‘It would be better, dear, if you lay down, I think. On your tummy.’
‘But haven’t you finished yet?’ Miranda said, in a sort of rebellion, half turning towards her solicitous masseuse. She was flushed and her voice sounded sleepy or dazed, as if she were divided by veils from full consciousness.
‘Finished? Oh dear, no.’ There was the slightest of snaps in Mrs Pritchett’s voice, denoting hurt perhaps at this attempt to curtail her ministrations. ‘It has to penetrate to the subcutaneous fat,’ she explained, after a moment. She patted the bed. ‘Just you lie here and relax,’she said. ‘Leave the rest to me.’
Miranda, divided between reluctance and compliance, looked for some seconds at Mrs Pritchett’s face. It was deeply flushed, brilliant-eyed, slightly smiling. ‘Come on now,’ Mrs Pritchett said, holding up hands shiny with oil. ‘We mustn’t keep nurse waiting, must we?’
She had adopted by some instinct or insight exactly the right tone for lulling Miranda, breaking down the girl’s residual resistance; playful, basically threatening, transporting her to school sickrooms, not so very far behind, when illness was regarded as weakness in the moral fibre somehow, perhaps even something to be ashamed of, and the way to reinstatement was unswerving, uncomplaining cooperation in all the details of treatment … Obediently, and without another word, Miranda stretched herself downward on the bed. She felt after a moment Mrs Pritchett’s hands stroking the thin tissue that sheathed her shoulder-blades. A strange smell had begun to expand in the cabin, like the exudation of some mammalian gland, attractive or rebuttive: the odour of the sun-tan oil. Miranda heard the other’s voice above her talking in richly elegiac tones about Mark, her former fiance and how she had walked away from Mark along the darkening river bank, past scented fields where cattle grazed …
Without pausing in her massage or in her speech, Mrs Pritchett looked down at the girl’s body. She could now with impunity dwell on the rounded, polished shoulders, the blunt sprouting of shoulder-blades, sheathed buttons of the spine. The skin was not really red as she had told Miranda except just along the shoulders, but reddish gold, like dark wheat – the girl had a depth, almost a duskiness in the skin which would always prevent that lobster redness. She was not yet completely relaxed, Mrs Pritchett noted: the arms were tensed, still held close to her sides and there was a slight, periodic clenching of the buttocks beneath the thin white cotton knickers. She continued her massaging movement, catching each time a thin fold of flesh which rippled into her hand, escaped again at the shoulder. And while she worked, with an obscure, slowly mounting excitement, on Miranda’s flesh, feeling the girl’s body more relaxed every moment, she continued the saga of Mark.
To Miranda the voice of Mrs Pritchett and the gentle yet remorseless pressure of her hands were becoming meshed, like a soft harness or a net. She was entering the territory that lies between sleep and waking, though sleep seemed dangerous at first, like a sudden descent into a dark place, or like some sort of submergence, and she resisted it, though sinking further and further into sleep and a sort of warmly sensuous desolation. She did not drown, the voice and the hands kept her from drowning, she was moving still, not gliding now, but flowing along a dark river, the voice leading her, the hands conducting, the river was bearing her. There were black cows on the banks, completely black, and she heard the breaths of the cows, the plashing of their feet in the black water, soft tearing of grass as they grazed along the banks …
‘Your bra is rather in the way dear,’ Mrs Pritchett said, and with oily fingers undid the two little hooks from their eyes. Then she dexterously slipped the shoulder straps down to the girl’s elbows. She now had the whole of Miranda’s naked back to work on, divided into two zones of darker and paler gold by the thin white line where the bra strap had been, the whole expanse gleaming and lustrous with oil. She could follow with her hands the long curve inward of the torso to the waist, and even below this to the compensatory initial convexities of the nates, before the thin band of the knickers stayed her. Miranda, in relaxing her arms, had moved them out some few inches from her sides, enabling Mrs Pritchett to see the launching outer curves of each breast. She ventured her hands along the exposed flanks, beginning at the armpit, rubbing lightly with the tips of her fingers along the outer curve of the breasts. This, since there was no flinching, no abatement of the girl’s deep, slumbrous inertia, she incorporated into the massaging movement, which was now a great cunning sweep, beginning at the hollowed base of the spine, proceeding outwards to the shoulders, returning via the flanks to the tops of the knickers in which each time her fingers caught and tugged a little.
