The Stories of William Sansom

by William Sansom

  A little later, it must have been four o’clock, I went downstairs to the parlour that served as both dining-room and entrance hall. The man and woman were sitting at one of the tables, drinking coffee and goat’s milk. Neither looked up as I came down the bare wooden stairs. It was a small room, holding three large tables, and draped about with a curious assortment of art-nouveau and early-jazz ornaments left long ago by forgotten commercial travellers from France. It had a very closed-in atmosphere. It would have been difficult to imagine any estrangement between strangers in such a room—but neither of these two looked up as I came down. Nor when I asked through the kitchen door for my own coffee and chestnut cake. When Madame Paolo brought this she walked round to the other table and asked whether they required anything more; the man answered politely, but impersonally, and had turned back to his coffee while Madame Paolo was still smiling. In such rooms, in a strange village, and with all the mountains and rolling maquis wild outside, it is exceedingly difficult to remain impersonal. One is in a shelter more than a lodging-house.

  Since they were so firmly absorbed in one another, I could watch them quite closely. This was not comfortable, the atmosphere was so aloof; but certainly one could feel no fear of indiscretion. At length it occurred to me what probably they were—and what they did prove to be: they were a couple sufficiently young in marriage still to be interested in themselves beyond any other person. Not so young as to feel themselves performers; not old enough to wish for others to perform.

  One has seen them everywhere in hotel lounges, or in one’s hometown masquerading as one’s friends. In the hotel lounge they sit together in their armchairs, he turning over the pages of a book, she with a writing-pad on her knees. They never speak, but one senses from them a stronger air of intimacy than from all others in the lounge. They never look up at other people. They are absolutely incurious about the world without them. Older couples will show the searching eyes of escape. Unmarried people will be searching for immurement. But these two will sit solid, an affectionate brother and sister arranging some funeral visit; but how warm, how enviable a funeral—how armoured, wonderful! And as for those who pretend still to be one’s friends—see them, for instance, as hosts at dinner. Watch them exchange private messages of the eyes, grow silent as they dismiss the conversation to speak anxiously of some intimate affair of their building which has been growing at the backs of their minds throughout dinner, watch them spring to their feet as you, the old friend, apologize for the need to leave early. And how enviable their glance as the door closes, how real the small things they will say—deeper than all the first passionate words. And how empty one’s back feels—walking away from the eyeless smiles, wishing even for the lance of malice, but receiving from them nothing, absolutely nothing….

  In this case, their evident prosperity increased such an armour. In mainland towns it would not have so obtruded; but here on the poorer island such prosperity fired into magnificence, their rich leather and tweed looked soft and fabulously of the town. One inferred immediately that the man must have something sinister in his dealings—but really, he could have been a well-off young merchant or professional man who had looked after his money. He was a lean man, dark-eyed, polished in his tweeds as a Parisian; manicured, muscular, silk-tied. The woman sat smooth and plastered in on to herself, in the sheath of her dress, in her close-set hair; nowhere a strand astray, but fired here and there with a jewel, and with over this smoothness a loose coat draped and askew to proclaim ease, to accentuate what sat tight and unruffled within. They sat silently drinking their coffee, looking for the most part down at the table, at their hands, or to the furniture a foot on either side. They spoke little—at first glance one would have considered them unbearably tired of each other. But when they did speak—they looked straight into each other’s eyes, without flinching, pulling no false expression! They smiled without laughing, without twitching! They neither raised their voices nor kept them low! When the woman asked for a cigarette, she took it without thanking him: yet he was thanked.

  Outside the weather was bright and fine, a hot November sun mixed with the clear high air and the breeze of autumn. No mountain chill, only a deep invigoration—like a cool old wine, a yellow wine. I walked out by the church, a rounded plaster basilica washed pale and sudden pink against the grim grey of the other village buildings; old men, moustached and corduroyed, sat smoking on benches against the wide circular end of the church—through the day they moved round slowly, as on a wheel, with the sun. I climbed up the road, then took a hill-path. It was steep, one mounted quickly. It was a path and a brook combined, so that upwards one trudged from stone to stone with the mountain water coursing down in between. Very soon the village lay far below. One saw the roofs huddling in round the church—in that broad, sharp mountainscape like a huddle of sheep round their pink shepherd, pathetic, blind, but nuzzling safe.

