August Is a Wicked Month Page 6

  ‘All rightie,’ Gwyn said as the waiter came with the first bucket of champagne. Vapour clouded the bucket except where his fingers had touched it, in putting it down, and there, four squat prints showed shiny. He brought four other tubs and various squat bottles of whisky with the black-and-white label she knew well, and fruit juice for the slim oriental girls.

  ‘You’re having what?’ Sidney asked as he dealt out numerous packets of cigarettes like a pack of cards. He was proud to be host to so many people and was paying particular attention to Ellen.

  ‘I’d like Pernod,’ she said, and Bobby who was halfway through a tumbler of whisky put it down and said he’d like that too.

  ‘What would I do without you?’ he said, smiling over at her. She smiled back. He said they must look at etchings some time. The evening was beginning to bloom.

  ‘Bobby’s the best in the world, the best in the world,’ the understudy kept telling her. She couldn’t see how he would fill in if Bobby fell sick. He had thicker features and spoke with oily Irish-American gusto, whereas Bobby had a sharp-boned face and spoke in a low, lazy manner.

  ‘Gave me forty-seven suits, no kiddin’,’ he said. ‘And my son got married and on their wedding day they didn’t know it but they had a honeymoon paid for, in Bermuda.’

  ‘Did they go?’ she said, thinking, ‘Supposing they didn’t want to go?’

  ‘Did they go!’ he said, affronted. ‘They had the time of their lives. Never forget it. Forty-seven suits he gave me, no kiddin’.’

  ‘Why don’t you kill him?’ she said, ‘then you could afford to buy your own suits.’ She hated his humbleness, his tell-you-the-honest-truth, jarvey driver’s drivel.

  ‘Hemlock,’ she said. ‘I have it on good authority, boil the roots.’

  ‘I was married to a woman like you once,’ he said, his face ground into a temper.

  ‘And you killed her,’ she said quickly.

  He got up and took his drink and dragged his chair to the end of the table. She pretended not to notice and looked around as if she were looking for someone special. A little boy on a woman’s lap sat with his mouth open, his face enraptured by the noise, the lights and the great, green, spreading tree that was the roof. She missed her son then and thought of the resonance of all their kissing and wished that she could hold him in her arms. She shut her eyes and tried to memorize the shape of his face, but it eluded her. She searched for it frantically, in her mind, through shut eyes.

  ‘Wake up, ma’am, we’re going to have a ball,’ Bobby said. Their drinks had come. The waiter brought the

  Pernod as he had been told to: an ice filter laid into each tall glass with small chinks as tiny and as splintered as diamonds, and a jug of water. Bobby did the pouring and as the water seeped through the filter the harsh green Pernod began to cloud, and looking from one green to another, she saw his eyes like the whey of the milk, and above them the great, green, spreading tree. She looked up at the tree, still trying to recall her son’s face, and he looked too, and was softened by the sight of it, and raising his glass he said:

  ‘Marje.’

  ‘I’m not Marje,’ she said.

  ‘I know you’re not Marje,’ he said, ‘but cheers,’ and still looking at the tree he asked if she had ever heard of white peaches.

  ‘Are there white peaches?’ she asked, shaking her head with surprise, with pleasure.

  ‘You can say that again.’ He described how they grew in New England and with his hands suggested how they squelched as they touched the ground. Because of a fatal softness.

  ‘I would love to see one,’ she said, not meaning that, but meaning, ‘You are nicer and less tough than you look.’

  ‘I like you,’ she said then.

  ‘I knew you would,’ he said. ‘I can read thoughts.’ It was beginning to be an adventure. The drink warmed her. A small boy in sequins was announcing the most fabulous strip tease of the season. Sidney said they could both watch and carry on their conversation. They had been discussing an American novelist.

  ‘He’s not a nigger writing about niggers, he’s a fairy writing about fairies,’ Sidney repeated, proud of his assessment.

  ‘Don’t talk like that,’ Gwyn said, injured, and looked towards the homosexuals as if they’d been hurt. They were absorbed in each other, and testing who could touch the farthest point of his nose with his tongue. The younger boy had a very clear and very pointed tongue, which he brandished like a knife. He could touch his nose quite easily with it, but his lover who was older found difficulty in doing the trick. Afterwards the older one gulped as if the exercise had made him sick. They seemed quite happy in their relationship.

