Becoming Strangers Read online

  He didn't turn from the shelves, but took his reading glasses from his top pocket to squint at the label on ajar of piccalilli. 'She has. All we got to do is show up.' He handed her the jar and she set it on the side and went to get the cold ham from the fridge. There was nothing more to be said.

  And now they were sat here, in this white room with its soft white rugs on a pale stone floor, billowing curtains, and a balcony that overlooked the sea. Strangers to the place, strangers to themselves. With no crossword to do, no post to bring in, no tea to get on, none of the regimented procession of news programming on radio and TV—seven a.m., eleven a.m., one p.m., five p.m., nine p.m. news; the same stories served different ways all day until they were stone-cold, what were they to do?

  'See if there's an iron, George,' she asked her husband who was standing, clad in vest and corduroy trousers on the balcony, looking down at the pool below.

  'Topless,' he said grimly. She raised her eyebrows.

  'And what can you do about it, at your age,' she said, 'you're not the man you were.'

  He went into the bathroom with her following. He gave the shower the scrutiny he usually gave to faulty radiators and used cars, checked the head on it and pronounced it safe for her to use if she wanted, but he'd just have a quick wash and brush-up, a quick wipe-over. Dorothy looked in the mirror at the bristle over her permanently puckered mouth. 'Oh Lord,' she said and felt around her cosmetics bag for the lipstick.

  There was a knock at the door and a black woman came in, wearing a smart green frock with a pinafore over it, and told them she was going to turn their bed down for the evening. Coming out of the bathroom, Dorothy went over to George, and both of them stood hands at their sides, backs to the wall, waiting for her to finish. They nodded and thanked her, and each noticed the accent of the other move up a tremor or two, posher.

  'She's left a couple of chocolates on the pillow,' said George, going to get one. 'They're cold,' he unwrapped one and bit it, 'minty tasting. Do you want yours?'

  She shook her head and he went back out to the balcony, leaving her to finish her face.

  They got to the bar on the dot of six-thirty, taking a turn round the gardens at twenty past. They found they were pretty much alone apart from the barman. It was George's way to engage staff, anywhere, in chitchat. But the man would not be engaged, neither would he look them in the eye. Dorothy felt her cashmere throw—a birthday gift from the granddaughter—weigh upon her like an ermine mantle in the still heat.

  George handed her the special welcome cocktail and removed the tiny paper parasol for her when she poked it up her nostril for the second time. After draining his glass, he gritted his teeth and frowned, looking out to the sea. He'd been likened to Montgomery, physically.

  As other people arrived, couples mostly, Dorothy and George stepped aside to allow them to get to the bar and then stepped back into the same space afterwards. When it was seven exactly, they went to the restaurant.

  7

  WHEN THE WAITER CAME to take their drinks order, Dorothy was buttering a bread roll and hadn't a clue what to ask for. George pressed her with impatience, thirsty himself.

  'Come on, dear, ladies first,' he said heavily, rolling his eyes in the direction of the Caribbean waiter. The fans were spinning and the jazz music was loud, she felt rushed. She'd been thinking of the effort in laying the tables. She gave the buffet the same scrutiny a sportsman gives a game he himself plays. She saw it all in terms of the hours worked, as if it were her own arms that were doused in pineapple juice, as if there were cheese under her fingernails, flour on her slippers.

  A sherry,' she said hastily, wishing she could think of the name of a cold drink she liked.

  A beer, thank you,' said George with a courteous but clipped smile. She knew he was afraid of waiters. To him, it might have been Saint Peter standing there, judging him.

  'You look nice,' he told her.

  She was wearing a long-sleeved, long-skirted dress she'd bought for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

  'Oh, this. You remember this. Bought it in Eastbourne with the girls. It's washed up all right, hasn't it,' she smiled, adding, 'you look all poshed up yourself.'

  He had his polka-dot braces on over a brown checked shirt and was wearing a lightweight beige jacket he'd needed to get dry-cleaned before they came. He was drumming his fingers on the table, making the fragile vase of flowers skip a little, and craning his head at the double doors.

  'I wonder if I should give their room a call,' he said, looking at his watch.

