The Rendezvous and Other Stories Read online

  But it was such a feeble refuge. He was so vulnerable in it, and he had no defence except pertinacity against such things as the gravel sprayed by running children. The children, the voices, the madly yapping, scurrying dog, they were all able to break in; yet he could defend himself to some extent – against those there was the barrier of numb remoteness and self-removal. The far more dangerous enemy, the enemy against whom he had no defence at all, lay just there on his left.

  If he were to stretch out his hand, and not to the full stretch either but only half a foot, he would touch her side. Her right shoulder, probably, for she had turned over some time ago to ‘do her front’.

  She had only to move, to say, ‘Darling, you aren’t burning, are you?’ to smash straight in. She possessed that power, was entitled to it, and several times already she had used it; once she had asked him to oil her back, once she had said that it was getting hot, and another time, having seen a French couple publicly embracing a little way along the beach, she had thought it would be fun and very ‘Continental’ to imitate them.

  But it was a long time now since she had moved or spoken. She was taking her sun-bathing very seriously; as she said, they had so few days left now that unless they wanted to go home without a tan they should spend every hour they could upon the beach.

  The time was short indeed. She had prolonged it twice already in spite of protests from her home; but for all that there would be little time now for lying in the sun. They had arrived at the hotel within a day of each other, in the same storm of wind and driven rain. This had been going on, said the despondent guests, since Tuesday; on Friday, when he arrived, it had never seemed likely to stop, and on Saturday, when the girl came dripping from the station, it appeared to be set to foul for ever. The people of the town said that there would be no grapes at all that year – mildew in the vines and the cold rain-bearing wind blowing perpetually from the sea.

  The rain poured from the gutters of the roof. Cactuses and palms glistened in the wet; the pomegranate flowers lay beaten in the mud. The hotel was not designed for indoor life; it was meant for sleeping in and eating meals. There was no sitting room and in the bedrooms the hard wooden chairs were shaped for holding bags and clothes. The inhabitants of the town, amazed by this weather (although they had it nearly every year), clustered in the cafés with their friends and stared at the racing sky or repaired their wine barrels and their fishing gear; but for the people in the hotel there was nothing to do at all. Those who spoke French joined together in sudden intimacy and talked with strange, compulsive freedom of their affairs, but these two spoke no French and obviously they were thrown one upon the other; and he, from idleness, boredom, and a feeling that it was ‘the thing to do’, had seduced her.

  That is to say, he had adopted a gallant attitude, and very quickly he had been hurried by circumstances, by an untimely consideration for her feelings (for she was as serious as she was plain), by moral cowardice and by the utter impossibility of getting away, into making declarations that he did not mean and into doing – doing, that was the inescapable fact – that which he had only the faintest desire to do.

  If only the rain had stopped one day earlier … the recollection of that unhappy, intensely self-conscious grappling made him sweat, and echoing in his head there came her words, ‘When we are married, darling, we will read psychology together.’ The echo exactly reproduced the mincing refinement of her voice, and the curiously artificial sound of ‘darling’.

  She knew all about psychology; she had ‘done’ psychology. She was a schoolmistress. She wore spectacles. She was what they called ‘one of the quiet ones’, and her convulsive ardours daunted him. She went a queer, mad colour when she was moved; a whiteness appeared about her nose and her lips went blue; it seemed that her heart was weak. She was awkward and superficially timid; but she had an astonishingly high opinion of her own abilities and she would recount, with satisfaction, the names of the diplomas that she had won; she was also persuaded that men found her irresistibly attractive and she said that she found travelling alone a great trial because of their attentions.

  If only she would go away he would be quite fond of her; he would indeed, and he would do all he possibly could to be agreeable by post. But she would not go away. Not in this life. He would have to kill her to make her go away. If he were to reach out now he would feel her there, and if he were to look sideways he would see her, fixed there and immovable.

