Collected Stories (28 page)

Just now I returned from the beach, ten minutes’ walk away, past a row of new bungalows. The sea is lugubrious, almost grey. I trudged beside deserted bathing huts set in scrub land. There was some appropriate beauty in the overcast desolation and drizzle, and the open, empty distances. A handful of men in yellow capes nursed fishing lines on the shore. On a patch of tarmac people were crowded in camper vans, staring out to sea. Otherwise there is no one else there. I consider all these to be the essential elements for a holiday in England. A couple who need to talk could have the opportunity here.

Bounded by farms and fields of grazing cattle and horses, the hotel is a large cottage with barns to the side, set in flower-filled gardens. There is a dining room, bright as a chandelier with glass and cutlery, where a tie is required – these little snobberies increase the further you are from London. But you can eat the same food in the bar, which is situated (as they said in the hotel guide, which Florence and I studied together) in the basement of the hotel. The rooms are snug, if a little floral, and with an unnecessary abundance of equine motifs. Nevertheless, there is a double bed, a television, and a bathroom one need not fear.

Now there is laughter next door! It is, admittedly, only him, the unconcerned laughter of someone living in a solid, established world. Yet she must have gone to the trouble to say something humorous. Why is she not amusing me? What did Florence say? How long will I be able to bear this?

Suddenly I get up, blunder over the corner of the bed and send the glass flying. Perhaps my cry and the bang will smash their idyll, but why should it?

I doubt whether my lover knows that I have been allocated the next room. Although we arrived in the same car, we did not check in together, since I went to ‘explore’, just as my sisters and I would have done, on holiday with our parents. It is only when I open the door later that I hear her voice and realise we are in adjacent rooms.

I will leave here; I have to. It will not be tonight. The thought of going home is more than disappointing. What will my flatmates say? We are not best friends; their bemusement I can survive, and I could live in the flat as if I am away, with the curtains drawn, taking no calls, eschewing the pubs and cafés where I do the crossword and write letters asking for work. But if I ring my close friends they will say, Why are you back already? What went wrong? What will I reply? There will be laughter and gossip. The story will be repeated by people who have never met me; it could trail me for years. What could be more beguiling than other people’s stymied desire?

Tomorrow I could go on to Devon or Somerset, as Florence and I discussed. We intended to leave it open. Our first time away – in fact our first complete night together – was to be an adventure. We wanted to enjoy one another free of the thought that she would have to return to her husband in a few hours. We would wake up, make love, and exchange dreams over breakfast.

I am not in the mood to decide anything.

They certainly have plenty to say next door: a little unusual, surely, for a couple who have been married five years.

I wipe my eyes, wash my face and go to the door. I will have a few drinks at the bar and order supper. I have inspected the menu and the food looks promising, particularly the puddings, which Florence loves to take a spoon of, push away and say to the waiter, ‘That’s me done!’ Perhaps, from across the room, I will have the privilege of watching this.

But I return to my position against this familiar piece of wall, massage my shin and try to depict what they are doing, as if I am listening to a radio play. Probably they are getting changed. Often, when I am alone with Florence, I turn around and she is naked. She removes her clothes as easily as others slip off their shoes. At twenty-nine her body is supple. I think of her lying naked on my bed reading a script for me, and saying what she thinks, as I fix something to eat. She does the parts in funny voices until I am afraid to take the project seriously. I have a sweater of hers, and some gloves, which she left at my place. Why don’t I rap on their door? I am all for surrealism.

They will be in the dining room later. I cannot see why it would occur to him to take her elsewhere tonight. The man will eat opposite his woman, asking her opinion of the sauces, contentedly oblivious of everything else, knowing Florence’s lips, jokes, breasts and kindnesses are his. I fear my own madness. Not that I will vault across the table and choke either of them. I will sit with my anger and will not appreciate my food. I will go to bed forlorn, and half-drunk, only to hear them again. The hotel is not full: I can ask for another room. In the bar I saw a woman reading
The Bone People
. There are several young Austrian tourists too, in long socks, studying maps and guide books. What a time we could all have.

