Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  But it was a good job, well-paid. And almost certainly less risky, less imponderable, than a job in one of the hotels or bars on the main island, even had such a job been obtainable. Mary Vella calculated and assessed and worried, discussed the price of a plastic-covered kitchen table, cuffed a straying child, beamed and bobbed at Father Grech, performing his evening tour of the parish.

  James made careful plans for Nan's visit. One wanted her to get the best possible impression of the place; she had been just a bit derogatory (as had one or two other friends) when he had announced his intentions. ‘There, James? But isn't it awfully English – why not Greece or Italy? Yes, I daresay prices are lower …’ Nan, of course, had been a great traveller all her life; whatever obscure French village you mentioned, whatever remote Greek island, she had been there, probably years ago, before it got so spoilt, when it was really lovely and untouched. It could be irritating, even in as old and dear a friend as Nan. The house, he knew, could not fail to impress – to inspire envy (pretty as one had to concede was Nan's Georgian Cheltenham house) – it was the island's shortcomings that were a nuisance. But there was nothing to be done about it except make a joke of the worst eyesores and exploit all that was most exploitable – sea, climate, the abundance and cheapness of all those fruits and vegetables that would be most expensive or unavailable in England.

  And Nan was gratifyingly appreciative. She arrived wan and tired (the winter had been appalling, life not easy with everything so dear now, what a wise decision you did make, James …) and unfurled within the first week, becoming tanned and gay, her old amusing self. She must be pushing sixty now, one would hardly believe it. She had a great way with people, of course, Nan. Within days she was much in demand, socially – invitations galore for them both. And she had nice things to say about the quality of the social life the island offered, such interesting people, people who painted and wrote and that kind of thing, really, it wouldn't be hard to settle down here, you'd hardly miss London theatres and exhibitions at all. They swam and sunned themselves, ate and drank, explored and talked.

  She was sweet to Lucia (and very good with Mary Vella, whenever they were in the bar, a graceful mixture of jokiness and charm). She gave Lucia some bits and pieces (but nothing too lavish – just a simple little blouse, oddments of junk jewellery), taught her how to make a really delicious gazpacho, was able, with amazing tact, to achieve what James had never managed and persuade the girl to use a deodorant.

  All in all, it was a most agreeable fortnight. Nan was a pleasant and stimulating companion (if, occasionally, just a tiny bit inclined to go on about plays one hadn't seen, or books one hadn't come across) – always eager and interested, sympathetic and understanding about things like the way people let you down – Roger, the French boy. Nan, of course, was a very intelligent and sensitive person; broad-minded, perceptive. James, in an appreciative mood, told her so. Nan laid a hand on his arm in graceful acknowledgement of the compliment.

  ‘I do think, you know,’ she said, ‘I do think that honestly our generation had the best of things’ – an elegant return, this, Nan must be ten or twelve years younger than he was. ‘It was so much easier to get about in our day, travel, see something of what life is like for other people. And I do believe,’ she went on, ‘I really do believe, James, that that has done so much for us. I mean, we mustn't be smug, and I know it's a cliche, but travel does broaden the mind, we don't have quite the same outlook on things as if we'd just lived in one little pond, but now, of course, it's so difficult for people, the young, how can they move around?’ She sighed, leaning back in the new cane garden chair that looked so well on the terrace, against the background of vine and pergola. ‘What an eye-opener it's all been. I am just so thankful that we had the opportunity.’

  James nodded. Peacefully, gratefully, they watched the sun set over the island while in the background Lucia hummed pop songs in the kitchen, pattered out from time to time to replenish glasses, fill the ice-bucket.

  He would have been pleased enough for Nan to extend her fortnight, but at the end of it she seemed quite eager to get back to Cheltenham – incomprehensibly so, James felt. Oh well yes, I know, she said, no doubt it'll be pouring with rain and one blanches at the thought of all that grind of housework and shopping again – it has been the most wonderful break, James – but there are things coming up, the Festival and then all the London things, so one way and another, and it's sweet of you to suggest it, I think I'll get back.

