‘Freelance,’ Plopl said. He continued to regard Farnaby intently. His hair, of a Central European fineness and straightness, fell in a wet fringe over his narrow simian brows, and troubled his vision. Still fixing Farnaby with his obscured regard he stepped back, reaching behind him to where he knew Pamela would be – he had stationed her there ten or fifteen minutes before, and she rarely changed position on her own initiative. Plopl felt the soft flesh of her upper arm and dug his fingers into it with habitual severity, drawing her forward at the same time to his side.
‘This is my mod-el,’ he said, retaining his grip, sounding more than ever kind and simple in his tastes.
‘And library books,’ said the man behind Farnaby. ‘He sometimes tears up library books.’
From his remarks about arresting the flux, Plopl had not sounded the sort of photographer who used models. Farnaby had an impression of a broad expressionless face, framed by tangled, hay-coloured hair; square shoulders; enormous breasts, contained by patterned nylon, appearing to float on the surface independently like beach balls.
Farnaby said, ‘How do you do?’
The girl made no reply, but she drew an inward breath rather hissingly, and it became obvious to Farnaby that the grip on her arm was hurting her.
‘You have to use the material to hand,’ Plopl said, a remark, it seemed, aimed in derogation at his model. He released the girl’s arm and she stood there quietly beside him. Vapour from the surface of the water rose up round the torsos of both.
Farnaby looked across to where the dark-haired girl had been, but there was no sign now of either her or Mrs Pritchett. He experienced a sense of desolation he could not account for. It was as though his will were for the moment suspended, in abeyance. He looked blankly before him at the glazed, misty surface, the milky, elongated ovals of light shed by the lamps. The air felt chill on his shoulders. He crouched at the knees, lowering himself into the warm, sealing water until it rose to his chin. A little water entered his mouth. It tasted bitter.
‘I will show you some of my photographs,’ Plopl said. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Are you planning to stay long?’
‘Oh, several days,’ Farnaby said. He began to move off, released by this assurance of a future meeting.
‘Very well.’ Plopl was gratified by the effect he felt he had made. Right from the start, with superstitious certainty, he had known that this was a person whom it was important to impress. His heart warmed with tenderness and camaraderie. He said, ‘We will have a drink, yes?’
Farnaby nodded his assent and with an intensification of purpose turned away and began to move off across the pool in the direction the girl had taken.
As he drew nearer the middle he became aware of a certain unevenness in the depth, slight variations, and he began to move more cautiously, remembering the slabs of antique masonry he had seen earlier, in the brilliant afternoon, from the footbridge. Though they, surely, had been in the area immediately adjoining the bridge itself. He tried to remember where exactly he had seen them, pale fluted drums beneath the glittering surface, but the afternoon seemed already too remote for such exactness of recall.
It was much darker out here, in the middle of the pool. Someone, another man, passed in front of him, very close, causing him to slow down his own rate of progress even further, in fact to stand still for a moment or two until the other should have passed. This other did not turn his head but proceeded slowly across Farnaby’s bows with a lordly rolling gait of his barrel-shaped body that Farnaby recognized suddenly – it was Spumantini, the Levantine commercial agent. He was holding his right arm, the one farthest away, rather daintily out of the water, but Farnaby could not see if there was anything in his hand. Light fell for a few moments on his calm, fleshy, senatorial profile. Then he was past, receding into the darkness. Farnaby glanced after him in an attempt to see the reason for such a purposeful sort of proceeding but the bulky form was lost after two or three yards. Perhaps, Farnaby thought, he had passed behind an angle or bend in the containing wall. He proceeded after a moment or two on his way, looking from side to side in an effort to pick up the traces of the dark-haired girl again. His feelings of excitement at this prospect intensified and they were not, he recognized, at all appropriate to a sense of mission, but rather concerned with moving through this fostering element towards a possibly willing quarry. He tried, experimentally, to remind himself that it was not a hunt he was engaged on but the performance of a solemn duty, enjoined upon him by Mooncranker, who had lain there with his speaking mouth, helpless under the sheets in the strong white light, strapped to his source of sustenance; but the reminder did nothing to lessen his excitement. It was in a predatory spirit that he had accepted the mission in the first place. Besides, this might not be Miranda. She had looked about the right age, and with shorter hair and a more upright posture could have been the girl marked on the photograph. Or any one of half a dozen others on that fifth form row …
