The Fabulous Mrs. V.

by H. E. Bates

  ‘I didn’t quite catch what you said again.’

  ‘I was wondering if you’d like some more coffee, that’s all.’

  ‘I think I would, please.’

  He again picked up the empty coffee cups and took them back to the kiosk. A woman polishing a glass behind the counter said ‘Just in time, dear. Closing down in five minutes,’ and filled up the two cups with milky coffee again. He paid for them, took his change, picked up the cups and started to walk back to the table, his hands trembling.

  ‘I was just in time. They’ll soon be closing.’

  ‘Yes, it’s getting late.’

  For some time he had had a growing suspicion that, just as there was no pin, there was no Schloss, no companion, no aunt either: nothing but the plain dull face, its hopeless stare and the straight short hair where no hair-pin could ever possibly have sat. The diamond had never fallen from the crest of the pin. There was no Aimée Vibert and the romantic image of a dark-haired woman with the scent of carnations in her hair now sat away in a far corner somewhere, a ghost of a cooled imagination.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he said. He stirred his coffee with laborious, thoughtful strokes of the spoon. ‘Will you be going back to Austria?’

  ‘I don’t think so. At least not for some time.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There is plenty of time for the pin if that is what you are thinking.’

  ‘Oh! yes, it will be some time yet.’

  The sudden mention of the pin after such a long interval unnerved him again. He gulped at his coffee quickly and then said:

  ‘What made you leave Austria? I mean if you like it and it’s so beautiful?’

  She looked slowly across the lake, her stare darker again.

  ‘You are interested in that?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.’

  She picked up her coffee spoon and balanced it on the edge of the cup. The bowl floated for a fraction of a second and then sank.

  ‘I wanted to get away from myself. I was in a little trouble there.’

  He could find nothing to say to this and laboriously sipped his coffee, not looking at her.

  ‘A friend of mine was killed.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s strange I should talk to you about it. When I don’t wish to remember it.’

  ‘There’s no need to talk.’

  ‘I haven’t talked to anyone about it for one year.’

  For the first time his clumsy deceit about the hair-pin struck him as impossibly and painfully idiotic; he felt suddenly cramped with shame.

  ‘It was just an accident.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But it looked perhaps that I was responsible.’

  Again he had nothing to say. In the last ten minutes the light across the lake had faded perceptibly and on the far side a floating pair of gulls shone like ghosts too.

  ‘It was something that began as a joke and then—’

  ‘A man?’

  She paused for some moments and then said:

  ‘No, a girl. We worked at the Schloss together.’ This time there was no mistaking the word; it was worked, not walked. ‘It’s really a hotel.’

  So he was right, he thought. She had made it all up. Like the pin—

  ‘I was very fond of her. I did a stupid thing to make her jealous. Just a little stupid thing.’

  That was all. The picture, incomplete though it was, flared up before him with a brief white brilliance and then darkened again. He got up. For a moment he didn’t want to know any more. The idiotic deceit about the pin gnawed at him like a persistent rat and he drew his long fingers across his face several times as if forcing it away.

  ‘You are going now?’ she said.

  ‘I think so. If you are ready.’

  She got up too and then, without looking at her, he said: ‘Before we go would you mind if I asked you something?’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘I suppose you know there is a rose named Aimée Vibert?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She had come across it in a magazine; she had done it on the spur of the moment; it was because she didn’t want to use her proper name.

  There was a break in her voice, not so much apologetic as an invitation for him to say something, to tell her perhaps that he understood her feelings and her motives about it all. He knew that the moment had come when he had to say he understood and to tell her too that everything about the pin was a fake. It was all false; he was a fake too. He had cheated in the hope of acquiring the experience of something romantic and all he had got was that plain dark face with its hopeless stare and now there was no hope of explaining it all. He simply said:

  ‘My grandfather grew that rose. That’s how I knew about it.’

