The Comfort of Strangers (3 page)

Mary folded her arms, and after a moment’s pause set off slowly down the right-hand fork. She had regained her slow, precise pace. ‘People take hanging seriously enough,’ she said. ‘A life for a life.’

Uneasily Colin watched her go. ‘Wait a minute, Mary,’ he called after her. ‘Are you sure that’s right?’ She nodded without turning round. In the far distance, picked out momentarily by a streetlight, a figure was walking towards them. Somehow reassured by this, Colin caught up with her.

This too was a prosperous street, but its shops were huddled and exclusive, dedicated it seemed, to the sale of single items – in one shop a gold-framed landscape in cracked, muddied oils, in another a hand-made shoe, further on, a single camera lens mounted on a velvet plinth. The drinking fountain, unlike most in the city, actually worked. The dark stone of the surrounding step and the rim of its great bowl had been worn down and polished by centuries of use. Mary arranged her head under the tarnished brass faucet and drank. ‘The water here’, she said between mouthfuls, ‘tastes of fish.’ Colin was staring ahead, waiting to see the approaching figure reappear beneath another lamp post. But there was nothing, except perhaps a rapid movement by a distant doorway, and that may have been a cat.

They had eaten their last meal, a shared plate of fried whitebait, twelve hours previously. Colin reached for Mary’s hand. ‘Can you remember if he sells anything apart from hot dogs?’

‘Chocolate? Nuts?’

Their pace quickened and their footsteps resounded noisily on the cobbles, making the sound of only one pair of shoes. ‘One of the eating capitals of the world,’ Colin said, ‘and we’re walking two miles for hot dogs.’

‘We’re on holiday,’ Mary reminded him. ‘Don’t forget that.’

He clapped his free hand to his forehead. ‘Of course. I get too easily lost in details, like hunger and thirst. We are on holiday.’

They dropped hands, and as they walked on Colin hummed to himself. The street was narrowing and the shops
had given way on both sides to high, dark walls, broken at irregular intervals by deeply recessed doorways, and windows, small and square, set high up and criss-crossed with iron bars.

‘This is the glass factory,’ Mary said with satisfaction. ‘We tried to come here on our first day.’ They slowed down, but did not stop.

Colin said, ‘We must have been round the other side then, because I’ve never been here before.’

‘We queued outside one of these doors while we were waiting.’

Colin wheeled round on her, incredulous, exasperated. ‘That wasn’t our first day,’ he said loudly. ‘Now you’re completely confused. It was seeing the queue that made us decide to go to the beach, and we didn’t go there till the third day.’ Colin had stopped to say this, but Mary kept on walking. He caught up with her in skipping steps.

‘It might have been the third day,’ she was saying as though to herself, ‘but this is where we were.’ She pointed at a doorway several yards ahead and, as if summoned, a squat figure stepped out of the dark into a pool of streetlight and stood blocking their path.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Colin joked, and Mary laughed.

The man laughed too and extended his hand. ‘Are you tourists?’ he asked in self-consciously precise English and, beaming, answered himself. ‘Yes, of course you are.’

Mary stopped directly in front of him and said, ‘We’re looking for a place where we can get something to eat.’

Colin meanwhile was sidling past the man. ‘We don’t have to explain ourselves, you know,’ he said to Mary quickly. Even as he was speaking the man caught him cordially by the wrist and stretched out his other hand to take Mary’s. She folded her arms and smiled.

‘It is terribly late,’ said the man. ‘There is nothing in that direction, but I can show you a place this way, a very good place.’ He grinned, and nodded in the direction they had come from.

He was shorter than Colin, but his arms were exceptionally
long and muscular. His hands too were large, the backs covered with matted hair. He wore a tight-fitting black shirt, of an artificial, semi-transparent material, unbuttoned in a neat V almost to his waist. On a chain round his neck hung a gold imitation razorblade which lay slightly askew on the thick pelt of chest hair. Over his shoulder he carried a camera. A cloying sweet scent of aftershave filled the narrow street.

‘Look,’ Colin said, trying to detach his wrist without appearing violent, ‘we know there is a place down here.’ The grip was loose but unremitting, a mere finger and thumb looped round Colin’s wrist.

The man filled his lungs with air and appeared to grow an inch or two. ‘Everything is closed,’ he announced. ‘Even the hot-dog stand.’ He addressed himself to Mary with a wink. ‘My name is Robert.’ Mary shook his hand and Robert began to pull them back down the street. ‘Please,’ he insisted. ‘I know just the place.’

