Spring

by David Szalay

  ‘I don’t need a week, though. I know what I’m going to tell him.’

  ‘What are you going to tell him?’ And then, feeling a need to justify himself, such is his sense that Fraser King has some sort of primacy over him in this situation, ‘I think you should tell me if…’

  ‘Of course.’

  Still, she does not speak for a few seconds.

  From the start he has frequently had the sense that she is measuring him against Fraser King—­measuring him in every way, from the most obviously physical to the most ineffably emotional—­measuring him, and finding him wanting. There have been times when seeing her lost in thought—­for instance on the Eurostar as it left Lille Europe—­he experienced the precise, painful feeling that she would prefer to be there with Fraser King than with him. That she would prefer to be anywhere with Fraser King than with him. And yet now she is telling him, in effect, that this is not true. Hearing her say it, he feels a hint of euphoria. Fraser King is no longer a factor. Everything is now okay.

  It is a feeling that lasts only a few seconds, until she says, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while.’

  And when that elicits a prolonged silence, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He turns to her and sighs and they smile wistfully at each other.

  She lets him slip his arm under her neck and snuggles up to him. The way she does this makes him improve his prognosis. When she says she does not think they should see each other ‘for a while’, what he now takes her to mean is maybe a week or two—­until she has told Fraser that she intends to turn him down. Poor Fraser.

  ‘I’m sorry, James,’ she says.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Thanks for being so magnanimous.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he says. (She laughs.) Easy to be magnanimous when he is the one in her bed. He says, ‘When you say a while…’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shakes her head—­he feels it move in the hollow of his neck. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I just… I don’t know. Sorry.’ And as if it were part of the apology, she strokes his leg with her foot.

  Still studying the ceiling fan, he twists a lock of her hair around his finger. Then he turns onto his side, and studies her face. She submits to this study with a small smile. For the first time that night she does not try to move away when he kisses her on the mouth. Indeed, she even opens her mouth, and there is an immediate surge to heart-­hammering intensity. She does not let this last long, however. He encircles her with his arms and squeezes her. She squeezes him too, and for a long time they lie there like that.

  ‘Should I turn off the light?’ she whispers.

  ‘If you want.’

  With a sudden twisting movement she turns and sits, takes a sip of water—­with water in her mouth she offers him the glass, he shakes his head—­and switches off the light.

  *

  It is still dark when he leaves the bed and feels for his things, which are mixed up with hers on the floor. He has a terrible feeling that he is neglecting poor Hugo—­who, having spent the night unexpectedly on his own in Mecklenburgh Street, must urgently need a walk. That is why he is standing there in the dark, even though to all intents and purposes it is still night outside and he has not slept much on the thin pillows, frequently waking to look at the time, in spite of the fact that the alarm was set. Then it went off—­loud and shrill—­and he sat up while she struggled, still essentially asleep, to make it stop.

  He is feeling for his things on the floor when she turns on the light. She puts a hand over her eyes. ‘No, it’s okay,’ he says quietly, doing the same. ‘I don’t need the light. Thanks.’ His mouth is thick and faecal-­tasting. He is sweating. It is too hot for him here, where the storage heater seems impossible to switch off and leaks nasty heat all night.

  When he is dressed he sits on the edge of the bed, wondering whether she has fallen asleep again. She has not—­as soon as she feels his weight on the mattress, she sits up, and seems to prop herself on an elbow.

  ‘Okay, I’m going,’ he whispers.

  ‘Okay.’

  He kisses her, lightly touching her lips with his own. Her lips are sleepily warm. Her whole face, which he can hardly see, is sleepily soft and warm. He kisses her again, and is just standing up to leave when she says, ‘James.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So… What are we going to do?’ she says. ‘Just carry on as before?’

  For a few seconds he says nothing. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  This time it is she who does not speak for a few seconds. ‘Okay,’ she says eventually. ‘Nothing too intense, though.’

  He is not sure what she means by this. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Nothing too intense.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Sorry to wake you up.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  She hears him tiptoe through the squeaking hall. There is a suspenseful silence while he puts on his shoes and jacket, then she hears the front door swing open and shut. Twice. In an effort to be quiet, the first attempt was too tentative.

  2

  1

  She is half an hour late for work, and striding across the lobby she sees immediately that Carlo is upset. ‘I’m sorry, Carlo,’ she sings, while still out in the open space, under the shimmering spectrums of the two-­tonne chandelier. He just shakes his head and skulks into the staff cloakroom. For a few seconds she stands at the front desk, paying down the oxygen debt of her hurry.

  Then she follows the small Italian into the staff cloakroom. In the mirror, she sees what a mess her hair is, how pouchy her eyes look.

  Carlo is shrugging on his smart blue overcoat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says flatly, as if it were a final offer.

  ‘S’okay,’ Carlo says, without looking at her. He straightens his scarf. ‘You owe me though.’

  Throughout the morning the huge hotel empties. The lifts ping. Porters push trolleys loaded with luggage. Taxis swarm on the manicured forecourt. The doormen endlessly open the doors, while from the windows of the top floor the waiters have no time to look out over the massed treetops of the park, pushing westwards for over a mile into the indistinct distance.

