Marble

Eleanor shivers.

She brings her hand up to her face, to peer through spread fingers, in the middle of an echoing corridor. The webbing between her fingers peeling now, from the sun and marine air.

“What do you think?”

She turns to face the elder of the two men standing in the hallway.

“It’s beautiful, Mr. Steadman,” Eleanor replies, sounding dutiful though she means every word.

He raises an expectant eyebrow. “Sorry, Niall. Really, it’s amazing. I can’t thank you enough.”

“No need. It’s been our pleasure having you with us. Changes the dynamic a bit.”

Niall Steadman’s resemblance to his son lies in quick gestures, the slight Scots burr; Niall’s stockier frame has the incipient softness of a retired athlete, in contrast to his wife’s languid movements and expensive pallor. Eleanor’s accustomed to gratitude as humiliation, like her mother’s warnings never to accept costly gifts, lest it set a dangerous precedent. She thrusts the uncomfortable sensation aside when Yannick slips away from her, at a wave from his mother. Ludivine stands in the shadow of the heavy doors, speaking in animated French to a sloe-eyed boy.

The boat, named for Niall and Ludivine’s youngest daughter, had been alien enough – Eleanor had never seen a yacht up close before this trip, growing up landlocked. The experience proved more practical and less exotic in reality than in imagination – Eleanor’s still half-ashamed of her ignorance, and of the flashy television glamour she had in mind. The reality had been disappointingly practical; no beautiful people sprawled on deck, idly sunbathing and drinking champagne.

A moment’s silence follows, before Ludivine returns alone. Ludivine follows Eleanor’s gaze upstairs, before turning to her with a smile. “Your room’s second on the left.” It’s unclear whether she means Eleanor to have a room to herself, or to share with Yannick, but Eleanor doesn’t feel comfortable asking, and so follows Ludivine’s lead, and her gently accented voice. “I’ll show you up, so you can freshen up before we eat.”

Their footsteps reverberate, the banister’s complex organic grille work cool to the touch. The room itself expansive, bright, the shutters half open. Eleanor’s case sits by the double bed, alongside a small, hexagonal Arabesque table, a vase of blooms bridal-white.

Ludivine backs out of the room, after a moment. She’s brisk and efficient, more difficult to read than her husband. “I hope you’ll be comfortable here. There’s a bathroom just there. Dinner’s at seven-thirty, if you need anything, just let me know.” Eleanor thanks her, but doesn’t begin to unpack. Instead, she moves to the window, opens the other shutter, carved too, so that when shut, thin shafts of light section the room, like from windows set high in a cathedral.

Beyond their narrow strip of coastline, and its sentinel of cultivated palms, the land sweeps round to sling the sea. Even at this hour, when the landscape fades into a hazy lilac in the last moments of sunset, there are still people bathing, or walking on the beach. Eleanor finds her eye following a long, dark figure walking out onto the courtyard, then recognises Yannick alongside, taking long strides to catch up. They embrace, in an open, easy way like brother and sister. She sees a matched pair, a set of pieces on a chequer board.

Eleanor can’t help comparing the scene to pair she and Yannick make; he rangy and athletic, with a perpetual nervous energy, she smaller, slower, carrying a little too much weight.

The thought prompts another in a long line of resolutions; this time to try swimming in the surf, risk the slither of seaweed, and the jellyfish Niall had teased her about, rather than the glassy pool immediately below. She’d told Yannick about her failed, mildewed efforts to learn to swim without meaning to.

Go on, he’d said, when she faltered. He’d propped himself up at her side on an elbow, waiting.

It’s stupid – I used to go with my sister. The other girls from the school up the road had names for me.

He frowned. Like what?

Ellie Bean. Ellie Belly. I don’t remember the rest.

Yannick, on some impulse, lifting up her faded T-shirt, a relic, kissed her navel with mock reverence, ventured a flick of his tongue that made her squirm. You know, I like Ellie Belly, with his rare, puckish smile.

It still surprised her. He’d been unable to conjure anything like it the first time they met, crippled by shyness in a bar neither had been to since. She fared little better, loathing the narrow tables set out for each pair, the moulded plastic chairs, though racy scarlet, reminiscent of school exams, compounded by oppressive awareness of time. Eleanor’s three minutes with Yannick promised little, though less painful than the evening’s other encounters.

