When lunch was over, it was their habit in the house to go to their rooms and sleep. She waited. First Monsieur Pierre went into his room, with his yellow novel. The Jew and her husband lingered. ‘The best thing about this place is the drinks,’ he was saying. ‘They’re cheap. You can have as much as you like. Down at those hotels in the town they don’t leave the bottle on the table.’ He was flushed and torpid. After a while he said:
‘I’m going up.’
‘I’m staying here. I shall take a deck-chair outside. That room’s too hot,’ she said.
He hesitated. ‘Go, go,’ she almost cried. She looked at the black shining hair of the young man, his full lips, the brown bare arms that came out of the blue vest, the large dark hands, redder with the flush of blood. They were spread on the table, stroking the cloth. She could feel, in imagination, those palms on her body. Her heart raced and shook her. She and he would be alone. She would talk to him, she would not listen to him, he should not have his own words, perfect, predestined and impersonal. It was she who would talk. She would make him halt and stammer. She would break through this perfection of impersonal speech. She would talk and make him know her. She would bring herself close to him with words, and then with touch. She would touch him. He was young, he was without will: he would touch her. She saw in her mind the open door of his room. She thought all this as her husband hesitated, stupefied, by the table.
But when he went and she was alone with Alex her heart stopped and there were no words in her throat. Her whole body was trembling, the bones of her knees were hard to her hands.
‘I think,’ Alex suddenly said as he had often said before, ‘I think I shall go for a walk. I’ll be back for the swim,’ he said.
She gasped. She looked with intent irony at him. She saw him get up from the table and, in his oddly studied way, as if there were meat in his solitude no one else could know, he went.
‘You fool,’ she said to herself. But as she stared out of the open door and heard his cool footsteps on the gravel outside until the sound of the breeze in the vines licked them away, she felt lost with relief.
In a deck-chair under the mulberry tree she thought about herself and her husband. It was the time of year when the fruit of the mulberry falls. The berries dropped on to the gravel, into the tank where the frogs croaked at night and on to the table. They broke there. Sometimes they dropped like small hard hearts into her lap and when she picked them off they crushed in her fingers and the red juice ran out. She breathed deeply, almost panting in her chair.
She had married an outcast. Her relations had said that and they had been right. Some of those who had been right – her mother and father, for example – were dead. Tom’s father had had a small boot-repairing business in Leicester. He worked in the front room of their house, with its bay window. Coram. Repairs While You Wait. That man and his wife had had seven children. Imagine such a life! Tom had studied, won scholarships, passed examinations. All his life he had been different from his brothers and sisters. Now his job was chemistry. Once he was going to be a famous chemist. Instead he got commercial jobs in the laboratories of big firms. He did not belong to the working class any more. He did not belong to her class. He did not belong to the class of the comfortable professional people he now met. He did not belong anywhere. He was lost, rough, unfinished, ugly, unshaped by the wise and harmonious hand of a good environment.
And she had really been the same. That was what had brought them together. He was ugly in life, she was ugly in body; two ugly people cut off from all others, living in their desert island.
Her family were country gentry, not very rich, with small private incomes and testy, tiresome genteel habits. The males went into the army. The females married into the army. You saw one and you had seen them all. She had always been small and thin; her long nose, her long mouth, her almost yellowish eyes and dead clay skin made her ugly. She had to be clever and lively, had to have a will or no one would have noticed her. At one time she supposed she would marry one of those tedious young men with dead eyes and little fair moustaches who were ‘keen’ on gunnery and motor cars. She had thrown herself at them – thrown herself at them, indeed, like a bomb. That didn’t suit the modern militarists. They had the tastes of clerks. They fingered their moustaches, looked dead and embarrassed at her, said they couldn’t bear ‘highbrow’ girls, and got away as quickly as they could. They were shocked because she didn’t wear gloves. The naked finger seemed an indecency to them. ‘I could be a General’s wife by now if I’d worn gloves,’ she used to say. Before they could throw her out and treat her as the bright, noisy, impossible woman who appears in every family, she threw them out.
So she married Tom. She got away from her home, went to live with a friend, met Tom and married him. There was a row. ‘The toothpaste man,’ her relations called him. Thought she was going to live in a chemist’s shop. He became a stick to beat her family with; he was going to be a great man, a great scientist – she flogged them. He was going to be a much greater man than those ‘keen’ subalterns with their flannel bags, dance records and little moustaches, or those furtive majors, guilty with self-love.
She looked back on these days. She had always expected something dramatic and sudden to happen. But – what was it? – Tom had not become a great man. The emergence from his class had become really an obsession, and a habit. He was struggling to emerge long after he had emerged. He was always spending his energy on reacting from something which no longer existed. He lived – she could never quite understand it – in the grip of some thwarting inward conflict, his energy went into this invisible struggle. The veins and the muscles swelled as if they would burst. Torn between dealing with her, that is with the simple business of giving her simple natural happiness, and himself, he was paralysed. And they had had no children. Whose fault was that? At first it was a mercy because they were poor, but later? She slept with him. Her body had grown old trying to tear a child from him. Afterwards she attacked him. He listened, stupefied.
