August Is a Wicked Month (18 page)

‘ Can I ask you somethink?’ he said.

‘Ask me,’ she said, brazen now.

‘There is a big beel,’ he said. ‘You are here twenty days.’

‘Oh that,’ she said, relieved.

‘We like our guests to pay the fortnight. Madam, then we pay our bills and all is as perfect.’

‘I’ll pay it,’ she said, leaning over, trying to read the amount. He had a sheet open in front of him.

‘I will send it up,’ he said.

‘I’ll pay it now,’ she said, anxious to snatch it out of his hand and learn the amount. That smile was gluey.

‘No, Madam, I will ask one of my boys…’

More tipping, she thought. She rose to go.

‘You mix with nice people here?’ he said.

‘I mix with nice people,’ she said, but he did not notice the bitterness.

‘You have a lot of success on your trip,’ he said.

‘A lot,’ she said. On the way to the door he held up a pair of glasses. ‘You don’t lose spectacles?’ he said.

‘No,’ she said, and went upstairs to wait for the boy who was to bring her bill.

She put some more disinfectant on and then covered the various bottles with a napkin, just in case. She sat like someone sitting in wait for a death sentence. It came on a white dinner plate. There were thirteen pages in all. Typed on purple ribbon. She thought it a suitable colour in her state of mourning and uncleanliness. Quickly she skipped the typed pages and got to the last one to read the final amount.

It was far beyond the four-figure sum she had roughly reckoned on. She divided by twelve. Staggering. More than she had ever reckoned in her wildest calculations. Apart from the nightly fee of four pounds for her room, there were millions of incidental items. What could they be? She rang down and the manager told her there was an index at the bottom of each page, explaining what each charge was for. There were capital letters to denote whisky and laundry and ironing and Perrier and baths and cups of tea. The laundry and ironing and Perrier and baths and cups of tea were written first in French and then in English. She’d had hundreds of cups of tea. There was nothing for it but to sign all the travellers’ cheques she possessed, and write out the balance on an ordinary cheque, then fly home and fling herself before her bank manager, begging for time to pay it back.

‘Money decides everything,’ she thought. Money would send her home when neither death nor disease could budge her. She wrote a cheque for more than the actual bill so that she would have a little French money for oddments until she left. But no more Perriers. She drank from the tap as if to invite typhoid and then went down carrying the bill on the plate. The manager said she should have rung. He would have sent a boy.

‘Can you get a flight for tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘I will try,’ and he picked up the telephone. He made a booking straight away. The season was fading, most of the people had gone home. He wrote down the time of the plane next day and she asked about a bus. He wrote down where she would get the bus and receipted her bill. Just as she walked away he called after her :

‘Madam, I understant, the bill not right.’

‘You overcharged,’ she said, jubilant. She would have money back. She would buy a half-bottle of Pernod and forget the ire between her legs.

‘Too small, we don’t count tonight,’ he said. She gave him back some of the notes he had given her in change and he handed her three franc pieces. She had fifty francs left and these three franc pieces. She was very broke.

Next day she tried to escape without being seen. She packed very quietly and ordered nothing so that Maurice need not come. About half an hour beforehand she closed the case and sat on the bed. The sunlight was bright in the room. She’d put two of the francs on an ashtray and kept the other in case a porter grabbed her baggage as she went through the hall. The thing had got worse. It was good that the money question had forced her to leave. She would see a doctor straight away, or go to a clinic. The name of a clinic was written up in a public lavatory in the centre of London. She would head for there.

‘Bye,’ she said to the room that contained so much of her. She’d taken two wooden hangers and one large towel with the hotel name on it. She put a towel in her travel bag just in case. She closed the door softly and moved along the corridor. The first to accost her was the man in charge of the bath. He tried to take her case but she held on to it. Then he put his hand out sullenly, and she walked by, a little laboriously, because of the heavy case. Down in the lobby it was calamitous. Maurice, the waiter from her table, and another boy were sitting on a bench inside the door. They all leapt up to assist her. Maurice had his hand on the leather strap of the case. Did she want taxi?

