August Is a Wicked Month (2 page)

‘They’re singing,’ she said, ‘my arms are.’ Rusted from disuse they began to come to life. Ripples of pleasure running down the length of those bare, white, rusted arms.

‘So you made your own candles,’ she said. ‘At Christmas.’ He’d told her earlier on that they’d melted white candles at Christmas time and put cochineal in them and had candles with ribs of colour running through them.
They.

‘What makes you think of that?’ he said.

‘The colours running through them, the way there’s ripples running through me now.’ She wished he had a thousand hands and could bring all of her body to life at the same moment. He was doing what he could. Her arms were singing and her hips wild with little threads of joy running through her like little madnesses. After a year’s solitary confinement.

‘I’m out of practice,’ she said.

‘A girl like you.’ He didn’t believe it. Who would? She was twenty-eight and had skin like a peach and was a free woman with long rangy legs and thick, wild hair, the colour of autumn.

‘At times,’ she said, ‘I longed to be touched but you can’t go and ask people, you can only ask yourself.’

‘Yourself?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said, sadly.

‘That’s bad,’ he said.

He caught the rug just as it slipped on to the wet grass and with both hands he brought it up behind his back, and over his shoulders, to his head.

‘Have I shocked you?’ she said. He smiled forgiveness, and then stretched the rug forward to cover her head, and when both their heads were engulfed by the rug he let go of it and he put his arms round her and took her mouth and felt it at first with his outer lips and then with the inside of those lips which was far softer. Their tongues wound round and round in a perfect, dizzying rhythm and he told her to open her mouth wide and wider. She received him right back the length of her mouth to her taste buds and although she feared choking she also thought she was sampling some beautiful fruit she had never known before. Her bones were singing away and the taste in her mouth was of magic. When they needed to breathe he lifted the rug back and put it like a veil around his face, and they were free to breathe for a minute and to watch. His face was good; pale, languid, and happy now. He normally looked bored. He had good bones and a habit of moistening his upper lip with his tongue all the time. To smile he had to do very little. He smiled so gently, so exquisitely and yet his face was not ever broken up into a big vulgar crease. He smiled around the eyes and there were plenty of lines there. Maybe he smiled a lot.

‘Why did you come?’ she asked, having put the question aside all day. He’d come at eight that morning and she’d gone down in a long-sleeved nightdress with an uneven hemline to answer the door thinking that it was the postman with a parcel or a registered letter. There he stood in a dark suit, an irreproachably white shirt and dark glasses. It took her several seconds to recognize him because she’d only seen him once.

‘Am I too early?’ he said.

‘Come in,’ she said and ran up the stairs before he could see her nightdress. She put on a girdle and a suit and then came down and shook hands with him formally and offered him breakfast. She thought it odd that he should have come, and she thought it improper that she should be frying him bacon and eggs without having panties on. She felt the coolth of her thighs and thought it nice to feel her own coolness and her distance from this man who’d obviously come because he was in some sort of trouble. Only trouble could have brought him out at that hour, braving the world in a pair of dark glasses. He stayed all day, slept in the garden on the rug that she’d taken off her bed and trailed down the stairs. He drank gins and tonic with six cubes of ice per drink and he was so fanatical about the ice that he filled the twelve-sectioned metal tray with water and turned the clock to full freezing speed so that more ice would be available through the course of his drink.

‘Why do you think I came? she said.

‘Trouble?’ But she was happy about it.

‘Miranda,’ he said, ‘has become my lodger. I’ve got a lodger who won’t go.’

‘You’ll have to get spades in,’ she said, and thought how quickly high love wanes. Miranda was his mistress. Ellen had met them both a year before, Miranda somebody and this pale distant man who talked to her for a few minutes and asked what she did. She said that she worked for a little theatre magazine and had been married once and didn’t approve of it and had a son. They got on to marriage. He’d been married too. He had hordes of children and a washed-out wife. But Miranda was calling.

‘Yes, darling.’

