August Is a Wicked Month Read Online Free PDF Page A

predicted that she would find it mostly good.
    ‘I don’t even speak French,’ she said.
    ‘Many don’t, but it still is mostly good.’
    ‘I won’t know what to do.’
    ‘You will swim and sunbathe and eat good and perhaps gamble at night.’ Was he proposing to do any of these things with her?
    ‘You make it attractive,’ she said, in a low voice.
    ‘Yes, you will do all of these things for your holiday,’ he said. He would have a holiday later in Italy, but now he must work. She told him where she was going and took out her diary to check on the name of her hotel.
    ‘You know it?’ she asked.
    ‘No, I live many miles into the mountains. With my family.’
    ‘Mountains,’ she said lovingly, speculating not on their calm ineluctable beauty but on his life. There would be a wife and one or two small children and they would sit out of doors on a wall, waiting for him, the children drawing patterns in the dust with the sharp edge of a stone or a slate that had come off the roof in winter, and there would be hens lazying around and perhaps a dog. The wife would knit, and her eyes would be calm, the calm contented eyes of a wife on a mountain with a husband coming home to love her.
    ‘How do you get there?’ she asked.
    ‘I drive. I have my car at the airport since yesterday.’
    ‘And there are buses also? ‘
    ‘Buses. Yes.’ He could see she was worried.
    ‘I show you. I go the opposite way, otherwise I drop you, with pleasure.’
    ‘Not at all,’ she said, and looked away in case he should see the light go out of her face, her round face quenched in disappointment. She looked through the window again. They had passed the fields and were going over a mountain of grey stone. She stared down at the figurations of stone coiled together the way corpses would be and thought of death and how once as a child with her sister she lay in bed on a Saturday morning thinking of the day of general judgement and rehearsing the two possible alternatives that God would say: ‘Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting flames which were prepared for the Devil and his angels,’ or, ‘Come ye blessed for my Father possesseth the Kingdom prepared for you,’ and while they rattled off the words she was conscious of her father forcing her mother to submit and drawing the mother’s face towards his with his hand under her chin and his thumb and forefinger dug into her, hurting her swallow and his other hand out of sight, doing something under the covers, and her mother resisting and saying ‘Stop,‘ while the children had first an argument and then a bet as to whether God would be up on a rostrum or not. At that time she approved her mother’s resistance and now she felt differently: her mother should not have been mean, and she thought of making love again and turning to the stranger said, ‘Perhaps you can come and eat with me one evening.’
    ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it will be possible,’ and he smiled a sweet patient smile. Perhaps. Another silence.
    Her first sight of the sea was of a saucer of deepest blue with patches around the edges. The patches were a turquoise and they looked as if they’d been put there specially. Like decoration. She gasped.
    ‘It’s perfect,’ she said, as if he were responsible for it.
    ‘I get the same answer from two ladies last week,’ he said. He travelled over and back each week and she thought that if meeting him in France were impossible then she might still be able to meet him in London.
    People began to gather themselves together, the dish of sweets came round again, more needles in her ears, the girl next to her putting on the sunhat and he opening a brief case and taking out a tie.
    ‘I show you,’ he said when she looked and wondered if he were about to vanish.
    In fact he was vital at the air terminal because her suitcase was lost. He spoke to officials and gave her name and the name and telephone number of her hotel.
    ‘Have a drink with me,’ she said,