The Comfort of Strangers

by Ian Mcewan

  The rest of the day followed the pattern of the preceding three: they left the café and returned to their room which the maid had just finished tidying. They met her as she was coming out, under one arm a bundle of dirty sheets and pillowcases, in the other hand a wastepaper basket half-full of used paper tissues, and cuttings from Colin’s toenails. To let her pass they had to press themselves against the wall, and they turned a little shamefacedly into her polite good morning. They remained in bed less than an hour, spent two hours over lunch, returned to bed, this time to sleep, made love when they woke, lay about for some time afterwards, showered, dressed and spent the rest of the evening, before and after dinner, sitting on their balcony. For all this Mary appeared troubled, and Colin remarked on it several times. She agreed there was something, but it was at the back of her mind, just beyond her reach, she explained, like a vivid dream that cannot be recalled. In the evening they decided they were suffering from lack of exercise and made plans to catch the boat across the lagoon the next day to the popular strip of land whose beaches faced the open sea. This led them to talk at length and euphorically, for they had just smoked another joint, about swimming, their preferred strokes, the relative merits of rivers, lakes, swimming-pools and seas, and the precise nature of the attraction water had for people; was it buried memory of ancient sea ancestors? Talk of memory caused Mary to frown again. The conversation became desultory after that, and they went to bed earlier than usual, a little before midnight.

  At half-past five the following morning Mary woke with a shout, perhaps the last of several, and sat upright in bed. The first light of day was penetrating the shutters, and one or two paler objects were visible. From the room next door to theirs came the murmur of a voice and the sound of a light switch. Mary clasped her knees and began to tremble.

  Colin was fully awake by now. He reached up and stroked her back. ‘A nightmare?’ he said. Mary recoiled from his touch, her back tensed. When he touched her again, this time on the shoulder as if to pull her back down beside him, she wrenched free and got out of bed.

  Colin sat up. Mary was at the head of the bed staring at the indentation in Colin’s pillow. There were footsteps across the nearby room, a door opened, and footsteps again in the corridor, which broke off abruptly as if to listen.

  ‘What is it, Mary?’ Colin said, and reached for her hand. She shrank away, but her eyes were on him, her look startled and remote, as though witnessing a catastrophe from a hilltop. Unlike Mary, Colin was naked, and he shivered as he fumbled for his shirt and stood up. They faced each other across the empty bed. ‘You’ve had a bad fright,’ Colin said, and began to edge round towards her. Mary nodded and moved towards the french window that gave on to the balcony. The footsteps outside their room receded, a door closed, bed-springs creaked and a light switch clicked. Mary opened the window and stepped out.

  Colin dressed quickly and followed her. She raised a finger to her lips when he began to say comforting things and ask questions. She pushed a low table to one side and gestured at Colin to come and stand in its place. Still asking questions, Colin allowed himself to be positioned. She turned him so he faced across the channel, towards that part of the sky still in night, and she lifted his left hand so it rested on the balcony wall; the right she raised to his face and asked him to hold it there. Then she took a few paces back. ‘You’re very beautiful, Colin,’ she whispered.

  A sudden and simple idea appeared to seize him and he turned abruptly. ‘You are awake, aren’t you, Mary?’

  He stepped towards her and this time, instead of backing away, she leaped forward and threw her arms around his neck, and kissed his face and head with desperate repetition. ‘I’m so frightened. I love you and I’m so frightened,’ she cried. Her body grew tauter and shook till her teeth chattered and she could no longer speak.

  ‘What is it, Mary?’ Colin said quickly, and embraced her hard. She was tugging at his shirt sleeve, trying to push his arm down. ‘You’re not properly awake, are you? You had a bad dream.’

  ‘Touch me,’ Mary said at last. ‘Just touch me.’

  Colin pulled clear of her and shook her shoulders gently. His voice was hoarse. ‘You’ve got to tell me what’s happening.’

  Mary was suddenly calmer, and allowed herself to be led back indoors. She stood watching while Colin re-made the bed. As they got in she said, ‘I’m sorry I frightened you,’ and kissed him, guiding his hand between her thighs.

