‘Maintenance?’
His wire uncoiled, touched the floor. ‘A wireless aerial fell on your terrace, and I was told to come through and get it back.’
Her accent was American, and she was thirty if she was a day, dark haired, and slightly sallow as if she’d had the odd bilious bout since her arrival. ‘They should have informed me from the desk.’
‘I thought they had. They’re very forgetful.’
She was cool, and gave a half smile. ‘You’re really a guest, aren’t you?’
He nodded. ‘I can’t get the BBC without the wire, and it fell out of my window.’ He told her the rest of his difficulties, which set her laughing: ‘I sure won’t forget that.’
The little plump bosom behind her red top moved when she stood, her smile showing the white and even teeth of a well cared for woman. He didn’t want to go. ‘Are you staying long in Egypt?’
‘Only a week. My husband’s ordered a boat to take us to Aswan. Then we’ll go back down the river to Cairo.’
The little red guidebook to Egypt on her table was so thick it must tell you everything. ‘Sounds good. We’re having a fortnight.’
She sat down again, enjoying their chat, and turned her chair to face this tall brush-haired thinnish man with his tattooed arm more squarely. ‘Are you a mercenary?’
‘Mercenary?’
‘A hired soldier.’
He would be, if he could, and thought he’d say yes. ‘When I can get the work. I’m running a boiler-room at the moment, where I come from, in a factory.’
‘You must have a few good stories.’
‘I have. I’d like to tell you ’em sometime’ – if I could get you where you’d like to listen. All women were different, but she was another world, though not so far out that after a while they couldn’t get used to each other. ‘I must go, though. My wife’s not well. It’s been nice meeting you.’
She came to show him the door, and shake hands. He was sure the pressure he put on was mutual. ‘I hope you get your radio to work,’ she said.
‘Sure to. I know all about ’em.’ He waved as he went down the corridor.
‘Have a nice day!’ she called.
‘What do you think?’ he told Jean. ‘In two minutes she was on her back naked with legs wide open and I was kneeling, bare as well, with the biggest hard on in my life. In three minutes she came, and in four I did. In five minutes her husband barged in, and we had a fight, so in six minutes I knocked him over the balcony, and in seven I grabbed my things and ran. I got dressed in the lift between two floors.’
Her laughter meant she was on the mend. Bogger the radio, he thought, at the look in her eye when she asked him to tell it again, only slower and longer, before saying come on, get into bed with me.
He fixed the wire, and reception was still uncertain. No powerlight came on, but new batteries made it as clear as a bell with the built-in aerial alone.
Next day on the West Bank he was carrying the book seen on the woman’s desk, bought for fifteen quid. He’d read all that was said about the area, opening it at every tomb and temple, and now there was little more to be seen. Mahmoud asked them to visit his house on the way to the ferry and have a glass of tea. Jean said yes, hoping for one more memory to take back.
‘He doesn’t mean it. It’s only their way, to offer.’ Daniel didn’t much want to, but the invitation was repeated, almost insisted on: ‘You meet my wives, and we say goodbye.’
‘He likes us,’ Jean said.
Mahmoud drove beyond the village, turned sharp right and took them into a courtyard surrounded by a wall of mud bricks.
‘I don’t like forceputs,’ Daniel said.
‘Let’s do it.’
‘Ah, all right, duck. I’m not a hard man!’
The mint tea was delicious, and sweet cakes went down a treat. Mahmoud’s six kids stood in line, fascinated at Jean and Daniel seated on wooden boxes covered with cloths. Daniel thought the two rickety storeys would fall down if you blew hard enough. ‘Lovely kids,’ he said. ‘And you’ve got a nice house.’
Three aunts and an old mother surrounded Jean, touching her all over, and Daniel saw how she enjoyed it. An hour passed quickly in talking, and smoking fag after fag. Mahmoud liked English brands. Jean stood up to go. ‘We ought to give him a present. I’ll bet it’s the custom.’
‘What, though?’ He looked through his haversack, not wanting to let the side down, and picked out his prized Swiss army knife, almost brand new. ‘Why not this?’
