The Kindness of Women (17 page)

The ferry passed within a dozen feet, a clamour of engine noise and clinking beer bottles, its wash sending a cloud of diesel fumes into my face. Exhausted, I lay in the rocking wake. The beach was six hundred yards away, and a row of unfamiliar hotels faced me across the water. Our apartment house had moved along the bay, and Miriam and the children were lost behind the lines of umbrellas and beached pedalos. The current had carried me beyond the concrete mole that marked the end of the Santa Margarita beach. Already I could see the undeveloped shoreline of Ampuriabrava, an area of grass-covered dunes, creeks, and mosquito inlets.

Giving up any hope of swimming across the bay, I rested on the current, and began the long swim to the empty beach. The concrete mole cut off my sight of Santa Margarita, and I wondered if Miriam had seen me apparently disappear under the ferry's lethal bows.

Twenty minutes later, when I reached the beach, I was too tired even to crawl. I lay in the shallow water, my hands resting on the corrugated sand, my face nudged by the curious waves. A speedboat swept past, two men towing a fifteen-year-old girl on water skis. They soared away, leaving behind a blare of pop music.

Untouched by the feet of holiday-makers, the white sand was like fluffed sugar. I stepped out of the water and sank into its soft quilt. I had nearly been chopped into bloody fillets under the critical gaze of hundreds of tourists clutching their Dalí guidebooks. Somewhere beyond the mole there was the sound of the inflatable's outboard. Miriam had seen me, and was speeding towards the shore.

She expertly beached the craft as Henry jumped onto the sand.

“Are you all right?” Miriam knelt beside me. “What are you doing here? I'm married to a madman.”

Henry scowled at me. “Is he dead?”

“He's pretending awfully hard.”

“Being dead must feel like this.” I sat up, glad to see the sun. “It was like trying to cross the Styx—a ferryman almost ran me down.”

“What a nerve! We'll report him to the Guardia Civil.”

“They're probably in league.”

“How many lengths did you swim?” Henry asked.

“About a thousand.” I leaned against Miriam, resting my chafed chin against her sea-cool shoulder. “What about Alice and Lucy?”

“They're with the Nordlunds—they spotted you from their balcony. Henry, we'll get Daddy back to the boat.”

“Hold on—let's explore a little. This is some sort of island.”

“A real desert island, Daddy? With cannibals?”

“Definitely cannibals…”

We had come ashore on a long sandbar, separated from the dunes of Ampuriabrava by an arm of shallow water. Some fifty yards wide, the sandbar followed the curve of the bay, rising in a series of grass-covered hillocks. As we walked along the firmer ground we passed the remains of a rusting shack. Wine bottles, an old portable radio, and a bicycle wheel lay half-buried in the sand beside this terminal hut. In the hollows between the dunes small fires had been lit during the winter. Across the inlet the scrubland of creeks and inlets extended as far as the Figueras road, but already property developers' signs stood by their marker posts, announcing a new resort complex of hotels, marinas, and apartment houses.

As we strolled along, my arm around Miriam's waist, Henry rushed back to us through the long grass.

“There's a Wendy house! It's got a door and windows—and guess what? A real toilet!”

“A Wendy house with a toilet.” Miriam took his hand. “Are you sure?”

“Yes—I used it!”

At the western end of the island the dunes rose twenty feet above the beach. An old seawall had collapsed into the inlet, and the stones had been carried ashore. Standing on a makeshift patio was an ornately gabled cabin that had once been an Edwardian bathing machine and had probably served for years as a chicken coop in some Rosas back garden. A tattered parachute canopy hung from a trellis of wooden poles and formed a shaded verandah.

I pushed back the cabin door and glanced at the interior. There was a rudimentary kitchen with a stone sink, bottled-gas cooker, and chemical toilet. Sand covered the wooden floor, blown through the weatherboarding.

Miriam lay back in a wicker chair below the canopy, while Henry and I set out to explore the dunes. We found burnt-out fireworks, beer cans, and even, mysteriously, an old portable typewriter. When I carried it back to the patio Miriam nodded approvingly.

