The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  Sydney seemed surprised at this quick little gush of humanity. She stared at her friend, who was brilliantly earnest, then turned away gloomily. “Oh, women’s lives…”

  “Well, I suppose it’s inconsistent of me,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I’m not a Feminist, but I do like being a woman.”

  Any approach to the personal seemed to be difficult. Sydney said airily: “Oh, of course if one’s one kind of woman—”

  “Well, so are you,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking abstractedly at her young friend. Sydney, at a probable twenty-two, had a clear pallor and regular features of which the lines were now, as too often, strained and broken up by an expression of over-eagerness. An exaggerated attention to what was being said or suggested would arch up the eyebrows tragically, harden the eyes and draw in the mouth to a line that prefigured maturity’s. The forehead was broad and lovely and could have been bland. The scarlet handkerchief bound round the head accentuated her darkness and pallor; it had in common with other details of her dress and appearance a faint kind of nervous swagger.

  “You could be charming,” said Mrs. Kerr. “But I daresay an indifference to one’s company which doesn’t comprehend the desire to please is really the safest—won’t you go and play tennis?”

  “I’m waiting for the people on E Court to finish,” said Sydney, and got up slowly, not quite knowing whether to resent this as a dismissal. Mrs. Kerr, with the air of a return to solitude, a cheerfulness rather suggestive of release, leant forward and signalled to someone below who had been looking up for a long time trying in vain to catch her eye. “Oh yes,” she replied, “do go and play tennis. Surely it wasn’t wise to come away from your partner when you were expecting a court?”

  “But what are you going to do?” asked Sydney. Mrs. Kerr did not answer. “I mean, do you want me to go?” she began again. She did not want to leave the pavilion, this “girl of your age” tone which was being used to her really did give her something to resent. She did not want to go down to the courts again; she knew that if Mrs. Kerr sat on here, watching her meditatively, her play would all go to pieces.

  “I have heard so much of your service. Today I am really going to watch it.”

  “This is one of my off days.”

  “Dear Sydney, whenever I come you tell me it’s one of your off days.” Mrs. Kerr laughed. “I’m unlucky.”

  “Oh, do you notice that? From the moment you come here I never hit anything.”

  “What on earth do you mean, my dear Sydney! How terribly sinister! It had never occurred to me that my eye might be evil. I meant something much more prosaic—that I happen to miss things.”

  Sydney felt foolish. How like her (Mrs. Kerr would agree) to have drawn so far-fetched, so morbid an inference. How unlike herself to have been betrayed into so bald an assertion.

  “Luck’s funny,” she said. “I don’t think it’s constantly good or bad, but it’s sun-y or moon-y, if you know what I mean, and one’s born with one kind or the other. Mine’s moon-y—I’d better go down.”

  “Yes, I shouldn’t have kept you.”

  Sydney played so badly that Colonel Duperrier was astonished. Now and then he permitted himself a “tut-tut”—by implication a tribute—an “Et tu, Brute!” at which she ironically chuckled. They crossed and recrossed one another grimly. Along the margin of her vision, distended by nervousness, shoulders were shrugged, and disappointed onlookers strolled away. At a net that grew ever higher Colonel Duperrier’s opponent, Chinesely grimacing, crouched and sprang incredibly. His partner, a long way behind him, nonchalantly flipped at her balls. Away at the back of the pavilion Mrs. Kerr remained sitting: the edge of her skirt, the tip of her parasol, came out into sunlight. From out of the black shadow that hid the rest of her, her scrutiny like a livewire was incessantly tugging at Sydney’s consciousness.

  The set was over, quickly over. Colonel Duperrier’s play had been affected by the collapse of his partner; now, as their opponents strolled off, he laughed deprecatingly, stooping to let the balls run up on to his racquet. He had several pleasant remarks in reserve to brush away Sydney’s discomfiture, but some kind of an explanation from her was needed to unlock them; he did not know how to begin. She did not apologize, and his embarrassment grew. No one could have been sorrier than her for the poor girl—a fine player subject to this deplorable kind of paralysis. He thanked God that he had not yet asked her to play with him in the tournament, and resolved never to do so, yet was filled with a special, protective benignancy for her.

