Doctor's Wife (7 page)

    “Great.”

    But then she remembered her hair. She asked him to
wait while she went upstairs to get a scarf. It was that time of
day when the hotel guests were all coming down for dinner, so she
had to wait a long time for the lift. When at last she reached her
room, she took out the big flame-and-white Givenchy scarf that had
been a Christmas present from Kevin’s mother, and tied it, babushka
fashion, around her head. It was all wrong. She retied it, but it
was no better. There was another scarf, a yellow cotton one, but
she had an awful time finding it, and when she tried it on, it was
worse than the first scarf, and then her hair was mussed so she ran
a comb through it and took the Givenchy scarf again and tied it
another way and felt she could weep, why was it when you had more
clothes than you ever used to have, nothing looked right? She tried
a last time, wanting the mirror to be kind, but the mirror was not
her friend. God, I look like the Queen at some gymkhana.

    Going down again, with the lift stopping at every
floor, squeezed in with four other people, she remembered the
dark-blue sun hat she had bought, maybe she should run back up and
get it? But if, after the walk, we go straight into dinner some
place, what would I be doing wearing a sun hat?

    In the hotel lobby there was a floor-length mirror
which she could not pass but must stop in front of it for a last
masochistic look. As she stared into the glass, she saw, reflected,
the front doorway of the hotel and, just outside, Tom Lowry waiting
for her. He was leaning against the iron railing, looking down at
the people promenading on the quay below. Seen thus through the
mirror, he seemed strange, a young conspirator waiting for his
accomplice. Yet, at the same time, she felt an overwhelming urge to
be seen with him, to go with him and leave everything else behind.
She turned from the mirror and hurried out to meet him.

    “I’m sorry. I had to wait ages for the lift.”

    “That’s all right.” He pointed to the sweep of the
bay. “Is that a beach down there?”

    “It is. A stony one.”

    “Let’s walk that way.”

    And so they went down a flight of steps, walking
side by side along the quay in the same direction she had taken
that afternoon. The sky was fading to dark, the restaurants were
filling up with people, and the strolling performers were out, just
as she remembered them. There was the familiar type of trick
cyclist, wheeling back and forth on a unicycle, wearing a frilly
woman’s hat. A swarthy young man sang Italian songs, cradling a
monkey in the crook of his arm. The monkey, tiny and frail, was
dressed in a tutu and clung to its owner like a frightened child.
And there were new, less professional, entertainers, a trio of
young Americans in jeans who drifted from restaurant to restaurant,
playing guitars and singing rock songs in wispy, wist-ful
voices.

    Suddenly, as on a given signal, lights went on on
each dining table in the restaurant they were passing and soon it
was lights up, too, on the boats moored along the quay. Far out in
the bay a huge luxury yacht flared in ostentatious display, a chain
of colored bulbs illuminating its outline from rigging to deck,
prow to stern. Within minutes, lights twinkled on from Villefranche
to Cap Ferrat, as though the whole bay were a stage while, behind
it, like some vast amphitheater, the sky went to black. Music came
up loud, and Mrs. Redden, hearing the singing voices, seeing the
constant parade of people, felt her eyes fill with pleasant tears.
Walking with Tom Lowry down toward the stony beach, passing the
entrances to the narrow back streets of the old town behind the
seafront, she began to reminisce about Villefranche, telling him
how, years ago, the U.S. Sixth Fleet used this town as a base port,
how the Americans put up American street signs in these narrow
Mediterranean alleys. She told him that the local nightclubs and
bars presented Wild West songs and American music and how the tough
Shore Patrol moved up and down the streets searching for drunken
sailors. And how, that summer, the local hotel proprietors
protested the way American naval wives went to the beach with their
hair done up in plastic rollers. It ruined the tone of the
resort.

    Chat. But edited chat, for not once did she mention
the year, or that she had been here on her honeymoon. He asked
about the best place to eat and she told him Mère Germaine’s, and
when they went in, with that good luck which now attended on their
every action, an elderly couple paid the bill and ceded them a
table with a splendid view of the port. The waiter brought a local
rosé wine and as Tom poured it Mrs. Redden realized that she was
still wearing the ugly scarf around her head. Embarrassed, she
unknotted it, pulling it into her lap, shaking out her hair,
smiling at him. “Tell me,” she asked, “do you often do things like
this?”

