The Four Beauties Page 3

  By this time the pleasure of teasing the boy, shallow though it was, had slightly worn off. Not wholly bored, she nevertheless started to find his presence about the place mildly irritating. And one very hot July afternoon, in a deliberate attempt to re-stimulate the amused pleasantries of the early acquaintanceship, she slipped off even the bikini and lay quite naked in the sun.

  She lay there for a good hour or more before gradually becoming aware that she was mildly irritated herself. For some reason the boy, she started to tell herself, wasn’t coming back that afternoon. In growing irritation she realised that the surprise she had planned for him, the surprise of discovering her there in full nakedness under the rose tree, was a sort of poor joke that had failed. From across the marsh she heard one of its many church clocks strike three and then, some moments later, as if in echo, the slow funereal boom of a fog-horn.

  The sound, mournful at any time, seemed even more like the moan of a dying animal in the hot July air. It mystified her that fog could possibly lie out at sea while she herself basked naked in the pure blissful heat of afternoon. Still further irritated, she found herself longing for the boy to be there, to touch her, caress her breasts, soothe her growing vexation and finally share her pleasure.

  She heard four o’clock strike. A few minutes later the sun abruptly disappeared. A grey curtain of sea-fog drifted in and the air was suddenly damp and cold. She suddenly felt cold too and ran into the house to dress herself.

  Dressed and imprisoned by fog, she mixed herself a stiff pink gin and gulped the greater part of it quickly. The lazy pleasure of the early afternoon had gone the way of the sun. She was again not merely irritated but querulous, cross, on the verge of being truculent. Every minute, after another gin or two, she became more and more loose-lipped, smoking in unsteady gasps, uneasily pacing about the rooms.

  It was past five o’clock when she heard the stutter of the boy’s small mo-ped coming up the track. That too merely served to irritate her and her voice was strident, even vicious, as she answered his call of ‘May I come in?’

  ‘Well, you bloody well know the way in, don’t you? You should do by now.’

  Coming into the sitting-room, he paused only a foot or two over the threshold, clearly nervous, as if about to apologise about something.

  ‘I thought you were coming to trim the lawn? I had a surprise for you, a nice big juicy surprise. But forget it now. Where the hell did you get to?’

  He started to explain that his mo-ped had gone wrong. He’d had to walk a couple of miles to a garage to get the necessary spare part and then back again and by the time—

  ‘And then the bloody fog came in.’ She suddenly laughed, partly against herself, softening. ‘And me without a stitch on. You silly darling, why couldn’t you have come? I was there waiting for you—’ her voice was already dragging its words, slightly out of control – ‘I wanted you to cook me – turn me over – get me brown all over—’

  She sidled voluptuously against him, put both arms completely round him and in a voice growing more and more loosely lugubrious said she was sorry she’d spoken so sharply. But there were times when a girl wanted things, even wanted them badly, terribly badly. And one thing she’d always wanted was to get her breasts sun-tanned too, brown as the rest of her.

  Just as men in moods of cold sobriety look on drunks with dispassionate embarrassment, seeing only objects of pathetic ridicule, he stood there statuesque, unmoved, not part of her mood and not knowing what to do.

  ‘Have a drink,’ she suddenly said. ‘Warm you up after the fog. It’s bloody cold, that fog. Warm you up. No use making love when you’re cold – have to be warm – have a drink, darling. Let me—’

  No, he said, he wouldn’t have a drink. In fact it wasn’t his intention to stay more than a few minutes anyway.

  ‘Undress me. Here if you like. We’ll use the settee – undress me, darling, here—’

  Nervously he bit and licked his lips, clearly unable to find or frame the words he intended to say.

  ‘What was that you said, darling? Not staying? Oh! but you are – now that I’ve got you here.’ With groping fingers she started to unzip her dress, revealing smooth brown shoulders. ‘See how marvellously brown I’m getting – want to get like that all over, every inch—’

  The next thing she heard, and then at first not very clearly, was:

  ‘I really came to tell you I wasn’t coming any more. I got a job down at the power station. It’s big money.’

