The Collected Stories (19 page)

‘No. I’m going to live here for a time.’

‘Do you have a house?’

‘Yes. I’ve been loaned a house.’

‘Will you be with people or alone?’ His questioning grew more eager and rapid.

‘I’ll be alone.’

‘Do you think I could take a room in the house?’

She was grateful to be able to rest her eyes on the blue sea in the distance. At least it would not grow old. Its tides would ebb and flow, it would still yield up its oyster shells long after all the living had become the dead.

‘I’m sorry. One of the conditions of the loan is that I’m not allowed to have people to stay,’ she lied.

‘I could market for you and cook.’

‘It’s impossible. I’m sorry.’ He would cling to any raft to shut out of mind the grave ahead.

‘You? Are you going far?’

‘The bus goes to Almería.’

‘And then?’

‘I don’t know. I thought to Morocco.’

She escaped from him in Alicante where they had a half-hour break and changed buses. She saw the shirtsleeved porters pat the Swede’s fur coat in amusement,
‘Mucho frío, mucho frío,’
as they transferred it to the boot of the bus returning to Almería. She waited till she saw him take the same seat in the new bus and then took her place beside an old Spanish woman dressed in black who smelled of garlic and who, she learned later, had been seeing her daughter in hospital. She felt guilty at avoiding the Swede so pointedly. She did not look at him when she got off at Vera.

The house was low and flat-roofed and faced the sea. The mountain was behind, a mountain of the moon, sparsely sprinkled with the green of farms that grew lemon trees and often had vine or olive on terraces of stone built on the mountain side. In the dried-up
beds of rivers the cacti flourished. The village was a mile away and had a covered market built of stone, roofed with tiles the colour of sand. She was alarmed when the old women hissed at her when she first entered the market but then she saw it was only their way of trying to draw people to their stalls. Though there was a fridge in the house she went every day to the market and it became her daily outing. The house had four rooms but she arranged it so that she could live entirely in the main room.

She reread all of Chekhov, ate and drank carefully, and in the solitude of the days felt her life, for the first time in years, in order. The morning came when she decided to face the solitary white page. She had an end, the coffin of the famous writer coming to Moscow for burial that hot July day; and a beginning, the boy crunching on the oyster shells in the restaurant while the man starved in his summer coat in the rain outside. What she had to do was to imagine the life in between. She wrote in a careful hand
The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July
, and then grew agitated. She rose and looked at her face in the small silver-framed mirror. Yes, there were lines, but faint still, and natural. Her nails needed filing. She decided to change into a shirt and jeans and then to rearrange all her clothes and jewellery. A week, two weeks, passed in this way. She got nothing written. The early sense of calm and order left her.

She saw one person fairly regularly during that time, a local
guardia
whose name was Manolo. He had first come to the house with a telegram from her old theatre, asking her if she would do a translation of a play of Mayakovsky’s. She offered him a drink when he came with the telegram. He asked for water and later he walked with her back to the village where she cabled her acceptance of the theatre’s offer, wheeling his rattling bicycle, the thin glittering barrel of his rifle pointing skyward. The Russian manuscript of the play arrived by express delivery a few days afterwards, and now she spent all her mornings working on the translation; and how easy it was, the good text solidly and reliably under her hand, play compared with the pain of trying to pluck the life of Chekhov out of the unimaginable air.

Manolo began to come almost daily, in the hot, lazy hours of the afternoon. She would hear his boots scrape noisily on the gravel
to give her warning. He would leave his bicycle against the wall of the house in the shade, his gun where the drinking water dripped slowly from the porous clay jars into catching pails. They would talk for an hour or more across the bare Scandinavian table and he would smoke and drink wine or water. His talk turned often to the social ills of Spain and the impossibility of the natural division between men and women. She wondered why someone as intelligent as he had become a
guardia.
There was nothing else to do, he told her. He was one of the lucky ones in the village, he got a salary, it was that or Germany. And then he married, and bang-bang, he said – two babies in less than two years. A third was on its way. All his wife’s time was taken up with the infants now. There was nothing left between them but babies, and that was the way it would go on, without any money, seven or eleven, or more …

‘But that’s criminal in this age,’ she said.

