The Comfort of Strangers (2 page)

Colin settled in his chair. Above him was a vast dome of clear sky, and he sighed again, this time in contentment. The workmen on the barges had put away their tools and now stood in a group facing out towards the sunset, smoking cigarettes. On the hotel café pontoon, the clientele had moved on to aperitifs, and the conversations from the tables were muted and steady. Ice chimed in glasses, the heels of the
efficient waiters ticked mechanically across the pontoon boards. Colin stood up and watched the passers-by in the street below. Tourists, many of them elderly, in their best summer suits and dresses, moved along the pavement in reptilian slow motion. Now and then a couple stopped to stare approvingly at the customers on the pontoon drinking against their gigantic backcloth of sunset and reddened water. One elderly gentleman positioned his wife in the foreground and half-knelt with thin, trembling thighs, to take a picture. The drinkers at a table immediately behind the woman raised their glasses good-naturedly towards the camera. But the photographer, intent on spontaneity, straightened and, with a sweeping gesture of his free hand, tried to usher them back on the path of their unselfconscious existence. It was only when the drinkers, all young men, lost interest, that the old man lifted the camera to his face and bent his unsteady legs again. But now his wife had moved a few feet to one side and was interested in something in her hand. She was turning her back to the camera in order to encourage the last rays of sun into her handbag. Her husband called to her sharply and she moved smartly back into position. The closing snap of the handbag clasp brought the young men to life. They arranged themselves in their seats, lifted their glasses once more and made broad, innocent smiles. With a little moan of irritation the old man pulled his wife away by the wrist, while the young men, who barely noticed them leave, re-routed their toasts and smiles towards each other.

Mary appeared at the french window, a cardigan draped around her shoulders. With excited disregard for the state of play between them, Colin immediately set about recounting the little drama in the street below. She stood at the balcony wall, watching the sunset while he spoke. She did not shift her gaze when he gestured towards the young men at their table, but she nodded faintly. Colin could not reproduce the vague misunderstandings that constituted, according to him, the main interest of the story. Instead, he heard himself exaggerate its small pathos into vaudeville, perhaps in an attempt to gain Mary’s full attention. He described the elderly gentleman as ‘incredibly old and feeble’, his wife was
‘batty beyond belief’, the men at the table were ‘bovine morons’, and he made the husband give out ‘an incredible roar of fury’. In fact the word ‘incredible’ suggested itself to him at every turn, perhaps because he feared that Mary did not believe him, or because he did not believe himself. When he finished, Mary made a short ‘mm’ sound through a half smile.

They stood several feet apart and continued to stare across the water in silence. The large church across the broad channel which they had often talked of visiting was now a silhouette and, nearer, a man in a small boat returned his binoculars to their case and knelt to restart the outboard motor. Above them and to their left, the green neon hotel-sign came on with an abrupt, aggressive crackle which subsided into a low buzz. Mary reminded Colin that it was getting late, that they should be going soon before the restaurants closed. Colin agreed, but neither moved. Then Colin sat down in one of the beach-chairs, and not long after that Mary sat down too. Another short silence, and they reached for one another’s hand. Little squeeze answered little squeeze. They moved their chairs closer and whispered apologies. Colin touched Mary’s breasts, she turned and kissed first his lips and then, in a tender, motherly way, his nose. They whispered and kissed, stood up to embrace, and returned to the bedroom where they undressed in semi-darkness.

This was no longer a great passion. Its pleasures were in its unhurried friendliness, the familiarity of its rituals and procedures, the secure, precision-fit of limbs and bodies, comfortable, like a cast returned to its mould. They were generous and leisurely, making no great demands, and very little noise. Their lovemaking had no clear beginning or end and frequently concluded in, or was interrupted by, sleep. They would have denied indignantly that they were bored. They often said they found it difficult to remember that the other was a separate person. When they looked at each other they looked into a misted mirror. When they talked of the politics of sex, which they did sometimes, they did not talk of themselves. It was precisely this collusion that made them
vulnerable and sensitive to each other, easily hurt by the rediscovery that their needs and interests were distinct. They conducted their arguments in silence, and reconciliations such as this were their moments of greatest intensity, for which they were deeply grateful.

