‘We met Mrs Wan this morning,’ he said.
‘Oh did you? She’s a rum bird – feeding all those cats.’
‘How many has she?’
‘I don’t know. They’re never all together at the same time. She’s a Duchess, you know?’
‘A real one?’
‘Yes. I can’t remember her title – from somewhere in England. She married some Oriental and lived in the Far East. Africa too for a time. When he died she came home. Look.’ She waved her hand at all the bric-à-brac. ‘Look at this.’ She went to a glass-fronted cabinet and took out what looked like a lace ball. It was made of ivory and inside was another ball with just as intricately carved mandarins and elephants and palm leaves, with another one inside that again.
‘The question is how did they carve the one inside. It’s all one piece.’
Neil turned it over in his hands marvelling at the mystery. He handed it carefully back.
‘You wouldn’t want to play boule with that,’ he said.
‘Isn’t it exquisitely delicate?’
He nodded and said, ‘Thank you for the lunch. It was very nourishing.’
He wandered outside in the garden and sat for a while by the pool. It was hot and the air was full of the noise of insects and bees moving in and out the flowers. He went down to the beach and saw that his friend Michael had joined up with some other boys to play cricket. He sat down out of sight of them at the side of a sand-dune. He lay back and closed his eyes. They had laughed at him in school when he said he didn’t know what l.b.w. meant. He had been given a free cricket bat but there was hardly a mark on it because he couldn’t seem to hit the ball. It was so hard and came at him so fast that he was more interested in getting out of its way than playing any fancy strokes. Scholarship boys were officially known as foundationers but the boys called them ‘fundies’ or ‘fundaments’. When he asked what it meant somebody told him to look it up in a dictionary. ‘Part of body on which one sits; buttocks; anus.’
He lifted his head and listened. At first he thought it was the noise of a distant seagull but it came again and he knew it wasn’t. He looked up to the top of the sand-dune and saw a kitten, its tiny black tail upright and quivering.
‘Pshhh-wshhh.’
He climbed the sand and lifted it. It miaowed thinly. He stroked its head and back and felt the frail fish bones of its ribs. It purred and he carried it back to the house. He climbed the steps behind the kitchen and saw a caravan screened by a thick hedge. The door was open and he had to hold it steady with his knee before he could knock on it.
‘Come in,’ Mrs Wan’s voice called. Neil stepped up into the van. After the bright sunlight it was gloomy inside. It smelt of old and cat. He saw Mrs Wan sitting along one wall with her feet up.
‘I found this and thought maybe it was yours,’ said Neil handing the cat over to her. She scolded it.
‘You little monkey,’ she said and smiled at Neil. ‘This cat is a black sheep. He’s always wandering off. Thank you, young man. It was very kind of you to take the trouble to return him.’
‘It was no trouble.’
She was dressed as she had been the day before except for the gloves. Her hands were old and her fingers bristled with rings. She waved at him as he turned to go.
‘Just a minute. Would you like something to drink – as a reward?’ She stood up and rattled in a cupboard above the sink.
‘I think some tonic water is all I can offer you. Will that do?’ She didn’t give him a clean glass but just rinsed one for a moment under the thin trickle from the swan-neck tap at the tiny sink. She chased three cats away from the covered bench seat and waved him to sit down. Because the glass was not very clean the bubbles adhered to its sides. He saw that nothing was clean as he looked about the place. There were several tins of Kit-e-Kat opened on the draining-board and a silver fork encrusted with the stuff lay beside them. There were saucers all over the floor with milk which had evaporated in the heat leaving yellow rings. Everything was untidy. He set his glass between a pile of magazines and a marmalade pot on the table. She asked him his name and about his school and where he lived and about his father. Neil knew that his mother would call her nosey but he thought that she seemed interested in all his answers. She listened intently, blinking and staring at him with her face slightly turned as if she had a deaf ear.
‘My father died a long time ago,’ he said.
