Piranha to Scurfy (15 page)

He surprised her. “I take the bus. In poor countries are always many buses.” He had learned that. She had a feeling he had said it many times before.

Why did she have to ask? She was half-afraid of him now, but his attraction for her was returning. “Shall I see you again?”

“Of course. On the beach. Diet Coke and chips, right?” Again he began laughing. His sense of humor was not of a kind she had come across before. He turned to her and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Tomorrow night, sure. Here. Same time, same place.”

Not a very satisfactory encounter, she thought as she went back to the hotel. But it had been sex, the first for a long time, and he was handsome and sweet and funny. She was sure he would never do anything to hurt her, and that night she slept better than she had since her arrival.

All mornings were the same here, all bright sunshine and mounting heat and cloudless sky. First she went to the pool. He shouldn’t think she was running after him. But she had put on her new white swimming costume, the one that was no longer too tight, and after a while, with a towel tied round her sarong-fashion, she went down to the beach.

For a long time she didn’t see him. The American girl and the Caribbean man were serving the food and drink. Alison was so late getting there that all the recliners and hoods had gone. She was provided with a chair and an umbrella, inadequate protection against the sun. Then she saw him, leaning out of the pavilion to hand someone a towel. He waved to her and smiled. At once she was elated, and leaving her towel on the chair, she ran down the beach and plunged into the sea.

Because she wasn’t being careful, because she had forgotten everything but him and the hope that he would come and sit with her and have a drink with her, she came out of the water without thinking of the mountain of water that pursued her, without any awareness that it was behind her. The great wave broke, felled her, and roared on, knocking out her breath, drenching her hair. She tried to get a purchase with her hands, to dig into the sand and pull herself up before the next breaker came. Her eyes and mouth and ears were full of salt water. She pushed her fingers into the wet, slippery sand and encountered something she thought at first was a shell. Clutching it, whatever it was, she managed to crawl out of the sea while the next wave broke behind her and came rippling in, a harmless trickle.

By now she knew that what she held was no shell. Without looking at it she thrust it into the top of her swimming costume, between her breasts. She dried herself, dried her eyes, which stung with salt, felt a raging thirst from the brine she had swallowed. No one had come to her aid, no one had walked down to the water’s edge to ask if she was all right. Not even the beach butler. But he was here now beside her, smiling, carrying her Diet Coke and packet of crisps as if she had ordered them.

“Ocean smack you down? Too bad. I don’t think you lose no jewels?”

She shook her head, nearly said, “No, but I found some.” But now wasn’t the time, not until she had had a good look. She drank her Diet Coke, took the crisps upstairs with her. In her bathroom, under the cold tap, she washed her find. The sight came back to her of Agustin encircling his wrist with his fingers when he told her of the white bikini woman’s loss. This was surely her bracelet or some other rich woman’s bracelet.

It was a good two inches wide, gold set with broad bands of diamonds. They flashed blindingly when the sun struck them. Alison examined its underside, found the assay mark, the proof that the gold was eighteen carat. The sea, the sand, the rocks, the salt had damaged it not at all. It sparkled and gleamed as it must have done when first it lay on blue velvet in some Madison Avenue or Beverly Hills jeweler’s shop.

She took a shower, washed her hair and blew it dry, put on a sundress. The bracelet lay on the coffee table in the living area of the suite, its diamonds blazing in the sun. She had better take it downstairs and hand it over to the management. The white bikini woman would be glad to have it back. No doubt, though, it was insured. Her husband would already have driven her to the city where the airport was (Ciudad Something) and bought her another.

What was it worth? If those diamonds were real, an enormous sum. And surely no jeweler would set any but real diamonds in eighteen-carat gold? Alison was afraid to leave it in her suite. A safe was inside one of the cupboards. But suppose she put the bracelet into the safe and couldn’t open it again? She put it into her white shoulderbag. The time was only just after three. She looked at the list of available videos, then, feeling reckless, at the room-service menu. Having the bracelet—though of course she meant to hand it in—made her feel differently about that credit card. She picked up the phone, ordered a piña colada, a half bottle of wine, seafood salad, a double burger and french fries, and a video of
Shine.

