Hotel du Lac

by Anita Brookner

  ‘Mummy,’ cried Jennifer hotly. ‘You are the best.’ She grasped her mother’s hand, and both sets of eyes took on the brave glisten of the recently bereaved, although even if the bereavement was occasioned by the disloyal specialist in drawn-thread work, Edith reflected, there was little she could offer in the way of consolation. While the, to her, extraordinary communion between mother and daughter was demonstrated once again, she studied Jennifer, who always seemed to her as inexpressive as a blank window, although all her gestures were vigorous and all her interventions emphatic. Jennifer was a splendid specimen, she acknowledged, an effortless testimonial to her mother’s care. Her large fair face, perhaps a little too sparsely populated by a cluster of rather small features, shone with the ruddy health of an unsuspecting child. Everything about her gleamed. Her light blue eyes, her regular, slightly incurving teeth, her faultless skin, all gave off various types of sheen; her blonde hair looked almost dusty in comparison. Her rather plump artless body was, Edith saw, set forth by clothes which were far from artless and possibly too narrow; Jennifer managed to give the impression that she was growing out of them. Everything about her was as expensive as her mother’s money could make it, but in a different style from Mrs Pusey’s careful elegance. In her navy linen trousers and her, perhaps too tight, white jersey, Jennifer was determinedly gamine. Edith wondered how old she was. She looked very young, as did Mrs Pusey, but in a way she could not define they were both out of date. They referred almost constantly to times gone by, times illuminated by glamour, happiness, success, confidence, and security, times of necessity remote and mysterious to their interlocutor. Edith reflected how enormously one-sided conversations with the Puseys were always likely to be. They imposed their past as deliberately as they did their present, and to both of these one was expected, in some curious way, to pay homage. They required no information at all; once they had assured themselves that Edith was alone, they had requisitioned her, and this was not only a kindness but a convenience, proof, to Edith’s mind, of sophisticated thinking. And as most of Mrs Pusey’s sentences began with the words ‘Of course’, they had a range of tranquil confidence which somehow occluded any attempt to introduce an opinion of her own. She found all this amusing and very restful; the last thing she wanted to do was to talk about herself. No, not that. But she confessed to herself that she was somewhat disturbed by Jennifer’s cheerful but steady refusal of any kind of mutuality. After all, she thought, we are almost of an age, although she is a few years younger. She might be, what? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? Possibly thirty-four? And yet she belongs to her mother, as if her mother had been cast upon an uncaring and philistine world and it was Jennifer’s duty to protect her from it. What Jennifer felt about this few people were likely to find out, Edith thought, as she observed, while Mrs Pusey was talking, Jennifer’s uninflected smile.

  At this point in her musings she was disturbed by a pleasant male voice saying, ‘Don’t lose this’, and offering her the notebook which must have slipped from her lap unnoticed while she was contemplating Jennifer. Startled, she looked up to see a tall man in a light grey suit smiling down at her. She murmured her thanks, expecting him to go away; she could hardly ask him to sit down and join them. But, ‘Are you a writer?’ he enquired, in a voice very slightly tinged with amusement. As if he knew, thought Edith, in some confusion, although the idea that anyone could be a writer in a place like this was not likely to be taken seriously. Or so she hoped. She gave a distracted smile, intending to deflect further questions, and, still looking amused, he moved away and followed his friends or colleagues out, away from the tea tables, into the fresh air.

  ‘It seems you have an admirer,’ said Mrs Pusey. And when more hot water arrived she added, ‘He’s had his eye on you since you came in. I saw it at once.’ She spoke roguishly, but her eyelids drooped, as if this merely added to the day’s disappointments. Jennifer, Edith saw, was still glassily smiling.

  It was time to go up and change and yet they lingered on. Edith felt constrained by a kind of loyalty to wait upon Mrs Pusey, although it was not quite clear to her why loyalty was involved. Their silence was ruminative; no confidences were to be offered or exchanged. Just what I wanted, Edith reminded herself, but what she suddenly longed to do was to speak to David; the intrusion of a man into her consciousness, however parodic, had the painful effect of awakening her longing. She glanced at her watch, calculating the time anxiously; if she rushed upstairs now, she might just catch him before he left. At the Rooms, she thought, with a pang of love and terror.