‘And your mother?’
‘She’s alive.’
‘And what does she do for a living?’
‘She works in the cinema.’
‘Oh how interesting. Is she an actress?’
‘No. She just works there. With a torch. She gets me in free – for films that are suitable for me. Sometimes I take my friend Michael with me.’
‘Is that the boy below?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought his name was Benjamin. But how marvellous that you can see all these films free.’ She clapped her ringed hands together and seemed genuinely excited. ‘I used to love the cinema. The cartoons were my favourite. And the newsreels. I’ll bet you’re very popular when a good picture comes to town.’
‘Yes I am,’ said Neil and smiled and sipped his tonic.
‘Let’s go outside and talk. It’s a shame to waste such a day in here.’ Neil offered his arm as she lowered herself from the step to the ground.
‘What a polite young man.’
‘That’s my mother’s fault.’
They sat on the deckchairs facing the sun and she lit a cigarette, holding it between her jewelled fingers. Her face was brown and criss-crossed with wrinkles.
‘Why aren’t you in swimming on such a day?’ she asked.
Neil hesitated, then heard himself say, ‘I can’t. I’ve got a disease.’
‘What is it?’
Again he paused but this old woman seemed to demand the truth.
‘A thing – on my chest.’
‘Let me see?’ she said and leaned forward. He was amazed to find himself unbuttoning his shirt and showing her his mark. In the sunlight it didn’t look so red. She scrutinised it and hummed, pursing her mouth and biting her lower lip.
‘Why does it stop you bathing?’
Neil shrugged and began to button up when she stopped him.
‘Let the sun at it. I’m sure it can do no harm.’ He left his shirt lying open. ‘When I was in Africa I worked with lepers.’
‘Lepers?’
‘Yes. So the sight of you doesn’t worry me,’ she said. ‘Watch that you don’t suffer from more than just the disease.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s bad enough having it without being shy about it as well.’
‘Have you got leprosy now?’
‘No. It’s not as contagious as everybody says.’
Neil finished his tonic and lay back in the chair. The sun was bright and hot on his chest. He listened to Mrs Wan talking about leprosy, of how the lepers lost their fingers and toes, not because of the disease but because they had lost all feeling in them and they broke and damaged them without knowing. Eventually they got gangrene. Almost all the horrible things of leprosy, she said, were secondary. Suddenly he heard Michael’s voice.
‘Mrs Wan, Mum says could you tell her where . . .’ his voice tailed off seeing Neil’s chest, ‘. . . the cheese grater is?’
‘Do you know, I think I brought it up here.’ She got up and stepped slowly into the caravan. Neil closed over his shirt and began to button it. Neither boy said a word.
At tea Michael spoke to him as if they were friends again and in bed that night it was Neil’s suggestion that they go for a swim.
‘Now? Are you mad?’
‘They say it’s warmer at night.’
‘Yeah and we could make dummies in the beds like Clint Eastwood.’
‘They don’t have to look like Clint Eastwood.’ They both laughed quiet sneezing laughs.
After one o’clock they dropped out of the window
and ran to the beach. For almost half an hour in the pale darkness Neil thrashed and shivered. Eventually he sat down to wait in the warmer shallows, feeling the withdrawing sea hollow the sand around him. Further out, Michael whooped and rode the breakers like a shadow against their whiteness.
IN THE HILLS ABOVE LUGANO
I HAD FIRST met Brendan through the Debating Society when he was a mature student at University doing medicine. I liked his moroseness, his intelligence and his drinking habits – which were much the same as mine at the time. We had been, despite the ten-year age difference, reasonably friendly. But it was with some surprise that I read his invitation to spend a week of the summer holiday with him and his wife in a place he had acquired for a month near Lugano in Switzerland.
‘It’ll be a reunion in the sun,’ he wrote.
I really didn’t know him all that well – but money for a provincial publisher is scarce and I had not had a real holiday for several years.
