Midsummer Night in the Workhouse Read online

  So there was nothing for it, the women felt, but to walk unhurried to the rocks, to change quite calmly and to reappear, cancelling with their indifference this unexpected playfulness. Neither looked back till they were hidden, when peeping round a boulder Jan could say, ‘At least they haven’t followed.’ ‘But are they getting dressed themselves?’ asked Sarah, and the answer was, they were not. Oh what a nuisance, both the women thought as they rubbed sand from feet and put on sandals. And as they folded towels about damp bathing-dresses they both glanced upwards at the cliff but neither said aloud: ‘It’s true, there is no way to climb out.’ Making sure that nothing was left lying, Jan asked carelessly,

  ‘Can you start an outboard motor?’ and Sarah answered,

  ‘He wrapped string round something and pulled, but what did he wrap it round?’ What, indeed?

  They stepped out from among the rocks, dressed, un- concerned, determined. Briskly they went across to where the two men still sat and Jan, picking up the ouzo bottle, dumped it on the piece of sacking. ‘We will pack up,’ she said to Christos, ‘while you and Spiro go and change.’

  Christos leant back on one elbow. He reached for the bottle, filled his glass and drank. ‘You no kiss,’ he said, ‘and we no go.’

  Turning to the younger man the women frowned and shook their heads, pointing to the boat; but he, glancing first at Christos for courage, only smiled, his lips parted, his eyes guilty but eager.

  ‘Now look,’ said Jan, ‘this is enough foolishness. We will get angry soon. It is time to go.’

  To which Christos replied: ‘You no kiss, we stay here all night.’

  Another silence. New York, the women thought, his age, his teeth, his status; here surely is an old man to whom we can talk sense. But when gravely and hopefully they looked Christos in the eye, there was no such man to be seen.

  ‘Christos!’ said Sarah gently in appeal, and hearing her softened voice he gleamed in anticipation, half-rose, caught her hand and pulled her towards him. ‘Christos!’ she cried out in anger, breaking away, and both men began to laugh.

  ‘We must be more angry,’ said Jan quickly and both women raised their heads, knit their brows and in hard voices began to scold. Courteously Christos poured more ouzo into Spiro’s glass and the men, having drunk, lay back upon the sand and grinned.

  ‘This is too silly,’ said Jan to Sarah. ‘Come, let us go to the boat.’ They turned away and went to where the wavelets laid handkerchief edges of foam upon the sand. They stood by the stone to which the boat was tied and looked at it. At the end of its rope it lay, some ten feet out, rubbing its splintered almost paintless side against a rock, much heavier to look at than they had expected, and a good hour from home. Could they row it? Oh no! While from its stern there hung the recalcitrance of that motor.

  The men rose and carrying bottle and glasses they came to stand behind the women, close behind. Christos bent forward so that between the women’s heads came a breath of garlic. ‘If you no kiss,’ he said, ‘all day we stay here and all night. I biggest bomb,’ and he began to cackle. Emboldened by this sound Spiro shuffled forward and gently put his arm round Jan’s middle. She wheeled, she saw his silly grin, and suddenly enraged she caught the glass of ouzo from his other hand and flung its contents in his face. He cried out, backed and fell upon his knees, his hand over stinging eyes.

  Now! thought the women; oh now what has been done? Will this have changed a joke into a threat? For how still Christos is standing, how silent is the beach. They held their breaths, but a few seconds having hovered, Spiro shook his head, got to his feet, looked first at Christos and began again to laugh. The men spoke briefly in Greek, then turned back to the women. Relish, it seemed, had been added to their game.

  Meanwhile the sun had moved. It was hidden now by the cliff ’s top and the strip of sand looked grey, no longer white. The sea had grown more steely and that cliff, so tall, had moved nearer.

