Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [23]
This information remained in many ways obscure. She was not sure whether she had in fact remained downstairs to witness the scenes which came into her mind, or whether, in some over-active recess of her brain, she was making them up. She was aware that her night was agitated, that the only alternative to waking up was to undergo more of these strange sequences, half dream, half memory. Everything seemed vivid, potent with significance. But the significance was hidden. She stretched uneasily, a prisoner of her troubled sleep. Somewhere, at some level of consciousness, she heard a door close.
When she awoke, rather later than usual, it was with the ancient and deadly foreknowledge that the day would be a write-off. Her broken night had left her with an aching head and an instinctive shrinking from both food and company. Minute noises seemed magnified: a trolley was wheeled vigorously along the corridor, and the high voices of the maids sounded unbearably piercing. As she took a bath, feeling as unwieldy as an invalid, she drilled herself into a regime of prudence. Depression hovered and must be forestalled. Writing was out of the question. Take things very quietly, she counselled herself: do not think. Close doors.
The pulled curtains revealed another brilliant day, the mountain, with its thin seams of snow, as clear as if it were a few metres distant. Traffic seemed to be in abeyance; a different sort of activity was under way. Outside, in the garden, waiters in clean white jackets placed small chairs and tables beneath the glass awning of the terrace and were even now discussing the advisability of drawing down the orange blinds to palliate the heat of the sun, already palpable through the glass. Somewhere in the distance a toneless bell struck. Sunday, she thought with surprise.
Contingency plans, of the sort at which she had become adept, were called for. Perhaps she could simply sit in the sun and read. She was not likely to be disturbed. Contingency plans were no doubt at that very moment being perfected in other rooms: she imagined the conversations. Mrs Pusey and Jennifer would be ordering the car to take them out somewhere, perhaps; she imagined a scenic drive, culminating in a gourmet lunch. The men from Geneva would get together for some sort of excursion, perhaps across the lake, to Evian. Mme de Bonneuil would be one of the few to stay, reading and silent, as usual. The tall thin beauty with the dog was never visible in the daytime and it was impossible to imagine her doing anything except eating ice cream and smoking, like a child on an exeat from school. Edith thought it entirely probable that she would have the day to herself, a prospect which she almost welcomed. Embroiled in her fictional plot, the main purpose of which was to distance those all too real circumstances over which she could exert no control, she felt a weariness that seemed to preclude any enthusiasm, any initiative, any relaxation. Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, but the choice of a book presented some difficulties, since when she was writing she could only read something she had read before, and in her exhausted state, a febrile agitation, invisible to the naked eye, tended to distance even the very familiar. Words became distorted: ‘pear’, for instance, would become ‘fear’. She dreaded making nonsense of something precious to her, and, regretfully, disqualified Henry James. Nothing too big would do, nothing too small would suffice. In any event, her attention was fragmented. In the end she picked up a volume of short stories, the beautifully named Ces plaisirs, qu’on nomme, à la légére, physiques. Colette, that sly old fox, would, she trusted, see her through.
Silence reigned