Читать книгу Invisible - Jonathan Buckley - Страница 8

A faint vibration, a low quiet thrumming, obtrudes into Edward’s consciousness. He hears it, at first, as water flowing through pipes: it is the sound that one hears when a heating system starts up and hot water begins to fill the radiators. Emerging from sleep, he recalls what time of year it is, and in the same instant he detects a smaller, sharper sound inside the murmur, a ticking inside the vibration. The source of the ticking is to his left, from where a wave of cooler air now passes, followed by a smothered boom of thunder. He goes to the window. Placing a palm on the glass, he feels the pulse of the rain. He pulls the window up and wipes his fingers across the slick wet paint of the frame. Again there is thunder, weaker than before, like a noise from a far-off quarry. He waits, and eventually there is one last boom, an expiring groan, so feeble it barely breaks through the sound of the rain. The horizon shrinks back to the margin defined by the spattering of water on the sill, then a piercing flourish of birdsong makes a point in space come into being, close to the building, within the garden. A pause follows, and a trill of high notes, a whistled baroque embellishment, identical to the first, straight ahead of him, no more than twenty yards away. A third trill receives an answering song: the same notes, in a new sequence. From a deeper recess of the garden comes a different call, a chirrup which rouses three or four kindred voices in a single tree or bush, down to the right, and this small chorus in turn stirs another, of the same species, somewhere behind it, and soon the garden is a fountain of birdsongs.

He puts on yesterday’s clothes and goes out into the corridor, into silence. With creeping steps he walks to the gallery. At the table near the top of the stairs he stops to ascertain what stands on it. His hands bump into a block of stone, on which a stone head is supported, a head with a swarm of minuscule furrows on its cheeks and a narrow nose and high brow crowned with short curls. The eyelids are smooth as cowries and half-lowered, and below the high collar there’s a medal or a badge of some sort. A general or a prince, he surmises, giving the bearded marble face a parting caress. Descending the stairs he becomes aware of rain drumming softly overhead, on a wide svkylight, he assumes. He steps down onto tiles and crosses the enormous hall, passing close to a clock he had not noticed before. Sensing the imprint of something sizeable on the air in front of him, he raises his arms and strikes a pedestal, with a long-leafed plant atop it. He steps aside, and five paces onward he touches the wall, which he follows to find the glass doors. They do not budge when he pushes them, but where they meet the floor he finds a metal plate with a countersunk bolt that slides easily upward, and at the top there is another, and then one door is free.

He stands in the shelter of the porch, his hands braced on a coarse stone column. Though the sun must be up, the coolness of night persists and the air has the cleansing scent of night-time. The conversation of the birds is ending; the rain is louder than it was. Water gargles in a drainpipe near the porch and the gravel driveway hisses, like air leaking from an inner tube that is almost flat. He leaves the porch and walks towards the garden, making a cowl of his jacket. A path of uneven stones departs from the gravel, flanked by leaves that scrape lightly under the impact of the pattering raindrops. Rhododendron, he guesses, and confirms his guess by touch. He reaches a junction of the path, where the rhododendron ceases. Following a track of bricks that veers off to the right, he comes to a spot where the rain is suddenly quieter. He stops and pulls the jacket down to listen. On both sides of the path he discerns a whispering that is the sound of water on a wide area of grass. He continues along the bricks until he comes to a smoothly paved area, encircled by sibilant shrubs. The rain is forming puddles here, but there is also a body of water high up, at the level of his head. His hands, groping, find a broad stone bowl that is fringed with slime. The shower is rapidly becoming heavier: the surface of the water in the bowl is burbling now, and the foliage of a nearby tree, a high tree, has begun to seethe. On the paving stones the rain raises a roar like a ceiling fan revolving at speed. It is a downpour now, but he does not move. Feeling the cold moss on his fingertips, and the cold water dribbling across his scalp, and the cold wet fabric on his chest and thighs, he senses the boundaries of his body, the contours of his invisible body, the dimensions of himself. All around him the garden is defined by tones and textures of sound, a continuum of sounds that give to the place in which he stands a continuous depth, a cohesion that the world presents to him infrequently. Avidly he listens, standing at the water bowl like a pilgrim with his hand on the foot of a miraculous statue.