Eating so much didn’t keep her from a big dinner four hours later. She went to the most expensive of the hotel’s three restaurants, drank more wine, ate smoked salmon, lobster thermidor, raspberry pavlova. She wrote her suite number on the bill and signed it without even looking at the amount. Under the tablecloth she opened her bag and looked at the gold and diamond bracelet. Taking it to the management now would be very awkward. They might be aware that she hadn’t been to the beach since not long after lunchtime; they might want to know what she had been doing with the bracelet in the meantime. She made a decision. She wouldn’t take it to the management; she would take it to Agustin.

The moon was bigger and brighter this evening, waxing from a sliver to a crescent. Not quite sober, for she had had a lot to drink, she walked down the winding path under the palms to the beach. This time he wasn’t plying his metal detector but sitting on a pile of folded beach chairs, smoking a cigarette and staring at the sea. It was the first time she had seen the sea so calm, so flat and shining, without waves, without even the customary swell.

Agustin would know what to do. There might be a reward for the finder, almost sure to be. She would share it with him—she wouldn’t mind that, so long as she had enough to pay for those extras. He turned around, smiled, extended one hand. She expected to be kissed but he didn’t kiss her, only patted the seat beside him.

She opened her bag, said, “Look.”

His face seemed to close up, grow tight, grow instantly older. “Where you find this?”

“In the sea.”

“You tell?”

“You mean, have I told anyone? No, I haven’t. I wanted to show it to you and ask your advice.”

“It is worth a lot. A lot. Look, this is gold. This is diamond. Worth maybe fifty thousand, hundred thousand dollar.”

“Oh, no, Agustin!”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

He began to laugh. He crowed with laughter. Then he took her in his arms, covered her face and neck with kisses. Things were quite different from the night before. In the shadows, under the pines, where the rocks were smooth and the sand soft, his lovemaking was slow and sweet. He held her close and kissed her gently, murmuring to her in his own language.

The sea made a soft lapping sound. A faint strain of music, the last of the evening, reached them from somewhere. He was telling her he loved her.
I love you, I love you.
He spoke with the accents of California and she knew he had learned it from films.
I love you.

“Listen,” he said. “Tomorrow we take the bus. We go to the city . . .” Ciudad Something was what he said, but again she didn’t catch the name. “We sell this jewel, I know where, and we are rich.We go to Mexico City, maybe Miami, maybe Rio.You like Rio?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

“Me too. But we go. Kiss me. I love you.”

She kissed him. She put her clothes on, picked up her shoulderbag. He watched her, said, “What are you doing?” When she began to walk down the beach, he called after her, “Where are you going?”

She stood at the water’s edge. The sea was swelling into waves now. It hadn’t stayed calm for long, its gleaming, ruffled surface black and silver. She opened her bag, took out the bracelet, and threw it as far as she could into the sea.

His yell was a thwarted child’s. As he plunged into the water, she turned and began to walk away, up the beach toward the steps.When she was under the palm trees she turned to look back and saw him splashing wildly, on all fours scrabbling in the wet sand, seeking what surely could never be found again. As she entered the hotel the thought came to her that she had never told him her name and he had never asked.

THE ASTRONOMICAL SCARF

IT WAS A VERY LARGE SQUARE, silk in the shade of blue called midnight, which is darker than royal and lighter than navy, and the design on it was a map of the heavens. The Milky Way was there and Charles’s Wain, Orion, Cassiopeia, and the Seven Daughters of Atlas. A young woman who was James Mullen’s secretary saw it in a shop window in Bond Street, draped across the seat of a (reproduction) Louis Quinze chair with a silver chain necklace lying on it and a black picture hat with a dark blue ribbon covering one of its corners.

