Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [21]
Edith, still filled with her vision of the hammam, the Arab café, the Mediterranean siesta, murmured somewhat distractedly, as he made his determined way to the door, ‘Could you describe these Rooms to me?’
He contemplated her from a considerable height, down a long nose. ‘A five-storey warehouse in Chiltern Street,’ he said.
Then she looked up at him and they exchanged a level glance from which all expression was studiously absent. She lowered her eyes, and he left. Nothing more was said.
Later, as she was helping Penelope to wash the glasses, she had asked, ‘That tall man, what does he do?’
‘David Simmonds? He’s head of the family business, now. Simmonds, the auction house. They handle a lot of the bigger country house sales. Rather a pet, isn’t he? He’s always been a bit keen on me, but he’s so hard to get hold of these days. He asked about you, by the way.’
‘How do you know him?’ said Edith.
‘I was at school with his wife,’ said Penelope. ‘Priscilla. You know. You’ve met her here a dozen times. You know, Edith. Tall, blonde, very good-looking. She couldn’t come today.’
Edith did remember her: tall, blonde, very good-looking. A woman with a rather insolent air of authority, of carelessness. A loud, confident voice. She had once encountered her in the china department at Peter Jones and had noticed the way she bounced along, trailing an assistant, like a favoured senior girl in the school common room.
Penelope removed her plastic apron imprinted with an advertisement for Guinness and pegged up her rubber gloves. ‘Now, Edith, I’m afraid I’m going to have to turn you out. Richard said he’d come back and take me out to lunch round the corner.’
Edith, at her window, watched Richard turn up, sprinting down the road with commendable alacrity. Spry, she thought. Jaunty. Good check suit straining slightly over wide back. Veined hand waving. She pictured David and smiled involuntarily. She sat down to wait for him.
When he came, as she knew he would, two or three hours later, they said nothing but looked at each other long and hard. In bed, they fell instantly into a warm mutual sleep, arms around each other, and when they woke, almost simultaneously, they had laughed with pleasure. After that, it seemed as if she knew everything about him; the only revelation was his delightful and constant appetite. She took to keeping the house full of food.
They were sensible people. No one was to be hurt. She prided herself on giving nothing away, so that he never knew of her empty Sundays, the long eventless evenings, the holidays cancelled at the last minute. Cursing inwardly, as he loaded the car for the long journey back from Suffolk, after another crowded and inharmonious weekend, he thought of her little house, its quality of silence, the green dimness of her drawing room. She, too early in bed, thought of him with his family, their habits, their quarrels, their treats. Of his children.
And thinking of this, yet again, in the Hotel du Lac, she felt the ache in her throat that preceded tears (but she was so good at concealing them), and murmuring an excuse to Mrs Pusey, she took the unprecedented step of leaving the salon before her. She would make no telephone call. She was, after all, if not still in disgrace, working out her probation.
The tears that had fallen from her fine light eyes seemed to have sharpened her vision. When, some two hours later, she sat down to dinner, she was aware that the lights were brighter, the room more alive with personalities, the tables full. It was agreeable to see men, after days in this gyneceum, bringing the place to life, to see waiters speeding to their command. The man in grey, who had picked up her notebook, half rose as she took her seat, nodded, and then applied his attention to the