May We Borrow Your Husband? (11 page)

A voice from the water said to her, ‘My name's Hickslaughter – Henry Hickslaughter.' She couldn't have sworn to the name in court, but that was how it had sounded at the time and he never repeated it. She looked down at a polished mahogany crown surrounded by white hair; perhaps he resembled Neptune more than an elephant. Neptune was always outsize, and as he had pulled himself a little out of the water to speak, she could see the rolls of fat folding over the blue bathing-slip, with tough hair lying like weeds along the ditches. She replied with amusement, ‘My name is Watson. Mary Watson.'

‘You're English?'

‘My husband's American,' she said in extenuation.

‘I haven't seen him around, have I?'

‘He's in England,' she said with a small sigh, for the geographical and national situation seemed too complicated for casual explanation.

‘You like it here?' he asked and lifting a hand-cup of water he distributed it over his bald head.

‘So so.'

‘Got the time on you?'

She looked in her bag and told him, ‘Eleven fifteen.'

‘I've had my half hour,' he said and trod heavily away towards the ladder at the shallow end.

An hour later, staring at her lukewarm Martini with its great green unappetizing olive, she saw him looming down at her from the other end of the bamboo bar. He wore an ordinary shirt open at the neck and a brown leather belt; his type of shoes in her childhood had been known as corespondent, but one seldom saw them today. She wondered what Charlie would think of her pick-up; unquestionably she had landed him, rather as an angler struggling with a heavy catch finds that he has hooked nothing better than an old boot. She was no angler; she didn't know whether a boot would put an ordinary hook out of action altogether, but she knew that
her
hook could be irremediably damaged. No one would approach her if she were in his company. She drained the Martini in one gulp and even attacked the olive so as to have no excuse to linger in the bar.

‘Would you do me the honour,' Mr Hickslaughter asked, ‘of having a drink with me?' His manner was completely changed; on dry land he seemed unsure of himself and spoke with an old-fashioned propriety.

‘I'm afraid I've only just finished one. I have to be off.' Inside the gross form she thought she saw a tousled child with disappointed eyes. ‘I'm having lunch early today.' She got up and added rather stupidly, for the bar was quite empty, ‘You can have my table.'

‘I don't need a drink that much,' he said solemnly. ‘I was just after company.' She knew that he was watching her as she moved to the adjoining coffee tavern, and she thought with guilt, at least I've got the old boot off the hook. She refused the shrimp cocktail with tomato ketchup and fell back as was usual with her on a grapefruit, with grilled trout to follow. ‘Please no tomato with the trout,' she implored, but the black waiter obviously didn't understand her. While she waited she began with amusement to picture a scene between Charlie and Mr Hickslaughter, who happened for the purpose of her story to be crossing the campus. ‘This is Henry Hickslaughter, Charlie. We used to go bathing together when I was in Jamaica.' Charlie, who always wore English clothes, was very tall, very thin, very concave. It was a satisfaction to know that he would never lose his figure – his nerves would see to that and his extreme sensibility. He hated anything gross; there was no grossness in
The Seasons,
not even in the lines on spring.

She heard slow footsteps coming up behind her and panicked. ‘May I share your table?' Mr Hickslaughter asked. He had recovered his terrestrial politeness, but only so far as speech was concerned, for he sat firmly down without waiting for her reply. The chair was too small for him; his thighs overlapped like a double mattress on a single bed. He began to study the menu.

‘They copy American food; it's worse than the reality,' Mary Watson said.

‘You don't like American food?'

‘Tomatoes even with the trout!'

‘Tomatoes? Oh, you mean tomatoes,' he said, correcting her accent. ‘I'm very fond of tomatoes myself.'

‘And fresh pineapple in the salad.'

‘There's a lot of vitamins in fresh pineapple.' Almost as if he wished to emphasize their disagreement, he ordered shrimp cocktail, grilled trout and a sweet salad. Of course, when her trout arrived, the tomatoes were there. ‘You can have mine if you want to,' she said and he accepted with pleasure. ‘You are very kind. You are really very kind.' He held out his plate like Oliver Twist.

