by Michel Déon
‘I’m not thinking anything.’
‘He tried. He talked a lot … He was so intelligent. I was scared of his hands … you remember. Afterwards … afterwards I imagined those “things” … He pulled me onto his lap.’
‘That’s enough.’
That night they sleep apart. At first light he wakes up and watches out for Mandy. A blanket of mist drifts elegantly over the water, hiding the Florida coast. Mandy walks down to the beach, unwraps her towel and walks slowly out into the wavelets, her arms held wide, like a tightrope walker. She vanishes in soft bubbles and reappears a few seconds later, swimming a long breaststroke, which attracts a silver and white barracuda the size of a large pike. With a sharp windmilling of her arm, she drives it away and lets herself be carried on her stomach towards the sand, her mouth open, taking in mouthfuls of water and blowing them out again like a whale. Catching sight of Arthur, she waves to him before she puts her feet down and then, standing deliciously in front of him, winds her discarded towel around her belly. Augusta is sleeping on the left side of the bed. He nestles next to her and pulls her towards him.
There is no more talk about Concannon. They speak about other things. Such as:
‘You didn’t make a fuss when I said we were going to fly to Miami. I thought you hated flying.’
‘When you’re there I’m not scared of anything.’
‘And you were happy to come to Key Largo, when you don’t like the sea?’
‘You like it. Isn’t that enough of a reason?’
Or one afternoon:
‘Unless you’re hiding it very well, I haven’t seen you taking any tranquillisers.’
‘You’re my tranquilliser. Never leave me, and I won’t be scared of anything ever again.’
‘I shan’t leave you. It’s you who’ll leave me.’
How can she not know it? And if she does know it, why does she pretend not to believe it?
Next day a storm breaks. Tons of water pour from the sky. The roof cannot withstand the onslaught. A wet patch spreads across the ceiling and they have to put a bowl by the bed. Water drips into it, slower and then faster. Augusta hates the noise and stuffs cotton wool in her ears. Cliff comes jogging along the path in a yellow oilskin and climbs onto the roof. His footsteps are so loud they expect him to come crashing through. The sea, which is usually a milky blue, turns the colour of molten lead. When the rain stops, the wind hurls itself into the space the clouds have left, shaking the bay window that looks onto the garden as if it wants to rip it out, uprooting the most ancient pines and blowing the skirts of palm trees up over their crowns. A whirlwind of red and white petals spirals up like butterflies over the rose bed as they pretend to read magazines – he National Geographic, she Vogue – while their thoughts wander, attracted and repelled by the tempest that has whipped up the sea around the keys, usually as flat and dull as a lake. Cliff, having repaired the leak, climbs down the ladder, which a sudden blast of wind knocks flying as soon as he is back on the ground. He takes off his oilskin and joins them. Arthur offers him a glass of bourbon. Cliff clucks his tongue; his trousers, which have slipped down over his paunch, and his flapping singlet reveal the crater of a belly button encircled by frizzy black hairs.
‘A little breeze,’ he says. ‘The tail end of the cyclone that ran out of puff all on its own off the Cuban coast.’
‘You have a funny belly button,’ Augusta remarks.
He pushes his index finger into it and wiggles it happily.
‘My girlfriend loves it. She’s always rummaging around in it to check I didn’t hide anything there.’
The bourbon makes his cheeks flush and lights up his eyes, two grey gimlets in his puffy face scored by wrinkles.
When the wind has blown itself out, a deathly hush falls. The horizon clears and over the Everglades fluffy greyish cumulus clouds lower a curtain of rain. Cliff puts away a second bourbon and leaves, sloping off with his rolling orang-utan-like gait, his arms swinging. On the beach a pair of white egrets flap their wings and chatter hoarsely.
In the night Arthur suddenly feels Augusta so tense and distant from him that he raises himself up to study her face, which is full of fear and disgust.
‘I can’t help it,’ she says. ‘I can’t get the image of Cliff ’s horrible belly button out of my mind. All that curly hair … I think I’m going to throw up.’
