Complete Short Stories (VMC) (92 page)

No, she wasn’t the crying sort, he agreed. She had a wonderful buoyancy and gallantry, and she seemed to knock years off his age by just
being
with him, talking to him.

In spite of their growing friendship, they kept to their original, separate tables in the hotel restaurant. It seemed too suddenly decisive and public a move for him to join her now, and he was too shy to carry it off at this stage of the holiday, before such an alarming audience. But after dinner, they would go for a walk along the sea-front, or out in the car for a drink at another hotel.

Always, for the first minute or two in a bar, he seemed to lose her. As if she had forgotten him, she would look about her critically, judging the setup, sternly drawing attention to a sticky ring on the counter where she wanted to rest her elbow, keeping a professional eye on the prices.

When they were what she called ‘nicely grinned-up’, they liked to drive out to a small headland and park the car, watching the swinging beam from a lighthouse. Then, after the usual knee-pattings and neck-strokings, they would heave and flop about in the confines of the Triumph Herald, trying to make love. Warmed by their drinks, and the still evening and the romantic sound of the sea idly turning over down below them, they became frustrated, both large, solid people, she much corseted and, anyhow, beginning to be painfully sunburned across the shoulders, he with the confounded steering-wheel to contend with.

He would grumble about the car and suggest getting out on to a patch of dry barley grass; but she imagined it full of insects; the chirping of the cicadas was almost deafening.

She also had a few scruples about Charlie, but they were not so insistent as the cicadas. After all, she thought, she had never had a holiday-romance – not even a honeymoon with Charlie – and she felt that life owed her just one.

After a time, during the day, her sunburn forced her into the shade, or out in the car with Stanley. Across her shoulders she began to peel, and could not bear – though desiring his caress – him to touch her. Rather glumly, he waited for her flesh to heal, told her ‘I told you so’; after all, they had not for ever on this island, had started their second, their last week already.

‘I’d like to have a look at the other island,’ she said, watching the ferry leaving, as they sat drinking nearby.

‘It’s not worth just going there for the inside of a day,’ he said meaningfully, although it was only a short distance.

Wasn’t this, both suddenly wondered, the answer to the too-small car, and the watchful eyes back at the hotel. She had refused to allow him into her room there. ‘If anyone saw you going in or out? Why, they know where I live. What’s to stop one of them coming into the Nelson any time, and chatting Charlie up?’

‘Would you?’ he now asked, watching the ferry starting off across the water. He hardly dared to hear her answer.

After a pause, she laughed. ‘Why not?’ she said, and took his hand. ‘We wouldn’t really be doing any harm to anyone.’ (Meaning Charlie.) ‘Because no one could find out, could they?’

‘Not over there,’ he said, nodding towards the island. ‘We can start fresh over there. Different people.’

‘They’ll notice we’re both not at dinner at the hotel.’

‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

She imagined the unknown island, the warm and starlit night and, somewhere, under some roof or other, a large bed in which they could pursue their daring, more than middle-aged adventure, unconfined in every way.

‘As soon as my sunburn’s better,’ she promised. ‘We’ve got five more days yet, and I’ll keep in the shade till then.’

A chambermaid advised yoghourt, and she spread it over her back and shoulders as best she could, and felt its coolness absorbing the heat from her skin.

Damp and cheesy-smelling in the hot night, she lay awake, cross with herself. For the sake of a tan, she was wasting her holiday – just to be a five minutes’ wonder in the bar on her return, the deepest brown any of them had had that year. The darker she was, the more
abroad
she would seem to have been, the more prestige she could command. All summer, pallid herself, she had had to admire others.

Childish, really, she decided, lying rigid under the sheet, afraid to move, burning and throbbing. The skin was taut behind her knees, so that she could not stretch her legs; her flesh was on fire.

Five more days, she kept thinking. Meanwhile, even this sheet upon her was unendurable.

On the next evening, to establish the fact that they would not always be in to dinner at the hotel, they complained in the bar about the dullness of the menu, and went elsewhere.