  He would see her round and satisfied face, her somewhat positive expression fixed by years of her calling into a didactic rightness that would nevertheless melt into a tender leer when she saw him looking – a tenderness that would appear intolerably simpering and affected to his hostile eye. Or worse, an arch coquetry, a privy beam of concupiscence. At all events, he would see this red and peeling face with its cardboard nose-guard against the sun and he would either smirk back at it or commit a horrible brutality; her confidence was spectacular enough, but it was so insecurely based.

  Above the face he would see the bright cotton square – ‘Real peasant-craft, with such a merry, sincere mood … don’t you feel it, darling?’ – and below it the long, thick expanse of body, somehow improperly exposed in a bathing-dress, not deformed in any way yet giving the impression of indecency; then the short, powerful legs, close-shaven and terminating in espadrilles made by ‘such a simple, friendly peasant-body – so direct and uncomplicated – at one with the sea, the sun and the vineyards’. Those dreadful, carefully enunciated phrases, how easily they came tripping out and how complacently. ‘Oh darling,’ she had said when he had given her the monstrous little coral and cameo heart-shaped gawd, ‘What a definitely genuine mood it has – and the lovely, lovely symbolism of the piece of coral – (solemnly) darling, what a wonderful person you are.’ Then archly, winsomely, ‘And is it really all for poor me, he, he?’ And solemnly again, ‘I will keep it for ever. It must have been made by some little sunny artisan who loved it. Wherever did you find it?’

  He had found it under the paper that lined the cupboard by his bed, and Heaven only knew what uses it had served before; he had felt ashamed the moment he had given it, uneasy, irritated, and ashamed; it was so tawdry and her enthusiasm was so silly, and yet when she said, ‘I will keep it for ever’ there was so much true and human feeling rising painfully through all the nonsense that it had stabbed his conscience hard.

  If only she would go away.… But she would never go away. And if he looked sideways she would be there, holding her brooch, her damned ‘for ever’ brooch.

  Yet perhaps if he looked sideways, if he looked sideways in point of fact he would not see the change he imagined; there would be no hurried rearrangement of the features into a romantic shape. Nor, if he reached out his hand, would he feel an answering reaction from her flesh. For nearly an hour ago her heart had given an odd triple beat and had then stopped. She had felt a confused exaltation which she had supposed to be a part of her radiant nervous state, something between sleep and dreaming, and she had never heard the guttural murmur that her dying throat had whispered out. Her right arm and leg had contracted momentarily, almost touching him; but they had relaxed at once.

  Her body now lay under the sun much as it had done before. Her mouth gaped a little more than usual and her eyes were staring wide behind her sun-glasses. If he looked at her closely he would see the blueness of her lips, but he was familiar with that and it would not strike him; he would also be deceived by the oil and the tan that she had already acquired – by the oil particularly because it gave a superficial gleam and because in places it had caught the dust (this tideless beach was very dusty) and that made the skin look inhuman anyhow.

  And if he touched her he might still suppose her to be asleep. She was not rigid yet; and the sun still gave her warmth.

  But cradled in his red dark secret world he did neither of these things. Although he knew that by now his back must be burning he lay there motionless, retracted and curled up.

  The m
etallic voices of the large family to the right Were now discussing lunch; they were calling the children with threats. There was a noise of furling parasols and the grind of their retreating steps at last. Now the chief sound in the forefront of the general, though diminished, clamour was a long stream of words in some Scandinavian language, all delivered at the same high, even pitch – a young man reading to his mother from a book.

  From time to time all this seeped in, together with the sound of leaving feet, the long, sad whistle of the train far off – that must be the big express – and oddments of sound like the splashing of a stone or an isolated cry.

  He went far, far down into his retreat, but all the time there was a part of his mind that was recording the noises by the sea and when he came near to the surface again he was in possession of two facts. One was that the beach was nearly empty now; the other, that she had not moved for such a very long while that she too must be burning in the sun.

