William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

“Shall we see what’s for grub?” he said.

People looked round as they walked into the dining room. It was busy but not full up. August was the most popular month in Trouville, coinciding with the race meeting. It was Paris-by-the-sea then, she had read.

During the meal Gabriel ordered champagne which, she noticed, he drank considerably more of than her. Indeed, his mood grew steadily more subdued as the meal progressed; he spent a lot of time gazing around the room as if unwilling to catch her eye. Charis understood. She felt the same sensations in her chest: a kind of breathlessness, as if foreshadowing the onset of a panic. To calm them both down she started talking about the times they had had when they first met in India.

Charis had been born there. Her father was a railway engineer. Her mother had died of some fever or other when Charis was very young, so young that she retained no memory of her whatsoever. Charis had been promptly sent back to England to stay with a family who took care of ‘Indian children’. From there she had gone to Bristol to live with her Aunt Bedelia (her father’s sister) and attend the small private school for girls she ran. However much she had loved Aunt Bedelia she had been ‘bored blue’ by life in Bristol, and consequently at the age of eighteen went out to India to live with her father. For a year her father was based in Bombay, which she had thrived on, with its exotic cosmopolitan life — its yacht club and taxi-cabs, natives in European clothes, its box-wallahs and millionaire merchants.

But then he was posted up the line to a small garrison town and, if anything, Charis was bored even bluer than she had been in Bristol. Like it or not, she became one of the Railway People — no matter how elevated her father’s position as chief engineer — and therefore distinct from Canal People, Army People or Government People. It was true that senior Europeans in the four groups happily intermingled at tennis parties, sales-of-work, polo matches and regimental sports days, but Charis soon grew aware that try to ignore or overcome it as she might, she carried the categorization with her wherever she went.

The only time she felt she left it behind was when the European population moved up from the garrison town on the plains to the popular hill station of Mahar Tal. There were no Railway People in Mahar Tal as the railway stopped at the foot of the hills. Charis stayed with a friend, Eleanor, the daughter of a District Commissioner, and attained, by association, Government People status.

It was during her second summer at Mahar Tal that she met Gabriel. He had been seconded from his regiment to be a ‘bear leader’ to the son of a local rajah. This involved teaching the young boy how to ride, how to play cricket, tennis and badminton and generally inculcate all the social airs and graces of an English gentleman.

Charis met Gabriel at an ‘At Home’ given by one of the senior officials’ wives. Some tennis was played, tea and lemonade were drunk. The hill garden in which the ‘At Home’ took place was devoid of turf but full of English flowers and surrounded by oak and pine trees. Gabriel had been quite a ‘catch’. Since then Eleanor and she had never been quite such close friends.

Charis shook herself out of her reverie and looked across the table at him. Gabriel was cutting up a peach with meticulous surgical care, his head bowed over his plate. In India everything had possessed a wonderful dreamlike quality. Somehow, back in England it proved hard to sustain. Perhaps it was meeting Gabriel’s curious family: all those sisters and brothers-in-law, his batty Aunt Mary and his eccentric mother, the very peculiar little major, and Felix, ‘clever’ Felix, of whom Gabriel spoke most fondly, but who had seemed to her, if she were honest, an odious little prig.

No, she told herself, don’t criticize. Not tonight, of all nights. It was an ordinary family, just like most people’s. Only Gabriel’s perfection showed them up rather.

Gabriel looked up at this point and caught her smiling at him. He smiled back, a little uneasily, she thought.

“Fancy the Casino, Carrie?” he asked, pouring the remains of the champagne bottle into his glass. “Shall we see if we can make our fortune?”

The Casino! she thought. What on earth was he talking about? “I don’t think so, Gabriel,” she said. “Perhaps tomorrow night.”

“Fine,” he said, “fine,” and drained his glass.

They went into the hotel lounge where Gabriel ordered brandy and a cigar. When he finished these he suggested a walk, but Charis again demurred. He had another brandy before they went upstairs to their room. Once there, Charis found Gabriel’s lack of composure beginning to affect her too. As she sat before her dressing table in the dressing room her hands shook slightly as she removed the pins from her hair.

In the bedroom Gabriel cleared his throat loudly and said he was going down the corridor to the bathroom. Charis wondered for a moment why he wouldn’t use the one attached to their small suite but realized that this was a kind of ruse to give her a moment or two of privacy.

She felt a pulse beating in her temple and a tightening of her throat. She pulled a nightdress over her underclothes, without putting her arms through the sleeves, and removed her corset and knickers beneath it, as she had done all her life. It was curious, Charis suddenly thought, but she had never seen her naked body in a mirror. She put her underclothes away and climbed into bed, lying on the left hand side. That was where she had lain last night: she didn’t know if Gabriel had any preference.

In two minutes Gabriel returned.

“D’you know, I think the water’s better down there,” he said artlessly and ducked into the dressing room. Charis lay stiffly in the double bed. Dear Gabriel, she said to herself, as if it were a prayer, dear Gabriel, how I love you. Suddenly she reached over and extinguished the light by the bed. Then she realized that the central ceiling light was still burning. Did she have time to switch it out before Gabriel came back into the room? Would he switch it out? Ought she to remind him to do so? She slid out of bed and scampered to the door.

“Everything all right, Came?” Gabriel said.

She whirled round. He stood in the doorway of the small dressing room. He wore pyjamas with a blue and green stripe. For some reason she noticed he was wearing slippers.

She gave a shrill nervous laugh. “I thought I should lock the door.” Her hand moved towards the key. There was a cardboard sign hanging from the doorknob. ‘ Priez de ne pas déranger, SVP ’, it said. They should really hang that outside too, she thought in a moment of rationality. But no, she couldn’t, not with Gabriel watching. But the light? What about the light? She turned the key in the lock and looked round again. She caught Gabriel edging noiselessly sideways towards the bed with little shuffling steps.

“Hah,” he said nonsensically, his hands foolishly trying to slide into non-existent pockets in his pyjama trousers.

“Yes.” She marched briskly, more briskly than she intended, across the carpet and round to her side of the bed.

Gabriel wandered back to the door where he turned off the light.

“Yes,” she heard him say in the sudden darkness. “Mmmm.”

Charis got into bed for the second time. As she slid her legs down between the sheets the hem of her nightdress rode up above her knees. As she checked her automatic move to pull it down she experienced a mild thrill of illicit pleasure. She lay back on the pillow and put her arms by her side. Her heart was beating quickly, but not wildly, she thought. That was good. The room was dark. The chambermaid had closed the shutters but left the windows open for coolness. She waited. Where was Gabriel?