  ‘He’s writing about fairy niggers, that’s what he’s doing,’ Bobby said suddenly. He had a knack of picking up the thread wherever the talk seemed liveliest.

  ‘Big theme!‘ Jason said in his powerful voice.

  ‘You see that stole, Jason, well that’s the one I always wanted,’ Gwyn said as she pointed to a woman who wore a cape of dark mahogany-coloured fur. It was the darkest, furriest fur Ellen had ever seen. You expected it to creep, it was so like an animal.

  ‘You never said, honey,’ he replied, patting his wife as if she were some sort of patient. Then he said to the actor, ‘He’s not even a nigger, for God’s sake,’ and an elderly lady from the next table requested to get the Yanks out. Her hair which was blonde was in a plait and she waved this menacingly at them. Then the lights were switched off completely and in the darkness Ellen heard Denise say to the actor:

  ‘How ‘bout us doing the shakes out of here?’ He didn’t move. On stage a woman on tip-toe circled a double bed which had a very frilly coverlet. Bathed in mauve spotlight the woman started to undress. She wore black mesh stockings and heels so high that she looked like some sort of bird perched on long, thin legs. As she disrobed she threw each garment to the audience. The actor caught her third and innermost petticoat, smelt it, and said, ‘A nursing mother,’ loud enough for everyone to hear.

  There was laughing from various tables and a fan said his name affectionately. Sidney was pleased. When the girl was naked except for the petals over her breasts and the kerchief lower down, she took a natural-colour fox fur and began to draw it back and forth, slowly between her legs. Each time she moved it she let out a moan and a muscle in her bare thighs quivered. She had taken off her stockings too. There were whistles and gasps from the various tables. The first orgasm of the evening.

  ‘I can’t stand it, I tell you I can’t stand it,’ Gwyn said. She was sobbing. Jason took an enormous handkerchief and held it over her eyes, and she sobbed and kept saying it was an insult.

  ‘You hold it,’ he said. Ellen looked from the woman sobbing to the dancer teasing the audience and then in matchlight at hordes of ants advancing over the tablecloth, and suddenly her son’s face came to her: in his duffle coat with the hood framing his round pale face, emphasizing his big eyes. She thought of the holiday he and his father were having; the pure unsullied days: digging for worms in the morning, fishing the rivers when the sun went down, slitting a trout open on the river bank and taking the insides out, tipping them back in the river; the smell of methylated and wood smoke; he would make a second fire to keep the flies off, and eating the trout off the new tin plates they would dip their bread in the frying-pan to get the last of the lovely black, savoury, melted butter. She licked her lips for them. The lights on the top half of the dancer were lurid now and dark down below. The natural-colour fox was black between the legs. You could hear a pin drop. Everybody except the actor was engrossed. She caught his eye and he leaned across and said something to her.

  ‘A what?’ she said.

  ‘ It’s a man,’ he said and she asked how.

  ‘It’s behind,’ he said, pressing his thumb on to his palm and hiding it there to show that the man had likewise hidden part of himself. Then the music got very fast and the dancer discarded the fox tail and hung the rubber breasts on either bed post and stood na
ked except for a triangle of black sequins above the thighs. It was a man who had perfectly mimicked all the coquette of a woman. People clapped, but some must have felt cheated as Ellen did. She also felt a little sick.

  ‘You’re all right?’ Sidney asked.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. She was ashamed to say that she felt disgusted. Gwyn was blowing her nose now into the big handkerchief. It was navy with white spots. It could have been a scarf really. The oriental girls smiled as if they’d just seen a religious ceremony.

  ‘Hungry,’ the actor said. He ordered some artichokes because it was too late to get real food.

  ‘Oh, baby, don’t be silly,’ Denise said to her, drunk now and not caring what she said.

  ‘I can’t eat artichokes,’ Ellen said appealing to the actor. On stage a boy was singing Anyone who had a heart, and the English were joining in because it was the craze song in England at that time. She thought of Hugh Whistler and for the first time had no regrets about his going away. His indifference had fated her to this gathering and this gathering was exotic in a way that no Englishman could ever be.