  'It's only just gone seven.'

  'He wanted to eat at eight, see. But I said, the wife and I prefer to get going at seven if that suits. And he said, all right, but you never know if they've understood, do you?'

  'Doesn't he speak English then?' said Dorothy, her lip trembling.

  'Oh, yes. He's got a proper accent too, none of the old "zis" and "zat" nonsense.'

  'How about his wife?'

  'I don't know, haven't met her. She was getting herself a treatment at the spa, he said.'

  'Is she young then?'

  'He didn't say.'

  'Well, how old is he?'

  'Don't know. Middle-aged, I suppose.'

  'Oh.'

  Jan and Annemieke rounded the double doors, side by side, Annemieke placing her hand on his arm as if to guide him. The Belgian man was wearing a sports jacket and chino-type pants, and his wife a waisted dress with beads at the hem and a low-cut flounced neckline. She had been at her make-up palette with fury, put green on her eyelids, dark brown over the sockets of her eyes, a shimmer blush along her pronounced cheekbones. She wore a tawny glittery lipstick, like marmalade congealing.

  An old woman!' thought Annemieke, taking a look at Dorothy and turning her face to Jan, hoping to catch his eye so that she could let him know she was not impressed. If she wanted to have supper with old ladies on her holiday she could have gone to see her own mother. 'This is my holiday,' she started to say to herself, preparing a conversation she would be having later.

  George was delighted, and stood to pull a chair back for his friend's wife, at the same time nodding at the waiter to come over.

  'Drink,' he was saying, making a cup shape with his hand and raising it to his lip, 'thirsty....'

  'Campari and soda,' said Annemieke, quick as a flash, resting her face on a manicured hand.

  'Now that's a drink,' said George, widening his eyes and nodding at their waiter.

  The room was a large clean arena, pillared and marble-floored with heavy round tables, draped with three tablecloths each and large matching napkins. There were three glasses at each place. The paned glass windows reflected the glare of too many table lamps and hanging chandeliers, but in places there were empty dark spaces where the windows were open. It was to these spaces that one's eyes wandered for comfort. At a table by an open window there was a woman in her sixties, sat opposite a young black man. He wiped his mouth delicately, and his eyes moved like white doves startled by unexpected noise. But she brought them back with her big soft hands moving in the air. The old girl, with badly shaved chins and sagging breasts, was pushing bits and pieces on to his plate with her knife and fork, and shaking her head with insistence. Feeding him up.

  The waiter came and indicated the seafood buffet, pink and bulbous, glistening, intermingled with scrunched lettuce offerings on trays of ice cubes scattered with wedges of lemon. George swallowed hard and led the way, applying himself single-mindedly to each silver platter and composing a heap of food on his plate, which he set about as soon as he had placed it on the table. He ate fast and did not speak.

  Annemieke sat back from her own plate and waited a moment before raising her glass and saying, 'Santé.' George looked up at her; the few bristles that were his moustache were wet. 'Good health,' he said.

  'Eat up, dear,' George placed a hand on Dorothy's elbow. She looked at the plate to which she'd helped herself and turned her fork over on the tablecloth, once or twice.
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br />   'The oysters are wonderful, Dorothy, did you have some?' asked Annemieke.

  'No.'

  'What did you take?'

  'I don't know.'

  Each of them looked up from their dinner and at her. George said quickly, his voice moving over the rough edge of anger.

  ''Course you bloody well know what you got.'

  'I can't think of it, though, the word. The name,' she said, and her fork was trembling in her hand so much that she put it back down.

  'They're prawns, your favourite, what we get down at the seafront, every week,' he sighed loudly and exclaimed, 'Gordon Bennett!'

  'I'm getting old.'

  Annemieke looked at her husband, but failing to catch his eyes, she dabbed her mouth and said to Dorothy, 'So, this is your first time in the Caribbean?'

  'Yes.'

