Alentejo Blue (7 page)

Stanton took a drag and managed not to cough. He passed it to Chrissie and their fingers brushed together.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The quotation entered his head and he saw at once how to rework a passage that had given him trouble.

China got out of his chair. He looked around, picked up a filthy T-shirt and blew his nose on it. ‘I’m going to check on Tina. She’s a little darling, she is.’ At the doorway he looked over his shoulder. ‘Listen, mate, my home is your home. Anything you want, you take it.’

Stanton followed Chrissie into the kitchen. The roof was plastic sheeting over untreated wood beams. There was a puddle of something – it had not rained for weeks – in the middle of the floor. Chrissie put more ice in a plastic bag and smashed it with a hammer. Stanton slipped his arm around from behind and held her wrist. He felt her grip tighten on the hammer before she let it drop. It was over quickly and this time they did not kiss. When they went back to the sitting room Ruby was there, hugging her knees to her chest.

He was drinking in the bar next door to the Casa do Povo and thinking it was a long time since he had driven home not drunk when he noticed her. He ordered a pineapple Sumol and took it over to her table. She had a pink satin handbag with a stain on it and a beaded scarf that she had placed on the chair opposite, as if reserving the space. Stanton knew she would be alone. He moved her things and sat down.

‘Do you mind?’ she said, her voice coming out gassy.

‘Not at all,’ said Stanton.

She turned her head and chewed her lip and then flashed back at him. ‘If you’re going to sit there I’ll have a beer.’

‘I’d be delighted to buy you one,’ he said, ‘when you’re eighteen.’

‘Ha, ha, very funny, my name’s Bugs Bunny.’

‘Good one,’ said Stanton. ‘Look, I’ll move when your boyfriend gets here. You’re meeting your boyfriend, aren’t you?’ He glanced at her stomach but there was nothing he could tell from that.

Ruby looked out of the window. She reached up and tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘I know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘Deaf doesn’t mean stupid.’

‘I know,’ said Stanton, speaking the words aloud this time. ‘I’m sorry.’ The shame seemed to spread from his anus, which contracted and released and contracted again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. She kept her hearing aid turned to him like a steady reproach. ‘I’ll buy you that beer if you like.’ Nothing. In the pit of his stomach there was a deep absence. He was sorry for her and he was sorry for himself. He thought of the pub at the top end of the Archway Road, and the horse brasses round the fireplace. He could walk in there most evenings and find someone to talk to; Roger or Connor or Sinead or a whole bunch of them to bitch and moan and sneer with.

‘Not much to do, is there, in the village? Not at your age.’

Maybe she really could not hear him. A light down spread out from the hairline at her ear to the puppy-fat along her jaw. The mole beneath her nose looked ticklish, like a crumb sticking there. Have it your way, thought Stanton, shaking it all off.

She heard him standing up or saw from the corner of her eye. ‘You can always find something,’ she said. ‘If you try hard enough.’

‘I expect so.’ He sat down and wished he had moved faster.

‘Party in Milfontes tonight. Should be good.’ She did the thing with the tip of her tongue reaching up to the mole.

Christ, he thought. Here I am.

China came through the door as if he meant to take it off its hinges. He was drunker than usual. His jeans looked as if they would stand on their own. ‘Mate,’ he bellowed, ‘let’s have a fucking drink.’ He noticed his daughter. ‘Get yourself home now. It’s late.’

‘It’s not,’ said Ruby. ‘And don’t fucking shout. Showing me up as per usual.’

China leaned over the table, hulking his shoulders forward. ‘Showing you up? Showing you up? You’ve shown yourself up. A long fucking time ago, my girl.’ His jaw hung open and Stanton gazed inside at the red and the black.

China straightened up, the fight gone out of him. ‘Ah well, fuck it. Do what you like.’

‘I will,’ said Ruby. She gathered her bag and scarf and went out, everybody watching the swing of her hips.

