Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [57]
‘Edith,’ hissed Monica. ‘Don’t hurry.’
Mildly surprised, Edith looked up, and saw in the distance Mrs Pusey and Jennifer, arm in arm, emerging from a shop that sold gloves and handkerchiefs. An assistant, holding three of the shop’s smartly decorated bags that were almost as handsome as their contents, followed them after a moment or two and was directed to the car, which Edith and Monica could now perceive cruising slowly towards them from the opposite direction. The driver stopped, emerged from behind the wheel, crossed the street, conferred with the Puseys, took the parcels and got back into the car. Mrs Pusey, apparently restored to health and equilibrium by her purchases, could be seen smiling and nodding her head vigorously, although Monica and Edith were too far away to hear what was being said. Instinctively, they backed into the bookseller’s doorway, in the hope of not being noticed. But after a minute or two it was clear that the attention of the Puseys was held in one of those intense and enthusiastic colloquies from which all outsiders were definitely disbarred. This realization, coming to them both simultaneously, caused them to exchange a look in which relief and something like resignation were exactly mingled.
‘The thing is,’ said Monica, ‘that we will either have to catch up with them or go past them or trail behind them in order to get back.’
‘You were going to the hairdresser,’ Edith reminded her.
‘Well, that’s on the way, isn’t it? You’d have to come that far with me if you wanted to get back to the hotel.’
‘I don’t want to get back all that much,’ said Edith, to whom the hotel or what it represented had become uncomfortable.
‘In that case,’ decided Monica, ‘we might as well go back and have another coffee.’
They retraced their steps through the little stony grey street. By this time their earlier intimacy had fragmented into a sort of disaffection; each was inwardly sighing at the wasted day. I should have stayed in, thought Edith; I should have spent the day writing. At least when I am writing I am gainfully employed. This strolling about is pointless. Functionless. Yet it is only a day, and I have no real duties, and I am not letting anybody down. In a way it is quite pleasant, really, she thought, heavy-hearted, as they made their way once more into Haffenegger’s, its interior now rich with the smell of sugar and coffee, and busy with the conversations of the immaculate, stolid, well-behaved ladies who made up the regular afternoon clientèle.
‘Makes you homesick, doesn’t it?’ said Monica, who seemed quite reduced by the fact that the attention of the waitresses was now monopolized by those stern and hearty women who seemed to have displaced her. Her face registered the wistfulness she felt at being displaced, and she busied herself with installing Kiki on a spare chair, just in case anyone should come to claim it.
They sat islanded in their foreignness, irrelevant now that the holiday season had ended, anachronistic, outstaying their welcome, no longer necessary to anyone’s plans. Priorities had shifted; the little town was settling down for its long uninterrupted hibernation. No one came here in the winter. The weather was too bleak, the snow too distant, the amenities too sparse to tempt visitors. And they felt that the backs of the residents had been turned on them with a sigh of relief, reminding them of their transitory nature, their fundamental unreality. And when Monica at last succeeded in ordering coffee, they still sat, glumly, for another ten minutes, before the busy waitress remembered their order.
‘Homesick,’ said Edith finally. ‘Yes.’ But she thought of her little house as if it had existed in another life, another dimension. She thought of it as something to which she might never return. The seasons had changed since she last saw it; she was no longer the person who could sit up in bed in the early morning and let the sun warm her shoulders and