  He felt a bit flat, after she had gone. There would be the Fletchers next month, and in the meantime Tom Harley had some very amusing people in television staying, making a documentary about the island for the BBC, so that there were diversions, and others to look forward to, but even so a bleakness crept over him from time to time. He was wheezing a bit, for no apparent reason, and toyed with the idea of going over to the main island to see one of the English doctors at the hospital (the local man was quite all right for run-of-the-mill things but for a proper check-up he wouldn't really do, of course). It could no doubt be left for a month or two, though. And in the meantime he could cheer himself up by deciding to have a new car in the autumn (and that was something he could never have afforded in England), and getting Lucia's second cousin to redecorate the bathroom a very successful terracotta colour at a quite ridiculously low price.

  When the blow fell he could hardly believe what he was hearing, at first. He had to make the girl repeat what she had said before he could be quite clear what it was she was on about. Lucia was incoherent to begin with, and then truculent, defensive even, in the face of James's indignation. Finally he ordered her out of the house. It took a good stiff drink to restore him sufficiently to get on to the telephone and relieve his feelings slightly by telling the whole story to Tom Harley and the Pierces, who, he reflected bitterly, were among those who had been most taken with Nan and her little ways.

  To think that they must have worked all this out behind his back, the pair of them. All those little chats in the kitchen; so this was what they had been about. No wonder Lucia had seemed moody and restless since Nan's departure.

  ‘Your friend say if I like to come to England she give me good job, and at first I say no, because of my family, you see, and then after she go I think and think about it and I think maybe yes. I would much like to see London …’

  ‘She doesn't live in London,’ said James savagely, ‘and how precisely do you imagine you're going to pay for the air fare?’

  Lucia delved in her pocket. Out of an air-mail envelope she produced a single BEA ticket to London, and a lot of instructions in Nan's neat handwriting.

  ‘When she go she say all right, my dear, you think it over and let me know. So when I have think, I write where she tell me, and she send me these.’ Lucia folded the documents with care, and returned them to her pocket. Not a word of regret, of apology; the ingratitude was unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable, the lack of any sense of obligation.

  ‘Get out,’ said James, near to tears.

  Mary Vella had not much idea where London was; she knew only that it was further away than Rome, since the aeroplane reputedly took longer to get there, but nearer than Australia. That was neither here nor there; Rome would have been preferable, in any case. She sat outside the bar, not, for once, talking to anyone, and her head churned and ached. She had a sense of things slipping from her grasp, of an erosion – by incalculable forces – of her matriarchal position. Lucia had been a good girl, always – docile, biddable, reasonably industrious. What had happened was as though some dependable aspect of the physical world had revealed itself to be quite otherwise – as though a stone had talked. And stones do not talk without provocation. Bitterly, Mary Vella's thoughts centred on James Winton. She cobbled, with large, inept stitches, a child's shirt, muttered to herself, wept a little, schemed, and knew that what had happened could not be undone by any scheming, that it was part of the order of things, part of that lurking retribution for sins and inadequacies,
part of the wilful world that could be manipulated only so far. She could not picture London, nor England, and did not wish to do so. What she could picture was the reduction of her daughter – or rather her daughter's familiar presence – to a series of blue, red and white air-mail envelopes. She fretted, and sewed, and sought, presently, the dark, cool, reassuring womb of the church. There, on her knees, she recited her anxieties, for herself, for Lucia, for Lucia's immortal soul, for Lucia's prospects of marriage and maternity.

  James got a girl through Paul at the garage and set about the wearisome task of training her. She was worse than Lucia had been. Irritably, he instructed and instructed again and chivvied and snapped when patience had been exhausted and nothing else would do. There was little prospect of Carmen knowing what was what by the time the Fletchers came out, that was clear enough.