  She would certainly move quite soon. She would think he was asleep; she would pat him, and in a deliberately musical voice she would cry, ‘Billy! Wake up darling!’ She called him Billy, or Billy-boy; and his name was Hugh.

  Yet on the other hand, if he raised his head and himself dispelled his safety, she could not break in. There would be nothing to break into. He began to count; he would reach a thousand slowly.

  Away down the beach there was a grating sound as the rich people with the villa across the bay launched their boat – the grating and then the hiss as it took the sea. It was a huge silence after that.

  At seven hundred and thirty-two he stopped, stopped instantly and flushed. His counting flew to the winds and he found that he was tingling all over with anticipation. Quite deliberately he raised his head, holding his breath and already straining his eyes round under his closed eyelids. He felt the crinkling of the burnt skin on his neck and then an intolerably brilliant flood of light blinded his opening eyes; they were distorted from his long pressing on them and all he could see as he peered so intently was a dark shadow by his side.

  The long beach stretched away on either hand. There was nothing alive but a solitary gull, immobile at the farther end; in the dead stillness the sea was flatter still, and only once a single ripple made the faintest sighing on the stones.

  He did not look again until his view was clear. There was nothing at his side. With a violent emotion that he could not define he saw that there was nothing, nothing but his own shadow and the hollow where she had lain, and in the hollow the cameo and coral brooch surrounded by a little heart of stones.

  He leant over it, observed mechanically that it was flecked with salt, and furtively he picked up his clothes. With a bowed head he hurried silently across the burning shingle to the road; he was aware of no emotion clear in words, but as he reached the steps he realized with horror that his face was streaming with tears, and that as they fell upon the stone they dried there in little rounds.

  Billabillian

  CORNELIUS O’LEARLY slid the last ten pieces of eight into the canvas bag and put it down again under the table with a grunt. The total was the same as before, when he had checked and re-checked it; but he was glad to have the confirmation fresh in his mind: it would not do to make a mistake.

  He sat down in front of the neat arrangement of papers and reviewed them anxiously: there was nothing missing, and he could find but one thing to do – he ranged the row of weights on the right-hand edge of the table in a still more exact line of descending size. He wished the captain would come, but he knew very well that a good half-hour must elapse before he heard his step on the companionway. Cornelius had begun his preparations far too soon: even before the anchor had roared out in Sumbawa Road at dawn he had started laying out his bills of lading, cargo lists, and books. The ship, the Trade’s Increase, lay under the shelter of Bloody Point, cut off from the ocean swell, and for once the wide, brass-bound table held his ranks of weights, his piles of coin, his strings of cash, his rulers, and his pens as firmly and as solidly as though it had been on dry land. It was all ready, and he wished the captain would come.

  It had been a long voyage, a hundred and eighty-three days from the Pool of London, and Cornelius was burning to be ashore: but he knew that he must not move from the cabin until the captain had come below to inspect his papers, and until between them they had concluded the payment of the billabillian with the captain of the port. He averted his gaze from the porthole and began to repeat his tables again. ‘Ten pecooes, one laxsan; ten laxsans, one cattee; ten cattees, one uta; ten utas, one bahar.’

  Yet although he could shut out the sight of the crowded harbour inshore, with its forest of masts, curving bamboo yards and rattan sails, he could not prevent the warm scent from drifting in and breaking through the dutiful, ordered line of calculations in his head. It was a heavy, indefinable smell: he could distinguish all the spices, but there was the scent of the tropical land, green leaves still wet from the warm rain of the night, and a thousand other things without a name.

  They had smelled it first far out to sea. He had come on deck from the stifling cabin where old Mr Swann lay speechless and twitching under his heavy rugs, and in the milk-soft air he noticed it at once. One of the sailors had said, ‘Do you smell that? We shall make our landfall in the morning.’ And as Cornelius stood leaning on the rail, breathing the clean and scented air and watching the phosphorescent wave glide smoothly from the bows to the white fire of their wake, the sailor had added ominously, ‘The tide is on the make. But it will ebb when the moon dips down: he will not see the light.’