  ‘I must be getting back to the Rooms,’ were the first words she had consciously heard him say, and she was struck by their mystery. She turned the amazing sentence over in her mind, conjuring up vistas of courtyards with fountains trickling and silent servants in gauze trousers bringing sherbet. Or possibly large divans in whitewashed houses shuttered against the heat of the afternoon, a dreaming, glowing idleness, inspired by Delacroix. Or of grave merchants, with clicking amber beads, in coffee houses below pavement level. Opium dens. Turkish baths. A tiled ham-mam, its walls bright with coins of light reflected from the water. Peace.

  ‘What do you do?’ she enquired, her eyes wide with this vision, gazing off into the middle distance.

  ‘I am an auctioneer,’ he replied. And then there had been a brief silence.

  They had met at one of her friend Penelope Milne’s irritating little parties. ‘Drinks before lunch next Sunday,’ came the inexorable voice over the telephone. ‘Now don’t let me down. You can work in the afternoon if you want to. I’m not stopping you.’

  But you are, thought Edith. Since you are too mean to provide any food, and since I don’t care to eat at half-past two or whenever I get back with a splitting headache, my day is effectively ruined. And Penelope had such a curious attitude to providing food; she regarded it as some sort of unseemly submission. Her company could only be purchased via the old and hoary routes of flowers, theatre tickets, and intimate dinners at the best restaurants, of which she was a connoisseur. To Penelope, men were conquests, attributes, but they were also enemies; they belonged to the species that must never be granted more than the amount of time and attention she considered they deserved. Her tone with such men was flirtatious, mocking, never serious; she spread about her a propaganda of rapid affairs, rapidly consummated, with a laughing lack of commitment on both sides. She seemed to take a pride in the steady succession of names. She was, Edith saw, accomplished in venery. And as an accompaniment, she was given to sighing elaborately over Edith’s uneventful life and was clearly of the opinion that Edith only wrote about those pleasures that reality had denied her. She was generous with offers to intro­duce Edith to various grass-widowers of her acquaintance – ‘my cast-offs’, as she laughingly referred to them – and was piqued when Edith pleaded that she was really no company when she was working on a book. She would have taken pleasure, Edith knew, in setting up a meeting, with herself present; she would have master-minded Edith, with many a jocund reference to her own successes with the amiable candidate; she would even have ushered them off the premises to a restaurant of her own choosing, would have whispered something in the cast-off’s ear, and then said firmly to Edith, ‘I’ll ring you in the morning.’ Yet she considered men to be a contemptible sex, and her eyes would sparkle when she recounted tales of conquest at the various committee meetings which were the very stuff of her social life. ‘That dreadful little man,’ she would say dismis-sively, of someone who did not know the rules of her game.

  She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years. She and Edith had in common the dispositions of their houses, for they were at opposite ends of the tiny terrace, their domestic arrangements, which consisted of the window-cleaner (not to be missed; they had each other’s keys), and Mrs Dempster, their dramatic and unpredictable cleaning lady. There was an understanding between them that if either were ill the other would shop and cook. This last contingency had not yet arisen but was
of a comfort to them both. Edith, tired, yawning, aching from her silent day, would push away her typewriter, wander out of her house and into Penelope’s, and be quite happy to advise her on what to wear on her next sortie. Penelope, though never referring to the matter of Edith’s work, would push her forward, as if she were a child, at her all too frequent parties, and say, ‘And of course you know Edith Hope. She writes.’ Such was their friendship.

  On this particular Sunday Penelope had drummed up a good attendance and there were many people there whom Edith did not know. She resigned herself to standing around for the requisite amount of time (Penelope did not like one to sit down) when the resonant sentence floated into her consciousness. Tracing it to its source, she saw a tall, lean, foxy man helping himself to a handful of peanuts; she saw, from his back, that he was restless, impatient, and burning to get away. Any excuse would do. Hence his improbable, his implausible remark, which was followed, rather too fluently, in the teeth of Penelope’s protests, by an account of a late catalogue entry which demanded his urgent attention.

