A Sunday Kind of Woman

by Ray Connolly

  RAY CONNOLLY

  A Sunday Kind of Woman

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Part One

  Chapter One

  At first he thought she was just another honey-brown sunshine girl preparing her body for her boyfriend or husband, luxuriating in the warmth and the wind which, while ferociously roasting him, seemed to temper its anger across her burnished skin. She was self-contained, and she was remote, and, although her swimsuit revealed much, her behaviour betrayed absolutely no possibilities for the making of further acquaintance. Indeed it appeared that she deliberately sought isolation, spending her mornings and late afternoons sunbathing on a crag of black rock at the end of the beach furthest from the fishing boats, and disappearing completely after lunch and dinner.

  She was, he observed, an early riser, and had invariably claimed her territory for the day when, at nine-thirty, he arrived on the beach. It was impossible to be unaware of her but her demand for privacy would have repelled even the most self-confident of seaside adventurers – had there been any to hand, which there were not. She was a woman alone, and although she would smile politely at the old ladies in their straw hats and elastic stockings if she happened to pass by them on her journeys to and from the beach, she did not encourage promiscuous friendships, or those demands which might intrude upon the solitary enjoyment of her holiday.

  He had noticed her at dinner on the night he had arrived. She had been licking her fingers, her expression concentrated and preoccupied as she had sucked the juice of an orange from her finger-tips.

  It was early in the season, too early for Sicily to be busy, and the hotel which later in the summer would become a noisy jam of fifteen-day packaged family lives, was quiet and full of muffled echoes; the murmur of the elderly underscoring the chink and light clatter of imitation silver upon imitation china. It was a large dining-room, an airy place of acutely angled barefaced concrete pillars, which enabled the hotel to be suspended out over the edge of the cliff, and which provided the guests with a bird’s eye view of the sea below and beyond. For convenience’s sake, since there were few waiters working at that time of the year, all of the occupied tables were situated by the window so that these off-season guests might better enjoy the rapidly fading view. And it was to a lonely table there that the head waiter had escorted him at just after seven on that Sunday evening.

  He had arrived at Catania Airport from London shortly before three, but, such is the degree of disorganization at that place, it had taken him all of three hours to locate his baggage and make the twenty-six mile taxi ride to the hotel. He had expected the quietness and welcomed it, but the early dinner hour, provided, he imagined, for the elderly holidaymakers, had surprised him, and without having time to shave or change he had hurried down for his meal.

  His entrance into the dining-room had not gone unnoticed. As he had made as discreet a way as possible to his table he had been aware of a general panning motion of the heads of the other guests, as they had observed and commented on this new giant in their midst. There had been eight oldish, heavy women, all Italian, and three men of a similar age. And then there had been the girl. She had been sitting alone at a table a little removed from the others and on the far side from where he had been placed. Immediately he had been aware that she was the only person who had not apparently noted his arrival by a look of inspection, so completely had she seemed engrossed in herself. Her table, too, was set for one, he had noticed, as he had spread the stiffly starched napkin across his knee: then, suddenly realizing that he had been staring at her, he had turned away in case she should have become aware of his admiring eyes.

  All week he had watched her, and watched the rest of the world watching her. He saw the lifeguard make an attempt at conversation, and the glacial smile she returned as a warning off. He saw the waiters, sixteen-year-old Lambretta Lotharios, cigarettes dangling from bottom lips as they clicked their tongues in an off-duty familiarity whenever she happened to choose the path where they lay in wait for her. And he saw too her kind grin which acknowledged their appreciation without encouraging their impudence. He saw all of these things and he was amused. And once or twice he wondered if she ever saw him.

  When he was not observing her he spent his time swimming or climbing the mountain, scrambling over the wide slate-grey cinder mounds of old lava flows and wandering through the chestnut groves which had not yet been buried by this most unpredictable of volcanoes. Etna fascinated him. A cause for suspicion and anxiety among local farmers who feared for their land, and pilots who steered well away from its extraordinary currents, it was for him a welcoming, warming place of ever-changing skylines and fragrant cinder-hot nights.

  He had first come to the mountain ten years earlier with a tent and a rucksack. Despite his size he was not normally an outdoor man but the nightly showing of the latest eruption on television had served as a beckoning to him. As usual in those days he had been short of money and had been forced to make the journey to Sicily by rail and ferry, arriving there just in time to see the lava flow dividing a village in half before the fire went out of it and the TV cameras move on. But he had stayed: there was nowhere else he wanted to go, and nothing he could afford to do but laze around in the sun and pick grapes from abandoned vineyards. After a few days he gradually found himself falling in love with the bruised and boil-scarred mountain, which, though it rumbled like a troubled stomach now and then, refused to cause further havoc.