He met me off the train and his first words were, ‘On a point of information?’
‘What?’
‘How are you, young fella?’ He shook my hand with both of his, then put his arm around my shoulder on the way to the car. It is disconcerting to find that an acquaintance considers you his best friend, his soul mate, but I could do nothing about it. He was in good form and as we drove up into the hills above Lugano he kept smiling and shaking his head in disbelief.
‘How many years is it?’ he said.
‘Five – six?’
‘It’s ten.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘And we all swore we’d meet up again every year. The best laid plans – blah-blah.’
‘Hey, this is some place.’ The scenery was magnificent – dry ochre hills covered with trees and dense foliage, lakes lying blue in the hazy distance.
‘This is my wife, Linden,’ he said. She was a tall girl, young for him – about the same age as myself – with a wisp-like quality of beauty about her. She wore a simple white dress and her skin was a golden brown from the first fortnight of the holiday.
‘Hi,’ she said and looked away from me shyly.
We ate on the patio and continued to sit at the table and drink the very excellent local wine until darkness fell. At one point, when Brendan went off to get another bottle from the fridge, Linden leaned over and said to me, ‘I’m glad you’re here. He’s been so down of late. Utterly, utterly black moods. You’re the only one he’s ever talked to me about.’
The fireflies came out, icy points of blue light, and flitted in the hot darkness. They hovered in one place for a moment then skidded off to another. Crickets kept up a constant trilling noise.
‘How’s the publishing?’ Brendan asked.
‘We’ve a very good Autumn list coming.’
‘The last novel got excellent reviews.’
‘I thought the author and I were the only ones who read those.’
‘We keep abreast. No philistines here.’
‘No,’ said Linden. ‘I admire what you’re doing – and having the courage to publish poetry.’
‘It doesn’t take courage – just money.’
Later Brendan became nostalgic, inevitably talking about people whom Linden didn’t know. I was aware that she was withdrawing from the conversation, her eyes straying away to look into the night or follow the path of a firefly. Brendan recalled our sessions together with a clarity I did not think was possible.
‘Do you remember that afternoon in Hannigan’s?’
I nodded. I could recall the bar and having been in it once or twice but had no recollection of being there with Brendan.
‘And you made the statement that there was no such thing as an unselfish act.’
‘Did I?’
He went on to outline my arguments from the past, the amounts we drank, who was in the company. It had obviously meant a great deal more to him than to me. And as he talked occasionally Linden caught me looking at her and once she smiled.
The next morning I awoke with a sore head. I felt dishevelled and awful as I made my way down to breakfast in my dressing-gown. Linden was sunbathing on her stomach at the side of the small pool, writing in a loose-leaf folder. When she noticed me she put on her bikini top and got up to make me coffee.
‘I can do it,’ I said. But she insisted. I think she was conscious of me looking at her because when she brought a pot of coffee and some croissants to the table she had put on an orange towelling beach robe.
‘Did we talk rubbish last night?’
She smiled but did not answer.
‘Where’s Brendan?’
‘Still abed.’
She sat down at the table, the perfume of her suntan oil wafting towards me. Just then a small middle-aged man in a navy T-shirt came across the patio. Looking neither right nor left he went down the three steps to the pool. He walked slowly, dragging his heels.
‘Who’s that?’
‘He owns the place. Lives in a hut at the back during the summer.’
The man took a long pole with a net on it and skimmed some flower petals and leaves from the surface of the pool. He clattered the pole back in its place and left the same way he had come, paying no attention whatsoever to us.
‘What a gloomy wee man.’
‘Money makes some people miserable. He doesn’t look like he’d own a place like this.’
‘But . . . we’re on our holidays.’ I poured myself another coffee. ‘Where did you two meet?’
‘In a hospital in Toronto.’ She smiled. ‘I was visiting and he ran after me – the whole way up the corridor – and said, “I’m looking for an excuse to talk to you but I can’t think of one.”’
