The Daffodil Sky (9 page)

An afternoon of indigo and snow-white brilliance blew in exhilarating bursts of wind that flowered into occasional running whirlwinds of sand. Above the dunes there was a tossing and continuous murmur of pines. Waves lashed with glittering and exciting brilliance the
rocks of the small point and sometimes it was too hot, and then too cool, to lie on naked sand in the sun.

That afternoon he discovered her name; it was Yvonne, but he did not trouble about the rest. Michel or something, Madame Dupont had said. It was Friday; and he said something, just before they went back to the hotel, about her father coming back for the weekend. Whether, in the crash of waves and the general dazzling exhilaration of sea and sun and wind, she did not hear quite what he said, or whether she was really not listening or not wanting to listen, he did not know. But it was not until they were walking back along the road that she answered him:

‘Yes: he is coming back tomorrow.'

‘Until when?'

‘He will go back to Paris on Monday.'

He remembered the little short-sighted dapper man who could not read the menu; the flower in the buttonhole; a certain touch of obedient filial care about her attitude towards him at table. And it did not surprise him when she said:

‘I will have to be with him. He likes me to be with him. All the time.'

‘I understand.'

That evening they danced in the bar and walked, afterwards, along dark calm sands. Under stars of tense brilliance, to a barely audible splash of tiny waves, she kissed him several times; and said:

‘Please don't talk to me when he is here. It isn't for long. Two days. But he likes to walk with me. And play cards in the evenings. You know. That sort of thing.'

‘I know,' he said. That night, as she put it, it did not seem very long.

Next day, for lunch, there were langoustines. He ate six. Saturday, for some reason, was always a disappointing day for food, with dishes that seemed scratched up and tired; and Jean-Pierre set up a commotion of mocking:

‘Monsieur Harris doesn't eat his food! Monsieur Harris doesn't eat his food! How many langoustines?'

‘I think I'm getting tired of langoustines.'

‘When you take things on your plate you have to eat them!'

Madame Dupont flashed her spectacles:

‘I see the girl's father has come back. She always puts a flower in his buttonhole.'

He did not turn to look; and Jean-Pierre said:

‘If you don't eat your langoustines you can't come to the
pardon
tomorrow.'

‘It is the greatest
pardon
of all tomorrow,' Madame Dupont said. ‘It's a wonderful thing. You should see it. You should come with us.'

‘Please!' the boy said. ‘Please!'

‘We are hiring a car,' Madame Dupont said. ‘There will be plenty of room for you if you care to come.'

There was nothing else to do; and he spent most of Sunday roaming about with the boy and the governess on a high crowded hill full of the shrieks of a fair-ground and the droning of unending priestly incantations. All day a great throng of surplices swarmed about a big grey church like fat, flapping moths. Bishops in yellow robes led a whole hillside of peasant faces in moaning and singing and ceaseless prayer. At the foot of the
hillside drunken orgies started between alley-ways of fair-stalls, in cider-booths, and peasants reaped rich harvests from car-parks in paddocks and stubble fields. From the top of the hill a vast bay of sand, clear and superbly cleansed by weedless tides, stretched curving away against miles of bright blue ocean.

And looking at it, thinking of the other, smaller bay, of the girl and her body taking to it like a magnet the golden grains of sand, he felt pained by an ache of sudden anguish for her. He was smitten with grey loneliness, made worse by the dry wearying incantations, the shrill callings down from heaven. He felt sickened by people. He wanted no one near him but the girl, on the burning shore or in the calm darkness of the other bay.

That afternoon Madame Dupont bought many hideous tinsel statuettes of saints and Jean-Pierre ate
pommes frites
from a paper bag and at five o'clock they drove home.

Always, on Sundays, the hotel was crowded. French boys played accordions, and sometimes guitars, with loud sweet tunes, on the esplanade. The gramophone blared all day from the bar.

