and let her fingers stroke the skin of his cheek very lightly. And then, as she had meant him to be, he was kissing her, gently at first but then with an urgency and a need that left her breathless.

  For a while she responded, returning his kiss and his caresses with an eagerness that matched his own. Until he murmured her name, saying it slowly, lingering over each syllable as though it were a kiss. And it seemed suddenly that she could hear two voices, his and Jason’s. Jason murmuring, “Bel-beloved” in a distant but vivid counterpoint. “Bel-beloved - ”

  It was as though she had been douched with a jet of cold water. The desire that had been lying there deep inside her like some dark and secret pool shivered and trickled away to nothing, leaving her with a sense of sick revulsion, and quite sharply she rolled over, away from his hands, so urgent on her skin, away from his warm breath on her face, and jumped to her feet to stand at the edge of the cave, rigid with self-hate.

  “I - I’m so sorry, Biff. That - that was unforgivable of me. To have let you - and then to leave you like - oh, God, I’m sorry! I’m not a tease, believe me! I wasn’t trying to - it just happened. I was asleep and - I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to be sorry,” he said after a moment, and his voice was heavy with control. “I - it was as much my fault as yours. I thought I’d be able to wait, to hold out, not to rush you. I thought, maybe she’ll get over him soon, she can’t go on grieving for him much longer, and then - when you lay there looking at me like that I thought, maybe she is over him - maybe she isn’t mourning for him any more - ? You said this morning, too, didn’t you, about being more to me than just some girl? and I thought - oh, hell! I should have known. I shouldn’t have brought you here, shouldn’t have risked it - ”

  She turned and looked at him, then, peering to see his face in the shadows, for her own eyes were dazzled by the sun, and she frowned and said uncertainly, “Risked it? I - don’t understand. How do you mean risk?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Isabel! Don’t treat me as though I were a complete fool!” His voice was rough with anger, and she could see him now, sitting on the sand with his arms clenched round his hunched knees, his knuckles white with control, and his face white, too, under its tan. “You must surely know what I feel about you! That I was waiting to ask you to marry me - waiting until you’d forgotten that bloody Jason!”

  “No - no, Biff! Don’t say that! You mustn’t - I never meant you to get so - oh, God, Biff, you’re my friend. I couldn’t marry you - not ever!” And even as she said it and heard the note of amazement in her own voice, she knew just how cruel she had been. She had been almost prepared to treat him as Jay had treated her - as a sexual object, someone to play with, to make her feel good - but no more than that. And she hated herself for it.

  Silently, she stood there staring
at him and he sat and stared back at her, his face tight and filled with pain. And then he grimaced and relaxed and moving awkwardly, stood up, and picked up the towel on which they had been lying to shake the sand from it before folding it with dreary neatness.

  “I’m sorry,” he said heavily after a moment. “I thought, maybe this time - maybe this time it’ll be different. But it isn’t.”

  “Different? I don’t understand - ”

  “Oh. God damn it all to hell, why should you? Why the hell should you?” He threw the towel on to the ground with a violent movement that knotted the muscles across his shoulders, and then whirled and looked at her. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me, do you? Everybody’s friend, Biff, that’s me - everybody’s friend! Nice guy Biff, great for swanning around with but when it comes down to it, not for real - not unless they know, of course. Then it’s for real all right - their sort of real. But it’s never mine. And this time, I hoped, I thought - oh, don’t look at me like that! I’ll get over it, like I always do! I’ll get over it!”

  “Please, Biff, don’t be so angry. I know I’ve treated you very badly, but - I - oh, I saw you as an amusing, kind, useful sort of person - not useful in a nasty way, believe me, but someone I could trust who wouldn’t make life complicated for me, who’d help me get my pride back. I - my pride took a hell of beating a while back, Biff, and when you showed you like me, it helped. But I should have thought, and realized. I suppose if I hadn’t been so totally selfish, so concerned for my own feelings, I’d have realized that no man goes on seeing someone unless - unless there’s some strong feeling of some sort involved. Does he?”

  He looked at her, his face a little twisted, and said harshly, “No. He doesn’t. Not when he’s had the sort of beatings I’ve had - you aren’t the only one to have been hurt, you know, Isabel. Not by a long shot.”

  She went on, not really hearing what he said, trying to be honest, trying to explain to him that it was a fault in herself rather than a lack in him that had made her behave as she had.

  “I suppose I was using you to prove to myself that I was still - that a man could still want me. Which was stupid as well as cruel because I know that, anyway, don’t I? Didn’t he write and tell me that? What I want is to be loved for me, to be wanted as a person, not just as - not just the way Jay wants me. And I used you to prove something I already knew, and it was - ”

  “Oh, don’t upset yourself, Isabel! There’s no need to upset yourself! Like, I’m used to it, this sort of experience. I can take it!”

  And this time she did listen to him, and looked at him, frowning her puzzlement, and he laughed, a hard unhappy laugh that echoed the bitterness in his voice, and said, “You wondered why I wouldn’t talk much about my home and my job and the rest of it? Why I stick with my job when the Old Man makes my life such a hell with it? I’ll tell you why - it won’t take all that long. It’s on account of the business is mine. Squires Construction - one of the biggest concerns of its kind in the world, and it’s mine, near as damn it. Mine and the Old Man’s. My father. My lousy father. Who’s got one hell of a lot more sense in his little finger than I have in my whole stupid body - ”

  She shook her head, confused and almost wanting to cry, for his face was so filled with misery and she knew she had created it. “I don’t understand Biff - I don’t understand - ”

  “No, sure you don’t! Why should you? Look, Isabel, so I’m in love with you, okay? I know it, and you know it, and you don’t feel the same way and that’s all there is to it. Just my bad luck, isn’t that it? And my bad luck it isn’t the first time it’s happened.”

