The Kindness of Women (19 page)

Smoking a cigarette, Sally climbed through the grass towards me. She still wore the straw horns around her white hair.

“Time for a rest.” She slumped down beside me. “Jesus, I'm pooped. You and Miriam … there must be a knack.”

“Tell us if you find it—we've been exhausted since 1957.”

She sailed the straw horns into the air. “They're wonderful, take it from me. Everything turns into a party. I wish my childhood had been so much fun.”

She spoke wistfully and flicked at the hair blowing into her eyes, almost trying to set the loose ends alight with her cigarette. Endlessly patient with Henry, Alice, and Lucy, she was short-tempered with her own body, as if it had failed like a thoughtless child to respond to the problems on its mother's mind. She had chewed her nails to the quick, and her left nipple was raw and tender. A faint chemical odour rose from the gusset of her bikini, a hint of stale spermicidal jelly, and I guessed that she had been too distracted to change her cap for a few days. She helped herself to an olive from my hand.

“Where's your apartment? I can't see it today.”

“Next to the hotel with the sign … if some developer hasn't moved it. We should have come straight here with a couple of tents.”

“It's great. I like Gozo best—Circe's island, I drank from her spring. And Ruanda. Last year I was going to live with the Watusi.” She patted the sand on her legs, as if readying herself for some husband painted in white dust. “Miriam told me that you come from China.”

“Years ago. I've settled in England now.”

“Do you like it?”

“It takes getting used to.”

“That could be a good thing. Maybe you need to feel like a refugee.”

“What about you?”

She grimaced through the smoke, a gleam of American teeth. “I keep waiting … there aren't too many stars in the east these days. Sometimes I think that everywhere is pretty much the same. Miriam says you want to buy some pot?”

“Only if you have any to spare. She feels we're getting too bourgeois.”

“It's good for sex…” Sally was lying on her side, her breast touching the bottle of beer in my hand. I could see the tender nipple magnified through the pale green glass. She passed her cigarette and watched as I took a draw on the loosely packed hemp and tobacco. The children were hidden behind the headland, Miriam was working on the patio, and the empty beach would give us all the warning we needed as we lay within the dune grass. Sally took another olive from my palm, her lips briefly sucking my thumb. She was waiting for me, but I felt curiously gauche, as if I were effectively a virgin with no experience of women. During the eight years of our marriage I had been faithful to Miriam and knew her body far more closely than I knew my own. Another woman's body was an unfathomed mystery, let alone another woman's emotions and needs.

“Well, back to the monsters.” Sally stood up, brushing the sand from her thighs. She smiled quickly, erasing the offer of herself without any resentment, and strode down to the beach.

I followed fifty yards behind her, pausing to wash the guilty sweat from my face. I was surprised to find that I was shaking with irritation at myself—I was loyal to Miriam, though a little less loyal than I had realised.

When I reached the cabin the Jouberts were stepping from their Citroën, loaves of bread in their arms, more tapas and cheap wine from the bodega. Lykiard was holding a biology class for the children, who stood in a line, gazing fixedly at the lizard in his hand as Sally pulled a face over his shoulder.

The bow wave of the Estartit ferry struck the beach. Miriam strode across the patio, about to rinse the swimsuits in the sea. She skipped down the steps, stumbled, and missed her footing on the polished stones. Her right leg skewed sideways, and she fell heavily on the staircase.

The crack of her head against the stone made everyone turn. When I reached the steps she was lying half-stunned, eyes staring at my face as if she no longer recognised me. Her leg was twisted under her hips, blood running from a deep graze on the ankle.

Lykiard was beside me, warning the children away with the lizard, which he threw into the sea. I lifted Miriam onto her side, trying to feel the broken bone. Still stunned, she held on to my shoulder and sat up, her face small and pale, inhaling shallow breaths.

“My, that was a knock.” She spoke flatly. “Silly fool, where was I going?”

“Love, are you all right? Your leg…”

“Hurts like hell. Don't worry, Lucy. Mummy was silly and fell over. God, my head—I shouldn't have laid all those steps…”

Sally and I helped her back to the patio and settled her in the wicker chair. Miriam was shivering with the shock, her hair matted to her scalp, as she held Henry's hand. I tried to calm her trembling shoulders while Sally cleaned the ankle wound with a tampon soaked in mineral water. She turned to kiss Henry, and I saw the swollen bruise above her right ear, pushing against the unbroken skin.