  ‘We can’t stand here forever,’ exclaimed Sarah, and walked away, Jan beside her, tramping fast through heavy sand, haughty in displeasure; but how to be haughty with conviction when both could see and both the men could see that after thirty yards or less of tramping they would come face to face with unscalable rock? The men came after them, and when they turned, turned too. Bolder with the drink they scuffled nearer, grabbing an arm or laying a hand upon a shoulder, at which each time the women swung round and scolded, stamping their feet and contorting their faces, hoping that where words were meaningless expression would serve.

  In this way they crossed the beach several times and neither woman wished to speak to the other, for each had now considered the word ‘panic’, though only to reject it, and each feared to meet it in the other’s eyes. The sand, wet only at times of storm, did not hold the tracks of these absurd pacings but only looked disturbed. The next to land here might wonder what sea monster had come ashore to play. The careless sea and sky rolled on towards evening, and the cliff gathered a faint chill into its shadow. At last, after what was almost a tussle and a shriller scolding, the men stopped following and withdrew some paces to make themselves comfortable, reclining on the sand, penning the women in at the narrow end of the beach. ‘We stay here,’ said Christos. ‘We stay here all night if you no kiss. I bomb, Spiro bomb.’

  It was no longer possible for the women to keep silent together.

  ‘Can he mean it?’ muttered Jan. ‘Can he really mean it, about all night?’

  ‘How should I know?’ said Sarah sharply. ‘But look at the bottle, it’s more than half empty already, and at this rate . . .’

  ‘What shall we do? I have never been so angry.’

  They stared at the sea, they stared at the cliff, they glanced quickly at the waiting men. A minute passed, perhaps, and in that minute they both saw in rapid flashes, hastily suppressed, that things which happen to other people, Sunday-paper things, could happen, might happen, might be happening to them. All, they believed, depended on the woman – but they had kept cool, they had been firm, they had neither encouraged nor panicked and here they were with time stretching, absurdity mounting, anger impotent, these unimaginable possibilities beginning to be imagined, and how much longer could they bear it?

  Each waited for the other to say it, but Jan it was who at last, and miserably, whispered: ‘What do you think would happen if we – well, if we more or less gave in?’

  ‘I have been wondering,’ said Sarah.

  As though they had understood, the men got up and came towards them. Christos was grinning – his teeth, the monkey jaw, the garlic – but Spiro, noticed Jan, was handsomer when flushed. ‘Poor Sarah,’ she half-thought, then blushed with horror at the implications of the thought.

  Both women felt their mouths gone dry, hands wet and hearts beginning to thump. But ‘Christos is yours,’ whispered Jan accusingly, and Sarah took one step forward. She paused, she cleared her throat, and then in a shaking voice she said: ‘Christos, if we give one kiss – just one – we go?’ Christos nudged Spiro, but he nodded.

  ‘You promise, Christos?’ whispered Sarah.

  Christos put down the ouzo bottle and wiped his hands on the seat of his bathing-pants.

  Now, thought the women, the nightmare begins. Now we will have to – will we? – yes we will have to fight, it is too undignified, and it’s the struggling, they always say, which ends in . . . but they could not think it quite. They stood with their hands clenched, round eyes fixed on the approaching faces in which narrow eyes gleamed triumphant. The men moved nearer, each came to his woman, reached out his hands and took her by the elbows. The women flinched, screwing up their eyes. The men bent forward and each, softly, touched his lips against his woman’s cheek. For less than a second a question hung in the air, hands lingered on arms, and they stepped back. ‘Now we go,’ said Christos.

  As the men walked away to fetch their clothes, Jan cau
ght Sarah’s arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, we must not sit down’ – for she knew the other’s knees as weak as her own. ‘We must collect the picnic things and go calmly to the boat.’ This they began to do, but hardly had they gathered up the remaining crust and their own two glasses when they heard a shout of laughter. In his trousers and shirt already, Spiro came running out from the rocks, ran stumbling through sand to the boat, wrenched the rope from the anchoring stone, splashed, scrambled aboard and stooped over the engine. He fumbled for an instant, then jerked it into life, took the tiller and the boat began to chug away. He is circling to bring her closer in, they thought, but no – he was heading for home.

