The Kindness of Women (18 page)

The bearded man in the water was calling in French to the children. The door of the bathing machine opened and a blond-haired young woman with an ivory-white skin came out to greet us. She wore high-heeled beach shoes and the bottom of a cream bikini. Her face had a look of slightly shop-soiled elegance, as if she had neglected herself for too long in some intimate way. When she smiled the sunlight shone against a set of immaculate American teeth, from which the left canine was missing, bridged by an inferior piece of English dentistry. But she had a rangy manner that I immediately liked.

“Hello … I thought some little pixies had been cleaning the kitchen.” She swept Lucy into her arms and held the startled girl to her shoulder. “Are you a pixie?”

“No! Mummy…!”

“I think you are. You've been scrubbing and dusting and polishing…”

She chattered on in a pleasant New England voice as the pipe smoker ambled up to us. The children stared at him openmouthed, even more intrigued by the star-shaped scars across his abdomen and thigh than they were by his penis and scrotum. I guessed that he had been badly wounded during the war.

Seeing that we were English, he introduced himself: “Peter Lykiard. You're from London? Good. I teach at Regent Street Poly.” He pointed to the couple in the water. “Robert and Muriel Joubert, from Nanterre. And this is Sally Mumford, one of my American students. She's probably going to steal your children.”

“I'm definitely thinking about it.” The young woman lowered Lucy to the ground and welcomed us into the shade. With a cheerful flourish she produced a jug of sangria, tapas, and cigarettes. The French couple sunned themselves on the patio, their naked bodies inspected by the children with the measured eyes of experienced anthropologists. They had seen Miriam and me naked every day of their lives, but a different anatomy, however small the distinctions, held a universe of intriguing possibilities.

Sharing our hamper and wine cooler with this amiable crew, we sat drinking under the parachute canopy as Lykiard explained that he came down to Ampuriabrava every summer—though this, sadly, would be the last. The property developers' bulldozers would soon level the site.

“This island will vanish, literally turn into cement. They'll up-end the beach into half a mile of hotels and apartment houses.” He pointed to the pine posts like so many gibbets which the surveyors had staked into the dunes. “There's a model of the whole complex in Gerona. They plan to consolidate the waterways with promenades of boutiques and bars, then sell off the housing plots to all those Düsseldorf dentists. Three years from now the place will be a film set, with a series of mock-antique Catalonian villages along the speedboat canals.”

“Miriam wants us to settle here—she thinks it would be good for my imagination.”

“I can't see that there'd be anything left for your imagination to do. In fact, it's hard to visualise the lifestyles of these sober-sided Rhinelanders once they've set up their beachhead. When bourgeois life meets Surrealism head on, we know who wins.”

Children's squeals came from the beach, where Henry's sandcastle was holding out against the ferryboat's bow waves. Sally was on her hands and knees, constructing an elaborate double bed of damp sand with bolsters and eiderdown, under which she tucked a delighted Lucy and Alice. I dozed while Miriam helped Lykiard and the Jouberts to unload the car. Lykiard worked in his unhurried way, pausing to refill his pipe and read a page or two of the books packed below the seats. Watching him put a friendly hand on Miriam's waist, I realised how bourgeois we had become, with our rented flat, estate car, and loyal inflatable bounding behind us on its trailer. Even our attempt to clean the bathing hut had shown the same bijouising suburban strain. I had always smiled at my parents for taking an intact piece of Surrey with them to Shanghai, but Miriam and I were in the same export business. The real trapeze artists and daredevils on the scene were the Düsseldorf dentists.

At dusk the first marijuana smoke began to overlay the warm air, pricking at the children's nostrils. Sorry to leave, we gathered our things together and piled them into the inflatable.

“Bye-bye, pixies, come again tomorrow,” Sally told the children as they sat in their life jackets. “We'll do some more cleaning. We've got to dust and polish the whole beach—just look at this untidy sand…”

Miriam winced, but I warmed to this excitable American girl. She waded out into the water, the smoke from her loose-packed cigarette sending its scent into the evening. Holding it aloft in one hand, she tugged at the inflatable with the other. As we motored away I could see her generous, ironic smile following us across the waves.

