She is off to the buffet for seconds. He watches, briefly, her cumbersome waddle as she passes among the tables. Others are watching her too, he sees.
Somewhere near him, Sandra’s voice says, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Charmian really likes you.’
Bérnard feels, again, that he is still in bed upstairs and just dreaming this.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ Sandra says, when he turns to her, with a look of pale incomprehension on his face.
‘Have you?’ she asks.
He shakes his head.
Sandra looks away and a few seconds pass. Some Russians laugh at something.
Then Sandra says, ‘Do you like sex, Bernard?’
Bérnard tries to steady himself with another sip of Fanta. ‘Sex?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Of course…’
Sandra chuckles. ‘Spoken like a true Frenchman.’
He is not sure what she means by this, or even if he heard her properly. ‘I’m sorry…?’ he asks.
‘Why don’t you ask Charmian up to your room after lunch?’ Sandra says. ‘I think she’d like that.’
Puzzled, Bérnard says, ‘To my room?’
‘Yes. I think she’d like that.’
He does not have time to ask any more questions — Charmian is there again, has taken her place at the table without a word, without looking at Bérnard, and is tucking into her next plate of microwaved lunch.
—
They are in the lobby afterwards when he says to her, ‘You would like to see my room?’
The words, flat and matter-of-fact, just seem to escape him. He had not planned to say them, or to say anything.
She looks at her mother.
Sandra says, ‘I’m going to have a little lie-down.’
She starts up the stairs on her own.
After a few moments, without saying anything else, they follow her.
They follow her as far as the first floor. She is taking a breather where the stairs turn and just nods at them as they leave her there in the stairwell window’s soiled light and enter, with Bérnard one pace ahead, the shadows of the passageway.
They stop, in semi-darkness, at Bérnard’s door. He operates the key, and lets Charmian precede him into the room.
He is aware, following her into it, that the narrow room smells quite strongly. The curtains are drawn and his dirty clothes are all over the floor.
‘I am sorry about the mess,’ he says, shutting the door.
‘Our room’s just the same,’ she tells him.
‘Yes?’
They stand there, in the soupy air. He has that feeling, again, that he’s dreaming this. She is huge. Her hugeness makes the whole situation seem more dreamlike.
‘What do you want to do then?’ she asks, still taking the place in — looking at the open suitcase still half-full of stuff on the neatly made bed, the one he doesn’t sleep in, nearer the door.
He shrugs, as if he hasn’t any idea what he wants to do, as if he hasn’t even thought about it.
‘Do you want to have a shower?’ she asks without obvious enthusiasm, looking at him now.
‘The shower doesn’t work.’
‘Oh, yeah — you said.’
‘Yes.’
They stand there for a while longer, and then she says, ‘Do you want to see my tits?’
After hesitating for a second, he says, ‘Okay.’
In the dim light she takes her top off — a frilly-edged shirt like the one she was wearing last night — and extricates herself from the colossal bra. The tits hang down. Doughy, blue-veined, they sit on the shelf of the next tier of her, each one equivalent, more or less, to Bérnard’s head. The nipples are pale pink, very pale, and the size of saucers — they occupy meaningful territory.
It is a strange moment — him just standing there, looking, while she waits.
He notices, eventually, that he has an erection.
She notices too, and with slow movements, she kneels in front of him and slides down the zip of his jeans.
Her mouth is soft and warm.
‘You have done this before,’ he says after a while, sincerely impressed.
She just shrugs. She wipes her mouth and moves back a bit. With a fair amount of shoving and tugging she gets herself out of her jeans.
Her legs do not quite have the overwhelmingly vertical quality of a normal leg — they have a definite and assertive horizontal dimension too. And not much in the way of knees. When she drags down her lace-edged pants, he sees, for a moment, somewhere among all the whitish flesh, a soft tuft of hair the colour of peanut butter.
She takes his hand and pulls him towards the bed where he sleeps, its sweaty mess of sheets.
While she stands there waiting, he sits on the edge of the bed and pulls his own jeans over his feet, his horizontally striped polo shirt over his head.
They are both naked now, and his hard-on is almost embarrassingly fervent. It almost hurts. She tries to lie back on the bed and open her legs. She needs to open her legs as wide as they will go or the flesh, pouring in from every direction, will obstruct him. The single bed, however, in its position flush to the wall, is simply too narrow for her to do that. She hardly fits onto it with her legs held parallel. After a few moments of frustration, Bérnard says, ‘I know. We put the mattress on the floor, okay?’
They stand up and start to move the mattress onto the floor.
Bérnard’s aching erection knocks against his stomach as he struggles with his end of the mattress.
They put it down on the brown tiles.
For a moment she stands there, in the veiled light, naked, looking like a huge melted candle, all drips and slumps of round-shaped waxy flesh. Pendulous surrenders. Those pale pink nipples the size of his face. There is just so much of her, it seems to him, standing at his end, stunned by how much he wants her now, so much of her, a quantity of woman nearly equal, if that were possible, to his need to possess it, physically, in every way imaginable. Though in fact at this moment that need seems infinite. His member nodding, his lungs pulling at the air, it seems that there is nothing else to him, that that is all he is.
She takes her place on the mattress.
And then it starts.
—
It lasts all afternoon, and into the evening. The light softens in the folds of the curtains. Finally they sleep for a while, and when he opens his eyes, she is dressing herself. Though she is wearing her shirt, she seems to be naked from the waist down.
‘What time is it?’ he asks.
‘Seven,’ she says. ‘You coming to supper?’
She pulls one of the curtains open and admits a wedge of light in which she immediately finds her enormous knickers. Sitting heavily on the second bed, she manoeuvres them on.
‘I don’t think so,’ Bérnard says. He is lying naked on the mattress on the floor, supine. Worn out by orgasms — at least five of them, he isn’t sure exactly how many — he feels sleepy and immobile. The idea of dressing, of dragging himself down to the dining room, seems impossible.
‘Fair enough,’ Charmian says, working her jeans on now.
‘I’ll see you later then?’ she says, when she is dressed, and standing at the door.
‘Yes, see you,’ Bérnard says.
When she has left, he lies there still, the air warm on his skin, his eyes fixed on the soiled paintwork of the ceiling as darkness slowly hides it.
Sounds arrive at the window
a moped’s noisy whirr
a snatch of music
very distant shouts
7
At lunch the next day he is shy and embarrassed. The women are normal, the same as always. Charmian, focusing on the food, hardly says anything, hardly looks at him. Sandra talks. She says, ‘You weren’t at the pool this morning, Bernard.’