August Is a Wicked Month (12 page)

Back at the hotel she undressed, lay on her bed and fell fast asleep.

Wakened by a knock she came to, thinking it was her son, and then realizing her surroundings she thought it was the room-boy and put her hands across her breasts to guard them.

‘It’s me, honey.’

It took her seconds to recognize the voice as being Denise’s.

‘It’s you, honey,’ she said acidly. Her head pained and she had a terrible thirst.

‘Oh come on, don’t be mad at me, I didn’t know where I was…’ Denise said. Rather than have their night’s history delivered in the corridor Ellen opened the door and let the girl in. She was wearing a grey dress and looked sober.

‘Prodigal,’ Ellen said.

‘Honest…’ Denise said and paused. Her voice was low as if she was talking in a church. Whatever occurred it had improved her face, given it back its childhood curves. Ellen felt a moment’s gladness on account of this and a small smile escaped from her thin, boned face. How elementary the aids to happiness. Little liver pills. Winning money. But much more so, an embrace, or a proposition, or a night’s panting. The great brainwash began in childhood. Slipped in between the catechism advocating chastity for women was the secret message that a man and a man’s body was the true and absolute propitiation.

‘So you’re not mad,’ Denise said, relieved by the smile. Ellen re-hardened. They must not get friendly or she might be obliged to hear the one thing that could stab her.

‘It was just another of those stupid, crowd-scene nights…’ Ellen said, looking abstractedly round the room as if there were something she had to locate. Oh for humility. Why could she not say that the gathering first enthralled her and later sickened her because her little-girl dream had not come to pass. Denise was rattling on:

‘I looked for you and suddenly you weren’t there, and then someone’s bringing me up steps and more steps, it’s like the Eiffel Tower only worse and I’m in bed stroking his hair and I’m saying, Frankie…’

‘Who’s Frankie?’ Ellen said, caustic again. She was in charge of this girl as she never suspected she could be.

‘Frankie’s my…was my beau.’

‘So you slept with our hero?’ Ellen said. ‘You could sell it to the magazines, call them long distance, reverse the charges…’

‘Listen,’ Denise said, less placatory now, ‘stop it. I got the understudy, some slob…’

Whether it was true or not, Ellen felt enormous relief. She moved about now, taking dresses off their hangers, waving them saying, ‘I’m off, I’m off…’

‘ I thought you were nice when I first saw you…’

‘Nice?’ Ellen said as if it were a dirty word. There was a long ash on her cigarette and she speculated how many minutes she could go without tipping it. She made a production out of just packing.

‘Don’t you want to ask me,’ Denise said following her.

‘You were raped,’ Ellen said, ‘and it was your father, sorry, your stepfather, and ever since when you meet men…’ and as she talked she looked and saw the thick face weaken as if it were being pulped and she thought, ‘How hard I have become, how hard,’ and she stopped. The girl opposite her in the grey dress was on the verge of awful, humiliating tears. Ellen felt tears come in her own eyes, and they looked at each other and laughed a little behind their tears. Denise sat down. Ellen hid her face by delving into the suitcase. They would not cry. She spoke for them both. On the contrary they would have a drink sent up and they would drink to women alone, to women’s solely noble hour without the company of men to vie for. She ordered two champagne cocktails and asked the operator to get the Travel Office again. She was really impatient to get home.

‘You can’t go…’Denise said. ‘It’s too soon, it’s still August. August is the month.’ She proclaimed it as if she was also in need of reassuring herself.

‘The wicked month,’ Ellen said, thinking of her own pathetic struggles towards wickedness. She could see Sidney’s face close to death, on the starched pillow; and the violinist behind the camera stocking up with titillation for the winter months.

‘I have to go, I have a son,’ she said, for no apparent reason. And again, for no better reason, she added, ‘His name is Mark but we call him Rock.’

‘You’re crazy about kids?’ Denise asked, threatened.

‘Not really,’ Ellen said and recalled a story she had been told of a woman who locked her son into a bathroom and of the child subsequently boring a hole through the wall and Ellen herself asking very coldly if it had been a tiled wall because in that case the child’s persistence was greater.