*   *   *

“God, I feel so square,” Miriam told me as she gazed around our apartment, pastis in hand. “‘Do some more cleaning'—that was a dig at me.”

“In a friendly way.”

“Am I square?”

“My depraved and respectable wife?” I pressed her reassuringly against the refrigerator. “Miriam, the Jouberts work at a left-wing lycée, and he teaches modern literature at a fashionable polytechnic. They drive a 2CV and smoke pot. What could be more square than that?”

“You're avoiding the point.” Miriam finished off the pastis and stared at the sandbar beyond the mole, a pale smudge along the shore of Ampuriabrava. The blazing driftwood fire we had left behind was a faint ember. “Let's buy some pot.”

“Okay—I know you're dying to be arrested by those handsome Spanish cops. Remember, Lykiard and his chums don't have children.”

“That amazes me—they look as if they're at it hard enough. Do you think they sleep with each other?”

“Who cares? They're probably all celibate.”

“In a way, I care…” Miriam nodded briskly to herself, mind already set on an urgent recovery project, the retrieval of those possibilities that marriage and motherhood had consigned to some cul-de-sac. I often caught her staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, as if she sensed that her entire life, her husband and children, were a detour from the main road.

Every morning we returned to the island, leaving the crowded beach at Santa Margarita with its haze of sun oil and deodorant that formed an almost visible microclimate. We berthed the inflatable on the sand below the headland and joined the others under the tattered parachute awning. In the afternoon the French couple, keen birdwatchers, put on their saris and prowled the creeks and dunes of Ampuriabrava, sketchpads and camera at the ready. Sally swam with Henry and the girls, while Miriam helped Lykiard to extend the patio, carrying stones from the seawall.

Watching Sally, I was surprised by her unforced pleasure in the children. She was forever down on her knees with them, devising games and conspiracies, mysterious errands that sent them darting off into the sand-grass. Miriam told me that her father was the owner of a Boston department store and that she had achieved the distinction, rare for a rich man's daughter, of being expelled from both her private school and exclusive women's college. She had set off for the Mediterranean, crewing the yachts of her father's friends, and had come to England to meet the Beatles. Self-consciously a free spirit, she seemed deliberately to neglect herself, living on nothing but tapas, sangria, and pot. I sensed that in some way she wanted to revenge herself on her own body.

Miriam also told me, in her most casual voice, that Sally slept with both Lykiard and Joubert, a piece of information that she swallowed whole and was digesting at her leisure. But it was only when we drove to Barcelona to see Cordobés and Paco Camino that she recognised the raw edge of Sally's mind and her uncertain grip on the world.

*   *   *

Leaving Lucy and Alice in our apartment with the Jouberts, the rest of us set off in our car. In honour of Cordobés, we sat in the primo barreras and bought thimbles of fundador to toast the Beatle of the bullring who scandalised the traditionalists with his bizarre stunts and reckless bravery. Henry sat between Sally and myself, clutching a huge plastic bull with a penis and scrotum, Sally whispered to me, larger than his own.

One of the early bulls, disoriented by the jeers and shouts of the tourist crowd, jumped the barricade and ran past, spraying us with his saliva, ragged horns inches from our hands. Henry clutched his model bull, awestruck by the inflamed eyes of this violent and terrified creature, but Sally sprang to her feet and slapped its dung-smeared haunches. She was wearing a pale silk dress, and her excited sweat stained the bodice and armpits. She gripped Henry's hand, whistling and shouting as she worked herself up, while the band blared and the crowd screamed at every pass of the cape. When the banderilleros savaged the bull's shoulders with their ribboned darts she rose to her feet with a strange throaty cry, like a madwoman in an abattoir.

Embarrassed by herself, she fell quiet when a handsome torera, in elegant black jacket and flared breeches, fought a bull on horseback in the Portuguese manner. A commanding, strong-nosed woman with the maquillage of a glamorous bank manager, she glared threateningly at the audience and noticed Sally standing at the barrera. The two women gazed at each other across the noise and the smell of blood and the reek of fundador. Time and again the torera was about to be caught by the veering bull, but always accelerated away as the horns brushed the flanks of her horse. During one standoff, while the bull choked on its tongue, bathed in blood and rage, she sat ramrod straight in her saddle a dozen feet from us. Sally and I could hear the stream of obscenities, the insults to the bull's testicles and paternity, spitting from the mouth of this imposing horsewoman.