  A climb of ten minutes on those slopes brings out the heat and sweat, and already the country is as wild as anywhere farther. I saw a mound of moss and brush and climbed off the path on to it; once there had been a stone goat-pen there, and the old circle of stones remained, a curious fairy-ring, and good to sit on. The ground was thick with dark olive moss, above the great chestnut woods blazed yellow up the mountain, below the green maquis of cystus and sweet-smelling scrub stretched down and down, past Piana, to the eucalyptus groves by the warm sea—to Porto, little port for the loading of chestnuts, cork and granite. All was vegetated, mountains thickly carpeted with a smell of herbs and the rich brown taste of chestnuts. Occasionally a small wood of arbutus pricked the green with scarlet berries; far above rose the mauve mountain-tops, beneath stretched the wide and lovely blue of Porto’s gulf, ridged with red stone. All the time I could still see that polished car and its tailored companions.

  They must, I thought, be from the mainland, motoring from Ajaccio right up the coast to Calvi. At Calvi, sleek with yachts from Cannes, they would come to rest in their grand hotel of balconies and bathrooms. What, I wondered, would they think when they found there was not even a bucket in the pension, nothing at all to be done but wander into the chestnut woods with one’s copy of the Sampiero? Then I remembered their armour—of course this would protect them. Nothing could disturb such equanimity. They would smile, remember that the journey was being broken only for one night, and indeed wander out into the chestnut woods—with perhaps a copy of Le Temps. That was in itself a small matter—but it suggested again the exasperating notion of that armour, their carapace of incuriosity against which no one in the world could prevail. No one—the absolute quality of such armour frightened. Here was something at last impeccable, a dreadful example of the perfection that man is supposed never to achieve. Indeed, it might not be constant, there was the certainty that time would corrupt it … but nevertheless for a time, and perhaps for as concrete a time as a year or two years, their state would remain an immaculate truth. Evanescence may be a condition of life, but against this generality there is the real measure of time—minutes, hours, years. Pleasure for a year is more desirable than for a minute; so, more valuable. What the two had, for all present purposes, was a solid armour. Nothing would undo them. Accident, malice, affection, the chestnut wood—they were proof against each eventuality. Lawyers might write their letters of doom—they would look at each other, inter-telegraph their two-ness, and then deal with matters, unsuccessfully or not, it made no difference. Friends might deliver their invitations, they would nod their dual head—and know that the friends would get no little piece of them, not one fragment, they would go only to come back.

  And of course they would be favoured by systems—I was walking back downhill to Piana again, having the idea to walk through the village and beyond to the Calanches, to watch again that sonorous eruption of red rock, a landscape unique in Europe—by simple systems and habits. By their clothes one could judge that they were part of a set section of society. There would be behaviour permitted and things not done, standards that w
ould aid considerably the impulse of agreement; many questions would never be posed‚ originalities of wish would not have to be agreed—nodding was made easy. They would not, of course, be proof against small disagreements, rows of the ruffled nerve—but these would soon be straightened out: the disagreement would never include anyone or anything else. They would suffer neither jealousy nor envy, nor any desire for escape; such rows would be physical, nervous reflexes, headaches essentially within the armour.

  I passed the car, now in shade, but still gleaming. What would they be doing upstairs in the bare white-washed bedroom? It was difficult to imagine them making love, they looked too intimate. But in fact they would have been satisfied often and well with each other—or the armour would have creaked. So upstairs above their car, while the leather travelling clock and the ivory hairbrushes sat quite still on the dressing-table, they might have been doing whatever they wished? Writing letters—each was as evidently sensible as the other in the case of these two, how could one interfere, even to guess?