Cressida Chilton had been working for James Mullen for just three months when he sent her out to buy a birthday present for his wife. Not jewelry, he had said. Use your own judgment, I can see you’ve got good taste—but not jewelry. Cressida could see which way the wind was blowing there.

“Not jewelry” were the fateful words. Elaine Mullen was his second wife and had held that position for five years. Office gossip had it that he was seeing one of the management trainees in Foreign Securities. I wish it were me, thought Cressida, and she went into the shop and bought the scarf—appropriately enough, for an astronomical price—and then, because no shops gift-wrapped in those days, into a stationer’s around the corner for a sheet of pink-and-silver paper and a twist of silver string.

Elaine knew the meaning of the astronomical scarf. She knew who had wrapped it up, too, and it wasn’t James. She had expected a gold bracelet, and she could see the writing on the wall as clearly as if James had turned graffitist and chalked up something to the effect of all good things coming to an end. As for the scarf, didn’t he know she never wore blue? Hadn’t he noticed that her eyes were hazel and her hair light brown? That secretary, the one who was in love with him, had probably bought it out of spite. Elaine gave it to her blue-eyed sister, who happened to come around and saw it on the dressing table. It was the very day she was served with her divorce papers under the new law, Matrimonial Causes Act, 1973.

Elaine’s sister wore the scarf to a lecture at the Royal Society of Lepidopterists, of which she was a fellow. Cloakroom arrangements in the premises of learned societies are often somewhat slapdash, and here, in a Georgian house in Bloomsbury Square, fellows, members, and their guests were expected to hang up their coats themselves on a row of hooks in a dark corner of the hall. When all the hooks were in use, coats had to be either placed over those already there or hung up on the floor. Elaine’s sister, arriving rather late, took off her coat, threaded the astronomical scarf through one sleeve, in at the shoulder and out at the cuff, and draped the coat over someone’s very old ocelot.

Sadie Williamson was a world authority on the genus
Argynnis,
its global distribution and habitats. She was also a thief. She stole something nearly every day. The coat she was wearing she had stolen from Harrods, and the shoes on her feet from a friend’s clothes cupboard after a party. She was proud to say (to herself) that she had never given anyone a present she had had to pay for. Now in the dim and deserted hall, on the walls of which a few eighteenth-century prints of British butterflies were just visible, Sadie searched among the garments for some trifle worth picking up.

An unpleasant smell arose from the clothes, compounded of dirty cloth, old sweat, mothballs, cleaning fluid, and something in the nature of wet sheep. Sadie curled up her nose distastefully. She would have liked to wash her hands, but someone had hung an Out of Order sign on the washroom door. Not much worth bothering about here, she was thinking, when she saw the hand-rolled and hemstitched corner of a blue scarf protruding from a coat sleeve. She gave it a tug. Rather nice, she decided, and quickly tucked it into her coat pocket because she could hear footsteps coming from the lecture room.

The next day she took it around to the cleaners. Most things she stole she had dry-cleaned, even if they were fresh off a hanger in a shop. You never knew who might have tried them on.

“The zodiac,” said the woman behind the counter. “Which sign are you?”

“I don’t believe in it, but I’m a Cancer.”

“Oh, dear,” said the woman. “I never think that sounds very nice, do you?”

Sadie put the scarf into a box that had contained a pair of tights she had stolen from Selfridges, wrapped it up in a piece of paper that had wrapped a present given to
her,
and sent it to her godchild for Christmas. The parcel never got there. It was one of those lost in the robbery of a mail train traveling between Norwich and London.

Of the two young men who snatched the mailbags, it was the elder who helped himself to the scarf. He thought it was new; it looked new. He gave it to his girlfriend. She took one look and asked him who he thought she was, her own mother? What was she supposed to do with it, tie it round her head when she went to the races?