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ said China when he had lined up the brandies and the beers, ‘I don’t mind telling you that in the old days I’d have knocked her for six. Not my style any more.’ He lifted his drink and spilled a little down his chin. ‘You got to let things be.’

Stanton was weary. ‘Your philosophy of life.’

‘That’s right,’ said China. It was just about possible to make out the whites of his eyes beneath the web of red veins. ‘When I was big on control, I was really big on control, know what I mean, and I controlled a patch of Yarmouth, ran nearly over to fucking Cromer, know what I mean, and what I said –’ he slammed his glass on the table – ‘went.’

My muse, thought Stanton, stabbed through with resentment. ‘What brought you out here then?’

China smiled, loose-lipped, slack-jawed. ‘Mate,’ he said slowly, as if to comfort a dying man. ‘Mate. What brought any of us? On the run, ain’t we? On the fucking run.’

Connor, at last, sent a letter: six pages of black Mont Blanc rollerball on pale blue Basildon Bond. Five pages of dreary news wittily rendered and on the sixth page this:

Roger, you may recall, was due to publish his masterpiece in July. Well, that should have told him everything he needed to know. Eight long years of toil and his publisher decides on July? The month for chick-lit, the collected bon mots of pre-pubescent columnists and monographs on crop rotation in fourteenth-century Westphalia. Of course he hasn’t left the house since.

Stanton lay back on the bed. He looked at his toenails, ingrained with dirt, the right big toenail chipped and peeling away at the corner, the nail on the little toe black though he did not remember banging it. He lay there gazing at his feet until darkness took them and the cicadas made audible his thoughts: insistent, streaming, unintelligible.

He had taken the truck to the garage to get the clutch looked at. When he got back Chrissie was waiting for him.

‘I’ll have to start locking the door,’ he said.

She had her arms wrapped around her chest, her hip bones were a pair of razor shells and her pubic hair was surprisingly dark. ‘I thought we should. At least once. You know, with our clothes off.’

‘Chrissie,’ he said, unbuckling, ‘do you think Ruby saw us?’

She turned on her stomach and spoke into the pillow so he could not catch the words. He ran his palm down the ridge of her spine and on to the shallow slope of her buttocks. She put her arms behind her back, wrists together. There was a spot of blood on the sheets from her forearm. ‘Turn over,’ he said.

She obeyed him but when he looked into her face there was nothing he could read except a kind of helpless defiance. He had seen once a picture of a protesting nun in a distant country who wore a similar expression as the flames licked up her robes.

‘I don’t care,’ said Chrissie.

‘Do you think she saw us?’

‘I can’t help it,’ she said, and pulled his head towards hers.

She came nearly every day. When she was not there he sat on the terrace spitting olive pits into an old can or shuffling a deck of cards, or he chopped wood and stacked it in the shed for the cool winter months that were not far off. He did no writing.

They got into a rhythm. When he heard her car he went to the bedroom and lit candles though the flames disappeared in the sunlight. He liked the way she dozed on her side with her hands between her knees. He liked the way she shivered when he ran his hand down her back. She always sighed as she took off her bra.

‘What’s the point of these?’ she said, blowing out one of the candles.

‘It’s romantic,’ he said. ‘You’re supposed to like it.’

Whatever pleasure she took she kept largely to herself.

‘Run away with me,’ he said.

She was making the bed. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

‘Venice,’ he said, catching her round the waist. ‘Monte Carlo. Rio.’

‘I’ve lost my hair slide,’ she said. ‘Did you see me put it down?’

He asked about Ruby. ‘She was,’ said Chrissie. ‘But she isn’t now. Miscarriage.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Stanton.

‘Don’t be.’

She scratched her arms until they bled.

‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

Jay came only once when she was there. Stanton pulled on his trousers and went to the door. ‘Come back in a couple of hours, can you?’ The car, he thought. Jesus. ‘Your mum came round. She’s in the woods. Thought she might find you there.’

‘Tina,’ said Jay. He put his hand up to shield his eyes as he looked out towards the corks.