Eloni looks out of the window of the dining room and sees Mr Morton walking along the path to the rose garden. His hair has been flattened by the rain and his jacket hangs over one shoulder like a used towel. His shirt is so wet that it looks as though his skin has been covered with clear plastic, but he is smiling as he walks along, turning his face this way and that, like somebody who is admiring the flowers. At the wooden arch of the rose garden he seems to change his mind. He lifts his face into the rain and wipes a hand down it, from his hairline to his chin. For a minute or longer he stays there, facing the clouds, then he moves off towards the hotel entrance, and his mouth is moving. He is talking to himself, calmly, continuously, as if having a discussion on his own. ‘Mr Caldecott,’ she calls, not raising her voice. She points at Mr Morton, who has gone up to one of the stone animals and is patting its head, smiling as you would smile at your pet dog. Mr Caldecott puts down the knife he was polishing and moves nearer to the window to watch what is happening, but at that very moment, as though he knew they were spying on him, Mr Morton stops what he was doing and crosses the path to the front door. ‘Do you think he is all right?’ she asks. Hearing the clang of the front door, Mr Caldecott goes out into the hall.

She finishes preparing the tables, recalling the old man who was mad. From morning to dusk some days he would stand by the fountain with his bag of apples and sing the same English song over and over again. His father was a duke, he said, and the pockets of his jacket were crammed with letters he said were from his father, but the letters made no sense at all, she was told. And on Sundays he walked all day, pressing a Bible to his heart, talking to himself as he walked, like Mr Morton was doing, and when he comes into the room for breakfast Mr Morton does look a bit mad, because he is grinning as if he has just met a friend in the hall, and he has rubbed his hair so it looks like straw sticking out of a sack, and his shirt is only half tucked into his waistband and has damp patches all over it.

He crosses the room, towards a chair that has been left out of place. Before she can move it he has knocked against its leg and stumbled. An expression of panic flashes on his face; his hand is on the back of the chair, gripping it as though it were a railing on the edge of a cliff. She runs up to him, and his eyes seem to trace shapes in the air around her head. ‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘Let me, please.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, and his hand moves up and closes gently on her shoulder. ‘I’m clumsy this morning,’ he apologises. ‘I think I have water in my ears. I got caught in the rain,’ he explains, with a small laugh.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It was bad.’

‘It was quite something,’ he replies. ‘I enjoy a good deluge. Wakes me up,’ he says, making his eyebrows go up and down. ‘And now I’m in the mood for a huge volume of food,’ he smiles, lowering himself into the chair that she has pulled out for him. Speaking clearly and courteously, he tells her what he would like to have for breakfast, and then, toying with a spoon, he remarks: ‘I didn’t catch your name. Yesterday, when I asked you –’

‘Eloni,’ she responds, retreating half a pace, and she adds, in the same breath: ‘I bring your coffee.’

‘And where are you from?’ he asks. Smiling directly at her face, he waits for her to answer. ‘Do you mind my asking?’

‘No. No. I come from Greece.’

‘From where, exactly?’

‘Ioannina.’

‘Ioannina,’ he repeats, pronouncing the name exactly. ‘Ioannina. Forgive me. I don’t recognise it. Where is Ioannina?’

‘The north.’

‘East or west?’

‘West.’

‘Up in the mountains?’

‘By the mountains.’

‘Is it a big town?’

‘A big town, yes.’

‘I see,’ says Mr Morton solemnly. ‘I apologise for my ignorance. I haven’t been to Greece and I haven’t read an atlas for a very long time.’ With the edge of his hand he pushes a shallow wave across the tablecloth. Just as she is turning to go, he asks: ‘And how long have you been here?’

‘In England?’

‘In England. At the hotel. Either.’

‘Some months.’

‘And do you like England?’ he asks with a smile that does not seem to be the smile of someone who is trying to trick her.

‘I like it, yes.’

‘But it rains.’

‘Everywhere it rains. It is not so bad.’

‘True, true. Everywhere it rains,’ he laughs, nodding his head, and then suddenly he says: ‘You have an intriguing voice.’ He says it plainly, as if her voice were something in the room, as if he were making a comment on the colour of the carpet. ‘It’s very nice to hear,’ he continues. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘No,’ she replies.

‘Good,’ says Mr Morton. ‘Sometimes I misjudge.’ He rubs his jaw, and it is obvious that he is thinking about what she has told him. ‘Forgotten to shave,’ he remarks, scowling at his hand. ‘I mustn’t keep you. You have other things to do, I’m sure.’

She turns away from Mr Morton’s smile, believing that he knows she is lying. At the door of the kitchen she looks back, to see him rubbing his chin thoughtfully, like a detective thinking about a clue. He turns his face towards her, and her skin goes hot and then cold. She steps backwards into the kitchen, certain now that he knows she is lying. When she takes his pot of coffee to his table she is afraid to look at him; she pretends to be busy so as to avoid having to talk. Through the window in the door she watches Mr Morton as he eats his breakfast. From time to time he stops, holding his fork upright and lifting his head as though listening to someone speak. Her heart is beating out of rhythm as she watches Mr Morton, and long after he has gone back upstairs it still feels as if something heavy and small, like a little block of lead, is turning inside her chest. Annie is telling her about something she saw on television last night, but she cannot listen properly to what Annie is saying. To control the shaking of her hands she washes some pans that did not need to be washed; she mops an area of unstained floor. At the bang of the kitchen’s inner door an attack of dread turns her muscles to water. She cannot move, but it is only Mr Caldecott, who is calling her into his office.

