The Comfort of Strangers (5 page)

He put into her hand a box of matches on which was printed the name and address of the bar. ‘I’m here almost every night.’ He closed her fingers around the box and squeezed. As he passed by Colin’s chair, Robert reached out and ruffled his hair. Mary watched him go, sat yawning for a minute or two, then roused Colin and pointed him towards the stairs. They were the last to leave.

I
N ONE DIRECTION
the street vanished into total darkness; in the other, a diffused blue-grey light was making visible a series of low buildings which descended like blocks cut in granite and converged in the gloom where the street curved away. Thousands of feet above, an attenuated finger of cloud pointed across the line of the curve, and reddened. A cool, salty wind blew along the street and stirred a cellophane wrapper against the step on which Colin and Mary were sitting. From behind a tightly shuttered window immediately above their heads came a muffled snore and the rasp of bedsprings. Mary leaned her head against Colin’s shoulder, and he leaned his against the wall behind him, in the space between two drainpipes. A dog walked towards them quickly from the lighter end of the street, its toenails clicking primly on the worn stone. It did not pause as it reached them, nor did it glance in their direction, and after it had dissolved into the darkness, its complicated step could still be heard.

‘We should have brought the maps,’ Colin said.

Mary leaned in closer against him. ‘It hardly matters,’ she murmured. ‘We’re on holiday.’

They were woken an hour later by voices and laughter. Somewhere a high-pitched bell chimed steadily. The light was now flat, and the breeze was warm and moist, like animal breath. Small children dressed in bright blue smocks with black collars and cuffs surged past them, each bearing high on their backs a neat parcel of books. Colin stood up and, holding his head in both hands, staggered into the centre of the narrow street, where the children parted and converged about him. A small girl tossed a tennis ball against his
stomach and caught it neatly on the bounce; squeals of glee and congratulation ran through the crowd. Then the chiming ceased, and the remaining children fell silent and began to run grimly. The street was suddenly and conspicuously empty. Mary was bent double by the step, scratching the calf and ankle of one leg vigorously with both hands. Colin stood in the centre of the street, swaying slightly and staring in the direction of the low buildings.

‘Something has bitten me,’ Mary called.

Colin went and stood behind her and watched as she scratched. A number of small red points were broadening to the size of coins and flushing crimson. ‘I wouldn’t keep on,’ Colin said. He took her wrist and drew her into the street. Far behind them they heard the children, their voices distorted by an acoustic which suggested a room of vast proportions, chanting a religious formula or an arithmetical table.

Mary jigged on her foot. ‘Oh God!’ she cried, a little self-mocking in her anguish. ‘If I don’t scratch them I’ll die. And I’m so thirsty!’

Through his hangover, Colin had acquired a distant, rough authority, quite untypical. Standing behind Mary, and pinning her hands by her sides, he pointed her down the street. ‘If we walk down there,’ he said into her ear, ‘I think we’ll come to the sea. There’ll be a café open down there.’

Mary let herself be pushed forwards. ‘You haven’t shaved.’

‘Remember,’ Colin said, as they picked up speed down the slope, ‘we’re on holiday.’

The sea lay immediately beyond the curve in the street. The frontage was narrow and deserted, bound in both directions by an unbroken line of weather-beaten houses. High poles jutted from the smooth, yellowish water at odd, futile angles, but there were no boats moored to them. On Colin and Mary’s right a pitted tin sign pointed the way, along the quayside, to a hospital. A small boy, flanked by two middle-aged women carrying bulging plastic carrier-bags, arrived on the water-front by the same street as they had. The group stopped by the sign and the women bent down to look through their bags as though something had been forgotten.
As they set off, the boy made some piping demand and was instantly hushed.

Colin and Mary sat down near the quay’s edge on packing cases which smelled strongly of dead fish. It was a relief to be free of the narrow streets and passageways of the city behind them, to be staring out to sea. The view was dominated by a low, walled island, half a mile out, which was completely given over to a cemetery. At one end was a chapel and a small stone jetty. At this distance, the perspective distorted by a bluish early morning mist, the bright mausoleums and headstones presented the appearance of an overdeveloped city of the future. Behind a low bank of pollution haze, the sun was a disc of dirty silver, small and precise.