  He did not feel all that good, either. The business had brought back his headaches; he got tired easily; some days it seemed almost too much of an effort to go down to the beach. He slopped about the house and garden through the long, hot days. The heat did not worry him at all, he had always liked it – that, after all was what one was here for. But he felt oppressed, all the same, and the island's landscape, encircling his garden – the cluttered little fields and squat villages and dry scrubby vegetation – seemed alien in a way they never had before. He would lie on the terrace with his eyes closed, between the hard blue sky and the hot dry earth that rasped all day long with grasshoppers, and experience a sense of displacement, of unease. It annoyed him. One was, after all, a person accustomed to moving around – had lived, at one time or another, in four different countries, had never really been settled anywhere in particular, called nowhere home, was not bound by restrictions of place or culture. He tried to divert himself by replanning the garden, and planted roses (‘Iceberg’, for coolness and sparkle) all along the pergola, but the plants withered and sulked, water them as he might.

  Mary Vella came up with Father Grech.

  ‘Oh, so she went, did she?’ snapped James. ‘Well, I really don't know what it's got to do with me now. It wasn't any of my doing, you know.’

  It was Father Grech who did the talking this time, with Mary standing a few yards back, silent but omnipresent, for all the world like the black governessy I-told-you-so figure in a Greek chorus.

  He launched forth, Father Grech, into a long, faintly accusatory monologue, about how worried the girl's mother was, and his own doubts about the girl's welfare, and so forth and so on, to which James listened with mounting exasperation. Good heavens, with a brood like that you'd think the old girl would be glad enough to get one of them off her hands, anyone would think she'd been whipped off into the brothels of Soho or somewhere. Neither of them, clearly, had given a moment's thought to him, left in the lurch like this. He felt like pointing out that it was entirely thanks to his efforts that Lucia was now a desirable commodity as a servant. She hadn't known a thing, when she came to him in the first place.

  ‘What?’ he said crossly. ‘No, I really can't imagine how she'll get the fare home again if she's not happy, she should have thought of that in the first place, shouldn't she? She'll have to save up for it, presumably. Teach her not to be so silly.’ My God, they weren't surely going to have the nerve to suggest that one stump up for the price of an air ticket? ‘And no, I don't know if there's a Catholic church there. I should think Cheltenham's jolly Protestant, as a matter of fact.’ His temples throbbed; there was a filthy headache coming on.

  Finally they went. James, standing on the terrace with thumping head, watched them walk slowly down the dusty road, a few yards apart, as though they had nothing left to say to each other. Mary had been sullen and remarkably silent, standing there with her eyes fixed on James and a kind of blaze to them that had been disconcerting; he had wondered if possibly the woman had gone a bit funny in the head. In any case, he thought, turning to go into the house, it is all quite ridiculous, they are making an absurd fuss about nothing, what on earth do they think can happen to the girl in Cheltenham, of all places? It's not exactly a den of iniquity. Come to that, it might do her good to get away from that family for a bit. They're smothered in family, these people. Family and priests.

  He spent a week or so quietly at the house, hardly going out at all, and felt considerably better by the end of it. The nasty little pains in his chest seemed to have gone away, and he was not getting so breathless. He went for one or two short walks in the evenings, and was none the worse. He was longing for a swim, and decided to risk a trip to the beach.

  The children were down there, the children and the goats. The sight of them was a tonic; he felt quite a rejuvenating little rush of something as he sat down on the sand, stripping off shirt and trousers, and stretched himself out in his bathing-trunks, lying on his stomach so that he could watch them – the boys' neat brown bodies and their lovely agility as they played football with a tin can picked from the rubbish at the water's edge. When he had swum, and dried himself, he walked up to them and tried, yet again, to make contact. One of the boys, he saw now, was older than he had thought – fifteen or sixteen at least. James stood there for a few minutes, fastening his trousers, rubbing the towel across his salted, sticky skin, and chatted encouragingly. Name? School? Interests? But the boy shook his head and shuffled, his eyes darting to James's trouser pocket: money, cigarettes, was that what he was after? No, thought James severely, one is not going to corrupt these people, and when all his chat had fallen upon stony ground, and the boy was retreating, edging backwards to join the others, he went back to sit for a while and rest before the upward climb to the car.

