by George Sims
‘You’re right, though I don’t know how you guessed. It’s so pleasantly cool there in the evening before the mosquitoes descend and I can’t resist pottering.’
Balfour pointed at the tiny bumps on her fingers: ‘Those are not mosquito bites—they’re minute insects—I don’t know what the French name is, but in Dorset they call them harvesters. Painful and very irritating I know by experience. Bathe your hands here while I get you some iced ananas.’
Mrs Hillyard went up the steps and through the front door, pausing for a moment and looking into the large room on her right with its series of french windows and views of the Golfe de Calvi and the Citadel. He put his hand on her back and she turned to him, cautiously smiling:
‘That’s rather super. Must be wonderful at night.’
She hesitated again at the end of the passage where there was a closed door on her right leading to the kitchen and patio, and a passage to the left with the doors of the five bedrooms. For a moment Balfour did not guide her. He was experiencing a light-headed feeling that often came to him in tricky situations: an indifference that was tantamount to a wish for danger, exposure and failure. Sammy Weiss called it ‘the will for self-destruction’. He felt that he did not really care if she turned left, forcing him to take part in a kind of French farce. But there was something else which had caused him to pause. When he had put his hand on her back she had shivered and as their eyes met there had been a momentary expression of attraction—a message so fleeting that afterwards one wondered if it had appeared. He did find her attractive—she had the same widely spaced dark blue eyes, clusters of freckles and firm jaw as Bunty. She smelt rather deliciously of Pears soap and dianthus talc. For a moment he had been tempted to slip his arm round her waist, and then was disturbed by this impulse. Barbara had said: ‘You’re sick. It’s an illness. There’s a name for it.’ It was true that he had always found many women attractive; he was not the type to make a faithful husband. But this casual, practically automatic, lust provoked by a smile and a moment’s intimacy was a new development, and one he did not like. Was Barbara’s diagnosis true—would he become a tiresome old Don Juan, always touching women, making advances to see if they would be repulsed?
He opened the kitchen door and turned on the tap with an abstracted air. Mrs Hillyard’s gaze became suspicious again, directed at the table in the dining alcove set for two, the plates untidy with scraps of ham and olives, a bowl containing the remains of a gazpacho salad, glasses half-filled with rosé wine.
‘Marie-Antoinette, the maid,’ he explained, rather too quickly. ‘She wanted to go down to the Lido so I said I would wash up, after my siesta. She’s not too hot at washing-up, but a splendid cook, comes from Brittany, does a marvellous gigot de pré-salé. You must all come for dinner some time.’
‘That’s very kind,’ she said non-committally. Her renewed suspicion had completely dispersed the air of intimacy; her eyes were watchfully attentive and Balfour wondered if Bunty had left anything identifiable by the table—he had begun to undress her there but only, as far as he could remember, to the extent of undoing the shoulder buttons on her terry towelling beach frock.
‘You’ve stayed here before?’
‘Yes, twice—but with my family then.’
‘Oh—you’re married.’ Again her tone was intended to be light and unconcerned but it was obvious that she had given the matter some thought and was surprised that he should be willing to confirm her suspicions, as if he had casually given her a weapon which could be used against him.
‘Yes—but we’re separated.’ His automatic, not very friendly grin and quizzical expression demanded how long this questioning would continue. She put down the glass of ananas.
‘Many thanks. It seems we shall have to make the trip to Piana daughterless. If by any chance you should happen to see her, perhaps you’ll say we shan’t be back till seven or so.’
He stood at the top of the steps blinking in the brilliant sunlight, then shading his eyes frowningly to make a pause for thought; but a phrase to pass over the tricky situation eluded him and after a moment she walked off, with a brief wave of her hand. He watched her until she had gone over the first little bridge and past the clump of eucalyptus trees, then he turned back and went down the dark and comparatively cool passage.
