Bright Air - Barry Maitland [1]
My Aunt Mary has gone to her bridge club leaving me in charge, and I am in the dining room, setting the tables for the next day’s breakfast and thinking how odd it is that I should find such a routine chore so comforting, like placing the pieces for a game of chess—cup, saucer, plate, knife, fork, spoon—in which no unexpected moves are permitted. This place—Mary’s little hotel—is a refuge, an old house screened by thick foliage from the tower apartment blocks that have grown up around it, a place of quiet predictability, of shady nooks and heavy dark timbers sheltering beneath a spreading orange tile roof. I have returned to the land of cosy abbreviations—the garbo, the ambo and the firey—and I just want to sink into it and disappear.
The reception bell sounds from the hall and I put down the cutlery to go and see, and there, standing at the counter, is Anna.
The sight of her jolted me, an Alice-in-Wonderland moment, as if I might be drawn back down some long vertiginous tunnel to the past. She wasn’t aware of me and I was tempted to step silently back behind the shelter of the dining-room door, but that would have been absurd.
‘Anna!’
She spun around, the smile forming immediately on her lips, not at all surprised to hear my voice. Clearly she had expected to find me here.
‘Josh!’
As she came towards me I was momentarily at a loss, not sure how to greet her. We were old friends, but time and circumstances had formed a yawning gap, and though it was only four years since we’d last met, we both hesitated to cross it. She reached out and held me at arm’s length for a moment, examining me, then ducked her face forward to kiss my cheek. I held her for a moment, feeling a little surge of affection alongside the foreboding.
‘You’ve changed, Josh,’ she said. Her smile was genuinely warm, that familiar ironic grin threatening to break into a laugh of pleasure at seeing me, and I felt ashamed that my initial reaction had been to run.
‘Oh?’
‘Mm.’ Her head cocked to the left. ‘You look more serious, a man of the world.’
‘It’s good to see you again, Anna. Is this a chance visit?’
‘I heard you were coming back.’
‘Really?’ That surprised me. ‘How was that?’
‘I ran into your aunt in town a month ago. Didn’t she tell you? She said you were coming home. Is it for good, or just a visit?’
‘We’ll see,’ I said vaguely. Mary hadn’t mentioned meeting Anna, but I’d noticed other signs of forgetfulness. ‘Glass of wine?’
‘Yes, please.’
We settled ourselves in the comfortable armchairs by the windows of the empty lounge. I’d been back ten days, but the place still had an air of unreality about it, as if I might jerk awake at any moment and find myself in a crowded tube train. I relished the abstraction of it, the invisibility of the stranger, knowing that it wouldn’t last, especially now that Anna had come.
The smile faded from her face, and without that sparkle I realised how much she, too, had changed. She’d lost weight, and her features seemed to have become a little harder and, in the process, to have developed more character. There was a small scar on her temple that I was sure hadn’t been there before, and shadows around her eyes, and I wondered if she might have been ill. Certainly she was much better groomed than in the old days, in a smart blouse and skirt, her face neatly framed by an immaculate helmet of black hair.
She turned to me with a serious look, as if trying to read something from my expression, and I felt a need to say something innocuous to head her off. ‘That’s our judge.’ I nodded at the figure through the window, now in murmured conversation with Socrates, Mary