I sat beside her and blew through the sandy keys. “Well, I guess I'm ready to start work. It's not quite the Villa Mauresque, but so what…”

“Good for you.” Miriam closed her eyes, listening to the waves. “It's lovely here—who owns all this stuff?”

“Local beatniks? Nothing's locked and everything's broken.”

“That sounds more like Shepperton. I always thought we were Shepperton's beatniks without realising it.”

“We still are.” I rested my feet on the typewriter, all notions of work already forgotten. “I hate to mention it, but the apartment is going to cost us a fortune in dilapidations.”

“I'll talk to Señor Robles. He'll understand.”

“So you always say. This time, put on your best show.”

“I will—I think he likes looking at my breasts.”

“It's his sinister little secretary you'll have to talk to. I hope she likes your breasts.”

“Maybe she does…” Miriam began to rub ointment into my blistered shoulders, her eyes turning towards Santa Margarita. Recently she had become intrigued by the admiring glances of other women. The admiration of her own sex existed on a higher and more intense plane than anything men could offer, like the romantic rivalries of sisters. Together, women formed a conspiracy of glances entirely exchanged behind the backs of their menfolk.

“We'll bring the girls tomorrow,” Miriam said. “I want them to see this—it's like something straight out of television.”

“Miriam? What a thing to say…”

“Tell me, why don't we get our own place here? You've always said you wanted to live in Spain.”

“We will, one day.”

“Hemingway, Gaudí, Buñuel … you could work here, they're more your world.” Miriam turned my face towards her and pressed a finger between my eyes. “Face it, dear, you're never going to feel at home in England.”

“Is that true? I feel at home in Shepperton.”

“Not even in Shepperton. You've been in England for eighteen years and you still look as if you've stepped off the wrong train.”

“Perhaps I need to go back to Shanghai. I should have taken up David's offer.”

“No, not Shanghai. You've finished with all that, thank God. Spain might give you just the jolt you're waiting for.”

“Am I waiting for a jolt?”

“Yes—like a rabbit in a Skinner box. You're getting bored with that one damned lever. Look how you come alive at those third-rate bullfights in Figueras.”

“That's tourist Spain. What about schools?”

“They have schools here. The Spanish may be mad, but they're literate. Think about your parents—they went out to China.”

“But they took a piece of Surrey with them. Spain would be a much bigger challenge. For you, anyway.”

“Balls. We've got to get you out of England … you've found a small strangeness where you're comfortable, and that's dangerous. Anyway, Dalí's here at Port Lligat. We might meet him.”

“And the mysterious Gala, his weird.”

Miriam bent down as if to kiss me and bit my ear. She held a speck of blood on the tip of her tongue and left it between my lips. “Jim, you need to meet more weird women. A tussle with Señor Robles's secretary would do you a world of good. I might even arrange it.”

“I wouldn't know what to do.”

“Dear, you would do nothing—she'd quietly take your brain apart like a neurosurgeon. Poor love, I'll protect you…”

She pulled my head onto her lap, with its scents of sea salt, baby lotion, and perfume borrowed from Mrs. Nordlund. We watched Henry wading in the water beside the seawall. He lifted a stone and carried it across the patio, where the first flight of a simple staircase had been laid. He smoothed out a new shelf and carefully laid the stone, then surveyed his work with a child's pride.

“I'm coming, Henry!” Miriam pushed me aside and leapt up. She waded into the water and began to help Henry with the stones. I lay back under the awning, watching her assemble this modest stairway that in her mind already led to a new life. Eight years of marriage and three children had failed to dent her enthusiasms. From our earliest days she had always pushed me along, giving up holidays so that I could finish a book, taking the children to London Zoo to allow me a few hours of peace. Her confidence in me had never wavered, even during the time of endless rejection slips. She hid bank statements, quietly borrowed money from her mother and Dick Sutherland. In many ways she had remade me. I owed her everything, my children, my first published books, my refound confidence in the world.

