Complete Short Stories (VMC) (75 page)

It occurred to her that her husband was dispirited and morose. He gloomed about the house. He compared the trek across the fields unfavourably with hopping on a bus in London. The tomatoes somehow didn’t ripen. Some of them fell off while they were still green. He gathered them up and laid them along window-ledges to redden.

‘Ah, I feel like a change,’ he said. ‘At half-term we’ll go up to town, Iris, and have a bit of a binge. A nice meal in Soho and go to a play. What’s on?’ He became excited and rushed to look for the Sunday paper. His enthusiasm affected her, too.

‘Let’s stay the night,’ she begged. ‘Yes, let’s stay the night. I love that feeling of getting up in London, with nothing to do but have breakfast and
go out to look at the shops.’ She saw the Marble Arch and Oxford Street in brilliant sunshine, all gay and glittering movement. It was something to look forward to.

Brin also had something to look forward to. His life had some purpose now. He felt this, as he played at the café and sat in the bus. He walked over those fields until he knew each tussock of grass by heart. Once, he met her husband there. He was going along, in no hurry to be home as Brin would have been, slashing venomously at thistles with his stick.

When he had made his plans there was still the business of getting a gun. His father had one, but that was in Leamington. He went up one Sunday and surprised them all; but he could find no opportunity of getting the revolver and came away without it. He went again the next week-end and surprised them even more and this time, since he was not such a novelty, he was allowed out of their sight a little more and was successful. Coming back on the train, his heart was singing.

The end of all his planning seemed unreal sometimes and then at other times very simple; but the task itself, and going carefully and efficiently from one step to the next, absorbed and delighted him. But by the time the dark nights came, he was suddenly exhausted. Iris was a little alarmed.

‘My darling, if this is making you unhappy, you must give it up. We won’t meet again.’

He stared at her stupidly. He had not been to as many plays as she. The truth was he had begun to bore her a little. Once more, the gossiping, mat-shaking neighbours oppressed her. She noted his shabby clothes, the fringed trousers, with repulsion.

Now it was quite dark when her husband reached home on Tuesdays and Fridays. Brin fixed on the exact night. Iris kissed her husband good-bye on that day and he went off to work. On his way home across the dark fields, he heard a shot. Brin, fed up with waiting and confronted too soon and for the first time by the reality and idiocy of what he was up to, had put the revolver up to his eyes and shot himself. His life had moved with some purpose towards the killing of his man. If he was not to kill him, then the purpose of his life was gone.

At the inquest, the father explained that his son was depressed at being rejected for military service. The usual verdict was returned.

When it was half-term, Iris and her husband went up to London for their treat. They dined in Soho, sat eating ravioli and looked bored and married. But Iris enjoyed the play. ‘Ah!’ she sighed, as they walked back through the foggy streets to their hotel. ‘How I wish I could have been an actress!’

When the voices began again, Laura decided that she had let things go too far to demonstrate the thinness of the walls by coughing. To have to speak in whispers from then on might spoil their holiday, and would take something from her own. As they talked, she could hear movements about the room, the rattling of coat-hangers in the wardrobe. The conversation was discursive, languid, and there were long, tired silences.

She had never seen them, had never come across them in the passage or waiting for the lift, and was amused to know so much about two women she had never met. For instance, she knew that Edith’s little trouble had cleared up at last, and she was glad about that. It had seemed a pity to waste two days of a holiday, from fear of leaving the hotel. Amy had seemed to be kindness itself, hardly venturing out except on little errands, and having trays of plain food sent up for her friend. ‘It’s the oil, all that oil,’ Laura often heard.

She spent the hot part of the day in her bedroom, writing letters or lying on the bed, listening, keeping quiet. When she opened the shuttered windows, the noise of Athens roared in – traffic, pneumatic drills, the chipping of steel on masonry, bells tolling – and in flowed, too, the steady heat, the glare from the sky, and greasy smells from the kitchen below. When she had failed to find any fresh air, Laura closed the windows and flopped back on the bed to listen.

‘It was just a sort of mince with a batter,’ Amy said.