Suddenly he saw them again, straight before him, not two yards away, the girl and the woman standing close together in silence. Perhaps they had broken off at his approach. It was too dark to see their faces clearly. Farnaby stood still, vainly peering. They were aware, however, of his presence there. Both at the same time turned faintly luminous faces towards him. He began to move cautiously round them in a half circle until he reached the wall again, some yards beyond. He settled himself low in the water, only a mist-wreathed head showing, to listen to what he could of the conversation …
Spumantini, who had come upon them only a few moments before, but more circumspectly, was now stationed more or less equidistantly, against the wall on the other side. He was short sighted – hence the softness and solicitude which appeared to be the permanent expression of his brown eyes. He had left Mrs Pritchett, as he thought securely, in a corner, while he went to fetch cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of his beach robe on the terrace. Returning, he had lost his bearings somewhat and casting round in the dimness had made out a form roughly the right height, though rather in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, he had launched himself immediately through the water, feeling beneath the broad soft pads of his feet the slightly slippery marble fluting of columns, only to find when almost upon the figure that it was too tall, it had shoulders too angular, moreover, and clinchingly, it began to speak in a man’s voice, saying in light diffident tones, ‘I have no wish to be a photographer.’
Spumantini stood still. A certain brutality, born of his frustration, stirred in him. He would have liked to take the thin form before him in a certain wrestling grip he knew of, which if successful did damage to the spine. He reminded himself that he admired their institutions, thought briefly but with gratitude of his British passport. The Englishman was built like a plank, shoulders and waist seemed not much different in width. How different from his Mrs Pritchett, with her sloping shoulders and globular buttocks, her fullness which was however not gross. He thought of Mrs Pritchett’s cleavage and the various convexities of her person. All were delectable. But what made Mrs Pritchett special was not merely this controlled abundance, which after all any Pavyon girl might be expected to possess. No, it was her accent which fascinated him, her British lady’s accent, upper-crust as he designated it, the throat-formed, strangulated sounds that came from her. She was the real thing.
Spumantini looked into the obscurity beyond Farnaby, turning his head slowly, narrowing his short-sighted eyes. Perhaps it had been there, that other corner, where he had left her. He recommenced his wading, diagonally across the pool, keeping his cigarettes and lighter clear of the water. As he drew level with the Englishman someone in a guttural and deliberate voice said, ‘We will have a drink, yes?’ and the Englishman turned away and began to move outwards across the pool. Spumantini quickened his own pace, passing quite close to Farnaby but without glancing at him. Almost immediately he heard Mrs Pritchett’s voice again, over on his left, saying ‘Call me Belinda,’ something which she had never said to him. She must have struck u
p a conversation with somebody. He moved softly towards the voice, making no sound through the water, turning his head slowly from side to side. After a moment or two he again stopped, with his broad soft back against the tiled wall. He was content for the moment to wait here. He listened. He thought of taking Mrs Pritchett to his villa in Karsheaka, which overlooked the great blue sweep of the bay. White walls. Foam of bougainvillea. Showing her the cacti on the terrace, the blue jasmine and the white, the sharp-leaved lemon trees. The gin and the tonic in correct proportions. Afterwards, in the shaded bedroom, from which all flies should previously have been driven, he would undress Mrs Pritchett amid odours of Cologne and attar of roses. In his ears her contralto ecstasies …
‘What do you know about the older generation anyway?’ Mrs Pritchett said. She took care to keep her voice amused and conversational.
‘Quite a bit, one way and the other,’ the girl said. She had not yet reciprocated in the matter of first names.
‘It’s sexual, it’s basically sexual,’ said an earnest male voice somewhere beyond them.
