Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner [64]
‘Edith’, said Mr Neville. ‘Please don’t cry. I cannot bear to see a woman cry; it makes me want to hit her. Please, Edith. Here, take my handkerchief. Edith. Let me wipe your eyes. Your eyes are almost silver. Did you know that? Come.’
For the first time she rested against him and cried herself into a state of weariness. She closed her eyes and stayed leaning on his shoulder, steadied by his arm.
‘You are very thin,’ he said. ‘I am afraid that I might break you in half. But there will be time to worry about that later.’
When she straightened up and stood with her hands on the rail, she saw that it was already dusk, or rather an afternoon twilight that would deepen imperceptibly into night. On the opposite shore she could make out lights, lights that seemed almost welcoming now: the lights of the Hotel du Lac.
They leaned against the rail, not speaking. When the landing stage came into view, he turned to her, but she held up her hand for him to be silent. The children, once more marshalled on the deck by their teacher, must be untouched by the miasma of these adult considerations. As they trooped off, their shoes pattering on the wooden boards, Edith and Mr Neville remained standing silently at the rail, facing the shore.
‘So,’ she said, after a long silence. ‘I am to live in your house – Regency Gothic; a fine example – along with your famille rose dishes. I am to be air-lifted out of my present life, as if a wand had been waved. I am to become sophisticated, relaxed, worldly, and discreet. I am to provide that conjugal calm that will ensure that your feelings will never be hurt again.’
‘And yours,’ he said. ‘And yours.’
‘I don’t love you. Does that bother you?’
‘No. It reassures me. I do not want the burden of your feelings. All this can be managed without romantic expectations.’
Edith turned to him. Her hair blew in eddies round her head, her eyes were grave, her mouth bitter.
‘And you don’t love me?’
He smiled, this time sadly and without ambiguity.
‘No, I don’t love you. But you have got under my guard. You have moved and touched me, in a way in which I no longer care to be moved and touched. You are like a nerve that I had managed to deaden, and I am annoyed to find it coming to life. I shall do my utmost to kill it off again as soon as possible. After all, I am not in the business of losing my centrality. We must get off, Edith. Give me your hand.’
They walked in silence, hand in hand, over the soft wooden boards of the landing stage and on to the gravel path. Now the mist was coming down again, with the dusk, blurring the street lamps, veiling the everyday sounds. The modest evening traffic was almost over, and a chill spread from the untenanted lake behind them.
‘I may have to think about this,’ she said eventually.
‘Not too long, I hope. I do not intend to make a habit of proposing to you. You will have to get your skates on, if we are to leave by the weekend.’
She glanced up at him, surprised by the new jocularity in his voice. It seemed to her that he had already effected such repairs to his self-esteem as he deemed necessary, and she was a little encouraged by the rapidity with which this had been achieved.
‘May I ask one more question?’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘Why me?’
This time his smile was ambiguous again, ironic, courteous.
‘Perhaps because you are harder to catch than the others,’ he replied.
12
Bathed and changed, her hair once more firmly secured, Edith sat in her room, waiting for it to be time to go down to dinner.
It seemed to her then that she had finished with this room, or perhaps that the room had finished with her. In any event, some sort of natural conclusion had been reached. Yet, just as it is in the nature of leavetaking to feel regret, she knew that this room, in which she had been entirely alone, would always awaken in her some memory of warmth whenever she summoned it to mind. Its silent, faded dignity would perhaps come to symbolize the last shred of her own dignity, before that too crumbled in the face of panic,