  ‘You’re going to learn.’ Bobby came and sat next to her. Two artichokes were brought and a small dish of very yellow mayonnaise.

  ‘Not enough here for a midget,’ he said, picking one of the outer leaves, dipping its base in the mayonnaise and then nudging her to watch. With his top teeth he grazed the white base that was covered over with the mayonnaise.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s a good artichoke.’ Sucking it meditatively he said it was going to get better the deeper they got in. He enjoyed showing her.

  ‘ Try it,’ he said. She picked a leaf and watched what he did and then did the same thing. They ate slowly at first and then they began to race it and the leaves got purpler as they went deeper but the white parts were just the same. They put the grazed leaves in front of them on the table and she was doing almost as well as he was.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised by the sheath of hairs that covered the heart. She had no idea it was going to be like that. She thought of the fox tail again but felt happier now.

  ‘I love it,’ he said. ‘It’s like a woman.’ They were very close and secretive, and she watched, ignoring the singing all round them as he made incisions with the sharp end of his penknife, nicking the hairs all round the base of the heart.

  ‘They get in the back of your neck and you know it,’ he said as she watched and held her breath while he slit the cap of hair right off and exposed the grey-white heart underneath. She felt as if he had been doing it to her.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, pushing the plate in front of her.

  ‘But it’s yours,’ she said, remembering how he said it was like a woman.

  ‘You have it,’ he said, ‘and I’ll whip you later.’ He watched while she tasted it. It may have been the ritual attached, or his company, or the three drinks, but it seemed to be the most subtle thing she had ever tasted.

  ‘I love anything that is trouble to get,’ she said, chewing, pretending to like it even more than she did, although the flavour was good and it had a strange texture.

  ‘I know you do,’ he said as he prepared the second one for her. She could see a man looking at her from another table. He wore dark glasses and had dark bushy hair. When he caught her eye he lowered the glasses a little on to his nose and beamed at her. The room-service boy. She burst out laughing. He thought it an invitation and stood up to come over.…

  ‘The room-boy from the hotel,’ she said to Bobby, ‘is following me around.’

  ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘He raped me this evening,’ she said, wanting to make a story out of it now.

  ‘How was it?’ He could be aloof and sarcastic quicker than anyone she ever met.

  ‘Not as good as this,’ she said, biting into the second heart.

  ‘Front or back?’

  ‘Side,’ she said, wanting to be as bright and brittle as all the other people. Some of the party were standing and some were objecting about having to go and Denise kept saying, ‘I’m damned if I’m going to be twenty-five in this position,’ and Bobby said to bring it with her and she went out chewing the last of the artichoke. The room-boy positioned himself near the door but she pretended not to see him. Mosquitoes like particles of dust were moving around the outside lights and people were walking around as if it were the middle of the day.

  ‘Same cars as last time,’ Sidney said.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Ellen asked Bobby, linking them both so that she could raise herself off the ground, just the way her son did when he was happy.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Bobby said.

  ‘She’s doing fine,’ Sidney said. ‘Like an eight-year-old.’ She was as breathless and as buoyant as she ever remembered having been. Happiness was surely pending.

  Chapter Nine

  THEY DROVE OUT OF the town and along by the coast, through Cannes. Someone pointed out a tall hotel with a white decorative front and it reminded her of tier upon tier of wedding cake. Then they took a narrow road and began to climb. It was hot. All the windows were down. Now and then at bends in the road she felt that an oncoming car had just shaved them and she was vaguely nervous but not frightened enough to protest. The driver had been drinking with them. Through the open window she watched the clouds slip between her and the moon and thought, This is living at last. A little drunk. Sidney’s arm around her neck. Bobby, though he was in front, took the trouble to stretch his elbow back and rest it on her knee. Reassurance. And an instant of danger from another passing car. The narrow steep road, the gears constantly grinding, the climb, the moon through the window and the fields twined with vines running down to meet the road. Sometimes there were walls and sometimes not.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Bobby often said, turning round. He was in front with Denise.

