August Is a Wicked Month Read online

  But that was to be expected.

  On the whole she managed. She ate quite well and did not over-drink.

  One late afternoon as she lay on the mattress, she felt, though her eyes were closed, that the someone standing over her was not one of the passing people. She stiffened. Her husband. Catching her out. How could she sit up and say, ‘I am not malingering, I am getting some streng before I come face to face with it,’ and looking through her lenses she saw that the man’s face looming over her appeared to be smiling.

  ‘So there you are,’ it said. She recognized Bobby’s drawl.

  ‘Oh you,’ she said, and sat up, neither pleased nor displeased.

  ‘Thought you were in a…?’ she didn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Full o’ fairies,’ he said; sitting next to her.

  ‘You look all right.’ He pushed the straw hat back on her head so that he could see her face clearly.

  ‘I feel all right.’ She was grateful to him for not asking why she hadn’t gone home.

  ‘Nice place,’ he said. He looked around and made faces at the bored, expectant girls, glistening with brown come-hither jelly. One stood up when she saw him and walked slowly past. He looked her up and down and said as she went by, loud enough for her to hear:

  ‘ Hail, the performance of the arse. Seats in all parts…’ She strolled to the sea and perched herself on the neck of the white gondola that was a few yards out. As if riding the neck of a swan.

  ‘Waiting for a squitter,’ he said, waving out to her. She did not wave back.

  ‘You have a one-track mind,’ Ellen said, but she was glad of a little conversation all the same.

  ‘Who?’ he said, and laughed. Then in an effeminate mincing voice he recited :

  But I do like to pee beside the seaside

  I do like to pee beside the sea,

  And I do love to pee inside the seaside

  With someone peeing in me…’

  The English group manned by Arthur heard this and rose huffily, to leave. It was early for them.

  ‘You’re driving people away,’ Ellen said. The English wife dressed her husband as Ellen had seen her do each day. She helped him into his shoes, his underpants and then his shorts. He’d graduated to wearing shorts.

  ‘Jesus, man, where’s your genital pride?’ Bobby said, aiming the pistol of his finger at the helpless husband.

  ‘You haven’t told me about Tangier,’ Ellen tried to engage Bobby, ‘and Denise.’

  ‘Fuck Denise,’ he said, and rested his head on the floor of the beach to have an under view of the man who was being dressed.

  ‘It’s there,’ he said, gripping her arm but looking in the direction of the English group. It was as if he had set himself a bet over it. ‘The member is present all right,’ he said, and then in a downcast voice, ‘but not waiting to strike,’ and burying his face in the sand he groaned and wallowed there.

  ‘You’re gone,’ she said. When he sat up his eyes were closed and his sand-encrusted face a mask of what it once was. Sad and pained now, he held her hand and asked again how she was.

  ‘Did you come to see me?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why?’ But she knew why.

  ‘They didn’t tell me…I didn’t hear about it for three days, then someone said…well someone said it.’

  ‘Sometimes I don’t…believe it,’ Ellen said. He squeezed her hand and told her to talk or not to talk whichever she preferred and they sat like that, looking out to sea, and there was not a puff of wind. He brushed the sand away from the corners of his eyes but left the grainy mask over his face.

  ‘Someone called it azure snot,’ he said, ‘Rimbaud, I guess. Only poet there was.’

  ‘Called what?’

  ‘The sea, you goose,’ and then, very alertly, he flicked his fingers and asked, ‘Goose, what do you think of, quick?’

  ‘Potato stuffing,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus, women have no logic,’ he said. ‘Ask me one.’

  ‘The colour of a road?’ She flicked her fingers as he had done.

  ‘All colours, ma’am, but I liked them gold.’

  ‘What do you remember from when you were small?’ she asked.

  Something about his voice had put that golden road in a childhood sequence.

  ‘Little sister gettin’ done, saw it through a keyhole.’ He closed one eye again and screwed up the other. The English group had departed.

  ‘And peaches,’ she said, ‘falling apart.’ The thought of anything falling apart now put it back in her head, the image of the way her son died. He put an arm around her.

