THE DINING-ROOM HAD A terrace. White tables stretched from one end to the other, and beyond the tables the palm trees were visible. Yellow floodlights flared on the trunks of those suave trees and on the tables there were candles alight. The grease of seasons had thickened on the sides of the candlesticks. Every colour candle had burnt in those thick bottles, every colour grease had encrusted itself. She thought of his story about the cochineal and wondered if they would be friends at Christmas time and could she give him a present? She sat with an American doctor who had marginal diabetes. It meant he had to pick his diet most carefully.
'You come from?'
'England,' she said. She was tired of saying it and anyhow it was not true. But saying one came from Ireland resulted in tedious stories about fairies and grandmothers. He was a family man himself on a medical course. He was lonely.
'Don't get me wrong,' he said, 'I'm a happy man.'
The kids and the hamburgers meant everything.
'What about you?' he asked.
'I'm happy too,' she said and looked down at her wedding ring to hint. Might they go gambling later?
'Be my guest,' he said. She shook her head and tried to reply but a fish-bone had got in her throat. He gave her a crust and told her to chew it hard.
'Chew it,' he said, very loud. He chewed fiercely to show what he meant. He was extremely coarse.
'Don't get me wrong,' he said. 'I just take the little lady out for the evening and we have fun.'
She looked at him with distaste.
'I'd hate to think you were getting the wrong impression. If I thought that I'd never speak to a strange woman again.' His eyes were beginning to anger. She kept looking down at her napkin where it had been darned. The darn was old and from various washings the thread was almost the same white as the linen.
'Let's see if you'll like it?' he said.
'Stop asking me,' she said suddenly. He snapped his hand then and called the waiter. A young boy came over and the American told him to cancel the order for dessert. The boy did not understand. The American repeated the command and left.
She kept her eyes on her plate for a while in case anyone else should engage her. But by nine o'clock everyone was seated and most people were half-way through. There was a feeling of agitation: pancakes burnt theatrically over flaming stoves, waiters talked angrily among themselves, overfull plates of soup just missed being bumped against, young boys knelt reverently to pick up a piece of cutlery that had fallen; and the diners talked and chewed with the savagery possible only in a strange public place where everyone else is talking and chewing as fiercely.
And as surely as they had all come, and debated over what to eat, and eaten it, so they all filed out again, sluggish now that they had been replenished. The main lights were turned down and the fever of the room began to subside. Waiters pushed trolleys of used dishes towards the kitchen and other waiters carried clean white cloths under their arms and set about restoring the tables. She was last.
It had fallen dark beyond the region of the dining-room. The light changed to ink without a dusk to forestall it. She'd eaten well. A raspberry seed had got caught in her tooth. Sitting there trying to worm it out, her eye fell on a man's jacket. It lay over a chair with the sleeves hanging down empty of arms. She longed to touch it because it was a dark velvet, the colour of plums in autumn. The colour of softness like the night, softness into which she longed to drown as into a pool or the pupils of large dark eyes. For some reason she recalled the velvet of soot at the back of a fireplace and her father singing 'Red River Valley,' singing it affectedly in a nasal tone, and the neighbours listening politely and looking at the flames of the fire. It must have been Christmas, one of the few nice times. Her father was sober, her mother passed around plates of jelly and custard. The custard was thick. Then. Now the trees were stark. The night and the jacket were softness. But the trees still rose supreme, their trunks tall, the old palms whittled down to form a base around the new leaves and next year these new leaves would be whittled away too and the trees would be stronger still. She moved across and touched the jacket. She had many superstitions like that. As a child she had to touch certain stones in the walls on her way to school, and get to certain spots before counting twenty. The jacket felt nice and the smell of tobacco recalled being in the fierce embrace of a man. She stroked it slowly, the way she would stroke a curtain or a cat. The texture was soft and it smelt nice. Then she became aware of someone behind her. She turned sharply to apologize.
'I'm not a pickpocket,' she said.
A man stood before her in shirt sleeves. A tall man with dusky skin, and the smile of a baby. The whites of his eyes were immaculate like the clean table-cloths.
'I have not seen you before,' he said.
'I only arrived today,' she said, withdrawing from the jacket.
You like it?'
'Yes, I like corduroy,' she said, and moved away. He put his hand out to detain her.
'You dance?'
'A little.' She should have taken a course in everything before coming to this place.
'I play the violin for you to dance.' He belonged to the orchestra that played for hotel visitors. He asked her to come in but explained that he would not be able to dance with her. She foresaw herself sitting by the wall, ignored, and the magic falling away from her like fake frosting or gold dust. She'd better not.
'A drink perhaps, later,' he said. How late? He did not finish until after midnight. She explained that she had just arrived and felt tired. No more impetuousness. There were ten long days to fill in.
'Tomorrow?' he said then.
'In the afternoon,' she said, conveying a certain morality. He had picked up her left hand and stared down at the ring on her marriage finger.
' Married?' he said.
'Once upon a time,' she said, trying to give the impression that a ring made no difference. They made a date for the following afternoon.
When he'd gone she went out and decided to take a stroll along the beach. Out in the lobby she had a slight moment of satisfaction. The perfect couple who had made the assignation on the beach were already at the disenchanted stage. The girl walked towards the lift, her head down. She looked totally different in clothes. Pert and secretarial, with her hair in an absurd bouffant. The fat man who had issued the invitation to her was behind, pleading, saying, 'You have some suspicion that is not so,' and the sultan was at the bar biting his thumb-nail. She looked at him now with reproach. Two men stared as she walked through the bar. The nursemaid outfit was effective and she looked like someone destined for the most poignant moment of the evening. In the garden the massed leaves made a fabric against the sky and there was a wind.
Among the palms were other trees that were taller and more feathery and these gave out a perfume. In the wind the perfume carried and got lost again and the sounds carried and faded like that too: foreign voices, arguments, a laugh, the syrup music of his violin trickling out. She went back to the beach where the mattresses were, not knowing any other walk just yet. It was totally empty, the mattresses like corpses. It was not lit up, but all around the lights of other hotels, and of the town and of nearby towns gleamed steadfast. The holiday night was happening. Under those lights people danced and walked and held on to each other, their senses heightened by the fairy-tale prettiness of the towns and the dark water with its withheld sea-sob : 'Ah...Ah... Ahh.' A feeling of waste took hold of her. She ought to be seeing this with someone. No longer consecrated to loneliness, she was impatient to reach her destiny.
She moved to the water's edge. Then she bent down and washed her hands and her wedding-ring-which was loose anyhow – began to slip off. She removed it, looked at it, put it to her lips, kissed it tenderly, and then threw it violently into the water. The last unwitnessed act of flinging her husband away. She stayed there for a while, not regretting it, lost in a patch of darkness, and then she decided to retire early so that she would look well the following day.