‘Mashed potato dance.’ She had her arms out to welcome him. She was a tall girl with an abundance of hair. Birds could nest in it. She’d had it dyed various grey-green woodland colours and she looked very womanly as she held her arms out and drew him near her. Miranda someone. The man who gave the party said she was dull and talked about Fallopian tubes all the time. Ellen felt relieved because the odds would have been too heavy if her temperament measured up to her handsome face and her lovely woodland hair. She did not talk to him again that night except that he came to say goodbye when he was leaving. He rang her at her office a few days later to tell her about a woman who put rubber bands instead of bacon rinds on her mousetraps, and to ask, incidentally, how she was. She said she was well and dashing off somewhere – which she was – and he asked what she was wearing and she said a brown dress with chiffon sleeves and amber beads and washed hair, which was true.

‘You would,’ he said churlishly, meaning he envied whoever it was she was going to see, and she guessed that he must have some interest in her in so far as a man with four children, a deserted wife, and a mistress can have the luxury of giving a thought to another woman. That was over a year before. For a few days or weeks she went around thinking of him and suffering, but the ache trickled away like all her other false-alarm aches, and when he arrived in dark glasses she was shocked to think that for a certain time he had burnt holes in her thoughts.

‘You’re sorry I came. I bore you,’ he said.

‘Not really. We had a nice dinner. I mightn’t have stirred myself to cook otherwise.’ She had her summer vacation from the office and was in the habit of going out to the café for a snack in the evenings. Without her son, or without a guest, she found that cooking saddened her. Alone, she ate standing up, so as not to make a ceremony of it.

‘And what now?’ he said. He’d put the rug over them again and they resumed kissing.

‘Like the last time,’ he said.

‘I’ve never opened it so wide before,’ she said.

‘ In that case I ought to bring you to bed and teach you all my wicked ways.’ The first and in fact the only funny thing he said. They moved up the garden and climbed the terrace of steps to the room that overlooked the river.

‘You’re lucky to be loaned this house.’ A rich woman who’d gone off to Africa had loaned her the house for a year.

‘I’m always lucky,’ she said, leading the way to her bedroom. He said they did not need the light on and she in turn asked if he would like the curtains drawn.

‘Leave them open,’ he said. ‘We’ll see the sun in the morning.’

‘Who said there will be sun?’ Relief. She thought, he means to stay until morning, and that pleased her as much as that he was going to sleep with her. She remembered a man who got up and left straight after he came, while she was still in the throes of desire.

In bed she opened wide. And christened him foxglove because it too grew high and purple in a dark secretive glade. He put the bedside light on. She felt him harden and lengthen inside her like a stalk. Soft and hard together. He loved her as no man had ever done, not even the husband who first sundered her and started off the whole cycle of longing and loving and pain and regret. Because that kind of love is finally emptying.

‘You loved me lovely,’ she said. His back was bathed in sweat. He had laboured on her behalf and she was filled with the most inordinate gratitude.

‘I’ll cool it,’ she said, dipping her hand in the water jug and spreading it over his back to mix with his sweat in a cool balm. Then he lay on his back and said good night although he was already asleep.

In the crook of his arm she lay and listened to him snore. She did not mind him snoring. She felt too happy to sleep. She just lay there thinking about nothing at all except that she was happy.

‘Say you’re sorry,’ she said in the morning when he wakened and blinked at the light pouring in and looked around the strange room and then at the unfamiliar red hair spread over the pillow, next to him. She was saying it as a joke and to forestall him.

‘Say I’m sorry!’ he said. ‘For what?’

‘Just in case you are,’ she said.

‘Are you?’

‘No I’m happy.’

‘I’m dumbfounded,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. I met you once.’

‘Twice,’ she said, ‘including yesterday. But never without pounds of stuff on my face.’

He liked her face better like that. Without its mask.

And he loved her again and spoke very little except to say how sweet it was.

They had breakfast and sat in the garden until it was time for her luncheon appointment. More sunshine. He dozed and talked a little and wondered aloud what he would do.

‘I suppose I’ll have to move out,’ he said. ‘It’s so bloody unfair, the man always has to leave.’