He gave up the idea of drinking about nine o'clock and decided to go to bed. As he passed the
salon
he stopped and stood looking in through the partially curtained dividing windows. A few games of cards were being played. Lights fell across litters of cards and small piles of money on green baize tables and he saw the girl, upright, neutral-faced, very quiet, playing with her father; but whether she was bored, or tired, or simply unusually circumspect in her black Sunday evening
dress he did not know. It struck him that, in these few moments, she hardly looked at her partner, dapper with his long amber cigarette holder, the flower in his buttonhole and his general French air of being the spruce shrewd successful man.

It was during that week, towards the end, that she saw, as they bathed, the scar on Harris' shoulder. It began a conversation not, as it turned out, so much about him as about herself.

Some time before this he had discovered that Madame Dupont had been wrong about her age; she had, perhaps, allowed for the fact that big supple girls are sometimes younger than they seem.

She was, after all, twenty-seven; and the conversation, for that reason, did not surprise him quite so much.

‘I have been married,' she said.

With an unpleasant choking sensation in his throat he lay looking at the sky. A sardine boat, chugging seawards about the point, seemed to travel for several miles before she spoke again.

‘During the war,' she said. ‘The scar reminded me. I wanted to tell you in any case.'

‘There was no need to tell me.'

‘You would have to find out,' she said.

She seemed suddenly, because of this remark, to speak more easily. The sardine boat cleared the point, quickening up its engines in a stabbing series of coughing barks that broke sharply across the water.

‘It was just for a day or two,' she said. ‘That's all.'

‘The war?'

‘Yes: a partisan.' She spoke quickly. ‘Two or three nights of love—and then, out—pouff!——'

She did not go on, and now as he turned to her, looking at her face, he found it unexpectedly pained and hard, embittered almost to giving the illusion of being old.

‘There was no need to tell this,' he said.

‘You would find out in time,' she said, and all of a sudden he felt all the fire of wanting her leap back, a sick central needle of pain. Her body, golden-grained with sand, rolled itself over to him, heavy with emotion, quivering to touch. ‘You would know,' she said. ‘You would have to know.'

The days of the middle week, in this way, mounted like a castle in sand. By the estuary, under hot white dunes, and then in the evenings, along the deserted shore, to the sound of tiny waves that were not more than spilled echoes, the structure of it, hot and frenzied and delicate, was raised up. And each time the weekend, like the sea, swept in and bore it away.

By each Monday he felt that a dark ugly hole had been torn in his existence. Not merely had the bright insubstantial castle gone. Her other existence, like the sea, had torn deep under it, leaving only a ravaged, lacerating hole of loneliness. He began to hate the dapper, card-playing flower-fop of a father who punctually came down every Saturday to perform, in his neat and neutrally precise way, the shattering extinction of everything beautiful the week had built up. He thought she hated it too.

On the following Friday, for the first time for several weeks, a squally wind brought an afternoon and then an evening of lashed cold rain. A squally touch of winter seemed suddenly to rip across the upturned tables of the
terraces. In an hour or two summer, like a sea-wrecked castle too, had been ripped away.

In the bar they had the customary dance or two, her body warm-pressed and supple against him as they went round and round to the familiar steel-worn tunes. But tonight, because of rain, the bar was full. Rain lashed at the windows and there would be no walking, he knew, to places made familiar by love along the deserted sand.

It seemed as if she too was thinking of this:

‘You could come to my room,' she said.

For a moment in the bedroom, before undressing, she went to the window to make sure that it was shut and to pull the long chenille curtains. She could not find the cord that pulled the curtains together, and for the space of half a minute she put on the light.

There, by the window, a coat stand held her father's hat and a crisp neat suit of cream alpaca he always wore when walking the esplanade, arm in arm with the girl, silver-headed walking stick jauntily swinging, on Sunday afternoons.

She saw him look at it. ‘He left them here to be cleaned,' she said.

At intervals he lay listening to cold rain beating with light flashes on the sea-exposed window beyond the heavy curtains. To his surprise, some time later, he turned and found her face, as he moved to touch it with his mouth, wet with tears.

