Complete Short Stories (VMC) (76 page)

Laura, lying on her bed, nodded to herself and smiled a different smile.

‘We will go after tea and get the stamps,’ said Amy, making it sound quite an expedition.

So somewhere, Laura thought, they had organised tea-time, as they had organised everything else. She felt ashamed of herself, not able to imagine
them
wanting to sit down on the steps of a church and weep.

There were some silences in the next room while – Laura supposed – they wrote their postcards. She hoped all those people in whatever village it was would value the trouble that had been taken.

‘The temple of Poseidon
is
later than the Parthenon, isn’t it?’ asked Edith.

‘I am almost sure; but you could look it up. Who is that for?’

‘The Vicar.’

‘I am just putting personal things. “Sitting here in the sun, drinking
retzina
.”’

Laura turned her face to the pillow, laughing silently.

‘But you aren’t,’ said Edith. ‘Oh, there is so little space on a postcard, and so much to say.’

When they had gone out to tea, Laura had a shower and went for a walk in the Royal Gardens. Dusky, dappled light was shed through leaves and petals, and peacocks stepped fastidiously over fallen, rotting oranges under the trees. She sat on a seat and watched the passers-by – beautifully dressed babies in perambulators pushed by English-looking nannies in uniform, young couples hand in hand, older men wearing sunglasses, swinging keyrings, treading ponderously. One of them passed several times, staring at her with curiosity, but her indifferent English air puzzled and at last defeated him.

The sun went down quickly, and when she got up at last and came out of the Gardens the temples on the Acropolis had turned from golden to a shadowy brown.

The next morning, after Alexis’s high-spirited ‘Good-morning, ladies’, Laura heard Edith and Amy mugging up Mycenae from the guide-book. They were to set out the next day, early in the morning, and Laura decided
that she, too, must go somewhere. She felt like knocking on the wall to ask them where. Delphi, she knew, they had especially enjoyed. It had been described as picturesque.

‘We now enter a circular chamber shaped like a beehive,’ Edith read from the guide-book in a voice unlike the one she used in conversation.

‘I can’t take in so much beforehand,’ Amy complained. ‘I like to read about it
after
I’ve been there.’

‘And
I
don’t like going round a site with a book in my hands,’ said Edith. She then must have dropped the guide-book on the floor, because Amy exclaimed about the pressed flowers that had fallen out.

‘And I get the royal family so muddled up,’ she said, panting a little, perhaps on her knees, gathering up wafery, dry wild flowers. ‘Agamemnon and so forth.’

‘Perfectly straightforward,’ Edith replied. ‘Agamemnon returns from the war, Aegysthus and Clytemnestra murder
him
; Orestes murders Clytemnestra; Electra—’

‘Your
hands
!’ interrupted Amy. ‘Just look at your hands. All the time you were saying that, they weren’t still for a moment. You laugh at
me
; but, goodness, you are even worse.’

‘I don’t do it in the street,’ said Edith coldly.

It was then that Laura, diverted and off-guard, suddenly sneezed. Reaching for a handkerchief to stifle it, she was too late, and knocked over a glass of water.

There was a deep, long silence in the next room. She imagined them staring at one another, hardly daring to stir. It was some time before they began to whisper and move stealthily about the room.

Sitting in the bus, on her way back from Delphi, Laura wondered how Edith and Amy had enjoyed Mycenae. Enjoy it she knew they would; their enthusiasm would reduce the ancient horrors, dispassionately they would relate old histories as if describing house parties at Balmoral.

Laura felt put to shame by their toughness. At Delphi, brooded over by towering crags, diminished, overawed, she had tried to put herself in their state of mind in the same place – happily darting from one wild flower to another, describing – as they had – the scenery as picturesquely mountainous. They had even had someone sick on the bus, as Laura had, but were led by this simply to talk of national characteristics. Greeks had poor stomachs; they had known this beforehand; hadn’t Colonel Benson himself said so?

When she reached the hotel, Laura found flowers in her room and an invitation to a party. She wondered if she might not accept it after all. The journey to Delphi, however shattering, had been a beginning. It might now
be pleasant to talk again to someone in her own language. Yet she had not been so very lonely. Edith and Amy had been just the undemanding company she would have wished for, and she hoped that they were not still talking in whispers on her account.

