Complete Short Stories (VMC) (100 page)

‘There’s my baby boy, my little Joey,’ the woman said in a sing-song, automatic way, as she held the kettle under the tap. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve had a cup of tea,’ she added, now supposedly addressing Sylvia.

‘It’s very kind of you.’

‘Any woman would do the same. There’s a packet of Oval Marie in my basket, if you’d like to open it and put them on this plate.’

Sylvia was glad to do something. She arranged the biscuits carefully on the rose-patterned plate. ‘It’s very nice here,’ she said. Her grandmother’s house was so dark and cluttered; Miss Harrison’s even more so. Both smelt stuffy, of thick curtains and old furniture. She did not go into many houses, for she was so seldom invited anywhere. She was a dull girl, whom nobody liked very much, and she knew it.

‘I must have everything sweet and fresh,’ the woman said complacently.

The kettle began to sing.

‘I’ve still got to get home,’ Sylvia thought in a panic. She stared up at a fly-paper hanging in the window – the only disconcerting thing in the room. Some of the flies were still half alive, and striving hopelessly to free themselves. But they were caught for ever.

She heard footsteps on the path, and listened in surprise; but the woman did not seem to hear, or lift her head. She was spooning tea from the caddy into the tea-pot.

‘Just in time, Herbert,’ she called out.

Sylvia turned round as the door opened. With astonished horror, she saw the man from the bus step confidently into the kitchen.

‘Well done, Mabel!’ he said, closing the door behind him. ‘Don’t forget one for the pot.’ He smiled, smoothing his hands together, surveying the room.

Sylvia spun round questioningly to the woman, who was now bringing the tea-pot to the table, and she noticed for the first time that there were three cups and saucers laid there.

‘Well, sit down, do,’ the woman said, a little impatiently. ‘It’s all ready.’

Harry and Rose, returning to Mahmoud Souk, found it a great deal changed. Along the sea-road there were neat beds of mesembrianthemum. There were lamp-standards, too; branches of globes, in the Parisian manner. Four years before, there had been only a stretch of stony sand, a low sea-wall, an unmade road. Now new buildings were glittering along the shore – a hospital, a cinema, a second hotel.

Until they had reached the town, nothing in this country seemed to have changed – not in the last four years, nor in the last four thousand. Veiled women walked beside donkeys that were laden with water-pots or the trimmings of olive trees; old men, hooded against the wind, stood among grazing sheep. They were all like extras in some vast film of Bible times.

Rose remembered the Arab habit of stillness – how what had seemed to be a large boulder among the scrub would, after a quarter of an hour, stir slightly. Rather sinister, she found it – especially when the figures leant, stiff as corpses, against a wall, perhaps begging, or just
being
.

Rose and Harry had rattled along the roads in their car hired from Tunis, driving south, as they had done four years before on their honeymoon. On the other side of the bay, they could see, for a long time before they reached it, the whiteness of Mahmoud Souk. Both were excited and apprehensive. To return some might think a mistake, but they had always intended to; indeed, had promised Habib and the others that they would – those friends they had made in Habib’s café: Mustapha, the thin and the fat Mohameds, Le Nègre – and other habitués whose names they had forgotten.

They drew up at the hotel right by the sandy shore, and the porter ran out to fetch their cases – a different porter, but this small disappointment could be brushed aside in the excitement of arriving.

The hotel, at least, was familiar. It had its own especial echo and smell – an echo from so much polished stone and tiles, and the smell of Tunisian cooking striving to be European.

‘We’ll go later, don’t you think?’ Harry asked Rose. He crossed the bedroom to the window, unwound the shutters and squinted down in the direction of Habib’s café, though knowing that it was just out of sight.

Rose knew what he meant. They were so much alike that it was quite extraordinary. Their friends back home in London had discovered that they could confide in them both at the same time, without embarrassment. It was like confiding in one person.

They unpacked happily, looking forward to the drink later, and the welcome they would have in the little garden in front of Habib’s café, facing the sea and the mimosa trees.

‘You remember your birthday?’ Rose said to Harry, as she had said so many times.

