by Allan Wells
THAT YEAR he kept the site open almost into October. It was the two Germans, Reinhold and Friedl, who prompted him. They had stopped one June day for bread and cheese, wanting to stay a night or two with their caravan.‘The site’s not really open,’ he told them.
‘May to September. It says here.’
‘There’s no shower working, and no one to clear up.’
‘I fix the shower.’
The gaze of the tall unsmiling Reinhold, shining strong and blue through the delicacy of his tan, had such integrity that you felt almost guilty.
‘Friedl clears up.’
The smaller, slightly older man just smiled. Apparently he spoke no English.
‘Well, if you don’t mind the state of things,’ he said, taken aback, ‘stay by all means. Put your caravan where you like.’
Big black clouds drew up after lunch, dark bellies scratched with lightning. The tips of the ornamental firs shone gold in the gloom and cold rain lashed them as they crossed the yard.
‘There are tools in this barn,’ he said, pulling the door against the tufts of grass and burdock. ‘The showers are at the end.’
He took a spade to clear the door of a shower cabin and of course when he wrenched it open nothing worked. Reinhold did everything absently and precisely, without thinking. He tore the creeper from the shower footing. Meanwhile Friedl stood there with the tools. Within minutes water ran.
They pushed the neat little caravan into place in the knee-high grass.
‘I’m afraid the mower’s not working,’ he said, ashamed.
‘Petrol or electric?’
‘Petrol.’
‘I fix the engine.’
He had no idea what they had in mind. Next morning they were up early, working in their easy, silent way until late on, clearing the alleys, trimming trees, fixing the toilet doors. The weather was brilliant. Within days the site that had slipped into disuse filled with caravans.
His pub stood at the crossroads sheltered by a copse of oak and beech, a tall grim building that he had tried to brighten with ivy the colour of oxblood. In Muriel’s day things had been livelier. She booked the campers in and ran a little shop.
‘How can I handle these people?’ he asked Reinhold when a family of Belgians arrived. There were seven of them.
‘No problem. I fix the other showers.’
‘But the lavatories -’
‘I fix the lavatories.’
As they spoke, Reinhold was mending the window of the kiosk where Muriel had kept a refrigerator for milk and eggs.
‘I fix the ice-box later.’
He shook his head, walking up the drive into the site. One or two chickens strutted at his feet and under the laurel his old labrador dozed. Looking round after the two had cleared up he felt amazed and moved. The place was transformed.
As he came back the sun beat blindingly into his eyes. Someone must have been taking a shower, for a cloud of steam belched from a cabin. Close at hand he heard a clucking scream. A cabin door flew open and something wet and blubbery hit his shoulder.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I’m no lobster.’
Instinctively his arms had closed in protection, catching the woman. She had switched the hot water full on without looking at the setting. What he remembered was the feel of her in his arms and against his body, padded yet sinuous, full of gentle movement in counterflow. Something white and fluid flashed from her eyes as she looked up. The skin, closer-pored than a man’s, was pearled with water.
He tried not to look down but compulsion was too strong. Her breasts were taut and fleshy, with dark, spreading nipples that sent a flood of heat welling through him. From the cabin came puffs of steam. He pushed his way in and grappled with the scorching control knob. A final hiss drove him back, but seeing her bathrobe hanging he grabbed it and flung it over her nakedness.
In comic rage she stepped back. The heavy copper hair had grey at the temples: the brown eyes too were flecked with bluish grey. He bent down and picked up her slippers. She began to laugh with a vaguely masculine sound. He recoiled with the slippers in his hand, staring.
‘You look like a valet or something,’ she said, ‘holding those things.’
Later when evening warmth filled the pub she came in wearing a blue cotton dress which showed the parting of her bosom. A silver clip pinned back the heavy hair.
She laughed and drank Murphy’s with him. The big parlour decorated with old farm implements was almost empty. She had someone with her, a younger, slimmer woman whose dark and slightly bulging eyes had lids drawn down at the corners. At first he thought they were mother and daughter, but they were just two women caravanning.
‘I bet he can say rude words.’
She was looking at Mattie, the parakeet caged beside the counter. Mattie had hardly uttered a sound since Muriel had left. He saw her eyes widen with pleasure. He thought she would stretch up and touch the bird through the bars.
‘What a little duck. Heck, I’m starving.’
The way she showed her tongue set him on edge. He watched, eaten up by her. A pressure was thudding shakily up through his veins.
It’s all this fresh air.’ She turned to her companion. ‘Aren’t you starving, Dora?’
