The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  During intervals between the courses women reft from intimate conversation looked across at each other’s tables yearningly. Mrs. Hillier held out by the fringe for a friend’s admiration a beautiful crêpe-de-chine scarf she had bought from the shops. She had chosen it for a wedding present, but it was such a lovely green that she could not resist wearing it, just till this evening, to take out the creases. The three pretty daughters of a London doctor at a table in one of the windows maintained their high level of uproariousness. They were the first to be interrupted by Mr. Lee-Mittison, who was going a round of the tables with an open botany-case. He showed them the roots of a very uncommon anemone, found in the hills. The three Lawrences turned their shining heads to wrinkle up their noses at the botany-case, but Mr. Lee-Mittison was not to be discouraged. He dangled one of the roots at them; his teeth and his glasses glittered benevolently.

  “My wife and I,” he said, “hope to make another expedition to the hills tomorrow, taking with us provisions for a picnic. We shall be delighted for you three young ladies to accompany us.” He rested a hand on Veronica Lawrence’s chair and beamed down on the top of her head. The Lawrences made round eyes at each other and tittered unabashedly. Their father, to show that he was in no way responsible for them, leaned back and looked out of the window. “There is a special invitation,” continued their friend, “for Miss Veronica, whom I know to be an excellent walker.” He clicked the lid of the botany-case, winked respectfully at Veronica and passed on to another table.

  The Lawrences had appropriated for general use the principal young man of the Hotel, young Mr. Ammering, who, having been unable to find a job since the war, was said to be suffering from nervous depression in consequence and had come out here for a rest with his father and mother. He seemed to be one of those young men of thirty (Public School and University education, active, keen sportsman, good general capacities) who advertise their willingness to try anything in the Personal column of The Times. Enforced inactivity must come very hard on poor Mr. Ammering, who played tennis all day long with a set face and went out at nights with the Lawrences to dances at other hotels, where he talked to his partners most beautifully about the War.

  Mr. Lee-Mittison after a moment’s pause—not diffident, only embarrassed by the richness of his acquaintanceship—veered left towards the Ammerings’ table. But Victor as he approached took up the local paper and began to read the visitors’ list aloud to his parents, who listened attentively. The nearer Mr. Lee-Mittison came the louder Victor read and the more eagerly his parents listened. Something about the group of them rather too exclusively domestic offended Mr. Lee-Mittison’s social sense vaguely: he turned away. The Ammerings should not see his anemones. He paused for a word with Mrs. Hillier, who shook out the fringe of her scarf at him, seeming delighted to talk; and decided to cut out the visit to the Mellarshes who, quite newly married, were, though not talkative, still solicitously watching each other eat.

  The Honourable Mrs. Pinkerton and her sister-in-law the Honourable Miss Pinkerton had professed to be interested in anemones; they had an extremely fine garden at home which Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison hoped to visit. But though the two families were on excellent terms, in fact becoming quite intimate, Mr. Lee-Mittison still did not like to approach the good ladies at mealtimes. They seemed somehow enclosed as they sat there, moated about by their patent honourableness. Distinction drew a bright line round their woolly white heads, detaching them from the panorama of faces; distinction flowed down with their sleek satin draperies into dark folds. Bowing towards their placid obliviousness, Mr. Lee-Mittison passed on.

  Sydney’s eyes went over Tessa’s shoulder, fixing the doorway; Tessa’s little smiles at her withered unnoticed.

  “Hasn’t Mrs. Kerr come in yet?” said Tessa at last, her penetration innocently revenging the death of the smiles. “How vague she is! I’m afraid she will miss the omelette.”

  “She doesn’t like omelettes,” said Sydney, looking solemnly at Tessa with her strained dark eyes. She could have screamed when Mr. Lee-Mittison, coming up unheard behind her, laid a hand on the back of her chair. Putting down the case on the table, he showed them his roots. He liked Tessa, to whom he had talked a great deal, but it was to Sydney that his invitation was to be addressed. “My wife and I—” he began, and glanced again at Tessa regretfully. She was not young enough…“—provisions for a picnic,” he concluded.