He closes the door of the office and shows her the chair she should sit on. He does not sit down himself, but leans against his desk, with a serious expression and his arms folded, just as he did on the morning she first saw this room, after she had told him the truth about where she was born.

‘Mr Morton seemed OK to me. Did he seem OK to you?’ he asks her.

‘Yes. He is OK.’

‘He seems a nice man.’

‘Yes,’ she says, but Mr Caldecott is not looking at her now. He is gazing into the garden, as if waiting for somebody to arrive with news that may not be good. With a blink he cuts off the thought that is troubling him and turns back to her. His lips make a shape like a smoker’s, slowly breathing out. ‘I’ve made some more calls, Eloni. It doesn’t look very hopeful, I have to say. There’s a hotel in Bath, the manager’s a friend, but he couldn’t arrange things the way we’ve arranged them here. Do you understand?’

‘I understand.’

‘He would have to do things properly. With the paperwork. You see?’ His hands rise and fall in an apologising gesture. ‘In London people wouldn’t be so strict. There would be more opportunities.’

‘I don’t want to go back.’

‘I know you didn’t like it. But it would be better for you, for work.’

‘It is a horrible place. And you need too much money. I cannot go back,’ she insists, and Mr Caldecott acknowledges that she cannot. Worriedly he glances at the garden again. ‘What will happen, Mr Caldecott?’ she asks him. ‘With the hotel?’

‘No, they won’t knock it down. They are selling it to another company, who will change it into something else. A club with bedrooms.’

‘For people to stay?’

‘Yes, for people to stay.’

‘So they will need it to be cleaned. So I could work here?’

‘Well, it will be closed for a long time, while they refit the building. And I think it would be difficult to work here. Difficult for you.’

‘But you will stay here?’

‘No, Eloni. I won’t stay here. They will bring a new manager.’

‘But you will be here? In this place? This –’

‘Area?’

‘This area, yes,’ she says, feeling her heartbeat growing stronger and uneven.

‘No. There’s not much demand for hotel managers in this neighbourhood,’ he says, picking a hair from his cuff. ‘I think it will be London. The bright lights.’

At the thought that she may never be in Mr Caldecott’s office again she looks where he is looking, at the path that leads to the tennis court. Steam is coming off the stones in curling wisps that disappear as they rise. The sunlight on the hanging raindrops looks like thousands of tiny light bulbs in the bushes, like Christmas lights but in summer. When a blackbird bursts out from the branches of the evergreen tree it sends up a shower of droplets that glitter like stars against the dark green leaves. It is so beautiful, the garden of the hotel, and so quiet in this room, that she feels as if she has drunk something that has made her mind stop working, a delicious drink of forgetfulness.

‘Well,’ says Mr Caldecott, touching the knot of his tie as he stands up.

‘Yes,’ she replies, pushing herself out of the chair. ‘I must go to clean the rooms,’ she says, and as she leaves the office she is thinking of the lights of London, the huge billboards of flashing lights above the traffic. She sees the crowds of people pushing each other, in air that tasted of aluminium, and then she sees another scene, a scene she was trying to keep away, and she has to go into an empty bedroom so that nobody will catch her crying, and she sits on the bed, pressing her face into a pillow until she can longer see the tattooed man.

In his room, Edward listens to another e-mail from Claudia:

Here is the story for you. It is a bit silly but also I think a little sad, and beautiful too. A postcard is what it is about. An old postcard and an old love. Not even a love, I think.

Papa called me into his cave of books. He gives me a creased old postcard and tells me what the trouble is about. Last week mother decided to make the living room tidy. The books were spreading all over the apartment – a book-lava, flowing out of the studiolo into every room. She picks them up from under the television, behind the chairs, all over, and carries the pile back to their right home. As she puts the books down, this postcard falls out of one of them. It’s an interesting thing to find – an old-style card, with wavy edges and a picture of Piazza Navona on the front, all in brown. It is addressed to my father at his parents’ house and was sent by someone called Antonietta. She reads the message. The message is not interesting: ‘Rome is exciting…so many things to see…we have visited this and this and tomorrow we will see that and that.’ Boring, the usual thing. But Antonietta had drawn a little red heart in one corner and a little arrow through it. So mother looks at the date: it is from the time when she (mother) was my father’s girlfriend, but before they were going to get married. My mother knows these dates: I know cephalopods, my father knows politics (and a lot more) and my mother knows when my father kissed her, and when he asked her to marry him, and when I walked my first step. She has all these dates wired into her brain. My mother is a calendar.