Bunty had removed one of the screens and put on her polka-dot bikini; she was sitting in a cane chair, reading an old copy of Paris-Match. She regarded him over the top of steel-rimmed dark glasses which were perched halfway down her nose. The look was at once provocative and critical. What was she thinking? That he was practically her mother’s contemporary? That someone her own age would be more fun? He could dive, swim and water-ski better than most of the youngsters on the beach, his sense of humour was still functioning off and on, and no one had ever accused him of taking life too seriously, but he was well aware of his limitations as far as she was concerned. Above all he lacked her true, spontaneous gaiety—and there were occasions when she seemed like an inhabitant of a different planet, instead of a member of another generation, and it was as if he could not possibly communicate with her. Perhaps her appraising look meant that he was for the chop. If so he could not grumble. That was the way they had agreed to play the game.
He patted the bed. ‘Come here.’
Bunty cleared her throat and raised her eyebrows in a meaningful way and said, ‘I’ve been there,’ but she put down the magazine and approached him rather coyly. He pulled her on to his knees, humming a brief snatch of ‘Baubles, Bangles and Beads,’ then made a fuss of fingering the pearl, raising his eyebrows like Groucho Marx and saying: ‘Yes, Madam, an eighteen grain orient drop on a fine trace. Worth…’
‘Yes. Worth how much?’
‘Who gave it to you?’
‘My old man. For my twenty-first. Can you really value it?’
‘I could hazard a fairly intelligent guess. I’ve a friend who is a jeweller and he’s told me a lot. But this seems to be the occasion for one of my rare moments of tact. Let us say you could not buy it for £200—a fine pearl. And not a bad bit of skin come to that…’
Bunty was cradled in his left arm. Her eyebrows looked as if they had just been dashed on in pale gold; the fine strokes glistened against her deeply tanned forehead. He tugged gently at the lobes of her ears and pretended to have difficulty in getting her face in the right position for a kiss. He was just bending down to complete this enjoyably protracted business when she gave a start: ‘What the hell’s that?’
She pointed dramatically to the ceiling. He looked up to see what appeared to be the elongated shadow of a man’s torso. For a moment it was stationary, then it jerked forward and down out of their vision. Some chance arrangement of mirrors and lenses had contrived a camera obscura effect to present them with this startling image. Once gone it seemed impossible that it had in fact been there, but Bunty was not in any doubt. She squirmed out of his arms and on to her knees on the floor. ‘Christ! First my mama. Now we have a voyeur out there!’
Balfour moved quickly to the open window, to see a postman straightening up from tying his shoe-lace. The man was sweating profusely and kept dabbing his forehead with a grubby handkerchief. He was obviously annoyed at having had to make this trip which necessitated a steep walk up from the rough track. He muttered something about a telegram and an inadequate address, and then frowned as if searching for something else to say to unburden more of his irritation. He pushed an envelope at Balfour with an aggressive movement which displayed a large black area round the armpit of his faded uniform.
Cables were a daily occurrence in Balfour’s business but he was faintly disturbed at receiving one on holiday: he had left instructions that he was not to be sent any communications from his office—it flashed through his mind that this might be something about one of the children, an accident perhaps.
The telegram was addressed simply to Balfour, care of du Cro
s, Calvi, Corsica. It read: VITAL I HAVE YOUR ADVICE ON TERRIBLE DECISION I MUST MAKE PLEASE PHONE ME TOMORROW MORNING AT THE ARCADE AS EVER SAMMY WEISS. Balfour was not aware of the postman leaving as he stood re-reading the form, slowly digesting its scanty, puzzling message.
Chapter III
While Bunty tidied the bedroom and put the dishes in the sink, Balfour drove the battered grey Citroen ‘two-horse’ round to the front of the villa, arranged two pairs of water-skis in the back and fetched an air-mattress for the girl to sit on as only the driver’s seat remained in the car. He went through these actions automatically, his mind preoccupied with the message from Sammy Weiss which was so curiously out of character as to seem spurious; in the fourteen years they had known each other there had been innumerable occasions when he had asked Sammy’s advice, but he could not remember a single occasion when the positions had been reversed; the situation was made even odder and more ironic by the fact that it was due to Sammy offering him some, for once, unwanted advice that they had not met during the week before he went on holiday. Looking for bathing towels he realized that his mind was going round and round pointlessly as it sometimes did in the early hours of the morning, laboriously from point A to B to C and then with a jump back exactly to A. This was due to a feeling of frustration: he liked tackling problems of any kind, but if they came up he wanted to start on them immediately and this time it was not possible—for some unknown reason Sammy had insisted on him phoning the next day, which meant he would have about eighteen hours of indecision and useless speculation.