‘She had her litter?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jay. ‘She’s et ’em though.’ For a moment he looked solemn and then he began to giggle. ‘They’d have been et in the end anyway. That’s what me dad says.’

Chrissie was dressed and sitting at his desk. ‘English,’ she said, ‘was my best subject at school.’

They ran out of steam, got to the end of each other. They both knew it. Still, he had to say something and it would be a delicate business. He sat out on the steps shuffling cards and waiting.

When she got out of the car she checked her reflection in the wing mirror. She carried a basket of eggs.

There was a cold rinse in his chest that might have been mistaken for fear.

‘Chrissie,’ he said, ‘I need to bury myself for a while.’

She set down the basket. ‘They’ve started laying in that old Citroën.’

He took her hand. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’

‘For some reason,’ she said, ‘we’re getting a lot of double-yolkers.’

She made it easy really. He was grateful. You’ve got your work, Harry, she told him. Need your peace and quiet. And I’ve got my husband. He kissed her on the nose. I’ll still see you, he told her. We’ll have coffee. I don’t drink coffee, she said. Tea then, he said, or a beer.

Later he met Dieter at the café and attempted a discreet celebration. ‘A bottle of red – the best you have.’

Vasco wiped their table and tucked his filthy rag into his belt. ‘You would like something special? Expensive, yes?’

‘OK,’ said Stanton.

‘OK,’ wheezed Vasco. ‘I charge you more.’

Dieter’s subject was Portuguese bureaucracy, an old favourite. ‘All these obstacles they put in your way. They do not really want you to work.’

Stanton nodded. The work on his own house would never be completed.

‘In Germany they will be fired. The officials are there to help you and if they do not they will be fired. Pure and simple.’

‘Pure and simple,’ said Stanton. ‘Why don’t you go back to Germany? Seems everything would be easier.’

Dieter sat up and clutched the arms of his chair. ‘Germany?’ he said. ‘If I never see that country again so long as I may live, so much the better for me. Germany? No. Never.’

Vasco came with a bottle of the usual. ‘Very expensive, this. Very good wine for celebrating. Wait, I bring a glass and make a toast with you . . . So, what do we toast?’

‘Long life,’ said Dieter, sounding pained.

‘Life and liberty,’ said Stanton, raising a glass.

They stayed late and Vasco was waiting to close. When Stanton went to pay he was reading glossy brochures at the counter.

‘Going on holiday?’

‘Listen,’ said Vasco. ‘Treasures of the ages await at Hotel Luxor’s Giza Galleria. Located on the main level of the East Tower, enchanting fountains, beautifully sculpted statues and elegant stone walkways greet visitors when shopping Luxor-style at Giza Galleria.’ He passed a fat hand over his mouth. ‘Only in America, yes?’

Stanton conceded this to be so.

‘But maybe also in the future in the Alentejo. Nothing is impossible.’

‘True,’ said Stanton, taking the easiest course.

‘You have heard of Marco Afonso Rodrigues?’

‘Remind me.’

‘A very big name in the tourist industry,’ said Vasco. ‘Luxury resorts in Thailand and Singapore. So I have been told. I believe he also has interests in London, Tokyo and Macau.’

‘Of course,’ said Stanton, attempting to stem the flow.

‘Do you know who he is?’

‘Do now.’

‘He is Eduardo’s cousin,’ Vasco said, inflating a little if that were possible. ‘And he is coming home to Mamarrosa. Imagine that.’

‘Well, I’ll try,’ said Stanton, more irritably than he’d meant. ‘He’s been away a long time?’ he added, as a counter-measure.

‘Twenty years or more,’ said Vasco proudly. ‘Of course if he wants to do business here he will need a partner. Local knowledge – you cannot make a business without that.’

‘Anyway,’ said Stanton, taking out his wallet, ‘when are you going to America?’

Vasco closed the brochure. ‘Oh, I cannot travel. The asthma. It is not possible.’