  It was, inevitably, he thought later, the mountain that brought them together. The Friday afternoon air was heavy and sultry and by four-thirty the old ladies and their men had deserted the beach with anxious looks towards the sky, which was now turning into a rosy greyness as the clouds above the volcano spread eastwards towards the sea. He, too, glanced at the sky. The girl didn’t move, but remained discreetly topless, eyes closed on top of her rock. By five o’clock the last of the sun was gone, and the pinkness of the clouds had turned into a threatening, bruising purple.

  He stood up, slipped into his trousers and shirt, collected his paperback novel, and hurried back across the pebbles towards the steps and into the cliff face tunnel which led to the lift. The tunnel was large, man-made and wore rush matting over its concrete floor to protect the bare feet of the bathers. On either side were changing rooms and fifty yards back were two lifts which transported guests right up into the middle of the hotel. For a holiday hotel it was a futuristic place: a kind of purposebuilt, white-distempered fortress perched on the edge of a cliff two hundred feet above sea level, where the bedrooms ran in a semi-circle around lifts which took them up for cocktails and dinner, and down for sea and sun.

  He reached the end of the tunnel
and pressed the button to summon the lift. It rang, lit up, and he heard the familiar clanking hum as the lift began its descent.

  Then, without warning, the tunnel fell into darkness. He looked again at the lift indicator. That, too, was dead. The humming had stopped. Turning to look back down the tunnel towards the beach, he was suddenly and momentarily half-deafened by a brilliant flash-gun of lightning and the simultaneous roaring tympany of thunder echoing down the mountain and across the bay. He peered with difficulty around the passage. Without the grotto lights, kitsch mermaid-shaped amber torches, the tunnel seemed as black as tar.

  ‘I hope you aren’t afraid of the dark.’ Her voice was quiet.

  He swung around. She was standing close to the far rock wall, wearing a long, floral towelling gown which reached to her sandals, and was split up to the top of her thigh. She must have followed him from the beach when the clouds came, but he had heard no footsteps. Again the thunder bellowed, and as if to emphasize its anger, rain began to fall heavily, rattling noisily on the pebbles outside.

  He tried to disguise his shock and gestured lamely towards the broken lift, his huge arm in its sweep also taking in the dead light bulbs in their grottoes: ‘The electricity must have been cut by the storm. It happens a lot around here,’ he said at last, and regretted it instantly. It was the most obvious thing in the world.

  ‘There are three hundred and twenty-two steps up to the hotel,’ she said, pointing towards the wide concrete-flagged spiral staircase which the hotel designers had installed for situations such as this, and which began right alongside the lift shaft.

  He looked at her. She seemed almost to be issuing him with a challenge. In the dark he could not see whether she was smiling, but he guessed that she was. He didn’t answer. She opened her beach bag, took out a small gold lighter, flicked it and held up the tiny wavering flame as though it were a beacon.

  ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘I can almost see you now. Shall we go?’ And without waiting for an answer she held out the lighter in front of her and began to move towards the stairs.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t smoke. I don’t carry a lighter,’ he said, catching up with her and taking the beach bag from her.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I noticed.’ And without another word she took his arm and they began the long climb through the darkness to the top of the cliff.

  She knows. She noticed. His mind played an Irish jig. She had noticed him. Who said miracles couldn’t happen?

  They climbed the three hundred and twenty-two steps in under ten minutes, bouts of climbing being interrupted by short rests during which they leaned against the hand-rail and, between deep breaths, exchanged a fragmentary kind of conversation about the weather, the local Greek amphitheatre, and the benefits of taking a holiday so early in the season. It was a conversation better carried on in the glimmer of her lighter, because when suddenly at around step three hundred the lights came on again, a self-consciousness arose between them. She snapped shut her lighter and dropped it into a pocket of her beach robe with a quick jerky movement as if the electricity had caught her out.

  She was, he thought, about twenty-five, and spoke with a quiet American accent. It should have been a simple question to ask exactly where she was from, but the aloofness which she had worn all week got in the way.

  Then suddenly, before he wanted it, they were at the top of the steps. He knew that unless he made some move to extend their meeting at this moment, the chance would be lost forever, and she would return to being the mysterious creature across the dining-room. This was his one chance. God loves a trier, he remembered.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer immediately, but that may have been because he hardly gave her the opportunity, and went gabbling on as quickly as he could. An embarrassed silence from her would have left him desolate.

  ‘Well, probably the bar isn’t open yet. I don’t know … hell of a climb, wasn’t it? I wonder if it’s still raining. That’s the trouble with the volcano … makes the weather so unpredictable.’ He paused for breath and she took her opportunity,

  ‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘It’s always open.’

  Apart from the waiter, a hairy, stout Sicilian called Franco, the bar was empty, and they sat in a window booth watching the storm turn the evening into night, and make rivers between the rock plants which clung to the side of the cliff.

  ‘Do you always go on vacation by yourself?’ she asked while Franco mixed the elaborate martini she had chosen from the list laid out on the table.