Thus circumspectly she extended her range. And when she realized, from the girl’s heaviness under her hands, and from the complete relaxation, indeed abandonment, of her body – that virginal clench of the bottom quite gone – that she was tranced, resistless, Mrs Pritchett pressed her own hot thighs together and, while not pausing even for a moment in the massaging and caressing of Miranda, encouraged her own increasingly lively feelings by setting up a frictive movement there.
‘We must get into the subcutaneous fat, we absolutely must,’ gabbled Mrs Pritchett, forgetting Mark as she experienced the approach of sensations never connected with him, but knowing by a sort of instinct that she must at all costs go on talking to Miranda so as not to break the spell. ‘That is the secret of it.’ She raced on, dry-mouthed, rubbing her robust thighs together. ‘Oh!’ she cried, with a preliminary pang of pleasure. ‘Oh, dear, yes, we absolutely must get below the surface, that is where the healing soothing balm is fully and to best advantage – ah!’ A further slight ejaculation, a sort of buzzing sound escaped her. She edged the elastic band of the knickers down slightly, revealing the initial cleft of the buttocks. More than this was not possible for the moment because of the weight of the girl’s body. Nevertheless she persevered, with each sweeping massage plucking a little at the band.
Miranda lay face down in fathomless indolence, her body tingling, yet heavy and inert, drugged by the monologue and by the repeated massaging movement, words and hands holding her as in a net, drawing her netted through dark water very slowly, more slowly than the flow of the water; banks and fields were moving slowly too, nothing was still but the fisherman, Mark, standing there in midstream, black, immovable. Not swimming, not floating, but towed, she moved towards him, outdistanced continuously by the water but drawing nearer, and passing saw it was James Farnaby; the river changed, silvered over, there was a wreckage of birds’ nests on the bank and she felt a sleepy tenderness for the boy’s serious face, left behind now; the silver water flowed past and around her, endlessly inventive and circumventive, waylaid at the edges, trapped in eddies and swirls and pointless scummy sidings but never ultimately blocked in its career to the sea, minutely to sweeten that salt immensity. The hands massaging her duplicated that ceaseless current, caught however, briefly cluttered, like water in a blocked channel, over and over again, in the elastic of her knickers, tugging down slightly, freeing themselves, caught again, a reiterated intolerable blockage. Breathing deeply, a slight impatience troubling her as at some temporary obstacle in a dream, Miranda arched her rump clear of the bed, remaining thus, under the dreamlike duress, long enough for Mrs Pritchett to reach round and pull the knickers down at the front, down to the girl’s knees.
Sighing, Miranda settled down again, feeling the long flow of the hands from her nape to the backs of her legs without let or hindrance. She heard a brief buzzing sound above her. At that moment there was a brisk knock on the cabin door and a man’s voice shouted, ‘Anyone at home?’ Miranda recognized it at once for Farnaby’s, and it brought her full awake. She sat up quickly, reaching for her wrap, which lay across the foot of the bed.
‘Don’t answer,’ said Mrs Pritchett, but Miranda answered almost immediately, in a voice full of gaiety and alertness. ‘Yes, is it you James? I shan’t be a minute.’ She went towards the door.
Mrs Pritchett sat helpless, a prey to violent
emotion, and saw the door being opened. Then she rose. She heard Miranda utter some bright form of greeting, heard the pleasure in the girl’s voice, saw with hatred a tall gangling male form, its arms occupied with foodstuffs. ‘I thought we might have a picnic,’ she heard this creature say and saw the look of delight on the equine face as he looked down at Miranda in her pretty flowered wrap. She saw Miranda hesitating, out of politeness to her presumably, she obviously wanted to go – this was the fellow, almost certainly, who had been occupying her thoughts all morning. Mrs Pritchett moved towards the door. ‘I’ll leave the oil with you,’ she said. She gave Farnaby a queenly glance, effectively concealing the turmoil within. He made way for her awkwardly, banging his shoulder against the door.