‘Not always,’ she said, thinking of her own situation and how she’d left and had to fend for herself.

‘I suppose I can’t ask her to leave,’ he said.

There was so much that Ellen wished to say and so much that she wanted to ask but she said nothing for fear of jeopardizing her chances with him. She hid all her meannesses and gave him a drink weighed down with ice cubes. They sat supporting each other with their backs, sometimes one or other of them hummed a song that was very popular at that time, called ‘Anyone who had a heart,’ and the words were especially nice because of the way they were feeling. At noon he offered to drive her to the centre of London.

‘Why are you smiling?’ he said as they stopped and started. It was Saturday and the traffic was bad.

‘Why?’ she said, lightly. So much had happened. She felt new again. Soft and indulgent towards the bad-tempered traffic. Looking at his ear lobe she remembered and told him how a drop of sweat behind it, in bed, had the effect of a crystal about to drop off. She kept moving from one position to another to give all her limbs a lovely stretch.

‘You have so much energy,’ he said.

‘I’m just boisterous.’ He looked at her and smiled and then looked in the car mirror and smiled to himself. He was happy too.

‘It’s not every day one gets a gift and gives a gift,’ she said. She wanted to do something lovely and loving for him. To give him a garden in full bloom – he liked flowers and was cultivating daisies in window-boxes – or a stone with a thousand colours, something he would never want to discard. Mainly she talked and hugged herself with happinesses, and twice when they were held up at the lights he kissed her. She knew they would meet again and she did not have to press him about when or where.

‘I suppose we’ll ring each other up,’ he said when she got out and stood on the kerb holding the door.

‘I suppose we will,’ she said. Wise now with the soft lustre of love upon her. Her eyes shining. They would meet soon and she would open again. The river of his being flowing into the pasture of her body. She was thinking of that when she got to the restaurant.

W
HICH MADE THE LUNCH
boring. A stingy theatre producer asking her what plays he ought to put on. Her. A week before she might have found it flattering. This well-known face with its striped suit and Mexican silver cuff-links at a special table near the window, some actress somewhere trying to catch his eye. He’d brought her to the roof garden of the hotel and they sat looking at the monstrosities of London: buildings jumbled in together and the appearance from up above of there being practically no trees and only one dusty parkland in the maze of un-matching houses and narrow streets.

‘So you haven’t found the perfect man yet?’ he said.

‘No, but I’ve applied for one.’ He tasted his cold soup. It was not chilled enough. He beckoned. The waiter who came over spoke no English, but lifted the bowl of thick soup out of its ice bed to show that it ought to be chilled enough. Her friend argued that it wasn’t, and that the pure orange juice they’d ordered was not pure but tinned. She had a feeling that they were being looked at. The waiter was having his revenge. She was wasting time.

‘And what will you do with your life?’ he said, waiting for the second bowl of soup to be brought.

‘I’ll just be,’ she said. A rare thing for her, racked as she was with anxiety, wondering always what would happen next, if an affair would be eternal, or if she loved her son over much, or if the wheels of a car they sat in would fly off and leave them half dead on the roadside.

‘So you’re getting sensible,’ he said.

‘I’m getting old.’ Not for years had she felt happier, more content, and therefore youthful. The bill was high and he left in a surly humour.

That evening she waited in and read a little (Keats) and walked around and journeyed to the end of her garden to make certain that the pipes of light were still there. She put a stone to the door in case she missed the ringing of the telephone. The evening was very still and the sound carried perfectly, so that in fact she heard the very first ring it gave as she ran up the lawn, past the frog pond and leapt up the steps. For some reason that had nothing to do with her running the necklace she wore dismantled and the beads ran down the steps as she was running up but it did not matter.

‘Hello,’ she said, as she picked up the phone and tried not to sound as if she’d hurried.

‘Can you come and have a drink?’ It was not him at all, but another man who often rang her on the spur of the moment to ask her out.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘There’s someone coming here.’

‘Infidelity,’ he said. He liked her a little and she often said to him how unfortunate that she could not have love affairs with someone for whom she had affection. Fear and hatred were what motivated her passions.