Walkers (16 page)

They shared
guacamole
and
cuesadillas
smothered
in Manuelo’s thick secret sauce.

They ate rich
chilli,
and washed it down with strong red wine. They talked about
advertising and office affairs and cars that broke down and childhood
embarrassments. They laughed and they held each other’s hands across the
tablecloth, their eyes sparkling in the light from the candles that flickered
between them. Ronald ordered more wine and Nancy went to the restroom. She looked
at her face in the mirror, and said, out loud, ‘I hope you’re not becoming
infatuated, my dear.’

She came back to the table. Ronald
had already poured her another glass of wine.

He said, with amusement, ‘You know
something? You know what our Christian names are? Ronald and Nancy! Can you
believe that? Isn’t that too Presidential for words?’

‘You were telling me all about those
old WC Fields radio sketches,’ Nancy reminded him.

‘Oh, sure. They were terrific. There
was one where he says he always collapsed at the sound of the word’ ‘work’’. In
his family, they wouldn’t say it out loud, they always referred to it as “W”.
Otherwise, he would pass out, and the only remedy was a deep dipper of dogberry
brandy diluted with straight gin.’

Ronald did a passable WC Fields
impression. ‘I remember the first drink of it. . .1 turned a little pale.’

Nancy laughed. She hadn’t felt so
incredibly happy for months. She took hold of Ronald’s hand again, and said,
‘How do you
know
all this stuff?’

He shrugged. ‘I guess I always
enjoyed the radio.’

‘But they don’t have that kind of
programme on the radio these days, do they?’

Ronald made a disinterested face,
and took out a cigarette.

‘Do you have tapes?’ asked Nancy. ‘I
mean, could I listen to some of them?’

Ronald shook his head. ‘I just heard
it, that’s all.’

It was clear that he didn’t feel
like talking about it any longer, so Nancy tried to change the subject. ‘You
haven’t told me anything about Mexico, what you were doing down there.’

He looked at her as if he was
surprised that she had asked him. ‘I wasn’t doing anything down there,’ he
replied, after a short pause.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t
mean to be nosey. I was interested, that’s all.’

‘Well, don’t be. It wasn’t interesting
at all.’

‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ said Nancy,
rather put out. She couldn’t understand why the mention of Mexico should have
made Ronald so unsettled all of a sudden, and so sour. He had enjoyed his
Mexican meal, but it seemed as if the country of Mexico itself was a
platinum-plated downer. He puffed quickly at his cigarette, and then crushed it
out, half smoked. ‘Well, let’s talk about something else,’ Nancy suggested.

‘We don’t have to talk about
Mexico.’

Ronald stared at her sharply. ‘Look
– what is it with you? I said I didn’t want to talk about Mexico. I thought I
made it perfectly clear that I didn’t want to talk about Mexico. And all I’m
getting is Mexico, Mexico, Mexico.’

‘For goodness sake -’ Nancy put in,
trying to calm him down. ‘I asked you in all innocence. I didn’t know that it
was going to upset you so much. Listen, I don’t care what you did or didn’t do,
down in Mexico. I was only making polite conversation, and if you don’t want to
talk about it...’

Ronald’s face was expressionless,
unreadable, as blank of information as a headstone.

‘Ronald?’
she
queried, reaching out for his hand.

At that moment, the waiter came
bustling over. ‘Is there anything else,
senor?
Did you enjoy your meal,
senorita?’

‘Just bring me the bill,’ said
Ronald, shortly.

The waiter glanced worriedly at
Nancy. ‘Is everything to your satisfaction,
senor?

Senorita?’

‘Everything’s fine, just bring me
the damned bill!’

Nancy said nothing until they were
walking back to the car. ‘Did you have to talk to the waiter like that? I was
embarrassed.’

Ronald was tossing his car keys up
in the air and catching them again, over and over with an irritating
slap-jingle, slap-jingle. He didn’t answer straight away, but it was plain that
his mood had drastically changed to one of unrelenting coldness.

