The Love Object (8 page)

‘Is your mother in?’ he asked, and I went halfway up the stairs and called her down.

‘I’ve come for the rug,’ he said.

‘What rug?’ Mama asked. It was the nearest she ever got to lying. Her breathe caught short and she blushed a little.

‘I hear you have a new rug here. Well, ’tis our rug, because my wife’s sister sent it to us months ago and we never got it.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she said in a very sarcastic voice. He was a cowardly man, and it was said that he was so ineffectual he would call his wife in from the garden to pour him a cup of tea. I suppose my mother hoped that she would frighten him off.

‘The rug the postman brought here one morning, and handed it to your youngster there.’ He nodded at me.

‘Oh, that,’ Mama said, a little stunned by the news that the postman had given information about it. Then a ray of hope, or a ray of lunacy, must have struck her, because she asked what colour of rug he was inquiring about.

‘A black sheepskin,’ he said.

There could be no more doubt about it. Her whole being drooped-shoulders, stomach, voice, everything.

‘It’s here,’ she said absently, and she went through the hall into the sitting-room.

‘Being namesakes and that, the postman got us mixed up,’ he said stupidly to me.

She had winked at me to stay there and see he did not follow her, because she did not want him to know that we had been using it.

It was rolled and had a piece of cord around the middle when she handed it to him. As she watched him go down the avenue she wept, not so much for the loss – though the loss was enormous – as for her own foolishness in thinking that someone had wanted to do her a kindness at last.

‘We live and learn,’ she said, as she undid her apron strings, out of habit, and then retied them slowly and methodically, making a tighter knot.

T
HERE WERE TWO ROUTES
to the village. I chose the rougher one to be beside the mountain rather than the sea. It is a dusty ill-defined stretch of road littered with rocks. The rocks that have fallen from the cliff are a menacing shade of red once they have split open. On the surface the cliff appears to be grey. Here and there on its grey-and-red face there are small clumps of trees. Parched in summer, tormented by winds in winter they nevertheless survive, getting no larger or no smaller.

In one such clump of green, just underneath the cliff, I saw a girl stand up. She began to tie her suspenders slowly. She had bad balance because when drawing her knickers on she lost her footing more than once. She put her skirt on by bringing it over her head and lastly her cardigan which appeared to have several buttons. As I came closer she walked away. A young girl in a maroon cardigan and a black skirt. She was twenty or thereabouts. Suddenly and without anticipating it I turned towards home so as to give the impression that I’d simply been having a stroll. The ridiculousness of this hit me soon after and I turned round again and walked towards the scene of her secret. I was trembling, but these journeys have got to be accomplished.

What a shock to find that nothing lurked there, no man, no animal. The bushes had not risen from the weight of her body. I reckoned that she must have been lying for quite a time. Then I saw that she, too, was returning. Had she forgotten something? Did she want to ask me a favour? Why was she hurrying? I could not see her face, her head was down. I turned and this time I ran towards the private road that led to my rented house. I thought, Why am I running, why am I trembling, why am I afraid? Because she is a woman and so am I. Because, because? I did not know.

When I got to the courtyard I asked the servant who had been fanning herself to unchain the dog. Then I sat out of doors and waited. The flowering tree looked particularly dramatic, its petals richly pink, its scent oppressively sweet. The only tree in flower. My servant had warned me about those particular flowers; she had even taken the trouble to get the dictionary to impress the word upon me –
Venodno,
poison, poison petals. Nevertheless I had the table moved in order to be nearer that tree and we steadied it by putting folded cigarette cartons under two of its legs. I told the servant to lay a place for two. I also decided what we would eat, though normally I don’t, in order to give the days some element of surprise. I asked that both wines be put on table, and also those long, sugar-coated biscuits that can be dipped in white wine and sucked until the sweetness is drained from them and re-dipped and re-sucked, indefinitely.

