Girl with a Monkey (7 page)

She had spent the half-hour before lunch completely unpacking the suitcase that she had brought back with her, to find after much fruitless unwrapping that her bank-book was wedged in the hat-box. It was then too late to notify Jon, who already would have departed for the Blue Waves Cafe where, day by day, with a gastronomic drudgery that was well-nigh unbelievable, he
worked his way round the menu as if in a charmed circle—steak with egg four and six steak with two eggs five and six sausage three shillings sausage with onion three and six bacon and eggs with tomato without tomato oh the infinity of the permutations coalesced into a greasy uninspired solution including bread butter and a pot of tea. But there was the chromium added to the mirror covered with the prices written up in whitewash, the leather-backed chairs to be paid for, and the heat-crimped waitresses toiling for the Greek behind the till. At night with lights and faces geminate on glass there was a double festivity or a double horror, depending on the mood.

Restlessly she closed down the piano lid and moved to the window where she gazed apathetically upon the lunch-hour stragglers. The shop awnings left regular planes of shade printed along the pavement. Behind her Jon's heavy step sounded on the uncarpeted stairs and his face, prognathous, smiling, handsome and absurd above his white tropic suit, peered round the door. He showed his near-perfect teeth in cinematic fashion.

“Hullo, chick. Am I on time? I had a hell of a wait today. Darned waitress.”

He bent over her to place a light virginal kiss upon her lips and brought with it the warm rich odour of beer.

“So long as you're not still hungry, darling,” she
said, and squeezed his hand. She glanced away preparing herself and him. “I feel so—so embarrassed.” Each word was given its pause and emphasis to underline her case. “Asking you to do this, I mean. After—after—”

“I know,” murmured Jon consolingly. “I know.” Thank God for these warm-hearted dullards, thought Elsie, who ride sanity like a well-broken horse along each day's crazy bridle-path.

“You must understand that I have to go. I was so frightened last term that there was no alternative but to get a transfer somewhere a long way away. The situation—between us—had become so difficult, I really think he might harm me more than he would mean to, if I broke it off and still stayed here.”

“The bastard,” breathed Jon. “The bastard. Did he make you stop seeing me? Did he?”

“Yes,” lied Elsie, quickly seizing on the untruth and the first gleam of passion Jon had ever displayed. “Yes, he did.”

She had not known real fear until a month before, easily five weeks since she had ceased to meet Jon, but she could not bring herself to hurt him again by throwing his dullness to him like a rose.

One moonless night in mid-week, pricked by the imminence of her final university examinations, she had declined Harry's invitation and remained at home to work. After reading for an hour she went outside into the untidy little lawn for a draught of wind-tinctured
air and, standing below the guava-tree that shaded the fowl-yard, became uncomfortably aware of someone watching her. There was no sound but the wind sifting and sorting the dark leaves above her, no visible outline beyond the blurred mass of church, house, and mountain. Shivering slightly, she strained her eyes into the blackness all around and was rewarded suddenly by the glow of a cigarette-end rosily alone in the plum-coloured air above the stacked pipes a hundred yards away. She remained perfectly still, while the light blossomed and withered as the unseen smoker drew upon it. She stood thus for nearly five minutes and then, strangely disturbed, ran swiftly in and stood breathing hard by Mrs Buttling's sewing-machine.

“What's the matter, Else? You look pale. Too dark outside for you?”

“Mrs Buttling, there's someone watching the house from over by the diggings. I'm sure of it. Come over to the window and you'll see the cigarette butt glowing. Quickly.”

“Can't a person have a fag without you getting suspicious? You need a cup of cocoa and a few early nights into the bargain wouldn't do you any harm.”

But she rose good-naturedly and joined Elsie at the window just in time to see a fiery parabola lose itself in the ground.

“See. He's put it out.”

“No. Wait.” Elsie gripped the older woman's arm.

“Here, what's up? You're hurting.” The girl's knuckles showed white against the freckled ginger of Mrs Buttling's arm, but Elsie, unhearing, stared so tensely into the darkness that Mrs Buttling, infected by her manner, ceased resisting and watched also. The little house was very still, a box with a kernel of silence, walls so thin between the inner stillness and the outer. Behind them on the mantelshelf the clock, the heart of the dwelling, thumped noisily, and then, out on the heap of earth and pipeline, a match spurted, and the next minute a cigarette glowed steadily.