It stood apart from all the other birthdays in England. After dinner, there had been a party in the café. One or two English people from the hotel had looked in, had come and gone; but Harry had gone on for ever, drinking beer and bouka, anything that came to hand. And then, suddenly, Habib had stood up on a chair and declared it midnight and not Harry’s birthday any more, but his own. They made more speeches to one another; they were comrades, brothers, born almost on the same day.

They always spoke in French, and Rose found it easier to understand than the French that French people speak.

She and Harry were still remembering that beautiful birthday, when they walked along the sea-road towards the café.
La Sirène
it was called. On the edge of the pavement, there had stood a sign cut out of thin wood – a blue-and-green mermaid carrying a faded list of prices.

‘Perhaps they won’t remember us,’ Rose said. She felt rather shy and nervous.

‘They will,’ said Harry.

He had sent a photograph to them – of Rose and the others standing by the painted mermaid – and he could imagine this pinned up in the bar: rather curled and discoloured it may be by now, but there it would be; for photographs were hard to come by, and prized.

‘It isn’t there,’ Rose said, as they turned the curve of the sea-road. She meant the mermaid.

‘Perhaps it fell to pieces, or got blown away,’ Harry said; but their pace had quickened from anxiety.

La Sirène
was deserted. In fact, it no longer was
La Sirène
, but a dark shell, sliding into decay. The benches and tables were gone from the garden, and old pieces of paper had been blown against the front door.

Rose and Harry pushed open the gate, and walked up the short path. Grit and sand and fluff from the mimosa trees swirled round the garden. They peered through the window-grilles into the dim, depressing interior. There was nothing left but marks upon the bare walls and dusty floor. Marks where the bar had stood, and on the walls where shelves and notices had hung, and the big coloured picture of President Bourguiba.

They walked quite sadly away, and went back to the hotel for their drink, sitting in silence for once, feeling let down.

‘I wonder what happened …’ Rose said. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘We need not stay here,’ Harry said; for he knew the magic of Mahmoud Souk was gone. ‘We could drive south – that would be new ground to us.’

‘It’s such a pity. So different from what I’d imagined.’

‘After all, just because one or two Arabs in a café …’

‘You know it isn’t only that … although they made us seem less like strangers.’

‘It was really our stake in the country as a whole.’

‘I suppose … yes, let’s go. This bar is saddening.’

There was no one else there. Outside, on the terrace, a party of Germans lay spread out on
chaises-longues
exposed to the last of the day’s sun.

Next morning, their gaiety was revived by the trembling brightness of the air, and orange-juice and coffee on the terrace. The Germans were already sunbathing, stirring only to shift another part of their bodies into the sun, as if they were revolving methodically upon spits. At seven o’clock, Rose had been wakened by the voices outside – ‘ ’
Morgen!
’ ‘ ’
Morgen!
’ they had shouted to one another – two men – as they spread about their towels and books and lotions, bagging the best places for the day. They had taken over the hotel and this, at dinner the evening before, had made Rose and Harry feel waifish and ignored, and missing Habib and the rest more than ever.

This morning, after breakfast, stepping off the sheltered terrace, they felt the edge of a strong wind. A veil of sand was racing along the shore. Grit swirled about the building-sites, the big rubble-covered spaces where once crumbling hovels had stood, and soon hotels and blocks of flats and other cafés than Habib’s would rise.

‘The Germans have the best of it,’ Harry grumbled. ‘Organised as ever.’

The wind made them both feel inharmonious, irritable.

When they came to the high walls of the medina, they went inside with relief. Here it was sheltered, and the air smelt spicy and of burning charcoal. They wandered in the souk, Rose either feasting, or averting, her eyes – exclaiming about the heaps of young vegetables, or flinching at the sight of a furry, bloody sheep’s head hanging over a butcher’s stall.

The narrow alleys buzzed with children. Little girls in blue overalls wearing ear-rings were inclined to be cheeky. ‘
Bonjour, madame!
’ they called to Rose, over their shoulders, just after they had passed by.

It became a bore. The children grew bolder.

‘Don’t take any notice,’ Harry implored.