She would like the house. It had simplicity despite its grandeur. A white house with green shutters and a fanlight of stone over each of the three downstairs entrances. A sundial, a well, a little chapel. The walls and the ceilings were a milky-blue and this, combined with the sea and sky, had a strange hallucinatory effect as if sea and sky moved indoors. There were maps instead of pictures. Around the light bulbs pink shells that over the years had got a bit chipped, but this only added to the informality of the place.

We would take a long time over supper. Petals would drop from the tree, some might lodge on the stone table, festooning it. The figs, exquisitely chilled, would be served on a wide platter. We would test them with our fingers. We would know which ones when bitten into would prove to be satisfactory. She, being native, might be more expert at it than I. One or other of us might bite too avidly and find that the seeds, wet and messy and runny and beautiful, spurted over our chins. I would wipe my chin with my hand. I would do everything to put her at ease. Get drunk if necessary. At first I would talk but later show hesitation in order to give her a chance.

I changed into an orange robe and put on a long necklace made of a variety of shells. The dog was still loose in order to warn me. At the first bark I would have him brought in and tied up at the back of the house where even his whimpering would be unheard.

I sat on the terrace. The sun was going down. I moved to another chair in order to get the benefit of it. The crickets had commenced their incessant near-mechanical din and the lizards began to appear from behind the maps. Something about their deft, stealth-like movements reminded me of her, but everything reminded me of her just then. There was such silence that the seconds appeared to record their own passing. There were only the crickets and, in the distance, the sound of sheep-bells, more dreamlike than a bleat. In the distance, too, the lighthouse, faithfully signalling. A pair of shorts hanging on a hook began to flutter in the first breeze and how I welcomed it, knowing that it heralded night. She was waiting for dark, the embracing dark, the sinner’s dear accomplice.

My servant waited out of view. I could not see her but I was conscious of her the way one sometimes is of a prompter in the wings. It irritated me. I could hear her picking up or laying down a plate and I knew it was being done simply to engage my attention. I had also to battle with the smell of lentil soup. The smell though gratifying seemed nothing more than a bribe to hurry the proceedings and that was impossible. Because, according to my conjecture, once I began to eat the possibility of her coming was ruled out. I had to wait.

The hour that followed had an edgy, predictable and awful pattern – I walked, sat on various seats, lit cigarettes that I quickly discarded, kept adding to my drink. At moments I disremembered the cause of my agitation, but then recalling her in dark clothes and downcast eyes I thrilled again at the pleasure of receiving her. Across the bay the various settlements of lights came on, outlining towns or villages that are invisible in daylight. The perfection of the stars was loathsome.

Finally the dog’s food was brought forth and he ate as he always does, at my feet. When the empty plate skated over the smooth cobbles – due to my clumsiness – and the full moon so near, so red, so oddly hospitable, appeared above the pines, I decided to begin, taking the napkin out of its ring and spreading it slowly and ceremoniously on my lap. I confess that in those few seconds my faith was overwhelming and my hope stronger than it had ever been.

The food was destroyed. I drank a lot.

Next day I set out for the village but took the sea road. I have not gone the cliff way ever since. I have often wanted to, especially after work when I know what my itinerary is going to be: I will collect the letters, have one Pernod in the bar where retired colonels play cards, sit and talk to them about nothing. We have long ago accepted our uselessness for each other. New people hardly ever come.

There was an Australian painter whom I invited to supper having decided that he was moderately attractive. He became offensive after a few drinks and kept telling me how misrepresented his countrymen were. It was sad rather than unpleasant and the servant and I had to link him home.

On Sundays and feast days girls of about twenty go by, arms round each other, bodies lost inside dark commodious garments. Not one of them looks at me although by now I am known. She must know me. Yet she never gives me a sign as to which she is. I expect she is too frightened. In my more optimistic moments I like to think that she waits there expecting me to come and search her out. Yet, I always find myself taking the sea road even though I most desperately desire to go the other way.

