Up at a Villa
They were woken by the deep-chested bawling of an angry baby. Wrenched from
wine-dark slumber, the four of them sat up, flustered, hair stuck with pine
needles, gulping awake with little light breaths of concentration. They weren’t
supposed to be here, they remembered that.
They could see the baby by the side of the pool, not twenty yards away, a
furious geranium in its parasol-shaded buggy, and the large pale woman sagging
above it in her bikini. Half an hour ago they had been masters of that pool,
racing topless and tipsy round its borders, lithe Nick chasing sinewy Tina and
wrestling her, an equal match, grunting, snaky, toppling, crashing down into the
turquoise depths together. Neither of them would let go underwater. They came up
fighting in a chlorinated spume of diamonds. Joe, envious, had tried a timid
imitation grapple but Charlotte was having none of it.
“Get off!” she snorted, kind, mocking, and slipped neatly into the pool via a
dive that barely broke the water’s skin. Joe, seeing he was last as usual, gave
a foolish bellow and launched his heavy self into the air, his aimless belly
slapping down disastrously like an explosion.
After that, the sun had dried them off in about a minute, they had devoured
their picnic of 辱徱è and peaches, downed the bottles of pink wine, and
gone to doze in the shade behind the ornamental changing screen.
Now they were stuck. Their clothes and money were heaped under a bush of
lavender at the other end of the pool.
“Look,” whispered Tina as a man came walking toward the baby and its mother.
“Look, they’re English. He’s wearing socks.”
“What’s the matter with her now,” said the man, glaring at the baby.
“How should I know,” said the woman. “I mean, she’s been fed. She’s got a new
nappy.”
“Oh, plug her on again,” said the man crossly, and wandered off toward a
cushioned chaise longue. “That noise goes straight through my skull.”
The woman muttered something they couldn’t hear, and shrugged herself out of her
bikini top. They gasped and gaped in fascination as she uncovered huge brown
nipples on breasts like wheels of Camembert.
“Oh gross!” whispered Tina, drawing her lips back from her teeth in a horrified
smirk.
“Be quiet,” hissed Nick as they all of them heaved with giggles and snorts and
their light eyes popped, overemphatic in faces baked to the color of flowerpots.
They had crept into the grounds of this holiday villa, one of a dozen or more on
this hillside, at slippery Nick’s suggestion, since everything was fermé le
lundi down in the town and they had no money left for entrance to hotel pools or
even to beaches. Anyway, they had fallen out of love over the last week with the
warm soup of the Mediterranean, its filmy surface bobbing with polystyrene
shards and other unsavory orts.
“Harvey,” called the woman, sagging on the stone bench with the baby at her
breast. “Harvey, I wish you’d …”
“Now what is it,” said Harvey testily, making a great noise with his two-day-old
copy of The Times.
“Some company,” she said with wounded pathos. “That’s all.”
“Company,” he sighed. “I thought the idea was to get away from it all.”
“I thought we’d have a chance to talk on holiday,” said the woman.
“All right, all right,” said Harvey, scrumpling up The Times and exchanging his
chaise longue for a place on the stone bench beside her. “All right. So what do
you want to talk about?”
“Us,” said the woman.
“Right,” said Harvey. “Can I have a swim first?” And he was off, diving clumsily
into the pool, losing his poise at the last moment so that he met the water like
a flung cat.
“She’s hideous,” whispered Tina. “Look at that gross stomach, it’s all in
folds.” She glanced down superstitiously at her own body, the high breasts like
halved apples, the handspan waist.
“He’s quite fat, too,” said Charlotte. “Love handles, anyway.”
“I’m never going to have children,” breathed Tina. “Not in a million years.”
“Shush,” said Joe, straining forward for the next installment. The husband was
back from his swim, shaking himself like a labrador in front of the nursing
mother.
“‘Us,'” he said humorously, wiggling a finger inside each ear, then drubbing his
hair with the flats of his hands. “Fire away then.”
She started immediately, as if she knew she had only two or three minutes of his
attention, and soon the air was thick with phrases like Once she’s on solids,
and You’d rather be reading the paper, and Is it because you wanted a boy? He
looked dull but resigned, silent except for once protesting, What’s so special
about bathtime? She talked on, but like a loser, for she was failing to find the
appropriate register, flailing around, pulling clichés from the branches. At
some subliminal level each of the eavesdropping quartet recognized their own
mother’s voice in hers, and glazed over.
“You’ve never moaned on like this before,” marveled Harvey at last. “You were
always so independent. Organized.”
“You think I’m a mess,” she said. “A failure as a mother.”
“Well, you’re obviously not coping,” he said. “At home all day and you can’t
even keep the waste bins down.”
Nick and Tina were laughing with silent violence behind the screen, staggering
against each other, tears running down their faces. Joe was mesmerized by the
spectacle of lactation. As for Charlotte, she was remembering another unwitting
act of voyeurism, a framed picture from a childhood camping holiday.
It had been early morning, she’d gone off on her own to the village for their
breakfast baguettes, and the village had been on a hill like in a fairy tale,
full of steep little flights of steps, which she was climbing for fun. The light
was sweet and glittering and as she looked down over the rooftops she saw very
clearly one particular open window, so near that she could have lobbed in a ten
franc piece, and through the window she could see a woman dropping kisses onto a
man’s face and neck and chest. He was lying naked in bed and she was kissing him
lovingly and gracefully, her breasts dipping down over him like silvery peonies.
Charlotte had never mentioned this to anyone, keeping the picture to herself, a
secret snapshot protected from outside sniggerings.
“The loss of romance,” bleated the woman, starting afresh.
“We haven’t changed,” said Harvey stoutly.
“Yes we have! Of course we have!”
“Rubbish.”
“But we’re supposed to change, it’s all different now, the baby’s got to come
first.”
“I don’t see why,” said Harvey. “Mustn’t let them rule your life.”
The baby had finished at last, and was asleep; the woman gingerly detached her
from her body and placed her in the buggy.
“Cheer up,” said Harvey, preparing for another dip. “Once you’ve lost a bit of
weight, it’ll all be back to normal. Romance et cetera. Get yourself in shape.”
“You don’t fancy me anymore,” she wailed in a last-ditch attempt to hold him.
“No, no, of course I do,” he said, eyeing the water. “It’s just a bit …
different from before. Now that you’ve gone all, you know, sort of floppy.”
That did it. At the same moment as the woman unloosed a howl of grief, Nick and
Tina released a semi-hysterical screech of laughter. Then-“Run!” said Joe-and
they all shot off round the opposite side of the pool, snatching up their
clothes and shoes and purses at the other end. Harvey was meanwhile shouting,
“Hoi! Hoi! What the hell d’you think you’re playing at!” while his wife stopped
crying and his daughter started.
The four of them ran like wild deer, leaping low bushes of lavender and thyme,
whooping with panicky delight, lean and light and half naked-or, more
accurately, nine tenths naked-through the pine trees and è-徱 dappling.
They ran on winged feet, and their laughter looped the air behind them like
chains of bubbles in translucent water.
High up on the swimming pool terrace the little family, frozen together for a
photographic instant, watched their flight open-mouthed, like the ghosts of
summers past; or, indeed, of summers yet to come.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from In the Driver’s Seat
by Helen Simpson
Copyright © 2007 by Helen Simpson.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2007
Helen Simpson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26522-7
