Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [37]
‘Do you really want to spend the rest of your life talking to aggrieved women about your womb?’ he went on, inexorably.
‘I really don’t think I have much of a womb to talk about,’ she said, with an unhappy laugh.
‘Oh, you would become gloomy about it in due course. In any event, I doubt if anyone’s bears close inspection.’
‘Tell me,’ said Edith, after a pause, ‘you don’t by any chance do psychiatry as a sideline, do you? Since the electronics industry leaves you so much spare time?’
‘What you need, Edith, is not love. What you need is a social position. What you need is marriage.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘And once you are married, you can behave as badly as everybody else. Worse, given your unused capacity.’
‘The relief,’ she agreed.
‘And you will be popular with one and all, and have so much more to talk about. And never have to wait by the telephone again.’
Edith stood up. ‘It’s getting cold,’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’
She strode on ahead of him. That last remark was regrettable, she thought. Vulgar. And he knows where to plant the knife. Yes, writing in my room leaves me free to be telephoned; who knows what might happen if I went out? And suddenly she longed for such solitude, like a child who has become overexcited at a party, and who should have been taken home, by a prudent nurse, some time ago.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, catching her up. ‘Please. I don’t want to pry. I know nothing about you. You are an excellent woman, and I have offended you. Please forgive me.’
‘You are sadistic,’ she said, pleasantly.
He inclined his head. ‘So my wife used to tell me.’
‘And how do you know that my capacity for bad behaviour is unused? That is a mild but definite form of sexual insult, you know. Less well publicized than bottom-pinching or harassment at work, but one with which quite a lot of women are familiar.’
‘If your capacity for bad behaviour were being properly used, you would not be moping around in that cardigan.’
Edith shot ahead, furious. To contain her anger – for she could not find her way down to the lake unaided – she tried various distancing procedures, familiar to her from long use. The most productive was to convert the incident into a scene in one of her novels. ‘The evening came on stealthily,’ she muttered to herself. ‘The sun, a glowing ball …’. It was no good. She turned round, searching for him, listening for the steps which should be following her and were not, and feeling suddenly alone on this hillside, in the cold. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.
‘I hate you,’ she shouted, hopefully.
A steady crunch of gravel announced the reappearance of Mr Neville. When his face came into focus, Edith saw that it was wearing its usual smile, intensified.
‘You are coming along very well,’ he said, taking her arm.
‘You know,’ she said, after ten minutes of silent descent. ‘I find that smile of yours just the faintest bit unamiable.’
His smile broadened. ‘When you get to know me better,’ he remarked, ‘you will realize just how unamiable it really is.’
8
‘Dearest David,
‘Astounding news! Mrs Pusey, that pinnacle of feminine chic, that arbiter of taste, that relentless seeker after luxury goods, that charmer of multitudes, is seventy-nine! I know this because she had a birthday two days ago and we were all invited to celebrate it. Premonitory rumours that something was afoot had reached me earlier in the day; as I was going out along the corridor I heard cries of delight and surprise emanating from the Puseys’ suite, while a veritable miasma of scent (a different sort) seemed to billow out almost to the head of the stairs. While I stood on the steps outside the hotel, I could see a boy emerging from a van with an arrangement of flowers which looked positively