‘If those dogs – start tonight – we won’t sleep,’ he said. He came to the bed and waited for her to get under the sheet. She felt his big-boned body beside her and smelled his sharp, curious smell.
‘God,’ he said. He felt stupefied in this place. In five minutes he was asleep. But she lay awake. Forty, she was thinking. A woman of forty with a son. No son. She heard, as she lay awake, the deep breathing of her husband, the curious whistlings of his breath. She lay thinking about her life, puzzling, wondering. Why had she no son? She dozed. She awakened. She threw back the sheet and sleeplessly sighed. If she slept it was only in snatches, and she woke up with her heart beating violently and to find herself listening for the sound of a step on the stairs. There was a sensation of inordinate hunger and breathlessness in her body.
Sometimes the young Jew waited for them in the morning and went down with them to the beach. He carried her basket for her or her book. He went back for things.
‘Tom,’ she said in front of her husband, ‘has no manners.’
She walked between them and talked excitedly to the young man about characters in books, or foreign towns, or pictures. She laughed and Coram smiled. He listened with wonder to them.
They sat on the beach. Under his clothes the Jew wore a black bathing-suit. He undressed at once and went into the water. His body was alien and slender, the skin burned to the colour of dark corn. He dived in and swam far out into the blue water, beyond the other bathers. He did not laugh or wave or call back, but in his distant, impersonal way he swam far out with long easy strokes. After a mile he lay floating in the sun. He seemed to pass the whole morning out there. She could see his black head. To be young like that and lie in the sea in the sun! And yet how boring to lie there for so long. She would have sudden pangs of anxiety. She would talk of the cold current that came out in the deeper water, from the harbour. She was always glad and relieved when she saw his head moving towards the shore. When he came out of the water he seemed to be dry at once, as if some oil were in his skin. She would see only beads of water at the back of his neck on the short black hair.
‘You can swim!’ she said.
He smiled.
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you?’
The question pleased her. She was astonished by the pleasure it gave her.
‘I’m not allowed,’ she said with animation. ‘Tell me, what were you doing out there? You were such a long time.’
His dark eyes were large and candid as he turned to her and she caught her breath. There were three or four black freckles on his skin. Her older yellow eyes returned his innocent gaze. Good heavens, she thought. With eyes like that he ought to be a girl. But she did not know and did not feel that her eyes were older than his.
‘I was nearly asleep,’ he said. ‘The sea is like a mattress.’
He and Coram had a scientific discussion about the possibility of sleeping on the sea.
It was absurd of her, she knew, but she was disappointed. Had he not thought of them, of her? She had been thinking of him all the time.
Coram sat beside them. He talked about the business scandals and frauds in the chemical trade. The quick-minded Jew understood all these stories long before Coram got to their elaborate end. Coram had an obsession with fraud. His slow mind was angry about that kind of quickness of mind which made fraud possible. Coram sat inert, uncomprehending, quite outside the gaiety on the beach. He was not gloomy or morose. He was not sulking. His blue eyes glistened and he had the wistful face of a dog trying to understand. He sat struggling to find words which would convey all that he had felt in this fortnight. He considered the sea and the young man for a long time. Then he undressed. Out of his dark red bathing-dress his legs were white and were covered with thick golden hairs. His neck was pink where the sun had caught it. He walked down awkwardly over the pebbles, scowling because of the force of the sun, and straddled knee-deep into the water. Then he flung himself on it helplessly, almost angrily, and began clawing at it. He seemed to swim with clenched fists. They could see him clawing and crawling as the slow swell lifted him up. For a hundred yards he would swim not in a straight line but making a half circle from the beach, as if he were incapable of swimming straight or of knowing where he was going. When he waded out with the water drenching from him there was a look of grievance on his face.
‘That water’s dirty,’ he said when he got back. The Mediterranean was a fraud: it was too warm, thick as syrup. He sat dripping on his wife’s books.
