Hotel du Lac
Page 16
Making her way silently along the thick carpet, anxious not to awaken or alarm the sleeping guests, she was just in time to see Jennifer’s door open and Mr Neville, in his dressing gown, emerge. With a caution equal to her own, he concentrated on making no noise, and pulled the door to very slowly. In the dim light left burning overnight she could quite clearly make out his controlled and ambiguous smile.
Of course, she thought. Of course.
She waited, frozen, until Mr Neville, unaware of her presence, turned away, walked rapidly along the corridor, and disappeared from sight.
And back in her room she realized how little surprised she was. She remembered his talk of preserving his centrality, repairing his self-esteem, noble words which she had perhaps accepted too easily. But that was not it, not entirely it. And then she remembered. When she had leaned against him and wept, and when he had put his arm around her, she had been aware that he had felt nothing. That he had returned her to herself most gracefully, but had felt nothing.
And Jennifer was no doubt one of those trivial diversions of which he spoke so dismissively. And that door, opening and shutting, in her dreams, in her delusive waking moments, had been a real door, the reality and implications of which she had failed to take into account.
She saw her father’s patient face. Think again, Edith. You have made a false equation.
She sat down slowly on the bed, feeling a little faint. And if I were to marry him, she said to herself, knowing this, knowing too that he could so easily and so quickly look elsewhere, I should turn to stone, to paste: I should become part of his collection. But perhaps that is what he intended, she thought; that I should replace the item that was missing. And for me, those pleasures which are lightly called physical would remain where they have been for so long now, so long for me that they have become my lifetime. And I should lose the only life that I have ever wanted, even though it was never mine to call my own. And Mr Neville’s smile, so unfailingly ambiguous, would always remind me of this.
After a while she got up.
Crossing over to the table, she picked up her letter, tore it in half, and dropped the pieces into the waste-paper basket. Then she took her bag and her key and left the room, went along the corridor and down the stairs. In the still silent hotel, the night porter, waiting to go off duty, yawned behind the desk and scratched his head. He straightened up when he saw Edith, and hastily assumed a morning smile.
‘I should like you to get me a ticket on the next flight to London,’ she said, in a clear voice. ‘And I should like to send a telegram.’
When the requisite form had been found, she sat down at a small glass table in the lobby. ‘Simmonds, Chiltern Street, London Wi,’ she wrote. ‘Coming home.’ But, after a moment, she thought that this was not entirely accurate and, crossing out the words ‘Coming home,’ wrote simply, ‘Returning.’