August Is a Wicked Month (3 page)

‘I hope he’s a dwarf,’ he said.

‘He’s almost,’ she said, and promised to have a drink another time and rang off.

Then she went to collect up the spilt beads. Some were easy to find, but as it got dark she trained the beam of a flashlamp into the corners of the mossy steps and felt with her fingers for the tiny pearled ones that were strung between the big blue beads and middle-sized glass ones. It was important to find every bead, not just to repair the necklace but because she took it as an omen. When she had retrieved a pile she held them between her palms, tossing them from one hand to another, killing time, and every so often she put her hand down and in the dark found another in a corner or under a weed. It was funny how you could go on finding them. Later she came in the house and sat in front of the telephone, staring at it, waiting for it to come to life, hoping, beseeching, lifting it from time to time to make sure it was not out of order, then, relieved at its regular purr she would drop it suddenly in case he should be dialling at that very moment, which he wasn’t.

Late next evening she took it upon herself to ring him. He worked at night in a newspaper office, writing editorials.

‘I don’t know why
I’m
ringing,’ she said chirpily. He asked how she was and what she’d done. She lied a bit about having gone out a lot and said her necklace was all over the garden, and then she heard herself say, softly and shamelessly, ‘It was lovely with you.’

He said yes and how he hadn’t been so happy for years and how he regretted nothing.

‘And?’ she said.

‘I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I love Miranda as I keep finding out every time I leave and come back to her. I suppose I want it every way, and I have such . . .’ He meant guilt, problems, responsibilities, but could find no single word to contain his meaning. He said they would meet in a while and she knew that possibly they would but it would be a duty meeting out of courtesy.

‘You’re all right?’ he said. ‘I mean, not worried?’

‘Not very,’ she said. She would have to resign herself to being alone again, alone like she was the previous morning when he came for comfort, except that now she’d lost that spacious calm that had been here through months of training, of discipline, and abstinence, and doing work and loving her child and watering the garden.

‘I think you’re one of the nicest people I ever met,’ he said. And meant it.

‘You too,’ she said, and they said a few more nice things and then they had to ring off because his other telephone was buzzing. It was no lie, she could actually hear the buzzing.

‘People get what they deserve,’ she said as she came off the phone. A great believer in punishment. She wondered if he’d told Miranda where he’d been.

The next couple of days were bad. She went around the house in her nightdress, thinking of him, thinking of her son, and the holiday that she’d meant to have. It had been her intention to walk around London and become a sort of tourist doing tourist things like taking a bus into the country and gathering leaves or buying bits of pottery to bring home. The fear that he might not ring was so great that she had to take the telephone off the rest to remove all possibility of his ringing, but part of her kept putting it back on again and hoping. She drank a lot and two nights she went to bed drunk and her head swam and the mattress swooned and she lay with the curtains open.

On the third day she went out to buy food. It was dull for August. A haze hung over the street and it was uncertain whether the sun would shine or if there would be rain. People were downcast.

‘We haven’t had a summer,’ the greengrocer said, forgetting about the five days. She bought strawberries to cheer herself up.

‘You’re going away?’ he said. She said no, but was he? He said later he’d go to Spain with the sister and they’d eat maggots and drink vino and come home tanned.

‘It’s astonishing,’ he said, ‘the way the sun gets you. Like the devil, that’s it, it’s demonic, like the devil. You’ve been around, you know what I mean. You get that you want it, irresistible…’

‘I know what you mean,’ she said as she went on her way up the High Street, past the flower stall and past the man who held up and acclaimed plastic wardrobes but sold none and towards the bookshop where she intended to get a new book to distract herself. She would sit on the bench at the top of the High Street and read a bit and watch the people go by and look at the big public house across the way which said ‘
BANQUETS, RECEPTIONS
’ and maybe the Cypriot would be there. He came most days. A big sad hulk of a man with a simpleton for a sister. They smiled at each other and once when he was eating an orange he tore off a section and gave it to her.