  The road out of the village became a first-class cliff motor-road, snaking about round a deep gorge, but neatly walled, and smoothly surfaced. It was quite a walk to the Calanches, and as one travelled this road—intensely alone in such a wild geography, as alone as the ringing of one’s boots—the sea opened far out down to the left. It was not, of course, miles or even far—it was the illusion of distance seen from a height. Now the broad sea with its corrugation of hair-size wrinkles looked like blue beaten steel, like the steel of a lacquered fire-iron: away out a large white cloud drifted, hanging down two vicious white tails that tried to be waterspouts. Ahead lay the Calanches. A quarter of an hour later I was among them.

  Here the vegetation to either side ceased—one walked along a road suspended between precipitous cliffs of fierce red granite, a steep convulsion of weird rock that seemed to glow still with the fire of its first spawning. This was a dead land, a canyon, but on one side open frequently to the far-down echoing sea. Promontories of dreamlike twisted red rock towered away down to that sea, gulches and gullies dreaded down to the great blue gulf—and each one of ten thousand pinnacles of rock was smoothly sculpted into a strange hooded shape. Holes and sockets stared as though blown by the wind, whistling silently with siren invocation. Nothing moved. All those fantastic sculptures stood still—coy tourists simpered that one looked like an elephant, that another was for all the world a bear—but they were in fact simply figures, figures standing inevitably as themselves and nothing more, figures deep in thought about themselves, their stone thoughts cowled and draped with red stone, ponderously waiting for motion. An aeolian music sang round them, but it was too ancient a sound for human ears.

  For human ears! But there, along the road leaning on the wall and watching this vast colloquy of still stone souls, stood two soft humans, tweeded and diamonded, but nevertheless soft skinfuls of flesh, those two of the contented car! They stood watching the sun sink on the Calanches, close in their companionship, proofed in their tegument of quiet passion. Theirs were no linked hands, no leaning and pressing together of bodies that searched for the other’s comfort—they could stand side by side, with the cool air between them, sure of each other’s presence and affection and without need for the flesh of reassurance. And then the sun with remarkable swiftness changed its golden blue for red, for gilt red reflective of hot coral and the branding iron. The sea turned purple, great stretches of olive milk appeared—and above the sky darkened, and began to shine with the phosphorescences of night; but overpowering everything, the Calanches started to glow, to burn, to blaze with hot red light. Now all those standing figures, those pinnacles of graven thought took on deep shadows—burning red themselves with projected movement, invested with misery, black shadows under their eyeless cowls and tapering behind them. One felt the sea itself would steam for the immersion of these sad hot creatures; ice-green lichens that here and there occurred were burnt up and vanished in the broad consuming glow.

  Alone thus with the rock and the sea stood the two whom nothing could assail. As the sun sank farther, the contortion upwards of all that rock showed itself more plainly—here suddenly was a vista such as Blake drew, a thousand souls in anguish moving upwards, the silence now a mute chorus of despair, each cowl griefed and crying.

  But I had been wrong. Their armour was not immaculate, those two were town-dwellers. The woman straightened herself, and gave a little shiver. They turned to each other, their eyes must have met, they seemed to hunch their shoulders and then hurried quickly away, back walking fast to the car, to the safety of their room.

  My Little Robins

  THAT notable engineer first made his appearance one night on the Ligurian Sea, on the Ajaccio passage.

  At nine or ten o’clock I was sitting huddled in a corner of the second-class saloon. One heavily shaded light burned above a flap-table that served, with its four or five bottles, as a bar. The rest of the saloon faded off on all sides into darkness, the darkness of bulwark-shaped walls and a portholed fore-partition: in the darkness lay passengers in all the humped and sprawled positions of shipboard sleep. They lay among the litter of their suppers—bread-rind, cheese-crumbs, wine bottles—and the crumpled shreds of newspaper in which all that food had been wrapped; among the first pale reachings of vomit; against shoulders and on laps, on Corsicans sailing back to their native island, on Corsican nieces visiting their old aunts in mountain villages, on Corsican entrepreneurs of Ajaccio, on the sons of Corsicans returning from their universities in France, on Corsican travellers in chestnuts and granite and wood, on long-moustached migrants homing again, on matriarchs intent upon the hearths of their first brooding—on all these who were bound together by the second-class look, dark and roughish, bound with the wicker-basket and the peasant spattering that distinguish both ships bound for islands and ships of the inland seas, rough ships that ply the Black Sea, the Caspian, the local Baltic and this the Ligurian Sea bound for Ajaccio in French Corsica.