‘He was always a smooth talker.’
‘No, he really meant it. But I agree, the way he spoke was really neat.’
‘And what did you do . . . before Brendan?’
‘Anything, everything. I’d been to college and graduated. Drama. I’d modelled a bit. I went to LA and tried to get into the movies. I was screen-tested for Alien.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. But Sigourney Weaver got the part.’
‘Did you try for others?’
‘It was then I met Brendan. I had to make decisions.’ She laughed. ‘He won.’
‘Speak of the devil.’
Brendan appeared in bathing trunks, muttered a good morning and plunged into the pool.
Later he and I walked down to the supermarket while Linden got on with her sunbathing. The villa was at the end of a leafy lane and Brendan pulled a switch from the hedge as he walked. He deleafed it and whipped it about.
He talked about his research – he was working on the effects of certain inhaled gases on brain tissue – and managed to explain, even to me, some of the complexities and problems.
‘I work on rats, of course.’
‘Are their brains the same?’
‘Elements are.’
‘Who’d be a rat? Made to sniff your gases – brain damage – then killed to be examined?’
‘It’s for our good eventually.’
‘I suppose so.’ The air was hot and I was conscious of moving through it. ‘Ahhh – this heat is wonderful,’ I said.
‘Wait until midday. Linden and I have taken to the siesta habit. It’s all you can do when it’s that hot.’
I raised an eyebrow. He whipped the switch across my backside.
‘I didn’t mean that, you adolescent.’
Because of my good Italian Brendan let me do all the transactions in the supermarket. After we had loaded a bag with groceries he said, ‘Is it too early for a cure?’
‘Why not?’
We sat outside on the patio of a small restaurant and ordered a bottle of white. The glasses when they were filled turned opaque with the coldness of the wine.
‘You’re getting a gut, Doctor,’ I said. He slapped his paunch loudly.
‘I am the age to wear it.’
‘Linden is very beautiful.’
‘Yes, I know.’ His voice was quiet. He reached out with his stick and drew the point of it down the side of the glass, making a clear track in the condensation. Then he said, ‘We’ve been brought up wrongly to deal with sexuality. Dogs have it right. And doctors.’
I waited for him to elaborate.
‘A doctor meets a beautiful woman in his surgery and before you can say knife he has her stripped and lying down. A minute later he’s palpated her breasts and sunk his finger in every available orifice. After that he can get to know her. That kind of thing should be socially compulsory. Dogs have it right. “I’d like you to meet Miss O’Neill,” and instead of shaking hands you have a good look and a rummage between her legs and a good sniff. Get the trivial things out of the way first.’
‘That’s a bitter Swiftian vision. Not one that appeals to me.’
Brendan shrugged and bent his switch in an arc until it broke. ‘A green-stick fracture,’ he said and dropped it on the floor.
‘It’s got to be more beautiful than that. More spiritual.’
He laughed.
‘It always amuses me when people make spiritual claims for the most physical of all human acts.’
‘I don’t want to be personal but does Linden agree with you about this?’
‘We don’t talk about it. This is why I’m so glad to see you. We can say anything to each other. Between friends nothing is barred.’
Brendan slugged off what was left in his glass and refilled it. I did not know what to say to his assumption of our closeness.
‘For Christsake, why should we associate physical beauty with sexuality – it’s not even physical beauty but a perfection of averageness. None of your black women with broad noses or fat Renoir nudes nowadays. They have to conform to the soft porn magazine. Fuck me, what crassness! What a load of fuckin baloney!’
I felt uncomfortable and tried to change the subject. The thought of Brendan in one of his utterly black moods for the rest of the holiday scared me. I suggested another bottle.
‘Why not,’ he said.
‘Linden tells me she nearly got into films.’
He looked at me askance. ‘An extra. She tried to get taken on as an extra in Alien.’
‘There were no extras in Alien. It was all set on a spaceship.’
Collected Stories Page 30