A Sunday Kind of Woman

by Ray Connolly

  He looked at her. With her eyes closed he could examine her face without he knowing. Despite her tan her complexion was full of light. It was, he decided, a face of symmetrical, fair, conventional beauty, a face which, with eyelids closed, could almost have been described as bland.

  ‘Stop staring at me.’ She hadn’t opened her eyes, but she had guessed right.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ he lied.

  She giggled: her eyes opened and again her face became a playground of mischief. ‘Why aren’t you married?’ she said. ‘It’s a waste for a talented good-looking guy like you not to have a wife.’

  ‘Nobody ever asked me,’ he said. ‘What about you? Anybody ever ask you?’

  She paused a beat before answering. ‘One or two. Nobody special. What about being in love?’

  ‘Love is the sweetest thing …’ he half-sang, an exit route from the question.

  ‘I’m serious, tell me,’ she demanded, her eyes flickering open at him for a moment.

  ‘Well, I’m thirty-five,’ he said. ‘So I suppose there must have been occasions in the past twenty years when I thought I was in love. But now that I try to remember them I’m not so sure. I suppose that’s one of the saddest things about getting older … realizing that love is such a finite thing.’

  ‘Finite?’

  ‘Well, yes, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. It always did in my case, anyway. I suppose that’s inevitable, but it seems sad to me to know that it’s as easy to fall out of love as it is to fall into love.’

  She gave him a long look. ‘No,’ she said at last.

  ‘It’s true. When I was at college I thought I was in love with a girl who played the cello in the National Youth Orchestra. Then she went off with an oboist with a beard and a vibrating top lip. And I can remember feeling sad because I knew I would get over it. So long as I was unhappy I was all right. She was in my mind. Now I can remember the unhappiness, but I can’t remember the girl. That was very finite.’

  She considered this for a moment: ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘That wasn’t love. That was infatuation. Love is something quite different.’

  She was resolute, he thought at that moment. She had made up her mind and that was that. Further discussion was pointless: she had closed the subject.

  He looked up at the sun. It was getting hotter. He reached over and picked up a tube of sun-tan protection cream, and very delicately squeezed some on to his shoulders.

  ‘Let me do that,’ she said sitting up next to him.

  She took the tube from his hands and ran ribbons of cream down his back. Then very lightly she began carefully to massage and ease the cream into his skin. He lay down on his stomach while she exerted more pressure, beginning around his neck and working quickly and thoroughly until his whole back was glistening with cream and scalding with excitement. It was the first time she had touched him and it was screamingly erotic. Yet she had done no more than many other women had done before. He was almost embarrassed to realize how much it had aroused him. He looked at her fingers as she wiped the last of the cream on to a towel. They were firm and pliant, workmanlike hands, with neatly clipped nails. They were not the hands of a model. His whole body glowed from the experience. But he didn’t know why.

  ‘That was … sort of … fantastic,’ he said at last, his face turned down into the towel so that she wouldn’t see his expression.

  There was no reply.

  He looked at her. The gaiety had gone. She was simply staring at her hands, her hair cascading around her face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, quietly. ‘Where’s my merry saint gone?’

  She tried a smile: ‘She’s still here.’

  He gazed up at her as she sat by him, her body back-lit by the glare of the sun. She was perfect, he thought. Her flesh firm across her body, her breasts small and neat beneath her bikini. She was just perfect. He wanted to reach up and pull her down on top of him. Involuntarily he put out a hand.

  She shook her head very slowly: a long look of regret. Then taking his hand, she put it back down on the rock.

  She’s rejected me, he thought. He turned his head away in an agony of embarrassment.

  Her fingers touched the back of his head and ran their way through his hair. ‘What kind of a saint do you take me for?’ she said, and ruffled her hand through his hair.