She meant to give it to her mother but accidentally left it in the taxi in which she was traveling from Kilburn to Acton. It was found, along with a carton of two hundred cigarettes, two cans of Diet Coke, and a copy of
Playboy,
the lot in a rather worn Harrods carrier, by the taxi driver’s next fare. She happened to be Cressida Chilton, who was still James Mullen’s secretary but who failed to recognize the scarf because it was enclosed in the paper wrapped around it by Sadie Williamson. Besides, she was still in a state of shock from what she had read in the paper that morning: the announcement of James’s imminent marriage, his third.

“This was on the floor,” she said, handing the bag over with the taxi driver’s tip.

“They go about in a dream,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff they leave behind. I had a full set of Masonic regalia left in my cab last week, and the week before that it was a baby’s pot, no kidding, and a pair of wellies. How am I supposed to know who the stuff belongs to? They’d leave themselves behind, only they have to get out when they pay, thank God. I mean, what is it this time? Packets of fags and a dirty book...”

“I hope you find the owner,” said Cressida, and she rushed off through the revolving door and up in the lift to be sure of getting there before James did, to be ready with her congratulations, all smiles.

“Find the owner, my arse,” said the taxi driver to himself.

He drew up at the red light next to another taxi whose driver he knew and, having already seen this copy, passed him the
Playboy
through their open windows. The cigarettes he smoked himself. He gave the Diet Cokes and the scarf to his wife. She said it was the most beautiful scarf she had ever seen and she wore it every time she went anywhere that required dressing up.

Eleven years later her daughter Maureen borrowed it. Repeatedly the taxi driver’s wife asked for it back, and Maureen meant to give it back, but she always forgot. Until one day when she was about to go to her mother’s and the scarf came into her head, a vision inspired by a picture in the
Radio Times
of the night sky in September. Her flat was always untidy, a welter of clothes and magazines and tape cassettes and full ash-trays. But once she had started looking she really wanted to find the scarf. She looked everywhere, grubbed about in cupboards and drawers, threw stuff on the floor and fumbled through half-unpacked suitcases. The result was that she was very late in getting to her mother’s but she had not found the astronomical scarf.

This was because it had been taken the previous week—borrowed, she too would have said—by a boyfriend who was in love with her but whose love was unrequited. Or not as fully requited as he wished. The scarf was not merely intended as a sentimental keepsake but to be taken to a clairvoyant in Shepherds Bush who had promised him dramatic results if she could only hold in her hands “something of the beloved’s.” In the event, the spell or charm failed to work, possibly because the scarf belonged not to Maureen but to her mother. Or did it? It would have been hard to say who its owner was by this time.

The clairvoyant meant to return the scarf to Maureen’s boyfriend at his next visit, but that was not due for two weeks. In the meantime she wore it herself. She was only the second person into whose possession it had come to look on it with love and admiration. Elaine Mullen’s sister had worn it because it was obviously of good quality and because it was
there;
Sadie Williamson had recognized it as expensive; Maureen had borrowed it because the night had turned cold and she had a sore throat. But only her mother and now the clairvoyant had truly appreciated it.

This woman’s real name was not known until after she was dead. She called herself Thalia Essene. The scarf delighted her, not because of the quality of the silk, nor its hand-rolled hem, nor its color, but because of the constellations scattered across its midnight blue. Such a map was to her what a chart of the Atlantic Ocean might have been to some early navigator—essential, enrapturing, mysterious, indispensable, lifesaving. Its stars were the encyclopedia of her trade, the impenetrable spaces between them the source of her predictions. She sat for many hours in meditative contemplation of the scarf, which she spread on her lap, stroking it gently and sometimes murmuring incantations. When she went out she wore it along with her layers of trailing garments, her black cloak, and her pomander of asafetida grass.

Roderick Thomas had never been among her clients. He was a neighbor, having just moved into one of the rooms below her flat in the Uxbridge Road. Years had passed since he had done any work or anyone had shown the slightest interest in him, wished for his company or paid attention to what he said, let alone cared about him. Thalia Essene was one of the few people who actually spoke to him, and all she said when she saw him was “Hi” or “Rain again.”