‘No, no,’ she said, but did not look at him at all. To the boy who was last in the row she gave the one franc and hurried on, down the concrete slope towards the trees and the bus terminal, running now that she had made her escape. It was hot and fiery and bright. But she knew that when she remembered the place it would not be hot like that but as it was the first night she came: blue and unknown, about to deliver up to her the most poignant experience of her life. And maybe it had.

A
T HOME THE HALL
was strewn with letters and there were two telegrams. Some of the letters had been posted and some were delivered by hand. They were all messages of sympathy. She had more friends than she ever dreamed. She opened several at once, scanned them, looked down to their signatures and thought how considerate people were. Some had even gone to the trouble of getting paper and envelopes edged with black. Although in fact this type of paper nauseated her. There were two from her boss. The first was full of condolence, the second was still sympathetic but mainly said, ‘Where are you?’ The first telegram was from Hugh Whistler and it said:

WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP

The second was from him too and it said:

PLEASE RING ME, PLEASE

It had been sent by mistake on a greetings form. It was strange, holding them together, the letters with their thick black edging and the telegram decorated with pink rosebuds. She shivered; the letters did not distract her enough. She had to make the journey to his bedroom. She ran to get it over with. His fort and soldiers were laid out on the floor and the pile of clean clothes on the bed where she’d left them, after ironing. She thought, ‘If I cry now I’ll never stop.’ She just picked up the clothes and put them in a bureau drawer and then she walked out of the room and turned the key in the door. She busied herself looking at the rest of the house, seeing if everything was as she left it. The garden was in a bad way. The geraniums dead in their pots. She felt the clay. Like cement it was. She got out the hose and went up and down the garden training the water on the flower-beds, the rockeries, and even on the dead geraniums. The garden seemed to breathe again and the earth crumbled as the water soaked through.

After a while she thought of her husband, although in fact he had been in her mind constantly. She washed herself most carefully and took a long time over it. She had got into the habit of washing over and over again as if there was some way of erasing it. She put on a dark dress and set out for her husband’s house around six. It was bright, of course, but not the fierce white brightness she had become accustomed to. It was a softer country; she would talk to him and say how awful it was, for him, for her, for anyone forced to live with an incurable sorrow. On the bus she missed her child more than anywhere. They had made that same journey so often, especially at week-ends when she delivered him to his father’s gate. They usually swopped riddles. She thought if they produced another child he might be the same. Reproduce their son exactly. But then she thought of her other trouble and felt daunted. She dimly knew that diseases like that were hereditary and the sins of the parent were truly visited upon the child. Her husband would have her publicly stoned if he knew. In fact she would have to be careful and keep several yards away from him in case he detected anything. She should have gone to a doctor first, not that she felt confident about going to a doctor at all.

The house looked very quiet, the hedge had grown wild in the month and the windows were boarded up. She rang and looked through the letter box and called. He’d put an old chamois inside the box so that she could not see through. Perhaps he’d died in there. She knocked at a neighbour’s door. They were semi-detached houses, divided by thin walls, and the neighbour would know if he was stirring around inside. The neighbour said he had not been there for days. He had gone away. He’d carried out some things – books, a clock and a record player – one day and put them in the car and driven off. There was a girl with him.

‘A nice girl?’ Ellen said foolishly.

‘In her twenties I would say,’ the woman said. ‘She had her hair down her back.’

For an instant Ellen felt the old repetitive stab: she too had had her hair down on her back when they met; and then something happened to change that feeling because suddenly she felt tears come in her eyes but they were tears of relief. Out of his pillaged life he had the strength to start afresh, to lay his head on some pure green breast where the milk might be wholesome. She was thankful to him in some strange way. He had freed her of the responsibility of feeling eternally guilty for him. More than anything she wished that they should be happy, he and this strange girl. She couldn’t bear the thought of it being just a girl who came to rent the house or deliver a breakable parcel to him. Maybe they fell in love at first sight. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Curiosity had died in her. For the first time she felt a fierce indifference. The passing away of the child and the boarded-up house put finality to their marriage. No more torture. In time he would write, but the letter would be about formalities and her reply would be businesslike too.