  He nodded: ‘It becomes a habit. Some people would think of it as a lonely time, but I like it. All the time in London the noise drives me crazy. So on holidays I look for quietness and come here, or go somewhere else. Always somewhere that’s quiet. That’s why I like the off season.’

  Franco brought the drinks over, all beams and twinkling eyes for the signorina. She smiled back, and then pulling up her legs underneath her bottom, she curled up in the window.

  ‘What do you do in London?’ she asked.

  This was one question he always had difficulty answering. Somehow the answer never sounded right: never dignified.

  ‘I’m a sort of musician,’ he said, feeling slightly uncomfortable.

  ‘Sort of …?’ she laughed. ‘What sort of?’

  ‘Well, all sorts, if you want to know. I teach piano in a girls’ school three afternoons a week. This week is half-term. I play tinkling nothing music in a cocktail lounge at night. And when I’m not doing either of those I imagine I’m Paul McCartney or Hoagy Carmichael or one of those guys and sit at home over a piano or guitar and try to write the songs that are going to turn me into a millionaire and make my name safe for posterity.’

  ‘Do you have any success?’

  ‘Well, it isn’t all rejection slips … but I haven’t actually written Eleanor Rigby yet or even Stardust. And I don’t really think Paganini is going to lose any sleep over my variations.’

  ‘Do you sing?’

  ‘In the bath I sing for free. In the Starlight Rooms, New Bond Street, I sometimes sing a song for sixpence … or even less on a rainy night. It depends on how vindictive I feel. A party of Italian Americans will tip generously for me to break the back of My Way. Hell hath no fury like a failed rock and roller.’

  ‘Is that what you are?’

  ‘No. Christ no! I’m a successful, respectable music teacher, a competent piano player and a songwriter of … well, let’s say, promise. I haven’t failed anywhere yet, particularly. The only person who thinks I’m a failure is my music teacher at school. She wanted me to be a concert pianist.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Three years at the Royal College of Music’

  ‘You didn’t enjoy it?’

  ‘I loved it. But after two days there I knew I was never going to be a concert pianist. Not even a third class concert pianist. So I’ve sort of been backing away ever since like a musical gypsy, gradually unlearning all the disciplines that a classical training laid on me.’

  ‘Sounds like a nice life.’

  ‘The melody’s nice, but the lyrics can get a bit tiresome now and again.’

  She frowned at him: ‘If that was supposed to be some kind of metaphor I’m afraid I didn’t follow it,’ she said.

  ‘Well, let’s say the general lifestyle is fine, but the day to day mechanics of hearing bored little girls struggle through Moonlight Sonata and Für Elise, and smiling across the keys at drunks and hookers, isn’t always a many-splendoured way of spending an evening.’

  For a moment she went quiet: ‘I guess every job has its drawbacks,’ she said. And then pulling a smile back into her cheeks she added: ‘Anyway, it sure as hell beats bear-baiting.’

  ‘Or serving behind a bar.’

  She smiled and nodded. Suddenly he realized that he had been doing all the talking. He was embarrassed. He was certain he was boring her. He searched his mind for something interesting to say, but
nothing came. At last she broke the silence, but not before she had considered him with a half smile across her lips for some thirty seconds, thirty seconds during which he took to staring out of the window at the storm, and wondering whether he ought to make some comment about the weather. He was not used to having afternoon cocktails with beautiful women: not this beautiful, anyway.

  ‘You seem too shy to be a performer,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean … shy? I’m telling you my life history, aren’t I?’

  ‘Only because I’m asking you. I think you’re really quite a shy person.’

  He shook his head: ‘No … I’m not shy, not when I’m working, anyway. When I get behind that piano, I just feel as though somebody else is playing me. I mean I can go on and on all night, rattling away, improvising so much that I forget what I’m playing sometimes. It’s like being on automatic pilot.’ He looked at her again. She was leaning forward resting her chin on her hands which were folded together at the knuckles. Her eyes never left his: ‘At the same time,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘I’m not pushy either. I bet you spend your life hiding from pushy men, don’t you?’

  She smiled and bowed her head, just a little and to one side: an act of acknowledgement, he thought. She really was stunning. Whenever he took his eyes away from her and allowed them back he almost found himself surprised to see her still there. For a moment he wondered whether she were a famous film star. He hoped she wasn’t.

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked, driving along the conversation with an easy aplomb, and stirring her martini with a little ornamental plastic stick as she talked.

  ‘No. But if you’re offering …?’

  She laughed again. She was a woman familiar with nervous, jokey compliments.

  ‘And you?’ he asked.

  For what seemed like an hour she said nothing, but went to fiddling with her drink pushing a piece of lemon under a chunk of ice. I’ve asked the wrong thing, he thought. Damn!

  At last she answered. ‘No. I don’t think anyone would ever say that I’m the marrying type.’