  “Terrible glare,” said he.

  “There generally is.”

  “I thought particularly bad today…”

  “I didn’t notice,” she said indifferently, wondering where to go now. Anywhere, she thought, but back to the pavilion after all this.

  “We ought to move off,” he said, rousing her; “they want the court. Well, I vote we take those two on again and get some of our own back. Don’t we?”

  Though he continued to admire Miss Warren, he could be no longer surprised that she was not popular in the Hotel. There was a certain dark stare of aloofness…He told himself that she was curiously dammed up: there was certainly something in the girl. Generally speaking, he preferred people who came out easily: she was not his type. He came up abreast with her dutifully as they walked from the court; then his face brightened: he knew he would soon be relieved of her as Mrs. Kerr smiled and nodded down at them from the shade of the pavilion. “Come on up!” he said eagerly, and Sydney was forced to precede him.

  “We-ell?” said Mrs. Kerr, as though they had been a pair of victors.

  “The glare is awful,” said Colonel Duperrier.

  “I expect it is,” she agreed, and made room for them both. Colonel Duperrier cheered up; soon, in a quiet way that diffused itself across his features and attitude and the expression with which he watched the players below, he was very cheerful indeed. When he had left them, Mrs. Kerr asked Sydney to walk with her to the library. “Unless,” she said, “you are going to play again.”

  To go to the library one turned to the left instead of the right at the top of the footpath; the same procession of chestnut trees arched one over with their boughs. At this hour the road was more frequented: lunch-time had made perceptible its earliest magnetism. Visitors strolled gravely hotelwards; villa residents were proudly distinguished by the possession of dogs. There was no traffic, and a long-legged English child in the middle of the road was able to read as she walked without menace.

  “What a nice man, that Colonel Duperrier!” said Mrs. Kerr.

  “Yes. Very patient.”

  “That seems a curious quality to attract you.”

  “Anyone else would have killed me this morning. I suppose he had learnt to be patient: that wife—”

  “Poor woman!”

  “It would be kinder if neurotics were to be chloroformed—did you admire my service?”

  “My dear child, don’t be heroic! I don’t remember it as anything terrible. I don’t know, of course, how well you can play.”

  Sydney was silent, stung by a sudden suspicion that Mrs. Kerr did not really believe in her tennis at all. If she did not exist for Mrs. Kerr as a tennis player, in this most ordinary, popular of her aspects, had she reason to feel she existed at all? It became no longer a question of—What did Mrs. Kerr think of her?—but rather—Did Mrs. Kerr ever think of her? The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney that moment a kind of extinction. Mrs. Kerr had many friends; all these demi-gods would leap up at a reference to one of the least of them, shadowy and menacing. Men and women of supreme distinction and beauty, they never appeared in person, were never described and so were never allowed to diminish. The very fact that Mrs. Kerr never praised them—seemed, in fact, rather flatly to take them for granted—was fresh reason for self-laceration. “A delightful woman…rather a charming person…I thought, an
amusing man…” These haunted Sydney, aloofly inimical, these friends of her friend. People one did not know remained on a different plane, inaccessible to one’s criticism. Sydney professed herself (to friends of her own age) a Realist, and it was perhaps because of this that her imagination, which she dealt with austerely, was able to revenge itself obliquely upon her.

  After a pause she said, “Well, you know one thing now about my play—if it interests you. You do know how bad it can be. I think that was the depths.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” her friend said benevolently. “Will you kindly choose me another book?”

  “Did you finish that last?”

  Mrs. Kerr shook her head and looked sideways at Sydney in a way of her own. She sighed, her eyelids delicately and sadly fluttered—she was a lovely thing.

