The Daffodil Sky (8 page)

He dressed and began to walk, as he had always promised himself, up the road that went along the bay. For about half a mile there were little hotels, each with its own small red-tented
plage
, a few villas with shutters pulled down on geranium-filled verandahs against the
sun, and then four or five
pensions
, shuttered too and noiseless behind walls of sea-bent cypresses. Between them a few boats lay beached, half-buried in thick white sand; and then the shore, at last, was clear, all pine and slate-blue rock and dune-grass, with the road winding thinner and thinner up the bay.

Here and there a cove of rock, a miniature bay, pushed the road further inland, so that the sea was suddenly not visible over humps of bracken and pine. He began to see that the fine long curve of road was a deception. It would take hours, half a day, perhaps more, to walk the long circle to the point. Sand blew in sharp tedious whirls under the pines and a sound of shaken boughs, somewhere between a moan and a whine, not summery at all, was almost ugly in the cooling afternoon.

He was glad to be on clear treeless road again, where he could feel sun. And then, abruptly, on a rise of rock, the road ended altogether. It shot upwards over the little rise, ending in barricades of wire and petrol cans and old sea-worn notices that had once spelled
‘Danger: Pont coupé'
in brighter red.

Beyond, a narrow estuary, tidal, filling now with the scum of incoming sea, cut him off from the higher coast, and he stood looking down at what remained of the bridge, two lines of old black tooth-stumps, crusted by weed and mussels in the sand. The estuary gave on to a little bay, sheltered from the west by a point of rock, with scattered pools: and then beyond again the repeated dazzling dunes of sand.

He sat down, lazy in the strong sea-air, glad to be cheated of the walk along the coast. He had not come to France for walking; he was happy to absorb sea and
sun and sand, eat a thousand
langoustes
, a thousand
langoustines
, and sleep, with no one to worry him, every day. He had been shot down over Lorient a day or two before invasion began. He had been wounded in the left shoulder; and now it produced a curious deflective sort of action in his arm, so that he travelled crab-wise when swimming. Partisans had taken care of him for a week or two, grim, high-spirited and very kind, and his first thought, after the war, had been to come back to them. He had wandered, later, all through the coast country about here, trying to find his unit in a countryside littered with abrupt, tired, severe notices saying ‘No: we do
not
know where your unit is.' All of it now seemed a million years away.

He would not have known the girl coming up the road, five minutes later, if it had not been for Madame Dupont's description of her: a white sun-dress with a red coat that could be slipped off. She had taken off the coat and was carrying it in her hand.

She too stood looking down at the little estuary, the bay, and the remains of the bridge; the wind filling and beating the skirt of her dress, so that she held it down with her free hand.

‘The bridge is cut,' he said. He spoke in French and for a moment she did not reply.

Then she said, with a curious repetitive flatness that he could not explain as either ironical or bored:

‘Yes: the bridge is cut.'

She stared across the bay, lips full, thrust outward, almost pouting. It was true, as Madame Dupont said, that she was a big girl, big and round, with sallow skin and fine full arms; but her eyes, like her voice, were flat
and unresponsive. Sea-light seemed to have pulled over the deep brown pupils a thin opaque blind.

He stood for a second or two not knowing what to say and then he remarked that, below, the little bay was very beautiful.

Yes, it was very beautiful, she said: flatly again, as if, perhaps, it were a stretch of corrugated iron.

There was probably a road round the estuary, he said, if she thought of walking on; and she said:

Yes, there was probably a road round the estuary: as if neither she nor anyone could possibly care.

Quite suddenly she turned and began to walk back down the road to the hotel. He watched her for some minutes and then began to walk back too. Half-way there the wind blew cool again, whining and moaning under the pines, and the girl put on the little scarlet coat as she walked along.

That evening the
patron
came to the table, as he always did, and said, ‘Tonight, sir, Mister Harris m'sieu, we have on the
menu
to eat a nice potage, a broth, and then some local fish cooked
en fenouille
, and afterwards a piece of meat, bifteck, cooked in butter. It is all right? You find it?'