When my father comes home the postcard is on his desk, in the middle of the desk, so he cannot miss it. The evidence. He picks it up, looks at it, puts it aside. A bit curious, but that is all. He puts it aside. But mother is behind him, watching. She thinks she sees what she was afraid of seeing – and what she wanted to see. Why was the card in the book, she wants to know. It has been in there for years and years, he says. He has not read the book for a long time. He’d forgotten it was there. It’s nothing important. So why had he kept it? He hadn’t kept it, he answers – he just hadn’t thrown it away. That is a different thing. Sometimes my father’s way of reasoning – his way of all the time being reasonable – makes my mother very angry and this is one of those times. She was already angry; now she is furious, because he is being like a Jesuit. Why had he kept the postcard? It is very meaningful for him, that is obvious. Why had he kept it? Was that girl in love with him? Was he in love with her? And my father, instead of telling her ‘No’, he stops to have a think. This was stupid, but what he did next was really stupid. He has his think and he says, ‘Perhaps a bit. Before I met you.’ Why did he say this? Is it because he wants to be an Englishman? Because this is what an Englishman would do? Not do what is best but answer like a child, honestly, saying the truth even if it makes things worse? He says, ‘Perhaps a bit.’ Unbelievable, no? This is the man who knows my mother better than anyone in the world. It is the worst he could do.

It is a very old thing, this card. More than thirty years old. But sometimes the years are like days. Sometimes you were a child yesterday and it is a terrible thing when you count how many years are gone. For my mother this card from Antonietta, this message with the little red heart and the arrow, this betrayal, it happened yesterday. She reads the message to him and it means more than the words are saying. The words are not important – the meaning is underneath them. She is jealous. It is ridiculous, but she is jealous. She accuses my father of deceiving her. She was watching him when he read the card, she tells him. He sighed when he read it, she says. He denies this. She insists that he sighed. I didn’t – you did – I didn’t – you did. So I sighed, he confesses. But not for Antonietta – for the time that has passed since then. Mother of God! What a thing to say! It has been a happy time, he tells her. A very happy time, he says, but now I’m old, he explains. It would be good to be younger, with you, he says. But it’s too late for explaining – she’s gone, out of the room, out of the apartment.

To understand this drama you must have a missing piece of the puzzle. Who is Antonietta? When she wrote the postcard she was Antonietta Venuti, the daughter of a farmer who lived not far from Recanati. A very wild and sexy girl who gave her parents worries because all the boys liked her and she liked all the boys. Antonietta was not liked by all the girls, of course, and was very much not liked by the girl who would become my mother, who was a bit of a goody-goody and never gave her parents any worries. So Antonietta Venuti was a girl who broke many hearts and had very many boyfriends before she married the electrician Roberto Pallucchini, whose son Paolo did not look very much like his father, some people said. There was gossiping about the boy, but Antonietta and Roberto did not give any attention to it. They were happy for some years, the three of them, then Roberto died in an accident when he was not even forty. A mistake by the boy who was working with him, and it killed him in the street, in the middle of the day, so lots of people saw him die. It was terrible. He was putting up lights for a festival, on a stage for dancing and singing that night. Lying on the stage under a string of flags, dead as iron. Paolo took up his father’s business and his mother locked herself in her apartment and never went outside.

For years she stayed in her rooms, seeing nobody except her son. After five or six years she came out again and now she was no longer pretty. She was much more than pretty: she was splendid. When she was younger she was always paler than the other girls, but now her skin was the colour of cream, like those ladies in earlier times who never let the sunlight touch them. And her hair – which was unusual also, because it was red as rust – it seemed even more bright now her skin was so white. It seemed to burn around her head, like a halo. She had become thin in her body and in her face, in a way that made her eyes huge and gave her a nobility she did not have before. In every way she was changed. Before she was mad about new clothes; now she wore plain dark dresses, very simple, very ordinary. Before she was a real talker; now she spoke when she had to speak to somebody, that was all. Now every day she went to mass, and after mass she went to the shops. She never talked about her husband or anything that she had ever done in her life. She is still in Recanati, living alone, in the apartment she shared with her husband and son. You see her every morning, on her way to the church. Sometimes you see her with Paolo or his children, but not often. All the women who hated her when they were young, when she took all the boys they liked, now they look at her with respect or pity, or as if she has something saintly about her. My mother looks at her in this way, but now the sight of the widow Pallucchini is making her jealous too – truly jealous, I think, though it’s about something that is dead and was never very alive, so my father says. And the jealousy is bad because the reason for it is this woman who has suffered and become sort-of-holy. So father will now reason with mother and life will be normal again soon, because really he did not do anything wrong and they have always loved each other, my father and my mother, in their way, which I know is a strange way sometimes. But love is always a strange way, no?

