‘I shall remember his name,’ said Jensen.
Ina promised to send Jensen a catalogue from his last exhibition, and Jensen wrote his Copenhagen address for Ina, in case he was no longer in Hammamet when she sent it.
‘My parents’ address, but I have no flat just now,’ said Jensen, ‘I’ll be in touch with Howard, in case I leave.’
‘I hope so.’ Ingham said quickly. ‘I’ll leave before you, no doubt.’
Ingham did not like the idea of parting company with Jensen. Ingham looked at Ina, who was watching diem both. Ingham thought she was in a rather strange mood tonight. The single Scotch had not helped her to relax.
‘Do you go back to a job in Copenhagen?’ Ina asked.
‘I paint scenery sometimes for the theatres. I get along. But Fm lucky, my family give me a little every month.’ He shrugged indifferently. ‘Well, they don’t give it, it’s mine from an inheritance. No hardship to anybody.’ He smiled at Ingham. ‘I shall soon see what fresh blood has flowed into our bustling little port.’
Ingham smiled. He realized that with Ina gone, with Jensen gone, and with his book finished except for polishing and retyping, he would be insufferably lonely. Yet he did not want to set a date when he would leave. Unless, of course, he arranged something specific with Ina, made plans to be with her in New York. They might marry, might look for an apartment together. (His wasn’t big enough for two.) It wasn’t necessary for her to live for ever in the Brooklyn Heights house in order to take care of Joey, Ingham thought. Something could be arranged there.
‘Would you like to visit the fortress tomorrow morning?’ Jensen asked Ina. ‘If you would like a walk along the beach, it is not far from the hotel, especially if we break the walk with a swim.’
Jensen arranged to call for her at eleven o’clock. He left after coffee.
Ingham thought Jensen had done quite well that evening, and waited for Ina to say something favourable, but she did not. ‘Want to take a walk along the beach?’ he asked. ‘What kind of shoes are you wearing?’ He looked under the table.
‘I’ll go barefoot.—Yes, I’d like that.’
Ingham paid the bill. Jensen had left eight hundred millimes.
The sand on the beach was pleasantly warm. Ingham carried Ina’s shoes and his own. There was no moon. They held hands, as much to stay together in the darkness as for pleasure, Ingham thought.
‘You’re a little triste tonight.’ Ingham said. ‘Does Anders depress you?’
‘Well, he’s not the soul of mirth, is he?—No, I was thinking about Joey.’
‘How is he—really?’ It gave Ingham a twinge of pain to ask it, and yet he felt the question sounded heartless.
‘He has times when he’s so uncomfortable, he can’t sleep. I don’t mean he’s any worse.’ Ina spoke quickly, then was silent a few seconds. ‘I think he should marry. But he won’t.’
‘I understand. He’s thinking of Louise.—Is she really intelligent?’
‘Yes. And she knows all about the disease.’ Ina’s steps grew more plodding in the sand, then she stopped and flexed the toes of one foot. ‘The funny thing—the awful thing is, he thinks he loves me.’
Her grip on his hand was light, no grip at all. Ingham pressed her fingers. ‘How do you mean?’ They were almost whispering.
‘Just that. I don’t know about sexually. That’s ridiculous. But it seems to force anybody else out of his—affections or life or whatever. He should marry Louise. It isn’t impossible that he could have children, you know.’
I’m sure.’ said Ingham, though he hadn’t been sure.
Ina looked down at her feet. ‘It doesn’t exactly give me the creeps, but it worries me.’
‘Oh, darling!’ Ingham put his arm around her. ‘What—what does he say to you?’
‘He says—oh, that he can’t ever feel for another woman what he feels for me. Things like that. He’s not always mopey about it. Just the opposite. He’s cheerful when he says it. The thing is, I know it’s true.’
‘You ought to get out of that house, darling.—You know, the house is big enough for you to get someone to live in, if Joey needs—’
‘Oh, Mom could take care of him.’ Ina said, interrupting him. ‘Anything he needs—and it’s really only making his bed. Matter of fact, he’s done that several times. He can even get in and out of the tub.’ She laughed tensely.
