August Is a Wicked Month Page 10

  Ellen hesitated with her tongue between her lips. It was no longer possible to give simple answers to a simple question. There were tears in her eyes again.

  ‘Don’t cry, El, don’t cry.’

  ‘Who’s crying?’ Ellen said and snuffled. She would have to account for herself, say something, gloss it over. Denise put the pillow in another position and lay back as if she were going to hear a play. Ellen felt an impulse to summarize her life. She spoke quickly and in a voice that was unnatural to her:

  ‘Irish, cottage, poor, typical, pink cheeks, came to be a nurse in London, loved by all the patients, loved being loved, ran from the operating theatre because one of those patients who had a cancer, was just opened and closed again, met a man who liked the nursemaid in me, married him in a registry office, threw away the faith, one son soon after. Over the years the love turned into something else and we broke up. Exit the nice girl.’ She bowed on the last three words.

  ‘It’s marriage,’ Denise said vehemently. ‘It louses everything up.’

  ‘It’s not marriage, it’s us,’ Ellen said, she was weary of generalities.

  There was a short silence. Suddenly feeling the heat, she let the cigarette fall from her mouth on to the washbasin and ran the tap out of habit so as not to cause a fire. The telephone startled them both. The Travel Office people to say there was no seat for that day, but they’d made a reservation for the next day. She asked the time she was due to arrive in London and wrote it on her cigarette packet. She would buy her son a dinghy and a pump to blow it up, because if there was one thing in this world she baulked at, it was blowing up dinghies, or balloons. She would also pocket the little tubes of mustard and single-portion boxes of salt that they supplied with lunch on the plane. Her son would use them to play shop with George. She thought of Christmas again and how it did not matter if she never saw Hugh Whistler again. At least her journey had fulfilled its purpose in one way.

  ‘But listen,’ Denise said, jumping up, ‘we have their house for the day, we’ll go by and have a ball…’

  ‘Who’s there?’ Ellen said. She had no intention of going.

  ‘No one. They left in hordes, Sidney, the fairies, people I’d never seen…’

  ‘Bobby?’ Ellen said.

  ‘God knows where he wound up last night, he was talkin’ of going to the Casino when I last saw him…’

  Ellen felt better already. A day away from the hotel meant money saved, not just the money spent on food and drinks and the innumerable cups of tea but the money that went towards such absurd things as tipping and the use of the bath. The man who held the bathroom keys was only willing to deliver them when he got a handsome tip. She thought of Sidney’s bathroom, large, spacious with the soft stones of crushable talcum powder giving out a delicate lavender smell. Her greed mounted. She pictured again the various dresses in the shop windows and decided which one she would buy. Her mind was made up.

  ‘Why not, see how the other half live…’ she said. They would drink wine from lovely long-stemmed glasses… Denise was bubbling on about how they would have the pool and servants to wait on them and all of Mel Brooks…

  ‘Do you know Mel Brooks?’ she said. Ellen shook her head.

  Denise looked annoyed. ‘You haven’t lived if you don’t know who Mel Brooks is, I tellya, I know…’ Already she was taking off her rings so that she could do her nails, before going over.

  In the late afternoon they drove in a hire car through the town and along a country road. They passed two gold-stone houses and fields where women stooped as they harvested. The road was unfamiliar to both of them.

  ‘It’s going to cost several thousand dollars,’ Ellen said, straining to see the meter.

  ‘Maybe the guy’s a killer, you never know,’ Denise said, and then leaned forward and said to him, ‘Excuse me, is this cab actually taking us where we want to go?’ The driver made no reply.

  ‘Every bloody one of those bloody French guys has something else in mind,’ Denise said sitting back, winking at Ellen.

  ‘I’m worried, honest to God I am,’ Ellen said. She both was and wasn’t. She half wondered if Bobby would be there, but talked about the driver and the heat lumps under her skin. Tiny red lumps. The more she scratched the bigger they got. Denise took hold of Ellen’s small, white, peasant hands to stop her scratching. They were that friendly. An agreeable last day.