  At the sound of the motor out came Christos and ran to join the women, now at the water’s edge. He dropped his bathing-pants, he dropped the ouzo bottle. Raising his hands above his head he shouted in Greek and his incredulity was clear to understand. Spiro waved and shouted back, and whatever his words, to Christos they meant panic. Christos’s shouting turned to screaming. He danced on the sand, his face yellow under stubble, in Greek he screamed and sometimes, after all the foreign words he had spoken that afternoon, in English: ‘Goddam bastard, come back, come back,’ and there was terror in it. Behind him stood the women, quiet. Now they might have been two nieces with an uncle lost to dignity, dismayed at their predicament but furtively amused at his.

  After perhaps no more than two minutes Spiro did turn back, laughing like a giant, while the women looked away from Christos’s face to spare his panic. He stormed along the beach towards the boat, but Spiro, eyes sparkling, still held the tiller and too much storming would not have been wise. So changing fear and anger into impatience and authority, Christos bundled the women into the boat and grabbed the tiller.

  Away they spluttered along the coast on water now Prussian-blue, in three camps: Spiro giggling, Christos muttering and the women breathless and exhausted. But as they went the muttering became less, Spiro’s smile, unwill- ingly, was sometimes returned, and after half an hour the two men drew together, talked and began to laugh. Then ‘Boat?’ called Christos to the women in the bows, and ‘Barca,’ answered the women. ‘Sea?’ called Christos, ‘Thalassa,’ answered the women. And they came again to the bay from which they had set out, the men to tell in triumph of what they had done, the women to keep silent in shame at what they had thought.

  A WEEKEND IN THE COUNTRY

  They had met two months earlier, in London, where Elizabeth lived and worked. She had been amused at first to find how much she enjoyed Richard’s company. He did not know the people she knew or do the things she did, but her childhood and early youth had been spent in his part of the country, she had been born into the world from which he came, so that she understood at once the sort of man he was and felt easy with him in a secret way which would have been hard to explain to her usual companions. Elizabeth shared a flat with another painter, Maggie Brent. When Richard came to London again, surprisingly soon after their first meeting, he invited her to go with him to Burlington House for the Royal Academy’s summer show, and she did not tell Maggie. She did not want to be teased, because she herself was touched. It was unlikely that Richard would have gone alone. She is a painter, he had thought, making no distinctions. She will want to go to the Royal Academy. He had walked round the exhibition conscientiously, liking best a small painting of his own estuary – his family’s house, he said, was behind a low hill in the left background – but anxious to learn the point of even the most ‘modern’ work there. Elizabeth had so far managed to avoid showing him anything of her own except for a few sketches from life, which he had admired. To know so well how he would see things put her in a false position. His incompre- hension or dismay at her abstracts would have embarrassed her – for his sake, she felt, though she hardly knew why – so she spared him occasion for such reactions.

  He was the son who had stayed at home to run the estate, now that his father was old. One of his brothers was in the navy, the other a doctor with a large practice in the county town. His sister had married a baronet and vanished to Northumberland. In London, among painters and writers and journalists and actors, he seemed improbable; but Elizabeth knew from her own connections that many people like him still existed, unaware that their lives looked strange to anyone. She, of course, was among those to whom they did look strange – only, at the same time, they did not. It was confusing to be so deeply familiar with the strangeness as it came back into her days with Richard, against whom there was no need to rebel, with whom she didn’t even wish to argue.

  He was attractive to her: a thin dark man, gentle, and rather silent at parties, but no fool. Alone with him, she had discovered that he was an excellent mimic, quick to catch the quality of people, and that he responded (this meant much to her) to sights, sounds and words with a sensitivity not superficial because it was limited. Though he saw beauty only in what was conventionally ‘beautiful’, he saw it with feeling, and he was not inarticulate. He could not be dismissed tidily as a philistine. To weigh him like this in her private scales made Elizabeth uneasily aware of a fastidiousness bordering on snobbery which she disliked acknowledging in herself.