‘What happened in Mexico, that upset
you so much?’ Nancy persisted. ‘I mean – whatever happened, you don’t have to
take it out on the rest of us. It wasn’t
my
fault.

And it certainly wasn’t that
waiter’s fault.’

‘You don’t think so?’ asked Ronald.
‘It’s been your fault all along, people like you and people like him.’

‘I don’t understand you at all,’
Nancy retaliated. ‘A half-hour ago, I thought you were fantastic, the nicest,
funniest guy I’d ever met. A half-hour ago, if you can believe it, I even
thought that I was going slightly crazy over you. But the way you’re acting
now, what can I say? What are you blaming me for? Something that happened in
Mexico that I don’t even know anything about? I never saw you before tonight,
how
could
I be responsible? And the
way you’re going on now, I don’t think I ever
want
to see you again.’

Ronald stopped beside his car, and
regarded Nancy over the top of the white vinyl roof with an expression that had
altered yet again. The coldness had gone. In its place was self-satisfaction,
and patronising smugness.

‘You
will see
me again, whether you want to or not.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Nancy.
‘Now, I think I’ll walk home, thank you very much. Do you want me to pay for my
share of the dinner?’

Ronald unlocked his car. ‘Forget it.
The condemned lady ate a hearty meal.’

‘What in hell is
that
supposed to mean? Are you trying to
frighten me, or what?’

‘Nobody – ever – has accused me of
trying to frighten them,’ said Ronald.

Nancy stood where she was. Ronald
climbed into his car, and slammed the door. His last reply hung in the evening
air like a complex carillon of bells. He had placed unusual and provocative
emphasis on the word
ever,
and on the
word
trying.
He had sounded to Nancy
as if he had really meant
ever.
Not
just a human lifetime, but hundreds of years, even thousands of years, even
eternity. And he had emphasised
trying
as
if he had meant that it was unnecessary for him to try: that he frightened
people without any effort whatsoever.

As he leaned forward to insert his
ignition keys, she caught a glimpse of his face, and the bright street-light
seemed to catch him at an unusual angle, so that he appeared suddenly drawn and
old and inexplicably unpleasant. He looked up again, and the old expression vanished,
but in that brief moment of – what was it? insight? revelation? – she felt that
she had seen him as he really was, and she was unhappily glad of it. All right,
so fate hadn’t been good toher, after all. Ronald had turned out to be just as
much of a macho bastard as John Bream, and all the rest of them. But at least
he had revealed himself quickly, before she became entangled. Fate may have
been playing around with her, but at least it had spared her the long-drawn-out
waiting and hoping that she usually had to suffer.

She swung her bag over her shoulder,
and started to walk north along Prospect. It was only five minutes back to her
house. She didn’t wave; she didn’t turn around.

She had encountered Ronald by
chance, she was going to part with him the same way. Casually, like two people
who have talked together on a plane, and then go their separate ways. She heard
his engine start up behind her, and the squealing of his tyres as he pulled
away from the kerb but she kept on walking as steadily as before. Ronald turned
the Lincoln around in the middle of the road, suspension bucking, and then he
drove past her at high speed, without looking at her.

Goodbye, she said to herself, knight
in shining armour thou never went. Still, she was grateful to be back in La
Jolla, instead of marooned on Interstate-5. She owed him that much, whatever
his complexes were; and for the Mexican dinner. She wondered why he was so
incredibly sensitive about Mexico. What could have happened to him there that
was so appalling that he blamed practically the whole world for it?

She thought about something else,
too, as she followed the curve of Prospect Street north-eastwards, her hair
blown by the cool sea wind. She thought about Ronald standing in front of La
Galeria window, for minutes on end, staring at that statuette of Pan. On
reflection, his behaviour seemed really strange, although it hadn’t struck her
as particularly peculiar at the time. He had stared and stared at it and she
could just picture his expression. Contempt, but fascination, too, as if he
couldn’t tear himself away from it, no matter how incompetent a piece of
sculpture it was.