  ‘Give my love to the pilchards,’ Ellen said. Up to then she had struggled to keep sober, but now she thought they were all behaving a little drunk and silliness was appropriate. She thought Denise said ‘Crap,‘ but could not be sure.

  ‘Here’s to sex,’ Gwyn was saying. Someone had brought a bottle of whisky and it was being passed round. The driver refused it. Ellen said she wanted to have it after Bobby, to have a taste of him. They all laughed.

  ‘There’s my girl,’ he said.

  ‘Sex within marriage,’ Gwyn said.

  ‘If I were six months younger,’ Sidney said, his arm tightening round Ellen’s neck, until she felt she’d choke, ‘we’d get married …’ and then the car was brought to a sudden grinding halt and the screech of the brakes was more desperate than the ‘Sweet Jesus,‘ that Gwyn let out. It was on a very deserted part of the road with no houses around. As soon as they stopped the cars behind had to stop too and there was an outrage of hooting.

  ‘General de Gaulle kidnapped,’ Bobby said and made a joke about having to build a private oratory for him to hear Mass every day.

  ‘And a mermaid on Fridays,’ Denise said, and then Gwyn said they ought to be ashamed of themselves ridiculing Catholics like that. They waited for a few minutes with the engine running, and cars hooting from behind, and the men making middling jokes, when the driver got out. When he came back he appeared to be trembling. A motor-cyclist was dead a few yards up.

  ‘Really dead?’ Ellen said, as if there was still a chance to prevent it.

  ‘Looks so,’ the driver said, and Gwyn said they ought to get a priest or something. They all got out. A small group of people surrounded the spot where the accident had happened. Their faces looked stricken and they had their eyes down because of the blinding headlights from a police car. They stood solemnly and watched as they would never have watched if this man had been alive. The actor pushed his way through. Over his shoulder Ellen saw the body, thrown forward from the motor-cycle which was in the centre of the road. A black car with wings like a giant bird was sprawled across the road where it had obviously swerved to avoid him. His trousers appeared to be empty of hi
s legs and one boot was a few yards away. His sock was running blood.

  ‘He was doing eighty,’ a voice said. Most people talked in French. Someone said he was German. His papers were German. She shivered at the thought of falling ill or dying in a strange country. She wanted to go home, not to London to the pipes of light but home to the race to which she belonged: and then she shivered uncontrollably, knowing that their thoughts were no longer hers. She had vanished back into childhood and the dark springs of her terrors. She quickly memorized prayers, saw bog-holes into which animals stupidly plunged, and a mountain lake where two mad women drowned themselves. No houses for miles around. The lake itself lyric and deceptive on a summer’s day. With water-lilies on its gentle surface. More leaf than flower. She dreaded death. She thought of a young priest who came to warn her once when she started to wade out to sea at a point where bathing was dangerous. His eyes brimmed over with soft love. He’d asked nervously if she’d seen the sign. She hadn’t. She could have died but for him, unprepared, shocked and unwilling. She thanked him with her own eyes and wanted to touch his pale hands and move her fingers towards his wrists, lost in big black cassock sleeves. But she did not dare in case of encroaching on his chastity. She reached out and gripped Bobby’s bare arm and clung to him the way she had wanted to cling to the priest with the soft eyes and the austere, Christ-like, disciplined hands.

  ‘Looking at it does no good,’ she said to Bobby. He didn’t hear because he and Jason were trying to restrain Gwyn.

  ‘Listen, baby, it’s none of your business,’ Jason said as he caught her by the stole. She detached herself and one end of the stole trailed along the road in the dust. Eventually it would be touched by the dead man’s blood, which was making small courses in different directions.

  ‘As a Catholic, it’s my duty,’ she said. She was trying to get to the dead man to say an Act of Perfect Contrition in his ear.

  ‘Attention!’ a policeman said, blocking her way. A second policeman had a notebook out and was taking statements in French. In the ghostly light, part moon, part headlights, everyone looked guilty. He was deader than anyone Ellen had ever seen. She did not dare look on his face. Then the ambulance came and they got the stretchers out and police asked those who had not witnessed the accident to return to their cars. They got in the car and she was in front this time. Being third in line they got away quickly. Quite a queue of cars had gathered up behind.