The Travellers and Other Stories (20 page)

And then one day, as she was bending over me so that her cheek was quite close to mine, I saw that her eyes were full of tears.

‘Precious?' I said softly. ‘Is there something the matter?'

At first she shook her head and continued polishing as before, but after a while her tears began to pour down over her face. She let go of her cloth and it fell from her hand onto my lap. She hung her head and chewed her lip, and then she looked up into my eyes as if she had something serious and important to say but lacked the courage to do so.

‘Precious?' I repeated gently, but again she shook her head.

‘It doesn't matter,' she said, and with that she picked up the cloth from my lap and dropped it into her big open bag and snapped it shut and left.

When the people came that morning I could hardly sit still while they filed past, laying their loaves of bread at my feet, their bottles of wine, their envelopes of cash, patiently queuing for their quick turn with my head. I found myself wriggling beneath the touch of their hands; all I could think about was Precious, and what might have happened to make her cry. I couldn't stop thinking that it must have something to do with me—that in the course of all the silent time we'd spent together she had finally fallen in love with me but was too shy, or too constrained by the relationship between us, to be able to tell me.

I was a fool of course, but I expect you've gathered that already.

I expect, with all your experience of the world, that you can see how things were beginning to shape up; that you have a pretty good idea, by now, of what lay in store for me. But for the moment let me tell you that all I wanted to do then was to find Precious and tell her that I loved her too, and ask her to come with me somewhere else where we could forget about everything that had happened here, somewhere where we could both find some sort of fulfilling work and settle down and live quietly together and be happy.

When the last of the townspeople left my apartment that day, and the housekeeper had loaded the last of their offerings onto her trolley and wheeled it off to the big clanking service elevator at the back and taken it down to the storage rooms in the basement, I went to my dressing room to change: there was a wedding that evening and I had been booked to attend it; the bride, I knew, was a cousin of Precious; Precious would be there among the guests; I would find her and I would speak to her and it would, I felt sure, be the end of one life and the beginning of another.

It seems pointless now to tell you how elated I felt as I strode out that day through the tall gates of the mayor's mansion and threaded my way through the narrow streets of the town. It seems pointless now to tell you anything other than what happened when I got to the wedding.

By the time I arrived the guests were all gathered in the yard of the bride's house—one of those little houses that cling to the side of the hill behind the town, two tiny wrought-iron balconies on the windows of the upper floor filled with bright geraniums; a small courtyard behind with acacia trees.

I took up my position next to the groom beneath a canvas canopy that had been erected in the yard for the ceremony and looked around for Precious. I couldn't see her anywhere. I looked at every face, craned my neck to see if she was hidden somewhere behind another person, or one of the trees. I squinted at the four small dark windows at the rear of the house to see if she was inside somewhere, and my eyes were still searching for her when the bride, dressed in a simple white frock and carrying a bouquet of lavender, appeared with her father at the back door of the house.

For one horrible moment, I thought it was Precious. My stomach lurched. I felt sick.

I blinked and looked again.

No. It wasn't her. Her cousin was rather like her, that was all—small and dark, with the same neat hands and feet; the same shy expression in her downcast eyes. Slowly she began, this cousin, to approach me on her father's arm, and the relief I'd felt on realising that she wasn't Precious turned quickly to impatience and irritation as she placed her small palms on top of my scalp and I watched the inevitable broad smile spread across her face. My head felt waxy and unpleasantly warm. I braced myself for the bridegroom's hand as it too came down, big and sweaty, like a hot heavy flannel, a half-cooked pancake. I told myself to be patient as he also began to smile; I told myself it didn't matter if my skin had begun to crawl the way it had earlier that day when Precious had left and all the townspeople had come. I told myself that it didn't matter if I felt as if I couldn't bear for another second to stand between the two of them with their hands on my head, that it didn't matter if I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that I didn't want to do this any more, because very soon, it would all be over. I would find Precious and we would leave. I gritted my teeth and looked at the ground, repeating to myself that it would all be finished very soon. I took several deep breaths. One, two, three, and at last managed to achieve a kind of calm, a feeling of patient expectation—a sort of quiet, thrilled excitement at the thought of everything I had to look forward to—and then, quite suddenly and quite without warning, the shouting began.