‘What is there to do?’

‘There’s contraception.’

‘In Spain there’s not.’

‘They could be brought in.’

‘If you can I’ll pay you,’ he said eagerly.

When she sent back the completed translation she asked the theatre’s editor if he could send the contraceptives with the next commission. She explained why she wanted them, though she reflected that he would think what he wanted anyhow. The contraceptives did get through with the next commissioned play. They wanted a new translation of
The Seagull
, which delighted her. She felt it would bring her closer to Chekhov and that when she had finished it she would be able to begin what she had come here to try to do in the first place. The only objection the editor had to sending the contraceptives was that he was uneasy for her safety: it was against the law, and it was Spain, and policemen were as notorious as other people for wanting promotion.

She thought Manolo was nervous and he left her quickly after she handed him the package that afternoon, but she put it out of mind as natural embarrassment in taking contraceptives from a woman, and went back to reading
The Seagull.
She was still reading it and making notes on the margins when she heard boots and voices coming up the gravel and a loud knock with what sounded like a gun butt on the door. She was frightened as she called out, ‘Who’s
there?’ and a voice she didn’t know called back, ‘Open. It’s the police.’ When she opened the door she saw Manolo and the
jefe
of the local
guardia
, a fat oily man she had often seen lolling about the market, and he barged into the house. Manolo closed the door behind them as she instinctively got behind the table.

The
jefe
threw the package she had given Manolo earlier in the day on to the table. ‘You know this?’ As she nodded she noticed in growing fear that both of them were very drunk. ‘You know it’s against the law? You can go to prison for this,’ he said, the small oily eyes glittering across the table. She decided there was no use answering any more.

‘Still, Manolo and myself have agreed to forget it if we can try them out here.’ His oily eyes fell pointedly on the package on the table but the voice was hesitant. ‘That’s if you don’t prefer it Spanish style.’ He laughed back to Manolo for support, and started to edge round the table.

They were drunk and excited. They would probably take her anyhow. How often had she heard this problem argued. Usually it was agreed it was better to yield than to get hurt. After all, sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be: in Paris the butcher and the baker shook hands with the local whores when they met, as people plying different trades.

‘All right. As long as you promise to leave as soon as it’s done.’ Her voice stopped him. It had a calm she didn’t feel.

‘Okay, it’s a promise.’ They both nodded eagerly. They reminded her of mastered boys as they asked apprehensively, ‘With the … or without?’

‘With.’

The
jefe
followed her first into the room. ‘All the clothes off,’ was his one demand. She averted her face while it took place. A few times after parties, when she was younger, hadn’t she held almost total strangers in her arms? Then she fixed completely on the two sentences
The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July
, her mind moving over them from beginning to end, and from beginning to end, again and again. Manolo rushed out of the room when he had finished. They kept their word and left, subdued and quiet. It had not been as jolly as they must have imagined it would be.

She showered and washed and changed into new clothes. She poured herself a large glass of cognac at the table, noticing that they must have taken the condoms. Then she began to sob, dry and hard at first, rising to a flood of rage against her own foolishness. ‘There is only one real sin – stupidity. You always get punished for behaving stupidly,’ the poet Severi was fond of repeating.

