Free Elementals by A.S. Byatt Page B

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 of Melanie’s ear with considerable distaste.
    ‘Will you have coffee?’ he said to Melanie in French. He indicated the coffee pot. She bent her head towards it with a quick curving movement, sniffed it, and then hovered briefly over the milk jug.
    ‘This,’ she said, indicating the hot milk. ‘I will drink this.’
    She looked at Bernard with huge black eyes under long lashes.
    ‘I wish you joy,’ said Bernard in Cévenol French, ‘of your immortal soul.’
    ‘Hey,’ said Raymond, ‘don’t flirt with my girl in foreign languages.’
    ‘I don’t flirt,’ said Bernard. ‘I paint.’
    ‘And we’ll be off after breakfast and leave you to your painting,’ said Raymond. ‘Won’t we, my sweet darling? Melanie wants – Melanie hasn’t got – she didn’t exactly bring – you understand – all her clothes and things. We’re going to go to Cannes and buy some real clothes. Melanie wants to see the film festival and the stars. You won’t mind, old friend, you didn’t want me in the first place. I don’t want to interrupt your
painting.
Chacun à sa boue
, as we used to say in the army, I know that much French.’
    Melanie held out her pretty fat hands and turned them over and over with considerable satisfaction. They were pinkly pale and also ornamented with pearly nail-varnish. She did not look at Raymond, simply twisted her head about with what could have been pleasure at his little sallies of physical attention, or could have been irritation. She did not speak. She smiled a little, over her milk, like a satisfied cat, displaying two rows of sweet little pearly teeth between her glossy pink lips.
    Raymond’s packing did not take long. Melanie turned out to have one piece of luggage – a large green leather bag full of rattling coins, by the sound. Raymond saw her into the car