Jasper moved cautiously. He was slightly above the pair, but well obscured from their view. Unfortunately it would be impossible to overhear a word they said. Wedging himself uncomfortably, he raised his binoculars and adjusted them.
A conversation, apparently heated, took place. There were many gestures on the part of the swarthy man and at one point he began to go away but was recalled by Mrs Vansittart. She offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. Then Mrs Vansittart took a wallet from a pocket of her trousers and counted a large number of notes on the palm of her companion. ‘My God,’ said Jasper, aloud, ‘she pays for it!’
The couple parted, the waiter hurrying back towards the Grand-Hotel. Mrs Vansittart sat for a moment where he had left her and then clambered slowly back to the coastal path. She disappeared from Jasper’s view.
Privately, Mrs Vansittart keeps an account of her life. While Harry composes his songs she fills a number of hard-backed notebooks with the facts she does not wish to divulge to anyone now but which, one day after her death and after Harry’s, she would like to be known. Of this particular day she wrote:
I paused now and again to watch the early-morning fishermen. I had paid ten thousand francs. At the end of the season the man might go and not return, as he had promised. But I could not be sure.
The morning was beautiful, not yet even faintly hot, the sky a perfect blue. The houses of Beaulieu seemed gracious across the glittering sea, yet the houses of Beaulieu are as ordinary as houses anywhere. A jogger glanced at me as I stood aside to let him pass, perspiration on his nose and chin. He did not speak or smile. I sometimes hate it on Cap Ferrat.
On the coastal path that morning I thought about Harry and myself when we were both eleven; I was in love with him even then. In Holland Falls he’d brought me to his mother’s bedroom to show me the rings she crowded on to her plump fingers, her heavily stoppered scent bottles, her garish silk stockings. But I wasn’t interested in his mother’s things. Harry told me to take my clothes off, which I shyly did, wanting to because he’d asked me and yet keeping my head averted. Everyone knew that Harry loathed his mother, but no one thought about it or blamed him particularly, she being huge and pink and doting on her only child in a shaming way. ‘God!’ he remarked, looking at my scrawny nakedness among his mother’s frills. ‘God, Jesus!’ I had wires on my teeth, and spindly arms and legs; I didn’t have breasts of any size. I took off Harry’s red windcheater, and after that the rest of his clothes and his shoes. We lay side by side between his mother’s scented sheets, while two floors down she talked to Mrs Gilliland. ‘Now, that’s just a damned lie!’ she afterwards shrieked at Rose when Rose said what she’d seen. I’ll never forget poor Rose’s pretty black face in the bedroom doorway, her eyes as round as teacups, bulging from her head. Harry’s mother got rid of her because of it, but the story ran all over Holland Falls and someone told my own mother, who sat down and cried. My father bawled at me, his fury a single crimson explosion of lips and tongue, his dotted necktie gulping up and down. It wasn’t Harry’s fault, I said, I’d tempted Harry because I loved him. Besides, I added, nothing had happened. ‘At eleven years of age?’ my father yelled. ‘It’s not the point, for God’s sake, that nothing happened!’
On the coastal path that morning I told myself it wasn’t fair to remember my father in the moment of his greatest rage. He’d been a gentle man, at his gentlest when operating his high-speed dentist’s drill, white-jacketed and happy. Even so, he never forgave me.
We ran away from Holland Falls when we were twenty-two. Harry had already inherited the paper-mill but it was run by a manager, by whom it has been run ever since. We drove about for a year, from town to town, motel to motel. We occupied different rooms because Harry had begun to compose his cycle and liked to be alone with it at night. I loved him more than I could ever tell him but never again, for Harry, did I take my clothes off. Harry has never kissed me, though I, in parsing, cannot even now resist bending down to touch the side of his face with my lips. A mother’s kiss, I dare say you would call it, and yet when I think of Harry and me I think as well of Héloïse and Abelard, Beatrice and Dante, and all the others. Absurd, of course.
I left the coastal path and went down to the rocks again, gazing into the depths of the clear blue water. ‘You’re never cross enough,’ Harry said, with childish petulance in the City Hotel, Harrisburg, when we were still twenty-two. I had come into my room to find the girl lying on my bed, as I had lain on his mother’s with him. In my presence he paid her forty dollars, but I knew he had not laid a finger on her, any more than he had on me when I was her age.