  It had not been easy to keep out of bed with him, but she had done it until now because the relationship’s unreality alarmed her. She might not have succeeded if she had not made it a game, on their first evening together, almost to caricature the kind of girl she considered appropriate to him. She had cast Maggie as a duenna-figure – a most un- likely role. That established, and Richard, who stayed with an aunt when he was in London, having no alternative accommodation to offer, it was possible to cut short dangerous goodnight drinks. Richard would clearly have welcomed bed if it had happened, but would not manoeuvre for it too openly unless encouraged; would not, for instance, suggest a hotel until the first steps in an affair had been taken. But Elizabeth’s uncharacteristic decorum had created problems instead of dispelling them. What had begun on Richard’s side as an attempt at a holiday flutter with someone he had supposed to be conveniently ill-behaved, was becoming serious. Without meaning to, she had driven the hook home, and now he had asked her to spend a weekend in the house behind the hill in the painting.

  ‘Can it be that the landed gent is seriously épris?’ Maggie had asked.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly. If you live in the wilds the only way you can see people is by having them to stay – it’s no more significant than dinner parties are for us.’ But it was clear to her that this time it was more than that.

  They drove down on Friday afternoon. When they arrived she found that she was seeing the house as Maggie would have seen it, admiring its proportions and the texture of its Georgian brickwork as though she were on a conducted tour of a Stately Home, hearing Maggie’s ‘Good Lord! How many people do they have to cut the grass?’ when she looked out of her bedroom window over the sweep of lawn. There was running water in her room, but she saw the Italian housemaid taking a brass can into Richard’s, and in the bathroom there was a Turkey carpet and mahogany casing round the tub. She saved these things up to exaggerate later, with the one glass of sweet dark sherry before dinner, and the talk about dogs and the garden fête to raise funds for the Conservative Party, but at the same time it was all so like her own grand- parents’ house that even the smells – beeswax in the passages, roses and pot-pourri in the drawing-room, dog-biscuit and gumboots in the back hall – made her feel at home. She smoked less than usual, said the right things in the right way or kept silent, and put on flat shoes the next morning. She was the only person to know that she was out of place, and to give a sign of it, as honesty demanded, became more difficult every minute. She could as easily have picked up the pot-pourri bowl (a Chinese punchbowl, eighteenth century, decorated for the European market – no one had ever bothered to know as much about her grandmother’s) and smashed it on the floor.

  I am making too much of it, she thought. I am inventing the gulf between us out of some kind of va
nity. It is only that they live in the country and I live in London; that they have capital and land, while I have no money but my earnings. Our circumstances are different but we are not creatures of a different kind, there is no need to go into disguise.

  But still, and largely because this was true, she continued to lie low. It was so comfortable, so pleasant, in many ways so right to be breathing that air again. To have disturbed it would have offended her more than it would have offended Richard and his parents.

  On Saturday mild entertainment was provided for her: the doctor brother and his wife over to lunch, a cocktail party in the evening. She had always sulked at the cocktail parties of her years at home, but this, which might have been one of them, began by seeming delightful. There were two pleasures in it: waiting for people to come in on their cues and rejoicing when they did; or catching at the unexpected things, the non- conformist words or attitudes, as though she could carry them back to London and say, ‘There, you see! They are not all like you imagine. They are real people.’

  Soon she realised that the talk all over the room kept coming back to one subject: the proposed establishment of a ‘prison without bars’ on a stretch of coast about eight miles away, against which, she gathered, Richard’s father was campaigning.

  ‘Isn’t it dreadful for them?’ said a retired colonel’s wife from another part of the county. ‘Right on their doorstep like that.’

  ‘But it’s not on their land, is it?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘And surely eight miles is quite a distance? There have been open prisons in other places for years and I can’t remember hearing about any trouble. I believe they work wonderfully well, you know.’

  ‘But it will be hideous – just imagine: great barracky buildings and Nissen huts and things, spreading all over one of the few bits of the country that’s still really unspoilt. They will have to go right past it – everyone round here will – every time they drive to the station or do a bit of shopping. I think it’s outrageous.’