After much effort over several paces, Colin and Mary brought Robert to a standstill and they stood in a close huddle, breathing noisily.

Mary spoke as though to a child. ‘Robert, let go of my hand.’ He released her immediately and made a little bow.

Colin said, ‘And you’d better let go of me too.’

But Robert was explaining apologetically to Mary, ‘I’d like to help you. I can take you to a very good place.’ They set off again.

‘We don’t need to be
dragged
towards good food,’ Mary said, and Robert nodded. He touched his forehead. ‘I am, I am …’

‘Wait a minute,’ Colin interrupted.

‘… always eager to practise my English. Perhaps too eager. I once spoke it perfectly. This way, please.’ Mary was already walking on. Robert and Colin followed.

‘Mary,’ Colin called.

‘English’, Robert said, ‘is a beautiful language, full of misunderstandings.’

Mary smiled over her shoulder. They had arrived once more at the great residence at the fork in the road. Colin
pulled Robert to a halt and jerked his hand free. ‘I’m sorry,’ Robert said. Mary too had stopped and was examining the posters again. Robert followed her gaze to a crude stencil in red paint which showed a clenched fist enclosed within the sign used by ornithologists to denote the female of the species. Again he was apologetic, and seemed to assume personal responsibility for everything they could read. ‘These are women who cannot find a man. They want to destroy everything that is good between men and women.’ He added matter-of-factly, ‘They are too ugly.’ Mary watched him as she might a face on television.

‘There,’ Colin said, ‘meet the opposition.’

She smiled sweetly at them both. ‘Let’s go and find this good food,’ she said, just as Robert was indicating another poster and preparing to say more.

They took the left-hand fork and walked for ten minutes during which Robert’s boisterous attempts to begin a conversation were met by silence, on Mary’s part self-absorbed – she walked with her arms crossed again – and on Colin’s faintly hostile – he kept his distance from Robert. They turned down an alley which descended by a series of worn steps to a diminutive square, barely thirty feet across, into which ran half a dozen smaller passageways. ‘Down there,’ Robert said, ‘is where I live. But it is too late for you to come there. My wife will be in bed.’

They made more turns to left and right, passing between tottering houses five storeys high, and shuttered grocers’ shops with vegetables and fruit in wooden crates piled outside. An aproned shopkeeper appeared with a trolley-load of cases and called out to Robert who laughed and shook his head and raised his hand. When they reached a brightly lit doorway, Robert parted the yellowing strips of a plastic walk-through for Mary. He kept his hand on Colin’s shoulder as they descended a steep flight of stairs into a cramped and crowded bar.

A number of young men, dressed similarly to Robert, sat on high stools at the bar, and several more were arranged in identical postures – all their weight on one foot – around a bulging juke-box of sumptuous curves and chromium scrolls.
A deep and pervasive blue emanated from the back of the machine and gave the faces of the second group a nauseous look. Everyone appeared to be smoking, or putting out his cigarette with swift, decisive jabs, or craning his neck forwards and pouting to have the cigarette lit. Since they all wore tight clothes, they had to hold their cigarette in one hand, the lighter and pack in the other. The song they were all listening to, for no one was talking, was loud and chirpily sentimental, with full orchestral accompaniment, and the man who sang it had a special sob in his voice for the frequent chorus which featured a sardonic ‘ha ha ha’, and it was here that several of the young men lifted their cigarettes and, avoiding each other’s eyes, joined in with a frown and a sob of their own.

‘Thank God I’m not a man,’ Mary said, and tried to take Colin’s hand. Robert had shown them to a table and had gone to the bar. Colin put his hands in his pockets, tipped back his chair and stared at the jukebox. ‘Oh come on,’ Mary said, prodding his arm. ‘It was only a joke.’

The song ended in a triumphant symphonic climax and immediately began again. Behind the bar, glass shattered on the floor and there was a brief spate of slow hand-clapping.

Robert returned at last with a large, unlabelled bottle of red wine, three glasses and two well-fingered breadsticks, one of which was broken short. ‘Today’, he announced proudly above the din, ‘the cook is ill.’ With a wink at Colin he sat down and filled the glasses.