One of the girls from work she’d come with winked at her from the next table, furtive and adolescent, and Eleanor winced. They’d push for a gleeful dissection of Eleanor’s prospects, if she lingered too long. She hated the lacquered flirtatiousness, the suggestively named chocolate-cherry cocktails with their aftertaste like swallowing cheap perfume.

On leaving the bar alone, relieved, Eleanor watched Yannick’s distraction spark into a fierce, inaudible argument with another man, someone he knew. She couldn’t turn with enough decorum to prevent him from noticing her curious glance. He crossed the road to a car parked beneath a street lamp, in front of a busy Italian restaurant. She watched him fumble with the keys. As Eleanor got into a cab, she saw that he hadn’t turned the ignition, sitting in the driver’s seat, a hand over his face. A moment later, he’d squared his shoulders, and the street, the bar began to recede into the distance.

Eleanor and Yannick descend the stairs together for dinner. She’s indulged in a neat-waisted shift for tonight, packed with its boutique tags, as if not yet belonging to her. It slid a tasteful pearly-silver over her head, and looks better against her new freckles, her loose hair than expected. She worries the amber pendant at her neck, tangled in her haste to dress before he takes her hand. The pendant, a graduation gift from her mother, prompts a visceral lurch of guilt.

They eat outside, lit only by part submerged spotlights in the pool, ceremonial and sinister. Candles in the centre of the table, and set in stone alcoves that give the impression of impossible infinity, an Escher conceit. Eleanor’s appetite makes her content to listen, Niall at pains to point out the traditional fare served, the names unwieldy on his tongue.

“It’s not all African, of course, strictly speaking.” Eleanor watches his slick mouth form the words with the irrational, unsettling urge to wipe away a tiny smear at the corner with her thumb, and an attendant flare of dislike. “The Ottomans left plenty behind. And it differs, depending on which part of the country you’re in. You go to the hotels, you get this stuff, but it’s been homogenized, sits in big buffet trays next to chips and beans.”

Eleanor swallows the stinging recognition, her mother’s ability to detect the missiles of a class-war engagement in every casual remark, and hates how defensive she sounds. “Not everyone’s looking for an adventure.”

Niall offers a grudging concession. “Okay. But, why travel so far to pile on a coach with a load of other pink, sweaty people in shorts, and then spend the rest of your time getting pinker on a lounger somewhere. George Sebastian and his white marble – a bloody great monument to all the people who ever wanted to carve up this place. And we’re still chipping away.”

He’s gathering momentum when Ludivine thanks someone arriving to clear the plates, the woman by the pool, with her white scarf and blouse, a floor-length denim skirt. In this light, she could be any age, with smooth skin, angular shoulders and broad jaw.

They finish the wine in silence, Ludivine rises first, gives Eleanor a warm smile, a hand on her husband’s forearm. “Well, I think we’ll leave you…”

Niall too, his indignation forgotten, wishes Eleanor a courtly goodnight.

Neither speaks until the Steadmans vanish into the dark. “Don’t let Dad wind you up,” Yannick says, after a minute. “I’d take it as a compliment if he wants to lecture you.”

“It’s fine. Honestly. He’s…enthusiastic. I can respect that. Who’s-”

A startling clatter of running footsteps drives the rest from her mind, and Eleanor turns. Across the water, a boy’s gap-toothed, ghoulish grin into a spotlight, positioned like a flashlight beneath his chin.

“Hicham!”

The woman in the white scarf, bearing a metal tray with four small enamelled glasses, issues a sharp reprimand to the boy.

“Labas, Yannick? Ça gaze?”

He returns her bright greeting with amusement as she sets down the tray of steaming tea. “Hi, Ines. You haven’t met Eleanor, have you?”

“It’s a pleasure, Eleanor.” Ines offers a hand to shake, then kisses her cheek. Her skin is cool. “Excuse me. Hicham dans l’amour déjà.”

Yannick laughs, turns to Eleanor, with a nod in the boy’s direction. “She says I’d better watch my back. Anyway, this is Ines. She’s known me since I was…eight?”

“Seven!” Ines volleys the word over her shoulder.

“Right. There you go. And my rival’s Hicham.” The boy looks at Eleanor, gives a shy wave, before allowing his mother to lead him away.

Yannick leans nearer and speaks quietly, though Ines and Hicham are out of earshot.