  ‘Not now,’ Colin said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  She nodded and lay down, her head pillowed on his arm. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again after several minutes.

  ‘What happened then?’ He spoke through a yawn, and Mary did not reply immediately.

  A boat throbbed soothingly up the channel towards the docks. When it had passed Mary said, ‘I woke up and realized something. If I’d realized it in the day-time I wouldn’t have been so frightened by it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Colin.

  Mary waited. ‘Don’t you want to know what it was?’ Colin mumbled assent. Again Mary paused. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That photograph at Robert’s is of you.’

  ‘What photograph?’

  ‘I saw a photograph at Robert’s flat, and it was of you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘It must have been taken from a boat, a little way beyond the café.’

  Colin’s leg twitched violently. ‘I don’t remember that,’ he said, after a pause.

  ‘You’re falling asleep,’ Mary said. ‘Try and stay awake a moment.’

  ‘I am awake.’

  ‘When I was down at the café this morning I saw you on the balcony. I couldn’t work it out. Then I woke up and remembered. Robert showed me that photograph. Colin? Colin?’

  He lay perfectly still and his breathing was barely audible.

  8

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS their hottest day so far, and the sky directly above was closer to black than blue, the sea, when they finally came to it down the busy avenue of street cafés and souvenir shops, was an oily grey along whose surface the gentlest of breezes pushed and scattered patches of off-white foam. At the water’s edge, where miniature waves broke on to the straw-coloured sand, children played and shouted. Further out there was the occasional swimmer lifting arm over arm in solemn exercise, but most of the vast crowd which stretched away to the left and right into the heat haze had come to sun itself. Large families sat round trestle tables preparing lunches of bright green salads and dark bottles of wine. Solitary men and women flattened themselves on towels, their bodies iridescent with oil. Transistor radios played and now and then there could be heard, above the babble of children playing, the falling sound of a parent calling a child’s name.

  Colin and Mary walked for two hundred yards over the hot, heavy sand, past lonely men with cigarettes and paperback books, past love affairs and through households with grandparents and hot babies in prams, looking for the exact place, near the water, but not too near the splashing children, away from the nearest transistor, and the family with two energetic Alsatian dogs, not too close to violate the privacy of the oiled couple on a pink towel, or to the concrete waste bin above which danced a thick cloud of blue-black flies. Each potential location was disqualified on at least one count. One empty space was suitable but for the litter scattered around its centre. Five minutes later they returned to it and began to carry the empty bottles and cans and half-eaten pieces of bread to the concrete dustbin, but a man and his son, their black hair sleeked back with water, ran out of the sea and insisted that their picnic remain untouched. Colin and Mary walked on and agreed – this was their first conversation since stepping off the boat – that what they really had in mind was a beach which approximated, as far as possible, the privacy of their hotel room.

  They settled at last near two teenage girls whom a small knot of men were trying to impress by turning clumsy cartwheels and by throwing sand in each other’s eyes. Colin and Mary spread their to
wels side by side, stripped to their swimming suits and sat down facing the sea. A boat towing a water-skier moved across their field of vision, and some seagulls, and a boy with a tin chest strapped to his neck selling ice cream. Two of the young men were beating the arm of their friend so hard that the teenage girls cried out in protest. Immediately all the men dropped to their haunches in a horseshoe formation around the girls and introduced themselves. Colin and Mary held hands in a tight grip, working their fingers to reassure themselves that despite their silence, each was keenly aware of the other.

  At breakfast Mary had repeated her story about the photograph. She did so without speculation, simply the facts in the order they had presented themselves to her. Throughout Colin nodded, mentioned that he remembered now from the night before, questioned her about one or two details (were the geranium pots in the picture? – yes; which way did the shadows fall? – she could not remember) but likewise indulged in no general remarks. He had nodded and rubbed his eyes tiredly. Mary had gone to place her hand on his arm and had knocked over the milk jug with her elbow. Upstairs as they changed for the beach she had pulled him on to the bed and hugged him hard. She had kissed his face and cradled his head against her breasts, and told him over and over again how she loved him, how she adored his body. She placed her hand on his bare, tight backside and squeezed. He nursed at her breast and sank his forefinger deep into her. He drew his knees up, sucked and burrowed while Mary rocked back-wards and forwards, repeating his name; then, half-crying, half-laughing she had said, ‘Why is it so frightening to love someone this hard? Why is it so scary?’ But they did not remain on the bed. They reminded each other of their promise to go to the beach and pulled apart to pack the towels.