I felt the sticky palms of the bride and groom stiffen with surprise, and when I raised my eyes there, in the crowded courtyard, was Precious, and she was shouting.

She was standing at the back near the house on what looked like an empty champagne box. In one hand, she held a glass of wine and my first thought was that she seemed rather drunk. She was swaying slightly from side to side, splashing wine on the shoulders of the guests around her. Her speech was slurred, and it was difficult, at first, to make out what she was saying. The crowd too had started to murmur which made it even harder to hear her but after a little while, as they listened more closely to what she was saying, their voices began to die away and I could distinguish her words clearly. She was talking about me. She was talking about my head.

How come, she was shouting, she always felt so miserable when she was touching it?

How was it, that in all the hours she'd spent in the plush apartment of the mayor's mansion, bent over my head, touching it non-stop, it had never once brought a smile to her face?

How was it that in all those weeks she'd been schlepping that huge leather bag up and down in the fancy gold elevator she'd never once gone away any more cheerful than when she'd arrived?

Surely, she shouted, if my head was so marvellous, then she, of all people, would be feeling a bit happier by now?

A silence had fallen over the courtyard. All the guests had turned to look at me; I felt all their eyes upon me.

Precious lowered her voice and I heard her say to them, wasn't I actually just a dull Englishman with no hair? A lonely tourist with tea-cup ears and poppy-out eyes?

Wasn't I actually just a nothing, a nobody, a useless piece of rubbish, a complete and utter waste of all their time?

I swallowed.

I whispered her name.

I stretched out my hand towards her but she didn't move, she just stared at me, and then one of her uncles stepped forward and picked up a rock from the dusty ground of the garden and threw it at her—a swift hard blow that caught her in the throat and sent her flying off her little box like a skittle, or a coconut, and then all the other guests began to close in around her, pushing and jostling and hurling everything they had, handbags and wedding gifts and glasses of wine and bottles of champagne, branches snapped from the acacia trees and poles torn out from under the canvas bridal canopy, more rocks from the dusty ground, and when at last they had finished and dispersed there was almost nothing left of her—a single shoe, a tattered strip of fabric from her cotton dress, some scraps of ragged flesh and splintered bone.

In my dreams I save her.

In my dreams I have seen what's coming and know how to prevent it. In my dreams I am quicker and stronger than they are—I do not stand there in the garden like a frozen lump, shocked and terrified and appalled.

In my dreams I do not have a new girl who comes to polish my head—in my dreams the mayor does not come with her in the early mornings to unlock my door; he does not stay to keep an eye on things when the people arrive with their gifts. He does not drive me himself to whatever functions are on in the afternoon and evening, he does not return with me to lock up my apartment for the night, he does not post his beefy guards beside both elevators, front and back, he does not tell me that I must never think of trying to leave them. He does not remind me that I am dear to them, that they love me and cannot live without me—that outside beyond the tall iron gates of his mansion, armed bands roam the countryside, hunting down anyone who dares to insult the name of The Bald One.

THE TAKING OF BUNNY CLAY

NANCY LIKED THAT
there were no fences between the houses, that everything was open.

Maybe when Bunny was older they would need to put something up, so he could play out, but for now she liked it the way it was—the wide, quiet, almost car-less avenue in front that ran down to the harbour and the town.

Sometimes at night, on the hot July evenings in the weeks before Bunny was born, she and Beecham used to walk down to the harbour and sit near the tethered boats, their tinkling masts, look out across the calm silvered water, and it was hard to believe they could be so close to any kind of city; that the moving lights in the distance beneath the canopy of stars belonged to the planes dropping down one after another into the airport, and weren't the last gently cascading points of a ship's flare way out in the middle of the ocean.

Into this unfenced and starlit world Cheryl had come, a recommendation from a neighbour of Nancy's friend Mary-Katherine in New Rochelle.

‘Heavy but reliable' was this neighbour's description of Cheryl, which at the time had sounded to Nancy like faint praise, but in the event she'd fallen instantly and gratefully under the spell of the girl's statuesque solidity, the calm and solemn expression that covered her broad mahogany-coloured face.

