Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [6]
Then there was nothing to do but go for a walk.
Through the silent garden, through an iron gate, across the busy road, and along the shore of the lake she walked in the fading light of that grey day. The silence engulfed her once she was past the town’s one intersection, and it seemed as if she might walk for ever, uninterrupted, with only her thoughts for company. This solitude to which she had been banished, by those who knew best, was not what she had had in mind. And this dim, veiled, discreet, but unfriendly weather: was this to be an additional accompaniment to this time of trial, for someone who had rashly travelled without a heavy coat? The lake was utterly still; a solitary lamp gleamed above her, turning the limp leaves of a plane tree to brilliant emerald. There is no need for me to stay here if I don’t want to, she decided. Nobody is actually forcing me. But I must give it a try, if only to make things easier when I get home. The place is not totally unpopulated. I do need a rest. I could perhaps give it a week. And there is a lot to find out, for someone of my benighted persuasion, although of course none of those people would fit into the sort of fiction I write. But that very long, narrow woman, that beautiful woman, with the tiresome dog. And more than that, the glamorous pair who seem so at ease here. Why are they here? But women, women, only women, and I do so love the conversation of men. Oh David, David, she thought.
Her walk along the lake shore reminded her of nothing so much as those silent walks one takes in dreams, and in which unreason and inevitability go hand in hand. As in dreams she felt both despair and a sort of doomed curiosity, as if she must pursue this path until its purpose were revealed to her. The cast of her mind on this evening, and the aspect of the path itself, seemed to promise an unfavourable outcome: shock, betrayal, or at the very least a train missed, an important occasion attended in rags, an appearance in the dock on an unknown charge. The light, too, was that of dreams, an uncertain penumbra surrounding this odd pilgrimage, neither day nor night. In the real world through which she walked she was aware of certain physical characteristics: a perfectly straightforward gravel path flanked by two rows of trees standing in beaten earth, on one side the lake, invisible now, on the other, presumably, the town, but a town so small and so well ordered that one would never hear the screaming of brakes or the hooting of horns or the noise of voices raised in extravagant farewell. Only the modest sound of a peaceable file of evening traffic going home came faintly to her ears from somewhere beyond the trees, out of sight. Much louder was the sound of her own steps on the gravel, so loud that it seemed intrusive, and after a while she began to walk on the soft earth of the path nearest the lake. Beneath the light of an occasional lamp, she walked on uninterrupted, as if she were the only one abroad in this silent place. A perceptible chill rose from the water, which she could no longer see, and she shivered in her long cardigan. Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth, she thought, and, brooding but acquiescent, she carried on until she thought it time to be allowed to stop. Then she turned and retraced her steps.
Walking back through the twilight she saw the hotel from afar, lit up, falsely festive. I must make an effort, she decided, although she knew that a different sort of woman would have said, with a worldly sigh, ‘I suppose I must put in an appearance.’
In the silent foyer, bright lights, a mumble from the television room, and a smell of meat. She went up to change.
At the desk, M. Huber the elder,