August Is a Wicked Month Read Online Free PDF

really grateful.
    ‘I make one telephone and I have a drink,’ he said. She waited in the bar but he did not come back. Maybe she missed him when she went to do her face, or maybe it was the wrong bar. Anyhow she missed him. By the time she came down the bus had left for her destination and she decided to taxi. The price was posted up plain to see. Thirty New Francs. The driver was chatty, wide awake and merry. The merry eyes of an assassin. She felt light in the head, wide awake and ravenous to see. The palm trees were not trees at all but great green quills set into well-shorn barks, hardly swaying. No moss. No ivy. Nothing cluttered the bareness of the place. Pink and white houses of stone fast asleep in the afternoon sun with their shutters folded over and towels on balconies and water sprinklers wetting lawns. He drove very fast. Sometimes he spoke but she just shook her head or said something in English that caused him to shake his head, in turn. The light was dazzling. They came to a town and he pointed to an hotel with two flags overhead. It was on a hill with a series of steps and grass terraces running down from it. Like a fairy tale house to which she was returning as in a dream. They drove right up the slope and under an open porch where he delivered her at the swing doors that were motionless. The agency had booked her safely, the assassin wished her well and by some extraordinary piece of mismanagement the air company had already delivered her lost case. She knew then that things were going to be all right. She signed the book and was given a key. She took the lift and then walked behind a bellboy who was carrying her heavy case down a corridor. She saw a naked man regarding her from a room. He held a door open a few inches and propositioned her not with a smile but with a look. He was in his thirties she estimated, and well built and the light in his room was dusk as if he had drawn the blinds and slept a bit and was now refreshed and ready for love. She looked at him and then hurried on for fear of losing the boy with the case. Her room was about ten doors farther down and on the opposite side to that of the naked man. It did not face the ocean. The brass bed was bigger than a single bed but nothing like a double. The bellboy put her bag on a straw stool and looked at her with a curious dazed expression and did not smile. The smell was strange. The clean, unfamiliar smell of linen and scouring powder and wood baked by the heat. The wood of the window-frame had many small cracks. It was a shabby room but nice. She unpacked straight away and hung her clothes up carefully, a dress for each hanger. She laid her muslin-light nightdress on the bed and said the word ‘honeymoon.’ There was a wash-basin and a bidet with a brownish stain around the faucet. A sign nailed above the wash-basin warned her about not drinking tap water. She picked up the telephone and very effusively asked for a bottle of Perrier.
    ‘I’ve just arrived,’ she said, partly as an apology and also to instigate a little welcome for herself.
    The Perrier came in a tub of ice, like champagne. The boy who brought it was very affable. She over-tipped.
    ‘Your name?’ she asked.
    ‘Hugo,’ he said.
    ‘Hugo.’ He poured her drink, bowed, and left.
    Out on the little balcony, wooed by the newness of the place, the town just beneath her, the silence, the sea somewhere, she stood sipping the drink, held by the sweet pressure of her thoughts, remembering vaguely: other smells, white frost on a road in Ireland, face powder in a glass bowl with a huge puff laid into it, the delicate mauve of a pigeon’s breast; and comparing all these things with this new place that bore no resemblance to any other place she’d ever been to. The light was shattering. Her skin empty of colour. The dazzle on houses like metal. She stayed for over an hour. She thought of the man on the plane hitching up his leather belt and the naked one in the doorway, and the