‘You’re crazy!’
She retches and throws her head back.
‘We’re never going to be able to make love again, ever. There’ll always be that horrible belly button, and his girlfriend’s fat finger—’
He shakes her; she retaliates by going completely rigid, stiff as a board. He grips her shoulders and presses her flat on the bed’s tangled sheets.
‘Stop it!’
Her head lolls limply on the pillow, on the point of nervous collapse. He grips her chin and she wrenches herself away. Pulling back, he looks at her and slaps her, twice. She remains motionless, her eyes huge.
‘You hit me!’
She jumps at him and hugs him hard. Two tears of happiness roll down her cheeks.
‘You do love me …’
They stay like that, entwined, holding each other tightly, until dawn.
*
They only have one day left. In the wake of the storm the weather has cooled. The sea surrounds Key Largo with a ring of churned-up water and washes driftwood up onto the beach, the sort Elizabeth likes to collect and put in glazed cabinets. Arthur falls asleep at first light. Augusta shakes his arm.
‘You’re going to miss Mandy swimming!’
Mandy: of course. But Arthur’s dreams have been of Concannon, on his deathbed, his pale, transparent hands lying on the sheet, hands that stroked Augusta and probably shocked her, but she had not had the strength to defend herself. We all have our ghosts. Sweep them aside and we’re naked.
‘You’re not the same any more,’ she says.
‘Yes I am. The only difference is that I didn’t know who I was before I met you.’
He has made a breakfast tray, the way he does every day, and goes outside to pick a rose, but the storm has laid waste to the flower bed whose fragrance once enveloped the veranda.
‘It’s a sign!’ Augusta says, her face sad for a few seconds before she starts to laugh, tugging on his too-short shirt to cover her thighs.
She has forgotten her terror of the previous day. Arthur remains the sole guardian of that memory.
Early next morning the Bertram noses out of the dock. On the jetty Cliff waves briefly, cross with Augusta for flinching with repugnance when he tried to lift her on board and preferring to take Mandy’s hand. He tidies away the fenders, and then only his crouching form is visible. Nobody looks back, except Arthur. The club is merging with the trees and laurel bushes; it is the bungalow’s turn next, in the long shadows of the pines and palms. He catches sight of Cliff ’s girlfriend, blacker than ever in her white tunic. She has already hung their bedsheets and blankets over the veranda rail. Things are fading. A few minutes before they departed, Augusta, having left two of her saris behind in their bedroom wardrobe and not noticed that Arthur had packed one in his suitcase, had dressed in a suit for the journey. Suddenly she went white: they were going to miss the plane; forewarned by a treacherous Elizabeth, Getulio would be waiting for them when their plane landed and would kill Arthur. Searching in her handbag, he found some tranquillisers, which she took with childlike docility. On board the launch she takes herself off to the cabin again, wrapping herself in a blanket the way she had on the way out. The sound of two weeks of stolen happiness swinging shut behind them is almost audible. Their lives are in Mandy’s hands now. Sitting on the Bertram’s bridge, she navigates it down the channel, the buoys at arm’s length. Over her yellow T-shirt she wears a thick, wide-ribbed navy-blue sweater. Her wool hat is pulled down over her ears. As the sun rises higher, she sheds both sweater and hat, and Arthur enjoys seeing the fine sculpted shoulders of the Greek statue again, the narr
ow waist and blond curls that flutter in the wind. She turns round and offers him a chocolate bar. He will not forget the puzzle she represents, nor the flat, wide opal sea that laps the islands.
His key had hardly turned in the lock when Mrs Paley appeared in the hallway, a letter and a telegram in her hand.
‘I didn’t know where to reach you. You should have left a forwarding address. It may be urgent—’
‘Nothing’s ever urgent.’
‘Are you here for a few days?’
‘Till the end of the month.’
‘I don’t have anyone after you. If you need a room, just say.’
‘I don’t think so. My classes start on 1 October.’