She reached her house, and walked up
the driveway to the front door. There were no lights in any of the front
windows. Most of the other tenants were out for the evening. The woman who
lived directly below Nancy had found herself a wealthy Indian petrogeologist
(married, of course) and he had taken her away to an oil seminar in Phoenix.

She took out her keys, but as she
stepped up to the front door, she was surprised to find that it was slightly
open. She hesitated, for a very long time. Nobody ever left the front door
open. It was not that they didn’t trust their neighbours, or the local
inhabitants. Out of the tourist season, La Jolla was as peaceable a community
as you could find anywhere in Southern California. Boondocks-On-Sea, one of her
friends called it. But the summer brought casual theft, purse-snatching, and
spasmodic outbursts of aggravated assault, and rape.

At length, Nancy pushed the door
open a little wider. The hallway was dark and silent. She could just make out
the lower part of the staircase, faintly illuminated by the stained-glass
window at the bend in the stairs. She called, ‘Hallo? Is there anybody there?’

Silence. She waited a moment longer,
and then she pushed the door open as wide as it would go. She could hear the
long-case clock ticking now, wearily, wearily, and see the intermittent
reflection of its pendulum. She remembered Ronald’s curious warning:
You
will
see me again, whether you want to or not –
and she had an
irrational fear that he was waiting for her under the stairs, ready to pounce
on her and stab her.

‘Ronald?’ she called, although she
felt foolish.

There was no answer. Holding her
breath, she slid sideways into the hallway and reached for the light switch.

The lights flicked on. The hallway
was deserted. Drab, and shabby, and smelling as it always did, of cooking.

There was a note on the hallstand.
She walked quickly across and picked it up. It was addressed to her, from the
Tecolote Road Wrecking Company, Inc. It was written in a quick, scrawled hand,
and advised her that her vehicle had been towed as she had instructed to their
downtown auto-repair shop, where it would be fixed and ready for collection in
approximately four days. She tucked the note back in its envelope, and looked
around. The tow-truck crew must have called here; somebody had answered the
door to them, and then failed to close it properly. She could hear, faintly,
the sounds of
Matt Houston
from old
Mrs. Oestreicher’s television, first floor back. It had probably been her.

Nancy closed the door behind her and
climbed the stairs to her apartment. She opened it up and went inside, throwing
her bag on to the sofa. Kicking off her shoes, she went through to the kitchen,
and took a bottle of white wine out of the fridge.

There were three neatly washed
wine-glasses on the drainer, the only three wineglasses she had. She filled one
up with Paul Masson’s best, and went back through to the living-room.

She kept thinking about Ronald
DeVries, and how his mood had swung so violently.

One minute he had been infinitely
charming, the next he had seemed capable of strangling her. Oh well, her mother
had always warned her about accepting rides from strange men. ‘The white slave
trade’s still thriving, Nancy – and don’t let anyone tell you different.’ Nancy
finished her glass of wine in three thirsty swallows, then refilled it.

She tried to watch television for
twenty minutes or so, but she was tired and restless and woozy with wine, so in
the end she went through to the bedroom, tugged down the raffia blinds, and
undressed. She hung her blue suit up carefully in her closet, and parked her
blue shoes neatly side by side beneath it. She had a fragment of music on her
brain, the introduction to Bob Dylan’s song
What’s
a Nice Girl Like You
Doing In a Dump
Like This?
She hummed it again and again as she ran herself a bath, and
went backwards and forwards from the bathroom to the bedroom, cleaning off her
nail polish, clipping up her hair, wiping off her lipstick.

She spent ten dreamy minutes in the
bath, watching the drips from the leaky tap, and the steam rising up to the
ceiling, a succession of embryonic ghosts. She found herself thinking again and
again of the statuette of Pan, with its hoofs and its beard and its wicked
slanting eyes. She seemed to have an image of it caught in her mind, like the
shuddering frame of a video film on pause; an image that wouldn’t go away, no
matter how hard she tried to dismiss it.