  With gin-soaked eyes she stared at him for fully half a minute, during which she tried several times to light a cigarette and each time failed hopelessly to bring lighter and cigarette together. Then she started laughing, nervously.

  ‘Blast. You’re going to what? Don’t bloody well make me laugh. Of course you’re coming again.’

  She suddenly let her dress slip completely off and down to her ankles. Her exposed breasts, two paler cups in the almost acorn-brown of the rest of her body, stood out in invitation.

  Stonily he resisted the invitation and then stuttered out a statement that first shattered and then infuriated her:

  ‘I don’t think it’s fair to Mr Bartholomew.’

  The sublime innocence of this sentence left her for a few moments impotent, utterly at a loss for any word, angry or otherwise. Then he opened his mouth to say something and she flew at him, bitterly:

  ‘Who’s talking about being fair? Oh! grow up. Be adult, for God’s sake. We don’t talk like that nowadays – it’s fifty-fifty, isn’t it? We’re in it together. Who’s talking about—’

  ‘I still don’t think it’s fair to Mr Bartholomew. He’s been very good to me.’

  ‘Amazing conclusion to come to. Bloody amazing conclusion.’

  ‘We ran down to the coast last Saturday afternoon while you were resting. He wants to buy a boat.’

  ‘Oh! don’t talk rubbish. Who the hell cares about boats?’

  Suddenly she softened again. Laughing loosely, she lifted his hands to her breasts, guiding them into movements slow and caressive. His response to this was as cold as the sea-fog outside and her next words had a bitter whip in them:

  ‘What in hell’s the matter with you? It’s like trying to rouse the dead.’ The bitterness rose to a fearful stridency. ‘But then you couldn’t anyway, could you? You never even had one good short innings, let alone a long one, did you? Bowled first bloody ball, every time. You never even once even remotely bloody well made it—’

  He stood shattered too, white-faced, unable to say a word. The effect was to goad her into one final intolerable screech of strident bitterness, half hysterical. Savagely covering her breasts she whipped at him shrilly:

  ‘Drop me a post-card one day. I’ll pack them up and send them to you. Registered. Cash on delivery, darling, cash on delivery.’

  The following weekend Bartholomew found her deep in a mood of grey gloom and petulance, drinking as early as nine o’clock in the morning, brain wandering, eyes as filmed as those of a dying fish. Her talk was again inexplicably bitter and of how she hated the bloody marsh, the bloody sea-fog, the fog-horns, the herons, the grey dykes and above all the cottage and being there alone.

  ‘But where’s Roger? Where’s the boy?’

  ‘Mr High-and-Mighty got too big for himself. Said I’d offended him or some damn thing. Withdrawn his labour, as they say. It’s always the way with these people. You treat them as equals and they spit on you.’

  ‘I think that’s a bit strong. He didn’t by any chance make a pass at you?’

  ‘He couldn’t make a pass at pussy.’

  ‘Oh! we can’t have this. This is ridiculous. The boy’s always been so friendly. There must be some explanation.’

  ‘You go and seek it.’

  ‘I think I must. We need him. He’s made such an awful difference to the place. Besides, I hate bad feeling. And I must say I’ve got awfully fond of the boy, in a way.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ Bitterness flowed again, unr
estrained, shot with the thinnest laughter. ‘Tell him from me I’ll write him a reference. Strong, willing lad, paints, cooks, gardens, waits at table, spits in your eye. And oh! by the way, what was all this about buying a boat?’

  Yes, Bartholomew said, he thought of buying a boat. He’d always wanted to. Now that the cottage was all spick and span he rather wanted a new interest. And after all it seemed silly to be so near to the sea and not have a boat. It also seemed that the boy knew of one, fair-sized and pretty serviceable and not all that expensive.

  ‘Went to sea in a pea-green boat,’ she said. ‘You’ll go alone if you do. Boats are not for me. Boat me no boats.’

  Once alone again, bitterness stifled, she nursed the absence of the boy with something very near to grief. With remorse she regretted everything she had said to him. Affection for him expressed itself in long cold spells of remorseless self-chastisement. A need for love found its answer in equally long gin-blind moods, grey and near to despair.