One morning when he came back and was drying himself, rubbing his head with the towel, he caught sight of Monsieur Pierre. The Frenchman was sitting not many yards away. Short-sighted, no doubt Monsieur Pierre had not seen them. Beside him were his towels, his red slippers, his red swimming-helmet, his cigarette case, his striped bathing-gown and his jar of coconut oil. He was in his bathing-dress. More than ever, but for his short grey hair, he looked like a pot-bellied middle-aged woman as he rubbed coconut oil on his short brown arms. His monocle was in his eye. He looked like a Lesbian in his monocle.
Coram scowled.
‘You see,’ he blurted in a loud voice. ‘He hasn’t been in. He won’t go in either. He just comes – down here – all dolled up – to look at the women.’
‘Not so loud,’ his wife said. ‘Please.’ She looked with anxiety at the Jew. ‘Poor Monsieur Pierre,’ said Mrs Coram. ‘Remember his age. He’s sixty. Perhaps he doesn’t want to go in. I bet you won’t be swimming when you’re sixty.’
‘He can swim very well,’ said the young Jew politely. ‘I went out with him a couple of days ago from the other beach.’ He pointed over the small headland. ‘He swam out to the ship in the bay. That is three miles.’
‘There, Tom!’ cried his wife.
She was getting bored with these attacks on Monsieur Pierre.
‘He’s a fraud, a rotten fraud,’ said Tom in his smouldering, struggling voice.
‘But Alex was with him!’ she said.
‘I don’t care who was with him,’ said Tom. ‘He’s a fraud. You wait till you know him better,’ said Tom bluntly to the Jew. ‘Believe me, he’s a rotten little blackmailer.’
‘Ssh. You don’t know that. You mustn’t repeat things,’ she said.
‘Well, you know it as well as I do,’ Tom said.
‘Quiet, Tom, please,’ his wife said. ‘He’s sitting there.’
‘He blackmails his brother-in-law,’ Tom persisted. He was addressing himself to the Jew.
‘Well, what of it?’
She was angry. Monsieur Pierre could easily hear. And she was angry, trembling with anger, because she did not want the young man to see the uncouthness of her husband and her mortification at it.
‘Pierre’s sister married a motor millionaire. That’s where Pierre gets his money. He waits till his brother-in-law has a new woman and then goes to his sister and pitches the tale to her. She goes to her husband, makes a jealous scene and, to keep her quiet, he gives her what she wants for Pierre.’
‘You don’t know that,’ she said.
‘I know it as well as you do,’ he said. ‘Everyone in the town knows it. He’s a fraud.’
‘Well, don’t shout. And use some other word. It’s a bore,’ she said.
‘I’ve no respect for a man who doesn’t earn his living,’ Coram said. Oh, God, she thought, now he’s going to quarrel with this boy.
The Jew raised an eyebrow.
‘Doesn’t he keep the Pension?’ the Jew inquired calmly.
‘You mean his servants keep it,’ blustered Coram. ‘Have you ever seen him do a stroke?’
‘Well,’ his wife said, ‘we can’t all be like you, Tom. My family never earned a penny in their lives. They would have been horrified at the idea.’
She was speaking not with irony but with indignation. At once she knew she had gone too far. She had failed for once to soothe, to smooth away.
&n
bsp; ‘Ay! Didn’t want the dirty work,’ Coram said, dropping into his Midland accent. He was not angry. He was, from his own stolid point of view, reasonable and even genial. He wondered why she was ‘getting at’ him.
‘Why, dearest,’ she said, knowing how irony hurt his vanity. ‘You’ve hit it. You’ve hit it in one. Bravo. They had no illusions about the nobility of work.’ She was ridiculing him.
‘You don’t believe in the nobility of work, do you?’ she said to the Jew. ‘My husband’s got a slave’s mind,’ she said.
‘Working is a habit, like sleeping and eating,’ said the Jew seriously in his lazy and too perfect enunciation. It had the well-oiled precision of a complexity of small pistons in an impersonal machine. She had heard him speak French and German with an equal excellence. It was predestined.