‘Yes, we can get you another.’
He opened all sections, which stopped the talk from dying away. ‘Yours, now. From us to you. I hope he’s pleased.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ Jean said.
Mahmoud smiled. ‘Very happy!’ He admired an unbroached box of English matches seen in the haversack, and Daniel gave him that as well. They shook hands, Mahmoud saying they were friends for life, and accepting another cigarette.
‘Come back and stay with us for a long time,’ he called from the top of the steps at the ferry, a grand and solitary figure in his robe, saluting as the boat pulled away.
‘He’s had a good week,’ Daniel said.
‘He needs it, with all them kids. Fancy having two wives!’ She looked down the broad sleeve of green towards the south, wondering where the river went. ‘They’re nice people here, though.’
‘The guidebook says it goes right to the middle of Africa,’ he told her, ‘and it’s four thousand miles long. About twice the distance from here to London.’
‘Don’t you know a lot?’ she mocked.
She noticed a haze-ring around the moon. ‘Do you think it’s going to rain?’
‘I hope so – after we’ve left.’
‘What a nice holiday it’s been.’
He poured the last of the vodka into two glasses. ‘In a couple of years we’ll go to Turkey, or Israel.’ That American woman might be walking along a street. He would spot her, and they would get talking. She would be on holiday without her husband, and remember him finding his length of aerial wire.
The men might be dishier there, Jean thought, even more than Mahmoud, or the man explaining all about the tombs, or the dandy at the tourist information bureau whose card she took out and looked at when Daniel wasn’t close. ‘I wonder what happened to your hat?’
‘I expect that soft young man will be wearing it after we’ve gone.’
She liked to imagine that.
‘It’ll be funny, getting home,’ he said. ‘Back in overalls and lagging them crumbling pipes. Still, at least I’ve got a good job, and I’m never bored at it.’
She looked at the line of palm trees and distant cliffs, and moon rays laid on the glass-like stream. ‘It’s been a dream here.’
He finished his drink. Where would we be without ’em? ‘You can never have too many dreams,’ he said.
A Matter of Teeth
DENIS’S GIRLFRIEND lived a few hundred yards from his dentist, so any onset of dental decay – which seemed to be necessary now that he was in his forties, and call for a long sequence of restorative bridgework – was not unmixed with a feeling of masochistic anticipation that he saw no reason to question. With such a perfect alibi, who cared about the muddy whirlpool of the psyche?
He said to his wife that the dentist’s only disadvantage was in being slow, but a man who took time over such work was none the worse for that. Deception was a murky trade, as he well knew, because hadn’t the British excelled at it in the Second World War?
For the sake of his mouth he sometimes wished Sylvia lived elsewhere but, being English and with the sort of teeth that went with it, he came to accept the situation, if not with complacency, then in the knowledge that there was something to be said for heredity after all. The managing director of a biscuit factory, he was as far from looking the part as possible, so casual in dress it was a wonder, his wife often thought, that the business hadn’t gone bump years ago. But his lackadaisical stance was deceptive, for he
got things done, and at the same time swore it had never been his idea to work more than necessary. ‘Things trundle along. We sell. We make a profit. The biscuits are even good. As long as we keep the bank manager at bay – and we’re doing that, believe me.’
Such an attitude, Glenda thought, was the bane of the country, but who was she to complain? Bringing up three children kept her busier than his work seemed to keep him. Complaining was whining, and too many people did that – another thing wrong with the country.
His meeting with Sylvia had been a boon to be taken immediate advantage of. He went alone to the party because Glenda wasn’t feeling well. Hadn’t she known that parties posed the kind of risk that he was in no mood to shirk?
Sylvia had been leaning against a bookcase as he went up the stairs, tall coffee table volumes on the lower shelf exaggerating the shape of her legs. Her face was no less interesting – thin (as was her body) but he noted the lively way she looked at him as he went by, and she thinking that he hadn’t taken in her glance. But he had: she would have to be sharper than that. She was: ‘I knew exactly what was on your mind.’
