Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [43]
Edith, reaching the haven of her room, closing the door behind her, tried to discover the reason for her low spirits, which seemed intricately bound up with the events of this evening, and the thoughts it had provoked. Was it that she was simply a stranger to the very act of celebration? Mrs Pusey’s birthday, Jennifer’s imagined wedding, had seemed to her so very much more three-dimensional than anything she could remember in her own life. For her birthdays in her parents’ house, Edith herself had made the cake and her father had brought it in, ceremoniously, with the coffee. Those occasions had been brief and timid excursions into family life as she had supposed they might ideally live it; her mother was stimulated into reminiscences of the coffee houses of her youth, and had talked vividly and amusingly, before falling once again into the sorrow of reminiscence. By that time the coffee had been drunk and on the plate the cake lay in ruins, and when Edith carried it back into the kitchen, her birthday had been over. And there had never been any mention of weddings.
And now, paradoxically, in the blessed silence and dimness of her room, Edith felt her own fatigue dissolve, and the underlying unease, of which she had been intermittently aware during the writing of her letter, began to stir, to increase, to take over. And at this very late hour, she felt her heart beat, and her reason, that controlling element, to fragment, as hidden areas, dangerous shoals, erupted into her consciousness. The careful pretence of her days here, the almost successful tenor of this artificial and meaningless life which had been decreed for her own good by others who had no real understanding of what her own good was, suddenly appeared to her in all their futility. Perhaps the champagne, the cake, the celebration, had eroded the barriers of her mind, trailing sly and unwelcome associations, making a nonsense of those careful arrangements she had worked out for herself, banishing amusement, returning her to seriousness and to painful reflection, demanding an accounting. She had thought that by consenting to this tiny exile she was clearing the decks, wiping the slate, and that she would be allowed to return, suitably chastened, in due course, to resume her life. ‘I am clearing the decks, Edith,’ she remembered her father saying, as he tore up the papers on his desk. ‘Just clearing the decks.’ He had smiled, but his eyes were full of sad knowledge. He had known that nothing would be the same for him again, that his stay in the hospital was not to be the brief interlude he had bracingly told her mother it would be. And he had not come home. And maybe I shall not go home, she thought, her heart breaking with sorrow. And beneath the sorrow she felt vividly unsafe, as she did when she saw that the plot of a novel would finally resolve itself, and how this might be brought about.
Sitting alone in the silence, she bowed her head and passed scrupulously in review the events that had brought her, out of season, to the Hotel du Lac.
9
On the day of her wedding Edith had woken earlier than usual, her senses alerted by the quality of the light, which was hard, white and uneasy, harbouring surprises of an unpleasant nature, far removed from the mature sunshine on which she had been counting. She took the weather as an omen, and her abrupt awakening as a sign, though of what she could not say or even think. More to the point, as she passed her dressing table she caught sight of her face and was shocked to see it so pale and drawn. I am no longer young, she thought; this