‘Willie would never have agreed!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Willie would not have changed a single word! He had a stubborn nature.’
‘Well, I admit that this letter sounds nonsense – not that I’ve read The Difficult Husband … But you are faced by a clear choice. Either fight for every word of your play, and be lucky if you keep one in ten; or else refuse to sign the contract.’
‘Enough, enough, Don Roberto! My mind is made up. The devil take this contract! If Señor Samstag’s assistants care to rewrite my play, very good! Let them spin a coin to decide who shall be the author. I will sell The Difficult Husband outright, making no conditions whatsoever, except that Señor Samstag must pay me a sum down, in pesetas, and – pff! – that’s it! … What might he pay?’
I told him: ‘Fortunately it’s not a case of buying your name: he’s only buying your story. Since the Señorita Samstag believes in it so strongly, he might be good for ten thousand dollars – around half a million pesetas. That’s nothing for a producer like Samstag.’
Jaume said slowly: ‘Not having yet signed my agreement with Señor Truscott, I am still my own master. Let us telegraph Señor Samstag that, if he flies here again, a new one page contract will be awaiting him at the notary’s.’
‘And Señor Truscott?’
‘For three hundred thousand I can become the Lord of La Coma, which is in the market now; so, since Señor Truscott envies me this cottage, he may have it and welcome. I will add a terrace or two, to round off the property. As for the lemon grove and olives, which are worth far more, they are yours, Don Roberto.’
‘Many thanks, Jaume; but I want nothing but your friendship. We should dispatch your message at once.’
Three days later Samstag flew in, delighted not to find Bill Truscott about. ‘Agents create unnecessary complications between friends, don’t you think?’ he asked us. A one-page contract in legal Spanish was easily agreed upon, and Samstag had arranged for the necessary pesetas. They went straight into an account which Jaume opened at the Bank of Spain.
As we drove home from Palma, Jaume said the last word on the subject: ‘What can be done with a man who complains that a play is dramatically bad before he even reads it? The Difficult Husband, as many Majorcans know, though perhaps few Americans, enjoyed a remarkable success at the Cine Moderno some years ago. My poor mother took me there. The film ran for three whole weeks. Only an imbecile would wish to change its plot. It was called – what was it called? – ah, now I remember: “La Vida con Papa”. How does one say that in English, Don Roberto?’
V. S. Pritchett
HANDSOME IS AS HANDSOME DOES
IN the morning the Corams used to leave the Pension, which was like a white box with a terra-cotta lid among its vines on the hill above the town, and walk through the dust and lavish shade to the beach. They were a couple in their forties.
He had never been out of England before, but she had spent half her youth in foreign countries. She used to wear shabby saffron beach-pyjamas with a navy-blue top which the sun had faded. She was a short, thin woman, ugly yet attractive. Her hair was going grey, her face was clay-coloured, her nose was big and long and she had long yellowish eyes. In this beach-suit she looked rat-like, with that peculiar busyness, inquisitiveness, intelligence and even charm of rats. People always came and spoke to her and were amused by her conversation. They were startled by her ugly face and her shabbiness, but they liked her lazy voice, her quick mind, her graceful good manners, the look of experience and good sense in her eyes.
He was a year older. On the hottest days, when she lay bare-backed and drunk with sunlight, dozing or reading a book, he sat awkwardly beside her in a thick tweed jacket and a white hat pulled down over his eyes. He was a thickset, ugly man; they were an ugly pair. Surly, blunt-speaking, big-boned, with stiff short fair hair that seemed to be struggling and alight in the sun, he sat frowning and glaring almost wistfully and tediously from his round blue eyes. He had big hands like a labourer’s. When people came to speak to her, he first of all edged away. His instinct was to avoid all people. He wanted to sit there silently with her, alone. But if the people persisted, then he was rude to them, rude, uncouth and quarrelsome. Then she had to smooth away his rudeness and distract attention from it. But he would ignore the person to whom she was talking and looking down at her would say, ‘What are you getting at me for, Julia?’ There was a note of angry self-pity in his voice. She liked a man of spirit.