Mrs Pritchett walked slowly away along the terrace, towards her own cabin, that cabin she had stepped out of earlier with such high hopes, clutching the bottle of sun-tan oil. The noonday sun lay on the pool, cutting athwart the vapour in glittering swathes. She noticed several persons standing silently in the bright water, among them a high-shouldered, rather distinguished-looking man she had not seen before. A young negro in scarlet swimming trunks came out of a cabin opposite and stood at the edge of the pool, chewing something, looking down. The sound of music, rather dirge-like, presumably from a radio somewhere, came to her. She felt terrible.
A man who had been sitting on the terrace in the shade of a beach umbrella, now emerged from under it and stood in her way. It was Vittorio. He stood there before her, brawny and servile, in a white towelling shirt and beige slacks. He smiled and she saw the flash of gold teeth. Vittorio’s wiry black chest-hairs curled up out of the vee of his shirt, extended to the base of his throat. The customary revulsion with which she noticed these things was complicated on this occasion, blended with feelings quite other. She stopped. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘How are you today? Why aren’t you in the pool?’ She uttered these questions with customary severity and contempt.
Vittorio stood regarding her, allowing the impeccable, elegantly throttled contralto tones to reverberate in his mind. The heedless authority of it, and the contempt, acted as always on him like a sexual stimulant, making him feel abject and brutal. He smirked at her, raised a beringed hand to smooth the hair above his right ear. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if you will have a drink with me?’ He made a gesture towards the table.
‘No, thank you.’ Never was a drink refused with such finality.
‘It is a genuine offer,’ Vittorio said.
‘I am going to my cabin,’ Mrs Pritchett said coldly. She began to move past Vittorio. He stood aside to let her pass and some happy intuition, some subtle transmission from his good angel, or some fortuitous access of insolence caused him to murmur as she passed, ‘Perhaps I could accompany you there?’
There are times when, drawing a bow at a venture without much hope of success, we see by certain preliminary signs, almost incredulously, that what was nothing more than a visionary gleam may be after all within our encompassing. It was so now with Vittorio. He had hoped, at best, for some crushing reply, which would have afforded him fresh examples of what had first attracted him, the delicious half-gobbled vowels, authoritatively trailed diphthongs, the plosive and the palatal commingled in ultimate derogation of all he stood for. Instead, she gave him in passing a single glance difficult to read and said, ‘If you like.’
For a moment or two he gazed after her, hardly believing it. Then, ‘I go now to get Scotch whisky,’ he called, ‘from my cabin, Johnny Walker.’ And he hastened to do this, not wishing to give Mrs Pritchett time for second thoughts.
They began the whisky with Vittorio sitting on the chair and Mrs Pritchett on the edge of the bed. But after a little while Vittorio moved on to the bed too, and they sat side by side. Mrs Pritchett drank too quickly. She began to tell Vittorio about her experiences during the war as a major in the W.R.A.C., training telephonists. Her voice became slurred and she frequently lost track of what she was saying. Vittorio listened gravely, drinking almost nothing, watching the decline of Mrs Pritchett with soft, solicitous-seeming eyes.
When the bottle was just over half empty Vittorio kissed Mrs Pritchett on the throat and the side of the neck and behind the ears. He was not rebuffed nor even reproved. He therefore put a large paw against Mrs Pritchett’s chest and gently pushed. Mrs Pritchett slowly and statuesquely fell back on to the bed and lay there in a supine position. She frowned up at Vittorio, who was commencing without haste to undress her. She lay frowning and speechless until all her clothes were off. Her body was plump, very white-skinned, marked with thin red weals where her brassière and girdle had been. Vittorio peered down at it in his short-sighted way. He could even now hardly believe that he had this upper-crust English lady naked on her back. He removed his own clothes and knelt above Mrs Pritchett, drawing apart her nerveless thighs as if they were tongs. She looked up dizzily to see that his burnished, wiry pubic hair grew right over his abdomen and continued in a dark band to join the more coppery pelt on his chest. Vittorio had thick hair from groin to throat, which made him unique in her experience. He also had a very highly developed sexual organ, now at its meridian – the view of it afforded by her recumbency was formidable.
‘Good heavens!’ Mrs Pritchett said.
Vittorio kneeling above her, felt a great surge of power and triumph. ‘Say something,’ he urged her, eager to hear once more the divine accent.