Yes. Joey had his own quarters on the ground floor, Ingham remembered. ‘You should still get out, Ina.—Darling, I didn’t know what was troubling you tonight, but I knew something was.’
She faced him. ‘I’ll tell you something funny, Howard. I’ve started going to church. Just the last two or three months.’
‘Well—I don’t suppose it’s funny,’ Ingham said, though he was thoroughly surprised.
‘It is, because I don’t believe in any of it. But it gives me comfort to see all those—greyheads, mostly, listening and singing away and getting some kind of comfort from it. You know what I mean? And it’s just for an hour, every Sunday.’ Her voice was uncertain with tears now.
‘Oh, darling? Ingham held her close for a minute. A great unspeakable emotion rose in him, and he squeezed his eyes shut. 1 have never,’ he said softly, ‘felt such a tenderness for anyone as I do for you—this minute.’
She gave one sob against his shoulder, then pushed herself back, swept the hair back from her forehead. ‘Let’s go back.’
They began walking towards the town, towards the palely floodlit fortress—monument of some battle plainly lost, at some time, or else the Spaniards would be there.
Ingham said, ‘I wish you’d talk to me more about it. About everything. Whenever you feel like it. Now or anytime.’
But she was silent now.
She must get out of that house, Ingham thought. It was a cheerful-looking house, nothing gloomy or clinging-to-the-past about it, but to Ingham it was now a most unhealthy house. It was now that he should propose something positive, he thought. But it was not the moment to ask if she would marry him. He said suddenly, stubbornly, ‘I wish we lived together somewhere in New York.’
Rather to his surprise and disappointment, she made no answer at all.
Only near his car, she said, ‘I’m not much good tonight. Can you take me back to the hotel, darling?’
‘But of course.’
At the hotel, he kissed her good night, and said he would find her somewhere after her tour of the fortress with Jensen. When he got home, Jensen’s light was off, and Ingham hesitated in the court, wanting very much to waken him and speak with him. Then Jensen’s light came on, as Ingham was staring at his window.
‘It’s me,’ Ingham said.
Jensen leaned on the sill. CI wasn’t asleep. What time is it?’ he asked through a yawn.
‘About midnight. Can I see you for a minute? I’ll come up.’
Jensen merely pushed himself back from the sill, sleepily. Ingham ran up the outside stairs.
Jensen was in his levi shorts, which fitted his thin frame loosely. ‘Something happen?’
‘No. I just wanted to say—or to ask—I hope you won’t say anything tomorrow to Ina about Abdullah. You see, I told her the story I told Adams, that I didn’t even open my door.’
‘No. Well, all right.’
‘I think it might shock her,’ Ingham said. ‘And just now she has problems of her own. Her brother—the one she was talking about who’s a cripple. It’s depressing for her.’
Jensen lit a cigarette. ‘All right. I understand.’
‘You didn’t tell her anything already, did you?’
‘What do you mean?’
It was always so vague to Jensen and so clear to Ingham. “That I threw the thing that killed him—my typewriter.’
‘No, I didn’t say that. Not at all.’
‘Then don’t please.’
‘All right. You don’t have to worry.’
In spite of Jensen’s casualness, Ingham knew he could count on him, because when Jensen
had said, ‘It just—doesn’t—matter,’ he meant it. ‘The fact is—and I admit it—I’m ashamed of having done it.’
‘Ashamed? Nonsense. Catholic nonsense. Rather, Protestant.’ Jensen leaned back on his bed and swung his brown legs up on the blanket.
‘But I’m not particularly a Protestant. I’m not anything.’
‘Ashamed yourself—or of what other people might think of you?’
There was a hint of contempt in ‘other people’. ‘What other people might think,’ Ingham answered. The other people were only Adams and Ina, Ingham was thinking. He expected Jensen to point this out, but Jensen was silent.
‘You can count on me. I won’t say anything. Don’t take it so seriously.’ Jensen put his feet on the floor in order to reach an ashtray.