Why had this happened to her? And why had she this guilt towards him so that now she pitied him and spent all her day coming between him and difficulty? She had sown her disappointment in him, he had sown his frustration in her. Why? And why did they live in a circle they could not break? Why did they live so long in it until suddenly she was forty, a grey-haired woman?
She went over these things, but she was not thinking and feeling them only. There was the soft stroke of a pulse between her breasts, making her breathless with every throb. Movement came to her blood from the sight of the blowing vines and the red soil of the olive fields and out of the wind-whitened sky. Her lips parted in thirst for the articulate lips of the young Jew. She could not sleep or read.
At last she went into the cool house. The flies, driven indoors by the wind, were swimming in the darkness. She went up the stairs to her room.
‘Get up,’ she said to her husband. ‘We must go.’
He couldn’t go in these clothes, she said. He must get the car. She bullied him. She changed into a green dress. Grumbling, he changed.
She looked out of the window. Alex was not coming. She could see the valley and the trees flowing and silvered by the wind. Dust was blowing along the roads between the earth and sun giving it a weird and brilliant light like the glitter of silica in granite.
Tom went downstairs. His clothes were thrown all over the room.
‘We’re waiting,’ he said when she came down. The black car was there and Monsieur Pierre. He stood by it as if he owned it.
‘Women,’ said Monsieur Pierre, ‘are like the bon Dieu. They live not in time but in eternity.’
Coram glared at him. Alex was there, tall and impersonal. He had come back, he said, some other way. He gravely considered Monsieur Pierre’s remark. He made a quotation from a poet. This was obscure to her and everyone.
‘Where the hell’s this picnic going to be?’ said Coram.
They disputed about where they should sit. That is, she said one thing and her husband another. At last Monsieur Pierre was in front and she and the young man were at the back. Coram got in and sulked. No one had answered his question. ‘If anyone knows where they’re going they’d better drive,’ he said. ‘The far beach,’ she called out. ‘Well, in God’s name!’ he muttered. Still he drove off.
‘Are you crowded at the back?’ he said later in a worried voice. A sudden schoolgirl hilarity took her.
‘We like it,’ she cried loudly, giggling. And pressed her legs against Alex.
She was immediately ashamed of her voice. Before she could stop herself, she cried out:
‘I’ve got my young man.’
She swaggered her arm through his and laughed loudly close to his face. She was horrified at herself. He laughed discreetly, in a tolerant elderly way at her. So they bumped and brushed over the bad roads to the beach. Coram swore it would break the springs of his car, this damfool idea. She could see the sweat on her husband’s thick pink neck. She goaded him. She called to him not to crawl, not to bump them about, not to take the town road but the other. Coram turned angrily to her.
She wanted to show the young man: You see, I don’t care. I don’t care how revolting I am. I don’t care for anything. I hate everything except a desire that is in me. There is nothing but that.
The car topped the hill and she turned her head to look back upon the town. She was surprised. Two belfries stood above the roofs. She had never seen them before. The clay-coloured houses were closely packed together by the hills, and those that were in the sun stood out white and tall. The roofs went up in tiers and over each roof a pair of windows stared like foreign eyes. The houses were a phalanx of white and alien witnesses. She was startled to think that she had brought her life to a place so strange to her. She and her husband had lived in the deeply worn groove of their lives even on this holiday, and had not noticed the place. Her mood quietened.
The outlying villas of this side of the town were newer and the air burned with the new resinous odour of the pines and the two flames of the sea and sky.
‘I often come this way,’ said the Jew, ‘because there is more air. Do you know the waiter in the café by the harbour? On one hot day last year he chased his wife’s lover down the street, loosing off a revolver. He breaks out once a year. The rest of the time he is the perfectly contented complaisant husband. If the café were up here, it would not happen. Or perhaps he might only be complaisant once a year. Probably our whole emotional life is ruled by temperature and air currents.’
She looked at him. ‘You have read your Huxley,’ she said dryly, ‘haven’t you?’ But afterwards she felt repentant because she thought if he was showing off, it was because he was young. ‘I could cure him of that.’
Presently the car stopped. They had got to the beach. They sat for a minute in the car studying it. It was a long beach of clean sand, looped between two promontories of rock, a wilder beach than the one by the town where people came to picnic. Now there was no one on it. And here the sea was not the pan of enamelled water they had known but was open and stood up high from the beach like a loose tottering wall, green, wind-torn, sun-shot and riotous. The sky was whitened on the horizon. The lighthouse on the red spit eight miles across the bay seemed to be racing through the water like a periscope. The whole coast was like groups of reddened riders driving the waves into a corral.
‘The east wind,’ said Monsieur Pierre, from his window, considering it.
They got out of the car. They walked on the sand and the waves unrolled in timed relay along the shore. The three men and Mrs Coram stood singly, separated by the wind, gazing at the tumult. They spoke and then turned to see where their words had gone. The wind had swept them from their lips and no one could hear.
