Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [16]
‘She is quite the most interesting person here, although there is a beautiful woman with a dog who looks promising. Her husband is something important in Brussels, I understand. However, we have not yet spoken. Mrs Pusey, on the other hand, is very communicative, which is rather a blessing because otherwise I …’ (this sentence she crossed out).
‘I adore Mrs Pusey. She is a totally serene, supremely confident woman who has, she laughingly suggests, simply made the best of what the good Lord gave her. She clearly has an enormous amount of money and I am rather interested to find out where this came from. When my husband was moved to Head Office, occasioning that tragic departure from Haslemere, where exactly did he go? What was his Head Office Head Office of? There is a nuance in Mrs Pusey’s behaviour, and even something, dare I say it, about the cut of Jennifer’s jib, that leads me to suspect that my husband might have been the kind of man who calls a shop a retail outlet. But he was clearly a man of decision. Apart from lodging some of his loot in a Swiss bank, it was he who realized that he could not risk the Mediterranean in the high season. Could not risk it for her, I mean. Did he slip off from time to time for a solitary spree at the tables? Was he a closet member of the Marbella Club? I rather hope so, but there is no evidence to support this.
‘Incidentally, although I have been thinking of Mrs Pusey as a lady, I have adjusted this downwards: Mrs Pusey is definitely a woman. “All woman”, my husband used to call her. (But he was one of the old school.) And the woman with the dog has to be adjusted upwards to lady, or rather Lady. She, or rather her husband, equally absent, is a member of the ruling class, although Mrs Pusey doesn’t think much of his title. Mrs Pusey clearly dislikes Lady X (I do not yet know her name). It will be interesting to find out why.
‘But otherwise, we all have names now: Mrs Pusey and Jennifer, of course, and the boy who brings the breakfast is Alain, and the pretty little blonde waitress at tea time is Maryvonne …’
Edith laid down her pen. It was all very well to write up Mrs Pusey and Jennifer, but she was still left with that memory of the two women lovingly entwined as they saw her to the door to say goodnight. For there was love there, love between mother and daughter, and physical contact, and collusion about being pretty, none of which she herself had ever known. Her strange mother, Rosa, that harsh disappointed woman, that former beauty who raged so unsuccessfully against her fate, deliberately, wilfully letting herself go, slatternly and scornful, mocking her pale silent daughter who slipped so modestly in and out of her aromatic bedroom, bringing the cups of coffee which her mother deliberately spilled. And shouting, ‘Too weak! Too weak! All of you, too weak!’ Sighing for Vienna, which had known her young and brilliant, and not fat and slovenly, as she was now. And weeping for her dead sister, Anna.
Thinking of Mrs Pusey’s sparkling charm, Edith encountered painful memories. They had aged badly, the fascinating Schaffner sisters, her mother, Rosa, her aunt Anna. They had enslaved many of the students who had lodged in their mother’s grim apartment while preparing their theses on Klimt or Schnitzler or the Jugendstil, or on all three. But although the sisters had married promptly, and young, they were soon bitterly disappointed. Those students, so attractive away from home, turned all too soon into mild university men. The campuses