Complete Short Stories (VMC) (95 page)

Looking offended, she grabbed instead Melanie’s spanking-new wedding present suitcase, and followed them grimly, as
they
followed Madame Bertail’s stiffly corseted back. Level with her shoulder-blades, the corsets stopped and the massive flesh moved gently with each step she took, as if it had a life of its own.

In Room Eight was a small double bed and wallpaper with a paisley pattern, on which what looked like curled-up blood-red embryos were repeated every two inches upon a sage-green background. There were other patterns for curtains and chair covers and the thin eiderdown. It was a depressing room, and a smell of some previous occupier’s Ambre Solaire still hung about it.

‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ Leonard apologised, as soon as they were alone.

Melanie smiled. For a time, they managed to keep up their spirits. ‘I’m so tired, I’ll sleep anywhere,’ she said, not knowing about the mosquito hidden in the curtains, or the lumpiness of the bed, and other horrors to follow.

They were both tired. A day of driving in an open car had made them feel, now they had stopped, quite dull and drowsy. Conversation was an effort.

Melanie opened her case. There was still confetti about. A crescent-shaped white piece fluttered on to the carpet, and she bent quickly and picked it up. So much about honeymoons was absurd – even little reminders like this one. And there had been awkwardnesses they could never have foreseen – especially that of having to make their way in a foreign language. (
Lune de miel
seemed utterly improbable to her.) She did not know how to ask a maid to wash a blouse, although she had pages of irregular verbs somewhere in her head, and odd words, from lists she had learnt
as a child – the Parts of the Body, the Trees of the Forest, the Days of the Week – would often spring gratifyingly to her rescue.

When she had unpacked, she went to the window and leant out, over a narrow street with lumpy cobbles all ready for an early-morning din of rattling carts and slipping hooves.

Leonard kept glancing nervously at her as he unpacked. He did everything methodically, and at one slow pace. She was quick and untidy, and spent much time hanging about waiting for him, growing depressed, then exasperated, leaning out of windows, as now, strolling impatiently in gardens.

He smoked in the bedroom: she did not, and often thought it would have been better the other way about, so that she could have had something to do while she waited.

He hung up his dressing-gown, paused, then trod heavily across to his suitcase and took out washing things, which he arranged neatly on a shelf. He looked at her again. Seen from the back, hunched over the window-sill, she seemed to be visibly drooping, diminishing, like melting wax; and he knew that her mood was because of him. But a lifetime’s habit – more than that, something inborn – made him feel helpless. He also had a moment of irritation himself, seeing her slippers thrown anyhow under a chair.

‘Ready, then,’ he said, in a tone of anticipation and decision.

She turned eagerly from the window, and saw him take up his comb. He stood before the glass, combing, combing his thin hair, lapsing once more into dreaminess, intent on what he was doing. She sighed quietly and turned back to look out of the window.

‘I can see a spire of the Cathedral,’ she said presently; but her head was so far out of the window – and a lorry was going by – that he did not hear her.

‘Well, we’ve
had
the Cathedral,’ she thought crossly. It was too late for the stained glass. She would never be able to make him see that every minute counted, or that there should not be some preordained method but, instead, a shifting order of priorities. Unpacking can wait; but the light will not.

By the time they got out for their walk, and saw the Cathedral, it was floodlit, bone-white against the dark sky, bleached, flat, stagey, though beautiful in this unintended and rather unsuitable way. Walking in the twisting streets, Leonard and Melanie had glimpsed the one tall spire above roof-tops, then lost it. Arm in arm, they had stopped to look in shop windows, at glazed pigs’ trotters, tarts full of neatly arranged strawberries, sugared almonds on stems, in bunches, tied with ribbons. Leonard lingered, comparing prices of watches and cameras with those at home in England;
Melanie, feeling chilly, tried gently to draw him on. At last, without warning, they came to the square where the Cathedral stood, and here there were more shops, all full of little plaster statues and rosaries, and antiques for the tourists.

‘Exorbitant,’ Leonard kept saying. ‘My God, how they’re out to fleece you!’

