Hotel du Lac Read online

  They retraced their steps to the hotel. On the terrace, Mrs Pusey and Jennifer were about to take their leave. Non-committal gestures were exchanged. Of Monica there was no sign. Mme de Bonneuil, her smile now tinged with anxiety, sat while her son and daughter-in-law discussed matters common only to themselves in loud voices which she could not hear. Finally, her son, responding to a cocked head and an ‘On s’en va?’ from his wife, stood up with alacrity and prepared to leave. His wife offered her cheek to her mother-in-law and tripped off to the car. Mme de Bonneuil attempted to retain her son but the car horn sounded, and ‘J’arrive,’ he called, kissing his mother noisily on both cheeks. Mme de Bonneuil remained standing on the terrace, gazing in the direction of her vanished son, until the silence in which she spent her days was palpable even to Edith and Mr Neville.

  That evening, at dinner, at her solitary table, Edith felt her smile returning from time to time. She drank her coffee with the Puseys and made her excuses early. She was, in effect, pleasantly tired and somewhat more contented than usual.

  ‘Jennifer,’ urged Mrs Pusey, ‘do ask that nice Mr Neville to join us. All on his own, poor man.’

  But Mr Neville could and would look after himself, thought Edith, and made her way, smiling, to the door.

  There was a moon, she noticed, opening her thick curtains and stepping out on to her balcony, and the air was like milk. She sat for a little while, turning many thoughts over in her mind. A beautiful night, pleasant, calm. Calmer than most. She felt well, and when she eventually moved inside to the mirror to brush her hair, she thought, I shall sleep better tonight.

  But a sharp scream from the corridor, and a sound of running feet, startled her into an awareness of danger. She listened, motionless, ancient fears awakening. Silence. Opening her door cautiously, she saw light streaming from the Puseys’ suite, and heard voices. Oh, God, she thought. A heart attack. And willed herself to take charge.

  It was Jennifer’s door that was open, and Jennifer herself, the straps of a satin nightgown slipping from her plump shoulders, laughing and uttering little moans, was poised on her bed, her legs drawn up. Her mother, in a pale pink silk kimono, stood in the door­way, her hand to her mouth. In the corner, crouching, Mr Neville busied himself with a newspaper, then went to the window and flung something out.

  ‘Quite safe now,’ he pronounced. ‘No more spi­ders.’

  And he raised his eyes briefly to Edith.

  Mrs Pusey came forward and laid a hand on his arm.

  ‘How can we thank you?’ she breathed. ‘She’s been terrified of spiders ever since she was tiny.’

  But she was not tiny now, reflected Edith, whose mind had photographed an impression of Jennifer that it had not previously entertained. An odalisque, she thought. And the nightgown revealing quite a lot of very grown-up flesh.

  In the corridor she waved goodnight to Mr Neville, whose secret smile was once again in place.

  Later that night, Kiki, waking up from his long convalescence and feeling hungry, set up a plaint which continued until dawn. Drifting off into a final sleep, Edith thought she heard a door close.

  6

  ‘My dearest David,

  ‘My cover has been blown, but of that more later.

  ‘I am sorry not to have written for the last couple of days but the desert of the Hotel du Lac has begun to blossom like the rose with strange new relationships. I fear that Mrs Pusey and Jennifer can no longer count on me to listen to their shopping sagas (always a triumph: the last this, the finest that, whatever it may be) for I am going shopping myself, spurred into this unusual activity by my new friend Monica (Lady X) who is delighted to have an excuse to whizz off in a hired car to some little place she knows and to festoon me with an assortment of garments which are more to her taste than to mine. Indeed, it sometimes occurs to me that she and Mrs Pusey have far more in common with each other than either of them has with me, but for some reason they are not on good terms and use me as a buffer state. I am subject to a certain amount of balkanization. I can’t say that any of this is deeply absorbing but I have bought a very beautiful blue silk dress and I think that you will like it. Monica says it makes me look years younger. I hate to think what I must have looked like when I first arrived.