  'And for us, no. We have been in the region many times. The Florida Keys, Mexico, and we've been to St Martin and to Trinidad too, before it was so popular, before any of them were, well, what they are now ... package deal places ... we take a long-haul holiday every year, sometimes twice, besides of course the short stays in Europe. But, yes, we like to go to upscale resorts as it's only for a week or so. I think we have deserved those few weeks. I wish we had done so much more, seen more. But Jan's work has taken first place. He sees himself as contributing to the good of mankind. I say to him, it's car rentals, my dear. My boys have seen the world and I see the difference in them. I think that it is good for one, morally, to travel.'

  'How's that?' asked George.

  Annemieke paused and took a sip of her wine.

  'It expands the senses, the intellect and, well, culturally, borders and so on.'

  Jan topped up all of their glasses and nodded.

  'I wouldn't know,' said George, 'we're homebodies. I like my own sort as a rule and I think it'd be better for us all if we stayed put, kept to our kind.'

  Annemieke looked at her husband again, but Jan, feeling her eyes on him, kept his face lowered and began to chew a new mouthful with steadfast rhythm.

  'Mind you,' George went on, 'I had a terrific time in Italy during the war. But that was special circumstances. The usual rules didn't apply.'

  'Oh, for a world without usual rules,' said Annemieke.

  'There must be rules, dear; even when there aren't rules, there are rules, and then it's just the more confusing. Better to be straight. Honest.'

  'There are rules, but you can choose whether you want to follow them or not...' started Dorothy. She was amazed to see that the Belgian woman flushed, her rouged cheeks rose like dough, her mouth fell slack and spare as a large man approached the table and bade her 'Good evening.' He turned to all of them with a nod and a smile.

  'Hello there,' said Annemieke, 'nice to see you again. Jan, this is ... I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.'

  'Bill Moloney.' The man extended a hand to Jan and raised it next in a salute to both George and Dorothy. 'Well, I'll not hold you up,' he added.

  He sat at a single table, at a remove from them, and signalled his salute again as Annemieke looked over, then later, catching Annemieke's awkward glance, he raised his glass and in a loud voice said, 'Your health!'

  The men responded eagerly.

  'It's his own he ought to worry about. I met him at reception. Remember I mentioned him to you, Jan? I think he's interested in me. Sorry,' she said with a small shrug.

  'Sex. All about you. It's the sex,' said Dorothy, mumbling, but loud enough for them all to hear. Jan stared at her, his mouth open for just a moment, his fork poised to enter it. George cleared his throat and drank noisily from his glass.

  'We came here on account of our granddaughter giving us the tickets as a present. Took us by surprise. We've never been on this sort of a caper. You can't complain, though,' he said, rearing a little with the gas in his system.

  'By us it is also the case,' said Jan, 'a gift to come here. From our sons.'

  'But we could have come all the same, Jan!' Annemieke reproached him, 'this kind of holiday is normal for us. But our oldest son, he is doing so well with his business. He has bought a big townhouse in Brussels; it was something like one point two million euros. A friend of ours, a stockbroker, he tells us it is a very good investment. He likes to spoil his mother; he spends too much on me. But then, this is a special case, you see. A last holiday. My husband is very ill. With cancer.'

  Jan laid his knife and fork side by side on his plate and closed his eyes momentarily.

  Dorothy wished she had a dustpan and brush to sweep up after the Belgian woman. She noticed that the woman was dropping little bits and pieces of bread as she twisted the bread roll in her hands, turning in her seat, looking over her shoulder at Mr Moloney and then looking back at her husband and at them.

  8

  JAN HAD HAD PLENTY TO DRINK at the bar with George that night, the women left them to it, but still sleep eluded him. It was the drugs.

  Night after night, he lay awake, plucking his past. The bald facts were what remained. His business partner, his one-time friend, André De Vries had cheated on Jan in these last years, when Jan was forced into retirement through his illness, divesting him of the profitable parts of their company—and also his wife and children. Off they went for trips here and there, sunshine days in the rain, while he sat inside, sheltered.

  'He likes to laugh. I like to laugh. The children, they must also laugh,' Annemieke said in explanation, the first time she and the boys had gone off with him for a Sunday lunch in Brugge. She wore a multi-coloured sweater, tight over her bust, and a long military-style skirt with straps. He had grabbed her by the arm.

