Mr Wrong (20 page)

‘No: this’ll be fine. Jean has done dozens of them. He’s awfully careful.’

Harriet thought of her huge, newish looking Cadillac as Susan poured another large brandy and tried to top Harriet’s drink up. She couldn’t be really poor. She said that she really
had better not drink any more before food, or she would be drunk. And useless, she added, although quite what her use might turn out to be was still a mystery to her. Susan looked rather blank.

‘I’m not sure what we’ve got. Corn Flakes, anyway. And there may bea bit of
pâté
, but this morning I thought it’d gone off. There’s some
peppermint-creams some guy brought when he came to stay in the other house. Look in the fridge, and see what you can see.’

Harriet looked. The mosquitoes were now homing in on her as though she were London Airport. There was not much to see in the fridge, and what there was did not seem in any way inviting. There
was a bit of
pâté
, dark and slippery and dangerous-looking. There was also a plate of very old crêpy-looking grapes, a withered lemon and some milk. Looking up rather
desperately from this unfruitful hunt, she said: ‘Do you, by any chance, have any anti-mosquito stuff?’

‘Harry, I don’t. I don’t have a thing. I don’t seem to be their meat, and I keep on trying to remember to put it on shopping lists and just don’t seem to get around
to it. Are you being bitten to death?’

‘Yes,’ said Harriet simply. The first ones were swelling up into their hard, itchy lumps that she knew she would scratch until she drew blood. She was hungry, tired, and baffled.
‘Don’t you eat in the evenings?’ she asked with a touch of petulance.

‘I don’t bother. I’d take you down to the village, only we can’t move the car, and I daren’t miss Jean. Have some Corn Flakes; I don’t think the milk is
off.’

She prepared this simple meal for Harriet while drinking her third brandy, sat her down at the white formica table and pressed her to have more to drink. The milk
was
off, so Harriet
accepted more brandy and lit a Gauloise.

‘Have the grapes; they need eating up,’ Susan said.

For a moment, Harriet hated her. It was a bit much to come all this way only to find a mosquito-ridden and cupboard-bare house. She thought of all the trouble she took when people came to her
tiny flat. The dash to Soho in her lunch hour, to buy fresh sardines, interesting vegetables and cheeses. Tim always said that she took too much trouble, in
his
eyes, at least, but, she had
soon discovered, any less than too much hardly amounted to trouble at all. If Sue really cared about her, wouldn’t she at least have provided some food? No: the answer had always been, and
was now, no. But an egg or some cheese would surely have been easy? ‘I can’t eat these grapes,’ she announced: trying to show some spirit nearly always turned out to be rude.

‘Listen! It’s them: at least they’ve come.’

Harriet listened: over and above the ominous drone of mosquitoes, she heard what sounded like a very tiny car being abused at great speed. There was a small explosion on the gravel, doors
slamming more times than four doors would slam, and feet outside – they could not tell how many. There were light taps with an intimate rhythm on the kitchen door: Sue had got to her feet,
opened it immediately and let two men and one woman into the room.

‘Voici Arlette,’ the older man said briefly.

‘Bonsoir, Arlette, je vous présente mon amie, Harriet. Elle part demain pour Londres. Voici Jean, et Jean Christophe.’ Harriet found herself shaking hands with all three of
them; each one responded ‘Madame’. Then they all sat round the table and Sue produced a bottle of wine and glasses. Harriet, too, was offered some wine: everybody excepting Arlette and
Sue smoked.

There was a complete silence, which, though she felt it was intimate between the three French and Sue, simply mounted her own feeling of tension. She tried to deploy this by noticing the friends
of her friend. Jean, the abortionist, was a heavy, dark man who looked as though no feat of strength could ever be beyond him. He wore a dark blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose arms
rounded with muscle and covered with dark hair. Beside him, Jean Christophe looked like some wild but faun-like creature. He too was dark, but very slender and wiry: he had the whitest teeth she
had ever seen in her life and a capacity for stillness that made Harriet feel that, if she were alone with him, she would hear his heart beating. She felt comfortable about him. Arlette looked
discontented and intelligent, excepting when either Sue or big Jean spoke to her, whereupon her face changed completely by her smile, both affectionate and sardonic.