I almost forget: tomorrow night Monica and her husband Bruno are inviting me to their house to eat with them. I will phone if it is possible, but I think it will be a long evening, because we all like to talk and it is a very long time since I have seen Bruno. But the day after, for sure, we will speak, you and I. But you must tell me the number of the hotel – you forgot to do it.

What other things are happening in Recanati? I have met Pierluigi’s girlfriend, the magical Graziana. She is beautiful. But of course she is. Pierluigi cannot see girls who are not beautiful. Ugly girls are invisible for him. Graziana’s mother is from Finland, so she is tall and blonde, with big blue eyes. And big big breasts. They are really amazing – you could hang an umbrella on them. Two umbrellas. I am sure she did not buy them from a doctor, because they do a little wiggle-wiggle swing when she walks. La Stupenda I call her. Pierluigi is very happy. Now he might not come to the villa. He wants to stay here to play with Graziana and her breasts. I am full of envy. My mother has the widow Pallucchini to make her miserable and I have Graziana’s breasts. Ha ha – I wish. Perhaps you wish too? Goodbye. She has good legs too. Bye bye.

Easing back in the chair, he brings to mind the melodiously deep voice of Claudia’s father, and his study full of books, and he remembers the sweet lemon fume that rose from the pot of tea he had set on the desk. The door had been closed, to shut out the sound of Claudia and her mother, who were talking in the kitchen. ‘We leave the women for a while,’ said her father, leaning forward to touch his wrist. ‘I must read you something,’ he said, taking a book from the desk. ‘Some sentences from Mr Burton. There are some words that escape me. I hope you will know them.’ He read a lengthy paragraph, with quirks of pronunciation and stress that he had passed on to his daughter. ‘It is superb, yes? Superb, sublime.’ It was the day after the visit to the Leopardi house and her father wanted to know if Claudia had told him about the coachman’s daughter? Did she tell him about the Contessa’s religious madness? About the way the great library was assembled? ‘Good, good,’ he commented at each reply, until at last he discovered something that Claudia had failed to mention: the public examinations of Giacomo, Carlo and Paolina, who were obliged by their father, Count Monaldo, to answer in Latin the questions relating to history, Christian doctrine, grammar and rhetoric that were put to them by the eminent citizens of Recanati. And later that day, at supper, Claudia joked to her father that he was as bad as Count Monaldo, and complained about the English exercises he used to make them do, every night, making them learn poems they did not understand.

In reply he writes:

I can think of a couple of anatomical corrections that might indeed be of benefit to us, but breasts like La Stupenda’s are not what I have in mind, however remarkable those protrusions may be. Though I wish your brother great joy with the beautiful big chest, I prefer the dimensions of yourself and Marie Antoinette, whose exquisitely modest bosom was said to be the inspiration, as you might know, for the shape of the champagne glass. But did you know that the breasts of Joan of Aragon – Juana la Loca, the mad mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – were reputed to exude a perfume of ripe peaches? I think we need hear no more of Graziana and her wiggle-wiggles.

Thank you for the story of your parents and the widow Pallucchini. I am pleased that harmony is returning to the home. I have to say that I don’t find your mother’s jealousy at all ridiculous. Envy is something I experience every day, but I have not experienced jealousy and I sometimes wish that I could, because evidently I am missing something. If I could see, then I could be very jealous, I am sure. Seeing the handsome Recanati boys you once kissed – that might make me as jealous as your mother. Is Bruno one of them? As it is, they don’t really exist for me, not substantially enough for retrospective jealousy, though I can envy them for having seen you, and seen themselves being seen by you.

As for my parents, the visit was not a success. I did try not to become irritated with my mother, but I made an insufficient effort, I fear. There’s something in her manner that suggests she regards her son’s misfortune as her fault and/or her burden in life, and the way she fusses around me makes me feel like a perpetual convalescent. I shouldn’t complain about her, I know – it was hard for her, bringing me up, and she did everything possible to make my childhood happy. And it was happy, by and large. I am grateful to her, and I do love her, but an hour of her company makes me want to go out and chop down large trees with a very big axe. With my father, on the other hand, there is no friction. What we have is a guilt-sodden truce. He seems to be afraid of me sometimes, and guilty at being afraid. And I think he doesn’t really like me all that much and feels guilty for that as well, while I feel guilty for whatever it is that he doesn’t like. I wonder sometimes how we came to be like this. My impression is that we moved in symmetry, my father withdrawing as I withdrew into blindness. I seem to remember that we understood each other better when I could see something of him, but this may not be true. I don’t know. I’ve started maundering. To conclude: I was a boorish lump and must go back soon, to make amends.