Robert began to ask them questions and at first they answered reluctantly. They told him their names, that they were not married, that they did not live together, at least, not now. Mary gave the ages and sexes of her children. They both stated their professions. Then, despite the absence of food, and helped on by the wine, they began to experience the pleasure, unique to tourists, of finding themselves in a place without tourists, of making a discovery, finding somewhere real. They relaxed, they settled into the noise and smoke; they in turn asked the serious, intent questions of tourists gratified to be talking at last to an authentic citizen. In less than twenty minutes they had emptied the bottle. Robert told them that
he had business interests, that he had grown up in London, that his wife was Canadian. When Mary asked how he met his wife, Robert said it was impossible to explain that without first describing his sisters and his mother, and these in turn could be explained only in terms of his father. It was clear he was preparing the way to telling them his story. ‘Ha ha ha’ was winding up to another crescendo, and at a table near the juke-box a man with curly hair sank his face in his hands. Robert shouted across the bar for another bottle of wine. Colin snapped the breadsticks in halves and shared them with Mary.

T
HE SONG ENDED
, and all around the bar conversations were beginning, softly at first, a pleasant hum and susurration of the vowels and consonants of a foreign language; simple observations evoked in response single words or noises of assent; then pauses, random and contrapuntal, followed by more complex observations at a greater volume and in turn more elaborate replies. Within less than a minute, several apparently intense discussions were under way, as though various controversial subjects had been allotted and suitable adversaries grouped. If the juke-box were to have been played now, no one would have heard it.

Robert, staring at the glass which he held down on the table with both hands, seemed to be holding his breath, and this caused Colin and Mary, who watched him closely, to breathe with difficulty. He appeared older than he had in the street. The oblique electric light picked out a set of almost geometrical lines like a grid across his face. Two lines, running from the base of each nostril to the corners of his mouth, formed a near-perfect triangle. Across his forehead were parallel furrows, and an inch below them, set at a precise right angle, was a single line at the bridge of his nose, a deep fold of flesh. He nodded to himself slowly and his massive shoulders drooped as he exhaled. Mary and Colin leaned forwards to catch the opening words of his story.

‘All his life my father was a diplomat, and for many, many years we lived in London, in Knightsbridge. But I was a lazy boy’ – Robert smiled – ‘and still my English is not perfect.’ He paused, as though waiting to be contradicted. ‘My father was a big man. I was his youngest child and only son. When he sat
down he sat like this’ – Robert adopted his previous tense and upright position and rested his hands squarely on his knees. ‘All his life my father wore a moustache like this’ – with forefinger and thumb Robert measured out an inch width beneath his nose – ‘and when it turned to grey he used a little brush to make it black, such as ladies use for their eyes. Mascara.

‘Everybody was afraid of him. My mother, my four sisters, even the ambassador was afraid of my father. When he frowned nobody could speak. At the dining-table you could not speak unless spoken to first by my father.’ Robert began to raise his voice above the din around them. ‘Every evening, even when there was to be a reception and my mother had to be dressed, we had to sit quietly with our backs straight and listen to my father reading aloud.

‘Every morning he got out of bed at six o’clock and went to the bathroom to shave. No one was allowed out of bed until he had finished. When I was a little boy I was always next out of bed, quickly, and I went to the bathroom to smell him. Excuse me, he made a terrible smell, but it was covered with the smell of the shaving soap and his perfume. Even now, for me eau-de-Cologne is the smell of my father.

‘I was his favourite, I was his passion. I remember – perhaps it happened many times – my older sisters, Eva and Maria, were fourteen and fifteen. It was dinner and they were pleading with him. Please, Papa. Please! And to everything he said No! They could not go on the school visit because there were going to be boys. They were not permitted to stop wearing white socks. They could not go to the theatre in the afternoon unless Mama went also. They could not have their friend to stay because she was a bad influence and never went to church. Then suddenly my father was standing behind my chair where I sat next to my mother, and laughing very loud. He took my napkin from my lap and tucked it into the front of my shirt. “Look!” he said. “Here is the next head of the family. You must remember to keep on the good side of Robert!” Then he made me settle the arguments, and all the time his hand was resting on me here, squeezing my neck between his fingers. My father would say, “Robert, may the
girls wear silk stockings like their Mama?” And I, ten years old, would say very loudly, “No Papa”. “May they go to the theatre without their Mama?” “Absolutely not, Papa.” “Robert, may they have their friend to stay?” “Never, Papa!”