The Comfort of Strangers Read Free Page B

were plastic rubbish sacks. Hands on hips, Colin peered down one street, then crossed to peer down the other. ‘We should have brought those maps.’
    Mary had climbed the first steps of the palace and was reading the posters. ‘The women are more radical here,’ she said over her shoulder, ‘and better organized.’
    Colin had stepped back to compare the two streets. They ran straight for a considerable distance and eventually curved away from each other. ‘They’ve got more to fight for,’ he said. ‘We came by this way before, but can you remember which way we went?’ Mary was translating with difficulty a lengthy proclamation. ‘Which way?’ Colin said slightly louder.
    Frowning, Mary ran her forefinger along the lines of bold print, and when she finished she exclaimed in triumph. She turned and smiled at Colin. ‘They want convicted rapists castrated!’
    He had moved to get a better view of the street to the right. ‘And hands chopped off for theft? Look, I’m sure we passed that drinking fountain before, on the way to this bar.’
    Mary turned back to the poster. ‘No. It’s a tactic. It’s a way of making people take rape more seriously as a crime.’
    Colin moved again and stood, with his feet firmly apart, facing the street on their left. It too had a drinking fountain. ‘It’s a way’, he said irritably, ‘of making people take feminists less seriously.’
    Mary folded her arms, and after a moment’s pause set off slowly down the right-hand fork. She had regained her slow, precise pace. ‘People take hanging seriously enough,’ she said. ‘A life for a life.’
    Uneasily Colin watched her go. ‘Wait a minute, Mary,’ he called after her. ‘Are you sure that’s right?’ She nodded without turning round. In the far distance, picked out momentarily by a streetlight, a figure was walking towards them. Somehow reassured by this, Colin caught up with her.
    This too was a prosperous street, but its shops were huddled and exclusive, dedicated it seemed, to the sale of single items – in one shop a gold-framed landscape in cracked, muddied oils, in another a hand-made shoe, further on, a single camera lens mounted on a velvet plinth. The drinking fountain, unlike most in the city, actually worked. The dark stone of the surrounding step and the rim of its great bowl had been worn down and polished by centuries of use. Mary arranged her head under the tarnished brass faucet and drank. ‘The water here’, she said between mouthfuls, ‘tastes of fish.’ Colin was staring ahead, waiting to see the approaching figure reappear beneath another lamp post. But there was nothing, except perhaps a rapid movement by a distant doorway, and that may have been a cat.
    They had eaten their last meal, a shared plate of fried whitebait, twelve hours previously. Colin reached for Mary’s hand. ‘Can you remember if he sells anything apart from hot dogs?’
    ‘Chocolate? Nuts?’
    Their pace quickened and their footsteps resounded noisily on the cobbles, making the sound of only one pair of shoes. ‘One of the eating capitals of the world,’ Colin said, ‘and we’re walking two miles for hot dogs.’
    ‘We’re on holiday,’ Mary reminded him. ‘Don’t forget that.’
    He clapped his free hand to his forehead. ‘Of course. I get too easily lost in details, like hunger and thirst. We are on holiday.’
    They dropped hands, and as they walked on Colin hummed to himself. The street was narrowing and the shopshad given way on both sides to high, dark walls, broken at irregular intervals by deeply recessed doorways, and windows, small and square, set high up and criss-crossed with iron bars.
    ‘This is the glass factory,’ Mary said with satisfaction. ‘We tried to come here on our first day.’ They slowed down, but did not stop.
    Colin said, ‘We must have been round the other side then, because I’ve never been here before.’
    ‘We queued outside one of these doors while we were