William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

The boy stood there in his underpants, uneasy in the intensity of her gaze. With a start she realised he was waiting for her to undress. She looked at his hairless body, the slim legs, the shadows of his ribs, the lean jut of his pelvis, and he seemed to her almost painfully beautiful. As she fumbled with the buttons on her dress she felt a strange thick sensation in her throat, and for a brief moment the utter grief of her life cut like a razor and her eyes spangled with tears.

Eric lay still in Marguerite’s arms. She was holding him tight, running her hands up and down his body, muttering soft phrases that he couldn’t understand. Eric was aware of an unfamiliar tiredness, and now that it was all over he longed to be away from this small room and this large white woman with her curious smell. At the beginning he had been numbed and filled with nervousness when she had taken off her clothes and lain down beside him on the mattress. What struck him was not the heavy flat breasts with their stark brown nipples, the bushy armpits or the overhanging belly, but the shocking nude whiteness of the woman. She was so white she was almost grey, as he remembered his arm had once been when it was removed from a plaster cast.

The brief, unsatisfactory coupling was completed within seconds, or so it seemed to Eric, who now ran through his past sensations like a clerk at a filing cabinet, seeking for something that was memorable, that retained traces of excitement. She had kissed his face and rolled him on top of her, manipulating and pushing him around like a worker he’d once seen operating a die stamper. But now it was over, she just seemed to want to hold him and Eric didn’t know what to do. And there was the smell. At first he thought it came from the mattress but then he realised it rose from her skin, a thin acidic smell, almost organic and living.

Eric was confused about his role; it had not been like the books he’d read or the stories he’d heard. He had been passive, merely fulfilling a function. He hadn’t felt anything. Once, when waiting for the school train, Haines had pointed to a group of women in black overalls who were carrying long brushes and heading up the platform towards the sidings. The women who cleaned the carriages, Haines said, were notorious. They’d do it for ten bob, anywhere, with anyone.

Tentatively Eric brought his hand up from the mattress and touched Marguerite’s breast. The nipple was coarse and thick like a small brown raspberry. His palm cautiously inched up the slack bulge of her breast. He gently touched the nipple and let his fingers trickle over it. As he touched it she said something and hugged him close to her with a strength he found surprising, so that he felt in a moment of panic that the viscid-white flesh might envelop him, lapping round his body like mud. She reached down for him, her other hand pressing his face into her neck, and he could smell her; he could feel it filling his lungs like water.

With a wriggle he broke free and sat up. He pointed to his watch. “I have to go,” he said, and quickly pulled on his clothes. Marguerite, alone on the mattress and suddenly aware of her nakedness, covered herself with her dress.

Eric crouched in the corner tying up his shoelaces, his face hot with embarrassment, unable to say a word, the silence heavy in the air like a threat. From the corner of his eye he saw her leg, the purple-veined thigh with its furze of dark hairs, and he felt his top lip twitch with distaste. He went over to her, carefully avoiding her gaze and breathing through his mouth.

Marguerite was very quiet. Eric reached into his pocket and withdrew two ten-franc notes. “Here.” He held them out. “Merci,” he added, feeling foolish. But she just curled his fingers back round them and pushed his hand away. For a moment his hand with the notes seemed to hover disconnectedly between them. Suddenly Eric wished she had taken the money. It would have been better.

“Well, goodbye,” he said. “Au revoir.”

Outside, the air felt washed and fragrant. Eric took deep breaths and tried to lift the mood he sensed was descending on him as inevitably as night.…

The afternoon sun beat down on him. It was that curious pause in the year: high summer slipping into autumn. Things started to decay then: wars began; dogs went mad. The green of the trees and the grass looked tired, old and tramped-on.

“How was it?” Pierre-Etienne asked when Eric caught up with them.

“Fantastic,” Eric lied automatically.

“You were a long time,” Momo said.

“Was I? Oh, well, you know how it is.”

“Did you … really?” Pierre-Etienne asked.

Eric looked at him curiously. “Yes. It went just like you said.” He shivered. “She’s big. Huge … you know.” He weighed two mammoth breasts in front of him.

Pierre-Etienne and Momo looked on with ill-concealed amazement. Eric said, “Elle pue,” and they both laughed uneasily. He touched his back pocket and heard the crinkle of notes. He turned and walked away from the abattoir back towards the market-place. Pierre-Etienne and Momo followed behind, deep in conversation.

“Come on,” Eric shouted, “I’ll buy you a Diabolo-menthe.”

Marcel looked up in surprise when Marguerite said goodbye. Normally they parted without a word. She went to the café and ordered a drink. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the street; a slight breeze shifted a scrap of paper on the pavement; amber light flashed momentarily from a chrome bumper. Some of the butchers from the day shift came into the café but she paid them no attention. She was thinking about clean shiny hair, smoothness, a touch.

She called for another calva . She would go home late tonight, maybe see a film or just sit on here in the café for a while. It was a pleasant evening. There was something solid and achieved about the depth of the shadows, it seemed to her; the kindness of the yellowy sun patches on the table tops pleased her obscurely. She took the last sip of calva . The English boy had been gentle and she had made him happy.

The waiter brought her new drink over. As he put it down he whispered his request in her ear. She looked round. The man leant confidentially over the table. She saw his oily hair, his silver tooth, his shiny watch.

“Well?” he asked, smiling, his eyebrows raised.

“No,” said Marguerite abruptly, before she had really even thought about it. “No. Tomorrow perhaps, we’ll see. But not today. Not today.”

I would like to make one thing clear before I tell my story. I don’t want you to think that because I have never married that there is any kind of … of a problem between me and the female sex. I could in fact have married any number of girls had I so chosen — but I didn’t choose to, so there it is. It was a question of my health, you see. I do not have a strong constitution and largely for that reason I decided, once my dear mother had died, to remain a bachelor.

My mother left me a small legacy along with the house. I live quietly and economically there. I have several projects with which I am currently occupied and they take up a fair amount of my time. I am a great reader, too, and one of the luxuries of not having to work for a living is that I can indulge to the full my passion for reading. Lately, however, I have grown rather tired of books and for the last year or so have read only magazines. I have subscriptions to thirty-eight and buy many others on a casual, sporadic basis. I read all kinds except the political ones; I like the bright, happy illustrations and I have been progressively coming around to the opinion that magazines are, indeed, more imaginative than many novels. The world of the glossy magazine holds more allure for me than the grimy realistic tragedies that pass for literature these days.