“Looks as if you're right. If they were only smoking the one they'd be gone by now. Maybe it's Harry checking up on you. Didn't he want to go out tonight?”

Their eyes met in a clasp of belief and disbelief, hope that that was all there was to it, unbelief that any one sane could act in such a fashion. How the femininity of their persons throbbed, exposed within the situation, forcing them nearer to each other. Without saying a word Mrs Buttling gently slipped the bolt on the back door. Throughout the next two hours they stopped occasionally in their work and went to the window, only to see the tiny orange light flickering from the same position. But after nine thirty it was gone, and though they checked over the next half-hour it did not reappear. Its absence hung over them as certainly as its presence, and all night, in the hollows of the wind,
they gathered the darkness round them for comfort.

“Well, you stayed in good and proper last night,” said Harry with grinning confidence when they met next afternoon at the Custom House bus stop.

Elsie stared in self-horror at the sunburnt face confronting hers, and, thrillingly repelled, noted its enlarged pores, its coarse jaw-bone and the tiny black lashes spaced so evenly on the lower lids. At the end of the street running right-angled to the river a tug went by, shrilling brazenly into the hot sky. Two boys on scooters swerved each side of them and shouted back cheek. Neither heard.

“Yes?” she said. “What do you mean?”—and knew.

“I was over your way about seven, sitting on the pipes there, near Fong's store. Did half a packet of Cappos, too.”

“Why?” asked Elsie and really meant it.

“Oh”—he did not even look diffident—“I thought you might be pulling one and going out on the side with Connington. But I believe you now. I only wanted to make sure. Saw you going up the back to the lav, too. Don't miss a trick, do I?” He laughed as he saw her embarrassment. “You've got yourself a real jealous fellow, Elsie. Won't stand any nonsense.”

He nudged her with an excessive jocularity so that she drew back in an uncontrollable fastidiousness. “How about some flowers, eh? You can give some to Mrs B., too. Butter her up for the next week.”

Recklessly he strode ahead of her into the tiny florist's and gave the cool blonde stare for stare.

“How much are gladioli?”

The assistant took in with practised eye the vulgarity of his pink shirt and sports trousers with over-wide waist-band.

“Ten and six.”

Harry winced and, turning, pointed to some magnificent spears of white and salmon that were resting in a tub on the floor.

“Well, them then. How much are them?”

“They're gladioli. They're ten and six.”

He burnt a slow angry red. “Give us 'em,” he said, shoving a pound note across the counter.

“Think a person don't know what their posh names mean,” he grunted aside to Elsie who, far from being amused at his discomfiture, felt exquisitely for him the foolishness of his blunder. After this she had not the heart to chide him for so frightening her landlady and herself the night before.

Jon looked upon Elsie's face with bumbling affection. His code of behaviour, simplified into school-boyish “rights” and “wrongs”, had long ago eliminated imagination from his interpretation of things. Perhaps he could not even be said to interpret, since externals had much the same effect on him as a bell upon Pavlov's dog. His drinking fell into the category of “wrongs”, but too weak to resist it, he vacillated amiably
between more definite signposts marked “behaviour to women”, “handling of money”, “behaviour to trollops”, and so on.

“Don't let's talk about it,” said Elsie. “I still have six hours to put in, and that is bad enough. Although I know the day must end, I have a nagging little fear inside me that it might stretch out elastically for twice as long. There's no need, by the way, to worry any further about my bank-book. I found it in my hat-box. I'm terribly sorry.”

Jon fumbled for his cigarettes and lighter, which worked only after much coaxing; then he blew outwards expansively, laureated by petalling wreaths of grey.

“Good. I was worried about getting that through today. The chief accountant has gone up to Mount Spec for a few days and he's the only one who would have acted immediately without making a shindy. But how are you fixed for luggage tonight?”

Elsie examined this aspect of departure and decided that she had more bags than she had bargained for; in addition there was her old brown rain-cape and a pile of books to be picked up at the school.

“I had thought of checking my cases in this afternoon,” she replied, “and then I can go fairly late to the station when it will merely be a matter of shifting them from the cloakroom.”

“Let's do it now. There's still twenty minutes of
my lunch-hour and a taxi up will simplify the whole thing.”