Driving down the steep slope and then along the narrow track was like negotiating an obstacle course. There were many large holes to skirt, and two places where rough bridges had been made from concrete slabs to cross the culvert which brought the water from the mountains, and these had to be treated with respect even if one was not concerned about the car.
Usually he enjoyed the bumpy drive with maquis-scented air coming in through the open roof, chestnut tree branches dipping almost to the top of the car and eucalyptus trees humming with bees. Even the oppressive heat in the car was made bearable by knowing that the journey led to the sea, but with the enigmatic telegram still nagging at his mind (surely it could only mean that S. was in some very serious though unimaginable danger/difficulty? Possibly a serious illness but why should he then want to consult him?) it now seemed rather flat and pointless.
‘Is it true—that you drove—this, this vehicle—down the steps—at Île Rousse?’ Bunty asked, grimly holding the side of the car but still bumping up and down, and occasionally rising out of contact with the lilo as the old ‘deux chevaux’ rattled along like a tank. Balfour nodded and grinned: ‘The story that I drove it back up again from the Café des Platanes is exaggerated.’ He could sense more than see that she was regarding him appraisingly again; she leant over and touched some of the small scars which circled his throat like a necklace and made smooth hairless places on his chest—the skin there was thin and wrinkled, like a dead leaf.
‘Did this hurt terribly? Being burnt like that—it’s something one can’t imagine.’
‘Yes and no. Not just when it happened, and then I had some morphine shots and blacked out—but boy it caught up with me later on.’
She traced the large scar below his ribs: ‘This is like Ireland. An archipelago round your neck. South America on your thigh. Squashed Australia or somewhere on your foot. Why is it all on one side?’
‘It was in the war—in Italy. A lorry full of jerrycans of petrol exploded. I was a wireless operator and we worked from a mobile transmitter called a “gin palace”—I’d gone off to make some tea when the convoy stopped. Some shells came down and our lorry was hit, and then I hope I was running back when the petrol went up whoosh!’
‘Hope?’ Bunty exclaimed.
‘Yes, hope. I don’t really know what I was doing. I might well have been streaking off—but I had two friends in that lorry and I hope I was trying to help them. Completely futile anyway as they were both dead but if I was trying that was my sole contribution to the war—we were only in Italy for five weeks, just four days within the sound of the German guns. The rest of the war I was swanning round England…’
He was on the verge of telling her of his abiding feeling of guilt and regret for not having done more in the war, but he rejected it just in time as putting too much weight on their flimsy relationship; it was required of him to amuse her as far as he was able, not regurgitate all this old stuff. The day before he had nearly asked her to remove some sea-urchin spines from his foot, as Barbara had often done on other Mediterranean holidays, but he had had a sudden vision of himself holding up a yellowing, hard-skinned sole for her to poke at with a needle, visualized a delicate cat’s yawn in response, and swallowed the request.
Turning past the veronica hedge on to the sand-covered road, Balfour determined to stop talking about himself and stop thinking about the cable—it was fruitless to brood on what it might mean and it could not help Sammy. They had an afternoon and evening to enjoy—water-skiing, swimming and then dinner, perhaps at Le Coucou pizzeria. He drove quite fast over the yielding surface of the parking area, swerving round the mobile crêperie so that he had sufficient momentum to run up the slope and park right under the umbrella pines. It was good to feel the dry sand and pine-needles under his feet as he unloaded the skis, pleasant to have the sun beating on his back and know that the sea was only fifty feet away. ‘Who doth ambition shun, And loves to live i’ the sun.’