While I’m thinking of it, I think your French phrase is esprit de l’escalier.

And what of life at the Oak? I’m still rattling around in it like one of the last biscuits in the barrel, yet Mr Caldecott, the manager, seems to be permanently on duty: he was at the desk when I first arrived, when I went downstairs to dinner in the evening and when Charlotte picked me up yesterday morning, and he was still around when I came back. I went for a wander in the garden before breakfast this morning and lo! – he’s there again. I can’t imagine what’s keeping him busy. Perhaps an inundation of coach parties is imminent, but I rather doubt it. We had a talk, the manager and I, after Charlotte had deposited me back here. A brief but pleasant chat, out in the garden, from which I learned that Mr Caldecott is a divorced hotelier with a preference for the rural life. I like him. His jib is a pleasing jib, you might say. I have also conversed, in a desultory fashion, with a member of Mr Caldecott’s staff. Her name is Eloni, she’s from northern Greece and that’s about all I know. She’s not the most voluble character, which is a pity because she has a fine voice: low and laryngitic, like a 100-a-day smoker.

No time for Leopardi yesterday, but I feel that work will go well today. Your message has gingered me up for a long stretch at the desk. Speak soon?

He adds the phone number of the Oak, and as soon as his reply has gone he resumes the translation of Leopardi. At four o’clock he rings reception to ask if he might order a plate of sandwiches and a pot of lemon tea. It is the manager himself who takes the call and who ten minutes later brings the tray, and places it on a table to the side of the bureau, and then departs, having made his presence as unobtrusive as possible.

Back in his office, Malcolm continues to leaf through the bills and memoranda and other ephemera from the time of Croombe’s ownership: receipts for quantities of insulating cork, bolts of damask, crates of Bordeaux wine, chairs to be supplied by Maple & Company of Tottenham Court Road. Annotations by Croombe appear in the margins of advertisements and brochures issued by fine hotels in Paris, in German spas, in Swiss resorts, in New York. ‘Flowers in every room, replaced daily,’ he has written beneath a view of the river frontage of the Savoy; ‘140 rooms!’ he exclaims on the back of a print depicting the Baur-en-Ville in Zürich; the single word ‘Cost?’ appears above an engraving of Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, connected by a loop of faded ink to a line announcing M. Cadier’s installation of steam-powered lifts. But the most charismatic of these items are the notebooks, small black leather notebooks with marbled endpapers and finely lined pages that have become as fragile as dead leaves, in which Croombe records his impressions of the building site on the Boulevard des Capucines, his introduction to the ‘captivating and capricious’ Sandrine Koechlin and, in 1872, the week that he and Sandrine spent at the Hôtel Splendide. Every meal that he and his wife ate in the hotel is recorded in detail, with observations on the appointments of their suite and the dining room, and then, halfway through the week, there is a conversation with the maître d’hôtel, a young Swiss by the name of César Ritz. ‘In equal proportion he possesses both ambition and discretion, and he displays a purposefulness that is quite remarkable in –’ he is reading when the phone rings and a woman’s voice says, ‘It’s me.’

They have not spoken to each other for months, but she speaks as if continuing an argument that had been interrupted earlier that day. ‘Hello, Kate,’ he replies. ‘How are you?’

‘What’s this all about, Malcolm?’

‘What’s what all about?’

‘You know perfectly well. This letter to Stephanie,’ she says crisply. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? Going behind my back.’

‘I was not going behind your back.’

‘You didn’t tell me. I’d say that’s going behind my back.’

‘Kate, I was not going behind your back.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because she asked me not to.’

‘She asked you.’

‘Yes, she asked me not to tell you yet, so I didn’t.’

‘So why do you think she asked you to do that?’

‘Because she didn’t want you to know yet, clearly.’

‘And you think that’s OK? She says “Let’s not tell Mum, eh?” and you just go along with it.’

‘No, I don’t just go along with it. Why don’t you ask her to read you what I wrote –’

‘I’ve read what you wrote.’

‘I see.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘That I’m surprised you open her mail.’

‘I found it in her room.’

‘Addressed to Stephanie.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is –’

‘The point is that you read it.’

‘Yes, I read it. I’m not going to apologise for finding out what you wrote to our daughter.’

‘And you think that’s permissible? Reading something addressed to her, a private correspondence.’

‘The point is, Malcolm, that I have a right to know about this. I have a right to know what’s going on.’

‘Well, that was my point exactly. As you know, having read my letter.’