  She didn’t speak. They started to walk slowly along the lake-side. In a vacuum of indecision he stared ahead, watching the street lights come on beyond the park. The yellow rays of them, like strong moonlight, struck upwards into the leaves of the street-trees, miraculously heightening the pattern of colours, shapes and veins.

  ‘My name is really Anna Winter,’ she said and the voice was so low that he hardly caught the rest: ‘Now you know all about me.’

  Through sudden humiliation at what she had said he made an abrupt and incredible conquest of shyness. He actually looked her in the face and said:

  ‘Would you mind if I walked home with you?’

  ‘I would not mind.’

  They walked slowly on and once, as they stopped before crossing the road, he held her back from the passing traffic by catching at one of the impossible shoulder flaps of her mackintosh. She turned and looked up at him, the immensely transparent eyes quite still under the street lights.

  He didn’t speak.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘I thought you were going to say something.’

  He was moved yet again to a sudden confession about the hair-pin and then, instead, heard himself incredibly uttering the words:

  ‘Perhaps I could see you tomorrow.’

  ‘If you would like it.’

  ‘The pin won’t be ready of course. These things take time.’

  ‘Everything takes time.’

  He guided her across the road, still holding the flap of the mackintosh. He had nothing much more to say. He had said for the time being all he had the courage to say but every now and then, as they walked on in silence, it seemed to him that the face beside him was plain no longer.

  A Dream of Fair Women

  After he had taken his pills and done a stiff and dedicated three quarters of an hour on his stretching-and-exercising machine—both the pills and the machine were guaranteed to increase your height by several inches, expand your chest and make you live longer—Sydney Palmer took a deck-chair out of the tool-shed and went into the back-garden to dream about women. Sydney was eighteen, short, soft-eyed and sandy-haired and looked not at all unlike a dormouse waking from the long sleep of winter.

  Sometimes he dreamt about women much older than himself: healthy mature women like Mrs. Fortescue, who ran the tea-trolley at the printing works where he was serving his apprenticeship. Mrs. Fortescue seemed to him a sensational person. For several weeks she had exercised over him an influence that was nothing less than grand hypnosis. She was a big but beautifully proportioned woman, with light fluffy golden hair and splendid, promiscuous indigo-coloured eyes. Her body was as rich as a side of beef and she carried with her, always, the deep and searching perfume of clove carnations.

  Although he had hardly ever spoken more than a dozen words to her he had managed, dreaming away in the deck-chair in the back-garden, to persuade Mrs. Fortescue to leave her husband and run away with him to the South Pacific, where they had lived together for some time on a deserted atoll.

  It had been a fevered, paradisiacal, tormenting affair. They had lived like Adam and Eve. Unclothed and unashamed, Mrs. Fortescue had taught him things about love that were utterly sensational. It was at this time, when he was clim
bing a coconut palm one day, that he decided to get the stretching machine. The way Mrs. Fortescue stood and gazed up at him from the foot of the palm, quite naked, her breasts so like splendid halved coconuts themselves, suddenly opened up all the delights of being taller. He was truly grateful to that palm.

  Already he was sure he had put on an inch and a quarter in height. His muscles as he flexed them in front of the bathroom mirror popped in and out like knotted snakes and he felt singularly virile in every way. Unhappily Mrs. Fortescue had suddenly left the printing works and the effect of these striking changes in him were lost on her.

  But this no longer mattered. Today he had decided he was going to dream about someone else. This time it was Miss Sumpter, the girl who served in the fruit shop round the corner. Miss Sumpter was an aloof, brown-haired girl with prominent high breasts and lovely soft gooseberry-coloured eyes. He liked her long bare arms too and her hands that were always as white and shining as strips of new-washed celery.

  She was altogether younger than Mrs. Fortescue and quite different in every way. Mrs. Fortescue oozed all the richness of the flesh; the South Pacific itself became voluptuous when she swam in it. But the thing that struck him most about Miss Sumpter was a kind of vestal purity. It was sort of Grecian, he told himself. Her very aloofness flowered, making her even more exciting than the bolder Mrs. Fortescue.