‘Is the house for sale?’ she asked the neighbour.

‘Not that we know of,’ the neighbour said, frantic to ask questions, eyeing Ellen’s body as if there was something to be learnt from it.

‘Will you let me know if it is?’ Ellen said, and gave her office telephone number. There was a set of old teaspoons in there she wanted. Her key to the house was no use because he had the locks changed after she left him. The teaspoons were all she coveted now, although when she left him she had tried to get back in and read his mind by the memos he wrote for himself on calendars, by the number of dirty cups on the table, by the squashed state of cushions in chairs. That was all behind her. The teaspoons were a different matter. They were silver, but that was not the point, because they were dented. Her mother had sent them as a wedding present, although she’d fallen out with her daughter for marrying a heathen. She sent the gift and put no name to it. Her mother had stolen them from the big house where she worked, because the initials were there for all to see, and Ellen thought it a very noble thing for her mother to have done. An actual gift. This was all she wanted from her early life, and she would have liked one pleasant photograph of her husband and of course the child’s belongings. Fragments were enough: in time those people who had meant everything to her and consumed her thoughts and inflamed her passions, those same people would become fragmented too and days would go by and she would not think about any of them. Her son would be the last to be relinquished but he would go, just as he would have gone of his own volition, if he had lived. Life had rendered her down: she no longer cherished any illusions about everlasting love, or about steadfastness.

‘Just a couple of odds and ends I wanted to pick up,’ she said.

‘Of course, it’s only natural, every woman has her souvenirs,’ the neighbour said. But the look in her eye was saying, ‘Your son is dead and you’re still alive, what a heartless woman you must be.’

‘And of course I have to arrange for a tombstone,’ Ellen said, taking offence at the woman’s unspoken thoughts. She had already decided on a rock, a strong, jagged rock the colour of blue slate. In a week or two she would take a train down there, and if she found his father had arranged for anything different she would have to usurp those arrangements. A rock was the most fitting thing for a young grave. A rock would outlast them all. And no inscription. Nothing soppy.

‘Of course, the poor little chap,’ the neighbour was saying. ‘His ball came over the hedge one day, and he asked ever so…’

Ellen had to go. With a sudden bolting move she excused herself. The neighbour must have thought her very callous. Yes, she was callous, she was hurrying away to find a doctor to cure herself. Already Bobby meant nothing, he had merely been the bearer of infection. The three-wise-men fable in reverse. Not that she blamed him. Blame, like nostalgia, was a sensation she had dispensed with. Trivial, all of these tags, when set against the huge accident of being alive or not. The days on the beach were some spent dream, only her disease was real, and the air around her and the stones of the road, and cars going by.

The neighbour closed the door hurriedly. Probably ran to tell her husband the news.

Why Ellen rang Hugh Whistler she was never sure. It certainly was not to start up anything romantic. On the telephone she thanked him for both telegrams, and hearing his voice she thought how English and formal and uninspired he was. She felt the same sort of relief as she had experienced outside her husband’s over-grown home. She no longer cared about whom he loved or whom he saw, she had no need of him, no innuendo slipped into the conversation, she simply answered drab questions and asked others. It was a new sensation, indifference; it was like observing a party as one passed by a sleek and softly lit front room and having no feeling of regret about being uninvited because to walk the streets alone provided a greater and surer pleasure.

‘Perhaps through the week,’ she said. He was asking when they could meet. She dallied. He insisted on visiting her later that night when his newspaper was put to bed.

She could see that her rude glow of health shocked him. When he looked at her face, he gasped. And the whites of her eyes! That clear pale-blue of baby’s eyes.