She awoke early the next morning, and there was silence in the next room. She lay and waited for the coming of breakfast and the beginnings of conversation. ‘Perhaps they have finished talking about Mycenae by now, and I shall never find out about it,’ she thought.

When Alexis came along the passage and opened the door of the next room, his voice was less warning than usual, Laura thought, and less genial. ‘Good-morning, good-morning,’ he called, falsely bright.

Someone groaned and yawned. ‘Good-morning to you,’ a man’s voice replied – an American voice.

Laura was quite shocked. As soon as Alexis had gone away down the passage, she began to cough sharply. She telephoned for her breakfast, making as much noise about it as she could when it arrived.

So they have gone, she thought. They have followed their postcards back home, and Colonel Benson will hear about Mycenae and the rest, not I.

‘Oh, heavens!’ said Deirdre Wallace, stepping out of the car with some of her Moroccan trophies – a water-carrier’s hat from Marrakesh hanging on a string from her wrist, a native basket, and an ugly, stamped-leather bag.

Her husband, Bunny, snatched at a crumpled chiffon scarf as it loosened from her shoulders in the wind from the sea. He was a soldierly-looking little man, with receding hair; had gone bald very early; was now in his fifties.
So English
, the other visitors at the hotel would be bound to say – not only because of his clothes, but on account of every stalwart movement he made.

Deirdre, before stepping into the coolness of the hotel, looked about her in dismay. She preferred something more Arab – an old Sultan’s palace, for instance; or some ancient house inside a medina, with broken mosaics, and wrought-iron lanterns casting fancy patterns on the walls. So far, she had had an instinct for finding such places. This hotel looked like being their first mistake.

Beyond a bougainvillaea-hedge, people were actually playing tennis in this broiling sun. Scarlet Thames-valley geraniums bordered the drive – though more brilliant than any in England, and exuberantly climbing the trunks of trees.

Driving through the town, Deirdre had remarked how very much it was in the style of the departed French, with its
boulevards
,
ronds-points
, shuttered villas named Les Mimosas, Les Rosiers, La Terrasse. There were more bicycles than in Oxford, where the Wallaces lived.

Arab women in
djellabahs
and
yashmaks
looked absurd riding them, Deirdre thought.

Despite the
palmeraie
near which it was built, the new white hotel looked very European. ‘It might be anywhere in the world,’ Deirdre complained, ‘from Nice to the Bahamas – or Torquay.’

Beside a peacock-blue swimming-pool, sunbathers were spread out like starfish on brightly cushioned furniture. Limbs stirred occasionally, but hardly a word was spoken. One lone swimmer stood as if bemused on the diving-board, then suddenly flung himself with a deep, crashing sound into the water. The shock of this interruption subsided into peaceful blowing
noises, gentle splashes, as the swimmer surfaced, shook the bright water from his face and then, as if once more bemused, began to swim slowly, aimlessly about the pool. No one opened an eye to look at him.

A porter, wearing a somewhat fancy-dress version of Moorish costume, took their suitcases to the lift. A man and woman, in beach clothes, carrying sunbathing paraphernalia stepped out of it. ‘English,’ Deirdre murmured to Bunny, as they stood side by side in the lift, ascending.

Bunny was secretly, guiltily, a little glad to see someone from his own country. His French was not as good as Deirdre’s, and he spoke it and listened to it under a sense of strain. It would be a relief to chat in his own language – in the bar before dinner, perhaps.

‘Very luxe,’ Deirdre said, but not in a tone of satisfaction, as she glanced about the large, cool bedroom. Bunny wound up the shutters and stepped on to the balcony. The pool, with its coloured umbrellas, was below him. No one was swimming now, but wet footprints round the edges were drying quickly. They vanished one after the other on the hot concrete.

The English couple were arranging themselves ready for their afternoon’s sunbathing. They removed their wraps and lay back in their deckchairs – a stout pair, already well on with their tanning. The sun beat down. Arabs, at this time of the day, were squatting in the shade, or safely indoors.

While she was waiting for Bunny to change into his swimming-trunks, Deirdre wandered out into the stone-paved corridor, moving slowly along from window to window, looking at the distant hills, the pink and paprika landscape. The heat seemed to move, to rise and fall, making the dusty air whirl giddily.

