The Road from the Monument

by Storm Jameson

A young woman was sitting at the table nearest to him; she was alone, she had an English newspaper that she was not reading, and a drink in front of her that she seemed not to enjoy: she sipped it, made a little grimace, sipped again. A little school teacher on holiday, he said to himself. He would not have glanced at her twice but for the fact that she reminded him of something or somebody. She had a head very slightly too big for her slender body; her face gave the impression of having been flattened by a hand passed across it when it was still malleable; it was almost without expression: a strange, smooth, not vacant but as it were unmoved, and unmoving, beauty. It was nearly not beautiful at all, but it arrested by its sense of a perfection (of line, of colour, of this smoothness) waiting below the surface to show itself or be shown. What puzzled him was the likeness — to what? He struggled to pin it down — nothing is more exasperating than a connection your mind refuses to make. Unconsciously he stared. After a time she noticed it and — no other word for it — bridled. This vexed him, as much because it blurred the impression she made as because he had been caught behaving offensively. He shifted his chair a little, to look past her.

  In a few minutes, swallowing the rest of her unwanted drink, she made a move to go. The waiter, who had been lounging in the doorway of the café, came to get his money. Then began a comedy Gregory watched for a moment without moving his head. She felt on the chair near her for her purse, then in the pocket of her cotton dress. It was nowhere. Blushing, she tried in pitifully unintelligible French to say that she must have left it in the hotel, she would go for it and come straight back. The waiter took this with something worse than the usual insolence of waiters with a foreign nobody. Her humiliation became intolerable. Gregory got up, sauntered — to make it seem unimportant — to her table, and said,

  ‘He doesn’t understand you. Let me pay him and you can pay me back.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’re English. I thought…’

  He paid the man, all shameless civility now, and waved him off. ‘They enjoy bullying.’

  She was still flushed. The smoothness of her face is really remarkable, he thought. ‘What shall I do?’ she stammered. ‘Will you wait here? I won’t be more than ten minutes.’

  ‘Let me walk away with you. Why should you come back?’

  ‘You haven’t finished,’ she said with an awkward glance at his table.

  ‘It’s hardly drinkable.’ He moved, and she followed him submissively. ‘Which is the way?’ he asked.

  ‘If we walk along the Promenade, and turn to the right… I’m giving you a lot of trouble. I — I’m ashamed.’

  Gregory stood still. ‘Listen,’ he said, smiling. ‘If you want to save me trouble — and yourself — you’ll let me pay those few francs for you. And instead of our trudging together to your hotel, you’ll come with me to a pleasanter café and let me give you an ice and myself a decent drink. Then you can go back alone, without giving me or the francs a second thought.’

  He saw pass across her face in quick succession doubt, embarrassment, a childish excitement. ‘Why… oh, you’re much too kind. I don’t really think I…’

  ‘Ought you to be back at some special time?’

  ‘No. Oh, no.’

  ‘Then come along,’ he said lightly. ‘Twenty minutes. Half an hour. You owe me the time to finish a drink, you know.’

  He could see that the bar at Ruhl’s was an experience she had never had nor imagined herself having. Fortunately it was almost empty: she was spared the further embarrassment of noticing that her rather silly dress was out of place. He wanted her to enjoy herself. He took pains to make her feel that she was behaving in a very ordinary proper way — they were two English people adrift in a foreign place, coming to each other’s help, as it was right and friendly they should. Very soon she was chattering and eating her ice, and talking about herself. Not well — a thin voice came from those short beautifully shaped lips, and she had no gift for explaining herself. He gathered something. Both her parents were dead; she lived with an older married sister, or was it half-sister?, who — obviously — felt no or little affection for her. She did not tell him this last: he doubted if she were even aware that she lived with people who were indifferent to her. She was very inarticulate, almost, he thought, simple.

  But then what was she doing here? ‘Is your sister with you?’

  ‘No. Oh, no.’

  ‘A friend?’