‘I cleaned yesterday, but you left everything so tidy—’
‘Thank you.’
He regretted his curtness and smiled at her. She was doubtless waiting for him to open his telegram and desperate to know what was in it.
‘I hope it’s nothing serious … Anyway, the sun and sea have done you good.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
He read the telegram standing by the window. He stared out at the roofs, the reddened sky, the towers already winking with lights. From the streets rose a dull rumble of traffic, a sound he had forgotten during the last two weeks. He reread the telegram.
Mother died suddenly 10th at 4 p.m. Heart failure. Funeral 12th. Waiting for you. Condolences. Émilie.
Émilie: his mother’s friend, who brought the news of another death with such relish. Five days ago. Where had he been at that moment? Had she called for him a last time? Why wasn’t he crying? As though he was being punished by remorse, refusing him even tears. The sloping, slightly old-fashioned handwriting ran across the envelope of the letter. The franked stamp gave the date and time it had been sent, the 9th at 3 p.m. from the post office in Rue des Saints-Pères. The day before she died. Who had found her? He tore up the letter without opening it. Moments such as this refuse ever to be forgotten.
From his landlady’s he called Allan Porter in Washington. Porter was in his office and Arthur was connected almost immediately.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ Porter said. ‘Hang up. I’ll call you back.’
‘You’re so alone,’ Mrs Paley said. ‘But your friends, those young ladies, will help you through this terrible time.’
‘I doubt it.’
Porter called back less than five minutes later. A military transport was leaving at 8 a.m. for Le Bourget. Without his helping hand Arthur would have stood no chance of getting to Paris on his last fifty dollars. At Miami airport Augusta had fallen in love with an antique silver bracelet. Where would his problems end? The phone at Elizabeth’s rang on. He hoped he might find her at the trattoria below her apartment. At the trattoria they told him she was away until Monday. He made do with a sandwich and coffee in a drugstore that was about to close and walked back to Rector Street. On his way past the customs building that was his usual route back he noticed, for the first time, a remarkable statue that decorated the entrance: the rounded figure of a woman who was leaning one elbow on a sphinx’s head, the other on a lion’s mane, and tilting her expressionless face forward as though she was softly calling to the passers-by. Naked to the waist, she thrust out two very modest breasts that pointed in different directions. A joker had painted the toenails of her huge right foot red. Arthur had walked past this mysterious allegory of customs and excise without ever noticing the woman, an apparently ideal woman of the 1900s. Hadn’t the municipal sculptors ever seen a Greek figure like Mandy’s, hadn’t they ever seen the unsettling willowy adolescence of an Augusta?
He stopped the lift at the eleventh floor and took off his shoes to walk to the twelfth without rousing Mrs Paley and her enveloping compassion. The suitcase that had come back from Key Largo with him was waiting on the bed. He tipped its contents out: trunks, shorts, brightly coloured shirts, and Augusta’s sari, the one she had worn on their last evening, still steeped in her perfume. He hung it on a hanger in the wardrobe, threw everything else in the trash. Then, sitting on a chair in front of the open window that bounded a rectangle of star-studded night, he waited for the dawn, buffeted by merciless images from his past and racked with sudden sobs that choked him almost to the point of suffocation.
When he got back from Paris, he finally reached Elizabeth by telephone.
‘You’re lucky I answered, I forgot to take the phone off the hook. We’re in the middle of rehearsing. Where have you been?’
‘Paris. My mother died when I was at Key Largo. I only found out when I got back.’
‘It’s difficult to know what to say to news like that.’
‘Don’t say anything.’
‘Are you unhappy?’
‘Yes. Have you seen Augusta?’
She was silent, and he heard muffled background noise, a man’s voice then a woman’s. He repeated, ‘Augusta?’
‘I need to talk to you about her. Come by tomorrow morning. Are you on your own this evening?’
‘Yes.’
After a short, murmured conversation with the two distant voices, she said, ‘Come in an hour.’