  “Oh,” said Sydney, in a secret ecstasy, “you are incorrigible. Then why do you go on asking me to choose you books?”

  “I know there must be something in them.” The way this was said might have stamped out of being, for Sydney, for ever the friends of her friend. “I know, you see, there has to be something. I want so much to be able to read them—I hope so much that I may.”

  “I shall give up choosing you books.”

  “Oh no, don’t do that…Sydney darling. I suppose I may be incorrigible. I still seem to read for amusement.”

  “But that was just it—I was so certain that man would amuse you. He’s got a brilliant mind like—like what would appeal to you.”

  “I’m sure he has. But you see, he was much too clever for me that he only seemed to me dull. And I do still like books to be—what shall I say?—decent. Though I know it isn’t the thing to admit: you all have such pure minds…I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t look a bit penitent. Tell me—has Ronald got a very ‘pure mind’?”

  “Alarmingly,” said Ronald’s mother. “But he’s learnt to respect my limitations.”

  Sydney, who was herself at times conscious of these limitations—remotely, as in a dream—smiled at the thought of Ronald, a long-limbed, intense-looking adolescent she was unlikely to meet. Ronald was a long way away, in Germany. (She had put together her Ronald from two photographs his mother possessed: a blurred snapshot and a shadowy portrait-study.) One could smile over Ronald; to imagine him was not distressing; he was not among the demi-gods. It was amusing to see one’s own qualities in him pilloried in smiling maternal allusions. Ronald was “young.” Yet all this might not have counted so much in his favour if it had not seemed certain that Ronald was to remain in Germany.

  “I should like to meet Ronald,” Sydney said benevolently. “And, by the way,” she added, “I must bring back Tessa another book. Anything that’s bright and very loving, with a certain amount of illness in it, will do her beautifully, provided she doesn’t remember having read it before…Now you’re not to say I’m horrid about Tessa: she’s as much amused at her own taste in books as I am. She hasn’t got much time for novels now—she’s reading Baudouin.”

  “It would never do,” said Mrs. Kerr, “to bring back Mrs. Bellamy one of your depressing books.” She slipped an arm through Sydney’s for a moment as they turned together up a flight of cold steps to the library.

  3

  Late for Lunch

  Tessa Bellamy did not feel so well again today, and lay wishing more than ever that she knew what were the matter with her. Several complaints had, it is true, been suggested to her by her doctors before leaving England, and she had come abroad with a perfectly open mind as to the possibility of most of them. Not one of them had proved itself entirely satisfactory. She wanted something that would settle down with her, simple and unexigent like an old family servant, so that they might get to know each other and understand each other’s ways. She was distressed by any suggestion of impermanence; she was a lonely woman. One had to have Something in one’s life. She lay on a velvet sofa in her bedroom with the head pulled round away from the window and wished that she were a religious woman and that it were time for lunch and that Sydney would soon come in.

  Tessa had made a special arrangement with the Management about dieting, if that should be necessary. She paid an extra five per cent to have the menu for each meal brought up in advance, but so far she had liked the sound of everything so much and hated so much to give trouble that she had not asked for anything to be changed. She was not sure now whether she should continue the arrangement; by which, of course, one did deprive oneself of the pleasures of curiosity and suspense. On the other hand, the arrival of the menu gave one something to think about during the morning. She wished so much that she could make up her mind about this, turned her head among the cushions and with a sigh refolded her hands on her bosom. In Life one seemed always to be making decisions.

  When Sydney came in she thought that Tessa, lying with closed eyes in the thick green dusk of the closed jalousies, must be asleep. She stood looking down for a moment and pretended to herself (to heighten a sense of her real security) that Tessa was dead. She was fond of Tessa, but imagination often divorces itself from feeling; all that occurred to her now was that in such a contingency she would have to leave Mrs. Kerr and the sunshine and go back to London because Tessa, whose guest she was here, would no longer be able to pay the bills. Later, however, she produced a real pang of distress—how her own irritability and coldness would glare back at her when Tessa was gone!