  For a moment she was troubled. ‘You’ll think I’m out of m’ mind. They do. The thing is I had five hundred pounds — in the Savings Bank. My father put it there for me. This year I was twenty-one, and I thought… I wanted… both my friends, the two other girls in the firm, you know, were going on holiday — you know, with their boys — and I thought: I’ll go somewhere… I saw a picture of Nice in the paper. I drew fifty pounds of the money. It’s a lot, I know, for a short holiday, but…’ A light sprang in her eyes — gaiety or a flicker of rebellion? ‘My sister said, If you like to throw your money away…’

  Her friends have boys they go away with, Gregory thought idly: no doubt she would like to do the same thing — her innocence is only a matter of looks. But what looks. I suppose they don’t attract the kind of young men she would meet. Does she even know she’s a beauty? Probably not.

  ‘You’re not sorry you came?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  It gave off an uncertain sound. ‘Really? You’re happy here?’

  Her face contracted suddenly and pitifully. ‘Not very. I never thought… with no one to talk to, it’s… you know… and then, you saw, I can’t understand them — they don’t understand me, either, and I can’t ask for things.’

  ‘What do you do all day?’

  ‘Walk. Look at the shops.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  She looked at him, ashamed. ‘You’ll think I’m properly dumb.’

  If only, he thought, I could remember what, who, it is she looks like. An image moved at the back of his mind, unseizable. He had an impulse of pure unattached kindness, the very impulse one feels, at the sight of a shabby brat pressing its nose on a shop-window, to descend on it in the form of a god giving away half-crowns. It was as simple as that. The pleasure of giving her one evening that she would remember all her life. He knew exactly what to say, how to handle her so that she felt she could take what he offered without — how would she put it? — without lowering herself.

  ‘Why don’t we have dinner here? No, I don’t mean in this bar. In the dining-room. It wouldn’t take long — I haven’t got very long, I’m staying outside Nice. If you can spare an hour, you would be doing me a very great kindness. Eating alone is dull — don’t you think so?’

  She responded as he hoped — like a child putting out its hand for a toy. ‘Oh, but my dress.’

  ‘It’s all right. We’re too early for many people, as you see.’

  ‘But — surely it’s very expensive?’

  He was enjoying — he always enjoyed it — the sense of controlling something, like a musician with a violin in his hands.

  He held her happiness in his hands, he had the power over her that he had over words, to make her wonderfully pleased with herself and happy: he couldn’t, as they say, put a foot wrong.

  ‘I’ve been saving up, too,’ he said, smiling.

  Her face when she laughed changed —when its smoothness broke up, the resemblance to whatever it might be disappeared — becoming less remarkable, even a little common, like her voice and the way she talked. ‘I don’t know your name,’ she said now.

  He was about to tell her who he was. Then he thought: It will only overawe her…. Not for a moment did it occur to him that she might never have heard of him. His glance fell on the cigarette case lying on the table between them; it had his initials, very distinctly, in black enamel on the dull gold. ‘Let’s agree we’re old friends. My name is Graham. What’s yours?’

  ‘Ann.’

  ‘Good. Let’s go and dine now.’ He saw her, as they crossed the hall,
looking stealthily round. ‘But you’ll want to wash, won’t you? That’s the way you go. I’ll meet you here.’

  She slipped off. Coming back, she stood still for a moment before she saw him, a hand lifted: the image came towards him again, trembled, vanished. Her clothes! he thought ruefully…. At the table he took care not to ask her what she wanted; he chose for her, dishes that looked exotic but were easy to eat: plovers’ eggs, chaud-froid de poulet, a soufflé. The only concession he made to himself was to order a splendid Château de la Tour, of which he allowed her one glass: she was certainly not used to wine, and he had no wish to ruin his humble little miracle by making her feel tipsy. The pleasure of turning her round a finger, of making her wildly happy, would have been marred. Even as it was, excitement had almost the effect on her of wine: she laughed, talked without stopping, and ate all she was given. She had forgotten all about his having to leave Nice in an hour, and when at the end he said, ‘I’ll take you home,’ she made no protest.