Elsie inwardly thanked the good fortune that had mislaid her bank-book, and set about using this offer to the full.

After they had left the station yard and were walking once more along the two-o'clock streets, Elsie noticed, as she always did, the torpidity of the crowds. Jostling and rushing were unknown in these northern latitudes because they were almost an impossibility under the vertical sun. Here one became a lounger, a lover of shade-patches and the cool gulfs of doorways. By common consent they drifted into a milk-bar and sucked lazily at the frothy pink drink, idly seeing the juke-box light up as a devotee in tight jeans paid monetary tribute. “But as long as you love me so,” wailed the juke-box, “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.” The devotee was joined in sacrifice by his female counterpart and, arms limp about each other's waist, they swayed in drugged ecstasy, their jaws in rhythm. Elsie felt for and found the hard parked circle of gum beneath the table—she only searched to satisfy herself that it was always there, in strange towns and new restaurants—and saw the usual crude anatomies sketched on a corner of the seat. It all made her yawn.

Back in her room, so dark now she was forced to switch on the light, Elsie pressed the cake-tin upon Jon.

“Go on. Don't be silly. I'd love you to have it, and
really you will be doing me quite a favour. I have as much as I can carry now. If you happen to see Mrs Buttling, don't let her know. She was being very kind to me.”

Reluctantly Jon accepted and, glancing at his watch, saw that it was time for him to leave. One hand on the door-knob, he turned wistfully, and Elsie, knowing it would not be again, moved into the passionless circle of his embrace, tasted once more the liquor and tobacco of his lips. Sensing a trembling upon her arm she glanced down quickly at his hands, astonished to see that they were shaking quite uncontrollably. She did not dare look up, for once find her eyes captured by his own, who knew what pain lay in store for either.

“See you at ten to eight,” Jon whispered, bending once more towards her. This is a penalty to pay, mused Elsie, to gain a porter and protector for departure, and raised cool lips again.

She was glad when he had gone, because the throbbing had started in her leg and was almost more than she could bear. The area surrounding the carbuncle was so swollen that when she pressed the flesh with her fingertips, deep white hollows remained stamped on her leg for nearly five minutes. The pain crystallized into arrow points of agony. Wearily she sat on the side of the bed, dragging her stocking off; then going to the narrow black tin in which she kept the few patent medicines she needed, with esoteric
familiarity began the ritual. Scissors, gauze, Ichthyol, gauze pads, scissors.
Sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur crus meum. Sed tantum dic verbo. Sed tantum dic verbo
.

August

M
OST OF
the houses were built on stilts, some five feet high, some fifteen, but especially those which, although built on the gentle rise south of the river, tended to receive the full force of the January rains, partly because here they were so close to the sea and partly because on the whole all this side of town was much lower than the north bank. They were ugly and they were necessary. Especially you thought them ugly in mid-year when the mud had hardened and the fowls ran squawking below the building, latticed only with tarred uprights, so you could see tubs and old packing cases and the underneath rain-water tank all jumbled together. But you knew they were necessary when the first flood-waters lapped the bottom step and the whole backyard and every other backyard was a shining lake whose level rose foot by foot till even the fence lines vanished, and at nights in bed you could hear the wavelets sucking at the tin ant-caps on top of the house piers. Some of the houses did not have lattice, but stood precariously on their long poles like swamp-birds. They were painted biscuit and chocolate, and some
were even ice-cream colour, but mostly they were drab, lacking in windows and roofed with iron on which the rain drummed frenziedly from December to February.

Elsie remembered how those storms had been preluded by heavy round drops that fell singly into the dust and bent the leaves, then, without warning, the rain had fallen like a thick curtain. All through that first week she tramped home under the javelin thrust of water, bare-foot like the children, with her rain-cape soaked right through to the rubber and her umbrella a pulp, hardly able to find her way, so alike were the flat, flooded streets and the box-like houses. During the day, whenever a gasp of watery blue edged its way into the sky, the whole class would point and laugh, and the men standing in their mud-splashed sports trousers along the verandas would light votive cigarettes and breathe the smoke in reverently in the first sunshine for nine days. But by two o'clock the gigantic cumulus would have rolled up from the horizon, heavily white and woolly with edges and underside dark-blue, and by three the whole sky would be black again with nimbus and the wind, springing up without warning as it did in these latitudes, would be on them with the first drops of the next storm.