So his remark about ‘the well-heeled liberals of Hampstead’ drove the other man away. ‘That won’t get you anywhere,’ she said, ‘with so many dishy men around. I’ve never seen so many dishy men at one party.’
The fact that he was disliked on sight may have been what drew her towards him, for he always went to such places dressed in the opposite kind of garb to which he wore at work: a man of small stature, with dark hair, wearing a formal suit but casually knotted silk tie. Even so, he considered himself broad-minded and liberal, though a fatal ability to say the right thing made it difficult to put his views in that coherent braying voice usual at such places. If he succeeded and someone argued against him he reacted with such vehemence that they regarded him as an extremist of the opposite camp. ‘I think socialism’s a wonderful idea, but not when it’s used as a device by the middle classes to keep the workers in their place.’
Such outdated quips sent a shock through Sylvia that was not entirely of dismay. Neither knew what it was about the party that made him decide she was the most fascinating woman there, and her to agree that he was the nth dishy man. He heard her telling someone, as he was meant to, that her husband was at a scientific congress in the States. Maybe there was a full moon, though he couldn’t be bothered to check the almanack.
In the next few days he recalled her to mind many times. The coloured Polaroid shot stamped the fact that she had red hair, wore a grey skirt, and had black stockings. Or would he find they were tights? Her thinnish face was somewhat plain, except for the slight bow of vulnerable curiosity which shaped her lips. A week after the party he telephoned her, and she wondered why he’d waited so long.
When he fixed an appointment at the dentist’s he didn’t know whether to arrange it late in the day so that he could visit her first, or make an appointment early in order to receive some consolation afterwards for any discomfort undergone. Whatever he chose, she made him a mug of coffee, the ritual drink before the run upstairs.
He couldn’t recall such keen pleasure during his other affairs, and wondered if he wasn’t getting randier in his old age, or whether the prospect of the dentist’s drill didn’t act as an aphrodisiac. But maybe it had more to do with her, because she began undressing immediately – the ethnic sack over her head, revealing no bra (she hardly needed one) and the briefest of pants on the bedrail before he reached the third button of his shirt.
Decisions were complicated by her husband, but they managed it well, both agreeing that they did not want to cause pain either to him or to Denis’s wife. ‘What it really means is that we don’t want any pain for ourselves,’ he said.
She stared. ‘I wouldn’t like to be married to you.’
He didn’t care to inform her that the feeling was mutual, left hand planing across her breasts. She only pulled the counterpane back, so that they made love on the blanket, and when afterwards he laid his head beside hers, unable any longer to support his own weight above her, the wool hair texture irritated his recently worked on, or about to be messed about with, tooth. While dressing, he took out a cigarette.
‘Not in the bedroom.’ It was all right downstairs, but even there she didn’t approve, though her husband smoked those vile cigars now and again. She descended first, and he heard the abacus slide of the curtains, not sure what any sharp-eyed neighbour might think. ‘Coffee?’
He sometimes wondered whether or not he was in love with her, but really in love, apart from just loving her. The longer the affair went on the less he seemed to know her, which was strange after having thought, at first sight, that he had taken in everything.
Her abrasive, almost nonchalant manner enthralled him, and he sometimes found it hard to decide what else did. She was cool enough while making love, even when she came. ‘Please,’ he said.
‘Sugar?’
‘Do you love me?’ he couldn’t help asking.
A lithe grey cat jumped on the table to get closer to the caged bird. She put it gently down, sprayed coffee powder in his mug. ‘Of course.’
‘Put in two, then. And more coffee.’
The liquid blackened. ‘When’s your next appointment?’
‘I’ll phone you later.’ The cat tried again to get at the birdcage, dug its razor-points into his thigh and, he thought, fetched blood. He threw it off. ‘When does hubbie come back?’
‘Tomorrow, but only for a few days. And next week he goes to Japan.’