A European girl had arrived two weeks after Bunny was born but she'd been so volatile and unpredictable in her moods they'd sent her back. After that, Cheryl's slow-moving steadiness, her absolute evenness of temper, had felt like a balm.

Beecham, too, was impressed and reassured by Cheryl's stately bulk, the way she loomed, silent and impassive, at the door every weekday morning without fail at six forty-five. He was even a little fascinated by her appearance. She had the sturdiest, most powerful-looking legs he had ever seen on a woman. Her calf muscles were so large and firm they practically made a right angle above her ankles. Nancy, in her suit and pumps, looked like a twig next to her. On her bare feet, the girl wore a pair of floppy tan plastic sandals that made a sound like a soft broom sweeping sand across their polished oak floors. She radiated a kind of imperturbable peace. She hardly spoke. Very occasionally, when their paths crossed in the early mornings, Beecham Clay wondered what went on in her head, what she made of them. But for the most part, he didn't give the girl a great deal of thought; she was Nancy's to think about; she was there, in their house, for thirteen hours a day and Nancy seemed happy with the arrangement; her return to work, after all the anxiety over the European girl, had been easier than he'd expected.

How did she seem to you then, Beecham, this Cheryl?

Oh, heavy but reliable
. That's probably what Beecham Clay would say now about Cheryl Toussaint if you could ask him.

Maybe it was because Cheryl reminded Nancy so much of her mother's maid, Iceline, that she took so strongly to her, right from the beginning. Even though Cheryl was nothing like Iceline to look at—Iceline had been much older, for a start, and very thin, almost dry-looking; and instead of the baggy over-washed T-shirts and wide gathered skirts Cheryl wore, Iceline had dressed every day in a pale grey uniform with a white apron; on her head, a small starched hat, like a paper boat. Iceline had been there in Nancy's parents' Chappaqua home, always. She'd been there before Nancy and her sister Barbara were born and had still been there when they'd left it; moving about the place, like a soft shadow, mopping and polishing and cooking and looking after Nancy and Barbara and keeping everything running smoothly with a stolid, wordless, uncomplaining proficiency. ‘That woman,' Nancy's father had been fond of saying (generally about once a week and always within earshot of his vague and dreamy wife), ‘is the only thing that stands between this family and Armageddon.'

Nancy, in ten short months, had come to feel the same way about Cheryl. Not that Nancy was vague and dreamy like her mother had been—oh no, certainly not—Nancy thought of everything, Nancy never (unlike her mother) misplaced important things, she was a list-maker, organized and efficient at home and in the office. Even so, she'd come to feel, almost from the first day, that she could never be without Cheryl. The thought of Cheryl ever leaving them was so dreadful she pushed it out of her head every time it popped in there. She loved coming home at the end of the day—always an hour before Beecham even though they worked in the same office building and went in together on the same 7:06 train in the morning, she always came back ahead of him on the 6:20 in the evening so she was home in time to put Bunny to bed—walking, almost running back from the station and leaving the car there for Beecham when he arrived later. She loved stepping into the hallway, everything so neat and clean, everywhere the bright sharp scent of Windex and Soft Scrub and Murphy's Oil Soap, the two of them, Bunny and Cheryl, waiting: Bunny perched on Cheryl's vast swaying hip, newly bathed, in fresh pyjamas, pink and delicious and with his corn-coloured hair parted smartly on the left-hand side so he almost looked like a little boy already instead of a baby still. It was true, it did prick her heart a little, the way he seemed to look older when she came home in the evening than when she'd left him that same morning—subtly different, as if he'd been slowly growing and changing minute by minute and hour by hour while she'd been away from him. But it gave her such joy too, coming back to him, her own boy, her greatest, most miraculous achievement, and such peace, knowing that all the time she was gone he was safe here at home with Cheryl. She couldn't bear the idea of ever having to get someone else in; to have to make Bunny get used to a new girl. It appalled her, the prospect of ever having to limp along, even for a week or two like she'd had to do after the European girl didn't work out and before Mary-Katherine's neighbour had come up with Cheryl; the idea of an agency sitter—a different one each day—rocking up in some battered old Plymouth, Bunny screaming his head off the minute she stepped inside and chucked him under the chin with a curly spangled fingernail.