  Edith, still filled with her vision of the hammam, the Arab café, the Mediterranean siesta, murmured somewhat distractedly, as he made his determined way to the door, ‘Could you describe these Rooms to me?’

  He contemplated her from a considerable height, down a long nose. ‘A five-storey warehouse in Chiltern Street,’ he said.

  Then she looked up at him and they exchanged a level glance from which all expression was studiously absent. She lowered her eyes, and he left. Nothing more was said.

  Later, as she was helping Penelope to wash the glasses, she had asked, ‘That tall man, what does he do?’

  ‘David Simmonds? He’s head of the family business, now. Simmonds, the auction house. They handle a lot of the bigger country house sales. Rather a pet, isn’t he? He’s always been a bit keen on me, but he’s so hard to get hold of these days. He asked about you, by the way.’

  ‘How do you know him?’ said Edith.

  ‘I was at school with his wife,’ said Penelope. ‘Priscilla. You know. You’ve met her here a dozen times. You know, Edith. Tall, blonde, very good-looking. She couldn’t come today.’

  Edith did remember her: tall, blonde, very good-looking. A woman with a rather insolent air of authority, of carelessness. A loud, confident voice. She had once encountered her in the china department at Peter Jones and had noticed the way she bounced along, trailing an assistant, like a favoured senior girl in the school common room.

  Penelope removed her plastic apron imprinted with an advertisement for Guinness and pegged up her rubber gloves. ‘Now, Edith, I’m afraid I’m going to have to turn you out. Richard said he’d come back and take me out to lunch round the corner.’

  Edith, at her window, watched Richard turn up, sprinting down the road with commendable alacrity. Spry, she thought. Jaunty. Good check suit straining slightly over wide back. Veined hand waving. She pictured David and smiled involuntarily. She sat down to wait for him.

  When he came, as she knew he would, two or three hours later, they said nothing but looked at each other long and hard. In bed, they fell instantly into a warm mutual sleep, arms around each other, and when they woke, almost simultaneously, they had laughed with pleasure. After that, it seemed as if she knew everything about him; the only revelation was his delightful and constant appetite. She took to keeping the house full of food.

  They were sensible people. No one was to be hurt. She prided herself on giving nothing away, so that he never knew of her empty Sundays, the long eventless evenings, the holidays cancelled at the last minute. Cursing inwardly, as he loaded the car for the long journey back from Suffolk, after another crowded and inharmonious weekend, he thought of her little house, its quality of silence, the green dimness of her drawing room. She, too early in bed, thought of him with his family, their habits, their quarrels, their treats. Of his children.

  And thinking of this, yet again, in the Hotel du Lac, she felt the ache in her throat that preceded tears (but she was so good at concealing them), and murmuring an excuse to Mrs Pusey, she took the unprecedented step of leaving the salon before her. She would make no telephone call. She was, after all, if not still in disgrace, working out her probation.

  The tears that had fallen from her fine light eyes seemed to have sharpened her vision. When, some two hours later, she sat down to dinner, she was aware that the lights were brighter, the room more alive with personalities, the tables full. It was agreeable to see men, after days in this gyneceum, bringing the place to life, to see waiters speeding to their command. The man in grey, who had picked up her notebook, half rose as she took her seat, nodded, and then applied his attention to the removal of the backbone from his sole. The woman with the dog looked amazing in a floating flowered chiffon dress, its narrow straps tied into two tiny bows on the beautiful bones of her ivory shoulders. Edith was grateful for the warmth, the food, the service; she felt very tired, and thought that she would sleep soundly that night.

  Mrs Pusey, in black chiffon, stood hesitant in the doorway, as if overcome by the excitement, hardly daring to make her way unaccompanied to her table, Jennifer standing mildly behind her. It was only when M. Huber came forward, gallantly holding out his hand, that Mrs Pusey broke into a smile, and allowed herself to be led forward. The woman with the dog let out a snort which Mrs Pusey chose not to hear.

