The Centre of the Green

by John Bowen

  Julian had taken the bus to the beach at Terreno after lunch, and the Colonel had been to sleep. It would have been neither wise nor practical to go for his usual afternoon walk in this heat and glare, so he had taken up again an older habit, acquired in India, the nap after tiffin. Now it was the tea-time hour. He sat on the terrace, wearing his old tweed hat against the sun, sipped citron pressé, and gazed at the sea. At the next table an Englishwoman, the only other person on the terrace, tried to order tea from an uncomprehending waiter.

  “And do you think I might have some thin bread and butter?” she said. “And perhaps some jam. Confiture, you know.”

  But the waiter did not know.

  “Bread. Pain. Pan.”

  “Pan?”

  “And butter.”

  Confusion.

  “Oh dear!” the Englishwoman said to Colonel Baker. “Excuse me, but do you know the word for butter?”

  “Mantequilla.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Mantequilla?”

  The Colonel said, “I’m afraid all you’re likely to get is bits of old bread in a basket, and butter in a separate dish. Is that what you want?”

  “I thought … bread and butter…. Perhaps if you were to tell him?”

  “Don’t think it would do any real good, you know. My Spanish isn’t really any better than yours. Sorry. Wouldn’t you rather have cake? I’ve got a book here somewhere. I could look it up. Bread and butter’s rather a foreign idea to these chaps.”

  “Perhaps just tea would be better. It isn’t really the weather for bread and butter.”

  Below them, with a splash and a flurry of lithe brown legs, the German dived into the pool. “That man winked at me this morning when I arrived,” the Englishwoman said. “I can’t think why. Is he Spanish, would you say?”

  The Colonel grinned, and said, “No. He winks at everyone. He winks at me.”

  “An affliction?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Have you been here long? It’s all very strange to me, I’m afraid. There aren’t any shades on the lights upstairs, and the water——”

  “It doesn’t run all day.”

  “I’ve never been abroad before. I was so determined I wouldn’t be a tourist, and now here I am, asking for afternoon tea and complaining about the plumbing. What must you think of me?”

  The Colonel, who had not exchanged a word in the way of friendship with anyone except Julian since their arrival the day before, said quite seriously, “I think you’re very nice indeed.”

  “Goodness! Perhaps you’d like some tea?”

  *

  Later that evening, the Colonel said to Julian, “Met rather a nice woman today, and we got talking. She’s a bit lonely, you know. Thought we might ask her to sit with us. Hope you don’t mind.” He had not yet discovered how to get a bath in the hotel, and was standing on one foot in a basin he had placed on the concrete floor of their room, squeezing water over his naked body with a sponge. Julian, who did not like to see his father naked, sat on the bed with his back to the Colonel, and wrote in a black exercise book with a ball-point pen.

  “No, I don’t mind,” he said.

  “Good.” The Colonel stepped out of the basin on to a piece of the Continental Daily Mail, and began to dry himself with one of the hand-towels provided by the hotel “What are you writing?” he said.

  “Diary.”

  “Chronicle of the Grand Tour, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t know people did that sort of thing nowadays?”

  “Well, I’m doing it.”

  Must remember, the Colonel thought. He must remember never to be hurt, because that would make him more clumsy than he was already, and above all he must remember not to ask questions, not to trespass. During the short sea voyage, during their holiday so far, there had been periods of calm when he had thought Julian was beginning to accept him, and always they had been broken by some act of spite and rudeness performed only as if to show the Colonel that he must not presume too far. Must be patient, the Colonel thought. You had to be patient, and take no notice, just keep your hand there with the lump of sugar in it, and after a while the sugar would be taken, and you could go on to the next small step. Good when that happened. And so now Julian surprised his father by saying, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude. I don’t know why I’m keeping it really, except to see whether I can, like a New Year’s Resolution. Sort of discipline, if you like. Besides, it might come in useful for a travel article or something, if Majorca hasn’t been overdone. I thought I’d stick in some snapshots, and really do the thing in style. Only I don’t want anyone to see it yet. I’ll show you some day.”

