Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [33]
They were seated outside a small restaurant under a vine-covered trellis, a bottle of yellow wine on the table between them. Shaded, they were able to look out across a small deserted square made brilliant by the sun of early afternoon. At this height the lake mists were no longer imaginable: half-tones and ambiguous gradations, gentle appreciations of mildness and warmth, were banished, relegated to invalid status, by the uncompromising clarity of this higher air. Up here the weather was both hot and cold, bright and dark: hot in the sun, cold in the shade, bright as they climbed, and dark as they had sat in the small deserted café-bar, resting, until Mr Neville had asked, ‘Could you walk a little more?’ and they had set off again until they reached the top of what seemed to Edith to be a mountain, although the golden fruit on the trees in the terraced orchards they had passed on their way rather gave the lie to this assumption. Now they sat after lunch, becalmed, the only two people contemplating these few square metres of flat cobbled ground, the only sounds the faint whine of a distant car and a mumble of music from a wireless deep in the recesses of the restaurant, perhaps from the kitchen, perhaps from the little sitting room at the back, where the owner might retire to read his newspaper before opening up again for dinner.
But who came here? hi Edith’s mind, Mrs Pusey and Monica and Mme de Bonneuil, the hotel itself with its elderly pianist and its dependable meals, seemed to be at the other end of the universe. The mild and careful creature that she had been on the lake shore had also disappeared, had dematerialized in the ascent to this upper air, and by a remote and almost crystalline process new components had formed, resulting in something harder, brighter, more decisive, realistic, able to savour enjoyment, even to expect it.
‘Who comes here?’ she asked.
‘People like us,’ he replied.
He was a man of few words, but those few words were judiciously selected, weighed for quality, and delivered with expertise. Edith, used to the ruminative monologues that most people consider to be adequate for the purposes of rational discourse, used, moreover, to concocting the cunning and even learned periods which the characters in her books so spontaneously uttered, leaned back in her chair and smiled. The sensation of being entertained by words was one which she encountered all too rarely. People expect writers to entertain them, she reflected. They consider that writers should be gratified simply by performing their task to the audience’s satisfaction. Like sycophants at court in the Middle Ages, dwarves, jongleurs. And what about us? Nobody thinks about entertaining us.
Mr Neville noticed the brief spasm of feeling that passed over Edith’s face, and observed, ‘You may feel better if you tell me about it.’
‘Oh, do you think that is true?’ she enquired, breathing rather hard. ‘And even if it is, do you guarantee that the results will be immediately felt? Like those obscure advertisements for ointment that help you to “obtain relief”. One is never quite sure from what,’ she went on. ‘Although there is sometimes a tiny drawing of a man, rather correctly dressed, with a hand pressed to the small of his back.’
Mr Neville smiled.
‘I suppose it is the promise that counts,’ Edith went on, a little wildly. ‘Or perhaps just the offer. Anyway, I forget what I was talking about. You mustn’t take any notice,’ she added. ‘Most of my life seems to go on at a subterranean level. And it is too nice a day to bother about all that,’ Her face cleared. ‘And I am having such a good time,’ she said.
She did indeed look as if she might be, he thought. Her face had lost its habitual faintly sheep-like expression, its quest for approval or understanding, and had become amused, patrician. What on earth was she doing here, he wondered.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ asked Edith.
He smiled again. ‘Why shouldn’t I be here?’
She gestured with upturned hands. ‘Well, that hotel is hardly the place