As they walked past the queue of children waiting for pancakes Balfour noticed two youths standing at the gap in the pines which led to the beach, and then saw one turn as if to signal to someone behind him. When they went over the single railway-track half buried in sand they saw they had quite a large audience of teenagers, sitting close together as if waiting for a show.
‘I say, this isn’t fair,’ Bunty complained. ‘I shall never get up with that bunch there. I do it badly enough without any critical eyes watching me.’
‘Nonsense,’ Balfour replied firmly. ‘You’ll show them. Just relax. Don’t forget to concentrate on keeping the skis straight as you start, then bring them closer together as they begin to plane.’
It was absurd, but he very much wanted her to get up on the skis at the first attempt with this group watching. There was something about a clique of wealthy French youngsters with their snobbishness, determined modishness and arrogance which irritated him, bringing out chauvinistic feelings. He decided to give them something to watch, and walked on his hands down to the firm sand at the sea’s edge despite a disapproving exclamation from Bunty. There was some derisive slow hand-clapping and a few jeering comments: ‘Amusez-vous bien!’ ‘C’est bien fait pour vous!’ ‘Le temps est arrivé!’
As he flipped on to his feet he wanted to make a small bow to his apparently hostile audience but this effect was destroyed as his right foot, already made sore by the removal of sea-urchin spines, connected with a sharp stone. The pain was quite intense for a moment and he hopped twice, then dissembled his discomfiture by plunging into the shallow water.
When he got up again the young man who owned the boat was wading in with the ski lines. The Boston Whaler was the powerful modèle sport which could easily pull two skiers. There was a smallish figure with a white yachting-cap seated hunched behind the wheel staring fixedly out to sea and another youth in a bathing-costume bending over the ropes at the stern.
Balfour pointed to the boat: ‘Il est prêt, le bateau?’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘Tu ne conduit pas, alors?’
‘Non, monsieur, pas cet après-midi.’
The owner of the boat turned away, grimacing as if these questions were irritating and absurd. Balfour was puzzled why this man who the day before had been so helpful about Bunty’s progress with water-skiing should now be surly and anxious for someone else to take over the boat. He said, ‘Bon
. Merci,’ and went to fetch the water-skis. He called out to Bunty: ‘Remember, rope between the skis, tips just out of the water and about ten inches apart. Knees up to your chest. Wrists well spaced on the bar with knuckles uppermost.’ As he gave this advice there were more unfriendly and derisive shouts from the beach: ‘On se verra plus tard’, ‘A bientôt’, ‘Monsieur, monsieur, bon voyage!’, and when the Boston Whaler moved off there was an ironic roar from their audience.
Bunty was pulling on the rope a little too hard so that her feet shot forward and she nearly went over backwards. Balfour shouted, ‘Keep your arms rigid. Don’t tighten up.’ He could see her nod and knew it was going to be all right. Then he looked in front again and noticed that the youth in the white cap had turned and was grinning, pointing first at the skiers and then meaningfully at the horizon; with a dull kind of shock he realized it was one of the boys with whom he had scuffled the previous evening at the café Chez Tao. Balfour motioned his head at Bunty but the youth only shrugged and gunned the engine.
Balfour sniffed—he had a tight feeling in his nose and chest, warning signals that came to him before the red mist of anger. He shouted, ‘Turn back or I’ll give you another clip. Arrête-toi! Tu veux que je te casse la gueule?’ The boy in the black trunks roared with laughter.
Balfour knew that his words could not be heard but this did not stop him from shouting; his abuse became stronger after a quick glance at Bunty showed she realized this was not going to be an ordinary trip. Balfour was a good skier and could take a long and bumpy trip, but Bunty had only just started to learn; her face was taut and pale. They were going at such a clip he did not like to tell her to let go. He bunched a fist and shook it: ‘Idiot. Saleté. Con! Espèce de con!’ The boy in the costume just jigged about in response, waving and making funny faces. Balfour could not remember him but from his animosity it seemed that he too must have been involved in the fracas Chez Tao. He took deep breaths and inwardly cursed himself. Did anyone else of his age get involved in affairs like this leading to a teenage vendetta?