‘I don’t know if I can accommodate that,’ Mrs Pritchett said. A sort of ripple passed over her face, like a rapid grimace, and the next moment her eyes filled with tears, thick tears which welled out and ran down her cheeks. ‘It’s all wrong,’ she said. ‘We’ve all gone wrong somewhere or other –’
Vittorio gritted his teeth with savagery and vengeance, and rammed himself into her with one great thrust.
‘I thought you might like to go for a picnic,’ repeated Farnaby, looking closely at the girl’s flushed, still rather sleepy face. There was in these first moments of seeing her again a sort of delighted incredulity, she had slipped a little from his previous image of her, had to be refocused as it were, and his delight lay in the fact that this slight redefinition enhanced her. He wondered how often this process had to be repeated, before all blur was eliminated, total familiarity achieved. Perhaps it never was …
‘What a super idea,’ the girl said. She raised a hand to her hair, which was not, Farnaby noted, in pigtails, as it had been in the pool, but pinned up on her head rather carelessly. He noticed when she raised her hand how the sleeve of her wrap fell away to the elbow, revealing a rounded forearm, pale along the inside.
‘Perhaps you could put the things down on the bed for the time being,’ the girl suggested. ‘While I get ready.’
Obediently he moved forward, but the commotion of his feelings plus the unusual nature of his burden and his sense of being in an unfamiliar place, affected his powers of coordination, always weak, and he began to dither slightly, caught his foot against one of the legs of the bed, opened his arms to save his balance and so let fall his parcels. They all landed on the bed except for the bag of apples which fell on to the floor and burst, sending apples all over the place.
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘I am so sorry.’ He was distressed by the thought that she might find him inept.
Miranda heard the contrition in his voice, took instinctive credit for the disturbance in him and felt pleasure at it. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘We can easily pick them up again.’
Together, on their knees, they hunted about – the apples had gone rolling about the floor. Several times, while engaged on this hunt, laughing and exclaiming, their bodies collided slightly and these collisions generated a sort of rivalry between them, as to who could recover the most apples. Both together made a dive for the last one, which had rolled down towards the foot of the bed, fastened on it more or less at the same time and briefly wrestled over it, Farnaby holding the apple firmly while the girl sought to prise it out of his grasp, without success
at first, while he looked laughingly at her. Suddenly he was visited by a vivid sense of the children they had been together, and immediately after this noticed that the front of her wrap had parted a little in the struggle, being held together only by a belt at the waist, he glimpsed the upper part of her breasts and realized that she was naked under the wrap, and at this his hold on the apple weakened and she recovered it. Sitting back on her heels in triumph she held the apple up, then saw the stricken look on his face and immediately her own faced changed, the smile disappeared. She drew the front of the wrap together. For some moments they regarded each other seriously. Then she said gently, ‘You’d better wait outside while I get ready.’
I see them go, Mooncranker informed himself. I see them go, clutching foodstuffs. They stop outside the cabin to cram these comestibles into a bag of traditional Turkish design. I recognize with a pang this bag. She bought it in my company, in a street in Istanbul. The question, as I remember, was to choose something typical, avoiding at the same time any hint of the touristic. A geometrical motif was thought best for this. Black and white with a black cord. Into it now go the things they will eat together. Sitting in some lonely place they will dip into this bag, which I once for some minutes scrutinized carefully, eager that she should not make a choice she would regret. Strange how often it is through the memory of trivia we experience desolation. I am standing here in the pool, seeking neither to advertise nor to conceal my presence. Simply standing in my bath, a slight breathlessness besetting me after some half hour of immersion. They do not look my way. They do not look towards the pool at all. They look only at each other, eyes for nothing, no one else. Did I expect this? Across these yards of steamy water, said to be healing, I watch them, she who was my darling in a lime-green dress for scrambling in the hills. I recognize that dress. He, the treacherous Farnaby, my emissary. How oddly he walks, as if not sure the terrace is solid. Should I announce my presence? No, not yet. It is clear that lout is busy betraying me, but was it not for this that I really sent him here, did I not relinquish my life-line the moment I asked him to reclaim Miranda? Still they do not look my way. Round the pool, over the bridge. Into the restaurant, presumably to buy further items. They do not appear again, have left presumably by an outer door …
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