This started quarrels. They were always quarrelling. They quarrelled about their car, their food, where they would sit, whether on the beach or at cafés, whether they would read upstairs or downstairs. He did not really know he was quarrelling. The trouble was that everything seemed difficult to him. He had thoughts, but he could not get them out. They were tied up in knots like snakes, squeezing and suffocating him. Whenever he made a suggestion or offered an opinion, his short brow became contorted with thick frowns, like a bull’s forehead, and he coloured. He lowered his forehead, not as if he were going to charge with fury, but as if he were faced with the job of pushing some impossible rock uphill. He was helpless.
She would see this and, cunningly, tactfully, she would make things easy for him. They had no children and, because of the guilt she felt about this and because of the difficulties he saw everywhere, they had become completely dependent on each other.
First of all they were alone at the Pension. There were themselves and Monsieur Pierre. He was the proprietor. At meal-times they all sat together. Monsieur Pierre was a plump grey man of sixty, with a pathetic, mean little mouth, a monocle in his eye. He was a short and vain little dandy and was given to boastfulness. The town was a gay place in the summer, like a pink flower opening by the peacock sea, and Monsieur Pierre was the butterfly that flutters about it. He had the hips of a woman. He was full of learned little proverbs, and precise little habits. Certain hours he would devote to lying on a couch and reading detective stories in a darkened room. At another time he would sit in his dining-room with a patent cigarette-making machine, winding the handle, meddling with the mechanism, turning out the cigarettes. He gave a lick to each one as it came out. ‘So he won’t have to offer you one,’ Coram said.
In the afternoon Monsieur Pierre made a great fuss. Appearing in yellow vest and red trousers, he took out a new bicycle done in grey enamel and glittering with plated bars, gears, brakes, acetylene lamps and elaborate looped wires. He mounted by a tree and, talking excitedly as if he were about to depart on some dangerous journey to the Alps or the Himalayas, he would whizz giddily down to the beach with his towel and striped gown on the carrier.
‘You are going to bathe this afternoon?’ Monsieur Pierre asked. ‘I am going.’ It was a question he put to the Englishman regularly at lunch-time. Monsieur Pierre would boast of his love of the sea.
Coram frowned and coloured, and a veil of wetness, as if tears were being generated by the struggle within, came to his eyes.
‘What’s he say?’ he asked his wife at last, for he understood French poorly.
‘He wants to know whether we are going to bathe with him.’
‘Him!’ said Coram in a surly voice. ‘Him bathe! He can’t swim. He can’t swim a yard. He just goes down to look at the women.’
‘Please, Tom!’ she said in a sharp lowered voice. ‘You mustn’t say that in front of him. He understands more than you think.’
Monsieur Pierre sat at the head of the table, grey hair parted in the middle, monocle on expressionless face.
‘He’s a fraud,’ Coram said in his blunt grumbling voice. ‘If he understands English, why does he pretend he don’t?’
‘Parlez français, Monsieur Coram,’ came the neat, spinsterly correcting voice of the Frenchman.
‘Oui,’ said the wife very quickly, smiling the long enchanting smile which transformed her ugly face. ‘Il faut.’
Monsieur Pierre smiled
at her and she smiled at him. He liked her bad accent. And she liked him very much, but for her husband’s sake she had to pretend to dislike him. Her life was full of pretences, small lies and exaggerations which she contrived for her husband’s sake.