  It was early evening, and hot still, though he had tried to time his bathe so that it would be cooler for his walk up the hill. There was a slight breeze; small waves frilled up the beach, leaving the sand laced with white foam. The sea was marbled with different blues; far out on the horizon there was a wispy layer of cloud. Not, of course, that that indicated anything but the inevitable sunshine tomorrow; one could be absolutely confident of the weather, that was one thing. Oh, he thought, really everything is quite all right, this little upset over Lucia is over and done with now, no point in harping on it. As for Nan Chalmers … Bitterness and resentment welled up, clouding the perfection of the evening. For the umpteenth time he went over the scathing, unanswerable, things that should (but never would, for Nan would take good care to see there was no opportunity) be said to her, and gained some little satisfaction. The emotion, though, made his heart race, and at last, with a deliberate effort, he forced himself to clear his head, lie in the sun, and relax.

  He must have dozed off for a while. When he came to he could not for a moment think where he was; it was like one of those times of perplexity and faint panic when one wakes in a strange bedroom and cannot think, for a few seconds, where or why … He sat bolt upright, staring round, and he was quite alone on the golden crescent of the beach, quite quite alone, with nothing but the noise of the sea, and a long way away someone shouting. And he had the horrid sensation of having been left behind, abandoned, by whom or what he could not say. He scrambled to his feet, awkwardly, stumbling and panting, and then all of a sudden things fell into place, he knew where he was, on the familiar beach, on the island, the car not far away, out of sight at the top of the hill.

  The children had gone (that, perhaps, accounted for the sense of abandonment, of loneliness). He gathered up his things and set off up the path, and as he climbed he saw them not far ahead, picking a leisurely way over the stones and through the bushes, twittering like a flock of migrating birds. He took the hill very slowly – it was hotter than he had anticipated, and the breeze had dropped – but even so it was an effort and seemed steeper, longer, than ever it had before. He trudged on, and there was a nagging pain in his chest, and a mistiness before his eyes; I am not well, he thought, I am really not too well, it was rash to come down here, I must get back and take things easy, have an early night.

  He climbed, and pause
d for a while, and then climbed again because he felt unaccountably exposed here, unsafe – the place had lost, for the moment, its appeal and seemed hostile, alien, unfamiliar. He tripped on a stone and almost fell, and the slight shock set his heart pounding, and that pain came again, hard, a sickening jolt to the chest.

  Just ahead, the children's voices were shrill; it came to him, as it had never done before, that he could not understand a word they were saying.

  And then something strange began to happen. His whole body was going numb, and everything had become blurred and distant. He had fallen, he realised, though he had hardly felt himself hit the ground. He was lying there, and knew that things were not right, not right at all, that he must get help. He tried to shout, and some sound must have come out, because he was aware of the children drawing near out of the darkness, the almost total darkness, at the periphery of his vision. And then the darkness swallowed him, and it had all gone – the island, the children, everything.

  The children stood a few yards off and looked at the old man. They chattered excitedly. They asked each other if he was dead. Presently one of the older girls, Maria, crept closer to make an inspection. The boys, the two big boys, had gone on ahead, missing this drama, and she was now the eldest present so that on her devolved the responsibility of action, if action was to be taken.

  She squatted down in the dust beside him, and stared. She thought that he was breathing still. His face, though, was a very strange colour. Her uncle Tony, she remembered, had looked like that when he was so ill last winter, and the doctor had come, quickly, in the middle of the night, and they had taken him away to the hospital in an ambulance, there had been much commotion and haste and rushing about in the dark. It seemed to her that there was the same urgency needed here. She discussed this with the other children (one of them, a very young one, poked James's inert leg, gingerly, and then skittered back into the bushes in panic) and then they all scampered away up the hillside, taking the goats with them.