  Home turned out to be a small dingy pension in a side-street behind the rue de France. No one was in the hall, which was ill-lit and stank of fennel-root, that most horrible of vegetables. She began thanking him, awkwardly.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  What he meant was: Don’t speak. That extraordinary face with its flattened planes and smoothness, unlike any living face he had ever seen, unlike life, suddenly overwhelmed him. It was the most violent sensation he had ever felt, neither anguish nor excitement, though he felt both — and felt the certainty of being able to take her: without questions, without uneasiness, without regrets. The simplest thing in the world…. He was sure of her, and sure of himself.

  ‘Take me up to your room.’

  She said under her breath, ‘Oh, no,’ then turned towards the stairs. He followed her, not even taking the trouble to walk quietly. They went up two flights, to the top floor, and into a room that smelled of warm stale air: in the darkness he could only see that it was small. She fumbled at a switch. They were in a room with sloping walls, covered in dark stained paper, with a bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, a worn drab carpet: in the raw light he saw it with frightful clearness. ‘Do we need this?’ he said, and turned it off, and opened the shutters. The light from a street-lamp came in feebly. He touched her. ‘Please undress.’

  Lying stretched out on the narrow uncomfortable bed, she closed her eyes. She was trembling violently. She had said nothing, as if all she might have said was given away by this involuntary movement of her narrow-waisted body, the bluish white of milk, with its small, very small, smoothly rounded breasts and scarcely visible sex. Forced by his hand to part her legs and arms slightly, she turned her face aside; he moved it gently back, and when he put his arm under her he felt that she was losing her stiffness. A ray of light fell across her narrow throat. Speaking for the first time, in a voice he could only just hear, she said, ‘You won’t hurt me, will you?’

  The sense of what she was saying did not reach him. The sudden violence of his need made him blind and deaf; he felt that her lips parted and closed and a movement began in her thin body like a wave rising, and falling: even through his own frenzy he was conscious of the pleasure he was teaching her and pleased that he could control her, play on her senses, provoke pleasure in her. Sharpened to the point of becoming intolerable, it was still the same sensation he had had earlier in the evening.

  Later he felt an immense tenderness, a wish to protect her in some way. There was barely room in the bed for two people to lie side by side, and he had raised himself on an elbow to give her more space and to look down at her. She was lying with her head thrown back, turned slightly sideways into her arm arched behind her neck, and suddenly he knew what she had been reminding him of — a Lucrèce by Lucas Cranach that he had seen, years before, in the museum at Besançon, standing in this pose, an arm supporting her head, the other hand driving in the blade. To have brought together the two things, the image and the living woman, filled him with the excitement it always gave him to hit on a triumphantly revealing metaphor. He lifted the hand lying against her thigh and laid it with the fingers under her left breast where the knife would have gone in.

  ‘Why do you do that?’ she asked half-audibly.

  He told her, but she paid no attention, as if it were not worth listening to.

  Walking to the street where he had left his car, he had a feeling of vigour, of lightness in his body and lucidity of mind, which surprised and pleased him a little. The sun was just below the hills to the east. He drove the dozen or so miles to the hotel very slowly, enjoying the coolness and the quiet of a coast too crawling with human lice during the day to seem as handsome as it is. In the early sun, the sea was of an astonishing purity; the delight it gave him was so acute that he felt tears behind his eyelids. How find a word to convey both the silent explosion of light on the horizon and the sensation itself?

  He thought with strong physical reluctance and a slight distaste of the room he had left, furtively, shutting the door and creeping down the evil-smelling stairs. (For a second he had seen himself parodying the lover in his novel, who also had been forced to creep up and down a staircase at night. No, he thought, no likeness.) But what possessed me? he asked himself, scowling. It had been pity, yes, a very facile pity — even, ridiculously enough, pity for a young creature forced to live in a room so sordidly unlike his room in the hotel. But more than that it had been greed, he thought coldly. For her youth…. For his own, too?

  With an effort, not now a difficult one, he pushed it from his mind.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘This place,’ said Gregory, ‘does not exist. A good deal of your Switzerland has all the air of being the scenery for an opera, with real houses, real leaves on the trees, real grass. But this beats all.’

