Mrs Golson could bear the tension no longer. Herself a rival goat, she charged at the gate, almost pushing it down, to arrive in what had been Eudoxia’s garden.
The woman in black could not laugh enough, then clenched her teeth as she bound her tight bunch tighter still with some stalks of grass she had torn off.
‘Que sont-ils — vos herbes?’ Now the intruder of all intruders, Mrs Golson heard herself stammer.
The smocked garment she had thrown on for the journey had fallen back, and she realised she was wearing the nightdress in which she had taken her restless afternoon nap.
As though awakened against her will, the woman frowned at her bunched herbs. ‘Sont des barbottines. On les met sous les draps pour chasser les puces.’
Mrs Golson would have to look up ‘barbottines’ together with Eudoxia’s ‘balm’, but her French-English pocket dictionary was not the greatest help and the herb manual somewhere on a shelf in Sydney Australia.
Now, since her friend had left for wherever, there was really no purpose in her staying.
‘Alors,’ she told this female, ‘moi aussi, je partirai.’
But the creature beckoned. ‘Venez! Venez!’ The cackle which followed revealed a number of black gaps as well as a span of aggressive gold. ‘Faut voir,’ she advised, leading the way to the shell of a house around which the sky was darkening.
Curiosity outdoing discretion and even fear, Mrs Golson followed.
The shutters were open, fastened to the outside of the walls, the windows closed, the interior stuffy. In spite of the furniture which she remembered from the day before, the rooms seemed to creak and reverberate like those in a dismantled house.
Her guide led her past mirrors from which Mrs Golson averted her face, and into the kitchen where a door open on the sea and village below, let in an unexpected burst of light, illuminating the Vatatzes’ last hours of tenancy: the squalor of unwashed dishes, smeared glasses, coffee grounds, a great over-ripe tomato melting into the papered surface of a dresser shelf.
Mrs Golson would have liked to persuade herself that Madame Vatatzes had been saving up this tomato for its seed. But the thought was bathetic in the guide’s presence; the woman in black did not condone improbabilities. From the juice of the putrid tomato, Mrs Golson’s glance was drawn to the woman’s leg, the musketeer stocking, the stained bandage, on it not so much the signs of watery matter from a running sore, as, Mrs Golson was convinced — pus.
‘Venez! Venez!’ The guide was leading one no longer her confederate but her victim always deeper into the lives of the departed.
The intruders had entered what passed for a bathroom. Choked by the sight of spilt powder, balls of hair, cotton-wool swabs, Mrs Golson put her handkerchief to her lips; she might be developing Daddy’s asthma.
‘Voyez! Ils out oublié ce true-là!’ the creature shrieked through her gaps, past the bastion of gold.
She poked at an object on a shelf, which as far as Mrs Golson could tell, was an enema of enormous proportions.
The shrieks indulged, the wrath began to pour. ‘C’est un vieux salaud — une jeune salope! Ils paieront. Beaucoup! Madame Boieldieu m’a dit.’
Mrs Golson had retreated into the comparative dusk of the passage.
She dredged up the necessary words and said, ‘Merci je m’en vais.’
But the woman put out a hand. ‘Ne voulez pas voir lew chambre à coucher? Ils n’ont fait, vous comprenez, que jouer au piano et baiser …’
‘Non! Non! Non!’ Mrs Golson skirted past the bedroom, through the door of which she caught a glimpse of shadowy, but turbulent sheets; she could not have borne further evidence of the games, perhaps even the stains, of love.
All the way down the hall, out upon the terrace, down the path smelling of tomcat, she was pursued by the woman’s diabolical voice as she ran from the flickering images of Angelos and Eudoxia Vatatzes, themselves as diabolical as her own never extinct desires — as she fled towards Curly, honesty, Australia.
‘Ils paieront — vous verrez!’ the woman hurled after her.
‘Qui sait?’ Mrs Golson gasped back as she pushed against the collapsing gate, which finally fell.
Who knows what? Herself, certainly, knew nothing, hurrying down the stony hill towards the waiting cab — if it had waited.
But it had. The man was sitting on the high driver’s-seat, looking out from inside the tunnel provided by the leather hood. As la folk Anglaise hurtled towards him.
For no explicable reason, the train was packed on that day. As it drew in at the station they stampeded along its steaming side as part of the lowing inconsolable herd lugging portmanteaux, baskets, parcels, bulging serviettes. Themselves, or rather, their hearts leaping like wild creatures inside the cages of their ribs. To arrive at the doors. To scrape their shins almost to the bone on the iron steps. To scramble panting, dragging, on, on, on board the contemptuous train.
They just succeeded. She forced him up, and after grasping a stanchion, protected him with her strong arm, while a guard, laughing, tried out her buttocks with a hand, pushed the last of the passengers higher, and slammed the door on the lot.
They stood breathing at each other, inhaling the perfumes from the toilettes. Even the round smell of shit.
‘Well, we are here, E.!’ he panted.
More practical, she answered, ‘We haven’t begun,’ and started weaving down the corridor, past the portmanteaux, the baskets, the bulging serviettes, somebody hanging out of a window, a handkerchief held against nausea.
They did squeeze in at last, into one of the wooden boxes, amidst the scowls, the luggage, the children of those already established. They seated themselves in a corner, more closely conjoined than at any moment of their life together, distributing the smiles of the false-humble, in which teeth return to being milk-teeth, cheeks illuminated not so much by the brief innocence as the prolonged guilt of childhood.
After staking their claim they might have looked out of the windows at the view, but on one side the blinds were lowered, admitting no more than a band of flesh-coloured light between hem and sill, on the other a human hedge planted in the corridor presented landscape as a flackering of vines and recurring gashes of red soil. There was also the occasional mountain crest like a heap of unquarried blue-metasl.
The old man said to his companion, ‘At least we can enjoy the thought of wine, but that won’t anaesthetise us.’
He laughed in his dry accusatory way. She regretted that, in the haste of departure, after a frenzied night of hallucination and barbed attack, she had forgotten wine and food of any kind, whereas everyone else in the wooden compartment seemed over-provisioned: the crusty bread, the purple bottles they held to their lips, hunks of salami to be sawn at, and rounds of cheese smelling of goat; in one instance, gobbets of truffled pâté de foie conveyed by fingers as refined as the bread on which the stufflay, the flesh dimpling with a diamond or two, the bosom on which the crumbs tumbled as black as the inlay of truffle itself.
The newcomers were lulled at last by motion, the alternate shuffling and hurtling of the train, and the sound of salami skins constantly stirred by the feet of children passing between the rows of knees.