  The next day he took her to see the mountain. The car he had hired was a tiny Fiat with a sunshine roof and an engine that wheezed like an asthmatic horse, but it was adequate for the job. They joined the autostrada at Taormina North and headed south. He wished at first that he had hired a more ambitious make of car since it seemed so unlikely that such a beautiful and sophisticated girl would be travelling in such a humble vehicle. But he needn’t have worried. She hardy appeared to notice as slinky Lancias and throaty Ferraris swept smoothly past spitting out macho and virility from their exhausts.

  At the Giarre turn-off they took to the winding mountain road and began to climb away from the sea. It was a steep climb, bumpy on an uneven road, but the little car had been built for such conditions and made little of it. They passed quickly through San Alfio and pushed upwards towards Fornazzo. Above them the volcano smoked watchfully.

  At Fornazzo he parked the car in the main square. All around evidence of the volcano’s recent forays scarred the landscape like huge, grey snail smears, thirty feet high and a hundred yards wide.

  When he had first visited the village there had been a carnival atmosphere as tourists became hysterical with excitement while the tumbling lava creaked and hissed its black and massive way towards the houses. There were no tourists on this day, just what remained of the village, its lemon groves, and a few old people.

  ‘The young people went away eventually,’ he told her, as he helped her climb up on to the black glacier which ran between and over the houses. ‘They told them it wasn’t safe, so they moved off to Catania. Old people are different. They’re more resilient. They wouldn’t go.’

  He painted out the rock beneath their feet. ‘Somewhere about twenty feet below here is a house. Years ago I stood alongside it as the lava came down. People were pulling out furniture and rugs and God knows what, and shoving everything on to the back of an army truck. But they’d forgotten about their pet rabbit. Everyone always thinks that a lava flow is going to miss them until it actually begins to get hot and the walls start to crack. So they stand around watching until it’s too late. And then it’s one mad rush to get out. And they forgot the rabbit. He was in a hutch. Just about here. Just round the back. The TV people were here, filming the evacuation, and the rabbit was tearing round in circles in terror. It was weird. The heat was unbelievable.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I opened the cage of the hutch and let him go. He was black and white. He ran off somewhere over there.’

  ‘That was nice.’

  ‘Well, yes and no.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the poor beggar didn’t get far. One of the soldiers saw him and hit him with a shovel he was using to build a soil barrier against the lava. It crashed his skull open. Black and white and red then, that’s what he was. I suppose they had rabbit pie that night.’

  She took a cigarette from a packet and lit it. ‘Why did you tell me that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ ‘I suppose I just wanted you to know that I’m kind to animals, too.’

  She smiled again: ‘I would never have guessed.’

  After that they climbed down from the frozen flow and wandered through the vineyards, and what remained of the woods. She was wearing a blue flowery dress and a large wide-brimmed straw hat.

  After a time, she began to tire in the heat and sat down to rest on the hillside, while he wandered away from her and picked a bunch of wild flowers, sky-blue like her dress, and gave them to her. And then she took them and with her teeth and fingers she made a daisy chain out of some and hung it around his neck, while he sat and watched her. Then at last sh
e kissed him: a cautious, almost reticent kiss, first on his forehead and then on his mouth. A kiss that was her present to him, but was not, he was sure, designed to excite or invite. And he just sat there and looked at her, cornflower blue against brown skin; her smile light and happy; a girl with kaleidoscope eyes, as the song said.

  She chose the amphitheatre at Taormina for his performance. She had never been there and he acted as guide, although the place was so well preserved that there was actually very little for him to tell her.

  ‘It was Greek, then the Romans rebuilt it,’ he explained as they walked around the almost circular stone terraces.

  ‘That wasn’t built by the Romans.’ She pointed to a wooden platform which had been erected on top of the original stage, and which bore an antiquated mahogany grand piano.

  ‘They still use the place,’ he explained. ‘In the summer there’s a film festival, and there are all kinds of local shows put on here … amateur dramatics, rock shows, music festivals, all kinds of things …’

  ‘You give me a show.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go on. You get up on stage. I want to see your routine. You can be a Graeco-Roman cocktail bar piano player. Pretend you’re auditioning for Caesar’s Palace.’

