Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [56]
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ said Edith truthfully.
Monica gave her a narrow glance. ‘My dear girl, that man had a price on his head the minute he walked into the hotel.’
‘Monica,’ said Edith, startled. ‘Do you mean you have fallen in love with Mr Neville?’
‘Who said anything about love?’ replied Monica, after a pause.
‘Then what…?’
‘Oh, never mind, Edith. No, I’ll pay for this. No, really, do let me. I’m going to, anyway.’
Edith, rubbing a patch of the steamy window clear, saw the grey mist advancing and felt herself begin to dissolve into it. This is when character tells, she thought. But her character, by which she had never set much store, seemed to have undergone a debilitating process recently, perhaps since the thoughts of last night, and she knew that the only remedy was work. I have done it before, she admonished herself, and I can do it again. Besides, I am getting behind with Beneath the Visiting Moon. I promised Harold I’d let him have it by Christmas. I haven’t written anything for three days. No wonder I feel depressed. I need to get down to some work.
‘I think I’ll go back,’ she said to Monica. ‘I’ve got some letters to write. What will you do?’
‘On a day like this, the only thing to do is to go to the hairdresser and have the works. The whole caboodle. Walk round that way with me. You’re not in a hurry, are you?’
No, she was not in a hurry. And when the tall woman linked arms with her, she found herself touched and warmed by the contact, and, with the little dog bustling ahead through the leaves, they wandered slowly and silently along under the damp trees, aware of an impatient but genuine good will towards each other, just enough to sustain them against the onslaught of more painful memories that came to them unbidden and uncensored.
Women share their sadness, thought Edith. Their joy they like to show off to one another. Victory, triumph over the odds, calls for an audience. And that air of bustle and exigence sometimes affected by the sexually loquacious – that is for the benefit of other women. No solidarity then.
In the dead hour between two and three, when sensible people put their feet up or take a nap, Edith walked with Monica under the lifeless trees by the lake shore. The day seemed interminable, yet neither was in a hurry to have done with it. It seemed to both of them in their separate ways that only the possession of this day held worse days at bay, that, for each of them, the seriousness of their respective predicaments had so far been material for satire or for ridicule or even for amusement. But that the characters who had furnished that satire or that amusement were now taking on a disturbing life of their own, were revealing capacities for command or caprice that threatened, although in a very obscure or oblique way, their own marginal existence. We both came here to get other people out of trouble, thought Edith; no one considered our hopes and wishes. Yet hopes and wishes are what should be proclaimed, most strenuously proclaimed, if anyone is to be jolted into the necessity of taking note of them, let alone the obligation to fulfil them. Yet how curious it is that some women have to be indulged and placated all the time … It seems that I shall never learn the rules of correct behaviour, she thought, those rules that girls are supposed to learn at their mother’s knee. All I learned I learned from Father. Think again, Edith. You have made a false equation. This is when character tells. Sad precepts of a lost faith.
With a sigh they turned round and began to walk back the way they had come, in the direction of the town and of the hairdresser. The streets were dull and empty, most people having prudently withdrawn from this unpromising scene. They rounded the corner and wandered past the bookshop; Edith, halfheartedly, hung back to look in the window, where Le Soleil de Minuit, in its paper cover, made a modest appearance.