She began to feel oddly at ease with the old man. She would have been less at ease, she was certain, with a possible adventure: she would have been wondering about her effect on him, while now she could be sure that she gave him pleasure – with the tomatoes. He was perhaps less the old anonymous boot than an old shoe comfortable to wear. And curiously enough, in spite of his first approach and in spite of his correcting her over the pronunciation of tomatoes, it was not really an old American shoe of which she was reminded. Charlie wore English clothes over his English figure, he studied English eighteenth-century literature, his book would be published in England by the Cambridge University Press who would buy sheets, but she had the impression that he was far more fashioned as an American shoe than Hickslaughter. Even Charlie, whose manners were perfect, if they had met for the first time today at the swimming-pool, would have interrogated her more closely. Interrogation had always seemed to her a principal part of American social life – an inheritance perhaps from the Indian smoke-fires: ‘Where are you from? Do you know the so and so's? Have you been to the botanic gardens?' It came over here that Mr Hickslaughter, if that were really his name, was perhaps an American reject – not necessarily more flawed than the pottery rejects of famous firms you find in bargain-basements.

She found herself questioning
him
, with circumlocutions, while he savoured the tomatoes. ‘I was born in London. I couldn't have been born more than four hundred miles from there without drowning, could I? But you belong to a continent thousands of miles wide and long. Where were you born?' (She remembered a character in a Western movie directed by John Ford who asked, ‘Where do you hail from, stranger?' The question was more frankly put than hers.)

He said, ‘St Louis.'

‘Oh, then there are lots of your people here – you are not alone.' She felt a slight disappointment that he might belong to the jolly bunch.

‘I'm alone,' he said. ‘Room 63.' It was in her own corridor on the third floor of the annexe. He spoke firmly as though he were imparting information for future use. ‘Five doors down from you.'

‘Oh.'

‘I saw you come out your first day.'

‘I never noticed you.'

‘I keep to myself unless I see someone I like.'

‘Didn't you see anyone you liked from St Louis?'

‘I'm not all that fond of St Louis, and St Louis can do without me. I'm not a favourite son.'

‘Do you come here often?'

‘In August. It's cheap in August.' He kept on surprising her. First there was his lack of local patriotism, and now his frankness about money or rather about the lack of it, a frankness that could almost be classed as an un-American activity.

‘Yes.'

‘I have to go where it's reasonable,' he said, as though he were exposing his bad hand to a partner at gin.

‘You've retired?'

‘Well – I've been retired.' He added, ‘You ought to take salad . . . It's good for you.'

‘I feel quite well without it.'

‘You could do with more weight.' He added appraisingly, ‘A couple of pounds.' She was tempted to tell him that he could do with less. They had both seen each other exposed.

‘Were you in business?' She was being driven to interrogate. He hadn't asked her a personal question since his first at the pool.

‘In a way,' he said. She had a sense that he was supremely uninterested in his own doings; she was certainly discovering an America which she had not known existed.

She said, ‘Well, if you'll excuse me . . .'

‘Aren't you taking any dessert?'

‘No, I'm a light luncher.'

‘It's all included in the price. You ought to eat some fruit.' He was looking at her under his white eyebrows with an air of disappointment which touched her.

‘I don't care much for fruit and I want a nap. I always have a nap in the afternoon.'

Perhaps, after all, she thought, as she moved away through the formal dining-room, he is disappointed only because I'm not taking full advantage of the cheap rate.

She passed his room going to her own: the door was open and a big white-haired mammy was making the bed. The room was exactly like her own; the same pair of double beds, the same wardrobe, the same dressing-table in the same position, the same heavy breathing of the air-conditioner. In her own room she looked in vain for the thermos of iced water; then she rang the bell and waited for several minutes. You couldn't expect good service in August. She went down the passage; Mr Hickslaughter's door was still open and she went in to find the maid. The door of the bathroom was open too and a wet cloth lay on the tiles.