  Charlie looked around for an excuse. He wasn’t afraid of playing normally, but with Kate’s attention fully on him he would feel exposed and self-conscious.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. They’d throw us out …’ he began. But she would have none of it, and leading him by the hand she teasingly half pulled him up the wooden trestle steps and on to the stage.

  ‘I’m a wonderful audience, Charlie,’ she said, as she dragged a stool across the stage for him to sit on.

  ‘What do you want to hear?’

  ‘You … that’s all. I just want to listen to you play.’ And with that she returned down the steps and sat in the front row of the amphitheatre.

  Hesitantly, at first, and then more confidently, Charlie’s fingers wandered across the keys, a familiar journey of seeking out the unplayable notes and measuring the touch. It was obviously years since a tuning fork had been anywhere near this piano, but the jangly off-key honky tonking was as always seductive to him and within seconds his fingers were leading him wistfully into the unsyncopated rhythms of Erroll Garner, on through Duke Ellington and them into the more accessible and beloved Gershwin. ‘Some day she’ll come along, the one I love,’ he murmured to himself, half forgetting where he was, bending the lyrics appropriately. ‘Some things that happen for the first time, seem to be happening again …’ And now the piano was in control. ‘Every kiss, every hug seems to act just like a drug, you’re getting to be a habit with me … don’t blame me, for falling in love with you …’

  It was a waterfall of music, sometimes unintentionally discordant maybe, but always tuneful, always hopeful. And Charlie was away and flying on automatic, hardly aware that his fingers were finding the keys, only happy that somewhere down there in the amphitheatre there was a beautiful girl watching him, willing him to entertain her. And hardly realizing it he moved into the fifties and then the sixties as the chords of rock and roll led him away from the structured intricacies of melody and into the beat of adventure and adolescence. ‘I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill’ … ‘TV chat shows, DJs keep calling out your name. Minds like pigeon toes, all their questions sound the same’… ‘Goodness Gracious, Great Balls of Fire!’ … ‘A-bop-bop-a-loop-op a-lop bam boom!’

  With a grin he was a showman, on his feet, a gigantic Elton John, towering over the rattling, crippled piano as he coaxed and forced more tunes out of it than it had probably known in its entire lifetime:’ B-B-B-B-Benny and the Jets …’ he sang, his foot stamping the wooden stage in abandoned enthusiasm. Now she was almost forgotten, and only the music counted, as he weaved it like silk through his fingers, racing through the memories of his lifetime: ‘If’s knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk … In the night there’s a night fever, you know how to do it … Staying alive, staying alive.’ And as disco music metamorphosed at his fingers into concerto he reflected wickedly that maybe Rachmaninov wouldn’t have been too ashamed to have been born a Bee Gee.

  Then suddenly he was finished. With a final flourish which would have outshone Liberace with its self-mockery he stood up to face his audience of one.

  There was a momentary silence and then a burst of enthusiastic clapping.

  ‘My God, Charlie.’ Kate was looking at him in genuine astonishment. ‘You really can play.’ She came towards him across the stage.

  ‘Well, I told you I could busk a tune or two,’ he said.

  She was shaking her head in genuine admiration: ‘Maybe you should have listened to your music teacher after all,’ she said, and suddenly leapt up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’re wonderful. I mean just incredible.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, embarrassed by her enthusiasm. And as they walked out of the amphitheatre he threw an arm around her while she pushed her head close to his chest. All those hours practising scales hadn’t been wasted after all.

  The next day they went shopping, wandering through the Taormina souvenir shops, hand in hand, but rarely speaking. It was, he would remember later, a delicate time of unspoken happiness, and they were completely relaxed in each other’s company. Of course she was still a total stranger to him in that he knew nothing of her background or her life outside this holiday resort, but none of that seemed to matter. For now he was happy wandering between the buckets and spades and bed-boats, while she held garish Taormina T-shirts in front of her to see if he approved, tried on Taormina silk scarves and leafed through a whole book of Taormina sea view photographs.