  Tessa put a hand up and patted her front hair, then opening her eyes looked up at Sydney thoughtfully, not as one who has just been awakened.

  “I’ve been thinking things over—” she said.

  “Good!” exclaimed Sydney with the geniality that endeared her to Tessa. “If it’s the menu, you know I should keep that up. It’s an excellent principle and I’m sure the manager respects you for it.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” said Tessa, and looking up with round eyes thought how untrue it was that intellectual people did not make pleasant companions. “But you know I do hate—”

  “Giving trouble? But that’s what they’re paid for…How are you feeling?” Sydney looked down with solicitude. To think one felt ill, to think only of that, to be so netted down must be terrible.

  Tessa, drawing in her chin upon its many duplications, lay still and considered a moment, then began to tell Sydney exactly how she did feel. While she was still talking the gong sounded; she got up and patted her hair again, this time in front of the looking-glass. Breaking off with a sigh she began to powder her nose. Sydney meanwhile pushed open the jalousies; if she did not do this, Tessa would quite contentedly make up her face in the half-light and go downstairs like a nice little clown.

  Sydney’s relations had been delighted that she should go abroad with her cousin Tessa. It had appeared an inspired solution of the Sydney problem. The girl passed too many of these examinations, was on the verge of a breakdown and railed so bitterly at the prospect of a year’s enforced idleness that the breakdown seemed nearer than ever. Now an ideal winter had offered itself: sunshine, a pleasant social round. Sydney could be out of doors all day long; she might distinguish herself in tennis tournaments; she might get engaged. And Tessa was so kind; she was forty, married, motherly; she had no nerves, she had no children. Her inside kept her happy and interested; she would be the ideal companion for anybody inclined to be neurotic. She admired Sydney whom she maintained to be cheerful and amusing; it would be good for Sydney to be with somebody who refused to consider her as anything but cheerful and amusing. Sydney seemed as a rule to be so unfortunate in her choice of friends.

  Sydney untied the red handkerchief and combed back the hair from her forehead. She frowned at her own reflection: Was this what all these people really saw when they looked at her? She was accustomed to stare at people as from a point of vantage, forgetting she too had a face. They had thoughts, too (with these she often forgot to credit them); did they also think as they looked at o
neself? The strangeness is that a cat can look at a king and see him; we kings forget so often that cats are more than objective.

  “—a lucky girl you are,” Tessa was remarking, “to be able to walk about like that in the sun without burning your face…We’re to have an asparagus omelette, Sydney: you know, ‘à l’asperge.’ We might come on down, if you’re ready: they bring in the omelettes at once, you know, and it really isn’t fair to the waiters…”

  Very few people cared as much as this about being fair to the waiters; the rest came trickling into the dining-room gradually, by twos and threes. The table Tessa had secured for herself was in a good position, near the door but not too far away from the window. By turning her head a little Sydney could feel the cool air on her face, and see, under the awning, palm-fronds rising up from the garden below, an orange tree in fruit and the roofs of the town behind it, vivid against the sea. Mrs. Kerr’s table was off to the right at such an angle that, from where they sat, without being too much observed, Sydney was able to watch it. It was generally empty the longest of all. Behind Tessa the double doors were spread wide in a hospitable gesture, like the hands of a maître d’hôtel. Beyond, down the long perspective to the foot of the stairs, one could see visitors take form with blank faces, then compose and poise themselves for an entrance. Some who thought punctuality rather suburban would gaze into the unfilled immensity of the room for a moment, then vanish repelled. Others would advance swimmingly and talk from table to table across the emptiness, familiarly, like a party of pioneers. Men came in without their wives and did not always look up when these entered. Women appearing before their husbands remained alert, gazed into an opposite space resentfully, and ate with an air of temporizing off the tips of their forks. When the husbands did come in it seemed a long time before there was something to say. It seemed odder than ever to Sydney, eyeing these couples, that men and women should be expected to pair off for life.