Alex stayed behind, but soon he ran forward in his bathing-dress.
‘You’re not going!’ Tom said. The sea was too wild. The Jew did not hear him and ran down to the shore.
‘Oh!’ Mrs Coram said anxiously and moved to Pierre.
Without a word the Jew had dived in. Now he was swimming out. She held Pierre’s arm tightly and then slowly the grip of her fingers relaxed. She smiled and then she laughed. It was like watching a miracle to see Alex rise and sink with those tall waves, strike farther out and play like some remote god with their dazzling falls. Sometimes he seemed to drop like a stone to the sea’s floor and then up he shot again as if he had danced to the surface. She watched him, entranced.
‘He’s fine,’ she called. She looked for Tom. He was standing back from them, looking resentfully, confusedly, at the sea. Suddenly all her heart was with the swimmer and her mind felt clean by the cleansing sea. Her fear for him went. She adored his danger in the water and the way he sought it, the way he paused and went for the greatest waves and sailed through.
‘Tom!’ she called.
Before he knew what she wanted, Coram said:
‘I’m not going out in that.’
‘Pierre is,’ she called. ‘Aren’t you?’
The old man sat down on the shingle. Yes, he was going in, he said.
Alex came back. He came out and stood by the water, unable to leave it. He was fifty yards from them. Suddenly he had dived in again. Then he came out once more and stood throwing stones into the sea. She saw him crouch and his long arm fling out as he threw the stone. He was smiling when he came back to them.
They sat down and talked about the rough water. They were waiting for Pierre to go in. He did nothing. He sat down there and talked. The Jew eyed him. Eagerly he wanted Pierre to come. The time passed, and Pierre said this sea was nothing. He began to boast of a time when he had been in a yacht which had been dismasted in a gale. ‘I looked death in the face,’ he said. Coram glowered, and winked at the Jew.
The Jew grew tired of waiting and said he was going to try the other end of the beach. She watched him walk away over the sand. Like a boy he picked up stones to throw as he went. She was hurt that he went away from her and yet she admired him more for this. She leaned back on her elbow; the soft stroke of pleasure and pain was beating between her breasts, a stroke for every step of his brown legs across the sand, a stroke for every fall of the sea on the shore. She saw him at last run down to the water and go in. He went far out of sight until there was a crest of fear to every breath of longing in her. He has gone far enough, she thought, far enough away from me.
She stood up. If she could fly in this wind over the sea and, like a gull, call to him from overhead and, pretending to be pursued, make him follow her to the shore! Then, to her surprise, he was suddenly on the shore again, standing as he had done before, studying the waves he had just been through. He stood there a long time and afterwards sat down and watched them. She called to him. It was too far. Timelessly he lived in his far-away youth. What was he doing, what was he thinking as he sat there remote in the other world of his youth?
Now Pierre had the beach to himself and there were no near competitors, he walked away and undressed. Presently he came back, short and corpulent in his bathing-dress and his red slippers. He asked particularly that Mrs Coram should be careful with his eyeglass. He fastened his helmet. Dandified, deprecating, like the leading dancer in a beauty chorus, he stood before them.
‘I float naturally in the sea,’ he observed, as if he were a scientific exhibit, ‘because the balance of displacement in my case is exact.’
He went to the sea’s edge like royalty, pausing every few yards to nod.
‘Look,’ she said.
It was odd, for the moment, to be alone with her husband, to feel that just he and she saw this as they alone had seen many other things in the world.
‘He won’t go in,’ said Coram.
Pierre had reached the sea’s edge. Impertinently a large wave broke and he stood, surprised, like an ornament in a spread lace doiley of surf. It swilled his ankles. He wai
ted for it to seethe back a little and then he bent and wetted his forehead. He paused again. A green wave stood up on end, eight feet high, arched and luminous like a carved window in a cathedral. It hung waiting to crash. But before it crashed an astonishing thing happened. The fat little man had kicked up his heels and dived clean through it. They saw the soles of his red rubber shoes as he went through and disappeared. There he was on the other side of the wave in the trough and then, once again, he dived through the next wave and the next, clambering over the surf-torn ridges like a little beetle. The foam spat round him, suds of it dabbed his face. Now his head in its red bathing-helmet bobbed up in dignified surprise at the top of a wave, now he was trudging out farther and farther into the riotous water.
‘He’s floating,’ said Tom.
‘He’s swimming,’ she said.
They talked and watched. She looked down the beach for Alex. He was lying full length in the sun.
Pierre was far out. How far they could not tell. Sometimes they saw the head bobbing in the water, sometimes they could not see him. They lost him. It was difficult to see against the flash of the sun. Nearer to them the emerald water fell in its many concussions on the shore and the shingle sang as the undertow drew back. She saw with surprise the lighthouse still racing, periscope-like, through the waves, dashing through the water and yet going nowhere. Why does he stay there, why doesn’t he come back? She looked avidly to the young man stretched on the shore.
‘Let’s go up to the car and have a drink,’ said Tom.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Wait.’
She looked up for Pierre. He was not straight ahead of them.
The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 25