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He tempts her with Portugal in spring – I can’t, she says, not having stayed before in a hotel with anyone but her husband. He laughs, kisses her, pointing out that there are four hundred bedrooms, so who will know or care? This being a question, for which she has no answer, they go, oblivious to the Carnation Revolution, bewildered to find their hotel empty, its terraces deserted, salt pool unruffled, to dine alone in a chandeliered ballroom where a trio of defeated women play selections from long dead musicals. This soup’s good, he says; she stabs her plate, an ill-conceived stew of pork, beans and shellfish. It can’t get any worse, she thinks but all week the sun’s too hot, the beach too far; they trail from one sad bar or café to the next, weary of fado, the endless bacalhau, the sickly egg yolk docinhos whipped up, she imagines, by sour-faced nuns. We should never go back, he says on the last night. I should never have come she thinks, sticky with guilt and sugar which she tries to rinse away in vinho verde. And later, it will not be this meal, his sleeping face and priapic body or his unfaithful mouth she will remember, but how, slipping in through shutters, the sunlight stained everything.
She is not sure about things any more, or why she is here – all day long she falls through the holes in her head into nowhere, forgetting her house and her garden.
There, her gloves, trowel, secateurs and galoshes wait for her where she left them in the potting shed, her terrace is clotted with thyme, Reine des Violettes arches over the walls, the ammonites in the rockery curl and spiral inward, everything is as she planned
At the visiting hour he brings in a posy of wild roses and cow-parsley, tells her that the swallows are flying lower than usual, that the death's head hawk-moth has not yet been seen and that the wood-pigeons call to him, as always, it's your fault, don't you know?
The brain coral they found on their last holiday together keeps the door propped open.
Men, they never know what they want— at first they can't get enough of us, our phosphorescent breasts, the way our bodies flicker in the dark, the sequined flick of our tails, that risky, salt-aftertaste of anchovies and seaweed, and us being always a little ahead of them somewhere, way out beyond their bowsprits,
oh, they swear then we'll be mistress of their hearts, queen of their hearth and home, no jewel too rare for us, we shall toil not, neither shall we spin – and occasionally we believe them, tell ourselves it might be worth a shot
but once they have us ashore, when the shine and novelty wear off, they don't know what to make of us, so stay out late or stare into the fire, take to drink, ignore us, wish they had thrown us back while the women cross themselves, draw in their skirts, walk on the other side of the road and teach the children to catcall, to jeer that we smell of fish.
At the exhibition of erotic art I see more than I expected, take penises, for instance, how, en masse, they lose most of their appeal, their potency and that veiled threat even the best of them offer and how instead they become innocent, mild and sweet as mushrooms in a field or like pallid sea-anemones swaying gently to and fro whereas female pudenda, usually so docile, so inviting with their pretty ways and sleek little curls - they take courage in a crowd, gang up and, if pushed, turn nasty, snapping at the men who peer too closely, making them tremble.
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