Once more Mary leaned against Colin’s shoulder. ‘You’re going to have to look after
me
today.’ She spoke through a yawn.

He stroked the nape of her neck. ‘Did you look after
me
yesterday then?’

She nodded and closed her eyes. The demand to be looked after was routine between them, and they took it in turns to respond dutifully. Colin cradled Mary in his arms and, somewhat abstractedly, kissed her ear. From behind the cemetery island a water bus had appeared and was moving by the stone jetty. Even at this distance it was possible to see that the tiny figures in black who descended bore flowers. A thin, reedy cry reached them across the water, a gull, or perhaps a child, and the boat edged away from the island.

It was making for the hospital jetty, which lay beyond a bend in the waterfront, out of sight from where they sat. The hospital itself however towered above the surrounding buildings, a citadel of peeling, mustard-yellow distemper, of steep roofs of pale red tiles supporting a tottering mess of television aerials. Some wards had high, barred windows which opened on to balconies the size of small ships where patients, or nurses, dressed in white sat or stood staring out to sea.

The waterfront and the streets behind Colin and Mary were filling with people. Old women in black shawls, wrapped in silence, trudged by with empty shopping bags. From a nearby house came the sharp smell of strong coffee
and cigar smoke which mingled with and almost obliterated the odour of dead fish. A wizened fisherman who wore a torn grey suit and a once-white shirt without buttons, as though he had long ago escaped an office job, dropped a pile of nets near the packing cases, almost at their feet. Colin made a vague, apologetic gesture, but the man, who was already walking away, enunciated with precision ‘Tourists!’ and waved his hand in special dispensation.

Colin woke Mary and persuaded her to walk with him to the hospital jetty. If there were no café there, the water bus would take them through the canals to the centre of town, not so far from their hotel.

By the time they arrived at the imposing gatehouse that was the entrance to the hospital, the water bus was leaving. Two young men in blue jackets, silver-rimmed dark glasses and identical, pencil-thin moustaches operated the boat. One stood ready at the wheel while the other unwound the mooring rope from a bollard with deft, contemptuous turns of the wrist; at the last possible moment he stepped aboard across the widening gap of oily water, released, in the same movement, the steel barrier behind which the passengers crowded, and secured it with one hand while staring impassively at the receding quay and talking loudly to his colleague.

Without discussing the matter, Colin and Mary turned inland and joined the people who streamed through the gatehouse, up a steep driveway lined with flowering shrubs, towards the hospital. Elderly women sat on stools selling magazines, flowers, crucifixes and statuettes, but no one even paused to look.

‘If there’s an out-patients’,’ Colin said, tightening his hold on Mary’s hand, ‘there might be a place selling refreshments.’

Mary was suddenly exasperated; ‘I’ve got to have a glass of water. Surely they’ll have that.’ Her lower lip was cracked and the skin round her eyes dark.

‘Bound to,’ Colin said. ‘It’s a hospital after all.’

A queue had formed outside a set of ornate glass doors which were topped by a great semi-circle of stained glass. By standing on tiptoes they could make out, through the
reflections of people and shrubs, a uniformed figure, a porter or a policeman, standing in the gloom between one set of doors and another, examining the credentials of each visitor. All around them people were taking from pockets and handbags their bright yellow card. It was clearly visiting hour in the wards, for none of those waiting appeared to be ill. The crowd edged nearer the door. An elegantly lettered sign propped on an easel announced one long and complex sentence in which a word closely resembling ‘security’ featured twice. Too tired to detach themselves in time from the queue, or to explain their need for refreshment once they had crossed the threshold and found themselves facing the uniformed guard, Colin and Mary descended the drive once more, pursued by general suggestions from the sympathetic crowd at the door; there appeared to be several cafés in the neighbourhood, but none close by the hospital gates. Mary said she wanted to sit down somewhere and cry, and it was while they were looking about for a suitable spot that they heard a shout and the muffled roar of a marine engine thrown into reverse; another water bus was tying up at the jetty.