Living with her husband, always dealing with the inarticulate, she had injured her own full capacity to speak. The Jew stirred her tongue and her lips. She felt an impulse to put her lips to his, not in love, but to draw some of the magic of exposition from him. She wanted her head to be joined to his head in a kiss, her brow to be against his. And then his young face and his dark hair would take the lines from her face and would darken her greyness with the dark, fresh, gleaming stain of youth. She could never really believe that her hair was grey. Her lips were tingling and parted as, lost in this imagination, she gazed at him; innocent and cool-eyed, he returned her look. She did not lower her eyes. How young she had been! A shudder of weakness took her shoulders and pain spread like a burn from her throat and over her breasts into the pit of her stomach. She moistened her lips. She saw herself driving in the August sun on an English road twenty years ago, a blue tarred road that ran dazzling like steel into dense trees and then turned and vanished. That day with its climate and the resinous smells of the country always came back when she thought of being young. She was overwhelmed.
The sun had gone in and the sea was grey and sultry and, in this light, the water looked heavier and momentous, higher and deeper at the shore, like a swollen wall. The sight of the small lips of foam was like the sight of thirst, like the sudden in explicable thirst she had for his lips.
Then she heard Tom’s voice. It was explanatory. Sitting with people who were talking, he would sometimes slowly come to conclusions about a remark which had struck him earlier in the conversation. He would cling to this, work upon it, struggle with it. She often laughed affectionately at this lagging of his tortoise mind.
The frowns were deep in the thick pink skin of his forehead, the almost tearful glare was in his eyes:
‘They didn’t want the dirty work,’ he said. He was addressing the young man. ‘They have butlers. They have a grown man to answer door-bells and bring letters. Her family had. They corrupt people by making them slaves …’
The Jew listened politely. Coram felt he hadn’t said what he meant. The frown deepened as the clear eyes of the Jew looked at his troubled face.
‘I was on a jury,’ Coram said. ‘We had to try a man …’
‘Oh, Tom, not that story about the butler who stole elevenpence. Yes, Tom was on a jury and a man got six months for obtaining a meal value elevenpence from an A.B.C. or a Lyons or some place …’
‘Yes,’ said Coram eagerly, his glaring eyes begging the Jew to see his point.
He wanted to explain that a man corrupts by employing servants. No, not that. What Coram really meant in his heart was that he would not forgive his wife for coming from a rich family. And yet something more than that, too, something not so ridiculous but more painful. He was thinking of some fatal difference between his wife and himself and their fatal difference from society. He was thinking of the wound which this place by the beautiful sea had made in him. He struggled, gave it up.
But she looked scornfully at him. She wiped him out of her sight. She was angry with him for exposing his stupidity before the young Jew. She had fought against it in the last few days; she had been most clever in concealing it. But now she had failed. The thing was public.
She got up angrily from the beach.
‘Pick up my book,’ she said to her husband. The Jew did not quite hide his astonishment. She saw him gaze, and was angrier still with herself. Tactfully he let her husband pick up the book.
They walked back to the Pension. All the way along the road she scarcely spoke to her husband. Once in their room, she pulled off her hat and went to the mirror. She saw him reflected in the glass, standing with a look of heavy resentment on his face, bewildered by her.
She saw her own face. The skin was swollen with anger and lined too. Her grey hair was untidy. She was shocked by her physical deterioration. She was ugly. When she heard the young man’s step on the stairs she could have wept. She waited: he did not close his door. This was more than she could bear. She turned upon her husband. She raised her voice. She wanted the young man to hear her rage.
Why had she married such an oaf, such a boor? Her family had begged her not to marry him. She mocked him. He failed at everything. There he was, stuck at forty, stuck in his career, stuck for life.
Sometimes he blurted out things in the quarrel, but most of the time he was speechless. He stood at the foot of the bed with his tweed coat in his hand, looking at her with heavy blue eyes, his face reddening under the insults, his tongue struggling to answer, his throat moving. He was not cold, but hot with goading. Yet he did nothing. The forces inside him were locked like wrestlers at each other’s throats, muddled, powerless. As the quarrel exhausted itself, she sank on to the bed. She was fascinated by his hulking incapacity. She had always been fascinated. From the very beginning.