It was a drab little restaurant, but they scarcely noticed their surroundings. They sat opposite one another at a corner table and ate shell-fish briskly, busily – he, from his enjoyment of the food; she, with a wish to be
rid of it. They rinsed their fingers, quickly dried them and leant forward and twined them together – their large placid hands, with heavy rings, clasped on the table-cloth. Phyl, glancing aside for a moment, saw a young girl, at the next table with a boy, draw in her cheekbones to suppress laughter then, failing, turn her head to hide it.

‘At
our
age,’ Phyl said gently, drawing away her hands from his. ‘In public, too.’

She could not be defiant; but Stanley said jauntily, ‘I’m damned if I care.’

At that moment, their chicken was placed before them, and he sat back, looking at it, waiting for vegetables

As well as the sunburn, the heat seemed to have affected Phyl’s stomach. She felt queasy and nervy. It was now their last day but one before they went over to the other island. The yoghourt – or time – had taken the pain from her back and shoulders, though leaving her with a dappled, flaky look, which would hardly bring forth cries of admiration or advance her prestige in the bar when she returned. But, no doubt, she thought, by then England would be too cold for her to go sleeveless. Perhaps the trees would have changed colour. She imagined – already – dark Sunday afternoons, their three o’clock lunch done with, and she and Charlie sitting by the electric log fire in a lovely hot room smelling of oranges and the so-called hearth littered with peel. Charlie – bless him – always dropped off among a confusion of newspapers, worn out with banter and light ale, switched off, too, as he always was with her, knowing that he could relax – be nothing, rather – until seven o’clock, because it was Sunday. Again, for Phyl, imagining home, a little pang, soon swept aside or, rather, swept aside
from
.

She was in a way relieved that they would have only one night on the little island. That would make it seem more like a chance escapade than an affair, something less serious and deliberate in her mind. Thinking about it during the day-time, she even felt a little apprehensive; but told herself sensibly that there was really nothing to worry about: knowing herself well, she could remind herself that an evening’s drinking would blur all the nervous edges.

‘I can’t get over that less than a fortnight ago I never knew you existed,’ she said, as they drove to the afternoon ferry. ‘And after this week,’ she added, ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t talk like that – spoiling things,’ he said heavily, and he tried not to think of Hove, and the winter walks along the promenade, and going back to the flat, boiling himself a couple of eggs, perhaps; so desperately lost without Ethel.

He had told Phyl about his wife and their quiet happiness together for
many years, and then her long, long illness, during which she seemed to be going away from him gradually; but it was dreadful all the same when she finally did.

‘We could meet in London on your day off,’ he suggested.

‘Well, maybe.’ She patted his hand, leaving that disappointment aside for him.

There were only a few people on the ferry. It was the end of summer, and the tourists were dwindling, as the English community was reassembling, after trips ‘back home’.

The sea was intensely blue all the way across to the island. They stood by the rail looking down at it, marvelling, and feeling like two people in a film. They thought they saw a dolphin, which added to their delight.

‘Ethel and I went to Jersey for our honeymoon,’ Stanley said. ‘It poured with rain nearly all the time, and Ethel had one of her migraines.’

‘I never had a honeymoon,’ Phyl said. ‘Just the one night at the Regent Palace. In our business, you can’t both go away together. This is the first time I’ve ever been abroad.’

‘The places I could take you to,’ he said.

They drove the car off the ferry and began to cross the island. It was hot and dusty, hillsides terraced and tilled; green lemons hung on the trees.

‘I wouldn’t half like to actually
pick
a lemon,’ she said.

‘You shall,’ he said, ‘somehow or other.’

‘And take it home with me,’ she added. She would save it for a while, showing people, then cut it up for gin and tonic in the bar one evening, saying casually, ‘I picked this lemon with my own fair hands.’

Stanley had booked their hotel from a restaurant, on the recommendation of a barman. When they found it, he was openly disappointed; but she managed to be gallant and optimistic. It was not by the sea, with a balcony where they might look out at the moonlit waters or rediscover brightness in the morning; but down a dull side street, and opposite a garage.

‘We don’t
have
to,’ Stanley said doubtfully.

‘Oh, come on! We might not get in anywhere else. It’s only for sleeping in,’ she said.

‘It
isn’t
only for sleeping in,’ he reminded her.

