Alligator Playground

A Respectable Woman

TRAVELLING SOUTH, Paul enjoyed the slow melting of cloud after passing the watershed, les partages des eaux: white lines waving on a brown board prominently displayed by the motorway, but the pleasure often had to be paid for with worsening weather on the homeward trip from the Mediterranean. That was life. What you didn’t expect, you didn’t appreciate. An electric dark blue sky between downpours turned into a threatening decline of the day.

Somewhere beyond Rheims, heading for Calais, white headlights made little impression on swathes of water at the windscreen, wipers sluggish on the fastest rate. He seemed to be driving under the sea, and marvelled at the occasional car overtaking confidently into the slush.

Life was too short to be maimed in such a way, or even killed, so he argued with himself about parting from the motorway at the nearest exit. Eight o’clock meant he would be lucky to get a room in Cambrai, but a sizzle of lightning settled him to try.

He trawled the streets, deserted under heaven’s free wash, calling at three places that were full. Coming again out of the main square, onto a road he didn’t know, he pulled in at the Hotel de la Paix, and took a room large enough for a family, no option but to pay up and bless his good fortune.

The way had been long from the house in Tuscany. After leaving Wendy at Pisa airport, with their two sons who could not be late for school, he drifted up the motorway through mountains he had always wanted to walk in. Wendy didn’t like the car trip, but he enjoyed doing it alone, whether or not he was late slotting back into managing his electronics firm. A long drive was good for mulling on problems he might find on getting there.

He backed into the last vacancy of the courtyard. All other cars faced inwards, but a quick getaway, though rarely a necessity, was always neat to think about. He took his overnight case to the room, washed and changed into a suit, and went downstairs before the restaurant closed. The tourist season lagged on, and he stood between the bar and reception counter waiting for a table, rain at the glass locking his gaze as firmly as had the tarmac sweeping all day under the car.

A dark blue Renault stopped at the door, and he assumed the GB plate because of the side the driver stepped from. She ran in like a goddess coming from the ocean to be born — he couldn’t help telling himself — and when she asked at the counter for a room he felt some satisfaction in knowing the answer.

‘Damn!’ she responded, ‘nothing at all?’

The clerk told her.

She had been all over the town — and so have I, Paul thought. ‘Isn’t there another hotel you can recommend?’

It was no feat to pick up her responses: ‘I can’t go on in this atrocious weather. What the hell am I to do?’ His feeling of guilt was overidden by exultation at having got there before her.

‘They’ll all be full,’ the clerk said. ‘I telephoned around for someone a few minutes ago.’

Paul, no reason to be concerned at her plight — though he was — sensed her annoyance at whoever might be responsible, and he for one wished he knew who it could be. A day on the road sleeved by the rich landscapes of France acted on him like a drug, opening his mind to spaces that made him ready for anything, especially after the relief of finding such an opulent billet. He couldn’t think why he said it: ‘I might have a solution to your problem.’

She stood in the doorway, a tall woman, in her late thirties perhaps, with short reddish hair and gold-framed spectacles, an opened raincoat showing a pale cream blouse, a loose purple skirt, and short black boots that zipped up the front. ‘Well, it’s my problem. I’ll just have to drive on.’

‘I took the last room, I’m afraid.’

‘I suppose someone had to.’ A trace of vinegar indicated that she was too proud to let him assume he might have done her an ill turn.

‘I had to take a room far too big for me. It seems a shame for you to go out in that, and me with a large double bed going to waste.’

He told her his name, and held out a hand, French style, which she barely touched, though looked at the card which he took from his wallet and laid on the bar, wondering what he thought he was up to. Of medium height and slender, with thinning dark hair combed dryly back above a pale relaxed face, he seemed too well dressed for a holiday bird of passage. Maybe he tried this stunt every night, staying all day in the hotel and waiting to pounce on such as her. She forced a smile as if to show she was embarrassed by such a proposition. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve driven up from Italy today, and I’m absolutely done for.’

‘You don’t look it.’

‘I’d be at death’s door if I did. But after dinner I’ll drop onto one of the beds and won’t wake for nine hours. All you have to do is fall onto the other and do the same.’ He regretted having spoken, since she thought he wanted to make love to her, which he had no intention of doing. ‘Have a drink while you’re waiting. By the time you’ve decided against my practical suggestion the rain might have eased off.’

Very smooth, yet she was tempted. After much experience she had evolved the notion that you should think everything but let no one suspect your thoughts. She sometimes wondered why it came so easy, but in that way, common sense — or an instinct for self preservation — decided your actions. No harm therefore in taking up his offer. ‘I could do with a Martini.’

On trips to and from her house in the Haute-Loire she whiled away the miles with a fantasy of such a meeting, and now that something like it was happening she would drink her drink and get back into the weather. Fantasy was one thing, and reality another game altogether.

He eyed his pastis as if to make sure every swallow was worthy of the honour. His idea of paradise, he told her, was the smell of pine trees in the hottest sun, subtly mixed with odours of rosemary and olive, preferably while sitting on the terrace with his wife at midday over a bottle of wine and a platter of dark bread and salami. Such an injection of relaxed living, at least once a year, was the best way he knew of keeping sane. In the afternoon — though he didn’t go this far — he would dispatch the boys into the hills with map and compass, and a haversack of things to eat, so that he and Wendy could go to bed as in the days of their honeymoon. He hoped that talking about himself would make her feel at ease, and not be so suspicious at what ought to seem his generosity in offering to share his room. ‘I’m a practical person, basically. I have to be, in my job, so it seems only logical to put the spare bed at your disposal.’