  ‘Monica herself is a stimulating if demanding companion. And I have found out why she is here. Monica has what is politely referred to as an eating problem: at least that is how she refers to it. One is always reading articles about this sort of thing in magazines. What it means in practice is that she messes her food around distastefully in the dining room, already slightly off-colour from acute and raging boredom, and ends up smuggling most of it down to Kiki, who is seated on her lap. In between meals she can be seen in a café near the station eating cakes. The story behind this is interesting. Her noble husband, in urgent need of an heir, has dispatched her here with instructions to get herself into working order; should this not come to pass, Monica will be given her cards and told to vacate the premises so that Sir John can make alternative arrangements. Naturally, she sulks. She eats cakes as others might go slumming. But she is very sad because she too longs for a child and I don’t think she will ever have one. She is so beautiful, so thin, so over-bred. Her pelvis is like a wishbone!

  ‘Our outings so far have followed a regular pattern. We wander through the town, while she gestures disdainfully at the goods, some of them very expensive, in the little shops. Then, when we arrive at Haffen-negger’s, she decides that she must have a cup of coffee, urgently. It is like being out with a child; she stops dead and refuses to go any further, and then Kiki starts up, and in we go. The cup of coffee escalates into several cakes, for she doesn’t bother to pretend with me. She says she feels safe with me (who doesn’t?) and the long rigmarole of her dilemma is poured forth once again. She hates and fears her husband, but only because he has not protected her, and she sees herself condemned to loneliness and exile. In this she is prescient. I see her, some years hence, a remittance woman, paid to live abroad, in such an hotel, in various Hotels du Lac, her beautiful face grown gaunt and scornful, her dog permanently under her arm. Her last weapon will be an unyielding snobbishness, which is already in evidence. She despises her husband’s family as jumped-up ironmongers (I understand that one of his ancestors invented some small but crucial industrial implement at the beginning of the nineteenth century) and glorifies her own particularly feckless lot. She is what Iris Pusey would call a fortune-hunter. But it is unlikely that another fortune will be hers, and her fine hieratic face droops into sadness as she contemplates what she can see of her future.

  ‘Naturally, all this is taking up much of the time that I intended to spend on my book, but I have been thinking that I might stay on a little longer. The weather is still beautiful.

  ‘And I am getting some much needed exercise. A man here, a Mr Neville, who looks rather like that portrait of the Duke of Wellington that was stolen from the National Gallery some time ago, took me out on a very long walk yesterday …’

  Edith laid down her pen, for it would have been inappropriate to continue. Coarse and mean thoughts hovered on the edges of her mind, waiting for a chance to take over. It was not, in fact, much to her taste to spend so much time talking about clothes or calculating other women’s incomes or chances: such discussions had always seemed to her to be of intrinsically poor quality. And yet she was invariably drawn into such conversations, and although playing no active part, did not retire from them altogether untainted. Monica, for example. With Monica she entered a rueful world of defiance, of taunting, of teasing, of spoiling for a fight. The whole sorry business of baiting the sexual trap was uncovered by Monica’s refusal to behave herself in a way becoming to a wife: by sheer effrontery she would damage her husband’s pride, humble him into keeping her, or, if not, ruin his reputation. And although cast adrift while he pursued other interests, other plans, she was waiting for him, as one waits for an enemy; once they met, she would, by dint of insult and outrage
, reawaken the fury that had once been between them. And until he came she would spend his money, waste his time, meditate her revenge. And, like the grand adventuress that she had once been, she would need a female attendant, a meek and complaisant foil, in whom she could confide, and whose opinion she could afford to discount.

  And for Mrs Pusey, Edith reflected, she fulfilled the same function. Mrs Pusey and, by extension, Jennifer, were beginning to emerge in a rather harder light than had at first been apparent. Mrs Pusey had had the sort of success that Monica was scornful of achieving: bourgeois, luxurious, demonstrable. Mrs Pusey’s references to her husband made Edith uneasy, perhaps because they appeared to be a function of Mrs Pusey’s narcissism: Mr Pusey, who still had no name, would have remained without a profession or a home had these not been added by circumstantial evidence. His character, his tastes, even his looks were veiled in mystery. The manner of his departing this life was still obscure and undated, although Edith had learned to be wary of this final revelation, fearful of the bestowing of comfort and sympathy that this would inevitably call forth. I too have a past, she thought, with an uncharacteristic spurt of indignation. I too have had my deaths and my departures, some of them quite recent. But I have learned to shield them, to hide them from sight, to keep them at bay. To exhibit my wounds would, for me, denote an emotional incontinence of which I might later be ashamed.