Lykiard had put on his jeans and sandals. He spoke quickly to the Jouberts and brought out a bottle of fundador, but Miriam waved it away. She was reassuring the children, her face as small as theirs, her eyes staring at the staircase as if she had mislaid part of herself on the damp steps.

“I'd take her back to your flat,” Lykiard suggested. “We'll drive the kids in the car. She'll be more comfortable in the dinghy.”

Sally and the Jouberts helped me to lift Miriam into the inflatable. We pushed off, leaving our hamper and beach equipment on the sand, where the waves were already soaking the towels. Miriam waved to the children climbing into the back of the Citroen, her hands awkwardly gripping the sides of the inflatable. During the short journey the sea air seemed to revive her, and she smiled at me confidently, raising her damp eyebrows to apologise. But she collapsed when I pulled the dinghy onto the beach and had to lie down among the lines of parasols and the watching sunbathers until she recovered her breath.

She was strong enough to walk to the lift, but when I opened the door to the flat I sensed that only half her mind recognised it. I called the bureau for the telephone number of a local doctor, and Miriam wandered onto the balcony, blinking at the crowded beach.

An hour later, when the Spanish doctor arrived, she was lying on our bed, smiling wanly at the sound of the children on the Nordlunds' balcony. The doctor examined her in a slow but scrupulous way. Afterwards he patted me encouragingly and spoke in Spanish to Lykiard. The practicante, a visiting male nurse, would keep Miriam under observation until the doctor called again that evening.

While the practicante sat beside Miriam in the bedroom I went into the kitchen and prepared the children's supper, then carried the tray to the Nordlunds' apartment. When I returned, the practicante was on the telephone. He spoke to the doctor and then told me to be calm while he summoned an ambulance. I went into the bedroom and held Miriam's forehead. She had lost all feeling from her left leg and arm and was moving in and out of a shallow consciousness, smiling in a faint way as she seemed to recede from herself. She frowned at me with one side of her face, touching her numbed body with a small hand.

When the ambulance arrived I was already dazed with panic. The driver and his attendant were trying to assemble the collapsible wheelchair. While they argued with each other I lifted Miriam from the bed and carried her in my arms to the elevator. Her eyes stared vaguely at the falling lights of the floor buttons, and her body was cold, as if she had spent hours in the sea. We eased her into the ambulance, waving away the tourists returning from the beach, watched by the expressionless children on the Nordlunds' balcony.

Miriam could no longer see them. I heard the rear doors close behind me and saw Lykiard smiling stiffly, with a fist clenched in encouragement. I crouched on the jump seat behind the attendant as he secured Miriam under the blanket and readied his oxygen cylinder. We sped along the Figueras road, siren wailing, and began to swerve in and out of the traffic. I massaged Miriam's calves, trying to feel the pulse in her legs. The oxygen from the mask had driven the sweat from her face, which seemed as small as Lucy's at the moment of birth. Only her right eye was focused, moving across the lace curtains on the windows of the ambulance. She was forcing herself to breathe, but her ribcage had collapsed.

We stopped behind a bus that blocked the road to the bullring. The attendant opened the rear doors and remonstrated with the driver, who slowly reversed out of our way. We reached the hospital ten minutes later, as the last crowds dispersed from the football stadium. The flower sellers by the ticket office were wrapping up their unsold blooms, and the news vendors were taking down their metal racks. But by then Miriam was already dead.

8

THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN

The kindness of women came to my rescue, at a time when I had almost given up hope. Within a few weeks of her death I discovered that I had lost not only Miriam but all the women in the world. An unbridgeable space separated me from Miriam's friends and the women I knew, as if they had decided to isolate me within a carefully drawn cordon. Later I realised that they were standing at a distance, in the nearby rooms of my life, waiting until I had faced my anger at myself. Then they came forward and did everything to help me. The kindness of women and the affection of my children steered me safely through those first long months.

