Complete Short Stories (VMC) (102 page)

‘There is one just like that in the carpenter’s shop, down the road,’ Rose said.

He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Isn’t tomorrow your day off?’ she asked, thinking of the excursion into the country to meet Fatma and the children.

‘It has been postponed,’ he said, in an offhand way. ‘Important guests are arriving at the hotel. I have a special dinner to create.
Asperges, coq au vin
…’

‘Crêpes flambées
,’ thought Harry

‘
Crêpes flambées
,’ said Habib.

‘When’s this weather going to improve?’ Harry asked sternly. ‘When shall we have the sun we came for?’

‘This afternoon, perhaps: tomorrow, certainly.’

‘Well, I hope so, I’m sure.’ Harry was unfairly sharp. It was not Habib’s fault that it was cold.

However, he seemed to take the blame for it. He looked put out, then he said, ‘In England, it is always raining. Here such weather is exceptional. Such a March has never been known.’

When he had left them to go off to his work, they went for a stroll along the shore, walking with their heads bent against the wind. If they could not swim and lie in the sun, there was very little else for them to do.

‘Give it another day, and then go home,’ Harry suggested glumly.

At the edge of the sea, women were doing their washing. There was a rhythmical, slapping sound, as they beat sad old garments into the sandy water.

‘We might try Hammamet,’ Rose said. ‘It should be more sheltered there.’ She hated the idea of giving in, of declaring defeat. It was always she who held on longest, hoping to turn their luck, or salvage something. She found it tiring, trying to jolly Harry along at the same time, deluding herself and him, seizing what brightness there was. He was all for cutting losses and clearing out.

It was nearly Independence Day, and some men were putting up triangular red flags in the square. The little flags whipped back and forth against the watery, blue sky.

Harry remembered that Habib had great plans for them for Independence Day. There was to be a procession, and a festival of Tunisian folk music in the cinema. His plans Harry found rather daunting.

A large picture of the President was being hoisted up in the square.

‘Let’s go to Habib’s hotel for lunch,’ Harry said, ‘and sample
la haute cuisine
.’

This hotel was also full of people writing postcards. Rose wondered what they put on them – hopeful messages or lying ones, or cries of despair? On her own cards, she left out mention of the weather. Her friends could assume that it was good – or not, as they chose. The truth would be seen when they arrived home early, pale as all their neighbours, defeated.

They sat on stools at the hotel bar, and Rose stared in front of her, counting bottles, and reading their labels. Her bright conversational openings had at last dried up. She had said all she had to to Harry.

‘We have come to try some of Habib’s good cooking,’ Harry said to the barman, who carefully polished a glass, and put it back on a shelf. He appeared not to have understood what was said, and was far too languid to enquire further.

In the dining-room, Rose and Harry looked about them, wondering in what region Habib was practising his new art.

There was an
hors d’œuvre
of tunny fish and raw onion; then some veal, rather tough.

‘
Crème caramel
,’ suggested the waiter, when the veal was finished.
Crème caramel
pursued them – or rather was waiting for them – on all their travels.

‘
Crêpes flambées
,’ suggested Harry.

The waiter shook his head sadly, but the sadness seemed to arise less from the lack of
crêpes
than from Harry’s fanciful idea.

‘Oh, God, I’ve let you down again,’ Harry said, while Rose was eating some dates. ‘I’m not speaking to God. No! I’m speaking to you. The whole damn holiday’s been a fiasco.’

‘You take too much upon you,’ she said reprovingly. ‘You think you can organise everything.’

‘Well, so I do,’ he said sullenly. ‘And in England, so I can.’

‘Right!’ she said decisively. ‘We’ll go to Tunis in the morning, and get a flight home as soon as we can.’

She felt some relief at not having to hold on any longer.

‘We’ll tell Habib tonight.’

‘No visiting Fatma. No Independence Day procession. No photograph of Habib.’

‘No picture of Madame Bourguiba, either.’

‘We won’t bother with Hammamet.’

‘All those dripping orange trees.’

‘All the same,’ she said. ‘This country I love. I was so happy here.’