  He was walking about now, marching from one side of the sandy little cave to the other, his arms wrapped around his chest as though he were hugging his misery to himself, and she watched him silently, feeling herself filled with his distress.

  “I’ve been in love before - twice before. And both times the Old Man laughed - and boy did he laugh! - it’s not for real, they don’t care for you, it’s Squires money they want, and God knows he should have experience. Three times he married, three times he got stuck with alimony - and now he’s the most suspicious - ah, hell, how can I complain about him? Wasn’t he right? Every god-damned time? Because he told ’em - both of ’em, he went and told ’em that the day I married every damned penny I had’d be taken away from me, that I’d be the same as any other guy looking for a job. And both times he was right, they just disappeared. All of a sudden, they just didn’t feel that great love and passion any more! So this time, I thought, no more. This time no girl anywhere is going to know about my family, or the money there is. So that if someone says she loves me, it just possibly might be true - just possibly. And I have to go and fall for a girl who’s - ah, what the hell! Forget it all. I’ll get over you. Like I said, I’ve had experience - ”

  “I have never said I cared for you, Biff.” Her voice sounded cool in her own ears, but she couldn’t help that. “I don’t talk that way. I like you - I have from the start. I found you - interesting. And if I hadn’t already been - if it hadn’t been for my circumstances at the time I met you, I’m thinking it’s very likely I’d have - that you’d not be feeling as you do now. But I’ll not be blamed for anything more than you’ve a right to blame me for. I behaved badly - tried to arouse you and succeeded and then backed down, and that’s a hateful thing to do. But I never have said at any time anything that should let you think I mean anything more than - ”

  “No, I know. And I’m being unfair.” He moved sharply then, and walked across the sand to come and stand in front of her, and suddenly he smiled, the same familiar and sweet smile she had become so used to, and he held out his hand.

  “Isabel, forgive me. I had no right to throw all that at you. Well - maybe a little right, because yes, you did play a game with me, and you did make me think that - you made me feel pretty damned urgent for a while there. And a man can behave badly when that happens. But I’m okay now. Nothing like losing your temper to take the edge off desire, huh? I’ve been twenty kinds of a fool, but that doesn’t mean I had to talk to you as I have. So, I’ll forgive you if you’ll forgive me, and maybe, we’ll still be friends. Maybe?”

  She looked at his hand, and then, gratefully, put out her own, and solemnly they shook and then let go to stand and stare at each other. And after a moment she said in a low voice, “Thank you for accepting my apology so handsomely. And of course, if you’ll - if you think you can - I mean, if it isn’t going to make you feel all unhappy, then I would indeed like to go on thinking we’re friends. Because I mayn’t be in love with you, nor likely to be, as far as I can tell, but I do like you very much, and I’d miss you sorely if I didn’t see you.”

  14

  But although they had agreed to go on as though the episode in the little cave had never happened, it was inevitable that things should be different. They had driven back to the hotel in silence, but not one of their usual companionable silences; it had been a strained and slightly polite one broken only by their over-punctilious inquiries about each other. “Are you quite comfortable, Isabel.” “Perfectly, thank you, Biff - is my bag in your way? I’m so sorry -” “Not at all - ”

  A horrid way to be with a friend, she had thought mournfully as he delivered her to the entrance to the Cadiz and she stood on the pavement after getting out of the car, feeling awkward as a schoolgirl on a first date. And now what? Do I just say “Good-bye and thank you for having me,” or just go running in, or shake hands -

  He had solved it for her by holding out his own hand and once more they shook with that slightly solemn heaviness.

  “Good-bye for now, Isabel. I’m sorry the afternoon turned out as it did, but I guess - ”

  “I’m sorry too - so let’s stick to what we agreed and forget it - ” she had said swiftly, and he nodded and with one final grip of her hand, let her go and climbed back into the car to drive away without a single backwards look.

  And she went wearily in to spend the eveni
ng in her room, ostensibly to wash her hair and do her nails, though she usually spent an hour or so in the hotel’s hairdressing salon each week for that purpose. But she had felt she couldn’t face the idea of an evening in the hotel lounges chatting to guests or swimming in the floodlit pool, much as she often did enjoy such activities in the usual way.

  For the next week she had to work hard, and was grateful for the fact. As well as the over-indulgent trio of men who had so marred her Saturday, there were other guests who needed a good deal of attention to their sunburns and overladen stomachs, and in addition a very minor epidemic of gastroenteritis developed among the children and took a lot of her time, and a good deal of effort explaining to parents how to prevent more children going down with it. So when Biff called her on Tuesday and suggested a date, she could say, with complete honesty, that she was both too busy and too weary at the end of each working day, and please would he forgive her -

  And when he called again on Thursday she had to say the same thing, and then he didn’t call at all for a week, and she was both glad and distressed; glad not to have to face the difficulties of attempting to recreate their old easy familiarity, distressed that the rift between them should be widening, that their friendship, despite their good intentions seemed to be so damaged.

  She hadn’t realized just how distressed about it she was, in fact, until the end of the second week. Sebastian had asked her to go with him to a concert and then on to dine at one of Palma’s more elegant restaurants and she had agreed, not with any real enthusiasm but because it was easier to go than to explain why she would rather not. And she would have preferred not to, in many ways, for somehow everything seemed more of an effort these days; less amusing, less challenging, even a little boring.

  She sat in the restaurant, staring down at the wineglass she was turning between her fingers, staring into its amber depths and thinking. Am I perhaps homesick? It was after all, a very possible reaction. Glorious as the daily sunshine was, fascinating though the foreignness of Majorca was, it hadn’t the glory of a London summer’s day, or the fascination of work and life at the Royal, she told herself a little sadly.