    “Like what?”

    “Like picking up and coming five hundred miles when
the notion strikes you.”

    “Never,” he said. “I wanted to be with you. When we
said goodbye there at the airport, I felt lonely. It was crazy. I
never felt anything b’ke it before.”

    “By the way,” she said, “I talked to my husband on
the phone. The trouble about being married to a doctor is that they
can’t plan anything in advance. He won’t be here before Friday at
the earliest, and I’ve got a feeling he may not come at all. He’s
going to ring me Thursday to let me know.”

    “He mightn’t come at
all
?”

    “No. He’s very busy. Anyway, Kevin’s not really keen
on holidays abroad. He’s quite content with the seaside at
home.”

    “Well,” he said, “the seaside in your part of
Ireland is beautiful. That northern coast.”

    
My part of Ireland
. She looked at the
colored lights on the millionaire’s yacht out there in the bay. A
day, long forgotten, came into her mind: her father, his green
summer blazer slung over his shoulder, wearing white tennis shoes
and cream flannels, walking with her along the promenade in
Portstewart, her hand in his—she was twelve at the time—and on the
other side, talking to Daddy, Chief Justice McGonigal, her father
called him Johnny. “Oh, Johnny, Johnny,” her father said, “I don’t
know. Dan’s children were sent to English schools, they speak with
English accents. Poor little West Britons he’s made of them. I want
my children to live here in the North, where they belong. Dan has
had a great career, of course, the U.N., and Europe, and the trade
treaties, he’s done a lot, no doubt about it, but do you know, when
I meet him now, my own brother, with his English accent, I feel a
slight contempt for him. Poor Dan, he has lost himself. You and I,
Johnny, we’re still what we were, only older. But Dan is like an
actor, always playing a part.” And then her father turned and
lifted her up in his arms and rubbed the tip of her nose with his
bushy brown mustache, in the way that he had. “Take this little
girl, now,” her father said. “What happens to a child like Sheila
when you remove her from her roots? Ah, no, no,” her father said
sentimentally. “Maybe I could have been a richer man and cut a
finer dash if I’d gone off to London, long ago, when I got a first.
But I wouldn’t have had
this
child, do you see? I’d have
some little Londoner here in my arms this minute, some little
Samantha or Beryl, some dogsbody of an English-sounding name. Oh,
darling,” her father said, looking at her with his grave, hurt,
hooded blue eyes. “Promise me you’ll stay in Ireland, will
you?”

    “If I say yes, will you buy me a Mars bar?” she had
answered and Justice McGonigal laughed and shouted out, “There you
are, Tim, it’s all economics, it’s not patriotism, d’you see.” And
her father, laughing, put her down and gave her a shilling.

    She looked back now at this eager stranger, this
American boy, smiling at her, sipping his wine. “I don’t know,” she
said. “Some people never want to go outside the place they were
born in. And others seem to want to run away from the day they’re
old enough to walk.”

    “And which are you?”

    “A runaway.”

    “But you didn’t leave, did you?”

    “No,” she said. The singer with the monkey had come
close to them. Wanting to show the monkey off, he took its paw and
held up its long prehensile arm, trying to get the animal to stand
up straight on his shoulder. But the monkey scampered down again
and, shivering, clung to its owner’s chest. “He’s afraid,” she
said.

    “What?”

    “The monkey. He’s afraid.”

    The waiter arrived with their first course, plates
of tiny fried fish. The singer, ending his song, came around to
collect, the monkey holding out a tin cup. Mrs. Redden put in a
franc, and as the singer left the restaurant, the trick cyclist
wheeled suddenly into the view of all the diners, going at
breakneck speed toward the edge of the quay, pulling up
miraculously short, then backpedaling in a sort of conga weave.
Mrs. Redden found herself laughing and, laughing, turned to Tom.
And there, in the middle of the music and the singing, found him
watching her in the same eager, secret way she had spied on him an
hour ago. Kevin and Danny are sitting at home, not knowing this
thing that is happening. And then, suddenly, he said something and
she laughed, her guilt gone, her mood back up on that high wire of
excitement.