But there is an awful compulsion; I need to know how they are together. My ear will always be pressed against this wall. 

*

To think that earlier today I was sitting in the train at the station. I had bought wine, sandwiches and, as a surprise, chocolate cake. The sun burned through the window. (It is odd how one imagines that just because the sun is shining in London, it is shining everywhere else.) I had purchased first-class seats, paying for the trip with money earned on a film, playing the lead, a street boy, a drug kid, a thief. They have shown me the rough cut; it is being edited and will have a rock soundtrack. The producer is confident of getting it into the directors’ fortnight at Cannes, where, he claims, they are so moneyed and privileged, they adore anything seedy and cruel.

Florence is certainly sharper than my agent. When I first heard about the film from some other actors she told me that when she was an actress she had had supper with the producer a few times. I imagine she was boasting, but she rang him at home, and insisted the director meet me. I sat on her knee with my fingers on her nipple as she made the call. She didn’t admit we know one another, but said she has seen me in a play. ‘He’s not only pretty,’ she said, pinching my cheek. ‘He has a heartbreaking sadness, and charm.’

There were scores of young actors being considered for the part. I recognise most of them, smoking, shuffling and complaining, in the line outside the audition room. I presumed we would be rivals for life but it was to me that the producer said, ‘It is yours if you want it!’

Waiting for Florence O’Hara on the train made my blood so effervescent that I speculated about whether I could have her in the toilet. I had never attempted such a caper, but she has rarely refused me anything. Or perhaps she could slip her hand under my newspaper. For days I have been imagining what pleasures we might make. We would have a week of one another before I went to Los Angeles for the first time, to Hollywood, to play a small part in an independent American movie.

With two minutes to go – and I was becoming concerned, having already been walking about the station for an hour – I glimpse her framed in the window and almost shouted out. To confirm the fact that we were going on holiday, she was wearing a floppy purple hat. Florence can dress incongruously at times, wearing, say, antique jewellery and a silk top with worn-out, frayed shoes, as if by the time she arrived at her feet she had forgotten what she had done with her head.

Behind her was her husband.

I recognised him from a wedding photograph I saw on the one occasion I popped warily into their flat, to survey their view of Hammersmith Bridge and the river. Florence had suggested I paint the view. Today, for some reason he was seeing her off. She would wave through the window at him – I hoped she would not kiss him – before sinking down next to me.

There is always something suspicious about the need to be alone. The trip had taken some arranging. At first, conspiring in bed, Florence and I thought she should tell her husband she was holidaying with a friend. But intricate lies made Florence’s hands perspire. Instead, she ascertained when her husband would be particularly busy at the office, and insisted that she needed to read, walk and think. ‘Think about what?’ he asked, inevitably, as he dressed for work. But, quietly, she could be inflexible, and he likes to be magnanimous.

‘All right, my dear,’ he announced. ‘Go and be alone and see how much you miss me.’

During the week before our departure, Florence and I saw one another twice. She phoned and I caught a taxi outside my front door in Gloucester Road. She put on a head scarf and dark glasses, and slipped out to meet me in one of the many pubs near her flat, along the river. There was an abstraction about her that makes me want her more, and which I assume would be repaired by our holiday together.

Her husband was walking through the train towards me. Despite having left the office for only an hour, he was wearing a cream linen jacket, jeans and old deck shoes, without socks. Fine, I thought, he’s so polite he’s helping her right into her seat; that’s something a twenty-seven-year-old like me could learn from.

He heaved her bag onto the rack and they sat opposite, across the aisle. He glanced indifferently in my direction. She was captivated by the activity on the platform. When he talked she smiled. Meanwhile she was tugging at the skin around her thumbnail until it bled, and she had to find a tissue in her bag. Florence was wearing her wedding ring, something she had never done with me, apart from the first time we met.

With an unmistakable jolt, the train left the station, on its way to our holiday destination with me, my lover and her husband aboard.