  In the large downstairs window she saw the reflected image of the hire car as they drove up to Sidney’s house. She and Denise got out together, Denise on one side, she on the other. They shared the cost of the taxi and Ellen hoped that no one looked. There was something shameful in carrying on money transactions and being watched. It cost far too much. But they had no chance to argue because the window was opened and Bobby came out in a white short-sleeved shirt. He said ‘Welcome’ as if he had been expecting them. Perhaps he had. Ellen suspected Denise at once. Had she invited her just to make it casual, or to humiliate her? Must she once again play plain, simple, old-fashioned gooseberry? He put an arm around each of them and led them through the open window towards the back of the house.

  ‘You’re just in time, I’m doing the marrows,’ he said, and laughed as if he was engaged in something wicked. He looked from one to the other, smiling equally at both. Denise had a very wide smile. Her eyes were large, brilliant, brown in colour, fringed with long false eyelashes. They seemed to be smiling straight at him even though her face was in profile. She kept them wide open without blinking. Ellen could never fathom why it was that other women no better looking than herself made a better impression. She could look well talking to herself in a mirror or again talking to herself through the pool of a loving man’s eyes, but most times she looked mawkish, and curiously unfinished.

  ‘How long since your last Confession?’ he said, commenting on the virgin starch of her shirt and the black silk skirt that came well below the knees.

  ‘Oh she’s full of the guilt jag…’ Denise said.

  ‘She knows me twenty minutes…’ Ellen said in a hysterical voice. She hadn’t prepared for this situation. Where was Sidney, where were all the others? The others, he said, were gone to Morocco, except for Gwyn and Jason and a few people who were gone riding. He was master of the house. They walked through one room and then another and out to the veranda and along a path bordered with flowers. His canvas shoes made no noise on the flagstones, but hers and Denise’s were like armour clanking and competing with one another. The war was on. He had both their arms linked. In a few seconds they were in a glass-house. It was suffocating. The glass steamed over from the heat. There were flowers that looked unreal, big lurid blooms of red and mauve in big terracotta pots. She touched them just to make sure. They were real all right but they had no smell. The smell was of geranium leaves and tomatoes. She touched the wrinkled leaves of white geraniums and looked at their white unblemished petals. To smell the leaf and enjoy the petals, that would be the way to enjoy geraniums. The leaves in themselves looked pained. He picked one tomato, then another, and handed the girls one each.

  ‘I’m not hungry…’ Denise said. She really starved herself.

  ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘It’s great, it’s right out of a tin…’

  He watched them both chew and asked Ellen if hers was good. She nodded.

  ‘Well have another, then.’ He put it in her mouth and watched while she bit into it and some of the seeds spluttered on to her chin.

  ‘Huh.’ He wiped them off with his finger and licked it. Sober, he was perfect to be with. She wished in a way that she had not seen him again because she was getting soft and hopeful. All acceptance again. She thought of the previous night and how close they had come and she smiled. He saw it happen. He put his arm under her long hair and let it sweep his skin from the elbow to the wrist.

  ‘You’re like Cinderella or something,’ he said.

  ‘Or something,’ she said modestly.

  ‘Walk me to the subway,’ Denise said putting her arm out fo
r him to link, but not moving. He saw her pique and touched her lightly under the chin. In that moment it looked as if they had slept together the previous night. Ellen turned to the geraniums.

  ‘And now for the mating rites,’ Bobby said as he steered them both towards a trough where there were a lot of green leaves and small marrows of different shapes under the leaves. There were flowers too, yellow flowers, limp and tired looking but quivering with pollen. They drooped in the sun. He broke a flower very gently and brought its face to the face of another flower and let them touch very delicately.

  ‘Clean fucking,’ he said.

  ‘Such nasty habits,’ Denise said. She was looking very carefully. ‘Do they enjoy it?’

  ‘Does this always have to be done?’ Ellen said enthralled. She had never seen such a ritual before.

  ‘In nature the bees do it, or the wind,’ he said, his fingers yellow from pollen dust.

  ‘Or the wind,’ she said longing for it. It was a special wind he conjured up: blowing pollen dust, sending seeds like velvet arrows to their appointed nests, scattering white geranium petals that fluttered like white butterflies; that wind in the tender blue inside elbows and thighs, no harsh sun, no Denise, the world soft with harmony and he and her joined together with fragments of wind like music falling upon them. It was too intimate, too physical a thought and she looked away. He stood straight as an arrow, his whey eyes saying to her, ‘All right, I’ll take you on.’