  ‘I have kids,’ he said. ‘Never see them.’

  ‘Why?’ she said, accusing.

  ‘Their mother thinks I’m a wolf.’

  ‘Are you a wolf?’ She knew she was going to cry.

  ‘I’m a wolf, I’m a wolf,’ he said and snapped at her with his strong white teeth and then he cradled her in his arm and let her cry. Sometimes he made a joke about people going by and said she was missing a ball because corruptions were quickening all over the place. Sometimes he just patted her and then again he’d say,

  ‘Wow, if people on the set could cry like you.’

  She cried and spoke in senseless bursts and blew her nose into a towel. One minute she was saying: ‘He put his clothes in a paper bag at night to save them from the moths,’ and then she was describing how he cut his own hair and got sorry and tried to stick it back on with Sello-tape before she saw it and that made her cry worse, and when she remembered, she apologized for blowing her nose so much. For no reason at all she began to talk about turtles on an island in the South Pacific. She said: ‘Their mothers lay eggs in the sand and then they can’t find their way back to sea and they wander all over the sand delirious and crying – turtles cry – and the children are born and they wander too, and they never know one another and they’re all crazed and wandering.’ There was some point to the story but she forgot it.

  ‘The century of hell,’ he said, in a low, even voice and for a minute she gave a thought to his children and asked how many they were and what sex.

  ‘You’ll have another kid,’ he said. ‘Or you’ll have something?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ she said. Had he come with the intention of sleeping with her?

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen things – pretty things – come out of slums and slag heaps and manure heaps; you see those big, indiscreet trees?’ He pointed to the palms behind the dressing rooms.

  ‘They are indiscreet,’ she said, through her tears.

  ‘Something will come,’ he said. ‘Some sort of…You might get to be a gipsy like me.’

  ‘I’ll never get over it,’ she said, affronted.

  ‘No one’s asking you,’ he said, and then he rose and pulled her up by the hand and said,

  ‘We need some liquor and fortification after all this high-powered talk and stuff…’

  Going up under the trees towards the hotel she blew gently to get the last traces of sand off his face, and then she asked if she could change into another dress. She really wanted to bathe his eyes, because they looked bloodshot.

  ‘We’ll buy you a dress,’ he said, and grinned. In the hotel boutique he bought her a costly white dress with a purse to match. The dress was made of linen, with big sleeves in which her hands could nestle. Like the saints that appear in the liturgy of the Church: white and limbless and very still.

  ‘It’s chastity day,’ he said as they sat in the hotel, drinking a white frothy drink that he’d had specially made. He ordered four drinks each time because it took the barman some time to make them. In that way they were never without a drink. They were called daiquiris and there was rum in them, but because of their froth-like appearance they looked harmless. Sometimes he reached out and touched her hand or let his fingers travel up her arm under the mantle of white, but the touch was delicate, like the ineffable touch of winds. Suddenly she missed the wind and wi
shed she could hear it blow.

  ‘You cheer me up,’ she said.

  ‘Eye-wash.’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I carry pessaries around,’ he said, ‘pessaries to cheer women up.’

  ‘You’re never serious,’ she said.

  ‘Serious!’ he said as if she had just uttered an obscene word. ‘Jesuses and Virgins, who wants to be that?’

  He would not entertain any talk about his wife, his children, his friends, pictures he’d been in or pictures he was going to be in. Now and then he concentrated for long enough to tell her the exact taste and texture of a melon he’d had in the Arabian desert, its name and the superstitions attached to it. The melons he described had long, descriptive names like the names of Chinese poems. He talked about the light on the stones in Greece and how it changed as one drove by, and what it was like to be one thousand leagues inside the world’s most sinful woman.

  A little blurred from the drinks, mesmerized by his voice and his way of touching her thin arms under the wide, sacramental sleeves, she heard everything he said and did not question it, even when he said preposterous things. It fell dark outside, people passed through to dinner, and still he did not show signs of moving. The waiter brought almonds with the fresh drinks. Bobby gave big tips. Like her he wanted to be thought generous, and yet he insulted people.

  ‘Are you the Bobby So-and-So?’ asked a man going by.