I stood up, sat down, tapped myself on the head, searched in my bag and looked around wildly, as if seeking someone to explain the situation to me. Eventually, having watched me eat the chocolate cake – on another occasion she would have licked the crumbs from my lips – Florence left her seat to fetch sandwiches. I went to the toilet where she was waiting outside for me.

‘He insisted on coming,’ she whispered, digging her nails into my arm. ‘It was yesterday. He gave me no choice. I couldn’t resist without making him jealous and suspicious. I had no chance to speak to you.’

‘He’s staying the whole week?’

She looked agitated. ‘He’ll get bored. This kind of thing doesn’t interest him.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Being on holiday. We usually go somewhere … like Italy. Or the Hamptons –’

‘Where?’

‘Outside New York. I’ll encourage him to go home. Will you wait?’

‘I can’t say,’ I told her. ‘You’ve really made a mess of everything! How could you do such a thing!’

‘Rob –’

‘You’re stupid, stupid!’

‘No, no, it’s not that!’

She tried to kiss me but I pulled away. She passed her hand between my legs – and I wish she hadn’t – before returning to her husband. I walked up and down the train before sitting down. It did not occur to me to sit somewhere else. Blood from her thumb was smeared over my arm and hand.

I had never seen her look this miserable. She is sometimes so nervous she will spill the contents of her bag over the street and have to get on her hands and knees to retrieve her things. Yet she can be brave. On the tube once, three young men started to bait and rob the passengers. While the rest of us were lost in terror, she attacked the robbers with an insane fury that won her a bravery award.

For the rest of the journey she pretended to be asleep. Her husband read a thriller.

At the country station, as I marched off the platform, I saw the hotel had sent a car to pick us up: one car. Before I could enquire about trains back to London, the driver approached me.

‘Robert Miles?’

‘Yes?’

‘This way, please.’

The bent countryman led me outside where the air was cool and fresh. The immensity of the sky could have calmed a person. It was for this that Florence and I decided, one afternoon, to get away.

The man opened the car door.

‘In you get, sir.’ I hesitated. He swept dog hairs from the seat. ‘I’ll drive as slowly as I can, and tell you a little about the area.’

He deposited my bag in the boot. I had no choice but to get into the car. He shut the door. Florence and her husband were invited to sit in the back. As we drove away the car bulged with our heat and presence. The driver talked to me, and I listened to them.

‘I’m glad I decided to come,’ Florence’s husband was saying. ‘Still, we could have gone up to the House.’

‘Oh, that place,’ she sighed.

‘Yes, it’s like having a third parent. You don’t have to keep telling me you don’t like it. What made you decide on here?’

I wanted to turn round and say, ‘I decided –’

‘I saw it in a brochure,’ she said.

‘You told me you’d been here as a child.’

‘Yes, the brochure reminded me. I went to lots of places as a child, with my mother.’

‘Your mad mother.’ In the mirror I saw him put his arm around her and lay his hand on her breast.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Just us now,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad I came.’ 

*

I am hungry.

At last I unstick my ear from the wall, shake my head as if to clear it, go downstairs, and have supper in the bar crowded with the local lushes, who prefer this hotel to the pubs.

I eat with my back to the room, a book in front of me, wondering where Florence and her husband are sitting and what they are saying; like someone sitting in Plato’s cave, trying to read the shadows. Halfway through the meal, having resolved to face them at last, I rise suddenly, change my seat and turn around. They are not there.

As I order another drink, the plump girl behind the bar smiles at me. ‘We thought you were waiting for some lucky person who didn’t turn up.’

‘There’s no lucky person, but it’s not so bad.’

I take my drink and walk about, though I do not know where I am going. Waitresses tear in and out of the hot dining room, so smart, inhibited and nervous, lacking the London arrogance and beauty. Middle-aged women with painted faces and bright dresses, and satisfied men in suits and ties, who do not question their right to be here – this being their world – are beginning to leave the dining room, holding glasses. For a moment they stand on this piece of earth, as it moves on imperceptibly, and they gurgle and chuckle with happiness.