  “I’d like that. Very much.”

  Julian smiled, “You might be surprised when you see it,” he said. “I’m putting in all sorts of stuff. What’s your nice woman’s name?”

  “Miss Plumstead. She runs a sort of hostel for theological students in Finchley, but she seems a very sensible woman. Easy to get on with; we had quite a palaver on the terrace. I thought we might—sort of show her the town or something later on after dinner.”

  “That sounds rather fast, Father.”

  “Well, you know, wander round a bit. Stop off for a drink at one of the local places. Take a look at the cathedral by moonlight. Visit the harbour. Look at the sea. That sort of thing. She might like it.”

  “The fleet’s in. You might find a lot of drunk Americans doing the same thing.”

  The Colonel knotted his tie seriously. “We won’t go anywhere off the beaten track,” he said.

  “You don’t mind if I don’t come with you? I feel a bit dopey with the sun. I thought I’d just have a drink at the open-air place on the road above, and then go to bed.”

  Although the Colonel was disappointed, he did not show it; he supposed it would have been rather dull for Julian; they had done much the same sort of thing the night before. Palma was not really the Colonel’s type of place; perhaps the Colonel’s type of place no longer existed outside the moor and his own garden. It seemed to the Colonel that, in spite of the hotels spread out on the promenade, there was little to do in Palma if you were too old for the beach and did not care to dawdle the hours away at a café table.

  Nevertheless, that evening the Colonel and Miss Plumstead looked at the cathedral by moonlight. They walked about the cobbled streets of the old town and beneath the dusty trees in the Paseo del Generalismo. After a while, Miss Plumstead complained that the backs of her legs were aching, so they sat at one of the two outside tables at a little bar near the harbour, and shared a carafe of red wine. The moon was full, and the bar had no outside lighting, so that the wine looked black. Miss Plumstead gazed at the moon, and at the dust in the street which seemed to absorb the moonlight like blotting-paper, and at the cathedral which dominated the harbour like a fort, and said doubtfully, “It’s all very beautiful, isn’t it? But you know——”

  As she spoke, an American sailor appeared from a little side alley that joined the street beside the bar. He had lost his hat, and there was dust on the front of his white uniform. He held his arms stiffly away from his sides, and his head was thrust forward; the moonlight glittered on the whites of his eyes. His sudden appearance startled Miss Plumstead, and she gave a little cry. The sailor turned his gaze towards her, focused with difficulty, walked forward so that he was within three paces of the table, and stood there swaying. “What’s the matter with you, lady?” he said. “You sick or something?”

  Neither the Colonel nor Miss Plumstead replied; instead their posture and expression became unnaturally stiff. The sailor continued to speak to them. “Am I a leper or something?” he said. His diction was indistinct, but now that he had made the effort to communicate, there seemed to be no reason why he should stop. “Someone asks you a civil question about your health, you can’t give him a civil answer?” he said. “What’s the matter with you, lady? A guy can’t even ask a question nowadays. A guy can’t live no
wadays. A guy can’t breathe, you know that? What’s the matter with you? Do you spurn—spurn—spurn sailors, lady? Do you spurn the fleet? You anti-American or something? Here am I, talking to you civil, and you just sit there like—like fishes. Well, I can make like a fish too, you know. Maybe you spurn me because I never finished high school, but I can make like a fish.”

  The sailor leaned dangerously forward to bring his face closer to them, and pouted like a fish, going, “P! p! p!” at them in fishy imitation. Miss Plumstead put one hand on the Colonel’s arm, and the Colonel said, “Look here——”

  “Look heah! Eaoh rahlly!” the sailor said in a very poor approximation of standard English. “F——ing limey! You think I’m looking for a fight. Well, I’ll tell you something; I am not looking for a fight. Everybody else in the whole town is looking for a fight but me, as it so happens. Everybody in the whole goddam fleet. I am the sailor who is not looking for a fight. Some of the greatest sweetest bunch of guys in this world is looking for a fight at this moment not far from here, but me, I don’t wanna fight, and I’m not gonna fight, because I am a man of peace, and not a man of war. Get it? I am not looking for a fight.”