She always made the mistake of encouraging them, of smiling and waving and replying; so that they were usually followed by a band of youngsters,
even toddlers, with hands outstretched for money, or with wilting flowers for sale. Boys were only too ready with guide-like information about souks and mosques. They jostled with one another for the job, and by the time Rose and Harry had reached the street of the carpet-makers, one slim, curious boy by some means had outwitted the others, and also, by the beauty of his manners, had forced Rose and Harry to succumb.

Courteously, he ushered them into one of the interiors, where they really did not want to go. It was dim and muffled inside and smelled of wool. Just beyond the entrance sat the Bedouin women, with kohl-rimmed eyes and rouged faces and gaudy rags and tatters, winding the wool, squatting on the floor before revolving frames, babies and little children lying beside them.

‘
Passez
,
passez
,’ indicated the young boy, with a graceful movement of his thin and grubby hand. His friends had disappeared, having seen that there was now nothing in it for them.

In the inner rooms, Arab women were working at the looms, knotting and snipping at a great speed, ramming down the tufted wool. Their eyes flew from the looms to the design cards pinned up beside them, but never towards Rose and Harry, whereas the Bedouins, when they passed them again, going out, stared at them mockingly, with their sharp eyes.

Having tipped the guide and refused other delights, Rose and Harry, ignoring his entreaties, strolled on. The alley was hung with skeins of dyed wool. All of the little streets had their own character. They went through the clattering metal-workers’ lane into the more leisurely, gossipy street where the barbers’ shops were, and the stalls of sickly-looking cakes.

Down two steps from one of the barbers’ shops, only half-shaved, ran Habib, wiping soapy foam from his chin with the back of his hand, his old brown coat slung over, slipping from, one shoulder. Hitching up the coat, he shook hands, as if it were yesterday that he had seen them last, not four years ago.

It was Harry he loved; Harry upon whom the true warmth of his welcome fell. Rose knew this. She had always sat meekly by, the one whose French rarely rose to the occasion. A foreign woman was, in any case, an oddity. They broke the rules of Habib’s womenfolk. Rose sat unconcernedly in cafés, smoking, drinking hard liquor, with her bare face, bare arms, bare legs. All the same, Habib and his friends had been friendly and respectful to her – live and let live – even if they could not quite admire and love her. She had set a little restraint, which perhaps only Harry’s exuberance could have dispelled. If she had not been Harry’s wife, none of them would have glanced at her – or only once, in passing. She was, for one thing, for their tastes, too thin.

‘She has not changed,’ Habib said, smiling at her, talking to Harry. ‘Still so thin.’

She could understand his French, if he could not understand hers. She laughed. All her life she had had little intermittent and half-hearted struggles with her weight, always hoping to whittle away (as the fashion magazines put it) a couple of inches from her waist.

Habib had apparently forgotten about the rest of his shave. He led them triumphantly down to a café by the medina gate.

‘We looked for
La Sirène
and it was not there,’ Rose said, having formed the sentence in French before she spoke.

Habib agreed that this was possible; but he looked troubled and guarded. He pursed his lips in a girlish pout and shrugged his shoulders.

Coffee was brought, and he sipped it daintily. He had a round, expressive face and mournful eyes. He looked shabbier than before – but had a touch of flamboyance in the fluorescent lime-green socks, which had ‘gone to sleep’, as nannies say, above his grey plimsolls.

‘I had a good situation offered to me,’ he said at last with dignity, dropping his eyelids.

La Sirène
, it was obvious, had collapsed. To say there had been no capital behind it, was a grand way of saying that it was scarcely solvent. Only when one bottle of Ricard had been sold could Habib afford to slip out to buy another. Until half-way through March the place was closed.

Harry, who seemed unlikely to give offence, enquired about his new job.

‘I am chef at the new hotel,’ Habib replied. He seemed not yet to have decided whether to be proud or ashamed of this. From having been his own master …
le patron
… He shrugged again.

‘And what about all our comrades?’ asked Harry. ‘The two Mohameds, Le Nègre, and Mustapha?’

They had all departed – to work in the larger towns. Le Nègre had even gone as far as France.

‘And you … you are married?’ Harry asked.