How bare the bedroom was. At least she had taken the trouble to add a few flowers, a photograph and half a dozen books on a bedside table which gave her room a lived-in air. Beside his bed there was only a literary digest lying open and face down; she turned it over to see what he was reading – as she might have expected it was something to do with calories and proteins. He had begun writing a letter at his dressing-table and with the simple unscrupulousness of an intellectual she began to read it with her ears cocked for any sound in the passage.

‘Dear Joe,' she read, ‘the draft was two weeks late last month and I was in real difficulties. I had to borrow from a Syrian who runs a tourist junk-shop in Curaçao and pay him interest. You owe me a hundred dollars for the interest. It's your own fault. Mum never gave us lessons on how to live with an empty stomach. Please add it to the next draft and be sure to do that, you wouldn't want me coming back to collect. I'll be here till the end of August. It's cheap in August, and a man gets tired of nothing but Dutch, Dutch, Dutch. Give my love to Sis.'

The letter broke off unfinished. Anyway she would have had no opportunity to read more because someone was approaching down the passage. She went to the door in time to see Mr Hickslaughter on the threshold. He said, ‘You looking for me?'

‘I was looking for the maid. She was in here a minute ago.'

‘Come in and sit down.'

He looked through the bathroom door and then at the room in general. Perhaps it was only an uneasy conscience which made her think that his eyes strayed a moment to the unfinished letter.

‘She's forgotten my iced water.'

‘You can have mine if it's filled.' He shook his thermos and handed it to her.

‘Thanks a lot.'

‘When you've had your sleep . . .' he began and looked away from her. Was he looking at the letter?

‘Yes?'

‘We might have a drink.'

She was, in a sense, trapped. She said, ‘Yes.'

‘Give me a ring when you wake up.'

‘Yes.' She said nervously, ‘Have a good sleep yourself.'

‘Oh, I don't sleep.' He didn't wait for her to leave the room before turning away, swinging that great elephantine backside of his towards her. She had walked into a trap baited with a flask of iced water, and in her room she drank the water gingerly as though it might have a flavour different from hers.

3

She found it difficult to sleep: the old fat man had become an individual now that she had read his letter. She couldn't help comparing his style with Charlie's. ‘When I have said good-night to you, my dear one, I shall go happily to bed with the thought of you.' In Mr Hickslaughter's there was an ambiguity, a hint of menace. Was it possible that the old man could be dangerous?

At half past five she rang up room 63. It was not the kind of adventure she had planned, but it was an adventure nonetheless. ‘I'm awake,' she said.

‘You coming for a drink?' he asked.

‘I'll meet you in the bar.'

‘Not the bar,' he said. ‘Not at the prices they charge for bourbon. I've got all we need here.' She felt as though she were being brought back to the scene of a crime, and she needed a little courage to knock on the door.

He had everything prepared: a bottle of Old Walker, a bucket of ice, two bottles of soda. Like books, drinks can make a room inhabited. She saw him as a man fighting in his own fashion against the sense of solitude.

‘Siddown,' he said, ‘make yourself comfortable,' like a character in a movie. He began to pour out two highballs.

She said, ‘I've got an awful sense of guilt. I did come in here for iced water, but I was curious too. I read your letter.'

‘I knew someone had touched it,' he said.

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Who cares? It was only to my brother.'

‘I had no business . . .'

‘Look,' he said, ‘if I came into your room and found a letter open I'd read it, wouldn't I? Only your letter would be more interesting.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't write love letters. Never did and I'm too old now.' He sat down on a bed – she had the only easy chair. His belly hung in heavy folds under his sports-shirt, and his flies were a little open. Why was it always fat men who left them unbuttoned? He said, ‘This is good bourbon,' taking a drain of it. ‘What does your husband do?' he asked – it was his first personal question since the pool and it took her by surprise.