  The Colonel said, “No, but I expect you’re looking for a drink, aren’t you? You’ll find one in there.” The sailor steadied himself, hesitated, and then went through the bead curtain into the bar at a lumbering run as if his legs were trying to keep up with his trunk. There was a confused noise from inside. The Colonel took a ten-peseta note from his pocket, and put it under the carafe. “I think we’d better be going,” he said.

  As they walked back along the promenade in the moonlight, Miss Plumstead began to laugh. “Those poor people!” she said. “They’ll never understand. All he wants is to avoid a fight.”

  The Colonel grinned, and said, “Perhaps he’ll do his fish imitations for them.”

  “P! p! p! Oh dear! I was really quite frightened at the time, and now I can’t stop laughing.”

  “You were frightened. I thought I was going to have to play Galahad, and I’m not the age for it. He’d have made mincemeat of me.”

  “You defeated him t—tactically,” Miss Plumstead said, going into a gale of giggles so that she had to hold on to the wall of the promenade. “It was just like C—Captain Hornblower or somebody. You lured him into an ambush. Of Spanish g—guerillas.” Her laughter was infectious, and the Colonel was in any case beginning to feel the bathetic after effects of tension. He began to laugh as well. “Come to that, he was a bit of gorilla himself,” he said. “As well as a fish.”

  “Really we shouldn’t be laughing like this; it’s not at all funny. But you were so—controlled. The awful silence when he went through that curtain! And then they all started shouting at once.”

  “Perhaps it was inconsiderate of me. I couldn’t think of anything else to do with him.”

  Miss Plumstead managed to stop laughing. “It was resourceful,” she said. “I’m very grateful to you.” As they resumed their walk, she said, “Colonel, do you like staying here? At the hotel. I mean, would you and your son find it dull to be somewhere—quieter?”

  “Quieter?”

  “Smaller. Some friends of mine once stayed at quite a tiny village further up the coast. They said they preferred it to the city. It was very quiet.”

  “Think I’d like that. I don’t know about Julian.”

  “A bus runs twice a week. It’s running tomorrow.”

  “I could ask him.”

  “Please do,” Miss Plumstead said. “I should be so pleased if we could go together.”

  *

  The bus left Palma early in the afternoon, and travelled north and west along a flat road, bordered sometimes with wheat, sometimes with the blue of flax. The interior of the bus was crowded with people and with baggage and clutter, yet the carrier on the roof was full of baggage also, and the Colonel was driven to conclude that Majorcans when they move even for the shortest visits take most of their personal effects with them. The Colonel and Miss Plumstead sat together, with Miss Plumstead on the window side, and Julian sat behind next to a woman with two live ducks on her lap. The bus bowled along through the afternoon heat and glare, and dust from the road permeated the interior, and formed a thin paste on the moist faces of the passengers.

  After a while, the road began to climb, and the countryside became more rocky. The wheat and flax were replaced by almond and by olive trees, grey-green, bent and twisted. “They look like Chelsea pensioners in their underwear,” Myra Plumstead said, “all twisted up with arthritis.” The road grew steeper, the bends sharper. The Colonel told Miss Plumstead that it reminded him of driving from Siliguri to Darjeeling in India, and that he hoped nobody would be sick. The driver sounded his horn almost continuously, and sometimes from above them another horn would be heard like the answering call of an animal, and a little later some car or coach would appear from the opposite direction, and (again like animals) the two would meet, and sniff, and cautiously pass each other, and part.

  Suddenly stone houses crowded in together, so that there was even less room to negotiate the corners. Cobbled side streets ran into the road. To the left rose the tower of a monastery. The bus stopped. The woman with ducks left the bus, and a woman with hens took her place. There was a shouting and bumping as luggage was shifted from the roof. The Colonel tried to ask how long the bus would be here, because he wanted to get out and stretch his legs, but could find nobody to understand him. Miss Plumstead explained to Julian that this was Valledemosa, where Chopin and Georges Sand had come to stay, but none of the inhabitants would have anything to do with them, poor things, because they were living in sin and Chopin had T.B. Julian showed Miss Plumstead a poster, on which there was an announcement in English, French and German that there would be exhibitions of folk-dancing during the season. The Colonel finally decided to get out anyway. The bus started. The Colonel got back in.

