August Is a Wicked Month Read Online Free PDF Page B

others everywhere about, waiting. She did not think of her son.

Chapter Five
    B Y THE TIME SHE got down to the hotel beach most of the mattresses were deserted. A few had the blemish of water where a wet body had recently lain, but mostly they looked like row upon row of dry, white, hospital beds. Beyond a railing was another beach and the mattresses there were striped. In the white sand all the footprints had effaced one another. She moved very cautiously and slunk on to a mattress when she thought the beach boy was not looking. Not meanness – she simply did not know how to ask for one. He was busy folding umbrellas and carrying them in bundles to a shed. He carried them like spears, their points forward, and stacked in the shed they looked like armour too. When he crossed over to talk to her she felt it an attack.
    ‘Anglais,’ she said, and started changing money in her head, setting herself quick sums so that she would be prepared no matter what amount he asked for. All he did was say the name of the hotel and then go off again. He was a dark, rich tan like everybody else in that place except herself and the English group a few mattresses away.
    ‘Look at Arthur, he’s turning,’ a woman was saying, while her friends joined her in looking at an unfortunate specimen of a man who was raging pink.
    ‘You’ll have to wear shorts in the garden when you go home,’ his wife said as she helped him to dress under a robe. She opened each leg of his underpants while he stepped into it and then she drew it up above his stomach and smoothed the cotton legs so that they did not bulge.
    ‘All right, Arthur?’ she said. He looked grumpy. Then he sat down while she put on his canvas shoes, worming each one over his swollen ankles with the help of a shoehorn.
    ‘Give him vinegar,’ another woman said. She’d discovered its soothing properties the previous summer. She waved a bottle that seemed to contain a chocolate-coloured lotion.
    ‘In a fancy bottle like that – vinegar?’ Arthur’s wife said. The woman had changed it into one of those sun-lotion bottles so that she wouldn’t look foolish.
    ‘Got it in Hull, on a beach. We went to Hull for our anniversary,’ she said, proud of the bottle.
    ‘Gladys is nothing if she’s not economical,’ a second man said and looked at her with bitterness. Once or twice they tried to engage Ellen by a word, or a mention of sunburn or what it said in the English paper that day but she pretended not to notice. She sat upright and had her first view of the Mediterranean and thought it odd that it should mean nothing to her, nothing at all. She had more interest in looking at the beach boy as he swept the mattresses with the long, soft twig, but every time she looked in her direction the woman with the lorgnette had the eyeglass fixed on her. She was dressed in black and had a thick white snood over her hair. Between trying to avoid this woman and having to ignore the English group she found she had to keep looking in the direction of the sea. It was hazed over and she could not see to the far side. Then a young girl came and temporarily everything was changed.
    They all stared because she moved so perfectly. She was in bare feet and her toes painted silver had the effect of having just had candle grease poured over them. They were so light compared with the rich, polished hues of her body. Like mahogany. The beach boy saluted her with the broom as she went by but she did not smile, her presence was its own reward. She came and sat two mattresses away from Ellen and lay right back trailing her hands in the warm sand: The woman with the lorgnette left Ellen abruptly and began staring at the new arrival. And then the man appeared. Almost on cue he stood on the balcony and looked down at the three people who were left. The English crowd had gone. He was like an advertisement for vigour. Gold-skinned with blond hair, and the spots of sand on his body gave him the glisten of stone. She