  “When?” said Sydney abruptly.

  He flipped the air with his hand to enjoin patience. “I was about to say: we shall be glad if you will join us tomorrow—”

  “Oh, thank you, I can’t. I am sorry, I have an engagement.”

  “O-oh!” said Tessa, who thought this would have been nice for Sydney. Mr. Lee-Mittison stared incredulously.

  “Tut-tut,” he said. “Well, think it over…” Sydney’s strangeness bothered him; the Lawrences had seemed so glad. From behind a screen that hid the service-lift the waiters with their steaming dishes debouched suddenly and sped like bees to distribute themselves among the tables. Excusing himself quickly, Mr. Lee-Mittison hurried back to his own table, where his wife, who rejoiced in Herbert’s popularity, had sat all this time knitting. Now she leant sideways and pulled his chair farther out for him, tucked her knitting away in a bag and gave him all her attention. The return was in the nature of a homecoming; she was the kind of wife who can always create this atmosphere.

  “Well?” said she.

  Behind Tessa the doorway still framed emptiness. The meal clattered on. Nearly everybody here was English: the air was allowed to come in pleasantly through the open windows under green-striped awnings and feel its way, cool-fingered, from flushing face to face. Nobody was hurried or constrained; time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it, however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage. Beyond the dining-room, along the expanses of the lounge, people risen early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek under the rule of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked up with ennui, had been sedulously barred away. Each armchair, each palm and bureau had become a trysting-place where couples met to hurry off or groups were reunited.

  Meeting, with an air of effort that made her seem to be breasting a current, the desultory trickle of the exodus, Miss Pym came in, very late. She was scarlet-eyed, the last tear must have been recently wiped away. Something wobbled in her throat, round which she twisted and untwisted an anaemic string of turquoise beads. She seemed constrained to look at everybody, then to look quickly away again. Sydney, leaning her cheek on her hand, turned from the door for a minute or two to study Miss Pym. She had never seen what she still called to herself a “grown-up person” so visibly ravaged by emotion. The emotional range of her elders seemed to Sydney narrow and stereotyped; they reacted without variation to stimuli from without. But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of having been attacked from within.

  Miss Pym looked diffidently at the waiter. She had cut herself off from the omelette, so he shrugged his shoulders and brought her up a plate of macaroni from the servants’ lunch. This the bruised creature pitifully but with evidence of hunger began to eat; the traditional British struggle with macaroni brought her down sharply from tragedy to farce. Sydney sighed impatiently and turned away.

  Mrs. Kerr, halfway across the dining-room, looked about her in surprise. Discounting her own lateness, she seemed to wonder if the other visitors had been dispersed miraculously. Her eyebrows said “How odd!” but did not seem to ponder over this. She sat down and looked out at the orange tree; then took up her Tauchnitz and without another glance at the room began to read.

  Tessa and Sydney had been sitting on interminably; they had watched from rise to fall of the curtain the whole drama of lunch. The fact was, Tessa did not
think it wise to hurry. She turned round and round pensively their basket of fruit, took each orange up, pinched it, and put it back again. The nicest-looking were never the softest: another of life’s perplexities.

  “I think,” she said at last, “that I will take another orange, but I won’t eat it here. I shall take it up to my room with me and eat it there. I’m quite sure, you know, that oranges are good…But don’t let me keep you, Sydney, if you want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr.”

  “Why should I want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr?” asked Sydney in an unconcerned voice that echoed round the big, deserted, crumby, orange-scented dining-room.

  4

  Bathroom

  The Honourable Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton occupied two wide-balconied rooms at the end of the first-floor corridor. Five times across the Hotel, each on a floor, these corridors ran—dark, thickly carpeted, panelled with bedroom doors. The front rooms looked over the town into dazzling spaciousness, sky and sea; the back rooms were smaller, never so bright, and looked over the road with its chestnut trees on to the side of the hill. Into these the north light came slanting; no sky was visible until one leant far out, only the scrambling olives and scared little faces of the villas. Eyes from the villas could have peered down into the vacant eyes of newly awakened sleepers. At this side of the Hotel, screened by opaque glass from the possibility of observation, were the bathrooms.

  Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton were of course on the sunny side, with their balconies from which the view could be patronized. The view was their own; they were to enjoy the spiritual, crude and half-repellent beauty of that changing curtain, so featureless but for the occasional passing of a ship. They barricaded themselves in from the assault of noonday behind impassable jalousies. No private suite with a bathroom was available; it was possible, they brought themselves to comprehend dimly, that in hotels of this type none existed. They therefore had had reserved, at some expense, the bathroom opposite to their doors for their exclusive occupation. One says “occupation” advisedly: here in white-tiled sanctuary their bowls of soap, their loofahs, their scented bath salts could remain secure from outrage; here, too, their maid could do their smaller washing and hang the garments up to dry before the radiator. There generally were garments drying there; the two distrusted foreign laundresses, perhaps with reason.

  Other visitors on the first floor respected this arrangement which had a certain beauty for them, the accretion of prestige. They bathed at the other end of the corridor; if that bathroom was full they went up to the second floor where people could not afford to have baths so often. James Milton, a clergyman, was, however, unaware of this, and going upstairs directly after his arrival locked himself into Mrs. Pinkerton’s bathroom. Here he hoped to remove by steaming and by prolonged immersion the grime, ingrained in one till one is almost polished, of a transcontinental journey. This was the bath that he had been promising himself for the last thirty-six hours: it had come to shine before his numbing intelligence as in itself the journey’s bourne. He did not notice the bath salts, but, unthinkingly, made full use of the loofah, which he was surprised and pleased to find there.

  He had arrived late, having dined on the train, and few people were at hand to witness the arrival: a big man talking Italian above the folds of a muffler and making abundant, baulked gestures at the boots and concierge. He seemed unwilling to admit how well they could speak English. The few onlookers, by hanging poised in their talk for an infinitesimal second’s observation, bore in a sense of his squalor upon him sharply. He was aware of the glow of clean faces, the glaze of immaculate shirt-fronts. He felt them averting their eyes considerately. Relegated, alien, blinking like an owl after his dark drive in the light’s untempered scrutiny, he stood for a moment, then fled upstairs on the way to Mrs. Pinkerton’s bathroom.

  He took in enough of his No. 19, when the chambermaid switched the lights up, to know that it faced out the wrong side, offered no space for his baggage, and was so furnished as to confuse thought, distract contemplation and impede the movements of the body. The lace-veiled window was pallid against the dark; pushing it open a little he let in some cold air and heard the rustle of a palm tree. Unwinding his muffler and throwing off his great-coat, he waited only to take out his sponge bag and dressing-gown and sweep his towels along with him; then made off down the corridor, calling back to the chambermaid in three languages that he was going to have a bath. He was an independent man with a bump of locality on which he had grown with years increasingly reliant, and he brought himself without difficulty to the door of a hospitable-looking bathroom.

  Mrs. Pinkerton and her sister-in-law never sat for more than a minute or two in the drawing-room where other ladies forgathered. They withdrew early to their own rooms where they would embroider, eat little pastries and drink coffee. No one else had ever been invited to join them there; such an invitation was hardly to be expected, though the Pinkertons had consented to be present once or twice at Mrs. Lee-Mittison’s coffee parties. They felt, perhaps, a little lonely these evenings; the comfortable feeling of enclosedness would fall away when there was nobody to be enclosed against. In the high room among marble-topped furniture they sat listening with well-bred attentiveness to one another’s breathing. Through the thin walls every footstep, every shutting of a door should have been audible in the velvety silence of the corridor. Yet the ladies had this evening no inkling of what was to occur; no premonition seems to have troubled them.

