Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(76)

“The Hungarian women aren’t up to it,” he said once. “They never know when it’s game over, in love, life, or death. They flirt with the undertaker, they flirt with the guy shovelling the dirt onto their coffin. They never give up.”

Neither Jo-Anne nor Noreen is Hungarian, but they too are displaying impressive flirting skills. If they had feather fans they’d be hitting Tobias with them, if bouquets they’d be tossing him a rosebud, if they had ankles they’d be flashing them. As it is they’re simpering. Wilma longs to tell them to act their age, but what would it be like if they did?

She knows Jo-Anne from the swimming pool. She tries to do a few laps twice a week, manageable as long as someone helps her in and out and guides her to the change room. And she must have met Noreen before at some group function like a concert: she recognizes that pigeon-shaped laugh, a tremulous coo. She has no idea what either of them looks like, though she notes via her side vision that they’re both wearing magenta.

Tobias is far from unhappy to have a whole new female audience. Already he’s told Noreen that she’s radiant tonight, and has hinted to Jo-Anne that she wouldn’t be safe in the dark with him if he were still the man he once was. “If youth only knew, if age only could,” he says. Is that the sound of hand-kissing? Gigglings come from the two of them, or what would formerly have been gigglings. Closer to squawkings, or cluckings, or wheezings: sudden gusts of air through autumn leaves. The vocal cords shorten, Wilma thinks sadly. The lungs shrink. Everything gets drier.

How does she feel about the flirtation that’s going on over the clam chowder? Is she jealous, does she want Tobias all to herself? Not all of him, no; she wouldn’t go so far. She has no desire to roll around in the metaphorical hay with him, because she has no desire. Or not much. But she does want his attention. Or rather she wants him to want her attention, though he seems to be doing well enough with the two inferior substitutes on hand. The three of them are bantering away like something in a Regency Romance, and she has to listen because there’s nothing to distract her: the little people haven’t shown up.

She tries to summon them. Come out, she commands silently, fixing what would once have been her gaze in the direction of the artificial flower arrangement in the centre of the table – top quality, says Tobias, you can hardly tell the difference. It’s yellow, which is about all she can say for it.

Nothing happens. No manikins appear. She can control neither their appearances nor their disappearances; which seems unfair, since they’re products of nobody’s brain but hers.



The clam chowder is succeeded by a ground beef casserole with mushrooms, followed in turn by rice pudding with raisins. Wilma concentrates on eating: she must locate the plate out of the corners of her eyes, she must direct the fork as if it’s a steam shovel: she must approach, swivel, acquire payload, lift. This takes effort. At long last the cookie plate descends, shortbread and bars as usual. There’s a brief glimpse of seven or eight ladies in off-white frilly petticoats, a can-can flash of their silk-stockinged legs, but they morph back into shortbread cookies almost immediately.

“What’s happening outside?” she says into a gap left in the web of compliments that’s been spinning itself among the others. “At the main gate?”

“Oh,” says Noreen gaily, “we were trying to forget all that!”

“Yes,” says Jo-Anne. “It’s too depressing. We’re living for the moment, aren’t we, Tobias?”

“Wine, women, and song!” Noreen announces. “Bring on the belly dancers!” Both of them cackle.

Surprisingly, Tobias does not laugh. Instead he takes Wilma’s hand; she feels his dry, warm, boney fingers enclosing hers. “More are gathering. The situation is more grave than we at first apprehended, dear lady,” he says. “It would be unwise to underestimate it.”

“Oh, we weren’t underestimating it,” says Jo-Anne, striving to keep her conversational soap bubbles in the air. “We were just ignoring it!”

“Ignorance is bliss!” chirps Noreen; but they’re no longer cutting any ice with Tobias. He’s dumped his Scarlet Pimpernel foppish-aristocrat frippery and has swung into his Man of Action mode.

“We must expect the worst,” he says. “They will not catch us napping. Now, dear lady, I will escort you home.”

She breathes out with relief: he’s come back to her. He’ll take her as far as the door of her apartment; he does this every evening, faithful as clockwork. What has she been afraid of? That he’d leave her to fumble her way ignominiously, deserted in full view of all, and scamper off into the shrubbery with Noreen and Jo-Anne to commit threefold sexual acts with them in a gazebo? No chance of that: the security men would scoop them up in no time flat and frog-march them into the Advanced Living wing. They patrol the grounds at night, with flashlights and beagles.

“Are we ready?” Tobias asks her. Wilma’s heart warms to him. We. So much for Jo-Anne and Noreen, who are, once again, merely they. She leans on him as he takes her elbow, and together they make what she’s free to picture as a dignified exit.

“But what is the worst?” she says to him in the elevator. “And how can we prepare for it? You don’t think they’ll burn us down! Not here! The police would stop them.”

“We cannot count on the police,” says Tobias. “Not any more.”