Her breathing becomes quieter, as if she is holding the phone away from her mouth, and then she resumes, at the same pitch as her first words, ‘So she wrote to you? Out of the blue, just like that, she wrote to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t start it?’

‘No, Kate, I didn’t start it. I’ve thought about it, I’ve wanted to do it, I don’t think any court would have convicted me if I had done it, but no, I didn’t.’

‘One day, after all these years, she gets it into her head to write to you.’

‘Apparently.’

‘This is a girl who hasn’t mentioned your name since God knows when. So why does she suddenly get this notion to send you a letter?’

‘Ask her, Kate. I don’t know. I was as surprised as you. You’ll have to talk to her.’

‘I will, don’t worry,’ she says.

In the pause he hears a tapping, perhaps of a pen on a table-top. ‘Kate?’ he asks. ‘Why are you so agitated about this?’

‘I’m not agitated,’ she retorts. ‘I’m livid. Absolutely bloody livid.’

‘But why?’

‘That’s a really dim question.’

‘Then tell me. I know this is confusing. It’s confusing for both of us. But why are you so angry that Stephanie wants to see me?’

‘What I’m angry about is you two scheming behind my back.’

‘We’re not scheming. I’ve explained.’

‘Malcolm, even if you’re not scheming, she is.’

‘That’s not how I’d put it.’

‘It’s how I’d put it.’

‘I’m sure she has good reasons for going about it this way.’

‘Do you now?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And what do you imagine these good reasons would be?’

‘I don’t know, Kate, do I? You tell me.’

‘Good reasons,’ she repeats, and he hears her whisper: ‘Jesus Christ.’

This curse, uttered wearily, as though to herself, sets off an echo in his mind, an echo of conversations he does not want to recall. ‘I can’t very easily –’ he begins.

‘I don’t need this, Malcolm,’ she goes on. ‘I really don’t need this.’

‘Don’t need what? Talking to me?’

‘Oh Christ,’ she sighs again. ‘I tell you what: I don’t even think she does want to see you. And that’s the truth. I think she’s doing this to get at me.’

‘But a minute ago you were complaining that she didn’t want you to know.’

‘I’d have known sooner or later.’

‘Kate, what is going on there? I should know. Has something happened?’

‘Nothing’s happened. Life’s lumbering on. She’s a nightmare to live with, and I’m fed up with it.’

‘I think we should discuss this.’

‘No, we don’t need to discuss it. It’s not your problem. It’s mine. Robert’s and mine.’

‘She’s my daughter.’

‘Not any more. You don’t know her now.’

‘Well, that’s about to change.’

‘Might be.’

‘No, Kate. Is. Is about to change.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this any more. I have to think. I’ll call you back.’

‘When?’

‘I’ll call you back. Soon.’

‘Call me at the weekend.’

‘Yes.’

‘Before Monday, OK?’

‘Yes. OK,’ she exhales.

‘Talk to her, Kate.’

‘Yes, Malcolm. I don’t need your advice.’

‘Talk to her and let me know what’s happening.’

‘Yes,’ she says, and puts the phone down.

In the beginning perhaps they had been drawn together by her discontent. He can still see her, in the dining room of the Zetland, standing amid a group of aunts and uncles, her eyes desperate and her smile frozen with boredom. A man with a bright red jacket and a paisley tie put his arm round her waist, and her neck stiffened as he kissed her on the cheek. She would have been fourteen then, or fifteen. He had often seen her walking with her friends, a demure little entourage that moved undisturbed through the mêlée of children around the gates, more like a gang of precocious office workers than schoolgirls. Waiting for the bus, she always stood extraordinarily straight, like a dancer, and she was standing that way at the Zetland, blinking at the cigar smoke that was being blown across her face. She turned and tapped his arm to ask if she could get a glass of water, then followed him to the kitchen. When she took the glass from him and sat down in the kitchen, her hair hid her face from him in a way that made her look more sophisticated than any of the adults. Lifting her head, she put a hand flat against her brow and sighed: ‘Jesus Christ, get me out of here.’ She’d drunk a glass of gin. She was three-quarters drunk, and she really didn’t like it, she said, looking at him, with her head resting on her arms. He told her she should eat something, and made an omelette for her, which she ate in about half a minute. His father called him back out to the party, and when he returned to the kitchen she had washed the plate and pan, and made two cups of coffee. And somehow, before the party was over, they came to be climbing up the spiral staircase to the roof of the turret. The weathervane creaked above their heads as they looked out at the sea, standing side by side, so close that her dress kept brushing the back of his legs. Kate surveyed the whole town in one continuous sweep. ‘What a dump,’ she said. ‘Just look at it. Death.’ She removed the pin that held the paper orchid to her dress and flung the flower upward. They watched it fly over the sea-coloured roofs and fall into the street. The skin on her arms had tightened with the cold. He took off his jacket and offered it to her, but she would not take it.