“She lived with us for a while – when she was a student, I think.”

Eleanor turns. “Here?”

“No. I mean at home. Then she left us to get married.”

Eleanor considers Ines in the Steadman’s Edinburgh home, tries to recall seeing a likely husband. The question in her mind remains half-formed. Ines, returning alone, takes an empty chair and a glass of tea.

“You don’t mind if I…?”

Yannick glances at Eleanor, as if asking permission.

“No, please,” when Ines half-rises. “Stay.”

“Okay.” She smiles again.

Ines looks to Eleanor for permission, too, and there’s a shiver of something complex that she can’t articulate. Her eyes, deep set and heavy-lidded, fix on Eleanor, her face serene.

“Yannick never said how you met.”

Yannick opens his mouth to reply, but Eleanor speaks first.

“It was at the gallery.” Yannick shifts a little at her side, but doesn’t correct the half-truth.

Eleanor hadn’t planned on coming in, running for shelter from a sudden, fierce shower, blundering into a conversation not intended for her.

- She wants to convert the space upstairs into a café. Bring in the punters. Buggered if I took this job to make lattes.

- God knows if that’ll ever happen, you know what she’s like. Oh, I’m sorry! Didn’t see you there. Can I help?

How different now! Eleanor hadn’t recognised him through the professional manner, her innate mistrust of any kind of salesman. She’d been on the verge of polite apathy, just looking, thanks. Instead, she pauses before an image of two figures, young girls with smooth hair and huge eyes. One gazed stolidly out at her from the frame, the other frozen in the act of looking back.

He’d dropped the determined friendliness, relaxed a little. When Eleanor glanced at his face, he’d looked at the images, ignored the squeak of her sodden shoes, while she’d been trying to remember his name.

Eleanor had been oddly disappointed, when it seemed he didn’t remember her, even as his name returned to her – something unusual, European. German or French? Yann? Yannick? That was it. He’d pronounced it carefully for her benefit, like the exchange student she’d been strong-armed into showing around school as a responsible, steady thirteen year old. Yannick mistook her small smile of triumph for one of interest.

- We’ve also got these – If you’d just follow me, through here. I know it’s a wee bit cramped.

He had a long, lean face, messy hair that had more than one colour in it. Taller than Eleanor with thin wrists and long fingers.

Eleanor remembers that later, trying and failing to describe the colour of his hair exactly, in order to have a word to accompany the image. They sit for a little while, once Ines leaves, rise together without speaking, until they reach Eleanor’s room. It’s warm and dim, the shutter still open.

“Your hair’s changed.”

Yannick brings a hand up to his head, shrugs. “It’s just the sun.”

“There, too,” he says, when she touches the very tip of her thumb to an eyelash.

“Anywhere else?” Wine works over subtlety, his eyes startle in a way that makes him seem younger and she’s tempted to laugh. Instead, they smile at one another like conspirators and undress without urgency in the friendly way they’ve grown into. It isn’t until involved enough almost not to notice that she hears the faint sound of a telephone ringing, before being picked up. It carries too well in the silence, a man’s voice in taut, angry English.

The voice drops to a murmur, the illusion of total privacy dissolved. Their dissonant breathing sounds too loud now; Eleanor can feel Yannick tense, see the sheen at his collarbone.

“You don’t think they can hear-” he asks; for answer, she rises to meet him once, twice.

Later, she disengages herself from the slack camber of his body. Eleanor wraps his shirt around herself, leans against the cool marble of the windowsill, and the air feels too close to inhale. She can feel it pressing on her lungs, and her heart constricts, her fingertips resting on the cold marble – dull rock transformed over ages to something gleaming by pressure and heat.

Eleanor wakes anxious the next day, unable to eat much of the breakfast Ines places on the table before her. Eleanor considers asking her what her job here is – housekeeper sounds archaic, even insulting, for a woman far from the matron the word evokes. What, then? Maid? Worse still. Eleanor doesn’t ask and tries not to make her thanks sound studied. She’s unable to concentrate later on the book she’s taken to read on the stretch of beach they share with a sleek spa hotel. The boy, Hicham, plays in the shallows, building an elaborate fort from wet sand and seaweed. He might find a discarded cigarette butt, or plastic cup from the tourists down the beach, but plucks it fastidiously from his castle.

