The Likes of Us (26 page)

She looked at him without recognition. ‘Was there something you wanted?'

‘I was up the hill,' Parker stammered. ‘I got lost... I was wondering if I could have a drink of water.'

He stood aside as she reached for the latch of the gate. Her gaze rested on him and he felt a flush of colour spreading up from his neck.

‘You'd better come in.'

He followed her to the kitchen door and waited while she ran a tumbler of water and brought it to him on the step. He drank it straight down without stopping. It took his breath away and he gasped as he lowered the glass from his lips.

‘I was ready for that.'

She took the tumbler from him. ‘Don't you feel well? You look pale, and there's blood on your face.'

‘I got lost,' Parker told her again. ‘Up the hill, there. Then I fell head first into some brambles.'

‘You look done in,' the woman said. ‘Look, why not come in and sit down for a while?'

‘Oh, I'll be all right now,' Parker said. ‘I feel better already.'

She asked him if he was staying in the village. Then, ‘You really ought to come in and sit down. You don't want to walk any more till you've had a rest.'

He was uncomfortable under her direct expressionless gaze. He said, ‘Well, just for a minute, then. I don't want to put you out.'

‘Don't be silly,' she said, turning into the house. ‘Come on.'

He was conscious again of the grace of her move-ments as she led him through the kitchen and into a long, airy lounge with big windows looking out towards the river.

‘Sit down,' she said. ‘You'll feel better after a rest.'

Parker lowered himself onto the edge of an armchair.

‘I don't want to get in your way.'

‘I'm not going anywhere,' she said. She put her hand on his shoulder and pressed him back into the soft upholstery.

‘Sit back,' she said. ‘Be comfortable.'

Her complete self-possession astonished Parker. He had never met anyone quite like her before. But he rested his head back gratefully and looked round the room, hearing the chink of a glass behind him, then her voice saying, ‘Here, drink this. It'll set you up.'

He took the glass she held out to him.

‘It's brandy,' she said as he looked at it. ‘More pep in it than water.'

‘I don't reckon to–' he began, and she said, ‘Drink it up. It'll do you good.'

She sat on the arm of a chair opposite him as he sipped from the glass.

‘Better?'

He nodded, feeling the fire of the brandy in his throat.

‘Have you walked a long way?'

‘I set off for the top,' Parker said, ‘but I got lost and came down again.'

She nodded. ‘It's easy to lose your sense of direction round here.'

‘I wanted to watch the tide coming in,' Parker said. ‘But I took too much on.'

‘Too much? It's not far if you know the wa
y
. Aren't you used to walking?'

She made statements and asked questions in the same flat, incurious voice, as though she was concerned only in asking and not with the answers he gave her. And the black eyes seemed to support this; for though they never left him for more than a few seconds, they rested so dispassionately on him they seemed to be occupied with some aspect that was of him yet somehow not of him. It struck him that she was regarding him with the withdrawn composure of someone contemplating an object.

‘I've been poorl
y
, you see,' he told her. ‘I'm supposed to be resting and getting myself well again, not knocking myself up.'

‘You've been ill?' Her eyes moved again to his face.

‘I had pneumonia.'

‘Bad?'

‘I nearly died,' Parker said. ‘I was lucky.'

Surprisingly now, she began to admonish him, as though she had some personal interest in his welfare... ‘You need somebody to stop you doing silly things. Are you married?'

Parker shook his head. ‘No. I lived with my mother, but she died.'

He was ill at ease again. He looked into his glass, then lifted it to take another sip of the brandy. It was doing him good. He felt a lot better already.

‘What made you come to this place? Have you been before?'

‘No, but I wanted somewhere quiet and it was recommended to me.'

She was at the window now, looking out, her back to him. He felt easier.

‘It's quiet, all right,' she said. ‘I've lived here for three years. Since I got married. I was on the stage before that.' She spun round to face him. ‘Did you guess I'd been on the stage? Could you tell?'

‘I thought there was something about you,' Parker said.

She nodded. ‘You can always tell. It stamps you, being on the stage.'