A commotion beneath one of the windows made her lean out. A smell of rotting fruit rose from below. This was the back of the hotel and a rough road ran close to it, leading to the cemetery. As she leant out of the window, Deirdre could see beneath her a swarm of children picking over a cart of refuse, disturbing the flies. The sight of this sickened her. ‘Oh, it is quite upsetting,’ she told herself. Especially was she moved by one little girl standing apart from the others, tearing pieces off a crust of bread. She was barefooted as they all were, but wore a crumpled party dress of violet-coloured velvet. This, too, had probably come off a rubbish cart, Deirdre thought. It was threadbare, like some old banner hanging in a chapel.

‘It was so upsetting,’ she told Bunny as they went down in the lift. ‘The back of the hotel might be in a different sphere from the front.’

The company about the swimming-pool was still somnolent. The large couple they had seen in the lift had been joined now by two other people – a man and a woman – and a lazy conversation had begun.

Deirdre took Bunny’s wrap and went to sit in the shade under a blue
umbrella. Very smartly, Bunny stepped on to the diving-board, sprang outwards and did a belly-flop into the still water. The French visitors cried out with good-natured shouts of anguish. Most of the English pretended that nothing had happened. Bunny came up through the water with a crimson chest. Deirdre blushed.

The Troughtons and the Crouches had struck up a desultory holiday friendship. They chatted when they met about the hotel, and joined one another for drinks before dinner, but did not yet go on expeditions together. The Troughtons, for that matter, very rarely went on expeditions. They had come here to get a tan, and seriously developed it from breakfast until the moment when the sun suddenly dropped out of the sky at six o’clock.

‘Yes, they were getting into the lift as we got out,’ Mrs Troughton told Mrs Crouch, who had turned her attention to the newcomers on the other side of the pool. ‘So English,’ she murmured. ‘Simply couldn’t be anything else.’

Bunny flailed about in the water – a splashy, disorganised crawl – and Deirdre sat under the umbrella in her white blouse, her flowered dirndl skirt, a book in her hands, which she read with so little attention that she had not turned a page. Her fond, dreamy gaze was more often upon Bunny. Admiringly, she watched him quietly floating on his back, the little hairy patch on his chest exposed to the sun, his eyes closed.

When at last he came out of the water, Deirdre handed him his robe. Something about her devoted attitude irritated Mrs Crouch. She doubted if they were married to one another, she said; but Mrs Troughton could not think why else they would be on holiday together.

Other people greatly engaged Mrs Crouch, and her husband shared her interest – a rather unmannish trait, Mrs Troughton thought. Her own husband was not, on holiday, interested in anything. Separated from the Stock Market, his mind became a vacuum. A paperbacked thriller was part of his sunbathing equipment, but he had not so far opened it. His hands were always covered with sun-tan oil, and for much of the time he dozed.

‘Doesn’t she remind you of Miss Simpson, Daddy?’ Mrs Crouch suggested to her husband, gazing across the pool at Deirdre Wallace.

‘
He
reminds me of someone,’ Mrs Troughton said, thinking what awful company one sometimes fell in with on holiday – and often, through proximity and one’s tolerant holiday spirit, became quite absorbed in their lives. ‘Someone I’ve seen somewhere or seen a photograph of,’ she added.

‘Miss Simpson was Janice’s music mistress,’ Mrs Crouch explained. No need to explain who Janice was. The Troughtons knew all about Janice, who was training to be a nurse. They knew about the hospital, too – the matron, sisters, patients. Mrs Troughton thought she could find her way
blindfold about it … poor staff nurse found crying in the sluice; old Mr Norwich’s registrar kicking up a rumpus in Casualty. She would also be quite at home in the other Crouch girl’s, Carol’s, office, and in their house (or home – as Mrs Crouch always called it) in Guildford, with its frilled nylon curtains at seven-and-elevenpence a yard; its sun-lounge and bar – quilted plastic décor done by Mr Crouch …
Leslie
…
Daddy
… himself.

Well, they were a nice homeloving pair, Mrs Troughton thought, though this
Daddy
business grated rather. The world would be better with more such peaceable, easily pleased creatures in it.

‘Don’t you think so,
Daddy
? The image of Miss Simpson.’