That evening, in the ice-cold café, they told Habib, and he stared down at the table, deeply offended.

‘I am sorry we shan’t be able to go out to your house in the country,’ Harry said.

‘It is very fine,’ Habib murmured.

‘Today we had lunch at your hotel,’ Harry said. ‘Most enjoyable.’

‘Very nice,’ Rose said eagerly.

His lips curved upwards very slightly.

‘You did not ask for
crêpes flambées
,’ he said, after a pause.

‘They were not on the menu,’ Harry said cautiously. ‘Unless we made a mistake.’

‘You should have commanded. I can arrange anything. If I had known you were coming …’

‘May we drive you home to the country tonight?’ Harry asked.

Habib had never allowed this. He always had some mysterious friend to meet later.

‘Tonight, I shall not go to my home. I must be very early at the hotel tomorrow to arrange a banquet for important foreign visitors. In fact, I think I shall now say “
au revoir
” and go to bed early in readiness.’

He had tears in his eyes.

‘Then where will you stay,’ asked Harry, and Rose thought that she would not have asked this.

‘I have many friends. I shall stay in the medina – a very poor little place, but for one night, what does it matter?’

‘Well, let us drive you there, at least.’

He blinked away his tears and put his head on one side. ‘As you wish,’ he said.

In the car, he was silent. Once, he sighed and said what a
dommage
it all was.

‘Won’t Fatma miss you – out in the country, all on her own?’ Harry asked.

‘She is accustomed … it is one of the hazards of my profession.’

They drove into the medina, down the widest street, and the only one a car could manage, and Habib leant over to shake hands with Rose, who was sitting in the back. Then, more emotionally, he put his hand on Harry’s shoulder.

‘Until our next meeting,’ he said. ‘If you would slow down here. My friend’s house is nearby.’

Rose thought, we shall never meet again.

Harry stopped the car, but not the engine, and with silent dignity Habib clambered out.

The street was empty, and there were stretches of darkness between wall lamps and open doorways.

Habib stood by the car for a second, with his hand lifted. Then he turned away. He was a brief shadow, and then had vanished, as if into the walls of the medina.

That pity may be felt quite genuinely at a distance is well known; and, when Eric joined up, Alison was pitied enormously by all sorts of people, who could not bear to think of her alone in her house so far beyond the village. She was quiet and solitary there. Woods – great woods, which stretched away over the hills and ran into other woods – came up to the fence on two sides, stretched branches down over the roof and in autumn shed their leaves, which came down steadily and relentlessly as snow, across paths and lawns and cabbage patch.

This first autumn he was away, the leaves fell suddenly. It was disappointing. For a day or two, sunlight struck the great tan-coloured woods, wavered as if falling through water. Then the winds brought destruction. The ash-leaves came down in bunches, still softly green, but the beech-leaves swirled in the air, flat, like coins, or curled and convoluted like sea shells.

It was like a painting by Monet, Alison thought, standing at the sitting-room window and watching. Leaves. They dripped, cascaded; they mounted up in columns like something from the Old Testament or fell like a fountain. Inside, they would lisp drily along the passage or sail in and float in the soup. In the morning she would find them in bed with her.

It was the sort of house which seemed always conscious of the outside world, which doors could not shut out, nor drawn curtains quite conceal. There was the feeling that, left on its own for a year or so, the woods would reclaim their territory; grass would grow, leaves pile up, owls fly in and out of the windows. Then Eric’s house, his effort to impose civilisation where it was despised, would be ruined, mocked at, even by the beetle crossing his hearth.

He was an architect. ‘I want to live in the country,’ he had explained to his wife, ‘but I will not have lavatories down the garden path and hot water carried in cans.’ He wanted it to be a healthy and pleasant house in which to bring up their children.

When war broke out, they had the house, but were still without the children. It had cost too much, felling trees, digging and levelling. It was, however, as comfortable as could be, Eric would think, turning the hot
shower to cool, then to cold, reaching for warm towels. Now – as Trooper Watson – he must accustom himself to something less. Naturally, children were no longer a possibility.