She had never noticed a tourist office in that place but now she saw one down a side street, about four doors from the corner. She went to look in the window and saw a coloured photograph of two girls in straw hats under a beach umbrella smiling to receive someone who was not shown in the photograph. The girls wore purple bikinis and their bellies were chocolate coloured with the belly button beautifully concave and she thought of him again and how the second time they had made love towards morning, he had not come inside her at all but touched her with his body, finding new places of pleasure that were virgin, and she longed for him as she stood in the street and thought the wickedest thing he had done was to come like that and give her false hope, and renew her life for an evening when she had resigned herself to being almost dead. Who, going by with prams and shopping and punnets of strawberries leaking blood, would know that she stood at a window with aggravation between her legs? It was demonic like the greengrocer said, and looking up at the overcast sky she cursed it for its darkness and cursed her own dark, convent life. She had been brought up to believe in punishment; sin in a field and then the long awful spell in the Magdalen laundry scrubbing it out, down on her knees getting cleansed. She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once. Was that why he ran? He saw jail written all over her face. And punishment. And looking again towards the window she said aloud, ‘I’ll punish him, I’ll go away,’ because of course she still hoped he would have another row with Miranda and come back for her. She went into the shop not knowing what she intended to inquire about. A delicate young man, who badly needed sun, told her there were dozens of places to go and gave her a free booklet to consult. She sat at a table and opened it at a page that said, ‘France will prove an adventure in all that is pleasurable in existence,’ and she saw photographs of beaches beautifully fronded by palm trees and she remembered a novel set on a French beach where all people though decadent were touched with a special, mellifluous charm. And she went back to the young man, with the page open. He’d been there himself once with his fiancée and its marvels had to be seen to be believed.

‘Breathtaking,’ was his word for it.

‘Do people go there on their own?’ she said. ‘I mean women?’

‘Best way to go,’ he said. She thought she heard regret in his voice. Had he wanted to slip away for an evening and have some lunatic encounter on that beach under one of those incredibly tall trees?

She would go there.

‘The sooner the better,’ she said as he rang up to arrange a flight and book an hotel. Her husband and son would not be back for a week or more and she would lie in a strange new place and let strange new things happen.

Afterwards she went to buy clothes. She bought trousers and shirts with slits at the sides to be worn over trousers and gold sandals with a strap separating the big toe from the other toes. Freedom clothes.

‘Do you know, I’ve never worn trousers,’ she said to the shop assistant. Squeamishness. As children they’d been told all that. And not to cross their knees because it caused Our Lady to blush. Well she was getting fast clothes now and blue trousers and Our Lady could blush to her follicles.

‘Slacks suit you,’ the assistant said. She had another pair over her arm, of lighter material, suitable for evenings. Ellen was overspending, but she told herself that she would skimp when she got back and do extras for the magazine throughout the winter, like reviewing out-of-town plays that no regular reviewer would deign to go to. She took the second pair as well. They were of green silk with a coatee to match. A small division between the waistband of the trousers and the end of the coatee. An inch of stomach showing, white as milk.

At home she fitted the new clothes on again and packed them in a case as she took them off. She painted her toenails carmine and pared the two corns on her little toes and thought them almost decorative like pearls, with their hard white centres. She danced in the new green outfit to wireless music. Dancing alone now, but by the same time next day she would be walking down a path to the sea, languid because of the heat, and she would stand and throw something in the water and know that there was some stranger behind, shadowing her, smiling and when she turned they.… She was happy and breathed deeply, deeply. But for him she might never have gone. ‘Bless you, Hugh Whistler,’ she said, as she copied the exact address of the newspaper so that she could send him back a snappy, happy, I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-you postcard. She ironed her son’s clothes and put them in a pile on his bed for when they all got back and life was normal again. She stored his sandals away. She did exercises to be supple and wrote the milkman a note. She packed odds and ends of food in a cardboard box and left them to a woman down the street. She could not sleep. In the mirror, as she danced with the portable radio, she saw herself in the new clothes with the milk-white waist showing and her toe-nails glistening, a wicked carmine in new gold sandals. She danced through the last night of aloneness. And when she slept it was in the downstairs room on a sofa with three alarm-clocks set to go off at intervals of five minutes each so that there was no possibility of her sleeping out. The flight was booked for noon.

