August Is a Wicked Month (8 page)

‘Oh, baby, don’t be silly,’ Denise said to her, drunk now and not caring what she said.

‘I can’t eat artichokes,’ Ellen said appealing to the actor. On stage a boy was singing
Anyone who had a heart,
and the English were joining in because it was the craze song in England at that time. She thought of Hugh Whistler and for the first time had no regrets about his going away. His indifference had fated her to this gathering and this gathering was exotic in a way that no Englishman could ever be.

‘You’re going to learn.’ Bobby came and sat next to her. Two artichokes were brought and a small dish of very yellow mayonnaise.

‘Not enough here for a midget,’ he said, picking one of the outer leaves, dipping its base in the mayonnaise and then nudging her to watch. With his top teeth he grazed the white base that was covered over with the mayonnaise.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s a good artichoke.’ Sucking it meditatively he said it was going to get better the deeper they got in. He enjoyed showing her.

‘ Try it,’ he said. She picked a leaf and watched what he did and then did the same thing. They ate slowly at first and then they began to race it and the leaves got purpler as they went deeper but the white parts were just the same. They put the grazed leaves in front of them on the table and she was doing almost as well as he was.

‘Oh,’ she said, surprised by the sheath of hairs that covered the heart. She had no idea it was going to be like that. She thought of the fox tail again but felt happier now.

‘I love it,’ he said. ‘It’s like a woman.’ They were very close and secretive, and she watched, ignoring the singing all round them as he made incisions with the sharp end of his penknife, nicking the hairs all round the base of the heart.

‘They get in the back of your neck and you know it,’ he said as she watched and held her breath while he slit the cap of hair right off and exposed the grey-white heart underneath. She felt as if he had been doing it to her.

‘Ma’am,’ he said, pushing the plate in front of her.

‘But it’s yours,’ she said, remembering how he said it was like a woman.

‘You have it,’ he said, ‘and I’ll whip you later.’ He watched while she tasted it. It may have been the ritual attached, or his company, or the three drinks, but it seemed to be the most subtle thing she had ever tasted.

‘I love anything that is trouble to get,’ she said, chewing, pretending to like it even more than she did, although the flavour was good and it had a strange texture.

‘I know you do,’ he said as he prepared the second one for her. She could see a man looking at her from another table. He wore dark glasses and had dark bushy hair. When he caught her eye he lowered the glasses a little on to his nose and beamed at her. The room-service boy. She burst out laughing. He thought it an invitation and stood up to come over.…

‘The room-boy from the hotel,’ she said to Bobby, ‘is following me around.’

‘So?’ he said.

‘He raped me this evening,’ she said, wanting to make a story out of it now.

‘How was it?’ He could be aloof and sarcastic quicker than anyone she ever met.

‘Not as good as this,’ she said, biting into the second heart.

‘Front or back?’

‘Side,’ she said, wanting to be as bright and brittle as all the other people. Some of the party were standing and some were objecting about having to go and Denise kept saying, ‘I’m damned if I’m going to be twenty-five in this position,’ and Bobby said to bring it with her and she went out chewing the last of the artichoke. The room-boy positioned himself near the door but she pretended not to see him. Mosquitoes like particles of dust were moving around the outside lights and people were walking around as if it were the middle of the day.

‘Same cars as last time,’ Sidney said.

‘Where are we going?’ Ellen asked Bobby, linking them both so that she could raise herself off the ground, just the way her son did when he was happy.

‘How are you doing?’ Bobby said.

‘She’s doing fine,’ Sidney said. ‘Like an eight-year-old.’ She was as breathless and as buoyant as she ever remembered having been. Happiness was surely pending.

T
HEY DROVE OUT OF
the town and along by the coast, through Cannes. Someone pointed out a tall hotel with a white decorative front and it reminded her of tier upon tier of wedding cake. Then they took a narrow road and began to climb. It was hot. All the windows were down. Now and then at bends in the road she felt that an oncoming car had just shaved them and she was vaguely nervous but not frightened enough to protest. The driver had been drinking with them. Through the open window she watched the clouds slip between her and the moon and thought, This is living at last. A little drunk. Sidney’s arm around her neck. Bobby, though he was in front, took the trouble to stretch his elbow back and rest it on her knee. Reassurance. And an instant of danger from another passing car. The narrow steep road, the gears constantly grinding, the climb, the moon through the window and the fields twined with vines running down to meet the road. Sometimes there were walls and sometimes not.