  He had never spoken more than a few dozen words to Miss Sumpter either, and then only to ask for a pound of grapes, a hand of bananas or things of that sort, but nevertheless he had decided to take her to Athens today. That was where she belonged, he thought: to Greece and the Greek Islands, the classical landscapes of long ago.

  It was happily Saturday afternoon and soon, in his dream, they were on the afternoon plane. It was the champagne flight, of course—this wasn’t the reckless abandoned affair that had borne naked fruit under South Sea palms—and he was determined that for Miss Sumpter, everything should be the absolute tops.

  ‘I thought three or four days in Athens would be nice. And then we could go out to one of the islands. What about that?’

  ‘You know so much more about these things than I do.’

  ‘Well, it’s just that Athens may be very hot. And then we’d be more alone on one of the islands.’

  He held Miss Sumpter by the hand; the gooseberry-green eyes glanced away and quivered. He looked swiftly at the high pronounced breasts perfectly shaped under her blouse of yellow silk and felt his body tingle.

  ‘One of the islands then?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  He squeezed Miss Sumpter’s cool celery-like fingers with rising enthusiasm; things were going splendidly.

  ‘Of course I do.’ A leading question suddenly occurred to him. ‘Have you brought your swimming costume?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘We’ll swim all day,’ he said, the words molten in his throat, ‘and perhaps all night too.’

  Athens itself was molten; the city and its surrounding gold-brown crust of hills quivered and sizzled under a barbarous sun. The Acropolis was a crown of melting candles.

  He was glad when Miss Sumpter confessed that she couldn’t sleep at night for the heat, the sound of traffic and the torment of flies. There was a little boat, he told her, that round-tripped the islands, just a sort of local bus service. They could take it tomorrow and hop off where and when the fancy took them.

  Fancy took them, the following day, to an island whose water-front seemed to have been built by the hands of children, with bricks of blue and peppermint-green and salt-white and sugar-pink. Great cochineal oleanders clothed the rocks, with cypress in black columns above them, with many vines and occasional vast mulberry trees dark with ripening fruit.

  They stayed at a little hotel some way along the coast, its wooden framework locked on a precipice, fifty feet above the sea. Vermilion strings of geranium and skeins of blue morning-glory twined everywhere on walls and fences. Musing donkeys, straddled by even more musing women, climbed the hot mountain road. The sea was vaporous with great heat and the white sand of the shore, though shaded here and there by vast brooding olives, scalded the feet of Miss Sumpter and himself as they ran down to swim.

  ‘How you know about these marvellous places I simply can’t think—’

  ‘Ah! well. Experience—’

  He had in fact read all of it up in a travel magazine; he was great on travel magazines.

  ‘Shall we swim? or shall we lie in the shade?’

  In the molten core of the white afternoon the shade of a big black-limbed olive seemed a blissful dark oasis.

  ‘Let’s lie in the shade.’

  They lay together on the sand, eating mulberries they had gathered on the way to the shore. The mulberries were delicious and turned Miss Sumpter’s lips an urgent purple. He was glad to see that Miss Sumpter was wearing a white swim-suit. It seemed to heighten all the vestal nature of her body. He watched with mounting eagerness the rise and fall of her young breasts as she breathed and presently he started stroking the smooth bow of her shoulder.

  ‘Are you glad we came?’

  ‘Terribly.’

  As the gooseberry-green eyes gazed up at him with their own absorbed dreaminess he kissed her full on her empurpled lips, at the same time slipping one hand into the warm crook of her arm-pit.

  Soon they were locked together in restless torment. This, he thought, was paradise. This was greater than Mrs. Fortescue. He felt twenty feet taller as his hand made gentle explorations of Miss Sumpter’s body and Miss Sumpter, in return, gave out frequent sighs, low and soft in appeal, that were somewhere between modest protest and exquisite acceptance.

  ‘Have you ever had an experience like this before?’