‘Heat water,’ Jean told her briefly, and at once she fetched a saucepan, filled it nearly full of water, and lit the gas on one of the stove burners. ‘Et un cendrier pour le
fauve là.’ Everybody laughed but Harriet, who saw Jean Christophe blush and shift his feet; he had been letting the ash accumulate at the end of his cigarette until about two inches of
it had fallen to the tiled floor. Then everybody talked, and Harriet by listening as hard as she could gathered that big Jean was telling Sue that she was a stupid little cabbage driving her car
into the middle of the heap of gravel. Sue replied defensively, mentioning several times the name of Jules, at which Arlette broke into a flood of sardonic reminiscence, which included an imitation
of Jules that made everybody rock with laughter except for Jean Christophe, who gave a succession of fleeting smiles when he was not looking at the wine in his hands or at Harriet. The water
boiled, and Jean took two things (instruments?) out of the small pack that hung round his back and dropped them in. ‘Alors; vingt minutes,’ he said. A moment of terror struck
Sue’s face, and Harriet saw her glance at Jean Christophe, but he was looking carefully at the end of his cigarette, as though it had nothing to do with him.

‘If only I could speak French!’ Harriet thought, realizing that this was what she had been thinking ever since the three of them arrived. The thought came to the surface because she
realized that Sue was talking to big Jean about her. She got the point that Sue was explaining that she, Harriet, was one of her oldest friends, but after that she was lost. ‘Marseille’
was mentioned: something about her going on a train from there tomorrow and would big Jean be able to drive her, when suddenly Arlette exclaimed: ‘Ah non!’ There followed a torrent of conversation, until Harriet could bear it no longer, and touching Sue’s arm said: ‘Sue,
please
, tell me what this is all
about.’

Sue lit a cigarette, took one puff and then stubbed it out before replying: ‘Sorry, honey: it’s just not being your night. Arlette says that if you want to get to England,
you’ll have to go tonight. There’s a
grève
beginning tomorrow. A strike, railway shut-down except for freight. There
is
a train going out tonight, but nobody knows
the time. Do you have to go tomorrow?’

‘I have to: I have to be back at work.’

‘Anyway, the strike could go on for a week or more. How about flying?’

‘Can’t do it.’ Harriet did not want to explain that she simply hadn’t the money for it.

Sue spoke rapidly to Arlette, who nodded, agreed and went out of the kitchen.

‘She’s going to try and telephone the station to find out the time. She may not get through, though.’

‘But how can I
get
to Marseille? You certainly can’t drive me.’

Sue turned to both the Jeans, impartially, as though they were almost one person, and asked a brief question. The younger Jean answered monosyllabically, and Sue said: ‘Jean will drive
you.’

‘It’s very kind of him,’ Harriet murmured, and as though he understood her perfectly, the younger Jean looked up at her suddenly with a smile both fleeting and mysterious, and
said: ‘C’est la moindre des choses, Mademoiselle.’

The larger Jean looked at his watch, and indicated that it was time. Sue leapt to her feet, but then stood transfixed there: Harriet got up from the table as well; she imagined that if there was
any use she could be it must be now, and fear that she would in some way fail her friend assailed her. But Jean, carrying the pan, took Sue gently by the arm and led her out of the room. Harriet
could hear them going upstairs together. She and the younger Jean were left alone. He offered her a cigarette, and while he was lighting it for her, she noticed that his hands, although the nails
were broken and the skin hard, were a beautiful shape. His eyes avoided hers while he lit the cigarette, and while he was lighting his own, and afterwards he simply stared at the table. Harriet
nearly thanked him, but then felt that this might lead to a conversation and she would be sunk, so she simply smiled at him. A clock ticked – like a metronome against the crowded sound of the
cicadas. Arlette came back into the room. She jerked her head upwards as she asked Jean something and he nodded. She then burst into a voluble description of her telephone call, eventually turning
to Harriet and clearly explaining to her about the train. ‘Trois heures moins le quart,’ she said several times, and Jean held up his three fingers and then cut the tip of his fourth
finger with the other hand. ‘Je comprends,’ said Harriet. A quarter to three! And there would probably be no sleeping compartments left on the train, or they would be first class, or
there simply wouldn’t be any. Oh well. She offered Arlette and Jean more wine; both declined, but she helped herself. There was no other form of sustenance; she wanted badly to scratch her
mosquito bites and hoped that the wine would help her to leave them alone. Doing nothing in silence would make that impossible.