She went into a long story about herself, about her career before her marriage, telling him of the shows she had appeared in, the towns she had visited, the people she had met.

Until, in a break in her monologue, Parker said, ‘What made you give it up if you liked it so much?'

‘Liked it?' She gazed at him as though looking straight through him to something beyond him. Then she shrugged. ‘I suppose it's all right if you've got what it takes. But there was no future in the kind of stuff I was doing. It was cheap-jack stuff. It's all right if you can get on, but I knew I never could. I hadn't got what it takes. I hadn't the figure, for one thing.'

Parker looked at her in the short beach-dress, at the light tan on her limbs. He said diffidently, ‘I think you've got nice legs.'

‘Oh, they're all right,' she said indifferently. ‘But I've no bust.' She ran her hands down over her flat breasts, posing in the sunlight flooding through the big window. ‘And I'm not pretty. And my skin's sensitive. You might not think so, but it is. I couldn't stand all that make-up.'

Parker drank off the last of his brandy.

‘Do you want another drink?' she asked him. ‘Some more brandy, or some whisky?'

‘No, thanks. That was all right.'

‘A cigarette, then?'

Parker said no. ‘I don't smoke.'

‘Haven't you ever smoked?'

‘No, I never got the habit.'

She took a cigarette for herself from a chrome-plated box on the low occasional table and lit it before sitting on the cushioned window-seat and swinging up her feet to stretch full length her long flat body and graceful legs. She puffed inexpertly on the cigarette, without inhaling.

Anxious not to outstay his welcome, Parker was gathering words of leavetaking, when she spoke again. ‘I left the stage for security,' she said. ‘That's what everybody wants, isn't it?'

‘I suppose so,' Parker said.

‘Yes, but it's dull,' she said. ‘It's so dull I could scream.' She turned her head towards him for a moment. ‘I'm talking a lot, aren't I?'

‘I don't mind,' Parker said. ‘I think mebbe I should be going, though.'

‘Miles was married before, you know,' she said. ‘He'd been married a long time. He's nearly sixty. They don't like me round here. They remember his first wife. She was in on everything. Miles is disappointed that I don't mix more. But I've tried to be friendly and they don't like me. I can feel it. They think I hooked Miles, but they're wrong. He was mad about me. He begged me to marry him. I was quite a time making up my mind.'

Parker sat forward in his chair and put down the empty glass. He took his mind off the woman by concentrating on the effect of the brandy. It had done him a power of good. An early night tonight and he'd be all fixed up.

‘We don't go out much,' the woman was saying. ‘There's nothing to do here: no shops or theatres. But Miles doesn't mind. He plays the gramophone when he's at home.' She reached down and slid open a cupboard under the window-seat, revealing a neat row of records in their sleeves. ‘Look at all those. That's all he does besides fishing. All he does: play records. Nothing lively, though; all dull stuff: Beethoven, Handel, Mozart. The duller they are, the more Miles likes them...'

‘Is that why you swim in the river?' Parker said.

‘It's the only exciting thing round here,' she said. ‘And I can only do that when Miles isn't at home. He's furious if he knows I've done it. He lost a boy in the bay once. He's never got over it. It was his only child. He talks about it sometimes when he's feeling sentimental. Then it makes me feel good to know I can beat it.'

Parker got up. He didn't know where to put his hands.

‘I ought to be going.'

She went out with him and at the gate he thanked her again. ‘Saved my life, I reckon,' he said, forcing a tight grin.

‘You can come again, if you like,' she said. ‘You could sit out in the garden and rest. You're too pale; you need sun.'

‘I go home Saturday,' Parker told her.

‘Well, come tomorrow. See if you can get your face red to go home with. You can't go back looking so pale.'

There was nobody to notice, anyway, Parker thought. He said, ‘I could come in the afternoon, I suppose.'

‘Yes, do that. Come after lunch.'

She showed him the shortest way back to the village and he left carrying with him the image of her running her hands over her body in the sunlight, the excitement fluttering in him as he thought of this and the flood of talk released in the extremity of her boredom. There was no need to go back, he told himself. He could decide tomorrow.