When she quietened she drank what was left of the cognac and then started to pack. She stayed up all night packing and putting the house in order for her departure. Numbed with tiredness she walked to the village the next morning. All the seats on the express that passed through Vera were booked for that day but she could take the
rápido
to Granada and go straight to Barcelona from there. She arranged for the one taxi in the village to take her to the train. The taximan came and she made listless replies to his ebullient talk on the drive by the sea to meet the train. The
rápido
was full of peasants and as it crawled from station to small station she knew it would be night before it reached Granada. She would find some hotel close to the station. In the morning she would see a doctor and then go to Barcelona. A woman in a black shawl on the wooden seat facing her offered her a sliver of sausage and a gourd of wine. She took the sausage but refused the wine. She wasn’t confident that her hands were steady enough to direct the thin stream into her mouth. Then she nodded to sleep, and when she woke she thought the bitter taste of oysters was in her mouth and that an awful lot of people were pacing up and down and waving their arms around. She had a sudden desire to look out the window to see if the word
Oysters
was chalked on the wagon; but then she saw that the train had just stopped at a large station and that the woman in the black shawl was still there and was smiling on her.

There was such a strain on the silence between them after he’d eaten that it had to be broken.

‘Maybe we should never have given up the farm and come here. Even though we had no one to pass it on to,’ Michael said, his head of coarse white hair leaning away from his wife as he spoke. What had happened today would never have happened if they’d stayed, he thought, and there’d be no shame; but he did not speak it.

‘Racing across hedges and ditches after cattle, is it, at our age. Cows, hens, pigs, calves, racing from light to dark on those watery fields between two lakes, up to the tips of our wellingtons in mud and water, having to run with the deeds to the bank manager after a bad year. I thought we’d gone into all this before.’

‘Well, we’d never have had to retire if we’d stayed.’ What he said already sounded lame.

‘We’d be retired all right. We’d be retired all right, into the graveyard long years ago if we’d stayed. You don’t know what a day this has been for me as well.’ Agnes began to cry and Michael sat still in the chair as she cried.

‘After I came home from Tesco’s I sorted the parcels,’ she said. ‘And at ten to one I put the kippers under the grill. Michael will have just about finished his bottle of Bass and be coming out the door of the Royal, I said when I looked at the clock. Michael must have run into someone on his way back, I thought, as it went past one. And when it got to ten past I said you must have fell in with company, but I was beginning to get worried.’

‘You know I never fall in with company,’ he protested irritably. ‘I always leave the Royal at ten to, never a minute more nor less.’

‘I didn’t know what way to turn when it got to half past, I was that paralysed with worry, and then I said I’ll wait five minutes to see, and five minutes, and another five minutes, and I wasn’t able to move with worry, and then it was nearly a quarter past two. I
couldn’t stand it. And then I said I’ll go down to the Royal. And I’ll never know why I didn’t think of it before.

‘Denis and Joan were just beginning to lock up when I got to the Royal. “What is it, Agnes?” Denis said. “Have you seen Michael?” I asked. “No.” Denis shook his head. “He hasn’t been in at all today. We were wondering if he was all right. It’s the first time he’s not showed up for his bottle of Bass since he had that flu last winter.” “He’s not showed up for his lunch either and he’s always on the dot. What can have happened to him?” I started to cry.

‘Joan made me sit down. Dennis put a brandy with a drop of port in it into my hand. After I’d taken a sip he said, “When did you last see Michael?” I told him how we went to Tesco’s, and how I thought you’d gone for your bottle of Bass, and how I put on the kippers, and how you never showed up. Joan took out a glass of beer and sat with me while Denis got on the phone. “Don’t worry, Agnes,” Joan said, “Denis is finding out about Michael.” And when Denis got off the phone he said, “He’s not in any of the hospitals and the police haven’t got him so he must be all right. Don’t rush the brandy. As soon as you finish we’ll hop in the car. He must be nearhand.”

‘We drove all round the park but you weren’t on any of the benches. “What’ll we do now?” I said. “Before we do anything we’ll take a quick scout round the streets,” Denis said, and as soon as we went through the lights before Tesco’s he said, “Isn’t that Michael over there with the shopping bag?”

‘And there you were, with the empty shopping bag in front of Tesco’s window. “Oh my God,” I said, “Michael will kill me. I must have forgot to collect him when I came out of Tesco’s,” and then Denis blew the horn, and you saw us, and came over.’