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Well—’ He was half-tempted to tell her of Mrs. Fortescue and then said: ‘Not exactly. But every time I used to see you in the shop I’d go home and imagine this was how it would be.’

  ‘You did? I didn’t dream you thought about me like that—’

  ‘Oh! yes, for ages.’

  And to think, she said, that all the time she was thinking like that about him. His heart leapt as she told him this and he said:

  ‘You mean you thought of us lying here like this? Kissing. Perhaps even—you know—’

  ‘Lots and lots of times. Especially in bed at night.’

  A flaming desire to touch her even more intimately whipped through him fiercely and he slipped a hand under the curve of her breasts. She stirred restlessly and made an uneasy appeal:

  ‘Please. You mustn’t do that. At least not here. People will see—’

  ‘Nobody will see.’

  ‘But not now. Not here.’

  ‘Where then?’ he said. Her body, though not so rich and mature as Mrs. Fortescue’s, was far more exquisite. It was as soft and delicate as a rose and he wanted to bury himself deep in the heart of it. ‘Where then? When?’

  ‘There’s always a night, isn’t there?’ she said. ‘You said we could swim at night.’

  When it was night he lay entwined with Miss Sumpter on the sand. Her breasts were golden in the moonlight and warm to his lips as he kissed them. The sea was glassy and calm. Farther down the bay, in the hot windless night, the lights of the little town quivered like so many fire-flies.

  He was about to come to the supreme moment of his companionship with Miss Sumpter when she suddenly gave a quick mischievous laugh and wriggled out of his arms and started to run for the sea. Even that was a pretty wonderful moment, he thought—to see that white figure, half-naked, lightly dancing into the thin phosphorescent line of little breaking waves.

  He laughed too and ran after her. Nowhere were the waves more than an inch or two in height and they broke like a lapping of warm milk on his feet. In breathless excitement he saw Miss Sumpter swimming fast out to sea and suddenly something made him shout:

  ‘Watch out! There are sharks!’

  She gave a cry as she heard this
and turned at once and came swimming swiftly back.

  ‘You didn’t mean that. You were just trying to frighten me.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ He was quite serious. There were indeed sharks; he had read about them too in an article somewhere. ‘A man lost a leg only last year over in Corfu. In full view of people promenading—’

  ‘Oh! my goodness.’

  Miss Sumpter confessed to feeling a little sick. It was almost as if he had saved her life, she said.

  At this he felt ten feet tall again and recklessly clasped Miss Sumpter in his arms, as if in splendid protection, thrusting his chest strongly against her bosom. To his delight she accepted this demonstration of male protectiveness with a great sigh, looking at him beseechingly with the soft gooseberry-green eyes. She was so thankful, she said. His concern for her safety had opened her eyes to the fact that he didn’t merely covet her for her body’s sake and all the complex desires and thrills that went with it. It wasn’t merely passion driving him on. He really loved her actual existence. He was really frightened she might be taken away.

  ‘Oh! you’re so nice,’ she said. She looked with admiration at his figure, god-like in the moonlight. ‘So wonderful.’

  He laughed and kissed her mouth, salty and wet from the sea. She looked such a glorious creature standing there half-naked in the moonlight, hair and face and shoulders still dripping with water, that he actually felt pretty god-like. By heaven, he was in great shape, he told himself. The stretching machine had done wonders. He could feel manhood pulsating through him like a brave hammer. The gleam of moonlight on his face might have been striking down on the brass of some tall and splendid helmet.

  ‘Let’s swim out together,’ Miss Sumpter said. ‘I shan’t mind about the sharks if you swim with me.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Let’s lie on the beach. Let’s just let the sea break over us. All night long.’

  In that brilliant and somehow solemn moonlight they were god and goddess lying side by side. Their bodies might have been made of gold and when at last another supreme moment arrived and Miss Sumpter leaned over to kiss him the young breast that touched his face was a golden apple beaded all over with the pearls of a divine and ancient sea.