An enormous man in white shirt and shorts came out to greet them. ‘My name is Radam. Welcome,’ he said, with confidence. ‘I have a lovely room for you, Mr and Mrs Archard. You will be happy here, I can assure you. My wife will carry up your cases. Do not protest, Mr Archard. She is quite able to. Our staff has slackened off at the end of the season, and I have some trouble with the old ticker, as you say in England. I know England well. I am a Bachelor of Science of England University. Once had digs in Swindon.’

A pregnant woman shot out of the hotel porch and seized their suitcases, and there was a tussle as Stanley wrenched them from her hands. Still serenely boasting, Mr Radam led them upstairs, all of them panting but himself.

The bedroom was large and dusty and overlooked a garage.

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ Stanley said, when they were left alone. ‘It’s still not too late, if you could stand a row.’

‘No. I think it’s rather sweet,’ Phyl said, looking round the room. ‘And, after all, don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t know any more than me.’

The furniture was extraordinarily fret-worked, as if to make more crevices for the dust to settle in; the bedside-lamp base was an old gin bottle filled with gravel to weight it down, and when Phyl pulled off the bed cover to feel the bed she collapsed with laughter, for the pillow-cases were embroidered ‘Hers’ and ‘Hers’.

Her laughter eased him, as it always did. For a moment, he thought disloyally of the dead – of how Ethel would have started to be depressed by it all, and he would have hard work jollying her out of her dark mood. At the same time, Phyl was wryly imagining Charlie’s wrath, how he would have carried on – for only the best was good enough for him, as he never tired of saying.

‘He’s quite right – that awful fat man,’ she said gaily. ‘We shall be very happy here. I dread to think who he keeps “His” and “His” for, don’t you?’

‘I don’t suppose the maid understands English,’ he said, but warming only slightly. ‘You don’t expect to have to read off pillow-cases.’

‘I’m sure there
isn’t
a maid.’

‘The bed is very small,’ he said.

‘It’ll be better than the car.’

He thought, ‘She is such a woman as I have never met. She’s like a marvellous Tommy in the trenches – keeping everyone’s pecker up.’ He hated Charlie for his luck.

‘I shan’t ever be able to tell anybody about “Hers” and “Hers”,’ Phyl thought regretfully – for she dearly loved to amuse their regulars back home. Given other circumstances, she might have worked up quite a story about it.

A tap on the door, and in came Mr Radam with two cups of tea on a tray. ‘I know you English,’ he said, rolling his eyes roguishly. ‘You can’t be happy without your tea.’

As neither of them ever drank it, they emptied the cups down the hand basin when he had gone.

Phyl opened the window and the sour, damp smell of new cement came up to her. All round about, building was going on; there was also the whine of a saw-mill, and a lot of clanking from the garage opposite. She leant
farther out, and then came back smiling into the room, and shut the window on the dust and noise. ‘He was quite right – that barman. You can see the sea from here. It’s down the bottom of the street. Let’s go and have a look as soon as we’ve unpacked.’

On their way out of the hotel, they came upon Mr Radam, who was sitting in a broken old wicker chair, fanning himself with a folded newspaper.

‘I shall prepare your dinner myself,’ he called after them. ‘And shall go now to make soup. I am a specialist of soup.’

They strolled in the last of the sun by the glittering sea, looked at the painted boats, watched a man beating an octopus on a rock. Stanley bought her some lace-edged handkerchiefs, and even gave the lace-maker an extra five shillings, so that Phyl could pick a lemon off one of the trees in her garden. Each bought for the other a picture-postcard of the place, to keep.

‘Well, it’s been just about the best holiday I ever had,’ he said. ‘And there I was in half a mind not to come at all.’ He had for many years dreaded the holiday season, and only went away because everyone he knew did so.

‘I just can’t remember when I last had one,’ she said. There was not – never would be, he knew – the sound of self-pity in her voice.

This was only a small fishing-village; but on one of the headlands enclosing it and the harbour was a big new hotel, with balconies overlooking the sea, Phyl noted. They picked their way across a rubbly car-park and went in. Here, too, was the damp smell of cement; but there was a brightly lighted empty bar with a small dance floor, and music playing.