  At about eleven, when things up there have finally quietened down, Ernő—­the Hungarian waiter, her silent suitor—­steps out of the lift with something in his hands.

  ‘Is that for me?’ she says, matter-­of-­factly.

  ‘Naturally,’ Ernő says, under the innocent impression that this is just an elegant way of saying yes.

  ‘Thanks. That’s very sweet of you.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he says.

  She puts the coffee under the summit of the desk and stares out at the long perspectives of the lobby. The shimmer of its spaces, of the chandelier—­an inverted wedding cake, listlessly iridescent—­seems superannuated. Its luxury seems stale. The little shops in the neglected, marble-­floored passage seem frumpy, superfluous, survivors from a time when only the shops in luxury hotel lobbies were open on Sunday, or even Saturday afternoon.

  She has lunch in the subterranean warren of linoleum passageways the public never sees, and it is sitting there in her sober work clothes that she starts to think properly about what has happened. She feels uneasy. When she said, ‘I don’t think we should see each other for a while,’ that was what she meant, and yet somehow it is not how things seem to have been left. She shouldn’t have had sex with him, of course. Probably she should not have let him stay the night at all. Should not even have let him kiss her. It had been her intention not to let him kiss her. She had felt sorry for him. She had felt sorry for him when he said, in that oddly simple way of his, ‘Why won’t you kiss me?’ There is something about him that tugs at her heart. (‘Why won’t you kiss me?’) So yes, she felt sorry for him. That was not the main thing, though. The main thing was that she seemed to find it impossible not to kiss him when he was there, in front of her. His mouth. The way that kissing it her whole mind
seemed to melt… Pondering this phenomenon, she pours herself some water. Her failure to hold to her intentions makes her wonder whether she is wrong to want not to see him for a while. It makes her wonder whether that is in fact what she wants. Does she know what she wants? She does not seem to.

  She finds it upsetting to upset people. That is her weakness. That is why she let him leave this morning thinking that everything would just go on as if nothing had happened. That is why the idea that maybe she was wrong to want not to see him for a while so easily tempted her as she sat propped on her skinny elbow in the dark and turned her face slightly away from his halitosis. She had nearly not said anything. Nearly not even said, ‘James! So… What are we going to do?’ And then, oppressed by his silence—­standing there like a sullen shadow—­and her own sudden uncertainty, ‘Just carry on as before?’ She had not meant the words to convey the sense that that was what she thought they should do. She had meant them more as the sceptical starting point for a conversation on the subject. That was not how they had sounded. They had sounded like a straightforward suggestion, and he was obviously willing to take them as one. So he left, and she lay there for a few minutes, feeling that he had somehow been unpleasantly sly—­which made her dislike him—­and then she fell asleep.

  She was hurt by his lack of emotion when she said she did not think they should see each other for a while. The way he was silent for a few seconds and then just said, ‘Okay.’ When he said that, she suddenly wondered what he felt. He did not seem to feel anything. And if he did, why did he not show it? Why did he not express it in words? Why did he not even try?

  She pours herself some more water from the plastic jug and someone sits down at the table, as far away from her as pos­sible. Ernő. When she looks in his direction, he just nods. They do not speak to each other, not even a few pleasantries, which seems odd. He must be ten years younger than her. He might be no more than twenty. Sometimes she thinks that if he simply walked up to her and suggested they take the lift upstairs and have sex in a vacant room—­as he presumably wants to—­she would just say, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and start setting up a suitable key. The trouble is, if he did that, he would no longer be Ernő, with his shy, lusty innocence. His unspoken, obvious longing. He would be something else.

  ‘How are things today?’ he says suddenly.

  It is a tedious question and his tone is tediously sincere and she just shrugs and says, ‘They’re okay. Fine.’ He has no sense of humour, or does not seem to. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she says, and stands up with her tray.

  ‘Okay, see you,’ he says.

  She smiles at him.

  Well, she ‘smiles’ at him. It is a smile she sometimes does—­a momentary flexing of her mouth—­which does not even pretend to be sincere. To that extent it is, in its way, a sincere expression. It expresses something. She knows this, and wonders as she leaves and wanders up to the lobby, what it does express. She tends to do it when she is nervous, when she does not know what else to do. It is a sort of surrender to the pressure of social niceties, to the pressure of pretending—­a sort of helpless shrug.