What seemed to Harriet a long time later, but was in fact only a few minutes, big Jean came down alone. ‘Montez, Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît,’ he said slowly and
carefully to Harriet, as he both looked at her and held the door open. Harriet got up, went through the door, to find herself immediately faced with a staircase behind it. Jean shut the door after
her, whereupon she could hardly see at all, except a fortunate glimmer coming from a half-open door somewhere to the right at the top of the stairs. In her bedroom, Sue was lying on the bed on a
blue towel. She wore simply her sleeveless shirt, and there was a pail beside the bed. Her face looked as though some faintly luminescent green light was shining upon it, and she was shivering.

‘Could you get me another towel, honey?’ she said in a voice diminished by either shock, fear or pain, Harriet was not sure. She fetched the towel from the adjacent bathroom, laid it
over Sue and began to tuck it in.

‘No, I can’t have it tucked in. Any minute now, I’ll have to shoot out and sit on that awful pail.’

‘Can’t you use the lavatory? I mean, wouldn’t it be more comfortable?’

‘It would, but Jean says he’s got to see that everything’s come out. He’s got to wait, poor sod, until I’ve got rid of everything.’

‘Poor Sue; I’m so sorry. Listen – apparently I’ve got to go tonight, as you know. But not for ages. The train leaves at three moins le quart.’

Sue smiled weakly. ‘Well done, at least you’re learning some French. I’m so sorry all that had to happen – Christ! Here it comes.’ She was out of the bed in a
single movement, and then sat on the pail. Harriet held out her hand, and Sue squeezed it.

‘It’s all right,’ she said: ‘It’s on its way. It doesn’t hurt.’ Her face began to sweat. ‘But it isn’t exactly enjoyable.’ Harriet
knelt by her and went on holding her hand. There was what Harriet could only describe as a stench of hot blood. This nauseated her, but she knew that she must be oblivious of it. After all, nurses
in hospitals . . . She was glad she wasn’t a nurse. She wasn’t kind enough, or tough enough, or, indeed, anything enough. Then, suddenly it was better; Sue had become a small,
vulnerable animal, entirely taken over by her body, and somehow impersonal and pathetic because of it. ‘Not over yet. He said there might be a waiting time in between.’ She panted like
a small animal as well.

‘I’m going to fetch a sponge for your face,’ Harriet said, with the first air of authority she had experienced for years. Sue nodded, and then was taken over again. Harriet
gently disentangled from Sue’s cold and demanding clutch, and went to the bathroom. This time, as she ran a sponge under the hot tap, and surprisingly very hot water soon emerged from it, she
noticed that the bathroom was also modern and immaculate – rather like the bathroom in a first-class hotel. That was to say that it had every gadget; gleaming tiles, a bidet, shower and bath
and basin, but no sign that Sue used it at all, except for the sponge.

When she went back, Sue said, ‘Getting on nicely’; her eyes were gleaming with tears. Harriet gently sponged her face, and fetched the towel to drape round her for warmth and
dignity. ‘Poor Sue: dear Sue,’ she kept saying, and as though she could not understand the words, but only her tone of voice, Sue kept looking at her dumbly. After a while, of no
duration that either of them could have measured, Sue said, ‘It might be over now. Will you ask Jean to come up?’

‘Of course.’ Harriet left her, and went carefully down the stairs, felt for the latch of the door, but before she had found it, Jean was there. Harriet said: ‘She wants
you,’ in English, but he understood, and went fast but heavily up the stairs.

Harriet, uncertain what she should do now, stood uneasily by the door to the kitchen. The etiquette of who could be where and when was obvious, she felt, to everybody excepting herself. Arlette,
without a word, handed her some brandy and a cigarette. Harriet, touched by the gestures, accepted both, neither of which she wanted. The other Jean looked significantly at the clock and at
Harriet. ‘Oh God! I’m going to have to go before it’s all over.’ This made her feel both treacherous and selfish. She nodded back, and went upstairs again.

When she entered the room, Sue was sitting on the pail. She said, ‘It’s not over. Jean says I must just stay here quietly.’ She then said something to Jean, who passed his hand
over her dank hair in a manner both kind and commanding. He then spoke to Sue, who said, ‘Jean says that Jean will drive you to Marseille. You’ll be all right with him. You ought to go
now to get a seat. I’m so glad, honey. Don’t worry about me.’