‘Why are you crying? What is it?' he said. ‘What is it?'

‘I am thinking of the time when you will be gone,' she said. ‘I can't bear that time——'

He held her face with his hands, and as she cried a
dark accumulation of all that he felt at each week-end, the dry dead misery of being alone, deprived of her, gave him a sudden bitter foretaste of what he knew, in time, would have to come.

But it was only briefly. It was early August now; there would still be four, even five or six weeks of summer. Then he asked himself what would happen if the weather broke? and once more, afraid and hateful, he listened to the rain beating with its almost wintry harshness across the bay.

‘Supposing the summer breaks up?'

‘We shall stay now. I have told him I want to stay——' He could hear by her voice that she had stopped crying. She was restrained and quiet again and his fear of losing her, always uppermost in his mind rather than any thought of going away himself, stopped now too.

In the morning his fear was renewed and twisted round. He discovered, as he paid his weekly bill at the hotel desk, that he had somehow made a miscalculation in his money. At the beginning of his holiday he had seemed to be so rich in traveller's cheques that he had really never bothered to count them carefully. The weeks had stretched deliciously ahead. Now, it seemed, he had ten pounds less than he had bargained for.

It meant going home a week, perhaps two weeks, earlier than he had calculated.

She was curiously indifferent about these fears. His Englishness revolted against and was troubled by a calculation that had gone wrong. He was worried by the new post-war fear of having no money in a foreign country.

‘By the end of next week I'll have no francs left—nothing at all.'

‘I have francs. I can get you francs.'

‘But I could never pay them back.'

‘Who wants you to pay them back?' she said. ‘Who wants it? Who cares?'

In his English way he was bothered by a possible failure to do something correctly. It wasn't exactly a question of dishonesty; it was not quite the game. For her, on the other hand, war had killed the meaning, if she had ever understood it in the same way, of all such phrases. Nobody bothered about that sort of thing any longer.

‘I will get you francs at the week-end. All the francs you wish.'

‘I couldn't possibly pay you back——'

‘Please,' she said. ‘All the money in France is black market money. Nobody is honest any longer. Who cares?'

He did not know what to answer.

‘Everybody has given up worrying about these things. Everybody has to live——'

And after all, it seemed, when she spoke like that, very easy. She could get a little each week for him. And in that way he could stay on.

‘And I want you to stay on,' she said. ‘I want it so much. I don't want you to go——'

All the time he felt himself held back by a small irritating matter of pride. It was the old uneasy business of taking money from a woman. Of course people did it; there were times when you had to and perhaps there was, after all, really nothing in it; but it always
left a bad taste somehow, a feeling of a man being kept.

‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Somehow——'

‘But it's easy, it's so easy,' she said. ‘And if you don't take it you have to go——'

‘I know, I know,' he said.

‘Then if you know and it's so easy why do you make it so difficult?'

He could not explain. All that he felt about being kept by a woman sounded priggish and adolescent and horribly and smugly English. And yet there was something about being kept——

‘I love you,' she said. ‘Please do it for that. Please. You will do it for that, won't you?'

Well, all right, he said, he would do it for that. He would do it for love.

And then she had a sudden thought. It seemed to her that for him it was really, after all, nothing but a matter of pride, and she said:

‘I will put it in a letter. Every Saturday I will write you a little letter and tell you how I love you and the money will be in it.'

He laughed. ‘You think of clever things,' he said. ‘Don't you?'

‘Only because I love you.'

‘The more you love the cleverer you get?' he said, ‘is that it?'

‘Of course,' she said. ‘Every woman knows that is what happens——'

And so every Saturday morning, before breakfast, he would find her letter with the hotel-porter, and inside it enough francs to take him through the week, and
with the francs a little note, brief and tender, about how she loved him and how she was happy now because, with the money, he could stay a little longer. He took the note away to read on the shore, before he swam, and in the fine exquisite air he lost his fear.