But change would soon come, and I wondered if I was equal to it. She had taken part in the Shepperton Players' open-air performance of
As You Like It,
playing a spirited Rosalind like a feminist agitator. Already she talked of going back to her career in journalism. Watching her move impatiently around her kitchen, bored with the endless meals, I could see the mature and strong-willed woman in her forties that she would become. In a sense she would leave me far behind her, a problematical Peter Pan whose pockets were filled with a strange yellow earth …

For the moment she had set her heart on Spain. I guessed that Señor Robles had already shown her one of his villas in the hills above Rosas and Cadaqués. The Dalís might prove to be more demanding neighbours than Miriam realised, but I was happy to see her revelling in the attentive gaze of the melancholy Spaniards as she strode around the supermarkets of Rosas in her black bikini. An economy of pleasure and possibility was about to rule our lives.

*   *   *

A new Europe had sprung up along the beaches of the Mediterranean, in effect a linear city three thousand miles long and three hundred metres deep, that stretched from Gibraltar to Glyphada Beach beyond the eastern suburbs of Athens. The old Europe had shed its past, its hierarchies and snobberies. Here in this classless realm Lancashire typists shared bar tables with Stockholm accountants and Danish truck drivers. The beaches of Spain were Europe's California, or at least its Florida. I liked its marina culture, its endless highways and apartment houses. This was the future that President Kennedy and the space race had helped to create, a residential zone laid down in advance for the science parks and high-technology projects yet to come.

In many ways there was something almost lunar about the white hotels, haunted by criminals running hash from North Africa, stealing antiquities, or on the run from Scotland Yard. After the sombre light of Northern Europe, the peculiar geometry of these overlit apartments seemed to lead us into a more abstract world where emotions were leached away. Even sex became more stylised. In the afternoons, while the children slept through the heat, Miriam and I would drink white wine in the kitchen. When she was pleasantly drunk, she liked to make love in the bathroom, taking up her positions against the mirrors and white enamel like a perverse gymnast. She watched me without expression, as if we were having sex in a space capsule hundreds of miles above the Earth, conceiving the first of a new race of astronauts.

After a year on the Costa Brava we would be totally decorticated, with that blankness of mind I could see in the faces of package tourists after only a week. Before leaving England we had seen Hitchcock's
Psycho,
and the English secretaries in their bikinis behaved like so many Janet Leighs who had decided not to take that crucial shower but could no longer remember where they had left their lives.

“Jim, stir a leg!” Miriam called to me, arms covered with wet sand. “While we're slaving away he's lying there like a pasha. Tomorrow we'll bring the dinghy here—the girls are going to be really impressed…”

Building this simple flight of steps was Miriam's touching way of showing that she was serious about settling in Spain. Every morning the five of us set off in the inflatable, taking with us a picnic for the day. As I repaired the awning, stitching the ragged parachute silk, Miriam and the children cleared out the cabin and swept the patio. In the afternoon, after cold chicken and sangria, we dozed in the shade or swam with the children from the stone steps. The water-skiers sped across the bay, portable radios gleamed on the beach at Santa Margarita, and the mad ferryman aimed his bow at any passing swimmer.

*   *   *

A week later, when we landed on the island, new arrivals had occupied our beach hideaway. A small Citroën loaded with suitcases and camping gear had crossed the shallow water of the inlet and was parked on the sand. A bearded man and a young woman with a black shingle were swimming from Miriam's jetty, watched by a tall, naked man in his forties with shoulder-length hair, a book in one hand and a pipe in the other.

Uncertain, the children stopped by the car. Henry pointed to the sticker pasted to the rear fender above the French licence plate:
HAPPINESS IS OVERTAKING A
2
CV
.

“What's a 2CV?”

“A kind of car—let's say hello.”

“Why is happiness overtaking it?”

Alice peered through her fringe and took Miriam's hand. “Are they the cannibals? Is Daddy going to fight them?”

“Of course not. It's probably their house.”

The car was packed with bottles of Spanish wine, loaves of bread, and a clutch of paperbacks by Kerouac, Henry Miller, Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Lashed incongruously to the roof rack was an expensive pigskin suitcase covered with the labels of New York and Chicago hotels. Had they stolen the case from some distracted traveller at Perpignan station? As the naked man waved his pipe at the children I was visualising a new breed of beach criminal, reading
On the Road
or
Howl
as he slid the tourist's purse from her handbag.