  Bartholomew was late coming home that evening and she went to bed, securely drunk, without him, so that it was almost midday on Sunday morning before she was sober enough to ask:

  ‘Well, did you see our late and unlamented Jack-of-all-trades?’

  Yes, Bartholomew said, he’d seen him.

  ‘And what about the boat? Did you buy the pea-green boat?’

  They were, Bartholomew said, going to try it out that afternoon.

  ‘And does it sail or has it got an engine? or do you have to row, jolly old row?’

  It had sails and an auxiliary.

  ‘Needless to say the Jolly Roger will do all the work.’ Bartholomew now said that he wished she wouldn’t talk like that. It wasn’t fair on the boy. He’d talked to him yesterday for a long, long time and he’d got the impression that there was something big on his mind that he couldn’t talk about. You might even say he was tortured about something in an odd sort of way.

  ‘Calf-love, I expect. They get it at that age.’

  Something more than that, Bartholomew thought. He divined somehow that it had something to do with her. He got an increasing impression that the boy thought he’d offended her and not the other way round.

  ‘Like I told you,’ she said, ‘he couldn’t offend pussy. I expect it’s some tart goading him, some bird—’

  He really thought he looked quite ill, Bartholomew said.

  These last words affected her so much that she lay on her bed all afternoon, in a stupor of self-chastisement that brought her, at last, to tears. She ached to talk to the boy, to explain, to apologise, to redeem herself, to make for some better understanding. She was gripped, instead, by a dark self-pity and in the end, by evening, went back to drinking.

  Bartholomew, returning home about eight o’clock, was a man as pleased with himself as a child with a brand new toy. He could speak of nothing but the boat, how she handled, the dream she was and the bargain, of how the boy would crew for him and how mightily competent, that afternoon, he had proved to be. Among all his other accomplishments he was now revealed as a damn good sailor.

  ‘Learnt it all from one of the local fishermen. Old life-boat johnny. Taught him all the wrinkles. It’s pretty tricky, this piece of coast. Hellish currents all over the show.’

  Uninterested, she listened through a haze of alcohol.

  ‘I’m so damned pleased with the thing,’ Bartholomew said, ‘that I’ve decided to take three weeks or a month off and really give her a thorough go. She’s sea-going all right. Thought I’d call her Sea Queen.’

  And what, she asked, did he call a thorough go? Where would he go?

  ‘Roger says he’s perfectly capable of taking her across the Channel and down the French coast. I thought we might even take her up the Seine, say as far as Rouen.’

  Well, he could count her out on that, she said. The simple life on shore was bad enough. But she wanted still less part of it at sea.

  ‘The boy’s never been abroad before. I thought it would be a great experience for him.’

  Really? Hadn’t there been, she said, some talk of his working at the power station? How was he arranging that?

  ‘Oh! I talked him out of that. It isn’t the job for him. He’s an outdoor man. The sea and the marsh and all that – that’s him.’

  Oh! indeed? she said. He seemed all of a sudden, she thought, to have started to take an almighty strong interest in the boy.

  ‘Well, frankly I have. I’ve got sort of attached to him.’

  Attached? She seized on the word like an alcoholic tigress. And what the freezing hell did he mean by attached?

  ‘He’s very sensitive—’

  Oh! indeed? How charming. And had the boy by any chance become attached too?

  ‘I don’t think it’s a thing to be sarcastic about. He’s going through a trying period – I feel tremendously in sympathy with him. He’s awfully sensitive. He’s all tangled up about something. I’d like to give him some understanding—’

  Oh! let’s all shed salt tears for the cabin boy, she said. Poor little cabin boy—

  ‘That’s pretty cheap,’ he said, ‘pretty low—’

  And so he, she supposed, was the pretty boy? Was that it? It was all very touching. She could only hope they both enjoyed their long French honeymoon.

  ‘I ought to belt you for that. But God help me, I doubt if you’re even worth belting.’

  No? she said. Then he could pour her a drink instead. A good long big whisky. Then she could wish him luck, good health, bon voyage, bless the bride and happy nights on honeymoon. God bless the Sea Queen and all who sail in her, while she stayed at home and burnt her bloody heart out.