One day, though, she made the mistake of saying a little more. The sun was shining out of a cloudless sky.

“The goddess loves us this morning.”

Roderick Thomas looked at her with his mouth open. “You what?”

“I said, the goddess loves us today. She’s shedding her glorious sunshine onto the face of the earth.”

Thalia smiled at him and walked on. She was on her way to the shops in King Street. Roderick Thomas started shambling after her. For some years he had been on the lookout for the Antichrist, who he knew would come in female form. He followed Thalia into Marks & Spencer’s and the cassette shop, where she was in the habit of buying music as background for her fortune-telling sessions. She was well aware of his presence and, growing increasingly angry, then nervous, went home in a taxi.

Next day he hammered on her door. She told him to go away.

“Say that about the sunshine again,” he said.

“It’s not sunny today.”

“You could pretend. Say about the goddess.”

“You’re mad,” said Thalia.

A client who had been having his palm read and had heard it all gave her a funny look. She told him his life line was the longest she had ever seen and he would probably make it to a hundred.When she went downstairs Roderick Thomas was waiting for her in the hall. He looked at the scarf.

“Clothed in the sun,” he said, “and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

Thalia said something so alien to her philosophy of life, so contrary to all her principles, that she could hardly believe she’d uttered it. “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll call the police.”

He followed her just the same. She walked up to Shepherds Bush Green. Her threats gave her a dark aura, and he saw the stars encircling her. She fascinated him, though he was beginning to see her as a source of danger. In Newcastle, where he had been living until two years before, he had killed a woman he had mistakenly thought was the Antichrist because she’d told him to go to hell when he spoke to her. For a long time he expected to be sent to hell, and although the fear had somewhat abated, it came back when he was confronted by manifestly evil women.

A man was standing on one of the benches on the green, preaching to the multitude. Well, to four or five people. Roderick Thomas had followed Thalia to the tube station, but there he had to abandon pursuit for lack of money to buy a ticket. He wandered onto the green. The man on the bench stared straight at him and said, “Thou shalt have no other gods but me!”

Roderick took that for a sign—you’d have to be daft not to get the message—but he asked his question just the same.

“What about the goddess?”

“For Solomon went after Ashtoreth,” said the man on the bench, “and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites. Wherefore the Lord said unto Solomon, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee and will give it to thy servant.”

That was fair enough. Roderick went home and bided his time, listening to the voice of the preacher, which had taken over from the usual voice he heard during his waking hours. It told him of a woman in purple sitting on a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. He watched from his window until he saw Thalia Essene come in, carrying a large recycled paper bag in a dull purple with CELESTIAL SECONDS printed on its side.

Thalia was feeling happy because she hadn’t seen Roderick for several hours and believed she had shaken him off. She was going out that evening to see a play at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in the company of a friend who was a famous water diviner. To this end she had bought herself a new dress or, rather, a “nearly new” dress, purple Indian cotton with mirrorwork and black embroidery. The blue starry scarf, which she had taken to calling the
astrological
scarf, went well with it. She draped it around her neck, lamenting the coldness of the night. A shawl would be inadequate, and all this would have to be covered by her old black coat.

A quick glance at her engagement book showed her that Maureen’s boyfriend was due for a consultation the next morning.The scarf must be returned to him. She would wear it for the last time. As it happened, Thalia was wearing all these clothes for the last time, doing everything she did for the last time, but clairvoyant though she was, of her imminent fate she had no prevision.

She walked along, looking for a taxi. None came. She had plenty of time and decided to walk to Hammersmith. Roderick Thomas was behind her, but she had forgotten about him and she didn’t look around. She was thinking about the water diviner, whom she hadn’t seen for eighteen months but who was reputed to have split up from his girlfriend.