He arrived early, just after nightfall, and walked up and down outside her building. A young woman skipped down the steps: he recognised Thelma, the curly-haired actress who had played the crucified woman up a ladder. She was followed by a tall, svelte young black man in a pink jacket and green bow tie. They kissed each other quickly on the cheek and walked off in different directions. Arthur waited a few minutes before going up. Elizabeth opened the door in a dressing gown, without makeup, her face shining with cream. Was she trying to discourage him? He had not come for that.
‘Did you eat?’
She made a plate of sandwiches in the kitchen. Arthur contemplated the spotlit acacia with its autumn leaves.
‘I haven’t thanked you for Key Largo.’
‘Augusta did. Here … open this burgundy.’
‘Have you stopped drinking your terrible Chilean wine?’
‘Chauvinist!’
‘You have to admit this is better.’
‘I do.’
She arranged some cushions round a low table and put the glasses and plate of sandwiches between them.
‘Is Augusta in New York?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She wouldn’t tell me her address. She flew off on her cloud afterwards. We live in different worlds. At Key Largo the princess granted me an interlude, or maybe I should say a playlet, the kind of thing you put on as a matinée for the underprivileged.’
Elizabeth walked over to the record player and picked up an LP.
‘No! Please. Music paralyses me. I need to talk.’
‘I don’t suppose you understand any of it,’ she said.
Understand? What was there to understand, except that no one can keep hold of anything, and that love, death, peace, success, and every defeat are crouching in the shadows and will spring at your throat just when you least expect it? It’s a game of blind man’s buff with no one in charge. He had gone into their holiday blindfolded, and everyone had understood everything before he had. At Key Largo he had isolated Augusta, and nowhere else existed. As soon as he let her go, she had put herself out of reach again.
‘You’re right, I don’t understand anything.’
Elizabeth enlightened him. Not totally, but a little. Getulio had not gone abroad. He had spent three weeks in prison. Convicted of what? Practically nothing. Speeding, and a ticket he’d paid with a cheque that bounced. His friend de Souza, the Brazilian wheeler-dealer, had got him released. Was de Souza broke? Far from it. Arthur saw danger looming. Do we sense these things? When they materialise, is it because we sensed them? ‘One upset leads to another,’ his mother used to say, always ready to find courage in adversity and forever drawing comfort from the inexhaustible wisdom of nations. But was this just an upset?
‘I’m happy to tell you the short version,’ Elizabeth said quietly.
‘What
sort of version is that?’
‘It depends on you. It might comfort you or it might drive you to despair.’
‘I’ll risk it.’
‘One day she’ll say you were the only one she ever loved.’
In truth he had never expected to keep her. Almost as soon as they stepped off the plane from Miami she no longer belonged to him. It was all fading. A stranger and her assignation. Not even a wave as her taxi drove away.
‘Did you know about her fling with Concannon?’
Elizabeth burst out laughing.
‘Everyone knew. He was crazy about her. But imagine him deflowering a Brazilian virgin! He’d never have been able to do it. I expect he cuddled her, and she was so impressed by him that she let him, but to go the whole way would have needed a different kind of man. No, my little Arthur, you are her first. A bit too much in awe of her, apparently. But maybe that was exactly the way to go about it with her. She’s an extraordinarily strange person. It was the one thing she wanted, and the thing she was most scared of in the world.’
‘It was the last thing I needed to do to become a man.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that. But do toughen up. Fast … When are you going back to Beresford?’
‘The day after tomorrow. I have to drop by Jansen and Brustein. They may hire me again next summer. Brustein’s being very decent. Why? I’ve decided not to ask myself. Goodbye, Mrs Paley; so long, New York. Though … I’ll be coming back for your play at the end of October. I brought a bit of money back from Paris. Not much. My poor mother counted every penny. And believe it or not, she actually kept it in a woollen stocking at the bottom of a drawer … I nearly let it go with the removal people who were taking everything to a sale. There are a few other souvenirs, photos and letters, in a trunk I left with an old uncle who I’ll never see again. Tomorrow’s the first day of the rest of my life.’