Eleanor imagines Niall bristling at this, the invasion made real when two girls in bikinis venture closer, looking to escape the neat rows of sun loungers before their hotel. Both brown and slender in a boyish way, from this distance they look like twins. Eleanor watches the girls wade into the water, splashing and shrieking, until only their small heads appear on the surface.

“What are you thinking about?” Always a dangerous question, though Yannick frames it affectionately. Not because she might answer with something sweet, or demanding, the way real girlfriends or wives were meant to, rather the reverse.

“Nothing much. I might try the water in a bit,” she says, and he returns to his reading, a volume of poems by someone she’s never heard of. The slim girls make her ache for home in a strange way; she and her sister had never looked so graceful. Eleanor’s sister unreachable now, married to that peevish little bastard who made his living suing town councils when people tripped over cracks in the pavement, or crashed their cars – had an accident that wasn’t your fault? Who should she blame for their lack of a real conversation in years, the brittle enquiries about work and the weather?

She’s often imagined a conversation with Yannick about her family, and always began with her mother.

- You know about my mum. She’s – she depends on me, has done since Rosie left.

He’d only asked once why he’d never met any of her family, or friends. The latter he understood, neither could say they had true friends. Eleanor hadn’t formed the sitcom-ready units of university roommates, didn’t need to share the details of her life with the girls at work. He struggled to make himself worth talking or listening to without the crutches used to sell paintings or coffee-table books, had been astounded to find that Eleanor seemed interested in him. This could be touching, self-pitying or falsely modest depending on her mood. His father’s money had paid for his travel, facility for French, his art history degree. Without those, he saw himself as formless, fictional and was endlessly curious about other people, those existing off-paper.

She’d joke that he was only interested in her for money, her lack of it. It became her way of resisting her mother’s voice, soft and spiteful.

- Poverty tourism, that’s what they call it, isn’t it? She’d said. He’ll drop you once the novelty’s worn off.

Eleanor half-stands, uncertain, the swimming girls’ screams no longer playful, but high and distressed. Not waving but drowning? Yannick looks up; shielding his eyes to scan the horizon, but his father reacts first. Yannick follows Niall as he takes long strides into the surf, calls something over his shoulder to his wife, who heads for the house.

Niall reaches them first, but only by half a minute and they share the weight of one the girls, helping her limp to shore. As they approach, Eleanor puts her age at about eighteen, but the girl’s blotched cheeks and hiccoughing make a child of her. The other close behind, eyes red-rimmed, speaking between gulping breaths in a language none of them recognise.

When Eleanor approaches, the injured girl shivers visibly, a great full body quake like the flanks of a colt. She’s sitting in the sand, her left knee twisted and the kneecap slides loose under her skin. Eleanor registers Niall’s authoritative bluster, but watches Yannick. Though white faced and a little repulsed, he remains quiet and calm at her side, the girl gripping his hand tight enough to bruise. She hadn’t known he’d be squeamish, something else to file away for her return home alone.

Eleanor had almost begun to mind being absent from the scene before her, unnoticed, when she felt a hand on her wrist. Hicham, his skin gritty, squinting against the sun, looks toward the stricken girl.

“You should go find your mum,” she says to him, rests an absent hand on his hair, stiff with salt. The boy doesn’t move, but continues looking at the girl, wipes sand from his palms across the fabric of his swimming shorts. “She’s hurt her knee, but she’ll be okay, don’t you worry.” Hicham understands none of this, but there’s Eleanor’s voice and smile, and he likes her freckles, her accent.

He follows her back to his half-built fort, and she listens to him explaining its features, at a loss.

“Someone’ll come to take her to the hospital soon, to help fix her knee. They’ll take a picture, she might have a plaster cast on it – that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?” This the only way she knows how to talk to him, soothing and gentling him, like with the children at work, fighting every step, or shocked into docility by impact with the ground, a car, or a fist.

“That’s what I do, take the pictures. So the doctors can see what’s wrong.”

But Hicham doesn’t need her reassurances. He blinks up at her, when her words fade into helpless silence. What to say now?

She could tell him about her mother and that ever-present savage whisper. About Rosie.

“We used to swim. My sister and me.”

***
Maysa Hattab writes short fiction and reviews for Popmatters, Crescent Blues, and Bookslut. She lives and works in Oxfordshire, England.