During our final days in Rosas, as the Nordlunds helped me to pack, I looked down from the balcony at the tourists stretched out on the beach, playing their parts in the eerie imitation of reality that life had become. The sun shone on the same parasols and pedalos, but everything had changed. In the hours since Miriam's death the entire female race had mutated into a different species. The women eating their gambas in the beach restaurants avoided my eyes, talking among themselves as they licked their red-stained fingers. When I cashed the last of my traveller's cheques I noticed that the bodies of the women queuing at the counter had lost their scent. Even Mrs. Nordlund, with her determined smile and affection towards the children, stared at me with the gaze of a relief worker from a foreign country.

Only Señor Robles's German-speaking secretary was still herself. Checking the inventory, she peered into the darkened bedroom, clearly assuming that here Miriam had died at my hands. She opened the mirrored cabinet in the bathroom and ran her fingers along the tooth glasses.

“Nix kaputt?”

“Kaputt nix.”

She glanced at me in that way I would come to resent, a mixture of curiosity and distance, like a spectator at the scene of a crime. I wanted to take her wrists and raise her elbows so that I could inhale the scent of her armpits, press my fingers into her natal cleft. I disliked this cocksure young woman enough to have sex with her while the children waited in the car with the Nordlunds. I wanted to prove that at least one woman still existed. But she moved away from me to the hallway and took the stairs rather than be alone with me in the elevator. In her mind my wife's death had let a rapist loose upon the world.

Rosas and the lizard-ridged rocks of Cape Creus fell behind us as we set off for Figueras and the French border. The resort beaches of the Costa Brava, the hotels and cafés slid past through a dream more lurid than any of Dalí's paintings, a vision of the world's end seen in terms of polluted sand, the stench of sun oil, and terraces of overexposed flesh. We passed the entrance to the municipal cemetery at Figueras and the long corridor of cypresses leading to the whitewashed walls and the ornate porticos of the family tombs. Miriam was buried in the adjacent Protestant cemetery, a flowerless boneyard where a few anticlerical Spaniards rested under modest stones beside an English youth drowned in a yachting accident. Looking back for the last time, I turned north towards the Pyrenees, France, and home.

The children sat behind me, playing compulsive games all the way to the Channel. Henry was too stunned to speak, but Alice and Lucy soon took charge. Already they were more concerned for me than they were for themselves. Mile after mile, they helped me with the road maps and chose hotels for our overnight stops, and kept a careful watch on the whisky bottle I held between my thighs. Their good sense and cheer laid the foundation on which we rebuilt our lives together.

During the drive I could remember only my last moments with Miriam and the burial service at the cemetery. Nature had committed a crime against my young wife and her children, and I felt a deep, confused anger not merely at myself, for bringing Miriam to Rosas, but at the vine-covered hills, the plane trees, and the grazing cattle. An hour after she died a fierce peace had come over Miriam as she lay in the emergency room at Figueras hospital. Her head was flung back, her chest braced upwards, and her lips gaped in a rictus that exposed the livid muscles of her mouth and throat. Her jaw thrust itself at me from the blue skin, teeth set in a scream of death. Steadied by Nordlund, I walked to the cathedral-like Figueras undertakers. We moved through the lines of ornate gothic coffins that resembled pews facing a profane altar of black marble headstones. Thinking of Miriam, I decided it only fitting that she should be consigned to the earth in a casket like a prop from a horror film.

But later that evening, when I returned to the hospital, a complete change had come over her. All the pain and fear of her last moments, as her stricken brain collapsed inwards upon itself, had passed. Her face had relaxed, and her skin was soft and white again. A nurse had combed her hair for me, and her cheeks and lips were as small and neat as a little girl's, giving me a last glimpse of her vanished childhood.

At the burial service the next day, the coffin was wheeled on its cart into the Protestant cemetery. The iron rims rang across the dusty rubble. The children stood beside me in their best party clothes, and I hoped that they would never hear the rage of death below the coffin lid. The young Spanish clergyman abandoned his broken English and spoke in a thick Catalan, once banished by General Franco, whose dark consonants were the language of the dead, which Miriam would now be speaking. Sally Mumford stood with Lykiard and the Jouberts. None of them could look at me. Smoking her reefer, Sally stared at the graves as if she expected the stone lids to be flung back and the angry occupants to leap out and seize us.