They dozed, then dressed hurriedly. While Colin went to the bathroom, Mary returned to the balcony to wait. The hotel sign had been turned off. The street below was deserted, and on the pontoon two waiters were clearing away the cups and glasses. The few customers who remained were no longer drinking. Colin and Mary had never left the hotel so late, and Mary was to attribute much of what followed to this fact. She paced the balcony impatiently, inhaling the musty smell of geraniums. There were no restaurants open now, but on the far side of the city, if they could find it, was a late-night bar outside which a man sometimes stood with his hot-dog stand. When she was thirteen, still a conscientious, punctual schoolgirl alive with a hundred ideas for self-improvement, she had kept a notebook in which, every Sunday evening, she set out her goals for the week ahead. These were modest, achievable tasks, and it comforted her to tick them off as the week progressed: to practise the cello, to be kinder to her mother, to walk to school to save the bus fare. She longed for such comfort now, for time and events to be at least partially subject to control. She sleepwalked frommoment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will.

‘Ready?’ Colin called. She went inside, closing the french window behind her. She took the key from the bedside table, locked the door, and followed Colin down the unlit staircase.

T
HROUGHOUT THE CITY
, at the confluences of major streets, or in the corners of the busiest square, were small, neatly constructed kiosks or shacks which by day were draped with newspapers and magazines in many languages, and with tiers of postcards showing famous views, children, animals and women who smiled when the card was tilted.

Inside the kiosk sat the vendor, barely visible through the tiny hatch, and in virtual darkness. It was possible to buy cigarettes here and not know whether it was a man or a woman who sold them. The customer saw only the native deep brown eyes, a pale hand, and heard muttered thanks. The kiosks were centres of neighbourhood intrigue and gossip; messages and parcels were left here. But tourists asking for directions were answered with a diffident gesture towards the display of maps, easily missed between the ranks of lurid magazine covers.

A variety of maps was on sale. The least significant were produced by commercial interests and, besides showing the more obvious tourist attractions, they gave great prominence to certain shops or restaurants. These maps were marked with the principal streets only. Another map was in the form of a badly printed booklet and it was easy, Mary and Colin had found, to get lost as they walked from one page to another. Yet another was the expensive, officially sanctioned map which showed the whole city and named even the narrowest of passageways. Unfolded, it measured four feet by three and, printed on the flimsiest of papers, was impossible to manage outdoors without a suitable table and special clips. Finally there was a series of maps, noticeable by their blue-and-white
striped covers, which divided the city into five manageable sections, none of them, unfortunately, overlapping. The hotel was in the top quarter of map two, an expensive, inefficient restaurant at the foot of map three. The bar towards which they were now walking was in the centre of map four, and it was only when they passed a kiosk, shuttered and battened for the night, that Colin remembered that they should have brought the maps. Without them they were certain to get lost.

However, he said nothing. Mary was several feet ahead, walking slowly and evenly as though measuring out a distance. Her arms were folded and her head was lowered, defiantly contemplative. The narrow passageway had brought them on to a large, flatly lit square, a plain of cobbles, in the centre of which stood a war memorial of massive, rough-hewn granite blocks assembled to form a gigantic cube, topped by a soldier casting away his rifle. This was familiar, this was the starting point for nearly all their expeditions. But for a man stacking chairs outside a café, watched by a dog and, further off, another man, the square was deserted.

They crossed diagonally and entered a wider street of shops selling televisions, dishwashers and furniture. Each store prominently displayed its burglar-alarm system. It was the total absence of traffic in the city that allowed visitors the freedom to become so easily lost. They crossed streets without looking and, on impulse, plunged down narrower ones because they curved tantalizingly into darkness, or because they were drawn by the smell of frying fish. There were no signs. Without a specific destination, the visitors chose routes as they might choose a colour, and even the precise manner in which they became lost expressed their cumulative choices, their will. And when there were two together making choices? Colin stared at Mary’s back. The street lighting had bleached her blouse of colour, and against the old blackened walls she shimmered, silver and sepia, like an apparition. Her fine shoulder-blades, rising and falling with her slow stride, made a rippling fan of creases across her silk blouse, and her hair, which was partly gathered at the
back of her head with a butterfly clasp, swung backwards and forwards across her shoulders and nape.