Years later she finally escaped, with him, and they had lived abroad and been happy. For a long time they had been happy, most of the time. He knows this to be true, but at this moment, in the grey wake of their conversation, no instance of their happiness shows itself. What impresses itself upon him is that often, even during their first months in Amsterdam, he would see on Kate’s face a look like the expression he had seen that night in the Zetland, and it seems to him now that their marriage was like a path laid upon a marsh, and that the frigid ooze of boredom would well up through it, more and more frequently as the years passed. And boredom became bitterness, became something like contempt. He remembers one afternoon, on a bridge by a bookshop, when he explained why it would be best to stay a little longer in Amsterdam, as Mr Rijsbergen’s assistant. Just three or four months more, then they could go back to England. She listened, watching a police boat moving slowly down the canal. At last she spoke. ‘Whatever you say,’ she said, nothing more, tightening the straps on Stephanie’s pushchair. She walked off without saying another word, and that night, when he came home, he found in the kitchen bin a sheet of the hotel’s writing paper, on which she had written, in lipstick: ‘bored bored bored bored’. He remembers crushing the piece of paper into an empty tin and sitting in Stephanie’s room to watch his daughter while she slept. He fell asleep on the floor beside the cot. When he woke up he went into their bedroom. Kate lay curled on her side, with one hand under her cheek. He was no longer annoyed by the childish message she had left for him to find. Looking at her as she lay in their bed, turned away from him in sleep, in the shadows that the curtains cast like raindrops across the room, he felt something akin to the misery of bereavement, a misery that now, summoned by Kate’s voice, is returning to him, like an amnesiac’s interlude of clarity.

He rummages through the relics on his desk, with no purpose other than to divert himself from the memory of Amsterdam. Taking up a sheaf of menus, he begins to plan the final night of the Oak. He makes notes on dishes that were prepared in Croombe’s kitchen, and drafts a letter to be sent to his most loyal guests, telling them of the special supper with which the Oak will be ending. He settles some bills, takes a call from Giles Harbison, goes down to the basement to check the gauges in the pump room. He continues down the passageway to the pool, but even the sight of the radiant blue walls, of the burnished pipes and the blooms of electric light within the water cannot bring him wholly into the present. As he stands by the water, breathing the sweetly stagnant air, it is as though he had recently arrived at the Oak, and Kate and Stephanie had departed merely weeks ago.

Going home, he drives down the High Street instead of taking his customary route. It occurs to him, as he waits for the traffic lights to change, that he needs some cash for the morning. He parks outside the bank. Something here is unusual tonight, he is aware, as he jabs at the keyboard of the cash machine, but precisely what is unusual he does not know. The drums and cogs inside the machine start to turn; he puts out his hand to take the notes, glances to right and left, and then notices that several street lights in a row have failed. A pallid light lies over the dark bricks of the bank’s façade. The road has a complexion of indigo and the clouds around the moon are bordered with dark lavender. At a shriek of laughter he looks to his left. Three teenaged girls are sitting on the steps of the library, passing a cigarette around. They sprawl on the steps, one with a foot resting on another’s knee, the third girl sitting apart, higher up the steps, ruffling her tightly curled hair. The two girls sitting together turn to look at their friend. Taking a drag of the cigarette, she makes a remark, a sardonic aside that makes the other two howl and throw their arms round each other. This is what Stephanie will be like, he thinks, and finally, in the delight of the idea of his daughter, the mood of the afternoon is obliterated.

In the alley opposite the library, Eloni drops a bag of stale buns into the bin. The pubs will be emptying soon, and the day’s last customers will arrive, some of them so drunk that they will vomit onto the pavement outside, and it will be her job to clear up the mess they make. She goes to the end of the alley; if nobody is coming she can stay outside for some fresh air. Three shrieking girls are walking down the street, veering across the pavement arm in arm. By the bank a man is getting into his car, and as they pass behind him one of them makes a remark that makes him turn and smile at them. Recognising Mr Caldecott, she steps back to avoid being seen, even though he knows she works here. In the shadows of the alley she watches his car go by, and her heart seems to clench, as though he had gone for ever and suddenly she is friendless and in danger. She returns to the kitchen. From the grills she scrapes the gritty pellets of meat and the slivers of onion that have shrivelled and hardened so they look like clippings from animals’ claws. She drains the dirty oil into a cut-down pop bottle. Out front, Charlie yells an order. She splays the grainy discs of meat onto the grill, and all the time the heavy small thing is tumbling in her chest.