 

‘Would you like another drink?' she asked, and Parker started. The silence since either of them had spoken had been so long that, dozing himself, he had thought her asleep. There was a tray with tumblers and a vacuum jug of iced lime-juice in the shade of the trees nearby.

Parker said, ‘No, thanks,' and lifted himself onto his elbows on the rug. He had been in the garden for nearly an hour now. The sun was hot again and his shirt clung damply under his arms.

After lunch he had sat for a time in the garden of the cottage before setting out across the village. He entered the grounds of the house by the main gate, walking up the driveway and mounting the shallow steps to press the bell by the front door. There was no reply and he rang again, wondering if she had forgotten her invitation; forgotten him, even, as soon as he had gone from her sight.

The house was quiet in the strong sunlight; deeply quiet, as though life had abandoned it, leaving it clean, preserved, but dead. It would be like one of those fantastic stories you sometimes read, he thought, if somebody else came to the door and told him they'd never heard of the woman. It struck him then that he did not know her name, and she had never asked his. He came down the steps again and walked with an increasing feeling of unreality round the side of the house to a gate in the tall cedar fence which shut off the garden and the back of the house. He opened it and went through, starting across the flagged area to the kitchen door before he saw her, lying face down on a travelling-rug by a border of flowering shrubs at the far end of the lawn.

She became aware of him before he was halfway to her.

‘I thought you'd decided not to come,' she said. She raised herself on her elbows as he approached. The dark look flickered onto his face, then away again as she relaxed as before, with her face on her arms.

She was wearing a bathing costume: not the one he had seen her swimming in, but a very brief two-piece of soft dark red wool.

‘I rested for a bit,' Parker said.

‘Isn't that what you were supposed to do here?' she said, and Parker thought she sounded like a petulant lover who had been kept waiting; not someone whom he had known only a few days; with whom he had exchanged only a few casual words before yesterday.

‘I suppose so,' he said.

He stood looking down at her, at the sallow skin of her neck and the broadness of her back with the straight spinal gully between firm pads of flesh. When she didn't speak again he dropped his jacket and sat down beside her on the rug, resting his weight on one arm.

‘I was just thinking how nice a cold drink would be,' she said then. ‘I'll get some in a minute...'

Now, after the long silence, she said. ‘I don't know how you can bear all those clothes. You should have brought some trunks and changed in the house.'

‘I haven't got any,' Parker told her. ‘I can't swim.'

‘I could teach you in a week,' she said. ‘But you're going home tomorrow, aren't you?'

‘Yes,' Parker said. ‘Tomorrow.'

‘What do you do at home?'

‘I've got a little shop: grocery.'

‘Does it pay its way?'

‘It does pretty fair... Course, there's only me to keep out of it now.'

There in the hot sunlight he was all at once mourning for his mother again, knowing that he was near the time when he must go home and face day-to-day existence without her. He had avoided making plans, as though unable to face the inevitable. Now he would be forced to think about it: about the housework and help in the shop; about the loneliness.

‘You'll have to find yourself a girl,' the woman said. ‘Get married.'

Just like that, Parker thought. It was the obvious thing. But the very thought of taking a wife into his life filled him with dread. And who could it be?

She had turned her head so that she could see him.

‘Don't you bother with girls much?' she said, and Parker made an awkward, bashful movement of his hand without speaking.

‘Somebody will take you in hand,' she said. ‘There'll be somebody with her eye on you now.'

‘I don't think so,' Parker said.

‘You don't know much about women.'

‘You're right there,' Parker said.

Her eyes were on him in one of those long moments of contemplation that so filled him with awkwardness and a feeling of inadequacy. He plucked at the cropped grass. What was he doing here, anyway? After nearly two weeks of being alone, looking at the river, thinking about home, he was here in a private garden with this strange, bored, restless woman. And she was leading the way at every step, spinning out of her boredom a web of excitement which gripped him now as it had from the first.