Melanie stood staring up at the Cathedral until her neck ached. The great rose window was dark, the light glaring on the stone façade too static. The first sense of amazement and wonder faded. It was part of her impatient nature to care most for first impressions. On their way south, the sudden, and far-away sight of Chartres Cathedral across the plain, crouched on the horizon, with its lop-sided spires, like a giant hare, had meant much more to her than the close-up details of it. Again, for
that
, they had been too late. Before they reached the town, storm-clouds had gathered. It might as well have been dusk inside the Cathedral. She, for her part, would not have stopped to fill up with petrol on the road. She would have risked it, parked the car anywhere, and run.

Staring up at
this
Cathedral, she felt dizzy from leaning backwards, and swayed suddenly, and laughed. He caught her close to him and so, walking rather unevenly, with arms about the other’s waist, moved on, out of the square, and back to the hotel.

Such moments, of more-than-usual love, gave them both great confidence. This time, their mood of elation lasted much longer than a moment.

Although the hotel dining-room was dark, and they were quite alone in it, speaking in subdued voices, their humour held; and held, as they took their key from impassive Madame Bertail, who still sat at the desk, doing her accounts; it even held as they undressed in their depressing room, and had no need to hold longer than that. Once in bed, they had always been safe.

‘Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me!’

They woke at the same instant and stared at the darkness, shocked, wondering where they were.

‘Don’t tell me! I’ll spend my money how I bloody well please.’

The man’s voice, high and hysterical, came through the wall, just behind their heads.

A woman was heard laughing softly, with obviously affected amusement.

Something was thrown, and broke.

‘I’ve had enough of your nagging.’

‘I’ve had enough of
you
,’ the woman answered coolly.

Melanie buried her head against Leonard’s shoulder and he put an arm round her.

‘I had enough of
you
, a very long time ago,’ the woman’s voice went on. ‘I can’t honestly remember a time when I
hadn’t
had enough of you.’

‘What I’ve gone through!’

‘What
you’ve
gone through?’

‘Yes, that’s what I said. What
I’ve
gone through.’

‘Don’t shout. It’s so common.’ She had consciously lowered her own voice, then said, forgetting, in almost a shout, ‘It’s a pity for both our sakes, you were so greedy. For Daddy’s money, I mean. That’s all you ever cared about – my father’s money.’

‘All
you
cared about was getting into bed with me.’

‘You great braggart. I’ve always loathed going to bed with you. Who wouldn’t?’

Leonard heaved himself up in bed, and knocked on the damp wallpaper.

‘I always felt sick,’ the woman’s voice went on, taking no notice. She was as strident now as the man; had begun to lose her grip on the situation, as he had done. ‘And God knows,’ she said, ‘how many other women you’ve made feel sick.’

Leonard knocked louder, with his fist this time. The wall seemed as soft as if it were made from cardboard.

‘I’m scared,’ said Melanie. She sat up and switched on the light. ‘Surely he’ll kill her, if she goes on like that.’

‘You little strumpet!’ The man slurred this word, tried to repeat it and dried up, helplessly, goaded into incoherence.

‘Be careful! Just be careful!’ A dangerous, deliberate voice hers was now.

‘Archie Durrant? Do you think I didn’t know about Archie Durrant? Don’t take me for a fool.’

‘I’ll warn you; don’t put ideas into my head, my precious husband. At least Archie Durrant wouldn’t bring me to a lousy place like this.’

She then began to cry. They reversed their rôles and he in his turn became the cool one.

‘He won’t take you anywhere, my pet. Like me, he’s had enough.
Un
like me,
he
can skedaddle.’

‘Why doesn’t someone
do
something!’ asked Melanie, meaning, of course, that Leonard should. ‘Everyone must be able to hear. And they’re English, too. It’s so shaming, and horrible.’

‘Go on, then, skedaddle, skedaddle!’ The absurd word went on and on, blurred, broken by sobs. Something more was thrown – something with a sharp, hard sound; perhaps a shoe or book.

Leonard sprang out of bed and put on his dressing-gown and slippers.

‘Slippers!’ thought Melanie, sitting up in bed, shivering.