He closed the garden gate, thinking she ought to put some oil on the hinges, and walked down the street, far too old a campaigner to have left the car close to the house. A man, bearing the heavy duty briefcase that doubled for luggage and saved endless waits at airport carousels, passed him, and Denis recognised the click of the latch. He was a large bear-like man, going home after a week’s work, to the comforts he had no doubt dreamed about from the moment of leaving.
He sweated so much at the assumption that her husband had seen him coming out that the thumping toothache was forgotten even as far as the dentist’s chair.
When he phoned to inform her about his next appointment a man answered, and Denis made the elementary mistake of placing the handset down instead of asking for someone he knew couldn’t live there. The gaffe bothered him, but the following day Sylvia came on as usual. Even so, he was unnerved by a situation in which the husband returned a day before he said he would.
Glenda and Denis had often joked about having affairs, but she had been too busy, too tired all the time, too proud perhaps. She couldn’t be bothered, had never got the hots to the extent of action, and in any case had the sort of luck that any handsome man who stopped on the motorway to help her change a wheel after a puncture would die of a heart attack from the effort. And Denis said he had the kind of luck that if he helped a beautiful woman by the roadside he would die from a massive cardiac arrest at forgetting to ask for her telephone number.
Their sixteen-year-old son Jonathan came in from school, for some reason even scruffier than usual. ‘Glenda, I saw Dad this afternoon sitting in a car with a woman. I waved, but he didn’t see me. I was on the bus.’
‘It’s not surprising, then, is it?’ She felt the sort of palpitations as on discovering when she and Denis first met that they had birthdays in the same month.
‘Who do you think it was?’
‘Something to do with work, I suppose.’
Denis was home later than normal. ‘I saw you in the car this afternoon,’ she said, ‘with a woman.’
He laughed. ‘I wish you had,’ and opened his briefcase to show his appointments book. ‘I was in St Albans, looking at that new site. The traffic was atrocious. But I had to do it today because I must get my teeth seen to tomorrow.’
He wanted to ask what she had been doing in Swiss Cottage, but couldn’t, poor man. She’d got him there. But if he really had been in St Albans, and she wouldn’t put it past Jonathan to try mixi
ng them up, since he’d been in a very bolshie mood this last six months, then she had as much as admitted to being where she didn’t normally go. And she refused to make up a reason, in spite of that little boy pleading act which Denis put on.
Everything comes to those who don’t make accusations, if they live long enough. So she hoped, arranging things into their relevant racks in the kitchen, just back from buying bagels and black bread, vegetables and fish, hopelessly overstocking in the last few weeks.
She opened and closed the refrigerator, always finding other items on the table. Yesterday his dentist telephoned to say that his next appointment had to be put off, which enraged him because he had kept a whole morning clear for it. He was more distracted than ever, a state which seemed to be catching. Perhaps the biscuit trade was going downhill. ‘Not likely,’ he said, with what she could only think of as a sly smile. ‘If it was we’d put in more sugar, jack the price up a penny, and snuff ten grammes off the weight. If you can’t shift biscuits in England, where can you?’
Coming back from a visit to her mother’s she saw him in the call box on the corner. Funny place to be, with a functioning, telephone at home. ‘I tried,’ he said when she mentioned it, ‘but the dialling tone seemed dead.’
She held the flimsy bit of plastic to her ear. ‘It’s all right now.’
When the engineer came he could find nothing wrong, and looked at her as if she was ready for the funny farm. Lying in bed that night – Denis wasn’t snoring for a change – it was as if she could actually hear the full white moon, rustling, perhaps moving, trying to talk to her.
Denis had taken the green Volvo from the drive, as was his right. Her dented Mini at the kerb was ten years old, but except for a little rust around the left headlamp it was the best runabout she’d ever had, always refusing to let him buy her a Golf or a Peugeot.
She waited nearly a minute to get onto the main road, didn’t know what she was doing, impelled by something over which she had no control but which in no way upset her. Curious as to where the mood would lead, she knew it was to do with Denis, but whether she wanted to meet him by accident, or trap him by design – well, she didn’t know that, either.