W
HEN THEY WERE FIRST
married they saw no one. That was his wish. They spent their days in their wooden house, high up, on a mountain. There was snow for four or five months of each year, and in the early morning when the sun shone they sat on the veranda admiring the expanse of white fields, and the pines that were weighed down’ with snow. Beyond the fields reigned mountains, great mountains. She did not feel lonely in the morning. But at night she sometimes sighed. Stabbed she would be by some small memory – a voice, a song, once it was by the taste of warm beetroot. These stray memories she had no control over, no idea when they might occur. They came like spirits to disconcert her. Even when making love they were capable of intruding. She sometimes asked herself why she had chosen a man who insisted on exile. The answer was easy: his disposition and his face fitted in with some brainless dream of hers. He was someone she would never really know.

The only outsider that came was the village idiot, who cycled up to do the garden. He grinned his way through hoeing and digging, never knowing how to answer her questions. Little questions about his mother, his father, his rusted lady’s bicycle, and how he came to possess it. Once he rooted up a creeper, and she laughed and talked to her husband about it incessantly as if it were something of major importance. They planted another.

The seasons brought variety – first a false spring, a premature thaw, then a real one, then the flowers, small and soft like the pupils of eyes, sheep lambing, and the things that they had sowed appearing above the ground. When the rains came the wood swelled, and then when the rains went the wood had a terrible time shrinking and settling down. The creak in the house was unnerving. She was not with child. They no longer got up in the middle of lunch or breakfast or supper and walked to their vast bed in a quiver of passion. They chopped wood, they lit the stove, they kept busy; there is always something to do in a house.

When summer came he took a sleeping bag out of doors, saying nothing. He chose the forest. At first she cried, then she became reconciled to it, but she was always hungry and always cold.

At length, feeling the bleakness himself, he agreed to move into a city but on the understanding that they would live perfectly privately. He went first to find an apartment because it had to be suitable, it had to look out on a stretch of green and in a city that is a difficult to find.

She missed him. It was the first time in years that they had been parted, and when he came back and walked along the dark lane carrying a torch she ran and embraced him. In their embrace there was tenderness and a reconciliation.

The apartment had a high ceiling, double doors and a radiator concealed behind wooden bars. They missed the stove. He fitted up his machines – his tape recorder, his record player, his infra-red lamp. Since they had only one room she made a point of being out a lot to leave him to his solitude. In her walks she came to know the streets, intimately. She knew where ill-fitting slabs of stone caused a ridge in the pavement, the rust stains on the red paper kiosks, nannies, prams; she never looked at those inside the prams. She knew the dogs that were at war with their owners and those that followed meekly on their leashes. One or two people smiled at her. There was one square of houses she found particularly enchanting. They were four-storey houses set well back from the road with a flight of steps leading to the tiled porchways. In this square she studied curtains, gateways and the paintwork, thinking she could tell the life of the house by these external signs. She loved that hour of evening when things perked up as people hurried home with provisions for their dinner. Their urgency excited her. She often hurried with them and then found she was going in the wrong direction. In the daytime she made bus journeys, going from terminus to terminus simply to overhear. When she came home she told her husband all that she had seen and all that she heard and he sometimes laughed because she heard some amusing things.

At Christmas she plucked up courage to invite people to dinner. They owned a gallery where she had passed many pleasant hours. It entailed manoeuvring beforehand and a war afterwards. They did not meet with his approval. The woman confessed to a weakness for leather suitcases and that he found distasteful. They had three sets of guests throughout a winter and only one of these evenings went well.

Christmas again, the anniversary of their betrothal and she left him. She walked out of the house and down the street. There were stars, a moon and a succession of street lights to show the way. The frost which was severe seemed to fix and make permanent her action as the frost had fastened the hoof marks of animals on their mountain walks long before. Her friends drove to his apartment and handed him her note saying that she had gone. ‘Peace, peace at last,’ was what he had said.