‘Really more of a custard,’ said Edith.

‘“
Mousaká
”, they called it.’

‘
Mousaká
,’ Edith said. She was the less gentle one. She liked to know more, and dominated. Taller, Laura thought. She imagined Amy rather plump and soft. Her voice was high and floating, very sweet. Edith’s was abrupt and deeper. It was Amy who had been so affected by the stairs when the lift was out of order. She had puffed and blown for a long time after they reached their room. It was the morning that they visited the Acropolis (a view of which Laura could have by leaning right out over the courtyard and craning her neck upwards), and both were worn-out, but exalted. To think they had really seen it, after all these years, they said over and over again.

To Laura, at first, they had sounded like school-mistresses; but the summer term could not be ended yet. They might have retired; yet she pictured them leading some kind of busy life together – ‘my colleague’, they might say in introductions to other people – ‘a colleague of mine’. It was clear that their holiday had been planned for a long time and Laura was glad that, apart from Edith’s little trouble at the beginning, it was being a success. They went off to Delphi, having what they called ‘mugged it up’ first, and Laura wondered anxiously if Delphi would come up to expectations. It had, and more. Sounion, in spite of a thunderstorm (perhaps because of it, Amy suggested), had greatly impressed, and even the food was what everyone – and especially a certain Colonel Benson – had warned them that it would be.

From Myconos (‘just a little bit touristy’) they had apparently brought back a quantity of peasant art – the prices of it were much compared and discussed – and Laura could imagine them making their excursions draped in crudely striped stoles, their hair covered with bright scarves, guide-books and sun-tan oil in fringed and tasselled shoulder-bags.

On the other side of the wall, they often mildly argued. ‘We paid no credence to Colonel Benson about drinking the water,’ Amy had said, when Edith had her bout of diarrhoea.

‘I paid no credence then. I pay no credence now,’ said Edith sharply. ‘It is a long time since the Colonel was in Athens. It was the oil – “This oil’s
off
”, I remember saying to you the first evening we were here. In that place with the wine vats. It was rancid.’

Amy had murmured something in reply, but for once Laura could not hear.

Sometimes, when Laura awoke in the morning, the voices were going on as if they had not stopped all night; other days, there was silence, broken by Alexis bringing their breakfast.

‘Good-morning, good-morning, ladies,’ he would call out in a warning, lilting voice, and Laura imagined the scramble for bed-wraps, the sheets drawn up to their chins as they gravely replied in the other language: ‘
Kali méra
, Alexis.’ When he had gone, Laura would hear long yawns, the sounds of breakfast beginning, and the start of the day’s conversation.

‘How kind Madame Petropoulos was,’ said Amy. ‘I made a note of the restaurant she recommended.
Where
did she say to get the rose-petal jam from?’

Edith had made a note of that somewhere. They had acquired a habit of writing everything down, for there was a great deal they were in danger of forgetting. They had brought a letter of introduction to Madame Petropoulos and had been greatly excited about their visit to her. Amy had even been tempted to wear the stole she had bought as a present for her niece.

Madame Petropoulos had a flat high up in a building at the foot of Mount Lycabettos (such a pull up from the hotel; they had arrived quite winded and then had to climb the flights of marble stairs), and they had sat out on a balcony and looked at the view – the Acropolis golden in the evening light, the mountains violet and Salamis darkening in the glittering sea. They had described it over and over to one another as they went to bed the previous night, rather over-excited, like children. It had been a high spot of their holiday. This morning, they began to marvel at it again.

‘We must remember to send her a Christmas card,’ Amy said. ‘Although I don’t think they make as much of it as we do.’

‘Don’t
speak
of Christmas,’ Edith begged her, with the English dread of it in her voice.

‘We needn’t have worried about the language. I must confess I was quite nervous at bringing out my few sentences.’

She had been rehearsing these – compiled from the phrase book – for days beforehand; but Edith, whom Laura suspected of fearing to make a fool of herself, would not try. ‘We know that Madame Petropoulos can speak English. Colonel Benson told us so,’ she had reminded Amy, interrupting her rehearsal of ‘Athens pleases us very much. We go to Delphi.’ (Everything in the phrase book was in the present tense, but she hoped to be understood.) ‘Delphi pleases us very much. Myconos pleases us very much. And Sounion.’