  Edith, once again anonymous, and accepting her anonymity, made an appropriately inconspicuous exit. And, sitting in the deserted salon, the first to arrive from the dining room, she felt her precarious dignity hard-pressed and about to succumb in the light of her earlier sadness. The pianist, sitting down to play, gave her a brief nod. She nodded back, and thought how limited her means of expression had become: nodding to the pianist or to Mme de Bonneuil, listening to Mrs Pusey, using a disguised voice in the novel she was writing and, with all of this, waiting for a voice that remained silent, hearing very little that meant anything to her at all. The dread implications of this condition made her blink her eyes and vow to be brave, to do better, not to give way. But it was not easy.

  Drinking her coffee in the salon, Edith felt purged by her grief, obedient and childlike, as she had on so many occasions, reaching back into the mists of childhood, to that visit, perhaps, to the Kunsthistorisches Museum with her father. And, childishly anxious to please, she went forward, when the signal came, to join the Puseys at their table. The man in grey had positioned himself nearby, and although purporting to read a newspaper, was almost visibly listening to their conversation. Perhaps he is a detective, thought Edith, without much interest.

  ‘You know, dear,’ said Mrs Pusey, after she had repaired her face and received compliments on her appearance, ‘You remind me of someone. Your face is very familiar. Now who can it be?’

  ‘Virginia Woolf?’ offered Edith, as she always did on these occasions.

  Mrs Pusey took no notice. ‘It’ll come to me in a minute,’ she said. ‘You two girls talk among yourselves.’ And she placed the thumb and forefinger of her right hand to the bridge of her nose, assuming an expression of such gravity that Jennifer, always on the look-out, stopped listening to what Edith was saying and turned her attention to her mother. Edith lay back in her chair and listened to the pianist, who was being ignored by everyone else, until she was aware of Jennifer’s face being lowered into her sightline. ‘Mummy says she wants to watch television, so we’re going upstairs.’ She turned back to her mother and watched the always difficult negotiation from seated to standing position. Again, Edith wondered about her age.

  At the door Mrs Pusey turned dramatically, and said, ‘I’ve remembered! I’ve remembered who Edith reminds me of!’

  Edith observed a slight spasm contracting the back of the man in grey, still behind his newspaper.

  ‘Princess Anne!’ cried Mrs Pusey. ‘I knew it would come to me. Princess Anne!’

  5

  But sleep did not come easily that night. Between disjointed dreams there fla
shed onto the cinema screen in Edith’s head short audio-visual messages which she would later have to decode. The fine ankles, the unexpected evening pumps of the man in grey. His decision, at some forgotten point, to fold that unconvincing newspaper, to get up, stretch himself slightly, and follow a colleague into the bar. The unusual sounds of merriment that were perceptible, even across the width of the salon, from the direction of the bar. The emergence from the bar, an hour later, of the woman with the dog, helpless with laughter and somewhat dishevelled, her arms linked in those of the man in grey and his friend. Kiki’s tiny head raised mournfully at this apostasy, his spherical body attempting to bar her path. A mild altercation between M. Huber and his son-in-law at this sight. The nervous withdrawal of the pianist. His placating smiles all round, to which only Mme de Bonneuil responded with a slight nod.

  This information remained in many ways obscure. She was not sure whether she had in fact remained downstairs to witness the scenes which came into her mind, or whether, in some over-active recess of her brain, she was making them up. She was aware that her night was agitated, that the only alternative to waking up was to undergo more of these strange sequences, half dream, half memory. Everything seemed vivid, potent with significance. But the significance was hidden. She stretched uneasily, a prisoner of her troubled sleep. Somewhere, at some level of consciousness, she heard a door close.

  When she awoke, rather later than usual, it was with the ancient and deadly foreknowledge that the day would be a write-off. Her broken night had left her with an aching head and an instinctive shrinking from both food and company. Minute noises seemed magnified: a trolley was wheeled vigorously along the corridor, and the high voices of the maids sounded unbearably piercing. As she took a bath, feeling as unwieldy as an invalid, she drilled herself into a regime of prudence. Depression hovered and must be forestalled. Writing was out of the question. Take things very quietly, she counselled herself: do not think. Close doors.