Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [12]
The impassive boy who had stood behind the chair of the woman with the dog delivered her breakfast tray, sliding it down from shoulder height onto her little table.
‘Merci,’ she said, her voice still unfamiliar to her, for it had not been in use for some time. ‘Il fait froid?’
‘Il a neigé cette nuit sur la montagne,’ he replied austerely.
He seemed to take his tasks so very seriously for one so young. He was, perhaps, eighteen; his hair was punishingly short, and he had the set expression and also the expertise of a much older servant, a gentleman’s gentleman, repository of secrets, man of honour in his own right, a worthy servitor to his liege lord.
‘Comment vous appelez-vous?’ she asked gently.
He turned at the door and smiled, revealing a chipped front tooth and the trusting eyes of a boy who has set himself stern tasks but who is glad to be befriended.
‘Alain,’ he replied. ‘Je m’appelle Alain.’
Edith drank her coffee and reflected on the previous evening. Well, something had been accomplished; people were beginning to have names. The here and now, the quotidian, was beginning to acquire substance. The dimension of terror that this realization brought with it – as if knowing the place too well might give her presence there some reality, some validity – was quickly palliated by the extraordinary accumulation of facts, and of such very diverting facts, that had emerged from her meeting with Iris and Jennifer Pusey. Or, rather, with Iris Pusey, for Jennifer was so much a reflection of her mother that although she occupied quite a large space and had a curiously insistent physical presence, she did not have too much to say for herself, and indeed Edith had once or twice had the impression that behind her large smiling face Jennifer was somewhere else.
But in any event Iris held the stage; Iris, it was clear, was the star. Like many a star, she could only function from a position of dominance; she held information at bay, so that Edith was not required to give an account of herself. Edith, having been briefly the recipient of Mrs Pusey’s compassion, was now to become Mrs Pusey’s confidante. And what a lot there was to tell, Edith reflected. What busy lives some people led. Iris Pusey was putting in her brief annual appearance at the Hotel du Lac for one purpose only; she had come to shop. And she was enabled to do this by virtue of the fact that her late husband had prudently deposited certain sums of money in an account in her name in a Swiss bank.
Edith had learned all this by the end of the first half-hour spent in Mrs Pusey’s company. Half an hour was all that was needed for the rules of the game to be set down, the wordless contract agreed upon by both parties. In return for her deliverance from that dread fate so sympathetically observed by Mrs Pusey, Edith was to make herself available when not otherwise engaged – and that engagement would have to be submitted to fairly searching scrutiny – and to provide an audience for Mrs Pusey’s opinions, reminiscences, character readings, or general views on life’s little problems. Edith acquiesced to this readily enough, not because of her plight, which she saw as irremediable but not entirely serious, but because Mrs Pusey presented her with the opportunity to examine, and to enjoy, contact with an alien species. For in this charming woman, so entirely estimable in her happy desire to capture hearts, so completely preoccupied with the femininity which had always provided her with life’s chief delights, Edith perceived avidity, grossness, ardour. It was her perception of this will to repletion and to triumph that had occasioned her mild feeling of faintness when she watched Mrs Pusey and Jennifer eating their dinner. She had also