She stopped at the window of a department store to examine an enormous bed. Colin drew level with her, lingered a moment, and then walked on. Two dummies, one dressed in pyjamas of pale blue silk, the other in a thigh-length nightie trimmed with pink lace, lay among the artfully dishevelled sheets. The display was not quite complete. The dummies were from the same mould, both bald, both smiling wondrously. They lay on their backs, but from the arrangement of their limbs – each lifted a hand painfully to its jaw – it was clear they were intended to be reclining on their side, facing each other fondly. It was the headboard, however, that had caused Mary to stop. Upholstered in black plastic, it spanned the width of the bed with a foot to spare on either side. It was designed, on the pyjama side at least, to resemble the control panel of a power station, or perhaps a light aircraft. Embedded in the shiny upholstery were a telephone, a digital clock, light-switches and dimmers, a cassette recorder and radio, a small refrigerated drinks cabinet and, towards the centre, like eyes rounded in disbelief, two voltmeters. The nightie side, dominated by an oval, rose-tinted mirror, was sparse by comparison. There was an inset make-up cabinet, a magazine rack and a nursery intercom. Balanced on top of the refrigerator was a cheque on which was written next month’s date, the name of the department store, a huge sum and a signature in bold strokes. Mary noticed that the dummy in pyjamas was holding a pen. She took a couple of paces to one side and an imperfection in the plate glass caused the figures to stir. Then they were still, their arms and legs raised uselessly, like insects surprised by poison. She turned her back on the tableau. Colin was fifty yards along, on the other side of the street. Shoulders hunched, hands deep in his pockets, he was watching a book of carpet samples methodically turning its pages. She caught him up and they walked on in silence till they came to a fork at the end of the street and stopped.

Colin spoke in commiseration. ‘You know, I was looking at that bed the other day too.’

Where the street divided there stood what must have once been an imposing residence, a palace. A row of stone lions stared down from beneath the rusting balcony on the first floor. The high-arched windows, flanked by finely grooved, pitted pillars, were blocked with corrugated tin which had been fly-posted, even on the second floor. Most of the announcements and pronouncements were from feminists and the far Left, and a few were from local groups opposed to the redevelopment of the building. High up, above the second floor, was a wooden board which announced in bright red lettering the name of the chain store that had acquired the site, and then in English, in quotation marks: ‘The shop that puts
you
first!’ Ranged outside the grand front door, like a line of premature customers, were plastic rubbish sacks. Hands on hips, Colin peered down one street, then crossed to peer down the other. ‘We should have brought those maps.’

Mary had climbed the first steps of the palace and was reading the posters. ‘The women are more radical here,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘and better organized.’

Colin had stepped back to compare the two streets. They ran straight for a considerable distance and eventually curved away from each other. ‘They’ve got more to fight for,’ he said. ‘We came by this way before, but can you remember which way we went?’ Mary was translating with difficulty a lengthy proclamation. ‘Which way?’ Colin said slightly louder.

Frowning, Mary ran her forefinger along the lines of bold print, and when she finished she exclaimed in triumph. She turned and smiled at Colin. ‘They want convicted rapists castrated!’

He had moved to get a better view of the street to the right. ‘And hands chopped off for theft? Look, I’m sure we passed that drinking fountain before, on the way to this bar.’

Mary turned back to the poster. ‘No. It’s a tactic. It’s a way of making people take rape more seriously as a crime.’

Colin moved again and stood, with his feet firmly apart, facing the street on their left. It too had a drinking fountain. ‘It’s a way’, he said irritably, ‘of making people take feminists less seriously.’