  Yet it was less Mrs Pusey’s tranquil exhibitionism that worried Edith than the glimpses she had caught of a somewhat salacious mind. Mrs Pusey’s disposition to flirt, even when there was no one around to flirt with, was, to Edith, somehow disturbing, although it was done with such lack of inhibition that it should have appeared harmless. On those rare occasions when Mrs Pusey was sitting alone, Edith had observed her in all sorts of attention-catching ploys, creating a small locus of busyness that inevitably invited someone to come to her aid. She would not be still or be quiet until she had captured the attention of whomever she judged to be necessary for her immediate purpose. And the enormous celebration of her own person, of her physical charm, so ruthlessly yet innocently set forth, was this altogether attractive in a woman of her age? This determination never to leave the field, not even for Jennifer, who appeared quite overshadowed, quite passive, in comparison with her mother’s ardent eye, her cocked head, her passionate absorption in what to wear next. And that glimpse, that Edith had had, in her bedroom, of those exotic déshabillés, not all of them in the quietest of taste, did one laugh them off as a harmless indulgence, a simple love of adornment, of play? Which was surely, undoubtedly, what they were. Edith wondered, sensing ancient prejudices about to come to the surface. Her mother, Viennese Rosa, would have had no doubts at all. She would have taken one look at Mrs Pusey and laughed her grim laugh; she would have discerned at a glance the sort of temperament she most admired in a woman, a subject much debated with her sister and her cousin in those days when they discussed their conquests and their rivals just out of earshot of their mother and aunt. Très portée sur la chose, they would have agreed, in the atrociously accented French they used as a code. And Rosa would have curled her lip, not out of contempt, but out of vengeful regret for her own wasted years, which should have been filled with lovers and their intrigues but which had instead been monopolized by an increasingly mute husband and a silent child.

  And Mrs Pusey hated Monica, in whom she sensed both opposition and failure. To Mrs Pusey, Monica was not merely a fortune-hunter but the sort of woman she, Mrs Pusey, should not be asked to admit into her presence. Those heights of scornful distinction, so effortlessly attained by Monica, were written off by Mrs Pusey as ‘a front’. She did not say what lay behind the front. But she intimated that she knew.

  The company of their own sex, Edith reflected, was what drove many women into marriage. So it had been with her. The meekness of her bowed head had failed to avert the confidences with which Penelope Milne daily sought to regale her and, even worse, the questions with which she felt authorized to confront her. Perfectly composed, tending her garden, writing, her face closed against pity, sympathy, curiosity, Edith kept silent and yearned for David.

  They thought of her as an old maid, or at least a maiden lady. Randy spinsters of her acquaintance turned their eyes heavenward in despair when she answered, no, there was no one in her life, and never guessed that she lied. She lied well, unpretentiously: she sometimes thought that the time spent working out the plots of her novels had prepared her for this, her final adventure, her story come to life. David, she knew, lied not quite so well, even dropped hints to his wife, in one of those dangerous quarrels of theirs, that he might look elsewhere. His wife laughed scornfully, knowing him to be burdened with responsibilities – houses, children, professional standing – that he could not shed. His friends were indulgent towards him: he was attractive and they granted him licence to enjoy himself a little. But they suspected that he enjoyed himself with a succession of tough young secretaries, or with other men’s wives. Never with her.