He would find it excellent, Harris answered, and at the bifteck Madame Dupont said:

‘The girl is all alone. She is wearing quite a nice dress, dark blue and white. It goes well with that dark hair of hers.'

‘You have butter on your chin, Monsieur Harris,' Jean-Pierre said, and Harris licked the running butter away with his tongue.

‘Their name is Michel. I found it from Madame. He
is something in automobiles in Paris. Quite well off, I think, too.'

‘Are they married?'

‘They are father and daughter.'

‘Then why do you suppose the father isn't there?'

‘Because he has gone to Paris,' Madame Dupont said. ‘He is like so many other gentlemen. He has
affaires
in Paris and he will come here, no doubt, for the
wickend.'

‘Have you seen him before?'

‘I don't know,' Madame Dupont said. ‘I am not sure. Somehow there is a little feeling I have seen him somewhere.'

In the evenings there was nothing to do but sit on the terrace and, in the darkness, almost always warm but hardly ever without a stir of wind, watch the awakening of lights across the bay. The long sea-strong days made him very sleepy and by ten o'clock, most evenings, he was too tired to keep awake and fell asleep at once, on the top floor, in his small attic bed. In the hotel
salon
games of bridge between staid French pairs, at tables of green baize, went on until midnight; and in the bar below plaintive French songs, on records, with dancing, beat into the wave-lapped night air for an hour or two longer.

That night he did not fall asleep. With sunset the bristling wind across the bay had died. In the still air the gramophone from below thumped like the heavy throbbing of a sardine boat setting out to open sea.

It seemed as if, for an hour, the same tune was played over and over again. He got up and looked at his watch. He shook it several times to make sure that half past nine, and not, as he thought, half past ten, was the time
it showed. Across the bay, at the headland, a navigation light flashed green and red, and below, on the terrace, there was still a noise of spoons in coffee saucers.

It suddenly came to him that, in a moment of sleepiness, he had made a mistake of an hour in the time. He dressed and went downstairs. There was much knitting by French mesdames in the lounge, and outside, under arbours of plane-leaves, a few people were still drinking, served by a waiter who in moments of idleness stared out at a dreamy milk-calm sea. In the bar a few others were dancing, the windows open for air, the gramophone filling the room with the beat of the same hot sweet tune he had heard upstairs.

In the bar he found the girl: but not dancing.

She was sitting alone on a high stool at the bar, playing with a few dark-golden grains of sugar in a coffee spoon.

‘Would you dance?' he said.

She held up her arms, not speaking, without a smile. The sleeves of her dress, dark blue, were long, ending in cuffs that clipped together with small white shells. The stuff of the dress was some light crêpe-like material through which, as they danced, he could feel her skin, smooth and blood-warm and unencumbered. She danced mechanically, smoothly, staring over his shoulder: either as if she were deep in thought or not thinking at all. He asked her once if she knew the name of the French tune that now, as before, the gramophone kept playing over and over again, but she shrugged her shoulders, whether because she did not understand or because she did not know he never discovered.

After the third or fourth dance he experienced a
curious feeling. A latent boredom, a kind of soft fungus of drowsiness rising from the same dance, the same tune, the same mechanical rhythm of her body—as if she had done all this and done it as silently, as beautifully and as efficiently with a hundred men like him before—began to creep up through his mind. He felt it over-hot in the little bar. He began to dislike the haunting repetitive little tune. A smell of sea-air, fresh and salt, came in lightly through the open window, and suddenly he felt he wanted to be outside, watching the bay and its lights, walking by the sea.

‘Shall we walk?' he said.

Her response to the idea of walking was exactly as it had been to the idea of dancing. Not speaking, again without a smile, she walked in her anonymous way into the darkness ahead of him. He followed her and, side by side, they began to walk along the little curving esplanade. For a time street lights at regular intervals lit up bright purple and scarlet beds of verbena and geraniums, rows of striped bathing huts, blue and brown boats upturned on white sand.

And then, soon, the last of the light had gone. The dark sea, a white fringe of miniature summer waves, a few dark rocks in white sand: it was all wonderfully quiet after the bright noises of the bar.

