Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [36]
‘You are wrong to think that you cannot live without love, Edith.’
‘No, I am not wrong,’ she said, slowly. ‘I cannot live without it. Oh, I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean something far more serious than that. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.’
‘You are a romantic, Edith,’ repeated Mr Neville, with a smile.
‘It is you who are wrong,’ she replied. ‘I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.’
‘Putting the cat out?’ suggested Mr Neville.
Edith gave him a glance of pure dislike.
‘That’s better,’ he said.
‘Well, you obviously find this very amusing,’ she said. ‘Clearly they order things better in Swindon, or wherever it was that you … I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was extremely rude of me. How dreadfully …’.
He poured her out another glass of wine.
‘You are a good woman,’ he said. ‘That is all too obvious.’
‘How is it obvious?’ she asked.
‘Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.’
Edith, breathing hard, wondered if she were drunk or simply rendered incautious by the novelty of this conversation.
‘I should like some coffee,’ she announced, with what she hoped was Nietzschean directness. ‘No, on second thoughts, I should like some tea. I should like a pot of very strong tea.’
Mr Neville glanced at his watch. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is getting on. We should be making a move soon. When you have had your tea,’ he added.
Edith drank her tea fiercely, unaware that the exertion of thinking, so remote, so unusual in her present circumstances, had brought colour to her cheeks and added brightness to her eyes. Her hair, slipping from its usual tight control, lay untidily on her neck, and with a gesture of impatience she removed the last securing hairpins, raked her fingers through it, and let it fall about her face. Mr Neville, appraising her with faintly pursed lips, nodded.
‘Let me tell you what you need, Edith,’ he said.
Not again, she thought. I have just told you what I need and I know what that is better than you do.
‘Yes, I know you think you know better than I do,’ he said, as her head shot up in alarm. ‘But you are wrong. You do not need more love. You need less. Love has not done you much good, Edith. Love has made you secretive, self-effacing, perhaps dishonest?’
She nodded.
‘Love has brought you to the Hotel du Lac, out of season, to sit with the other women, and talk about clothes. Is that what you want?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
‘No,’ he went on. ‘You are a clever woman, too clever not to know what you are missing. Those tiny domestic pleasures, those card games you talk about, they would soon pall.’
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘Never.’
‘Yes. Oh, your romanticism might keep rueful thoughts at bay for a time, but the thoughts would win out. And then you would discover that you had a lot in common with all the other discontented women, and you’d start to see a lot of sense in the feminist position, and you’d refuse to read anything but women’s novels …’.
‘I write them,’ she reminded him.
‘Not that sort,’ he said. ‘You write about love. And you will never write anything different, I suspect, until. you begin to take a harder look at yourself.’
Edith