‘I’m crazy about him, but nothing else much,’ Ellen said, picking up clothes she had never worn and stuffing them purposefully into the fibre suitcase. Better to have bought a decent case. Her peasant origins coming out again. Caught napping.

‘If you tell yourself you don’t care, then you become like that,’ she said, flatly.

‘It’s all slightly above my head,’ Denise said. ‘But what’s your other name anyhow ?’

‘Ellen. Ellen Sage. Sage means wise or something like that.’

‘I have a sneaking suspicion you’re a nice girl,’ Denise said as the boy knocked and came in with the drinks. They drank to that, to being nice girls, no matter what. They drank quickly and then as Ellen munched the cherry off the skewer Denise looked at hers and ran it over her face and said very abruptly, ‘You got a guy then, or what?’

Ellen hesitated with her tongue between her lips. It was no longer possible to give simple answers to a simple question. There were tears in her eyes again.

‘Don’t cry, El, don’t cry.’

‘Who’s crying?’ Ellen said and snuffled. She would have to account for herself, say something, gloss it over. Denise put the pillow in another position and lay back as if she were going to hear a play. Ellen felt an impulse to summarize her life. She spoke quickly and in a voice that was unnatural to her:

‘Irish, cottage, poor, typical, pink cheeks, came to be a nurse in London, loved by all the patients, loved being loved, ran from the operating theatre because one of those patients who had a cancer, was just opened and closed again, met a man who liked the nursemaid in me, married him in a registry office, threw away the faith, one son soon after. Over the years the love turned into something else and we broke up. Exit the nice girl.’ She bowed on the last three words.

‘It’s marriage,’ Denise said vehemently. ‘It louses everything up.’

‘It’s not marriage, it’s us,’ Ellen said, she was weary of generalities.

There was a short silence. Suddenly feeling the heat, she let the cigarette fall from her mouth on to the washbasin and ran the tap out of habit so as not to cause a fire. The telephone startled them both. The Travel Office people to say there was no seat for that day, but they’d made a reservation for the next day. She asked the time she was due to arrive in London and wrote it on her cigarette packet. She would buy her son a dinghy and a pump to blow it up, because if there was one thing in this world she baulked at, it was blowing up dinghies, or balloons. She would also pocket the little tubes of mustard and single-portion boxes of salt that they supplied with lunch on the plane. Her son would use them to play shop with George. She thought of Christmas again and how it did not matter if she never saw Hugh Whistler again. At least her journey had fulfilled its purpose in one way.

‘But listen,’ Denise said, jumping up, ‘we have their house for the day, we’ll go by and have a ball…’

‘Who’s there?’ Ellen said. She had no intention of going.

‘No one. They left in hordes, Sidney, the fairies, people I’d never seen…’

‘Bobby?’ Ellen said.

‘God knows where he wound up last night, he was talkin’ of going to the Casino when I last saw him…’

Ellen felt better already. A day away from the hotel meant money saved, not just the money spent on food and drinks and the innumerable cups of tea but the money that went towards such absurd things as tipping and the use of the bath. The man who held the bathroom keys was only willing to deliver them when he got a handsome tip. She thought of Sidney’s bathroom, large, spacious with the soft stones of crushable talcum powder giving out a delicate lavender smell. Her greed mounted. She pictured again the various dresses in the shop windows and decided which one she would buy. Her mind was made up.

‘Why not, see how the other half live…’ she said. They would drink wine from lovely long-stemmed glasses… Denise was bubbling on about how they would have the pool and servants to wait on them and all of Mel Brooks…

‘Do you know Mel Brooks?’ she said. Ellen shook her head.

Denise looked annoyed. ‘You haven’t lived if you don’t know who Mel Brooks is, I tellya, I know…’ Already she was taking off her rings so that she could do her nails, before going over.

In the late afternoon they drove in a hire car through the town and along a country road. They passed two gold-stone houses and fields where women stooped as they harvested. The road was unfamiliar to both of them.

‘It’s going to cost several thousand dollars,’ Ellen said, straining to see the meter.

‘Maybe the guy’s a killer, you never know,’ Denise said, and then leaned forward and said to him, ‘Excuse me, is this cab actually taking us where we want to go?’ The driver made no reply.

‘Every bloody one of those bloody French guys has something else in mind,’ Denise said sitting back, winking at Ellen.