  ‘I am a Bobby so-and-so,’ he said, and nodded to the waiter to take the man away. She stirred her drink nervously with a rod. There was a thin wooden rod for stirring, and a heart-shaped ashtray with three gold hollows on the rim for three cigarettes, though there were only two of them. Sometimes she looked in the wall mirror to see him talk to her, and his talking and her listening became half-dream, half-happening because of the awful silence of five days, the strong rum drinks, the love he shed on her. They were at a table near the window, the light outside a dark impenetrable blue. It did not seem like the same hotel where she’d met the violinist. He just went by and stared at her in an unseemly way. She felt triumphant that he had seen her with a man. A display of flowers at her back worried her hair and, leaning over, Bobby plucked one and put it under her armpit. The violinist saw that too. She held it tight, tighter, crushing it under her arm, thinking that perhaps its red dye might harm her new pure dress, thinking, but not over-worried.

  ‘Your turn, ma’am,’ he would say and look at her. She could say anything she liked. So long as she didn’t talk serious or ask questions about his life.

  ‘My knickers getting wet in a field of barley,’ she said. Sensation for sensation. He’d given her the white peaches.

  ‘A holy hour in a lavatory with a strumpet,’ he said.

  ‘Chamber pots never rinsed,’ she said, and thought again of her home, the two bedrooms, wet clothes slung across the indoor line, the table never fully cleared off, relish bottles, relish stains, the garden as the lavatory.

  ‘Keep it clean,’ he said, and feigned anger by raising his fist.

  ‘Wild garlic sweet on the breath,’ she said quickly. They were playing a child’s game and to miss one’s turn was to fall out of the game. There was garlic in the hedges that boundaried the barley fields. And ‘Please do not trespass’ signs. And she herself not much higher than the high swaying barley ears. The landlords responsible for the ‘Please do not trespass‘ signs could hardly distinguish her. She was blonde, also. It was later in life her hair darkened to red-gold.

  ‘Good,’ he said and rose and stretched himself. She put the pressed flower in her new purse, and left a drink untouched.

  ‘Look,’ she said, showing the satin inside of the purse, ‘it’s clean.’

  There was a car waiting for him outside. The driver handed him a telegram, but he didn’t open it.

  ‘Open it,’ she wanted to say, ‘in case you have to go,’ but as they got into the back seat he stuffed it in his pocket. His tie billowed out from the draught caused by the open windows and she saw the label of a Paris fashion house.

  ‘Grandeur,’ she said. He took the penknife, the same one that he had used to cut the hairs off the artichoke, and sawed the label off and tossed it through the window.

  ‘Someone else will find it and stitch it on,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care, I really don’t care.’ It was a thing he said often as if he had to assure himself of his indifference. They drove to a castle that was also a restaurant and he asked the driver to come back at midnight. The stone entrance arch was covered with vine and bell wistaria and there were a few flowers still in bloom, their light mauve phalloids hung limply over the green soft leaves. Like a man and a woman after loving. It was well known for its pictures, he told her, and very solemnly he walked her through the stone passage and from room to room to see the various paintings hung in dark gilt frames with tubular lights above each one. The rooms were dark but she could see the pictures quite clearly. Her favourite was of a drunk but thoughtful woman at a café table. Not joking now, not saying anything except a surprised and marvelling ‘Christ’ from time to time when he saw something that staggered him.

  They ate out of doors and a huge black dog rested at their feet.

  ‘It’s the devil,’ she said, ‘keeping us apart.’ The dog was between them under the stone table.

  ‘You got the story wrong, ma’am, the devil is the guy who brings us together, it’s mean old…’ He looked up. The sky was vast and calm, its deep-blue light protective over them, and over all the holiday sinners. His mouth full of wine, he gluggled up at it and it seemed as if his laughter and his happiness vibrated on the leaves he looked through. In a seizure of happiness, she said:

  ‘It’s the nicest night I’ve ever had.’

  And for that little minute she did not feel guilty for being happy so soon after her son died. Even when he was alive she was only a mother some of the time. She doted and hovered over him for months and then of a night she would have a wild longing to go through the town and do delirious things and not bear the responsibility of being a mother, for hours, or days, or weeks.