H
E LOOKED AT HER
twice but conveyed no emotion. He reminded her of certain men who played extras in French films; in that his face was long and thin and sharp featured. She purposely sat in the outside seat across the aisle from him because he was the best-looking man. She noticed him the minute they got in the aeroplane, while other people were settling down, fretting about the view, putting their hands up to control the air, pretending to be concerned about these things when in fact they were mainly terrified about being killed. They’d been flying for over an hour now and he’d stopped reading
France Soir.
He was looking around, mildly curious: at her, at the girl beside her with long hair and sloe eyes who had her sunhat placed on her lap like an ornament. Should she thank him? Say her ears were all right? When they took off she had developed a pain in them and panicked in case her swallow was going to cease, and the darts of pain through her ears were as if needles were being pushed through. He was the one to advise her to suck a sweet.

Could she discuss her ears – blobs of wax on the end of a hair-clip, deafness, the stink of bacteria? She looked through the window and tried to think of something subtle. The horizon was like a sandbank, only blue, with hollows in between the long blue crests and snow beyond that, or white sky. Pockets of cloud like phantom cloud moved over the fields; green fields and ploughed fields that were a dull, pinkish brown and the road was a river because of the way it wound in and out between the fields.

‘The road is like a river,’ she said, turning suddenly and catching his eye as he hitched up the leather belt around his waist. She could make love to him there and then, lie down and love this total stranger. She’d always wanted to. He had intelligent eyes. She was going to make overtures to every good-looking man she met. This trip was her jaunt into iniquity.

‘Pardon,’
he said. Oh God, to have to repeat it and be overheard by the girl with the sloe eyes.

‘Just the road,’ she said nervously. ‘It reminds me of a river.’

‘Good, good,’ he said, smiling as if it were funny. She told him how she’d never been to France before and he predicted that she would find it mostly good.

‘I don’t even speak French,’ she said.

‘Many don’t, but it still is mostly good.’

‘I won’t know what to do.’

‘You will swim and sunbathe and eat good and perhaps gamble at night.’ Was he proposing to do any of these things with her?

‘You make it attractive,’ she said, in a low voice.

‘Yes, you will do all of these things for your holiday,’ he said. He would have a holiday later in Italy, but now he must work. She told him where she was going and took out her diary to check on the name of her hotel.

‘You know it?’ she asked.

‘No, I live many miles into the mountains. With my family.’

‘Mountains,’ she said lovingly, speculating not on their calm ineluctable beauty but on his life. There would be a wife and one or two small children and they would sit out of doors on a wall, waiting for him, the children drawing patterns in the dust with the sharp edge of a stone or a slate that had come off the roof in winter, and there would be hens lazying around and perhaps a dog. The wife would knit, and her eyes would be calm, the calm contented eyes of a wife on a mountain with a husband coming home to love her.

‘How do you get there?’ she asked.

‘I drive. I have my car at the airport since yesterday.’

‘And there are buses also? ‘

‘Buses. Yes.’ He could see she was worried.

‘I show you. I go the opposite way, otherwise I drop you, with pleasure.’

‘Not at all,’ she said, and looked away in case he should see the light go out of her face, her round face quenched in disappointment. She looked through the window again. They had passed the fields and were going over a mountain of grey stone. She stared down at the figurations of stone coiled together the way corpses would be and thought of death and how once as a child with her sister she lay in bed on a Saturday morning thinking of the day of general judgement and rehearsing the two possible alternatives that God would say: ‘Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting flames which were prepared for the Devil and his angels,’ or, ‘Come ye blessed for my Father possesseth the Kingdom prepared for you,’ and while they rattled off the words she was conscious of her father forcing her mother to submit and drawing the mother’s face towards his with his hand under her chin and his thumb and forefinger dug into her, hurting her swallow and his other hand out of sight, doing something under the covers, and her mother resisting and saying ‘Stop,‘ while the children had first an argument and then a bet as to whether God would be up on a rostrum or not. At that time she approved her mother’s resistance and now she felt differently: her mother should not have been mean, and she thought of making love again and turning to the stranger said, ‘Perhaps you can come and eat with me one evening.’