He didn’t notice the younger woman’s reply. He took his eyes from the bare arms where the sleeves gently nipped the skin.
‘Marty comes in at seven. There’s hamburgers and ploughman’s. Liver sausage.’
She drew in a deep breath.
‘I can smell fresh bread in the kitchen.’
‘Reinhold fetched it from town this morning.’
‘He your manager?’
‘No, no.’ He found himself fumbling for words. ‘Just a friendly chap who helps out.’
‘No one in the family to do it?’
He knew she meant a wife. She began talking about camping sites, with the girl Dora sitting like a pupil at her side. He watched with fascination; the brown eyes with their sudden flash of white; the hands that moved so surely, touching the counter, the glass of stout, the wrist of the silent girl.
Reinhold and Friedl came in for their bitter.
‘Everybody needs rolls and milk in the morning,’ she said. ‘Dora and me are up early. We could bring stuff in from the town.’
‘That big fridge in the kiosk -’ he began.
‘I fix the fridge,’ Reinhold said.
Marty the barmaid came in, draping her coat over a chair. She put out the menus.
‘Let’s have a ploughman’s,’ the woman said to her companion. ‘I’m starving, I tell you.’
He knocked the broken tiles out with a mallet and chipped away the old mortar. It was tough and the sharp pieces flew in all directions. He missed the two men, Reinhold and Friedl – it had been his strangest friendship.
Autumn was coming on. The Belgians had gone, and the Germans. In the mornings mist hung in long sleeves over the coppice after some days of heavy rain. By now the two women had gone too. He had stood at the end of the drive watching their caravan disappear. They were off to the Dales, they said, and would stop over again on their way back.
‘See you in Autumn,’ the older one had said, smiling. She had briefly leaned against him and the same flame, knife-sharp now, had flickered again. After that he had to work on the shower cabin. It was the one in which she had nearly scalded herself. The place had become a fixation with him. He knelt on the floor with a cold chisel and pounded away until the bits flew at his cheek like darts.
Towards the end, the older woman had taken to taunting him at the bar. ‘You need civilising. Not enough women about you. ’
‘My wife got fed up with all the work.’
She drank her stout slowly, looking at him over the rim of the glass, caressing it with her lips.
‘You didn’t look after her right, that was the trouble. A woman has to feel good inside.’
Occasionally she tried a different tack.
‘I bet you rigged that shower just to see me in my birthday suit. Caravan sites are just the place for larks like that.’
One evening in the full richness of August he stood aimless and lost with Marty at the bar. Reinhold and Friedl had gone for a swim and only one or two children played the machines. The woman hadn’t come. He took a bowl of plums a farmer had brought and walked up to her caravan in the dusk. All was quiet. A group of French and Belgians sat outside passing a bottle of wine. The long caravan of the two women was brightly lit. He stopped at the window, hesitating. Muffled voices reached him.
‘...only a bit of fun...’
It was the low, warm burr of the woman, causing his stomach to churn in panic. As usual he didn’t hear the girl’s reply.
‘...life he leads. Noticed the way he watches your lips?’
He stepped back in consternation. Who?
‘You can see he’s panting for it.’
He could have flung the plums at her window but instead he jettisoned them in the hedge. As he turned away the lights of the caravan died and the older woman sniggered. The whispering snigger came repeatedly, dying down into silence.
By his watch it was only nine. In the other caravans televisions flickered. Oh, so they’re like that, are they, those two, he thought. Like that. I might have known. He felt sullied, jealous, bitterly scornful. That young one who couldn’t get her mouth open clung like poison ivy. What a fruit. You could tell her sort a mile off.
For weeks, right into September, it raged through his blood. What he hadn’t realised was his state of giddy delusion. A dazed happiness had possessed him – he had lived some schoolboy dream of love.
It was a passion based on ignorance. But where ignorance was bliss, insight emerged with a sharper tip. Beneath that fanciful emotion the young girl had filled him with unease. Always when she had been sitting there jealousy simmered in his gut. After that, after his eavesdropping at the caravan, it had all sickened and hardened into a rancid cake. Soured desire and frustration lay in his stomach like vomit. When they had driven off he felt only the black vortex of migraine.
The very season of Autumn itself he banged into dust, splintering that time of shame with his mallet. He was in love. By the beginning of October he longed for the woman to return. They had all gone, the Belgians, the French. The site was an empty field with patches of gravel.
He cursed bitterly to himself, closing his mind. They wouldn’t come to taunt him again. No, he would stop them. He went out to the drive and put out the sign that Reinhold and Friedl had so meticulously repainted: Closed for the Season.
~The End~
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