  The Honourable Edward Pinkerton had died before his father, Lord Parke. Though he had not been young when he died, such a frustration of life’s high purpose for him—he was an only son—had lent him the pathos of youth. Had his widow been less substantial and less palpably recent he might have passed, by the references made to him, as having died before his majority. He remained “Poor Edward,” embalmed like a dead child in the pity and patronage of the living. He was making a third with them, this evening as ever; his mild bewhiskered face, with that expression of awe on it with which fancy is wont to invest the pictured faces of the dead, looked out from a vast scrolled frame that overshadowed the silver-stoppered bottles on the dressing-table. A similar photograph commanded the bedroom of Rosina, his sister, to the exclusion of other relationships. Rosina sat in an armchair pulled out under the light with her work held up to her eyes, embroidering diligently. She and her sister-in-law had grown very like one another, coiffured and dressed by the same hands, worked upon from within by similar preoccupations. They were more closely allied to one another in the memory of Edward than they had either of them been to Edward himself. Somehow, up to the moment of death, Edward had eluded both of them; it was after death they had closed in relentlessly. Cherished little animosities reinforced their ties to one another; Rosina maintained to herself implacably that if she had been Edward’s wife she would have borne him children; Louisa was enough aware of this to be a little markedly generous to Rosina, who was not in a position to refuse anything that might be offered.

  Mrs. Pinkerton sat turning over the pages of the Tatler and talking to Rosina while she embroidered.

  “I see,” she said, “the Wyntons’ girl is to be married.”

  “Ah?” remarked Rosina, snipping with her gilt scissors. “Who is he?”

  “A Barre, apparently.”

  “Are there Barres? I never heard of any. Where does it say he comes from?”

  “It says here,” replied her sister-in-law, looking at the paper closely, “Hampshire.”

  “There are no Barres in Hampshire,” said Rosina definitely. “Then it is another of these marriages.” They both sighed.

  “Elissa Howard,” Mrs. Pinkerton went on more cheerfully, “writes a very pleasant, cheerful letter. She is so considerate when one is abroad or ill. She is a woman that I always like to hear from. She is coming out next month, to Nice, you know.”

  “It will be pleasant to have Elissa within reach: one feels very isolated.” />
  “Oh, I’m sorry, Rosina, that you don’t like the Hotel…I cannot understand how anyone can go to Nice: they say it is a kind of French Brighton.”

  “They say the Carnival is very pretty…But I dare say,” Rosina unguardedly added, “that it’s more expensive than we—”

  “It’s not a question—” Mrs. Pinkerton was beginning. “Come in!” she cried in an exasperated voice.

  Lurgan the maid put her long wedge of a face round the door. “I beg your pardon, Madame, I’m sure,” she said, “but I put the Shetlands to air an hour ago and now I cannot get into the bathroom…”

  * * *

  —

  Three or four minutes after this announcement Tessa, thoughtfully taking her hair down with Baudouin propped up before her, was surprised by the entrance of Sydney, unusually animated.

  “Mrs. Pinkerton and Rosina,” said Sydney, “cannot get into their bathroom. They simply can’t. I’ve been watching. Both their doors are open and they take it in turns to come and rattle incredulously at the bathroom door. It is really funny; I wish you would peep out and look. That determined little rat of a maid of theirs is being the man of the party; she heaved her shoulder against the door just now as though she were going to force it, and Rosina cried, ‘No, don’t, I forbid you—there may be somebody there!’ ”

  “Oh, poor things,” said Tessa, “how awkward for them! Do you think they will send for the manager?”

  Tessa, with her fluffy hair falling down round the innocent, interrogatory O of her face looked younger, looked really rather—there was no other word for it—sweet. She wrapped her kimono closer round her and followed Sydney into the dusk of their end of the corridor, from whence they expected to watch unobserved. But a moment later Miss Pinkerton, down at the other end, turned in their direction a wild face of appeal. She hesitated, then something in the essential Tessa brought her towards them. She ignored Tessa’s deshabille. “Oh, Mrs. Bellamy,” she began, “I wonder if you…It is rather embarrassing…”