Elementals - A. S. Byatt [26]
‘I am so sad, Bernard. I want to be a woman.’
‘You’ve had thousands of years already. Give me a few more days.’
‘You see how kind I am, when I am in pain.’
What would have happened if Raymond Potter had not kept his word will never be known. Bernard had quite forgotten the liver-fluke conversation and Raymond’s promised, or threatened, visit. But one day he heard wheels on his track, and saw Potter’s dark red BMW creeping up its slope.
‘Hide,’ he said to the Lamia. ‘Keep still. It’s a dreadful Englishman of the fee-fi-fo-fum sort; he has a shouting voice, he makes jokes, he smokes cigars, he’s bad news, hide.’
The Lamia slipped underwater in a flurry of bubbles like the Milky Way.
Raymond Potter came out of the car smiling and carried in a leg of wild boar and the ingredients of a ratatouille, a crate of red wine, and several bottles of eau-de-vie Poire William.
‘Brought my own provisions. Show me the stove.’
He cooked. They ate on the terrace, in the evening. Bernard did not switch on the lights in the pool and did not suggest that Raymond might swim. Raymond in fact did not like swimming; he was too fat to wish to be seen, and preferred eating and smoking. Both men drank rather a lot of red wine and then rather a lot of eau-de-vie. The smell of the mountains was laced with the smells of pork crackling and cigar smoke. Raymond peered drunkenly at Bernard’s current painting. He pronounced it rather sinister, very striking, a bit weird, not quite usual, funny-coloured, a bit over the top? Looking at Bernard each time for a response and getting none, as Bernard, exhausted and a little drunk, was largely asleep. They went to bed, and Bernard woke in the night to realise he had not shut his bedroom window as he usually did; a shutter was banging. But he was unkissed and solitary; he slid back into unconsciousness.
The next morning Bernard was up first. He made coffee, he cycled to the village and bought croissants, bread and peaches, he laid the table on the terrace and poured heated milk into a blue and white jug. The pool lay flat and still, quietly and incompatibly shining at the quiet sky.
Raymond made rather a noise coming downstairs. This was because his arm was round a young woman with a great deal of hennaed black hair, who wore a garment of that see-through cheesecloth from India which is sold in every southern French market. The garment was calf-length, clinging, with little shoulder-straps and dyed in a rather musty brownish-black, scattered with little round green spots like peas. It could have been a sundress or a nightdress; it was only too easy to see that the woman wore nothing at all underneath. The black triangle of her pubic hair swayed with her hips. Her breasts were large and thrusting, that was the word that sprang to Bernard’s mind. The nipples stood out in the cheesecloth.
‘This is Melanie,’ Raymond said, pulling out a chair for her. She flung back her hair with an actressy gesture of her hands and sat down gracefully, pulling the cheesecloth round her knees and staring down at her ankles. She had long pale hairless legs with very pretty feet. Her toenails were varnished with a pink pearly varnish. She turned them this way and that, admiring them. She wore rather a lot of very pink lipstick and smiled in a satisfied way at her own toes.
‘Do you want coffee?’ said Bernard to Melanie.
‘She doesn’t speak English,’ said Raymond. He leaned over and made a guzzling, kissing noise in the hollow of her collar-bone. ‘Do you, darling?’
He was obviously going to make no attempt to explain her presence. It was not even quite clear that he knew that Bernard had a right to an explanation, or that he had himself any idea where she had come from. He was simply obsessed. His fingers were pulled towards her hair like needles to a magnet: he kept standing up and kissing her breasts, her shoulders, her ears. Bernard watched Raymond’s fat tongue explore the coil