She smiled at this good sense, good for him, anyway, and as if to confirm it even more, rain drummed louder at the windows. She asked herself, during the second Martini, what her thoughts would have been on passing him in the street, and decided she might have found him interesting enough to want to know more. She could even, in a certain mood, have ‘fancied’ him. Such a judgement had no bearing, but the warmth within reddened her face.

He would have the advantage of a good story, if only to tell against himself, about how he had rescued this very personable woman in distress, and been correct in not trying to seduce her. ‘If you don’t accept my suggestion you leave me no alternative but to push on. I’ll stop in the first layby, and sleep soundly at the wheel, more than happy in knowing you’re well taken care of. Here’s my key. I’ll have a word with the clerk.’

Occasional dips into the bread-and-sausage bag along the way had left her famished, and the two Martinis, quickly drunk, were having an effect. Though his plan ought to be rejected in no uncertain manner, she heard herself say: ‘All right, I’ll take it.’

Such an adventure to look back on couldn’t be bad: ‘This very kind chap actually gave up his room for me. Would you believe it? No, he wasn’t that sort. He was such a gentleman that on thinking about it I rather wish he hadn’t been.’

He put his glass down. ‘There’s just one condition.’

Oh Lord, her grey eyes said, now I’ve dropped into it. Why are men always so sly? He probably plays chess. If he’d come straight out with it I’d at least know where I was.

‘I can see what you’re thinking.’

There was too much triumph in his tone for her liking, but he probably knew that, too. She was ready to leave. ‘Am I so transparent?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that. I only want you to have dinner with me, before I ask the clerk to transfer the room. I always hate eating on my own in a strange place. I hope you won’t take too long to decide, though, because here’s the waiter coming to say our table’s ready.’

What am I doing? — he refilled her glass from the bottle of Côtes du Rhône — me, a supposedly respectable woman getting into a situation like this? ‘My name’s Margaret,’ she told him. He reasonably wanted to know about her, so what could she do but say she was a teacher at a girls’ school. She couldn’t think why such plain truth seemed so out of place: ‘An aunt died and left me enough money to buy a small house near Le Puy. A cottage, really, but I don’t imagine you can use such a word in France, can you? There was enough left over to buy a car, so I go when I can.’

On leaving, and putting the key under the earthen flowerpot outside the back door, she drove down the winding cobbled track with bushes scraping the car. On the main road she already thought of her flat in Ealing, and the cat her neighbour was looking after, though she was too much a lover of France not to enjoy the scenery before reaching the more rolling country of the north. ‘What delicious onion soup. I’m feeling better already. I was done for when I arrived.’

‘So I noticed.’ He wanted to touch her wrist, and say how sensible she had been in agreeing to stay, but held back in case she changed her mind. A man and his soignée wife of forty-odd sat at the next table, and she saw him look at their slim daughter who had a rather mousy helmet of hair but an exquisite bust. He was merely noting how each had a plate of open baked potato with grated cheese on top, the whole in a bed of curly lettuce. ‘They believe in a healthy diet,’ he said, seeing the waiter with his steak tartare and her platter of cutlets, ‘which seems such a pity in France.’

He leaned against the rail and levelled his binoculars, but it was hard to see the assembly lines of cars coming onto the boat, so he moved to the loading end, knowing he would curse himself for the rest of his life at not having stayed for breakfast. Hurry was in his bone marrow, and it was impossible they would meet again. Unable to stop thinking of that warm and womanly figure under her clothes, he had passed half an hour in a layby hoping to see her tuppenny sardine tin trundling along.

Five minutes to sailing, the ship loaded with trucks, buses, caravans and cars, he supposed it was too late now for her to make it. Maybe he would have a cup of coffee at Dover, and wait to see if she was on the next boat.

There were moments on the hundred motorway miles to Calais when she forgot who she was, whereabouts she was, even what she was doing. Everything went, the brain went, the car went from around her. All protection went, but she came back to safety — thinking herself lucky — and ran once more through her adventure of the night.

The smell of wine on their combined breaths filling the shuttered and curtained room had not stopped them falling asleep almost immediately on their separate beds. In the middle of the night she was awakened by him going to the bathroom, flushing whatever it was, and washing his hands. Drifting back into sleep, and wishing it could happen without embarrassment, she felt him beside her, and they moved against each other to find an even greater comfort than oblivion.

When she awoke, more raddled than after an insomniac few hours at the flat or cottage, he had gone, and his lack of politeness in not saying goodbye so that she could at least thank him properly left a sense of injury which didn’t dissipate on finding another of his cards with ‘Thank you for everything’ scrawled on the back. At breakfast she felt as if half of herself was missing, the only advantage in being so shamefully maudlin was that maybe he was in the same state.

She made a stupid blunder in asking whether the bill had been paid, as if a man she had picked up had left her to do it. A bit more know-how would have saved her a funny look from the clerk. Carrying her overnight bag to the car, she wondered how far or if at all a respectable woman could be called sophisticated. She had always had so many and such strident opinions as to how ‘men’ ought to behave that she did not know to within any shade of accuracy what exactly ‘men’ finally were. Well, now she did, a little more anyway. They were all different, and he was the most different one she had known.

The motorway was visible for miles ahead under high-flowing clouds, landscape hillier than she had previously noted. Every turn of the wheels brought the sea closer. A man who would use an offer to give up his room so as to get into her bed must be given top marks for ingenuity — and skill.

A postcard, in an envelope, to his business address, could do no harm — with her own locations firmly scripted in. When he next came up from Italy he might want to stay at her place overnight, an offer almost as good as his. And the detour shouldn’t faze him.