And a woman replied, ‘But it must cost him a bit, replacing all those books, it must take a fair slice out of his salary.’
‘The acoustics are odd in this pool, aren’t they?’ Mrs Pritchett said, in lowered tones. The girl’s face was close to her own, an almost perfect oval, and very fragile-looking, framed by the heavy, burdensome-seeming hair. ‘There are parents, of course,’ she added.
‘Oh, I don’t mean parents,’ the girl said. ‘I stopped telling my parents things quite early on. They never seemed able to handle it somehow. I mean they turned everything into something else. So I stopped telling them things. Then they said I was secretive. Which I am, I suppose. I don’t really know why I am telling you all this now, as a matter of fact.’
‘Something in the water,’ suggested Mrs Pritchett, raising her head slightly and giving the girl a full smile. They were standing very close together and in the small movements and adjustments that both of their bodies were constantly making in the water, Mrs Pritchett’s knee brushed against the girl’s thigh.
‘Besides,’ Mrs Pritchett said, ‘the darkness confers a sort of protection on us, doesn’t it?’ As soon as she had said this she regretted it. She did not need the girl’s uncertain laugh to tell her it was the wrong note. This terseness, this premature attempt to establish complicity, had damaged her prospects before. ‘Or perhaps that is the wrong word,’ she said quickly.
‘In Athens,’ a confident nasal voice said. ‘Any time, day or night. That is their proud boast. You can’t say that about Istanbul.
The girl laughed again, more purely in amusement now. ‘He’s still going on about that,’ she said softly.
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know his name, just the voice. He was having this identical conversation with someone else about an hour ago.’ She laughed again and Mrs Pritchett laughed too, a full-throated, rather barking laugh. ‘That must be his gambit,’ she said. ‘Are you on your own here?’
‘Yes,’ the girl said, in a changed voice. ‘I’m having a sort of holiday on my own.’
‘A very good idea,’ Mrs Pritchett said fervently. She moved her knee through the water again but met nothing. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘At night I mean. In the pool.’
‘Oh, yes,’ the girl responded slowly, as if in doubt. Then with a sudden eagerness she said, ‘I don’t know about protected, really, it isn’t as if –’ She turned her head restlessly, and the heavy hair swung across her face.
Some men were speaking in Turkish quite loudly. Mrs Pritchett looked over her shoulder, saw a number of dark forms surmounted by hats at one of the tables on the terrace. Presumably they had come up from the village to drink and watch the crazy foreign bathers. There did not seem to be any Turks actually staying here.
‘I don’t mean that we are in danger, of course,’ she said. ‘Except in so far as one always is.’
Suddenly, from some unidentifiable corner of the pool, they heard a whispering voice, that could have been a man or woman, saying, ‘Findest Du ich habe abgenommen?’
‘Good heavens,’ Mrs Pritchett said. She looked at the girl’s face but could discern no particular expression on it. ‘Do you think that is the voice of the spirit of the place?’
‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘It was German wasn’t it?’
I must be careful, Mrs Pritchett told herself. I must not be too bold. The young are more hypocritical than we are.
‘I see what you mean,’ the girl said. ‘About the pool. You don’t need to put on any sort of show, do you, and people can’t get at you much, can they?’
‘You cease to be a target,’ Mrs Pritchett said. She was surprised, and in some vague way alarmed, by this consonance with her own feelings, expressed however differently. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know exactly what you mean. How strange that we should both have felt this. In any case,’ she added, ‘you mustn’t be reluctant to speak freely to me – confession is good for the spirit.’ As she uttered these words the desire to confide in this girl, to secure her interest and sympathy by speaking of intimate things, rose strongly in her.
‘Yes, it does you good, I suppose,’ the girl said, vaguely and carelessly, looking away across the pool.
Mrs Pritchett said, ‘I think so too.’ She paused, conscious for a delicious moment of being forbearing, having this child at the power of the confidences she was shortly to make her.
‘I was meaning confession in a general sense,’ she said, her voice fastening harshly but with a certain gratitude on this depersonalized view of things.
