Becoming Strangers (12 page)

Dorothy shrugged at the sun and pulled in the book, closer to her chest.

George had always been jealous in a funny pernickety way. Not a romantic way. He'd tried to stop her reading. He couldn't stand it. He nagged her, stood over her, couldn't let her be. He'd always have a reason why what she was doing was stupid. He reasoned her out of everything. She'd got so much hidden in that house of theirs even she couldn't find it. They'd think she was a senile old goat when they came to clear out after she died. Books, letters, chocolate bars, bits and pieces. She longed to be alone, to be private.

Tm good and ready,' she said aloud.

The truth was he couldn't bear her being elsewhere, when she could be listening to him. Once he'd used to get narked if she went into town, or had her head in a book, and now neither of them knew where she went from time to time. Only Him upstairs knew where she was heading, bit by bit. Being shipped over in pieces.

She looked at her old Timex watch. Twelve-fifteen. He'd be back soon.

'Don't go out,' he'd said, and the sod had put her shoes up on the bathroom cabinet where she couldn't reach them.

E
ACH DAY AT THE RESORT
was fair, to the same specifications, part God-given, part man-managed. The sun shone, a breeze blew, the flowers bloomed, the pool was clean. Breakfast was laid out, beds changed, tiles mopped, cutlery cleaned, splats of dinner wiped from
floors, splashes of sticky drinks rubbed off the bar, garbage to be emptied and removed and piled into the hidden stinking containers where the flies went mad in ecstasy, but these things happened before the main act or offstage. Some hundred men and women came together to make it all perfect for the forty or so people that inhabited this little paradise for a week, and they did so every week, even in the off-season when there might be just half the number. Burns was required to provide the service required for physical stasis.

'The main thing about: good service, is that it's so good you don't know it's happening. That's my theory,' Steve Burns had said to his staff at one of the first weekly team meetings. It wasn't his theory, in a proprietary sense, but it was an organizing notion that he adhered to with some conviction. He had his own individual interpretation. His overly thick-framed glasses spoke of that. Every time he put them on, he knew who he was. He looked like a 1960s scientist. It was quite a popular look with musicians, students, that sort of crowd.

The staff gave service that tended towards the morose.

'You can't teach it,' he thought to himself; that dry, witty, evasive manner of the restaurant and hotel world's staffing
crème de la crème.
It was a European thing. A throwback to 1930s Europe—arch eyebrows, a brittle laugh, the implication that superiority was not completely conferred by the arrangement of paid services.

He was watching Benjamin, one of his barmen, bending down to pass the Dutch lady a drink at the Jacuzzi. He looked miserable.

'Engage with them a little bit,' he said to Benjamin as the man walked back to the bar with his empty tray. He stepped inside the bar with him. 'Watch how I do it.'

The American crowd was already hanging about the bar, by eleven-thirty, looking for the 'lite' drinks they had on drip-feed throughout the day. Diet this and diet that. Had they any idea what the chemicals in that stuff were doing to their systems? They seemed anxious, and were jostling slightly, sharing what they knew of the story of the recovery of the old lady.

'You'd do better with a decent drink in you,' said Steve, grinning at the tall blond man who had remarked that he knew the chairman. 'Let me get you a beer or a nice glass of wine. On the house.'

'No, thanks,' said Jason abruptly, adjusting the waistband of his swimming shorts and folding his arms across his chest. 'Your problem's solved, then.'

'What's that? Diet Cokes, three. The old girl? The lost sheep? Yes, yes, on their way back with her now I expect.'

'Must be a relief.'

'Sure. Ice and a slice? All round?'

Jason nodded. 'Uh-huh, uh-huh,' he said as if counting, as if keeping his temper. 'Minimum effort, too. You didn't even have to lose a night's sleep over it!'

Steve looked awkward. Of course he slept, what was he supposed to do, pace up and down?

'There wasn't much else I could do, Sir, beyond what I did,' he smiled briefly.

'You know the Danish guy's a bit of a hero.'

'Who? Oh, yes. Dutch. And our employee, young Adam.'