  In one shop he showed her an ash-tray made at the top of the mountain out of molten lava, and in another he bought her a ring. It wasn’t an expensive thing: less than 5000 lira, but she liked the dull greyness of the local stone from which it was fashioned. She slipped it on to her little finger, the only ring on those small hands; and he realized that despite her elegance this was the first jewellery he had ever noticed her wearing.

  It was without doubt the most romantic holiday he had ever known. Every minute of every day they would spend together, lolling on the beach, taking trips in the wiry little car to the far side of the island, and even, on one energetic day, climbing to the very summit of the mountain where they peered with fear and trembling feet into the great wound in the earth where a burning fountain of ash, sparks an smoke rose constantly from the fractured earth. It was more than awe-inspiring: it was frightening as the thin rock beneath where they stood rumbled and threatened, and neither of them wished to remain long so high up the mountain. And yet, although Kate sought the comfort of instinctive refuge in Charlie’s arms when an unexpected eddy of fire leapt from the volcano, she quickly parted from him when the seeming threat had disappeared. And he became enchanted by her old-fashioned respectability. Every night after supper they would walk down to the village or across the cliffs. But then on returning to the hotel she would reach up, kiss him delicately on the cheeks and retire to her room alone, while he would slope off to his, to lie awake and order up mental action replays of the delights of the hours just spent. And as the days passed the mystery surrounding Kate seemed to lessen in importance. Nothing mattered other than the enjoyment of the moment. On the Monday night, four days after they had met, their dinner was interrupted when the head waiter slid across the room to say that there was a long distance telephone call for her. For a moment Charlie thought he detected a clouding of fear cross her eyes, but it was gone instantly as she turned to the waiter and spoke quickly in Italian. The waiter shrugged and returned to the telephone alone.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘I said that I was on holiday and didn’t wish to be interrupted by business calls. I told him to tell the caller I was out.’

  ‘How do you know it was a business call?’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and with a q
uick smile ordered Charlie to forget about it. ‘If you can miss a day at school, then I can miss whatever I was wanted for, can’t I?’

  Charlie could have thought of a dozen replies to this. He didn’t understand her refusal to take phone calls or her tearing up the telegram, but he didn’t need to understand. It was enough for him that she should wish to stay with him in this curious but wondrous non-sexual love affair.

  By the Tuesday thay seemed to have been together for always, and spent a day deepening their tans on the beach. Once again he tried to teach her to swim as he had done for the past four days, but once out of his protective arms she was as nervous as a chicken and began to struggle so violently that he was forced to pick her up and out of the imaginary danger.

  ‘How did you ever get through school in Toronto without learning to swim?’ he asked.

  ‘I learned to lie a lot,’ she replied. ‘I can’t help it. Water terrifies me. It always has done.’

  At supper time that night they had an animated, if confused, conversation about vampires, which was sparked off when he happened to mention that red wine always reminded him of blood.

  ‘You mean like the body and blood in Communion?’ said Kate.

  ‘No. More like real blood … the blood Dracula drinks.’

  She picked up her glass and raised it in a toast: ‘To Dracula,’ she said.

  ‘He had kisses sweeter than wine,’ he half-sang. She giggled and spluttered a little as a trickle of wine ran from her lips down her chin. ‘You know you can’t hold your liquor, lady,’ he said, and leaning across the table he wiped the trace of wine from her skin with his forefinger and then licked it clean.

  ‘Do you think vampires can fall in love?’ she asked.

  ‘Only at night.’ He bared his teeth and stretched out his arms towards her. ‘Just call me Nosferatu.’

  ‘You look about as frightening as a London bobby,’ she laughed.

  He saw his chance: ‘Do you know London well?’