Half a mile farther on they stopped by the sea-wall and looked out to where, over the bay, it was possible now to see the lights of the lower port, the green and scarlet flashes of navigation points, the trail of a sardine fleet making for open water. He watched for a few moments and then, casually, he turned to kiss her. He thought for a moment he had made a hasty and
blundering attempt at it because, as he came close to her, she turned her face away. And then suddenly he knew that she was simply offering her cheek, lightly and formally, in the conventional French way.

‘Not that way,' he said and began to turn her towards him, kissing her full on the mouth. He felt a great start of quickened response flare up through her body that, from her breast downward, seemed to have nothing covering it but the flimsy crêpe-like stuff of the dress.

Like one of the navigation lights pricking the darkness, the start of her body flared up and went out again. She seemed to kill it and then hold herself away.

He stood for some moments tracing with one finger, slightly puzzled, the line of her long arm and the bare curve of one shoulder. She had taken up a half-crouching attitude, leaning forward on the wall, looking at the sea.

‘How long do you stay here?' he said.

‘Until the hot weather is finished. It is very hot in Paris now.'

‘Do you live in Paris?'

‘I live in Paris.'

‘Do you like it here?' he said. ‘Do you swim?'

‘Yes: I swim,' she said.

There was something increasingly curious, he thought, about that repeated formality, the flashing start of feeling, the sudden ending of it, the holding away. He felt that behind it, behind all the soft correctness of tone, a disturbed moment of high feeling, of anguish in heat or even anger, might suddenly flare out if he touched her again.

‘Perhaps you would like to swim to-morrow?' he said. ‘With me.'

‘I would like it. Thank you.'

‘What time? At half past ten? Before lunch?' he said.

‘Before lunch: yes.'

He began to explain to her about the sand in front of the hotel. The wash of tide covered it with unpleasant contours of sea-weed and a species of ugly splintered grey shell. By noon crowds of feet had turned it into a mess. It was better to bathe some distance up the shore and now he suddenly remembered the smaller bay, at the estuary, where the bridge was broken, that he had seen that afternoon.

‘Would you come there?' he said. ‘It's better.'

‘Yes: I will come there,' she said.

For more than half the way back to the hotel she had nothing else to say. He did not kiss her again. At a turn in the esplanade a brief curl of wind, like some afterthought from the breezy afternoon, caught her long hair and blew it, intensely black and beautiful, across her face. She stopped to pin it back; and standing there, in the half-light of the first esplanade lamp forty yards away, she addressed him for the first time with a question of her own.

‘How long do you stay here?'

He laughed.

‘As long as the money lasts.'

‘You don't know?'

‘No.'

He had not given it serious thought. He had been able to bring about seventy pounds—all that was left of his precious magnificent gratuity, all he had. After that had gone he hadn't a penny, not a prospect, not the remotest idea of a plan or a job.

‘When there's no more money you go home?'

‘That's it.'

‘You must be careful with your money,' she said.

In the morning they lay in the sun, below dunes of scorching sand, beyond the estuary. A wind had risen with customary freshness after sunrise and it seemed to keep off the heat of a brilliant day. But it was the wind, he knew, that burnt; and he was torn between telling her to cover her body for comfort's sake and letting her leave it there, magnificent and full, breast and loins held in nothing but simple triangles of sea-green, long hair blue-black on her full ripe shoulders, so that he could take his fill of watching it.

Finally he reached for her sun-wrap. She was lying full-stretched on sea-whitened sand, her skin almost as pale. ‘You ought to put this on,' he said. ‘The sun will burn you.'

She turned over, her flanks picking up star-like grains of sand, one breast dipping and taking up with its heavy tautness a coat of the same shimmering particles of whiteness; and in a moment he felt himself fired and trembling and began to kiss her. Her mouth, now, came full to him at once, without hesitation. Her hair fell across his face and with a long slow arm she brushed it away and then let the arm curl across his back. He felt the five needles of her fingers nicking down the bone of his spine, clenched, holding him in still frenzy.