'Did you know the man is seriously unwell?' Jason picked up one of the drinks and showed it to his wife who got up from her poolside lounge chair and came over. 'The Danish guy, I mean. He's sick. And he spent the night looking for one of your guests.'

'I didn't know that, Sir. No.'

'He's a hero.' Jason took a sip of his drink and squinted at Steve. 'Some folks go the extra yard.'

'Yes,' said Steve, helping himself to a glass of water.

'He deserves some sort of a thank you from your hotel.'

'It's sort of hard to believe that with everything that went on last night, you're just carrying on as normal round here. I think people feel, well, they want to see some sort of acknowledgment, you know,' his wife interjected, coolly.

'Well, I will personally make sure he and his wife get nothing but the best attention from our staff, you can be assured of that, Sir.'

'Like you assured me you were
personally
going to find the wife.' Missy squeezed Jason's arm and gave him what might have been either a reproachful look or a coquettish invitation to an afternoon in bed. It was hard to tell.

'I hear you, loud and clear.' This was what he'd been
taught. Make sure they know you have heard them, then hopefully they'll fuck off.

'Did you know the old lady's got Alzheimer's?' said Missy.

'Oh really?' said Steve. 'I didn't know that.' The stupid old git! To have brought his wife to their resort when he knew she was likely to do a runner at any moment! Why hadn't he been told?

'So you'll give them some sort of recognition then, a party or a gathering?' the wife went on.

'I was planning to have a party actually, after dinner tonight,' he said, as the American couple walked off, the man with a hand on his wife's bare arse. It was only when she turned around to walk off that it become apparent she was wearing nothing more than a thong.

Steve looked at Benjamin. Benjamin grinned, then apologized.

A
FTER LUNCH AT THE BAR
and an afternoon with his eyes closed, lying by the pool, the events of the night seemed unreal. Jan was uncomfortable but too weary to do anything about it. He had exhausted himself. His head stuck to the canvas cover of the lounger mattress. He moved it left and right feeling the sun strike him with great golden slaps whichever way he turned. He saw, again, George and Dorothy standing together on Charlotte's porch.

'I don't understand anything,' he said to himself, 'except that everyone seems closer to knowing anything than I am.' He sat forwards on his chair, dropping his feet into the flip-flop shoes that were either side of him. He watched the beads of sweat run across his chest and down the central canal, ending as a small pool in his belly button.

Opposite him, a Chinese woman was spreading a towel on to a vacant sun lounger. He had not seen her before. She was wearing a structured black swimming costume. Before she sat down she stood with a hair clip between her teeth, pulling her shoulder-length black hair back from her face to fix it in a ponytail. She bent forwards like an athlete, straight from the waist, and took a paperback from her rather ostentatious handbag; it had an unwieldy gold logo dangling from the zipper, large enough to cover half of the face of the bag and yet when it fell over, she looked down but did not move to stand it back up. Reclining, she raised one knee, and felt for her sunglasses, which were, like her bag, black and gold. Before she put them on, she noticed something and went to wipe them on the end of her towel and as she did so, she saw him looking at her and she gave him a broad smile, showing some teeth.

He went for a swim, principally so that he could look at her without being seen. His head dipped in and out of the water. With each glimpse, his feeling grew that there was something Hollywood about her. Her smile had made him think of the screen goddesses captured on the newsreels he'd seen as a child in the cinema at Brugge. They would raise a hand to the crowds from the steps of a steam train—polite, patient, sure of themselves.

Back on his lounger, he saw that Annemieke had left the Jacuzzi and gone off to their room for a late-afternoon siesta. She had complained all morning about her fatigue. She wanted to be fresh for supper. She didn't want to get too much sun. She was determined to look after herself this holiday, she said.