  His wife did not speak.

  He drove, carefully, playing with the idea that it would end abruptly in the wings, up the narrow street of the village; on both sides the shops were crammed with holy images, in plaster, in sandstone, in cardboard, in flat glazed pastry. The street, fairly steep, came out into an immense cobbled square, its back-drop the façade of the monastery stretching the width of one side of the square; in the centre of the scene, a fountain, a semi-circular arcade, low and squat, of booths like narrow stables (for the sale of images), and a wide flight of steps which became a stone ramp rising steeply to a narrower flight: beyond the top of that, across another desert of cobblestones, the portico of the monastery, flanked by towers. A hundred or more cars and coaches were packed tightly on one side of the square: they masked the entrance to the hotel: he caught sight of it as he drove past, and had to manœuvre backwards.

  ‘The sooner we get inside the better. Before the chorus of pilgrims comes on and tramples us.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say about Einsiedeln?’ his wife asked.

  ‘The whole thing is preposterous — an industry, not a shrine.’

  She said nothing.

  Inside the hotel, he was reassured. Only pilgrims from the Catholic aristocracy were likely to fetch up here. They had been given a suite of one vast bedroom, with a remarkably fine floor and rugs, and, beyond the bathroom, a dark little room not much wider than a cupboard. The large room looked out over the square to the steps, the ramp, and the great sandstone monastery. At this height you saw the hill, black with firs, rising behind the monastery; the vaporous blue sky above it was a perfect imitation.

  In the certainty of being comfortable for the night, Gregory began to take an ironical pleasure in the scene. This room itself amused him: it ought, he said to himself, to be occupied by a cardinal-bishop, a man of the most cultivated tastes, accomplished and discreet (except for one time when he had unwisely allowed himself to say, in joke: I ought really to have been a Renaissance Pope): in the other room, of course, he would put his secretary, a handsome young man only a year or two out of the seminary, of good family, perhaps one of his nephews, or a cousin…. The enormous empty square outside— where on ear
th had they stowed all the people from the coaches? — must be meant for something more than the sale of images? Surely?

  ‘We have orchestra stalls,’ he said, smiling.

  To his annoyance, Beatrice insisted on taking the small bedroom. One of her tricks was to mortify herself in these ways: it always irritated him. Not only did it put him in an odious light: even more irritating, it was a thoroughly unnatural gesture. No one was more insistent on luxury in her daily life. Then why, why on earth, did she seize chances to be — in small ways, it was true — uncomfortable? An affectation, he thought. For form’s sake, he protested, but she cut his protests short to say impatiently,

  ‘Do you or do you not want to hear the singing?’

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What singing?’ — then remembered the suavely authoritative manager saying, in the same breath as his greeting, ‘You’ll want to hear the Salve Regina, of course; it’s sung at four o’clock, you have fifteen minutes.’ Pulling himself together, he said,

  ‘I’ll come with you. Of course.’

  They crossed an angle of the square. Beatrice’s high heels slipped on and off the cobblestones and she complained sharply. She complained again, under her breath, of the crowd which prevented her from getting near enough to look between the gates of the Gnadenkapelle, an elaborate casket of black marble (bristling with candle-flames) which housed the black Virgin. The church itself was fantastic. Out of sight behind the high altar a choir of (Gregory supposed) monks sang the service — admirably. He could not attend to it; he was lost in a madly baroque jungle of painted walls and ceilings, alive with saints in the likeness of ardent fauns and over-ripe nymphs, and — breaking out on all sides, springing from ledges, from brackets, from the arched vault of the roof, suspended by a feather, a single foot, a finger — angels with trumpets, with outspread wings, with scrolls, with wreaths, smiling, gesticulating, half-naked in flying garments, gilded, painted in all the colours of a shoal of tropical fish…. What, he wondered, does the cardinal-bishop think of this? No doubt he finds it as extravagantly tasteless as I do. Or does he amuse himself by trying to decide which of these lively Ganymedes pretending to be saints is most like the young secretary-cousin he left behind in the hotel bedroom, copying letters and getting ink on his pretty fingers?