Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [50]
Two hours later she sat in the dark, waiting for the sound of David’s car. He mind was quite empty, but she was filled with longing, a longing which she now perceived to be fatal. For this misdemeanour could hardly be overlooked, would inevitably cause a whole chain reaction of amusement, caution, withdrawal. Quarrels can be made up; embarrassment can never quite be forgotten. Edith foresaw, sadly, that she would become an embarrassment.
Yet David, when he came, took her in his arms and said nothing. When he released her, he held her at arm’s length and looked at her. She saw strain in his face, and tiredness, and knew that she had caused both. And something else. He looked rueful, wary. The situation was too complicated, too loaded, for the unwritten contract between them to bear. For they were reasonable people, and no one was to be hurt, not even with words. Above all, not with words. And so, with her last ounce of energy, and that was rapidly disappearing, she made a joke of it. An accident of timing, she said. Poor Geoffrey had been a stand-in; what she really needed was a holiday. Clearly she was not cut out to be a married lady. But they might as well finish the champagne. And, in the end, after watching a lugubrious film on television, he was quite relaxed, and they were loving again. But she noticed with sorrow, after waving him goodbye, that he had not touched the plate of little delicacies she had salvaged for him from the wedding breakfast.
She had sat out the next few days, waiting to hear from him, but plans had been made in her name, and when the telephone rang it was Penelope, with the name and address of this excellent hotel, and information about flights, and what to pack. It had seemed to suit everyone that she should disappear, and to make sure that she did so, Penelope monitored her every movement. She was allowed out to have lunch with her agent and to leave him her address, for it was now grimly assumed that henceforth she would have to live on her wits, or at least by her pen. And on that last grey day, summer quite gone, she had found herself, unresisting, in Penelope’s car, on the way to the airport. Mrs Dempster had promised to come in the following day to give the house a final overhaul, and to return the key to Penelope. She could not see her way clear, she explained, to coming back. She was funny like that. Sensitive. Edith would have to make other arrangements.
But as the car had drawn away, Edith had been comforted to see Terry, paler than ever, making his steady way along the pavement with a box full of bedding plants. He had raised his free hand, with his spare key in it, when he saw her, and she had waved back. At least, she thought, the garden will be cared for.
10
Edith, her head aching with the follies and perils of prolonged reminiscence, had finally made her way to bed at an advanced hour, when the entire hotel was silent and no cars could be heard on the road that ran along the shore of the lake. Sleep had come suddenly, like an anaesthetic: total blackness. When she opened her eyes, it was to the same unvariegated grey that had greeted her on the afternoon of her arrival. She had forgotten to pull the curtains and the daylight was all around her. Alarmed, as if she had been absent from this scene for some time, during which unknown events might have taken place, she sat up and reached for her watch. It was eight o’clock, a reasonable hour at which to awake if one’s day had no structure, but for Edith, who was accustomed to begin her writing very early, sometimes even before the milk or the newspaper had been delivered, guiltily and unconscionably late.
She rang for her breakfast, and bathed and dressed hastily, anxious to remove the traces of the disarray into which the previous night’s thoughts had plunged