With his eyes closed, he was in a void. His senses were unoccupied but his mind wandered after them, as if manufacturing dreams, patching memories together. In them, he was a free man, no wife, no children, no history, just himself. He rounded a corner on a summer's evening in a big city, Brussels, Paris, London, even New York, and came upon himself and the Chinese woman together at an outside table, near a noisy kitchen extractor unit on the wall outside. He felt weightless, he was all heightened perception. He could dance with his feet planted, choose to say anything, choose truth or choose concealment. Becoming strange to himself was pure joy; it was she who owned the new person. Her regard created him. If she liked what she saw then he would live. His heart lurched suddenly like a ship banging into a harbour wall. The two of them were squeezed between other couples, tables askew on cobbles. Elbows were pressing down to preserve some sort of balance between the faces that confronted each other. He saw people drinking things they didn't mean to (it was Saturday night), and saying things they
couldn't afford (it was late). He wished he hadn't taken notice of them. It was their eyes now through which he saw himself, the middle-aged stoic with a stern face strung out on a new addiction, high on his self-created problem.

What is sweeter than a problem one makes because one's other problems are too familiar?

Looking again at the scene, he saw that his body was turning, and in his expression he saw the bleak moment in which one realizes one needs help, if only from a waiter. Something was missing, could it be that merely a drink would set things right? His hand twitched but he would not raise it. The waiter came and the evening began in earnest. The Chinese starlet was silent, as impenetrable as a poster. Her bag was new and expensive, so were her shoes and dress. Her worn-in lipstick was the only indication of there being a chance of a discount. And the compliment he'd chosen to pay her was priceless. It was one that you only gave to one or two people in your lifetime. No, he could never afford it! His Catholic upbringing would not let him ditch Annemieke, no matter what the circumstances. It was ridiculous to spend so much time on this woman, to talk with painful candour about love.

As soon as he'd done so, he'd regretted it.

She had faded, she was fictitious, she might as well not be there. She barely lived now. Her eyes were moving slowly across new territory, just gained, she was assessing it quietly. She did not smile.

He opened his eyes and saw the Chinese woman,
who was lying flat on her back, with a book dangling from one hand.

Perhaps what he should have said to her was, 'I am alone. Forget everything else. I am coming to you for help.'

But he knew that one persons truth—even when they know it, even if it is with their last breath that they say it—is for another person nothing much more than an imposition.

D
OROTHY HAD SENSED
G
EORGE'S ANXIETY
about their going to dinner that evening; even as he washed she knew he was giving himself a pep talk in the bathroom. He came out and gave a big resounding clap of his hands, it had made her jump. Being an old lady was not as hard as being an old man. She could be old but George must ever be the man. He didn't say a word all the way down to dinner, kept his teeth gritted. Like the good fellow he was, he pulled her hand on to his arm and placed his other hand over it.

'I shan't get into talking about it,' he'd said to her after lunch, people will want to know. Some were concerned, I expect. But some are just bloody nosy. So we shall just carry on as if nothing had happened.'

'Is that what you and I will do as well?' she'd asked him. He'd nodded, absorbed by his worries.

They'd taken a table and for some reason an

American couple had joined them. They'd started off with some nonsense about her 'adventure' and being 'so happy at the way it had worked out' and progressed to the husband knowing the chairman of the group. After a few glasses they'd told them how poorly they thought the manager had handled it all. Jason dealt with what he perceived to be the most serious injury, George's ego, and Missy with Dorothy's feelings. With her jabbering on, Dorothy couldn't hear what the men were saying. She would have liked to know what it had been like without her, like witnessing your own funeral. She was rather thrilled to hear of her George organizing things, to think of him on his own, putting his best foot forward. That was what she wanted to hear, but the woman went on and on.

She was attractive, the woman. But Dorothy felt it was rude of her to be half-naked, with her breasts almost exposed, nipples quite visible through a pale white smock. What was it her London Jewish friends used to say? Chopped liver. That was how Dorothy felt and she resented it now even as she had when she was young and fresh-faced.

Other people had come up to them, with nice things to say, and she could cope with them but not with the American woman. She was ashamed of her animal hatred. The only difference between herself as a young woman and herself now was that she could see her own hatred plainly for what it was, she didn't have to invent other names for it or find faults with the woman that weren't there. Even so, she felt miserable.

Other Americans came up to talk to them, propelled by their good intentions. Talked about other English people they knew or a town in England they or their friends had visited, and all the time their eyes moved like servants' hands, moving over a mess and making it into something tidy, forming an opinion for later.