Ingham left Jensen’s room with the awful feeling that he had gone down in Jensen’s estimation because of his weakness, his cowardice. He’d been truthful with Jensen, beginning with their talk on the desert. But it was funny how guilty he felt, how shaky with Jensen, though he knew he could trust Jensen even with a few drinks in him. Jensen was not weak. Ingham suddenly thought of the scared-looking, but flirtatious and seductive Arab boy who was sometimes loitering in the alley near the house, who always said something in Arabic to Jensen. Twice Ingham had seen Jensen dismiss him with an annoyed wave of the hand. Jensen had used to go to bed with him occasionally, Jensen had said. The boy looked revolting to Ingham, mushy, unreliable, sick. Despite all that, Jensen was not weak.
20
INGHAM could not get to sleep. It was oppressively hot and still. After a bucket shower, he was damp with sweat again in a matter of minutes. Ingham did not mind. He was used to the discomfort by now. And his thoughts entertained him. He was thinking of Ina, and he was filled with tenderness and love for her. It was a large, all-enveloping feeling, taking in all the world, himself, all the people he knew, everyone. Ina was its centre and in a way its source. He thought of her not only as an attractive woman, but in terms of her background and what had made her. She had told him she felt neglected in her childhood, because Joey, being ill from birth, had captured all her parents’ affections and attentions. She had tried to do very well in school (this was in Manhattan, where the family had lived then) in order to call attention to herself. She had finally gone to Hunter College and made excellent grades, majoring in English composition. She had been in love with a Jewish boy when she was twenty, a boy more or less approved of by her family (he had been a postgraduate student of physics at Columbia, Ingham remembered), but his family had made Ina feel uncomfortable, because they strongly disapproved, at the same time saying that their son had a right to lead his own life. Nothing had come of the love but a few months of heartache for Ina, and a slightly lower mark when she graduated than she would have got, she had told Ingham, if it had not been for the break-up. Before that, at fifteen, she had had a terrible crush on a girl a little bit older, a girl who was really queer, although doing nothing about it at that time. Ingham smiled a little at that, at the bitter suffering of adolescence, the loneliness, the inability to talk to anyone. Everyone had such experiences and somehow at twenty-five, at thirty, they became forgotten—like rocks in a stream which had to be swum over, causing pain and wounds, yet which the unconscious knew were to be expected, and so like birth pains, perhaps, the agony was not even vividly remembered. And then there was her marriage of a year and a half to that brilliant playwright Edgar something (Ingham was pleased that he had forgotten his last name) who had turned out to be a tyrant, who had drunk erratically, and had struck Ina a few times, and who had been killed in a car accident a couple of years after her divorce.
And now, Ina loved him, and she loved her brother Joey, and she had turned to the church for some moral support and perhaps for some kind of guidance. (How much had she turned to the church, he wondered.) But what kind of guidance did the church ever give except to counsel resignation? Stop sinning, of course, but if one were in an awful predicament with husband, family or whatever—or if the problem was poverty, for instance—the church’s advice was to resign oneself to it, Ingham felt, and he was reminded of the Arabic religion, uncomfortably.
His thoughts veered away from that and returned to Ina. He was glad he and she were old enough to know the importance of tenderness, to have lost some of the selfishness and self-centredness of youth, he hoped. They were two worlds, similar but different, complex yet able to explain themselves to each other, and he felt they had something to give each other. He recalled a few paragraphs he had written in his notebook, in preparation for the book he was writing, about the sense of identity within the individual. (As it turned out, he had used none of them in his book, but it was always that way.) He wanted very much to read some of these notes to Ina, to see what she would think of them, what she would say. One note, he remembered, he had copied from a book he had been reading. It concerned under-privileged children in an American primary school The children had had no joy in life or in learning. All of them lived in crowded homes. Then the school had given each child a small mirror in which he could see himself. From then on, each child began to realize that he or she was an individual, different from everyone else, someone with a face, an identity. The world of each child had changed then. All at once, Ingham felt acutely the pressure of Joey’s tragedy on Ina now, the sadness his disease must cause in her whenever she looked at him—or thought of him—even in the best of moments. And now the mysterious and perhaps insoluble problem of Joey’s attachment to her. This onus, this pain, was like something which crept up behind Ingham’s back and leapt upon him, sinking its claws. He sprang out of bed.