  Colin lay on his stomach while Mary sat astride his buttocks and rubbed oil on his back. Eyes closed, he rested his face sideways on the backs of his hands, and told Mary for the first time of how Robert had hit him in the stomach. He recounted, without embellishment or reference to his own feelings, then or now; simply the conversation as he could recall it, the physical positions, the exact sequence of events. As he spoke Mary massaged his back, upwards from the base of his spine, working the small, firm muscles with convergent movements of her thumbs till she came to the unyielding tendons at the back of his neck. ‘That hurts,’ Colin said. Mary said, ‘Go on. Finish the story.’ He was telling her now what Caroline had whispered as they were leaving. Behind them the murmur of the young men’s voices rose steadily in volume till they erupted in general laughter, nervous but good-natured; then the young women spoke to each other softly and rapidly, and there was general laughter again, less nervous, more subdued. From behind these people came the lulling sound of waves breaking at near-regular intervals, and waves yet more soporific when they suggested unfathomable complexities of motion by breaking, as they occasionally did, in rapid succession. The sun blared like loud music. Colin’s words slurred a little, Mary’s movements were less earnest, more rhythmic. ‘I heard her,’ she said when Colin had finished.

  ‘She’s a kind of prisoner,’ Colin said, and then, more certainly, ‘She is a prisoner.’

  ‘I know,’ Mary said. She kept her hands in one place, looped loosely round Colin’s neck, and described her conversation with Caroline on the balcony.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about that before?’ he said at the end.

  Mary hesitated. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ She climbed off him and they sat on their own towels once more facing the sea.

  After a prolonged silence Colin said, ‘Perhaps he beats her up.’ Mary nodded. ‘And yet …’ He lifted a handful of sand and let it trickle on to his toes. ‘… and yet she seemed to be quite …’ He trailed away vaguely.

  ‘Quite content?’ Mary said sourly. ‘Everyone knows how much women enjoy being beaten up.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody self-righteous.’ Colin’s vehemence surprised them both. ‘What I was going to say was that … she seemed to be, well, thriving on something.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mary said. ‘Pain.’

  Colin sighed and rolled back on to his stomach.

  Mary pursed her lips and watched some children playing in the shallow water. ‘Those postcards,’ she murmured.

  They remained sitting for half an hour, by their slight frowns in private versions of an argument that would have been difficult to define. They were inhibited by a feeling that these past few days had been nothing more than a form of parasitism, an unacknowledged conspiracy of silence disguised by so much talk. She reached into her bag and took out a rubber band which she used to secure her hair in a pony tail. Then she stood up abruptly and walked towards the water. As she passed by the small, boisterous group, a couple of the men whistled after her softly. Mary looked back questioningly, but the men smiled sheepishly and glanced away, and one of them coughed. Colin, who had not shifted his position, watched her standing ankle-deep in water among children who laughed and screeched excitedly as they chased over the waves. Mary in her turn appeared to be watching a group of larger children, further out, who were scrambling on to and tumbling from the flat, black inner tube of a tractor tyre. She waded out till she was level with them. The children called to her, no doubt exhorting her to get in the water properly, and Mary nodded in their direction. With the briefest possible glance back over her shoulder towards Colin, she pushed forward and nestled into the water, into the comfortable, slow, breaststroke that could take her twenty effortless lengths of her local swimming-pool.