‘How are you doing?’ Bobby often said, turning round. He was in front with Denise.

‘Give my love to the pilchards,’ Ellen said. Up to then she had struggled to keep sober, but now she thought they were all behaving a little drunk and silliness was appropriate. She thought Denise said ‘Crap,‘ but could not be sure.

‘Here’s to sex,’ Gwyn was saying. Someone had brought a bottle of whisky and it was being passed round. The driver refused it. Ellen said she wanted to have it after Bobby, to have a taste of him. They all laughed.

‘There’s my girl,’ he said.

‘Sex within marriage,’ Gwyn said.

‘If I were six months younger,’ Sidney said, his arm tightening round Ellen’s neck, until she felt she’d choke, ‘we’d get married …’ and then the car was brought to a sudden grinding halt and the screech of the brakes was more desperate than the ‘Sweet Jesus,‘ that Gwyn let out. It was on a very deserted part of the road with no houses around. As soon as they stopped the cars behind had to stop too and there was an outrage of hooting.

‘General de Gaulle kidnapped,’ Bobby said and made a joke about having to build a private oratory for him to hear Mass every day.

‘And a mermaid on Fridays,’ Denise said, and then Gwyn said they ought to be ashamed of themselves ridiculing Catholics like that. They waited for a few minutes with the engine running, and cars hooting from behind, and the men making middling jokes, when the driver got out. When he came back he appeared to be trembling. A motor-cyclist was dead a few yards up.

‘Really dead?’ Ellen said, as if there was still a chance to prevent it.

‘Looks so,’ the driver said, and Gwyn said they ought to get a priest or something. They all got out. A small group of people surrounded the spot where the accident had happened. Their faces looked stricken and they had their eyes down because of the blinding headlights from a police car. They stood solemnly and watched as they would never have watched if this man had been alive. The actor pushed his way through. Over his shoulder Ellen saw the body, thrown forward from the motor-cycle which was in the centre of the road. A black car with wings like a giant bird was sprawled across the road where it had obviously swerved to avoid him. His trousers appeared to be empty of his legs and one boot was a few yards away. His sock was running blood.

‘He was doing eighty,’ a voice said. Most people talked in French. Someone said he was German. His papers were German. She shivered at the thought of falling ill or dying in a strange country. She wanted to go home, not to London to the pipes of light but home to the race to which she belonged: and then she shivered uncontrollably, knowing that their thoughts were no longer hers. She had vanished back into childhood and the dark springs of her terrors. She quickly memorized prayers, saw bog-holes into which animals stupidly plunged, and a mountain lake where two mad women drowned themselves. No houses for miles around. The lake itself lyric and deceptive on a summer’s day. With water-lilies on its gentle surface. More leaf than flower. She dreaded death. She thought of a young priest who came to warn her once when she started to wade out to sea at a point where bathing was dangerous. His eyes brimmed over with soft love. He’d asked nervously if she’d seen the sign. She hadn’t. She could have died but for him, unprepared, shocked and unwilling. She thanked him with her own eyes and wanted to touch his pale hands and move her fingers towards his wrists, lost in big black cassock sleeves. But she did not dare in case of encroaching on his chastity. She reached out and gripped Bobby’s bare arm and clung to him the way she had wanted to cling to the priest with the soft eyes and the austere, Christ-like, disciplined hands.

‘Looking at it does no good,’ she said to Bobby. He didn’t hear because he and Jason were trying to restrain Gwyn.

‘Listen, baby, it’s none of your business,’ Jason said as he caught her by the stole. She detached herself and one end of the stole trailed along the road in the dust. Eventually it would be touched by the dead man’s blood, which was making small courses in different directions.

‘As a Catholic, it’s my duty,’ she said. She was trying to get to the dead man to say an Act of Perfect Contrition in his ear.