  And now into this sleep-smelling saloon, shuddering from the engines aft, dusky with the cramp of travellers, there stepped the bright-blue dungarees of an engineer. He entered firmly, straight from his engines, with a seaman’s tread; stood for a moment wiping some of the oil from his hands; stepped over to the circle of light over the makeshift bar. Disregarding the passengers, he fingered a packet of cigarettes from his dungaree pockets, held it high to drop a cigarette unsoiled into his mouth, then ordered a pastis. He held the milky glass outstretched, curling out one long finger in a gesture of stiff delicacy—and drank. This man’s presence was forceful—instantly one was affected. There was nothing odd in what he did—though later it was to prove otherwise. The appearance in the second-class saloon of a ship’s worker, an ordinary engineer, was not unusual to any but a few northern passengers accustomed to firmer disciplinary divisions on larger and colder ships. It was more his personal figure; and, of course, some essential power beneath this.

  He did not look like what an engineer might be supposed to look. He was a tall, thin, gangling man, with a beaked nose and dark bright eyes that peered forward with the look of an angry scholar. His thin stomach arched in, his knees knobbled and bent forward, his arms held bonily akimbo, he moved—and he moved all the time, he never stopped—like an agitated don doing his best with a fox-trot. Often the scholarly, the nominally unworldly, lurch and stumble not so much because their bodies have been misshapen by the length of their books, as by a deficiency in ordinary vanity—they have never worshipped bodily grace in a manner personal enough to imitate it; they are neither nervous nor preoccupied, simply they have never learned. But this is often compensated by a delicacy of smaller movements—gestures of the hands, inclinations of the head, reclinations of the whole body. Thus also the engineer: his hands, long-fingered, black-oiled, fluttered beautifully; the movements of his head followed fluently the thoughts of his mind, and even standing his whole body was sitting—he drooped relaxed. He wore dark sunglasses, and perched on
his head a blue cap crumpled like a képi from the Crimean war.

  He never stopped moving. As he took his glass and first surveyed it, he arched further backwards, and then as he drank revolved slowly with his lips to the glass, scrutinizing the deep half-circle of sleepers; simultaneously he managed to speak to the barman and wave with his free hand to one of the passengers who was still sitting upright and awake. Now taking his drink he gangled over to this man, and started an intense gesticulated conversation. His body swayed, his hands fluttered, his nose pecked, his eyes rolled. He spoke in French in either a Provencal or Italian dialect. It was difficult to understand all he said—but it had to do with prices, the loan of a gun, and the sale of something he had brought from the mainland. It was plain now that some of his volatility was moved by the common Mediterranean need for commerce, for using each moment as a street-corner; yet this too he managed with a curious distinction. The other man said little, sometimes shrugged his shoulders—his was the situation of the approached. But finally, as if forces had been slowly gathering inside him, he too began to talk, without pause, giving with definition his own idea of the matter; he pointed suddenly to his stomach, and began to talk faster and louder. The engineer opened his arms wide, and managed at the same time to move his shoulders up and down in a series of hopeless shrugs. Impossible, the shoulders said, hopeless. The other man drew from his pocket a note—twenty francs. The shrugging ceased, the engineer took the note—though indeed still as if there could be no hope, with down-pressed lips that expressed also something of the worthlessness of all money—and went shuffling and lurching from the saloon. In a few moments he returned, carrying bread and a huge dish of soup. The man nodded and began to eat. Just then, I suppose, my eyes closed and I was off to sleep.