  She looked towards his hands doing the wind’s work, bringing the seed from one yellow flower to another. An act of creation. If I could put out my hand, she thought, but I cannot. Denise was there, saying, ‘I quit America, I got a single ticket. I ended up in Scotland, cheapest fare, costs less to Scotland than anywhere in the world. Europe’s for me, it’s so goddam old, you know historic, you can live realistically, open up, grow, men treat you like a woman…’ And already the simple moment had gone, Denise was speaking to him saying how men treat a girl and he was listening with a smile. The actor’s downfall. He daren’t lose a customer. Ellen felt hollowed again.

  ‘Shall we take a walk?’ he said, to Denise.

  ‘Why not?’ she said; They cantered off and Ellen followed a little behind. There was no telling how the evening would go.

  Later they sat in the large room where Ellen had been earlier. She re-saw things as if she’d been away for a long time, the small gay coloured birds of nylon, the ear-ring under the clock, the picture that had been changed by lightning.

  ‘I lived through a yellow thunderstorm here,’ Ellen said idly, moving the ice around in her drink. He suggested they get stoned. But she liked him better sober. He had just been saying how he had always wanted to have two women together and this was his chance. Ellen looked at Denise with distaste. There was black blood in that girl somewhere. Their eyes met, they did not smile, but gleamed, the bare gleam of rivalry in their big eyes, her green eyes and Denise’s brown ones. He was working his tongue in his mouth, the next thing he had to do was to spit. He stood midway between them, both hands on his belt as if guns were hanging there.

  ‘You smoke like an amateur,’Denise said to Ellen who was holding a cigarette between her middle and her ring finger.

  ‘And you’re so observant,’ Ellen said in a voice that people were accustomed to accept as real. A hard, formidable voice.

  ‘And what are you going to do in Europe?’ Bobby asked of Denise, pretending not to notice the duel.

  ‘Well I can’t give up acting, that’s one thing,’ she said. Up to that moment it had not been declared that she was an actress at all. It was quite touching the way she said it. Ellen watched him react. She tried to read the answer in the inclinations of his body. Then he suddenly walked as if he had made up his mind and sat on the sofa beside Denise.

  ‘You’re a good girl, sunshine, what else do you do?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m learning style,’ she said, ‘and writing…mainly for the discipline.’

  ‘That’s a Jesus brilliant thing to do,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that supposed to be, an insult?’ Denise said. She’d painted her lips a bit more. She and Ellen had withdrawn to his bedroom just before cocktails. Ellen had left her bag in there, by mistake.

  ‘No joke,’ he said. ‘I admire you. I admire women who are on the ball.’

  ‘Oh that’s cute, you’re getting so Latin, lover, what’ll you give me…’

  ‘Marshmallows of course,’ he said. He punched at one of her breasts then the other.

  ‘Hands off,’ she said, and then looked at Ellen and said to him, ‘She thinks we’re stupid.’

  Ellen was gazing into her glass of whisky, apparently indifferent to their flirtation.

  ‘She’s thinking what is the colour of the wind,’ Ellen said, still looking into the glass, a half-smile of serenity on her face. It was not easy to keep so cool, but she wanted now to be the lone, interested observer.

  ‘Egg-head stuff,’ he said. ‘All we want now is some very nice spiritual guy to make up a foursome.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ Ellen said, smirking, tucking her feet up under her black skirt, drawing the skirt higher, very daintily with her thumb and first finger.

  ‘I follow you,’ he said, following the line of her very white, milk thigh beneath the darkness of the silk skirt. She’d decided not to use sun lotion. If her legs were white she was going to make a virtue out of it. Be the nurse she once set out to be.

  At that moment a white-coated man appeared in the doorway and asked if they wanted anything.

  ‘Dinner?’ he asked, looking at Bobby, then at each of the guests. None of them responded to the question.

  ‘Any pussy cats in the garden?’ Denise asked the white-coated figure. He did not know what to say.

  ‘Are there,’ she repeated, ‘any pussy cats in the garden?’