  Alone, on a day in August, she walked across the marsh, along the dykes. A keen wind, quite cold, was blowing in from the sea, ruffling and bending brown feathered reeds, pale lilac heads of marsh-mallow, purple torches of loose-strife. The many grazing sheep on the pastures were accompanied by white-grey flocks of gulls, feeding and spasmodically flying from one field to another. The towers of the power station, some distance down the coast, had the appearance of some curious castle, ancient but new, the colour of grey sand.

  It was her intention to walk the four miles or so to the sea. She would, she felt, feel freer by the sea. A solitary imprisonment on the marsh, alone in the cottage, an entire month of the simple life, had become tolerable no longer. She had to walk, see the sea, acquaint herself with a new horizon.

  Winter, as she had always felt it did, had once again begun in August. The voices of sea-gulls were harsh on the wind. There was a cold, clenching touch of salt in the air and ahead of her a heron rose from the dykes in slow flight, a grey ghost watching for prey.

  The Four Beauties

  I first met the Davenports when they kept a little café behind the market square where, in a brief, highly unsuccessful and very painful spell of purgatory, I worked, or pretended to work, as a press reporter.

  The little shop, not much more than fifteen feet square, was wedged behind a churchyard, between a row of solicitors’ offices, a doctor’s surgery and a religious bookshop, very much like a shabby orphan long since abandoned by the wayside and left there, unwanted and for ever unretrieved. Round the corner was the coroner’s office and to this I dutifully went every morning to inquire if, by any chance, some unfortunate had been murdered, had committed suicide or come to some other untimely and perhaps violent end in the night. After this I called in on Mrs Davenport for a cup of tea, a poached egg on toast and sometimes an unusual sort of saffron cake, looking very much like a bright yellow toadstool.

  Like her shop, Mrs Davenport, who was probably about thirty-nine, was slightly shabby. This is not to say that she was unwashed or in any way a slattern. She seemed merely to lack any kind of inspiration. The pinafore-smock she generally wore was clean enough but it always looked rather as if a restless and hairy horse had rolled on it for some considerable time. In the same way her dark hair was never quite in and never quite out of curlers. Somewhere she had simp
ly lost heart about the business of either putting them in or taking them out again.

  A little inspiration, or even a little lipstick, I always felt, would have worked miracles with Mrs Davenport, who was not only quite young and well-shaped but attractive in a doll-like way, but certainly none ever came from Mr Davenport. You never saw Mr Davenport in attendance at the steaming tea-geyser behind the counter; it was never he who came in from the back of the shop with the toast, the saffron cakes, the poached eggs or the plaice and chips. But sometimes a collarless, slightly balding, unshaven, jockey-like figure in shirt-sleeves skived sharply through the café like some swift and haunted malefactor on the run and slipped back again a few minutes later carrying a couple of bottles of stout and one of our racing extras.

  But if Mrs Davenport had neither help nor inspiration from Mr Davenport she got a good deal from her three daughters, Tina, Sophie and Christabel. The most striking thing about the three girls was that they were not only beautiful, but beautiful in an utterly different way. Tina, the youngest, was fourteen and there were frequent moments when I, at twenty-two, felt quite elderly in her dark, delicate, impish presence. She had the eyes of a teasing, mischievous cat.

  Sophie, at seventeen, was much more like a flower. Her blazing red hair always caused me to think of her as a tiger-lily. Perhaps it was also because she always wore it brushed into Turk’s-cap curls, rather low in her long, honey-coloured neck. Her greenish sepia eyes were, strangely enough, not at all like those of a cat, when they clearly should have been. They had a deceptive limpidity that, until you knew her better, concealed a disarming – almost outrageous – way of changing expression, tone and colour, so that you never knew from one moment to another what mood lay behind them. You would see in them sometimes all the ardent, dreamy moodiness of someone deeply, even passionately, in love with you, only to have your hair madly ruffled a second later by the innocent fingers of a tomboy who not only hadn’t the vaguest idea of what love was about but who hadn’t an atom of femininity in her at all. She was, in fact, perhaps the most feminine of the three: elusive, intangible, infuriating and constantly giving the impression, in some odd way, of uneasy impermanence: as, if like a flower, her time of blossoming was not long.