To reach the hotel, it was necessary to walk across one of the great tourist attractions of the world, an immense wedge-shaped expanse of paving, enclosed on three sides by dignified arcaded buildings and dominated at its open end by a redbrick clock tower, and beyond that a celebrated cathedral of white domes and glittering façade, a triumphant accretion, so it had often been described, of many centuries of civilization. Assembled on the two longer sides of the square, facing across the paving stones like opposing armies, were the tightly packed ranks of chairs and round tables belonging to the long established cafés; adjacent orchestras, staffed and conducted by men in dinner jackets, oblivious to the morning heat, played simultaneously martial and romantic music, waltzes and extracts from popular operas with thunderous climaxes. Everywhere pigeons banked, strutted and excreted, and each café orchestra paused uncertainly after the earnest, puny applause of its nearest customers. Tourists surged across
the brilliantly-lit open ground, or wheeled off in small groups and dissolved into the monochrome patchwork of light and shade within the delicately colonnaded arcades. Two-thirds, perhaps, of the adult males carried cameras.

Colin and Mary had walked with difficulty from the boat and now, before crossing the square, stood in the diminishing shade of the clock tower. Mary took a succession of deep breaths, and over the din suggested that they find a drink of water here. Keeping close together, they set off round the edge of the square, but there were no vacant tables, there were no tables even that could be shared, and it became apparent that much of the movement backwards and forwards across the square consisted of people in search of a place to sit down, and that those who left for the labyrinthine streets did so in exasperation.

Finally, and only by standing several minutes at the table of an elderly couple who writhed in their seats waving their bill, they were able to sit, and then it was obvious that the table was on a remote flank of their waiter’s territory, and that many others who craned their necks and snapped their fingers unheard would receive attention before them. Mary gazed at Colin with narrowing bloodshot eyes and muttered something through cracked lips that were beginning to swell; and when he jokingly offered her the slops from the diminutive coffee cup in front of him, she buried her face in her hands.

Colin walked quickly round the tables towards the arcade. But the group of waiters who lounged in deep shade at the entrance to the bar shooed him away. ‘No water,’ said one, and indicated the bright sea of paying customers framed by the dark curves of the arches. Back at the table, Colin took Mary’s hand. They were roughly equidistant from two orchestras, and though the sound was not loud, the dissonances and cross-rhythms made it difficult to decide what to do. ‘They’re bringing something I think,’ Colin said uneasily.

They released their hands and sat back. Colin followed Mary’s gaze to a nearby family whose baby, supported at the waist by its father, stood on the table, swaying among the ashtrays and empty cups. It wore a white sun hat, a green-and-white striped matelot vest, bulging pants frilled with
pink lace and white ribbon, yellow ankle-socks and scarlet leather shoes. The pale blue circular bit of its dummy pressed tight against and obscured its mouth, giving it an air of sustained, comic surprise. From the corner of its mouth a snail’s trail of drool gathered in the deep fold of its chin and overflowed in a bright pendant. The baby’s hands clenched and unclenched, its head wobbled quizzically, its fat, weak legs were splayed round the massive, shameless burden of its nappy. The wild eyes, round and pure, blazed across the sunlit square and fixed in seeming astonishment and anger on the roofline of the cathedral where, it had once been written, the crests of the arches, as if in ecstasy, broke into marble foam and tossed themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if breakers on a shore had been frost-bound before they fell. The baby emitted a thick, guttural vowel sound and its arms twitched in the direction of the building.

Colin raised his hand tentatively as a waiter whirled towards them bearing a tray of empty bottles; but the man had passed them and was several feet away before the gesture was half-complete. The family was preparing to leave and the infant was handed round until it reached its mother, who wiped its mouth with the back of her hand, placed it carefully on its back in a silver-trimmed pram and set about securing with sharp tugs its arms and chest into a many-buckled leather harness. It lay back and fixed its furious gaze on the sky as it was wheeled away.

‘I wonder’, Mary said, watching it go, ‘how the children are.’ Mary’s two children were staying with their father who lived on a rural commune. Three postcards, addressed to them and all written on the first day, still lay on the bedside table in the hotel room, without stamps.