Alison was not really to be pitied, for down there in the wood she was neither happy nor unhappy. She was never nervous, as other women thought she must be and men considered that she should be. No one came to see her. They liked to sympathise by telephone or, at all events, without the walk home afterwards.

She was busy, though, in the house and working in the garden until dark. There were all the leaves to be swept, the wrecked lurching rows of runner beans to be cleared away, logs to be sawn. She was keeping the house beautiful for Eric’s first leave, looking towards that and no further.

By tea-time now, the garden grew muffled and drips of moisture fell furtively from leaves. Through the mist and bonfire smoke the great sunflowers turned their faces at her. Day by day, their heads dropped lower. Then they were collapsed and were done for and she brought them into the shed and strung them up to dry for chickens’ food.

Inside, spread on window-sills to ripen, were flat baskets of green and yellow tomatoes, waxen-looking and with high-lights which reminded her of fruit she had painted at school. Marrows of a deep saffron colour with lemon stripes lay on the dresser. In the evenings, with the curtains drawn, it seemed as if part of the garden had crept inside. She would sit knitting or writing her daily letter to Eric, her report on the garden and the house. When she had listened to the nine o’clock news, she would get ready for bed. Lying flat on her back, looking out at mist or stars, listening to the endless fidgeting of the leaves, she would feel a sense of achievement, her hard, strong body aching from the day’s work. Only occasionally would a breath of defeatism ruffle her tranquillity. ‘Surely,’ the small voice breathed – or was it the leaf upon the floorboards? ‘Surely?’ But that was enough. On that word, she slept.

His leave grew nearer and now his letters ended – ‘In eight days …’ ‘In five …’ They were like children towards Christmas, throwing one pebble each night from a window. Towards the end was a little rush of excitement, polishing, baking, airing his clothes.

On the last day but one, she washed her long bright hair and stood at the window in the sun drying it. She watched Rose, the gypsy woman, coming up with her copper bucket for water, watched her crossing the little orchard from the woods, a baby on her shoulders, the bucket on her arm, a young child with its hand on her skirt. Every other day she came for one bucket of water. They never wash, then, Alison thought, fluffing her hair. They had lived for three months down in the wood, in a tent under a clump of holly trees. Once she had seen the woman pushing the pram – a
deep and dirty one – without a hood – back from the village. At each end of the pram, a child, between them a stack of bread.

Now, she wrapped her head in the towel, and went out to the back door. The woman stood there smiling. The children, fat, dirty and backward for their ages, recoiled from Alison towards their mother, who held out in her rough hand a present – four clothes-pegs, newly made, the wood white and gleaming as the kernel of a nut.

Alison took them and felt them damp. For a second, she saw the hand in contrast to them – ridged with dirt, scaly, and heavy with thick gold rings – the family wealth.

As the baby was hoisted up higher on the woman’s shoulders, its bare bottom was exposed, bare, blue with cold, tinted like a ripe plum, and the firm thighs.

‘Oh, God, the dirt!’ she thought, fascinated.

That they were truly gypsies she could not be sure. Their hair was darkly yellow, their skin fair: and the names of the children – Leonard and Kathleen – were incongruous and absurd. Only once had Alison seen the father – a short, swarthy man, a knife-grinder. He went about the countryside, sharpening scissors; his eyes, when he had lifted them from the turning wheel and the knife’s edge, were dark and keen and his manner suggested a strange combination, of courtesy and contempt. At night, he returned to the holly bushes, covering the grinding machine carefully with a tarpaulin – a better one than the children had. Sometimes, drawing the curtains after tea, Alison would think of them down in the wood with their long night begun.

Now, as she lifted the copper can to the tap, she thought that the woman was all courtesy but no contempt. She was timid as a squirrel, but not so clean. Human beings need so many bits and pieces in order to keep themselves clean, that when they are living in the wild state they cannot compare with animals.

The can was heavy and she lifted it with two hands. For a moment it linked the two women together – their hands lay side by side and their eyes were on the swinging water. But it was impossible to imagine that they had anything in common, anything even as general as sex or race, that they had been born in the same way and would one day share the same death, the same earth.