  He said that he did not know and bowed slightly and excused himself. They went on sitting, drinking, once Bobby stood up to click on a light but Denise put her hand out to restrain him, she said the light brought the mosquitoes and if there was one thing in the world she was allergic to it was boring mosquitoes. He shrugged and sat down again. The distance between them on the couch was at least a yard. Ellen, who had been looking at a magazine, closed it and folded her hands and waited.

  ‘You may not know it but you are still a woman in your wiles,’ Ellen said. Spears of conversation like that escaped from her mouth.

  ‘And under your armpits,’ Bobby said, jocosely. Denise was dressed in a light-blue sleeveless dress and an arc of black showed when she raised her arms above her head and murmured something inaudible but cuddlesome.

  Outside the night ripened. It was immense and black. They still sat. In the complete darkness only the paler things showed, her white shirt, and his, her pair of hands, their hands. She felt for her heat spots and scratched them violently. Crickets from the garden. Bobby and Denise got on to talking about old movies, ones she’d never seen. Ellen’s eyes getting used to the darkness imagined that they were drawing nearer to each other. Two of their four hands went out of sight. Perhaps they had them clenched under his, or her, thigh. The conclusion being reached was that they loved Gary Cooper. Then Bobby stood up and walked with long strides towards the door, his white shirt disappearing into the greater darkness of the hall.

  ‘For the sake of old times I’ll show you the pussy cats,’ he said. Denise stood up and ran, absolutely ran after him.

  Ellen was not sure what she would do. Whether it would be something ridiculous and shameful or tragic and noble. For a long time she did nothing except sit there and think about ineptitude. Then she rose and decided to get her handbag.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THEY LOCKED HER OUT. She hung around the hall, her back to their door, not stirring, just waiting for sounds of them, and once again she thought, ‘This is not me, I am not doing this,’ and she remembered the calvary journeys her mother made across the narrow hall to her father’s bedroom and t
he don’ts and the don’ts and the don’ts; she waited now, as then, knowing that the first sounds that would carry them heavenwards would also be the beginning of the end. She felt no humiliation, they would be empty for each other after and she would still be unexplored for him, and therefore desirable. To pass the time she began to fit on the hats. They were the hats left by each of the summer visitors. It was one of Sidney’s little crazes, to have each person leave a hat on the big table. She tried first a linen one, then a straw one over that, then another straw that was wider, and lastly the very ornamental one with baubles, and dolls’ mirrors stitched on its wide brim. She set herself little time limits. She thought, ‘By the time I count a hundred, or put on four more hats or jump from the gold tile to the black spotted one’ – there were many colour tiles in the big hall – ‘he will have opened the door and he will be saying: “How ‘bout us going drinking, ma’am?”’

  Their light was out and from under the door came the sounds: the murmur and bed-creak and whisper of people in the dark. There were foot sounds soon after and a thud as if a shoe or a clothes brush had been dropped, and then it was quite still for a while as she tried to deduce what part of the ritual was over and what yet to come. Her bag was in there so she could not even smoke, and she daren’t go upstairs in case they heard her departure and sneaked out. Not that they would. Anyhow she wanted to be there when they came out, smiling, disapproving, triumphant. She planned what she would say, she would say, ‘Anyone for tennis?’ and he, being as he was the first one likely to appear, would tell her to get her hair combed because they were going out and then the Princess would come, her hair all neat again but her dress a little wrinkled around the middle.

  ‘It must be ten,’ she thought as the clock from another room began to strike. The chimes were slow, steady, and friendly. She counted ten. A good omen.

  Then in the lonely hallway where it was beginning to get dark she turned to face their door and reaching out put her hand on the brass knob that had the likeness of Sidney’s face. In fact was Sidney’s face. She held it for a while before turning it. If she turned it back and forth the inside knob – someone else’s face – would move and one or other of them would see it and call out. Strange, how when the urgency was over people regained their embarrassment. Then she remembered that it was dark in there and they would not see the knob being turned, so she knocked on the door very lightly, and, in the light, inconsequential voice which she had rehearsed she said, ‘Anyone for tennis?’ They made no answer. She knocked louder and with her other hand she turned the knob and gave the door a little push. Through the narrow slit of darkness she said,