  They had buried the old man in sight of land, sewn up in canvas and with heavy shot at his feet: he had slid quietly off the grating and had vanished with hardly a splash in the clear green water, leaving a trail of white bubbles. He had been out of his right wits since they had left the Cargados Shoals, that fetid and toothless old man without a nose, but he had been kind when he was not ill, and Cornelius, thinking of him now as he looked at an entry in the dead man’s hand, felt ashamed that he was so cheerful and excited.

  A general roar on deck broke across his train of thought: he looked up, and there, framed in the wooden square, was a brown girl, her face and her bare breasts pointing up to the rail. She was holding a basket of fruit to show, and as she stood in the unseen boat, gliding from right to left, the ripple of the water, reflected from the side of the Trade’s Increase, flickered over her satin body. The crew were shouting a babel of encouragement, praise, and invitation: Cornelius heard the loud smacking noise as one kissed his hand, and the girl’s cat face smiled. Cornelius had heard that the heathens went about with almost nothing on, and he was charmed to find it true: he felt the strong stirring of his blood, but as he heard the bellowing of the mate he blushed and restrained himself from going over to the porthole and craning out. There was a padding of bare feet on deck and then the renewed hammering as the men went to work again on the hatches.

  He stirred uneasily in his chair. Would the captain never come? Beyond the porthole there was a square of brilliantly sunlit world, all the more dazzling for the darkness of the cabin: the calm dark blue of the road, with the ships lying spaced out; the paler blue of the harbour with the close-packed fleet of junks and proas; the cascade of green on shore, not very far away; and the sun over the whole of it was the sun of the land, warm and golden with dancing motes and heavy with the scent. They had coasted for a week, but still his nose was sharp from months at sea, and he drew in the air with a deep, savouring breath; it was as heady as wine, and it stirred him to the heart. Would the captain ever come?

  But he imposed on his face the serious look of a man – a man with great responsibilities – and repeated, ‘The Java tael is two and a quarter pieces of eight, and that is two ounces English.’ He laid his hand over a paper whose edges were curling in the sun and went on, ‘The Malay tael is one ounce and a third: but the China tael is one ounce and a fifth. So the China tael is six-tenths of a Java tael exactly.’

 
Yes, he had all that by heart. All the currencies, weights and measures of the East Indies and the Spice Islands at his fingertips. And he knew his bills of lading by heart, too: there was no need for this array of papers. He could tell precisely what they had in their cargo and where it was stowed, without his lists. But they had to be there; it was orderly and correct, and their neatness gave him a feeling of solidarity and accomplishment. He was sure that the captain would be pleased. He had seen little of him, but from what he had seen, he knew that the captain liked exactitude: Cornelius had already been commended for knowing how many barrels of powder there were without having to go and count them. That had been a little while after Cornelius had been moved from the Clove to the Trade’s Increase because of Mr Swann’s illness, and just before the captain himself went down with the calenture that, together with scurvy, had attacked the whole ship’s company when they were making their northing from the Cape. It had been a sickly ship from the start of this long and dangerous trading voyage, and they had all thought that the captain was going to die. But every morning and every evening, except for the days of the great storm, they had heard the psalms coming from his cabin, and just before old Swann sank for good and all, the captain reappeared on deck, thinner than ever, pale in his black coat, silent, but very much in command. He had at once had the guns run out – they were still a match for any Dutch ship, in spite of their losses – and had had two men flogged who were slow and remiss.

  ‘You are a lucky devil, Teague,’ said the mate to Cornelius (the mate was lax in his expressions). ‘You have all the luck in this ship, I believe.’

  In a way it was true. Both the men over him had died: Wilson of the calenture in Saldanha Bay and at last old Swann; and when their consort the Clove had vanished in the storm, Mr Rolfe and the merchants’ factor had vanished with her, leaving Cornelius and the mulatto clerk as the only men, under the captain, for the trading, which was the heart and being of the venture.