  Colin lay back on his elbows, luxuriating in warmth and relative solitude. One of the men had produced a bright red beachball, and now there was a clamour about the right sort of game to be played with it, and about the more difficult question of teams. One of the girls joined in. She was stabbing her finger in mock admonition into the chest of the largest man. Her friend, who was thin and tall and a little spindly in the legs, stood apart, fiddling nervously with a strand of hair, her face fixed in a polite, acquiescent grin. She was gazing into the face of a square, ape-like figure who seemed determined to entertain her. At the end of one of his stories he reached up and gave her a friendly punch on the shoulder. A little later he darted forward and pinched her leg and ran off a few steps, turned and told her to chase him. Like a newborn calf, the girl took a few aimless steps which faltered in embarrassment. She swept her fingers through her hair and turned towards her friend. The ape came at her again and this time slapped her bottom, a skilful passing stroke, which made a surprisingly loud noise. The others, including the shorter girl, all laughed, and the ape performed an exultant, flailing cartwheel. Still smiling bravely, the spindly girl backed out of his way. Two beach-umbrella poles were planted in the sand several feet apart, joined at the top by a length of string; a game of volley-ball was about to begin. The ape, having made certain that the spindly girl was in his team, had taken her aside and was instructing her in the rules. He took hold of the ball and, showing her his bunched fist, punched it high in the air. The girl nodded and smiled. She refused her turn, but the ape persisted and she obliged by knocking the ball a few feet into the air. The ape applauded as he ran after the ball.

  Colin walked by the water’s edge and stooped to examine a patch of foam that had been washed ashore. In each tiny bubble the light was refracted to form a perfect rainbow in the film. The patch was drying out even as he watched it, dozens of rainbows disappearing each second, and yet none of them simultaneously. When he stood up nothing remained beyond an irregular circle of scum. Mary was now some two hundred yards from the shore, her head a small black dot against a flat grey expanse. To see her better Colin shaded his eyes. She was no longer swimming out; in fact she seemed to be facing the shore, but it was hard to make out if she was swimming towards him or treading water. As though in answer, she raised her arm and waved urgently. Was it an arm though, or a wave behind her? For a moment he lost sight of her head. It sank and reappeared, and once more there was a movement above it. Surely an arm. Colin took a sharp breath and waved back. He had
taken several paces into the water without noticing. The head seemed to turn, not disappear this time, but thrash from side to side. He called Mary’s name, not out loud, but in a panicky whisper. Standing in water up to his chest he took one last look at her. Once more her head disappeared, and still it was difficult to see whether she had sunk into the waves, or was concealed behind them.

  He began to swim in her direction. In the same local swimming-pool, Colin performed a furious, stylish crawl that pushed a deep furrow in the water for one length, on good days two. Over greater distances he was weak, and complained of the tedium of swimming up and down. Now he compromised with long strokes, breathing out with noisy sighs, as though mocking a succession of sad events. After twenty-five yards he had to stop to catch his breath. He lay on his back a few seconds, and then trod water. For all his squinting, Mary was not in sight. He set out again, this time more slowly, alternating his crawl with a sidestroke that allowed him to breathe more easily and kept his face clear of the waves which were larger now, trailing smooth troughs that were tiring to swim through. By the time he stopped again he could just make her out. He shouted, but his voice was feeble, and it seemed to weaken him to let so much air out of his lungs at once. Out there, only the top few inches of water were warm; his feet, when he trod water, were numbed by cold. As he turned to swim on, he caught a wave full in the face and swallowed a large quantity of water. It went down smoothly, but he had to turn on his back to recover. Oh God, he said, or thought, over and over again, Oh God! He started out once more, took a few strokes of the crawl and had to stop; his arms were water-logged, too heavy to lift out of the water. He used the sidestroke all the time now, edging his way through the water, making imperceptible progress. When he stopped again, spluttering for air, craning his head over the waves, Mary was ten yards away, treading water. He could not see the expression on her face. She was calling out to him, but the water slapping round his ears obscured the words. Those last few yards took a very long time. Colin’s stroke had degenerated into a sideways scrambling movement, and when he had the strength to look up, Mary seemed to have moved further away. At last he reached her. He stretched his hand to her shoulder, and she sank beneath his fingers. ‘Mary!’ Colin shouted, and swallowed more water.