  She starts to walk up the service stairs, with their strip-­lit landings. She finds it impossible to pretend. She is not sure why. Other people seem to be able to do it so easily. Once—­and they have been together just long enough for there to be ‘once’—­James said it was impossible for him to imagine her acting, acting in a play for instance. Impossible to imagine her playing someone else. If she had to, he said, she just wouldn’t take it seriously, she’d turn it into a joke. It was not something she had thought about. He was very pleased with himself for having had what he thought was an insight into her personality—­and one which she had not had herself. She is still sometimes astonished that anything much has happened with him at all, after that first—­or was it the second?—­night at his flat. The fiasco. That was the word she used for that episode of pure sexual misery, which a sort of politeness had led her into. It was a problem, the way she let men polite her into things. And that night, when he was suddenly all over her in the hall of his flat, it was a sort of politeness which pressured her into letting him do what he wanted with her—­a feeling that perhaps it would not be polite to stop him, that he might be offended, that there might be a scene, with her somehow in the wrong. When she thought she was pregnant the following week and he seemed unable to understand what she was suffering, she hated him as much as she had ever hated anyone. He was in his own world and seemed to have no understanding of hers—­and no interest in having such an understanding. That was what she found so strange. His two-­dimensionality. He was, however, the first man she had felt a strong attraction to since Fraser, and she had started to fear that she would never feel very attracted to anyone else again. That was probably what had made the fiasco so painful—­it had been surprisingly painful. And that was probably what had made it so hard just to end it, as for a week afterwards she had fully intended to, even when it turned out that she was not pregnant.

  She visits the Ladies, and while she is in there she tries to tidy up her hair. She splashes water on her pasty face, and nurses her shot eyes. Then she takes up her post at the front desk and stands there facing the hours of the afternoon. From the heart of the lobby, the huge London outside and the weather, which is increasingly wild, seem like another world. It is difficult not to think of Fraser here. It was here, in this lobby, that she met him. It was this time of day. An afternoon like this one—­a dark sky through the distant, attended doors. He had been hanging around for some time, since the morning. First outside. Then, when the downpour arrived, in the lobby. He was not the only photographer; there were a few others, all waiting for someone upstairs—­she did not know who. The sort of person they were waiting for never used their own name, so to look at the long list of people staying in the hotel was pointless. She had not been given any special instructions; there were no special security people in evidence.

  The photographers were matey with each other, but it was obvious from their eyes—­she had plenty of time to watch them in the quiet hours of the early afternoon—­that they were plotting against each other too. (As he later explained to her, any edge over the others, however marginal, might make the difference between a massive payday and a total waste of time. The point was—­if they all got the same shots, they would all be worthless.) He was the most talkative. He seemed the happiest—­he was always smiling, and made the others laugh. He was also the tallest. And also, she noticed, the most determined. It was he who quietly detached himself from the others and tried to slip into the lifts, until he was spotted and held up his hands like a football player. When he tried it a second time the security guards evicted him from the lobby. She found, standing at the desk, that—­while she had watched its noisy slapstick progress with a sort of smile—­she did not welcome his eviction. The lobby seemed more tedious with him not there. And something had happened as he was being ejected—­their eyes had momentarily met and, from the middle of his melee with the security men, he had smiled at her. She was not sure whether she had smiled back. There might not have been time. The other paps did not entertain her. They stood in a little sour-­faced huddle, pacing up and down the strip of marble to which they were now limited—­the security guards had seemed to want to throw them all out, there had been a long negotiation—­and not speaking much.

  It was several hours later that she suddenly found herself facing him. She had more or less forgotten about him, though the other paps were still there, on their strip of marble. They had been there for such a long time that she no longer noticed them. And she did not have time to notice them. It was early evening and the lobby hummed with purposefully moving people. She turned to the next person waiting there. ‘Hello,’ she said, and only then saw who it was. To her irritation, she immediately felt nervous. He too seemed nervous, however. When he smiled—­and he was smiling nervously at her—­his eyes shrank to laughing slits. He was in his mid-­forties probably and his f
ace was pleasantly weathered. It was the face of someone who smiled a lot, and who spent a lot of time outside. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this,’ he said. Was he American? ‘And I quite understand if you call security on me straight away.’ She did not move. ‘But I really need this shot and there’s no way I’m going to get it out there.’ No, not American—­he had just said what sounded like ‘oot there’. He tilted his head quickly in the direction of the doors, and through them the sodden London evening, still just streaked with light, where a mush of fallen plane seeds and soppy leaves was choking the drains of Park Lane. It was October. ‘So I was wondering,’ he was saying, ‘if I could wait in there for a bit.’ He had noticed the staff cloakroom, a door to the side of the front desk, the wood of which discreetly matched the wood of the section of wall in which it was set, with a sign saying, ‘STAFF ONLY’. Or maybe he knew about it already. He was probably very familiar with the layout of the hotel. This was probably not the first time he had done this. ‘I quite understand if you say no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get you in trouble.’

  And of course she would get in trouble if he was found in there.

  ‘Okay,’ she said quietly.

  She let him into the cloakroom—­‘Thank you so much,’ he said—­and went back to her post at the desk.

  An hour or two later, she went into the cloakroom herself. It was windowless, and except for a hanging-­rail with some wire hangers—­one of which held her coat—­and a few stained chairs withdrawn from public service, it was empty.

  He was on the phone. As soon as he saw her, he said, ‘Listen, can I call ya back? I’ll call ya back. Okay.’ He smiled at her. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for this,’ he said. ‘My name’s Fraser, by the way.’ He stood up and held out his hand.