The Comedians

'Then why must you be back at one?'

'I have a child. He always wakes around one and calls for me. It's a habit

- a bad habit. He has nightmares. About a robber in the house.'

'Your only child?'

'Yes.'

She touched my arm and at that moment the ambassador in the car put out his right hand and sounded the horn, twice but not too impatiently. He didn't even turn his head or he would have seen us.

'You're summoned back,' I said, and with my first claim on her the shadow of other claims fell on me.

'I suppose it's nearly one.' She added quickly, 'I knew your mother. I liked her. She was real.' She went out to the car. Her husband opened the door for her without turning, and she got behind the wheeclass="underline" the end of his cigar glowed beside her cheek, like a warning lamp at the edge of a road under repair.

I went back to the hotel and Joseph met me on the steps. He said that Marcel had come back half an hour before and asked for a room for the night.

'Only for tonight?'

'He say he go tomorrow.'

He had paid in advance, putting down the sum which he knew to be correct, he had ordered two bottles of rum to be sent up, and he asked if he might have the room of Madame la Comtesse.

'He could have had his old room.' But then I remembered that the new guest - an American professor - was there.

I wasn't unduly troubled. In a way I was touched. I was glad that my mother had been so liked by her lover, and by the woman in the casino whose first name I had forgotten to ask. I would have liked her myself perhaps if she had given me half a chance. Perhaps I had in mind the hope that her likeability might have been passed on to me - a great advantage in business - as well as two-thirds of her hotel.

4

I was nearly half an hour late when I found the car with the C.D. sign outside the casino. There had been a great deal to keep me, and I was not really in the humour to come at all. I couldn't pretend to myself that I was in love with Madame Pineda. A bit of lust and a bit of curiosity was all I thought I felt, and driving into town I remembered everything in the register against her, that she was a German, that she had made the first move, that she was an ambassador's wife. (I would certainly hear the chandeliers and the cocktail glasses tinkle in her conversation.)

She opened the car door for me. 'I nearly gave you up,' she said.

'I'm sorry. A lot of things have happened.'

'Now you are here, we had better drive away. Our colleagues begin to arrive after eleven when the official dinners are over.'

She backed the car out. 'Where are we going?' I asked.

'I don't know.'

'What made you speak to me last night?'

'I don't know.'

'You followed my luck?'

'Yes. I suppose I was curious to see what your mother's son was like. Nothing new ever happens here.'

Ahead of us the port lay in a wash of temporary floodlights. Two cargoships were being unloaded. There was a long procession of bowed figures under sacks. She swung the car round in a half-circle and brought it into a deep patch of shadow close to the white statue of Columbus. 'None of our kind come here at night,' she said, 'and so no beggars come either.'

'What about the police?'

'The

C.D. plate has some value.'

I wondered which of us was using the other. I had not made love to a woman for some months and she - she had obviously reached the dead-end of most marriages. But I was crippled by the events of the day and I wished I had not come and I couldn't help remembering she was German, even though she was too young to bear any guilt herself. There was only one reason for us both to be here and yet we did nothing. We sat and stared at the statue which stared at America.

To escape from the absurdity I put my hand on her knee. The skin felt cold; she wore no stockings. I said, 'What's your name ?'

'Martha.' She turned as she answered and I kissed her clumsily and missed her mouth.

She said, 'We needn't, you know. We're grown-up people,' and suddenly I was back in the Hфtel de Paris and powerless, and no bird came to save me on white wings.

'I only want to talk,' she lied to me gently.

'I would have thought you had plenty to talk about at the embassy.'

'Last night - would it have been all right, if I could have come to your hotel?'

'Thank God, you didn't,' I said. 'There was trouble enough there.'

'What kind of trouble?'

'Don't let's talk about it now.' Again, to disguise my lack of feeling, I acted crudely. I pulled her body out from under the wheel and thrust her across my thighs, scraping her leg on the radio-set, so that she exclaimed with pain.

'I'm

sorry.'

'It was nothing.'

She settled herself more easily, she put her lips against my neck, but I felt nothing: nothing moved in me, and I wondered how long she would put up with her disappointment, if she were disappointed. Then for a long moment I forgot all about her. I was back in the midday heat knocking at the door of what had been my mother's room and getting no response. I knocked and knocked, thinking that Marcel was in a drunken sleep.

'Tell me about the trouble,' she said. Suddenly I began to talk. I told her how the room-boy became anxious and then Joseph, and how finally, when there was no reply to my knocking, I used the pass-key and found that the door was bolted. I had to tear down the partition between two balconies and scramble from one to the other - luckily the guests were away swimming on the reef. I found Marcel hanging from his own belt from the centre light: he must have had great resolution, for he had only to swing a few inches to land his toes on the curlicued ends of my mother's great bed. The rum had all been drunk except a little in the second bottle, and in an envelope addressed to me he had put what was left of the three hundred dollars. 'You can imagine,' I said, 'how I've been occupied since. What with the police - and the guests too. The American professor was reasonable, but there was an English couple who said they were going to report it to their travel agent. Apparently a suicide places a hotel in a lower price-bracket. It's not an auspicious beginning.'

'It was a horrible shock,' she said.

'I didn't know him or care about him, but it was a shock, yes, it really was a shock. Apparently I shall have to have the room purified by a priest or an houngan. I'm not sure which. And the lamp has to be destroyed. The servants insist on that.'

It proved a relief to talk and with words desire came. The back of her neck was against my mouth and one leg spread-eagled across the radio. She shivered and her hand shot out and by bad chance fell on the rim of the wheel and set the klaxon crying. It went on wailing like a wounded animal or a ship lost in fog until the shiver stopped.

We sat in silence in the same cramped position, like two pieces of machinery which an engineer had just failed to fit. It was the moment to say good-bye and go: the longer we stayed the greater demands the future would hold for us. In silence trust begins, contentment grows. I realized I had slept a moment, woken, and found her sleeping. Sleep shared was a bond too many. I looked at my watch. It was long before midnight. The cranes ground over the cargo-ships and the long procession of workers passed from boat to warehouse, bent under their cowls of sacks like capuchin monks. One leg hurt me. I shifted it and woke her.

She struggled away and said sharply, 'What's the time?'

'Twenty to twelve.'

'I dreamt the car had broken down and it was one in the moming,' she said.

I felt put in the place where I belonged, between the hours of ten and one. It was a daunting thought how quickly jealousy grows - I had barely known her for twenty-four hours and already I resented the demands of others.

'What's the matter?' she asked.

'I was wondering when we shall see each other again.'