‘I don’t think it will do in any sense,’ the girl said, in her clear, rather lazy voice. ‘Not for me at least. I feel the one sinned against, not sinning. I mean it may be all wrong spiritually, but that is how I feel.’
‘You must have had a bad time,’ Mrs Pritchett said, infusing her tone with sympathy.
‘I got involved with an older man,’ the girl said.
Mrs Pritchett waited, but no further details came. After a moment or two, the girl said, ‘Your husband is not here with you then?’
‘My husband and I were divorced several years ago,’ Mrs Pritchett said. The urge to present this girl with something of her life was now too insistent to be any longer denied. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said slowly, ‘I was to have married again, but I backed out at the last minute.’
She paused on this for several moments. Then, as the girl said nothing more she began again, in slow deliberate tones, almost as though reciting: ‘Mark, his name was. He was a widower himself. A partner in a firm of solicitors in Penrith. He played cricket sometimes for the Penrith second eleven.’ She always began like that, even when she was only telling the story to herself. It was important to get these preliminary details right, establish poor Mark as a living man. ‘But his main interests,’ she said, ‘were going to bed with me and troutfishing. I put them in that order though I don’t know where the true emphasis lay, I mean I don’t know which came uppermost in Mark’s mind. Actually, he liked to combine the two things. Not simultaneously, but over the week-end, you know …’
The attentive oval of the girl’s face was turned towards her. Her voice quickened, lost its first diffidence. ‘He used to take me to this cottage,’ she said, ‘which belonged as a matter of fact to a friend of his, a doctor by profession, also of Penrith. He used to take me there in his green M.G. Mark, that is. I walked out on him a month, less than a month before the wedding day, left him standing in midstream, literally and figuratively, he was actually standing in the river fishing when I decided to go. He ate his aphrodisiacal buttered trout alone that night …’ Her tone had become harsher, more vibrant, as at some residual pain, though still of impeccable modulation. ‘He was a good man,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t stand him.’
At this moment, moving outwards a little and turning her body in the water, Mrs Pritchett caught sight of Spumantini, crouching not three yards off, pre
sumably listening to their conversation. Rage rose in her at the sight. Was she to be dogged for ever by this hideous lecherous Levantine? Checking her first impulse, which was to assault him with her nails, she said quietly to the girl, ‘Shall we move on a little, into the deeper part? I am getting chilly round the shoulders.’ The girl assented and side by side they waded out, feeling the water rise gradually higher over breast and shoulders. When she judged they had gone far enough, Mrs Pritchett said quickly, ‘Let’s just cut across to the other side, shall we?’ and she took the girl’s arm with gentle urgency. That will have thrown him off the scent, she assured herself. Myopic beast.
Farnaby, who had contrived to hear a good deal of this conversation, failed however to notice their withdrawal because he allowed himself to be distracted at this crucial point by two male voices in altercation, voices which had been getting steadily more obtrusive, one precise and mincing, the other definitely foreign with a displeasing abrasiveness about it, and very harsh aspirations.
‘Discharge,’ this latter voice was saying, ‘in art as in life. That is my theory Henry. More than a theory. It is an article of faith with me.’
‘Like most of your ideas,’ the other man said, ‘it manages to be sentimental and brutal at the same time.’
Farnaby was able now to see the forms of the two men, who had approached to within two or three yards of him: the one addressed as Henry thin and somewhat taller than average, with what seemed a sort of superstructure on his head raising his height still further; the other bulky, bald, with thick drooping moustaches. He recognized them for the couple that Lusk had described, with an effect of grudging praise, as practising.
‘No, no, no,’ the man called Henry said, spacing the monosyllables pedantically. ‘It is glorified mallachia. It is a masturbatory theory, Alexis.’ He looked at Farnaby while saying this, presumably in the wish to include him. With something of a shock Farnaby saw that the superstructure on his head was a plastic mob-cap, doubtless intended to keep his hair dry. The bald man nodded to him.
Mooncranker's Gift Page 17