‘Attention!’
a policeman said, blocking her way. A second policeman had a notebook out and was taking statements in French. In the ghostly light, part moon, part headlights, everyone looked guilty. He was deader than anyone Ellen had ever seen. She did not dare look on his face. Then the ambulance came and they got the stretchers out and police asked those who had not witnessed the accident to return to their cars. They got in the car and she was in front this time. Being third in line they got away quickly. Quite a queue of cars had gathered up behind.

‘Well what about the war, what about it?’ Jason kept saying as his wife accused him of having no feeling.

‘I always knew you were hard, always,’ she kept saying.

‘Should make us all think a little deeper,’ Jason said then as if he were making a speech.

‘Poor bastard,’ Bobby said.

‘He died on his face,’ Gwyn said suddenly and with animosity.

‘He was on his back,’ Ellen said, and looked to the others for confirmation.

‘Listen, my girl, we picked you up and brought you out of that dump tonight, otherwise you’d have gotten nowhere,’ Gwyn said and one of the men said to shut up, that a man was dead.

‘We know he’s dead, nobody’s saying he’s not dead,’ Jason said, and they were all a little on edge and sober now. The driver was taking it easy too. Ellen kept looking out of the window. There were no landmarks except signs advertising night-clubs, and road danger-signals, and high walls around houses. Sometimes there was no wall and it felt dangerous then. The fields when she could see them were very steep and tilled. Each row of tillage was buttressed by a row of stone. The stone kept the soil from being washed down the steep hills in heavy rain. She wanted to be like that, supported, by a solid man. Her husband would be asleep now, under stars, with frogs and other night animals moving about in the hay field out-side. He was a strong man whom she’d thrown away, not for a year, not for an age, but for ever. She was afraid she might cry, so she started to hum blithely: ‘Anyone who had a heart.’ Someone said she was callous.

When they got to Sidney’s house the other two cars were already there. They’d got off the main road, they said, after they saw the hold-up of cars.

‘Was that boy lying on his face or not?’ Gwyn asked one of the oriental girls. The girl just looked at her and said nothing. Ellen hurried in the house in case there might be a scene. She entered a huge hallway with tapestries on the wall and a big table covered from end to end with sunhats. There were hats with their crowns laid into other hats and some piled on each other, their straw canes sticking up like haystalks. There must have been hundreds of hats in all. Suddenly she wished that she had not come. The evening had turned sour after what they’d seen. People climbed the marble stairs in silence. Only the homosexuals seemed close but that may have been because they were manacled together.

‘You saw it?’ she said, first to one, then to the other.

‘Oui,’
they said as calmly as if they had seen a leaf drop from a tree.

‘I think I ought to go home,’ she said, turning to Sidney who was on the bottom step directing people up.

‘I wouldn’t hear of it,’ he said.

‘Chrissake relax, we haven’t beaten you yet,’ Bobby said. She went on climbing but was not happy about it, any more.

‘L
ISTEN FELLAS WE DON’T
have to turn it into a wake,’ Jason said when they were all in. Some of the men said, ‘Quite right,’ and Sidney said a drink wouldn’t be a bad idea. When he rang, white-coated waiters came in from the shadows of the hall. The elder women grouped together comparing what they had seen of the accident and one of the oriental girls sat on a chair that tipped back when she sat, so that she appeared to be floating. Her long brown legs stretched out in front of her. The homosexuals took down a book of illustrations that they’d obviously been engrossed in before they went out because there was a fairly fresh blue delphinium as a bookmark. They were coloured drawings of diseased parts of the human body. She saw a warty breast discharging pus and looked to see their responses. Their faces were quite calm and they took turns in moving the pages. Their prisoned hands were out of sight under the table. She moved away and hid her bag behind a chair – a habit from her young days when she went to dance halls in Ireland and hid the purse that contained her cloakroom ticket, her rosary beads and perhaps a shilling.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said to Sidney as he stood there waiting for her to say something about his house. It was an enormous room, a garden really, with the heavens as a roof and for walls a serration of trees that stooped harmoniously towards the sea several hundred feet below. Lights nesting in the trees were softened by the lantern of leaves and there were mirrors in the loops of branches to multiply those lights. Wooden and stone busts rose like ogres out of some trees and in the spacious darkness everyone seemed enhanced. So different from the place they’d left. The long refectory table was being laid at that hour.