We went to England because Harry was frightened when a police patrol stopped our car one day and asked us if we’d ever been in Harrisburg. I denied it and they let us go, but that was why Harry thought of England, which he took to greatly as soon as we arrived. It became one of the games in our marriage to use only English phrases and to speak in the English way: Harry enjoyed that enormously, almost as much as working on his cycle. And loving him so, I naturally did my best to please him. Any distraction a harmless little game could provide, any compensation: that was how I saw my duty, if in the circumstances that is not too absurd a word. Anyway, the games and the distractions worked, sometimes for years on end. A great deal of time went by, for instance, between the incident in Harrisburg and the first of the two in England. ‘It’s all right,’ the poor child cried out in London when I entered my room. ‘Please don’t tell, Mrs Vansittart.’ Harry paid her the money he had promised her, and when she had gone I broke down and wept. I didn’t even want to look at Harry, I didn’t want to hear him speak. In an hour or so he brought me up a cup of tea.
It was, heaven knows, simple enough on the surface of things: I could not leave Harry because I loved him too much. I loved his chubby white hands and tranquil smile, and the weakness in his eyes when he took his spectacles off. If I’d left him, he would have ended up in prison because Harry needs to be loved. And then, besides, there has been so much happiness, at least for me: our travelling together, the pictures and the furniture we’ve so fondly collected, and of course the Villa Teresa. It’s the strangest thing in the world, all that.
A fisherman brought his boat near to the rocks where I was sitting. I had lit a cigarette and put my sunglasses on because the glare of daytime was beginning. I watched the fisherman unloading his modest catch, his brown fingers expertly arranging nets and hooks. How different, I thought, marriage would have been with that stranger. And yet could I, with anyone else, have experienced such feelings of passion as I have known?
‘I’m sorry,’ Harry began to say, a catch-phrase almost, in the 1950s. He’s always sorry when he Comes in from the flowerbeds with clay on his shoes, or puts the teapot on a polished surface, or breaks the promises he makes. In a way that’s hard to communicate Harry likes being sorry.
‘Bonjour, madame,’ the fisherman said, going by with his baskets of sole or whatever fish it was.
‘Bonjour’, I replied, smiling at him.
Harry would be still in bed, having worked on his cycle until three or four in the morning. Old Pierre and Carola and Madame Spad would not arrive for another hour, and in any case I did not have to be there when they did. But at the back of my mind there’s always the terror that when I return to the Villa Teresa Harry will be dead.
I clambered back to the coastal path and continued on my way. In England, after the first occasion, there was the convent girl in her red gymslip, who wasn’t docile like the other ones but shouted at me that she loved Harry more than I did. Sometimes she was there when I returned from shopping in the afternoons, sometimes there was only the rumpling of my bed to remind me of her visit. We had to leave England because of the scenes she made, and after the awful melancholy that had seized him Harry promised that none of it would ever happen again.
My presence at the lighthouse that morning had to do with a German girl in Switzerland eleven years ago. The waiter who is at the Grand-Hotel fo
r the season was at the Bon Accueil in Château d’Oex. The German girl was given wine at dinnertime and suddenly burst into tears, hysterically flinging her accusations about. I simply laughed. I said it was ridiculous.
We were gone by breakfast-time and Harry has kept his promise since, frightened for eleven years. Dear, gentle Harry, who never laid a finger on any of those girls, who never would.
Later that morning Jasper’s friend shopped in St Jean, with Jasper’s terrier on a lead. When he had finished he sat down to rest at the cafe by the bus stop to have a jus d’abricot. He watched the tourists and the young people from the yachts. The terrier, elderly now, crept beneath his chair in search of shade.
‘Ah, Mrs Bloch!’ Jasper’s friend called out after a little while, for the lean South African lady was shopping also. He persuaded her to join him – rather against her will, since Mrs Bloch does not at all care for Jasper’s friend. He then related what Jasper had earlier related to him: that Mrs Vansittart now paid money for the intimate services she received from men. He described in detail, with some natural exaggeration, the transaction by the lighthouse. Repelled by the account, Mrs Bloch tightened her lips.
