The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [216]
The pension was amiably noisy. It was inhabited by very diverse people. There were two very large men with huge heads of hair and tangled sprouting beards, one red, one dark. They sat in shirtsleeves, in a corner of the eating-room, and argued—about the cosmos, Griselda thought, trying to understand the southern German accents and eccentric terminology. There were two very buttoned-up, precise men, with slick black hair and small moustaches, who wore pince-nez with black rims, and with tiny circular handles on the eye-pieces like moons on a planet. They went in and out—to work, presumably—but over dinner joined in the arguments about the cosmos. There were also three young women—art students at one of the independent women’s art schools. The Royal Bavarian School of Art admitted only men. One of the young women was clearly well off—she had many changes of dress, elegant hats and elaborately dressed hair. The other two were patched and darned and serviceably clothed. All three laughed a great deal. There was a perpetual smell of paint and varnish in the pension. Elli and Emmi, when they came home in the evening, turned out to be younger versions of these three. Both had their mother’s bony and somehow rackety good looks, and struck up casual and amusing conversations with the other inhabitants. They had simple dresses under aprons streaked with spilled colour. They hugged Charles, as though he was a family member or old friend, and expressed surprise when he introduced Griselda as his sister. We didn’t know you had a sister, said Emmi and Elli in unison, and laughed. Griselda felt awkward. Dorothy, who understood nothing at all of what was said, felt more awkward. The place was buzzing and humming with chatter and argument, and it is hard, when you are seventeen, in a foreign land for the first time, not to feel that the laughter is mockingly directed against you, and the camaraderie designed to exclude you. She had a moment, standing stiffly amid the clamour, when she wondered why on earth she had disrupted her life so furiously to come here and feel lost. She was rescued by Toby Youlgreave, also a stranger to this world, who could read German as a good folklorist must, but had no speaking vocabulary and also no acquaintance with Bavarians.
“We shall feel like old inhabitants in two or three days, I imagine,” he said to Dorothy. “All this will come to seem quite normal and ordinary.”
The pension was, it became clear, open to all sorts of café society—artists, Bohemians, students, wandering mystics and anarchists—at lunch time. In the evening the guests of the pension dined together, round a large table, from charming flower-rimmed plates. There was soup, full of cabbage, and sausages and large pork cutlets, and a heap of potatoes and a delicious pudding of red berries and cream. Much beer was served, in large earthenware mugs. Afterwards, one of the precise men produced a flute, and one of the art students sang, in a husky voice, whilst the guests tapped with feet and fingers, until everyone joined in, beards wagging, throats swelling. Toby drank several jars of beer and joined in, humming the tunes. Dorothy said she had a headache, and went to bed.
It is hard to get to sleep in an unknown room, with unaccustomed bed coverings. Dorothy shifted and stirred and dozed and jerked awake. She could see a thin, curved penknife of a moon, steel-bright on a blue-black sky. She heard a strange sound, a regular banging and flapping, banging and flapping, thump, thump, thump, speeding up as it continued, which it did for a long time. It was accompanied by a creaking sound of bed-slats, and also by a mixture of moaning and giggling. Then there was a wailing cry,