As Leonard stepped out into the passage, he saw Madame Bertail
coming along it, from the other direction. She, too, wore a dressing-gown, corded round her stout stomach: her grey hair was thinly braided. She looked steadily at Leonard, as if dismissing him, classing him with his loose compatriots, then knocked quickly on the door and at once tried the doorhandle. The key had been turned in the lock. She knocked again, and there was silence inside the room. She knocked once more, very loudly, as if to make sure of this silence, and then, without a word to Leonard, seeming to feel satisfied that she had dealt successfully with the situation, she went off down the corridor.

Leonard went back to the bedroom and slowly took off his dressing-gown and slippers.

‘I think that will be that,’ he said, and got back into bed and tried to warm poor Melanie.

‘You talk about your father’s money,’ the man’s voice went on, almost at once. ‘But I wouldn’t want any truck with that kind of money.’

‘You just want it.’

Their tone was more controlled, as if they were temporarily calmed. However, although the wind had dropped they still quietly angled for it, keeping things going for the time being.

‘I’ll never forget the first time I realised how you got on my nerves,’ he said, in the equable voice of an old friend reminiscing about happier days. ‘That way you walk upstairs with your bottom waggling from side to side. My God, I’ve got to walk upstairs and downstairs behind that bottom for the rest of my life, I used to think.’

‘Such triviality!’ Melanie thought fearfully, pressing her hands against her face. To begin with such a thing – for the hate to grow from it – not nearly as bad as being slow and keeping people waiting.

‘I wasn’t seriously loathing you then,’ the man said in a conversational tone. ‘Even after that fuss about Archie Durrant. I didn’t seriously
hate
you.’

‘Thank you very much, you … cuckold.’

If Leonard did not snore at that moment, he certainly breathed sonorously.

During that comparative lull in the next room, he had dropped off to sleep, leaving Melanie wakeful and afraid.

‘She called him a cuckold,’ she hissed into Leonard’s ear.

‘No, the time, I think,’ said the man behind the wall, in the same deadly flat voice, ‘the time I first really hated you, was when you threw the potatoes at me.’

‘Oh, yes, that was a
great
evening,’ she said, in tones chiming with affected pleasure.

‘In front of my own mother.’

‘She seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. Probably longed for years to do it herself.’

‘That was when I first realised.’

‘Why did you stay?’ There was silence. Then, ‘Why stay now? Go on! Go now! I’ll help you to pack. There’s your bloody hairbrush for a start. My God, you look ridiculous when you duck down like that. You sickening little coward.’

‘I’ll kill you.’

‘Oh God, he’ll kill her,’ said Melanie, shaking Leonard roughly.

‘You won’t, you know,’ shouted the other woman.

The telephone rang in the next room.

‘Hello?’ The man’s voice was cautious, ruffled. The receiver was quietly replaced. ‘You see what you’ve done?’ he said. ‘Someone ringing up to complain about the noise you’re making.’

‘You don’t think I give a damn for anyone in a crumby little hotel like this, do you?’

‘Oh, my nerves, my nerves, my nerves,’ the man suddenly groaned. Bed-springs creaked, and Melanie imagined him sinking down on the edge of the bed, his face buried in his hands.

Silence lasted only a minute or two. Leonard was fast asleep now. Melanie lay very still, listening to a mosquito coming and going above her head.

Then the crying began, at first a little sniffing, then a quiet sobbing.

‘Leonard, you must wake up. I can’t lie here alone listening to it. Or
do
something, for heaven’s sake.’

He put out a hand, as if to stave her off, or calm her, without really disturbing his sleep, and this gesture infuriated her. She slapped his hand away roughly.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ he said, still clinging to the idea of sleep; then, as she flounced over in the bed, turning her back to him, he resignedly sat up and turned on the light. Blinking and tousled, he stared before him, and then leaned over and knocked on the wall once more.

‘
That
won’t do any good,’ said Melanie.

‘Well, their door’s locked, so what else can I do?’

‘Ring up the police.’

‘I can’t do that. Anyhow, I don’t know how to in French.’

‘Well, try. If the hotel was on fire, you’d do something, wouldn’t you?’

Her sharp tone was new to him, and alarming.

‘It’s not really our business.’

‘If he kills her? While you were asleep, she called him a cuckold. I thought he was going to kill her then. And even if he doesn’t, we can’t hope to get any sleep. It’s perfectly horrible. It sounds like a child crying.’