He had not moved during all this, but when she lay down on the bed with her head in the pillow he went quietly to the clothes peg and hung up his coat. He stood there rolling up his sleeves. He was going to wash. But she heard him move. She suddenly could not bear that he moved away, even those two steps, from her. She could not bear that he should say to himself, ‘One of Julia’s scenes. Leave her alone. She’ll get over it,’ and, taking his opportunity, slip away and go on as if nothing had happened.
She sat up on the edge of the bed. Tears were stinging her cheeks.
‘Tom!’ she called out. ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’
He turned guiltily. She had made him turn.
‘I want a child, Tom. What are we going to do? I must have a child.’
Her tone made his blood run cold. There was something wild and horror-struck in her voice. It sounded like a piercing voice crying out in a cavern far away from any other living creature, outraged, animal and incomprehensible.
God, he thought. Are we going over all that again? I thought we’d resigned ourselves to that.
He wanted to say, ‘You’re forty. You can’t have a child.’ But he could not say that to her. He suspected that she was acting. He said instead what she so often said to him; it seemed to be the burden of their isolated lives.
‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘People will hear.’
‘All you ever think of!’ she cried out. ‘People. Drift. Do nothing.’
They went down the tiled stairs to the dining-room. The sun had come out again, but it was weak. A thin film of cloud was rising in the east. The shutters of the dining-room were always closed early in the morning, and by noon the house was cool and dark. Before his guests came down, Monsieur Pierre used to go round the room with a fly-swatter. Then the wine was brought in a bucket of water and he put it down beside his chair and waited. A clock clucked like some drowsy hen on the wall, and the coloured plates, like crude carnival wheels, glowed in the darkened room on the black carved shelves of the cupboard. Mrs Coram came into the room and she heard the dust blowing outside in the breeze and the leaves moving in the vines. A bolt tapped on the shutters.
Their faces were dark in the room, all the faces except Mrs Coram’s. Her face was white and heavily powdered. She had been afraid that when s
he saw Alex she would be unable to speak, but would choke and have to run from the table. To her surprise, when she saw him standing by his chair in the room, with his brown bare arm on the chair top, she was able to speak. So easily that she talked a great deal.
‘Red wine or white? The wishes of women are the wishes of God,’ said Monsieur Pierre to her, paying himself a compliment at the same time.
She began to mock the young man. He laughed. He enjoyed the mockery. ‘The wishes of women are the sorrows of Satan,’ he said satanically. She went on to mockery of Monsieur Pierre. He was delighted. She repeated in her own way the things which her husband said about him.
‘Monsieur Pierre is a fraud,’ she said. ‘He goes to the beach. He pretends he goes there to swim. Don’t you believe it! He goes there to look at the girls. And Alex – he has got a motor inside him. He goes straight out and anchors. You think he’s swimming. But he’s only floating.’
‘I can swim ten miles,’ said Monsieur Pierre. He took a small mouthful of wine and boasted in a neat, deprecating way. ‘I once swam half across the Channel.’
‘Did you?’ said the young man with genuine interest.
And once Monsieur Pierre had started to boast, he could not be stopped. She egged him on.
‘Challenge him,’ said Coram morosely to the young man, chewing a piece of meat.
‘I challenge him,’ said Monsieur Pierre.
But not at the town beach, he said, at the one beyond. It was true he rarely swam at the town beach. He liked to be alone when he swam … solitude … freedom …
‘You bet he does,’ grunted Coram.
‘And Monsieur Coram too,’ said Monsieur Pierre.
‘I have been in once,’ Coram said.
‘So have they!’ she exclaimed.
When they got up from the table, Coram took his wife aside. He saw through it all, he said to her; it was a device of Monsieur Pierre’s to get a drive in his car. She was astonished at this remark. Before today she would not have been astonished, she would have tried to smooth away the difficulties he saw and the suspicions. But now everything was changed. He was like a stranger to her. She saw it clearly; he was mean. Men of his class who had worked their way up from nothing were often mean. Such a rise in the world was admired. She had once often admired it. Now it amused her and made her contemptuous. Mean! Why had she never thought of that before? She had been blind.
The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories Page 24