On the way back to the Villa Hadrian she called in at the Villa Japhico with two mouse-traps which she had promised last night she would purchase for Mrs Cecil. The Cecils, with neither gardener nor cleaning woman, do not easily find the time for daily shopping and the chandler’s store in St Jean will not deliver mouse-traps. Mrs Bloch waited to be thanked and then began.
‘To think that man came last night for money! With Harry there and everyone else!’
Mrs Cecil shook her head in horror. Jasper was a troublemaker and so was his rather unpleasant friend, yet neither would surely tell an outright lie. It was appalling to think of Mrs Vansittart conducting such business with a waiter. The satisfying of lust in a woman was most unpleasant.
‘I really can’t think why he doesn’t leave her,’ she said.
‘Oh, he never would. That simply isn’t Harry’s style.’
‘Yes, Harry’s loyal.’
That morning the Cecils had discussed the dropping of the Vansittarts, but had in the end agreed that the result of such a course of action would be that Harry would suffer. So they had decided against it, a decision which Mrs Cecil now passed on to her friend.
Mrs Bloch gloomily agreed.
Mrs Vansittart plays an ace and wins the trick. It is autumn, the season is over, the swarthy waiter has gone.
Harry enters the salon with his tray of tea, and the pâtisseries he has made that morning. He is so quiet in the shadows of the room that Mrs Bloch recalls how strangers to the villa have occasionally taken him for a servant. Mrs Cecil throws a smile in his direction.
Mr Bloch and Mr Cecil and Signor Borromeo, all of whom know about the transaction that took place near the lighthouse, prefer not to think about it. Jasper hopes that Mrs Vansittart will commit some further enormity shortly, so that the gossip it trails may while away the winter. It would be awfully dull, he often remarks to his friend, if Mrs Vansittart was like Mrs Bloch and Mrs Cecil and Signora Borromeo.
‘Oh, my dear, don’t pour it yet!’ she cries across the room, and then with some asperity, ‘We really aren’t quite ready, old thing.’
Harry apologizes, enjoying the wave of sympathy her protest engenders. He waits until the hand is played, knowing that then her voice will again command him. He can feel the stifled irritation in the room, and then the sympathy.
He pours the tea and hands the cups around. She lights a cigarette. Once, at the beginning of their time in the Villa Teresa, she had a way of getting up and helping him with the teacups, but then she sensed that that was wrong. She senses things in a clumsy kind of way. She is not clever.
‘Oh, look, you’ve made marzipan ones again! You know no one likes marzipan, dear.’
But Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch both select the marzipan ones, and Harry is apologetic. He is not aware that people have ever said his wife had three affairs and sundry casual conjunctions when they lived in England; nor does he know it is categorically stated that a peasant woman once spat in her face. It would not upset him to hear all this because it’s only gossip and its falsity doesn’t matter. It is a long time now since she sensed his modest wish, and in answer to it developed the rhythmic swing of her hips and the look in her eyes. Unconsciously, of course, she developed them; not quite in the way she allows the English intonations to creep into her voice. When he looks at her in the company of these people it’s enjoyable to imagine the swarthy waiter undressing her among the rocks, even Signor Borromeo trying something on beneath the bridge table.
Harry smiles. He goes around with the teapot, refilling the cups. He wishes she would say again that an avenue on Cap Ferrat would be called after him. It’s enjoyable, the feeling in the room then, the people thinking she shouldn’t have said it. It’s enjoyable when they think she shouldn’t swing her hips so, and when they come to conclusions about her made-up English voice. It’s enjoyable when she listens to his saga of Soaring Cloud the child-wife, and when her face is worried because yet another song has a theme of self-inflicted death. Harry enjoys that most of all.
Mrs Vansittart loses, for her attention had briefly wandered, as it sometimes does just after he has brought the tea around. She tried not to love him when her father was so upset. She tried to forget him, but he was always there, wordlessly pleading from a distance, so passionately demanding the love she passionately felt. She’d felt it long before the day she took her clothes off for him, and she remembers perfectly how it was.