But Coram disliked the Frenchman from the beginning. When Monsieur Pierre saw the Corams had a car, he persuaded them to take him about the country; he would show them its beauties. Sitting like a little duke in the car, he pointed out the torrid towns raked together like heaps of earthenware in the mountain valleys, the pale stairways of olives going up hills where no grass grew and the valleys filled with vines. Driving in the fixed, unchanging sunlight, Monsieur Pierre directed them to sudden sights of the sea in new bays more extravagant in colour. Coram frowned. It was all right for his wife. She had been to such places before. Her family had always been to such places. This was the thing which always awed him when he thought about her; pleasure had been natural to her family for generations. But for him it was unnatural. All this was too beautiful. He had never seen anything like it. He could not speak. At noon when the mountains of the coast seemed to lie head down to the sea like savage, panting and silver animals, or in the evening when the flanks and summits were cut by sharp purple shadows and the sea became like some murmuring lake of milky opal, he felt the place had made a wound in him. He felt in his heart the suspended anger of a man torn between happiness and pain. After his life in the villas and chemical factories of the Midlands, where the air was like an escape of gas and the country brick-bruised and infected, he could not believe in this beautiful country. Incredulous, he mistrusted.
‘Garsong!’ (There was a café near the harbour where the Corams used to sit for an hour before dinner.) ‘Garsong – Encore – drinks!’ That was the only way he could melt his mistrust.
Coram could not explain why. He was thwarted like his country. All he could do was frown and take it out of Monsieur Pierre.
‘He’s a mean squirt,’ Coram said.
‘He’s a liar,’ he said.
‘Look at him making those cigarettes.’
‘We’ve known him a week, and what’s he do but cadge drinks and rides in the car. He’s a fraud.’
His wife listened. Her husband was a man without subtlety or wit, quite defenceless before unusual experience. He was a child. Every day she was soothing this smouldering aching struggle that was going on inside him.
After they had been there a week a newcomer arrived at the Pension. He arrived one morning by the early train, walking down from the station with his new light suitcase. He was a young man in his twenties, tall, dark, aquiline, a Jew.
‘We will call you Monsieur Alex,’ said Monsieur Pierre with his French love of arranging things.
‘That is charming,’ said the Jew.
He spoke excellent English, a little too perfect, a little too round in the vowels, and excellent French, almost too pure. He talked easily. He had heard, he said, that there were some excellent pictures in the churches of the mountain towns.
‘Rather sweet isn’t he?’ said Mrs Coram. The Jew was grave and handsome. Coram was admiring too, but he was more cautious.
‘Yeah. He looks all right,’ he said.
His mother was French, the young Jew told them on the first evening, his father German. But they had both come from Austria originally. He had cousins in every country in Europe. He had been educated in England. Slender, with long hands, a little coarse in complexion in the Jewish way, he had grey and acute sepia eyes. He was so boyish, so free in his talk about himself, so shy and eager in his laugh – and yet – how could Mrs Coram describe it? – he seemed ancient, like some fine statue centuries old that has worn and ripened in the sun. He was thick-lipped and had a slight lisping hesitance of speech, and this sense of the ancient and profound came perhaps from his habit of pausing before he spoke as if judiciously cogitating. Mrs Coram would sit there expectant and curious. She was used to the hesitations, the struggles with thought of her husband; but there was this difference: when the Jew spoke at last, what he said was serious, considered, a charming decoration of commentary upon their discussions.
Monsieur Pierre always longed for fresh worlds to patronize; he was delighted with Alex. Too delighted for Coram and even for his wife. She could not help being on the point of jealousy when Alex sat and talked to the Frenchman. Coram bluntly wanted to rescue the young man from ‘the fraud’.
‘You know what’s wrong … with this place,’ Coram said to Alex. ‘There’s no industry.’
‘Oh, but surely agriculture, the wine,’ said Alex.
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Coram. ‘I mean real industry …’
‘My husband’s a chemist, industrial chemist,’ she explained.
‘I mean,’ said Coram, grinding on and frowning quizzically, ‘they just sit around and grow wine and batten on the visitors, like this feller. What a town like this wants is a couple of good whore-shops and a factory …’
‘Tom!’ said Mrs Coram. ‘How exotic you’ve become.’
‘I expect ample provision has been made,’ said the Jew.
‘No,’ said Coram, in his halting, muddling, bullying tone, ‘but you see what I mean.’
He screwed up his eyes. He wished to convey that he had not quite found the words for what he had meant really to say.