    From then on, their evening sailed. They began to
exchange silly jokes about their fellow diners, they finished the
bottle of wine and ordered a second; they talked about books they
had read, plays they had seen, talk she never had at home, and,
still talking, excited, left the restaurant to begin a long stroll
around the sea wall to Port Darse, where dozens of pleasure craft
were moored. They idled on the quays, looking at sloops, sailing
dinghies, and catamarans, at a sleek Chris-Craft riding at anchor,
its owner sprawled aft on a deck chair, his cigar tip a tiny
rosette in the velvet night. They climbed a steep pebbly slope to
steps which led to the old town, where, under a lonely street lamp
in a grassy alley, four local men played
pétanque
, the
thud and click of the steel bowls strangely sinister at this late
hour. Through narrow deserted streets, they came down again to the
little square where the front door of the Welcome was still open,
the lobby a harsh pool of light in the surrounding darkness, the
night clerk dozing at his desk. In the public rooms two shut-off
television sets stood, like surrogates for public speakers,
surrounded by audiences of empty chairs. They took the lift down to
the bar, where a few stragglers sat over a last drink, and moved to
a table at the far end of the room. A waiter brought cognacs and
Mrs. Redden showed her room key, telling the waiter to put it on
her bill.

    “What about tomorrow?”

    She looked at him. “There’s a sandy beach at Cap
Ferrat. We could go over there by boat. I could get us a picnic
lunch from the hotel here.”

    “Sounds great. What time?”

    “Let’s go right after breakfast,” she said. “I want
to get burned red.”

    “Why don’t we have breakfast together. Say at eight,
out there on the terrace?”

    “All right.”

    And then, all at once, she felt she must be the one
to do it. She stood and said, “I’m going up now. Thanks for a great
evening.”

    “Do you have to go?”

    “Yes,” she said, and abruptly turned and walked to
the lift. The lift cabin was already waiting, and as she went into
it, she still felt that elation. She looked back through the little
window of the lift and saw him standing by the table, watching her.
Oh, God, I want to go back to him. She pressed the button and the
lift went up, wiping out his image like a shutter click.

    Chapter 4

    • At seven next morning she woke and suddenly knew
where she was and what had happened. She got up, excited, and went
to the window to open the wooden shutters. There, in the cold
morning sunlight, the millionaire’s yacht rode at anchor in the
bay. She stood in her cotton nightgown, her hand on the shutter
latch, gripped by the mysterious silence of those decks. Once, in
Galway, she and Kevin were walking in a narrow country road when a
huge Rolls-Royce came up behind them, forcing them into the ditch
as it inched past. At that moment she noticed an old woman peering
out of a cottage door at the great silver motorcar and the thought
came to her that the old woman’s husband in all the years and all
the labor of his life had probably earned less than the price of
that Rolls. As now, she knew that Kevin in all his years of surgery
and sutures and knives and blood had not earned as much as the
price of that yacht. Why do some people lead such special lives?
Remember Villa Cara, Groothaesebroekseweg, Wassenaar, Den Haag,
Uncle Dan’s splendid place, where Owen and I went on that holiday
when we were children: the Italianate gardens, the chauffeured
Mercedes, the menservants in white gloves? We children having lunch
with Uncle Dan and Aunt Meg in the big dining room, white Dutch
double tulips as the centerpiece: the first secretary, Brogan, so
short that even at twelve I came up to his shoulder, arriving to
play tennis with me. That Irish embassy in Holland, was it the
closest I will ever be to the existence of the people on that
yacht? Will they wake up this morning to a steward in white gloves
bringing a breakfast tray on which sits one red rose? Will they
order the captain to sail for Formentor after lunch? Imagine going
down now to the quay, a private motorboat coming for us, taking Tom
and me out to that yacht, the anchor up, stewards pouring
champagne, us dancing on deck under the stars, sailing down to the
Azores and on to the South Seas. Is there really a life like
that?