For a moment at the bridge table the thoughts that have slipped beneath her guard make her so light-headed that she wants to jump up and run after him to the kitchen. She sees herself, gazing at him from the doorway, enticing him with her eyes, as first of all she did in Holland Falls. He puts his arms around her, and she feels on hers the lips she never has felt.
‘Diamonds,’ someone says, for she has asked what trumps are. Her virginal longing still warms her as the daydream dissipates. From its fragments Harry thanks her for the companion she has been, and her love is calm again at the bridge table.
Downstairs at Fitzgerald’s
Cecilia’s father would sit there, slowly eating oysters. Cecilia would tell him about school and about her half-brothers, and of course she’d have to mention her mother because it was impossible to have a conversation without doing that. She’d mention Ronan also, but because of her father’s attitude to her stepfather this was never an embarrassment.
‘Aren’t they good today?’ Tom, the waiter at Fitzgerald’s, would remark, always at the same moment, when placing in front of Cecilia’s father his second pint of stout.
‘Great, Tom,’ her father would unhesitatingly reply, and then Tom would ask Cecilia how her bit of steak was and if the chips were crisp. He’d mention the name of a racehorse and Cecilia’s father would give his opinion of it, drawing a swift breath of disapproval or thoughtfully pursing his lips.
These occasions in Fitzgerald’s Oyster Bar – downstairs at the counter – were like a thread of similar beads that ran through Cecilia’s childhood, never afterwards to be forgotten. Dublin in the 1940s was a different city from the city it later became; she’d been different herself. Cecilia was five when her father first took her to Fitzgerald’s, the year after her parents were divorced.
‘And tell me,’ he said some time later, when she was growing up a bit, ‘have you an idea at all about what you’ll do with yourself?’
‘When I leave school, d’you mean?’
‘Well, there’s no hurry, I’m not saying there is. Still and all, you’re nearly thirteen these days.’
‘In June.’
‘Ah, I know it’s June, Cecilia.’ He laughed, with his glass half-way to his lips. He looked at her over the rim, his light-blue eyes twinkling in a way she was fond of. He was a burly man with a brown bald head and freckles on the back of his hands and all over his forehead and
his nose.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she said.
‘Some fellow’ll snap you up. Don’t worry about that.’ He swallowed another oyster and wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘How’s your mother?’
‘She’s fine.’
He never spoke disparagingly of her mother, nor she of him. When Cecilia was younger he used to drive up the short avenue of the house in Chapelizod in his old sloping-backed Morris, and Cecilia would always be ready for him. Her mother would say hullo to him and they’d have a little chat, and if Ronan opened the door or happened to be in the garden her father would ask him how he was, as though nothing untoward had ever occurred between them. Cecilia couldn’t understand any of it, but mistily there was the memory of her father living in the house in Chapelizod, and fragments from that time had lodged in her recollection. By the fire in the dining-room he read her a story she had now forgotten. ‘Your jersey’s inside out,’ he said to her mother and then he laughed because it was April Fools’ Day. Her father and Ronan had run a furniture-making business together, two large workshops in Chapelizod, not far from the house.
‘Lucky,’ he said in Fitzgerald’s. ‘Any fellow you’d accept.’
She blushed. At school a few of her friends talked of getting married, but in a way that wasn’t serious. Maureen Finnegan was in love with James Stewart, Betsy Bloom with a boy called George O’Malley: silly, really, it all was.
‘The hard case,’ a man in a thick overcoat said to her father, pausing on his way to the other end of the bar. ‘Would I chance money on Persian Gulf?’
Cecilia’s father shook his head and the man, accepting this verdict, nodded his. He winked at Cecilia in the way her father’s friends sometimes did after such an exchange, an acknowledgement of her father’s race-track wisdom. When he had gone her father told her that he was a very decent person who had come down in the world due to heavy drinking. Her father often had such titbits to impart and when he did so his tone was matter-of-fact, neither malicious nor pitying. In return, Cecilia would relate another fact or two about school, about Miss O’Shaughnessy or Mr Horan or the way Maureen Finnegan went on about James Stewart. Her father always listened attentively.
The Collected Stories Page 97