To her girlish wonder and – it appeared to Laura – Edith’s annoyance, the phrases had seemed to be understood and had gone down well. Madame Petropoulos had responded with warm surprise, had said, in fact: ‘Now I do not know whether to speak to you in English or Greek.’

‘Such a lot of gold teeth when she laughed,’ Amy said afterwards, repeating what she had said. ‘And clasping her hands and shaking them over her head like that reminded me of those boxers we saw on the television.’

‘
You
saw,’ Edith said.

‘But the
view
– the colours changing all the time and then suddenly the lights going on out at sea.’

‘I think we stayed too long. I kept trying to catch your eye.’

‘I simply forgot time existed.’

Laura could hear breakfast-trays being put aside, and then creakings and rustlings about the room, water running. She lay very still in bed, her arms laced under her head, and wondered what to do with her day. She also had letters of introduction and invitations, but she had done nothing about them. The habit of inertia is a hard one to shake off, the accidie of mind and body torments as it takes hold. After a long illness, her parents had persuaded her to go away – perhaps as a holiday for themselves as well. For her, it was too soon; travel had not broken into her apathy; flying in, she had
gazed down at the islands with indifference, though their tawny beauty would at one time have moved her to tears. Since then, she had wasted the holiday, mooning about in the morning sunshine, lunching at the same place every day, resting in the afternoon. It was a much more real holiday – this one she enjoyed vicariously through the bedroom wall.

When Amy and Edith had gone out, she telephoned for her own breakfast and ate it sitting up in the hard bed – spreading the pieces of dry bread with melting butter, drinking coffee from a large, thick cup.

It was such a silence, now that the next room was empty. They had gone down to the travel agency in the Square to arrange a trip to Mycenae.
I
ought to do that, Laura thought. As things were turning out, she would have nothing to say for herself when she returned home. ‘Did you go there? Did you see such and such?’ And to those questions, she would say, ‘No, no, no,’ her voice rising irritably. ‘I just stayed in my room and listened to two old ladies chattering.’

She dressed and went out and wandered about the busy streets. The day was well on for other people. After a time, she found herself in a cool flower market with watered pavings. She walked all round it, breathing the scented air, made her way out of it by a different narrow street, and soon was lost. Some buildings looked familiar from other similarly aimless wanderings, but she could form no pattern from them. She could not even read the letters of the street names, or those above the shops. The feeling of isolation was the worst she had suffered since her illness, and she was ready to sit down on some church steps she had arrived at and weep until someone rescued her. She was too much of a burden to be managed by herself alone.

In the end, she found a taxi and was driven back to the hotel. When she reached her room, she was a little comforted to find that Edith and Amy had also returned, were busily counting coins as they did after all their expeditions. When they had settled everything fairly down to the last drachma, they began to sort out the picture-postcards they had bought.

‘There is quite an art in timing them,’ Edith said in a humorous voice. ‘If you send them off too soon, one’s friends are apt to think one is at a loss to know how to pass the time, that there is nothing better to do, that one can only think of people back home, and are perhaps homesick. Then, too late seems like a last-minute thought and a dreadful risk that they may arrive after one arrives oneself.’

‘I think
now
is just about right,’ Amy said.

‘And another thing is that they must all be posted together. I haven’t forgotten that rumpus when we went to Rimini and some people in the village got them early and others thought they had been forgotten.’

‘Don’t you think we might send Colonel Benson’s off a little earlier than
the rest? After all, he’s been so kind. It would be a small mark of appreciation.’

‘Perhaps a couple of days,’ Edith conceded. ‘I thought this one of the Evzones for him – it was about the nearest I could find to anything of a military nature.’

‘And this Archaic statue for Mrs Campion, don’t you think? It is
so
like her daughter-in-law.’

‘Funny that that smile looks so beautiful on a statue, and is simply infuriating on a real person.’