May We Borrow Your Husband? by Graham Greene Page A

the details were not yet worked out. The study might possibly end with the first arrival of Dylan Thomas on the shores of America – at the Cunard quay or at Idlewild? That was a point of later research. She examined herself again closely in the glass – the new decade of the forties stared frankly back at her – an Englander who had become a New Englander. After all she hadn’t travelled very far – Kent to Connecticut. This was not just the physical restlessness of middle age, she argued; it was the universal desire to see a little bit further, before one surrendered to old age and the blank certitude of death.
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    Next day she picked up her courage and went as far as the swimming-pool. A strong wind blew and whipped up the waves in the almost land-girt harbour – the hurricane season would soon be here. All the world creaked around her: the wooden struts of the shabby harbour, the jalousies of the small hopeless houses which looked as though they had been knocked together from a make-it-yourself kit, the branches of the palms – a long, weary, worn-out creaking. Even the water of the swimming-pool imitated in miniature the waves of the harbour.
    She was glad that she was alone in the swimming-pool, at least for all practical purposes alone, for the old man splashing water over himself, like an elephant, in the shallow end hardly counted. He was a solitary elephant and not one of the hippo band. They would have called her with merry cries to join them – and it’s difficult to be stand-offish in a swimming-pool which is common to all as a table is not. They might even in their resentment have ducked her – pretending like schoolchildren that it was all a merry game; there was nothing she put beyond those thick thighs, whether they were encased in bikinis or Bermuda shorts. As she floated in the pool her ears were alert for their approach. At the first sound she would get well away from the water, but today they were probably making an excursion to Tower Isle on the other side of the island, or had they done that yesterday? Only the old man watched her, pouring water over his head to keep away sunstroke. She was safely alone, which was the next best thing to the adventure she had come here to find. All the same, as she sat on the rim of the pool, and let the sun and wind dry her, she realized the extent of her solitude. She had spoken to no one but black waiters and Syrian receptionists for more than two weeks. Soon, she thought, I shall even begin to miss Charlie – it would be an ignoble finish to what she had intended to be an adventure.
    A voice from the water said to her, ‘My name’s Hickslaughter – Henry Hickslaughter.’ She couldn’t have sworn to the name in court, but that was how it had sounded at the time and he never repeated it. She looked down at a polished mahogany crown surrounded by white hair; perhaps he resembled Neptune more than an elephant. Neptune was always outsize, and as he had pulled himself a little out of the water to speak, she could see the rolls of fat folding over the blue bathing-slip, with tough hair lying like weeds along the ditches. She replied with amusement, ‘My name is Watson. Mary Watson.’
    â€˜You’re English?’
    â€˜My husband’s American,’ she said in extenuation.
    â€˜I haven’t seen him around, have I?’
    â€˜He’s in England,’ she said with a small sigh, for the geographical and national situation seemed too complicated for casual explanation.
    â€˜You like it here?’ he asked and lifting a hand-cup of water he distributed it over his bald head.
    â€˜So so.’
    â€˜Got the time on you?’
    She looked in her bag and told him, ‘Eleven fifteen.’
    â€˜I’ve had my half hour,’ he said and trod heavily away towards the ladder at the shallow end.
    An hour later, staring at her lukewarm Martini with its great green unappetizing olive,