‘I’m worried, honest to God I am,’ Ellen said. She both was and wasn’t. She half wondered if Bobby would be there, but talked about the driver and the heat lumps under her skin. Tiny red lumps. The more she scratched the bigger they got. Denise took hold of Ellen’s small, white, peasant hands to stop her scratching. They were that friendly. An agreeable last day.

In the large downstairs window she saw the reflected image of the hire car as they drove up to Sidney’s house. She and Denise got out together, Denise on one side, she on the other. They shared the cost of the taxi and Ellen hoped that no one looked. There was something shameful in carrying on money transactions and being watched. It cost far too much. But they had no chance to argue because the window was opened and Bobby came out in a white short-sleeved shirt. He said ‘Welcome’ as if he had been expecting them. Perhaps he had. Ellen suspected Denise at once. Had she invited her just to make it casual, or to humiliate her? Must she once again play plain, simple, old-fashioned gooseberry? He put an arm around each of them and led them through the open window towards the back of the house.

‘You’re just in time, I’m doing the marrows,’ he said, and laughed as if he was engaged in something wicked. He looked from one to the other, smiling equally at both. Denise had a very wide smile. Her eyes were large, brilliant, brown in colour, fringed with long false eyelashes. They seemed to be smiling straight at him even though her face was in profile. She kept them wide open without blinking. Ellen could never fathom why it was that other women no better looking than herself made a better impression. She could look well talking to herself in a mirror or again talking to herself through the pool of a loving man’s eyes, but most times she looked mawkish, and curiously unfinished.

‘How long since your last Confession?’ he said, commenting on the virgin starch of her shirt and the black silk skirt that came well below the knees.

‘Oh she’s full of the guilt jag…’ Denise said.

‘She knows me twenty minutes…’ Ellen said in a hysterical voice. She hadn’t prepared for this situation. Where was Sidney, where were all the others? The others, he said, were gone to Morocco, except for Gwyn and Jason and a few people who were gone riding. He was master of the house. They walked through one room and then another and out to the veranda and along a path bordered with flowers. His canvas shoes made no noise on the flagstones, but hers and Denise’s were like armour clanking and competing with one another. The war was on. He had both their arms linked. In a few seconds they were in a glass-house. It was suffocating. The glass steamed over from the heat. There were flowers that looked unreal, big lurid blooms of red and mauve in big terracotta pots. She touched them just to make sure. They were real all right but they had no smell. The smell was of geranium leaves and tomatoes. She touched the wrinkled leaves of white geraniums and looked at their white unblemished petals. To smell the leaf and enjoy the petals, that would be the way to enjoy geraniums. The leaves in themselves looked pained. He picked one tomato, then another, and handed the girls one each.

‘I’m not hungry…’ Denise said. She really starved herself.

‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It’s great, it’s right out of a tin…’

He watched them both chew and asked Ellen if hers was good. She nodded.

‘Well have another, then.’ He put it in her mouth and watched while she bit into it and some of the seeds spluttered on to her chin.

‘Huh.’ He wiped them off with his finger and licked it. Sober, he was perfect to be with. She wished in a way that she had not seen him again because she was getting soft and hopeful. All acceptance again. She thought of the previous night and how close they had come and she smiled. He saw it happen. He put his arm under her long hair and let it sweep his skin from the elbow to the wrist.

‘You’re like Cinderella or something,’ he said.

‘Or something,’ she said modestly.

‘Walk me to the subway,’ Denise said putting her arm out for him to link, but not moving. He saw her pique and touched her lightly under the chin. In that moment it looked as if they had slept together the previous night. Ellen turned to the geraniums.

‘And now for the mating rites,’ Bobby said as he steered them both towards a trough where there were a lot of green leaves and small marrows of different shapes under the leaves. There were flowers too, yellow flowers, limp and tired looking but quivering with pollen. They drooped in the sun. He broke a flower very gently and brought its face to the face of another flower and let them touch very delicately.

‘Clean fucking,’ he said.

‘Such nasty habits,’ Denise said. She was looking very carefully. ‘Do they enjoy it?’

‘Does this always have to be done?’ Ellen said enthralled. She had never seen such a ritual before.