  They had crudités du pays to start with. They were brought on a huge dish, and were of so many kinds of vegetable that she giggled about a garden having been wheeled through. There were two eggs also on the dish, their brown shells glistening, where they’d been buttered. He cracked one deftly on the stone table, held it over his mouth and swallowed it whole. She burped over-genteelly into the sleeve of her new dress. She could not stand eggs.

  ‘Come on, eat,’ he said. He knew the best sauce to dip each separate vegetable in and he chewed untíl he had robbed each mouthful of its flavour.

  Afterwards they had a Châteaubriant steak and the wine that came was in a very old bottle with a cobweb round it.

  ‘We never swam,’ he said, as they recalled the day and how they’d passed it. ‘We’ll swim tonight.’

  ‘I can’t.’ Better tell him than have to stand shivering in a bathing suit and disappoint him.

  ‘You can’t swim!‘ he said. She nodded. He would teach her the next day. She touched his hand lightly in gratitude. She thought again of the young priest that had once saved her from drowning and now, looking at Bobby, she thought of his greater gift to her. He’d given her forgetfulness, a day’s distraction, a day’s healing. When she remembered her son at all it was a sweet memory of his living another life, with real children, in a place she called Limbo. In a sense she inhabited Limbo too, a place of almost-painless, patient consciousness through which other thoughts from her other world wandered. But her son was in a happiness place. She’d had him secretly baptized as a baby and she had a sneaking relief about that now. Not that she believed or disbelieved, she simply did not know.

  ‘Is there an after-life?’ she said, quite ordinarily.

  ‘There’s half a glass each,’ he said, holding the wine bottle firmly and taking the cobweb in his grasp. Afterwards she thought the cobweb got on his face because he wiped his jaw from time to
time of some nuisance.

  ‘Is there?’ she said, looking towards the sea, made vaster by the darkness.

  ‘What about the snails that have their heads cut off and grow new heads, what about that?’

  ‘What about it?’ she said. Had her fearfulness disappointed him? He wound a corner of the napkin round his finger and removed castor sugar from the valley at one side of her mouth. Detaining his hand with her cheek she looked at his arm in the white shirt and then at the tiny rim of dirt in the fold of the cuff.

  ‘Dis…gusting,’ he said. She was never to forget how he said that.

  He booked a room in her hotel, to be there for the morning for her first swimming lesson. The biggest compliment anyone could have paid her.

  ‘I’ll be down in the lobby,’ he said, ‘so don’t worry.’ They were on the threshold of her bedroom, the door half open but the light in the room not on.

  ‘Bobby, Robert,’ she said. She wanted to kiss him, thank him, make known to him with all of her five senses how perfectly the day had gone.

  ‘Get sleep,’ he said, whispering because it was late, and then, as she lingered, he took out a tiny silver pen and wrote on her neck where the new dress had a diamond opening. She looked down to read, but the scroll was too close under her chin to see.

  ‘See ya,’ he said, and put the pen as a token in her new purse. In the bedroom mirror she saw what he had written:

  QUEEN OF HEARTS

  It was still there in the morning.

  Early next morning she had her first lesson. He bought rubbers for her arms and while he was blowing them out he told her to go and make herself known to the sea. The beaches all around were empty except for the sounds of children. She hated the sounds of children now and put her hands to her ears instinctively.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘baptism by water…’ It looked so simple to walk in. There were no clouds written on the water. It was still cool, and a mist shrouded the places all around and as far as she knew there was only him and her. Coming into the sea he took her hands and forced them both to duck down and douche their bodies, then rise up and shake the water off their faces. He said she must first get used to the water going in her eyes. ‘Your hands,’ he said again, taking hold of her and he moved away until they were at arm’s length. It took a lot of persuasion before she risked raising her legs from the sea-bed, but when she did, she clung tenaciously to his hands, and declared the most extraordinary trust in him. She could live like that for the whole of her life, his hands holding her, his beautiful happy eyes beholding her, her legs and body lost, but safe.