When she dismounted to kill the exhausted beast, she first fed saliva from her scarlet lips onto the tip of her sword, making plain that she was advancing on the bull as more than a mere man and that her saliva was the semen with which she would impregnate the creature as she struck it dead at her feet.

Dazed by the fundador and the screams of the crowd, I was trying to visualise how one would even dare to approach this terrifying figure, let alone have sex with her. But Sally had already decided. Sweat soaking her armpits, she gripped the wooden rail and stared at the horsewoman as if she recognised all the headmistresses of her New England childhood. I expected her to rip away her silk dress, leap the barricade, and mount the horse with her white legs, arms clasping the torera's waist as they galloped out of the arena.

While Cordobés was in the ring I forgot Sally and marvelled with Miriam and Lykiard at this handsome street fighter, part gangster and part film star. As Lykiard pointed out to us through the hoots and applause, however close the bull charged, the boy never moved his feet. For all his theatrical strutting and open insults to the decorum of the bullring, he took immense risks with his own life. After exhausting his second bull he began to play the fool, humiliating the gasping beast that staggered towards him, drenched in blood. As it stood on its shaky forelegs, Cordobés knelt with his back to the bull, its horns only inches from his shoulder blades, arms outstretched to catch the approving roars of the arena, which the older Spaniards were already leaving in disgust.

When he retired from the ring, through the delirium of the European and American tourists, I saw Sally clambering between the seats, her dress half-torn from her back. An hour later we found her in the melee around the bullfighter's black Mercedes, her makeup bruised, being pushed about by the jeering chauffeurs and bodyguards. Lykiard and I carried her to my car, watched by a shocked little Henry, who offered her his bull. When we lifted her into the back seat she struck at us with her hard fists, still gripped by her unsatisfied need for some kind of violent climax to the afternoon. Miriam managed to calm her, holding her hands and wiping the streaks of mascara from her chin. The two women sat side by side, like sisters returning from a deranged funeral.

In the traffic back to Gerona I watched the flush in Sally's cheeks fading through the rearview mirror. She sat in her torn silk dress, a delinquent schoolgirl caressing the coarse hide of Henry's plastic bull, forcing her lips together as she swallowed the aftertaste of some toxic emotion.

*   *   *

“I like her American spunk,” Miriam decided when we returned to the apartment. “She knows what she wants and goes out and gets it. Of course, she's completely mad.”

“Maybe she's completely sane—for people like Sally that amounts to the same thing.”

“Jim, she wanted to fuck those bulls! Never mind Cordobés and the chauffeurs. I bet they caught her trying to cut off the testicles. What do they do with them, anyway?”

“They're some kind of delicacy. Why don't you try a pair? We'll find a good restaurant in Gerona.”

“I might…” Miriam stared in a determined way from the balcony. “Sex is a branch of gastronomy—the best cooks make the best lovers. Every woman soon discovers that.”

I could see the 2CV trundling across the sand dunes of Ampuriabrava. Sally was standing in the open roof behind Lykiard, the tatters of her silk dress floating like pennants between the poles of the property developers, an eager fury touring a field of gibbets.

Miriam put her arm around me. “She's strange, but I like her. Do you wish you'd married someone like that?”

“I did.”

“I'd like to help her. She needs to have a child.”

“Only I can help her there.”

“You're going to be busy with Señor Robles's secretary, remember. Tomorrow could be tricky.”

I embraced Miriam, glad that Sally had charged her imagination. “Dear, you always wanted to live on a desert island with three strange men.”

However, by the next day Sally's sunny humour had returned. She knelt on the sand by the bathing hut, straw horns tied to her head as Henry made passes with a beach towel. While Miriam fed Alice and Lucy, I took a handful of black olives and a bottle of beer and walked into the scrub-covered dunes. I sat down in one of the hollows, trying to work out my route across the bay. Thinking of Cordobés and the maimed beasts waiting for the sword, I imagined a startled tourist on a pedalo crossing a wake stained with blood. Long after the ferry left for Cadaqués, its waves rolled against the beach, as if Poseidon himself were reminding me of my close escape.