  Now it was only a short distance to the coast, and soon they could see the sea and the rocks far below them on the left, and salt sea air blew in through the windows instead of dust. Miss Plumstead perked up and looked proud, because it was she who had brought them, and the road ran on in broad sweeping curves that followed the shape of the coast, and it seemed that at every second curve there was a notice calling attention to the view. There were coniferous trees here, and the occasional houses were white, and every now and then one caught a glimpse of a small round watch-tower like a chessboard castle perched on the headland. The Colonel, feeling happily that this was more his line of country, kept turning to Julian behind him to see if it were also his. But Julian said nothing.

  Bend after bend. Then a grey stone church, dominating a village which seemed to be little more than a border of houses above and below the road. The bus stopped outside a café. “Is this Deya?” the Colonel said. It was. They disembarked. Miss Plumstead produced a piece of paper on which the name of a pension was written, and showed it to the man behind the bar in the café. A small boy was found who took them there. “What happens if there isn’t room?” the Colonel said, and Miss Plumstead, who was on her own ground in matters of accommodation, replied, “Don’t fuss so, Colonel. They always have friends in the village who can produce a bed. Getting somewhere to stay in small places is never difficult, because everybody knows everyone else. It’s only in big cities that you have to spend the night in the police station.”

  So began a happy period for the Colonel. Deya was his kind of place—a small kind of place. It had three shops, one of which was licensed to sell stamps, and two cafés. One of these, the Café Nuevo, had a wide concrete veranda overlooking the road and a game of table football by the bar; here the visitors and many of the local people gathered. The other café was behind a shop and had a much smaller veranda overlooking the lower village; most of its customers seemed to be expatriate Americans, some of whom were writing novels, and some of whom were not. Above Deya, the land rose to the mountains; below it, the land dropped to the sea. Every day Mi
ss Plumstead and the Bakers, after breakfast in the open air under the vine at their blue and white pension, would walk down the rocky track to the little fishing harbour, an hour’s journey below the village. They walked at an easy pace in rope-soled sandals bought at the post office, and carried with them the beach bags, books and bathing costumes which were their impedimenta for the day. At the beach they would meet some of the other “international” guests of the pension —the French engineer and his wife, who seemed to spend most of the day under water, taking photographs of fish; Betty and Anne, the two stenographers from the City; the young architect from Reading who had come on holiday with his mother; Milton and Doris, the Canadian dentist and his sister; Mrs. Gamage, the Scots widow with two pallid, faddy children, who had insisted on porridge for breakfast but could persuade no one else to eat it. Myra, the Colonel and Julian would change into bathing costumes and settle down near or with these people to read, and sunbathe, chat and (after a while) swim, for the Colonel had no objection to lying on the beach in company of this kind, and a dip twice a day came quickly to have the same ritual significance for him as his afternoon walk at home.

  So the morning would pass, and lunch would be taken on the beach, where again there was a choice of two cafés, both run by fishing people. One stood on the rock above the beach, and specialized in a kind of fish soup with rice; the proportion of fish to rice depended on how good the catch had been that morning. The other café was smaller, and served omelettes, or simply provided wine or soda to drink with the packed lunch put up by the pension. Chaps remained perhaps in the shade of the café during the worst of the afternoon heat, or strolled in the shade of the woods that rose above one side of the harbour, or returned to the beach, and the afternoon passed much as the morning had passed, and then it was time to stroll slowly back again to Deya itself for an apéritif before dinner. And after dinner one sat on the veranda of the Café Nuevo or played table football until, at midnight, all the lights went out, because there is no electricity in Deya after midnight. Then chaps would walk back to the pension through the night and the warm air, and go to bed by candle-light.