  'This is the man that has stolen from me, and from me means from us, Annemieke.'

  'He has an explanation. I wish you'd listen to him. He means to capitalize on, well, what is it, the capital, the liquid assets, that's it, the cash and then he will turn them into assets, property and so forth, he will expand the franchise and then, he will give us our share and in this way you need not work, Jan. You must see it is the best thing. Don't be paranoid. We all care about you. You need to rest.' All of this she had delivered at pace. He had wondered whether she had done so from emotion or because they were running late. She had not been at all concerned about his hand around her upper arm. 'I must go, Jan. You will not listen to him, will you, you won't give him a chance? It's not Andrés fault that you have cancer. You have a persecution complex.'

  'You look cheap,' he had told her. 'You are cheap.'

  'Stop it,' she said, 'stop it. You are demeaning yourself.' Her reply, delivered calmly, had caused him to let her arm drop instantly. To them, he must look like a fool, to his sons. They thought he was going mad; perhaps it was true. Perhaps he misunderstood De Vries. They had worked together for years, been friends.

  Then one of the boys had knocked on the door to the study. 'Mother?' he'd said without coming in and she had left. When he heard the kitchen door close, he called out, in a cowardly sort of way, 'Your mother's a whore and yet you love her.' Then he called out, 'What about me?' and was so ashamed of himself he lay on the sofa and wept.

  Often, when he was finally about to go to sleep, he saw the optimistic set of De Vries's eyebrows hunching over immediate and easy ambitions. He had a horrible feeling that when he was dying, this man's face was what he would see. He'd have to make an effort to push him aside, to see behind him, further back, the happiest time of his life; his childhood, modest and rural, as bland and good as rice pudding, milk-fat and rain-fed. Days of comfort, meadows baking under a soft light, a mother warm and tender, ready with his clothes warm from the stand in front of the fire, the smell of cow shit, long walks and a father dead in the war. What boy could have asked for more? Her to protect him and he her.

  If only his memory could rest easy, but no, it paced up and down, goose-stepping into the near-past, seizing at the photographic images of the holidays they had taken before he was ill. The four of them; André and he and the wives, in expensive white pla
ces with cheap black labour; the Maldives, Mauritius, holidays which had started when the children were at boarding school, about ten years before. Their second wind, supposedly. Annemieke, discovering sex again, but not with him, bartering for wood carvings as if she were bartering for life itself, triumphant over pennies, rubbing anti-cellulite lotions into her body with the door to the bathroom locked. He recalled too André's wife, Lucie, sat at dinner table after dinner table with nothing to say, her eyes occasionally meeting his as they let the other two have their sway. Together, they conjugated the drinking. I drink. You drink. He, she and it drinks. We all drink. After the diagnosis, he stopped drinking for a while, when he was a believer in the medical establishment. They said his body needed to be given a chance. He was to find other ways to relax. He thought it would make him less bitter, but it made him worse, being both sober and resentful. It was the resentment he had to kick, not the drinking. This was why he couldn't sleep.

  When he lay awake with all of this in his mind, he went back further to find better things. The children. Two boys, growing up with the purpose of becoming strong of mind and body but then suddenly a new regime adhered to, one prescribed by their friends. The speedy loss of moral weight. The loss of opinion or conviction. They both found cynicism an easy way out. A generation thing he was told. Sitting in their rooms with headphones on and feet up on the wall. Euphoric briefly when they returned with a new pair of sneakers from Brugge. Doors shut. To everything they said, 'I don't give a shit.' How can you argue with that? He couldn't. He was envious of them.

  He had to hold firm, to go back further. As little kids they had thrilled him. Tired him out at weekends and after work and thrilled him. The euphoria of falling in love, daily. At times he came close to crying with thanks for the chance to look at the world through their eyes. Ben in the car, four years old or so, listing the reasons he was happy that day. Marcus, so mischievous, making Papa hide under the bed and Jan staying there unaware the boy was having his supper downstairs. Those boys, they could have been ... he didn't know what. He used to nod quick and hard at them when he said good night, to get out of the bedroom fast so as to avoid being run down by the feelings he had for them.