The odd thing about the young Jew was that although he seemed to be rich and was cultivated, he had no friends in the town. The young always arrived in troops and car-loads at this place. The elderly were often in ones and twos, but the young never. Mrs Coram detected a curious loneliness in him. Polite and formal, he sometimes seemed not to be there. Why had he come? Why to this Pension? It was a cheap place, and obviously he had money. Why alone? There were no relations, no women. When he went out he saw no one, spoke to no one. Why not? Alone he visited the mountain churches. He was equable, smiling, interested, happy – yet alone. He liked to be alone, it seemed, and yet when they spoke to him, when Coram urged by her – asked him to come down to the beach or drive in the car, he came without hesitation, with the continuous effortless good manners and curious lack of intimacy that he always had. It baffled her. She wanted to protect and mother him.
‘The Jewboy,’ Coram called him. His wife hated this. They quarrelled.
‘Stop using that stupid expression,’ she said.
‘He is,’ said her husband. ‘I’ve nothing against him. He’s clever. But he’s a Jewboy. That’s all.’ He was not against the Jewboy. He even liked him. They talked together. Coram almost felt protective to him too.
‘Aren’t you being rather vulgar?’ she said to her husband.
One effect the Jew had on them was to make them stop having this kind of quarrel in public. Coram did not change. He was as uncouth as ever. But his wife restrained herself. In mortification she heard his crude stumbling words and quickly interrupted them, smoothed them away hastily so that Alex should not notice them. Either she was brushing her husband away out of hearing, first of all, or she was working with every nerve to transform her husband in the young man’s eyes. At the end of the day she was exhausted.
One evening when they went up to bed in the hot room at the top of the house, she said to her husband:
‘How old is he, Tom? Twenty-two?’
Coram stared at her. He did not know.
‘Do you realize,’ she said, ‘we’re nearly old enough to be his parents?’ She had no children. She thought about him as her son.
She took off her clothes. The room was hot. She lay on the bed. Coram, slow and methodical, was taking off his shoes. He went to the window and emptied out the sand. He did not answer. He was working out how old he would have been if the young man had been his son. Before he found an answer, she spoke again.
‘One forgets he must think we’re old,’ she said. ‘Do you think he does? Do you think he realizes how much older we are? When I look at him it seems a century and then oth
er times we might all be the same age …’
‘Jews look older than they are,’ said Coram.
Her questioning voice stopped. Tom was hanging up his jacket. Every time he took off a garment he walked heavily across the room. Her questions went on silently in her mind. Twenty-two? And she was forty. What did he think of her? What did he think of her husband? Did her husband seem crude and vulgar? Did he seem slow-minded? What did the young man think of both of them? Did he notice things? Did he notice their quarrels? And why did he like to spend time with them, talk to them, go about with them? What was he thinking, what was he feeling? Why was he so friendly and yet ultimately so unapproachable?
She lay on her side with her slight knees bent. Out of her shabby clothes her body was thin but graceful. Her shoulders were slender, but there were lines on her neck, a reddish stain spreading over her breast bone, a stain hard with exposure to years. Her small breasts were loose and slack over the ribs. The skin creasing under them was sallow. She ran her hands over her hips. She moved her hands round and round on her small flat belly, caressing herself where she knew her body was beautiful. It seemed only a few days ago that this had been the body of a young girl. She was filled with sadness for her husband and herself. She could hear the beating of her heart. She found herself listening for the steps of the young man on the stairs. Her heart beat louder and louder. To silence it she said in an anxious voice to her husband, lowering her knees:
‘Tom – you haven’t stopped wanting me.’ She knew her voice was false.
He was taking off his shirt.
‘What do you want?’ he said.
His face looked grotesque as it looked out of the shirt top.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
Tom took off his shirt and looked out of the window. You could see the white farms of the valley with their heavy walls from the window. The peasants kept their dogs chained, and when there was a moon they barked, a dozen or more of them, one after the other, all down the valley.
The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 23