He had an impulse to go straight to Ina now, to comfort her, to tell her that they would be married—maybe to ask her, but that was a technicality—to stay with her the rest of the night talking and making plans until the Tunisian dawn came up. He looked at his wristwatch. Eighteen minutes past three o’clock. Could he even get into the hotel? Of course, if he banged on the door hard enough. Would she be annoyed? Embarrassed? But what he had to say was important enough to cause a disturbance in the night. He hesitated. Wasn’t it weak, even fatal somehow, to doubt whether he should go or not? Wouldn’t he have gone if he’d been twenty-five, even thirty?
Ingham decided that he shouldn’t go at this hour. If Ina had been in a house alone, yes. It was the hotel part.
He cheered himself up by thinking about tomorrow. He would see her at lunch. He’d tell Jensen he wanted very much to see Ina alone at lunch, and Jensen wouldn’t mind. And then Ingham would talk about all this, and he would talk also about their marrying. He would fly back with her, or at least very soon after she left, and they would look for an apartment in New York and maybe in less than a month from now, she would be out of that Brooklyn house and living in an apartment in Manhattan with him. That was a very exciting plan. He went back to bed, but it was at least half an hour before he fell asleep.
Ingham awakened at nine-thirty, and found that Jensen had already left the house. Ingham had intended to offer to drive him to the Reine, though he doubted if Jensen would have accepted. Now he would have to keep an eye out for them, if he expected to see them before lunch, Ingham supposed. He worked in the morning, mainly polishing and retyping messy pages in his manuscript, but just before twelve-thirty, he wrote two new pages. Then he put on white dungarees and a shirt, and went down to the Caf6 de la Plage.
He was happy to see Ina and Jensen sitting at a table over glasses of vin rosé. ‘Knock-knock.’ Ingham said, approaching them. ‘Can I crash in? Did you have a nice morning?’
They looked as if they had been talking seriously for some minutes before he arrived. Jensen dragged a chair over from another table. Ina’s eyes moved all over Ingham—his face, his hands, his body-in a way that pleased him, and she was absently smiling.
‘Is the fort interesting?’ Ingham asked her. 1 haven’t been inside.’
‘Yes I Nobody there. We could wander around anywhere.’ she said.<
br />
‘Not even ghosts.’ said Jensen.
It was soon evident Jensen was not going to leave. They went to Melik’s, and all of them had yoghurt, fruit, cheese and wine, because it was too hot for anything else. Ina might enjoy a siesta, Ingham thought. He might go back with her to the hotel, and they could talk there. Jensen got the bill and asserted his right to pay it, as he had wanted to take Ina to lunch. Then he excused himself.
‘I’m going to work for a while—after a nap, that is. Did Fatma turn up?’
‘Not this morning.’ Ingham said.
‘Damn! If she turns up this afternoon, I think I’ll send her away. Do you mind?’
‘Not a bit,’ Ingham said.
Jensen left.
‘What’s your fatma like?’ Ina asked.
‘Oh—about sixteen. Always a big smile. She doesn’t know much French. Her favourite activity is turning the tap on the terrace. She just stands there watching the water run and run. Sometimes we give her money to buy food and wine. There’s never any change from it. Whatever we give her is “exactly enough”.’ Ingham laughed.
Ina looked as if she were not listening, or was not interested.
‘Tired, darling? I’ll take you back to your hotel. It’s so damned hot—I thought you might like a siesta. Maybe with me.’
‘Do you think we’d sleep?’
Ingham smiled. 1 had some things I wanted to talk to you about.’ He wished he’d brought his notebook along, but he hadn’t, and he wasn’t going to the house for it. ‘Matter of fact, I almost came storming over to see you last night. At three-thirty. I even jumped out of bed.’
‘A bad dream? Why didn’t you come over?’
‘Not a bad dream. I hadn’t been to sleep. I was thinking about you.—You know, darling, you could come back to my place. We could have a nap there.’
‘Thanks. I think I’d rather go back to the hotel.’
She’d be of course much more comfortable at the hotel, Ingham realized. But he had the feeling she disliked his place, maybe thought it sordid. He felt a vague defensiveness about his two rooms, even though she had not yet specifically attacked them. They were, after all, the sanctum of his work just now, and as such they were rather hallowed to Ingham. ‘All right. Let’s go darling.’
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