  She knew his wife, of course, but contrived never to see her. Naturally reclusive, she found it unsurprising that people left her to her fate. There had once been a dinner party, which she had urged herself to attend as a matter of social duty, not knowing that he was to be there. Yet outside the drawing room, she had heard that triumphant laugh, and did not quite know, in that moment of confusion, whether it would take more courage to leave or to continue. In the event, her steps continued without her, and she found herself sitting, with a glass in her hand, and to all intents and purposes entirely normal. She behaved well, as she knew she was expected to behave: quietly, politely, venturing little. While she listened to the pleasant middle-aged man on her left (and as her hostess observed them with a pleased and proprietorial eye) she looked across the table and saw his wife, highly coloured, drinking rather a lot, argumentative. Sexy, she thought painfully. But discontented, nevertheless. Her neighbour held out a lighter for the cigarette she had taken and she turned to him with her usual grave smile. Later, as the evening was coming to an end, she saw that David was sitting with an arm on the back of his wife’s chair, and that she, her eyes vague now, her face very pink, had become silent. She saw that they would make love that night and, getting up rather abruptly, thanked her hostess for a delightful evening.

  ‘My dear, must you go? It’s still quite early.’

  ‘You must excuse me,’ she said. ‘I have something I rather want to finish …’

  ‘Poor Edith. Burning the midnight oil. But such lovely books. We are all such fans, my dear. Now, how are you going to get home?’

  Her neighbour offered his car and they left together. On the journey back from Chesham Place, she was rather silent. The man, who had been introduced as Geoffrey Long, was also silent, but she was vaguely aware of him as an affable and comforting presence. She told him not to get out of the car, but that he must come and have a drink with her one evening, exchanged telephone numbers with him, and waved him goodbye from her tiny front garden. Then she picked a sprig of lavender, crushed it between her fingers, and sniffed the aromatic leaf. And finally she went indoors. Oh David, David, she thought.

  She knew that he was a man who could not deny himself anything. And that she had a part in his self-indulgence. That she must remember this.

  When she telephoned her hostess the following morning, she learned that the evening had rather foundered after she had left. Or so she was given to believe. ‘Priscilla is rather naughty. Poor David has his hands full at times. But of course they are absolutely devoted to each other.’ She imagined scenes, conflagrations, accusations. But her hostess was saying, ‘I’m so glad you got on with Geoffrey. He has been quite at a loss since his mother died. You must both come again, very soon.’ But she thought that she would not go there again and, resolving to leave Geoffrey in those capable matchmaking hands, she said that she was going to disappear until the book was finished but would be in touch as soon as she was able to organize her time a little better. But that s
he would be so happy if her hostess would come to tea one day. The garden was looking so pretty.

  That had been four years ago. And the disagreeable memory of David on that evening had been obliterated almost immediately after, when Penelope, who liked to rally her troops, whether they knew that they were hers or not, took Edith off to a sale at Sim-monds’. They had found David with his warehouse­man, Stanley: in their shirtsleeves, both were sitting in silent harmony on packing cases, while on a third packing case stood two mugs of tea and a plate of virulently coloured jam tarts. Hauling himself to his feet, David presented a smiling and attentive face, be­hind which Edith knew he was thinking of something entirely different, to Penelope, who was full of arch reproaches. Edith had watched her flush becomingly but talk too much as his eyes rested on her. ‘Two-thirty, David,’ Stanley had warned. And as Penelope turned to have a benevolent word with Stanley, Edith willed her features into neutral as David, shrugging into his jacket and questing her attention, allowed one eyelid to minimally fall. Thus, wordlessly, was an urgent meeting agreed upon.

  When they next saw him, he was all business. Herded into rows of chairs, regressed to the obedience of childhood, they raised their eyes as to a pulpit. On the rostrum, David, gavel in hand, announced, ‘Lot Five. Time Revealing Truth. Attributed to Francesco Furini. What am I bid?’

  Edith, in her veal-coloured room in the Hotel du Lac, sat with her hands in her lap, wondering what she was doing there. And then remembered, and trembled. And thought with shame of her small injustices, of her unworthy thoughts towards those excellent women who had befriended her, and to whom she had revealed nothing. I have been too harsh on women, she thought, because I understand them better than I understand men. I know their watchful­ness, their patience, their need to advertise themselves as successful. Their need never to admit to a failure. I know all that because I am one of them. I am harsh because I remember Mother and her unkindnesses, and because I am continually on the alert for more. But women are not all like Mother, and it is really stupid of me to imagine that they are. Edith, Father would have said, think a little. You have made a false equation.