by Alison Moore
‘Of course not,’ she said. But the truth was, she did sometimes wonder whether she had made a mistake. Anyway, she did not see Conrad at Ida’s, and she did not ask Bernard about him again, and Bernard never mentioned him.
Over coffee, Ida asked, ‘So when can I expect grandchildren?’
Ester, who did not especially want children and thought that she had even said as much to Ida, said, ‘Well, we might not have children.’
‘But Bernard wants children,’ said Ida. She turned to him. ‘You’ll never guess who I saw last week – Andrea, and she has a little baby boy, he’s just beautiful.’
And later, Ida said, ‘Bernard, I saw Susanne in the supermarket the other day. She asked after you.’ When Ida mentioned these other girls, Ester wondered if one of them was the girl Ida had told her about in the register office toilets, the girl Bernard had loved.
At night, she lay with Bernard on the pull-out bed in the living room, with her head on his rising and falling chest, and she said, ‘The day we got married, your mother told me there was only one girl you had ever loved.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s probably true.’
Ester lifted her head to look at him.
‘Until you, of course,’ he added.
‘She said you were only with me to get revenge on Conrad for taking her.’
‘Well, maybe that was partly true too, at first.’
Ester lay quietly for a long time, and when she finally said, ‘Who was she?’ Bernard was asleep, or pretending to be. When Ester broached the subject again in the morning, Bernard became annoyed and would not talk.
At breakfast, Ida said, ‘Bernard, Therese has three children now, the girl and twin boys,’ and Ester studied his face.
Ida said to Ester, ‘You’ll lose your figure anyway, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
On Ester’s last visit with Bernard, Ida invited a girl for dinner. The girl came out of the kitchen with two plates of liver, putting one down in front of Ester and giving the other to Bernard. Ida, following her out with more food, said, ‘This is Liese. She is a nursery nurse, very fond of children. She is twenty, still young. Although when I was twenty I was already pregnant with Bernard.’
Ester and Bernard always argued on the drive back to Hellhaus.
Eventually, Ester suggested to Bernard that he go to his mother’s alone. She made some excuse the first couple of times, but after that she didn’t give a reason and he didn’t ask for one.
With or without Ester, Bernard always comes home in a bad mood, along with a pile of ironed underpants and paired socks. Ester imagines Ida saying to Bernard what a shame it is that Ester is too busy to come, and couldn’t a cheap cleaner have been hired for a couple of days to do what Ester does?
Ester finally opens her eyes and looks at her watch. She gets up and puts on some make-up and the same cleaning clothes she wore yesterday and goes into the bathroom. She runs the tap and fills the saucers of the Venus flytraps which stand on the ledge behind the sink. She brought just one with her from home – one of her mother’s plants – dividing and repotting until she had half a dozen. She waters them, and feeds them the dead insects she finds on the windowsills, tickling the leaves to make them close. She drops in flies which she has swatted. Not quite dead, they buzz furiously inside the tightly shut traps, and after a while there is silence. She puts her plants in the sunshine and talks to them, but still they sometimes die.
Opening a window, Ester smokes a cigarette and chats to her plants, her ash falling onto the expectant leaves. The sun is strong even at this hour. It is going to be a hot day.
After breakfasting alone and then checking out the honeymooners who have been there all week and have barely been out except to eat, she cleans their downstairs room. When she has finished, she wheels her cleaning trolley into the lift and goes back to the bar.
She sits on her stool and looks around. There are a couple of customers in. One is a stranger; the other is not. Without taking off her rubber gloves, she has her first gin of the day without tonic. She is hot; she is flushed and damp. She adds tonic to her next one, rolling the icy glass across her forehead and holding it against her breastbone, the condensation trickling into her cleavage.
The door behind her, the door to the guest rooms, swings open. She glances around and sees the boy she put in room ten walking through. He has his rucksack on his back, and his arm around the new girl. Ester goes over to her desk and checks him out, crossing him off in her ledger and returning his key to its hook on the wall. The girl stands at a distance, waiting for him. He seems to be making an effort not to look at Ester, glancing instead at the tired remains of the breakfast buffet beside them, at the sweating meat, the dried-out eggs. Then he and the new girl walk out into the street and the boy puts his arm around the girl’s shoulders and Ester watches them walking away.
She drains her glass and removes her rubber gloves.
‘Same again?’ asks the question mark, moving along the bar towards her. His breath smells of strong coffee. She looks at him, and at the clock, and nods. She leads the way to the lift and they travel up with the cleaning trolley.
She does not take him to her room, will not have him lying on Bernard’s side of the bed, lying naked where Bernard sleeps, with his head on the camphor-scented pillow. In room ten, the question mark lies down on the bed, on barely cooled sheets. He undoes his belt and pushes down his trousers, using his feet to get them as far as his ankles. He pulls one foot free but the other one gets stuck and his trouser leg trails from his pale pink shin and Ester thinks of sausage meat and sausage skin. He leaves on his T-shirt and his socks.
Ester, on the other side of the bed, undresses slowly in the bright room while he watches her. When the pieces of her clothing lie around her like the dropped petals of a half-dead rose, she climbs onto the bed.
By the time Ester returns to the bar, the girl is there, serving customers. Ester sits down on her stool and the girl says, ‘Bernard’s looking for you.’
‘Bernard’s not back until tomorrow,’ says Ester.
‘No,’ says the girl, ‘he’s back.’
Ester climbs carefully down from her stool. ‘Where is he now?’ she asks.
‘Upstairs,’ says the girl, ‘I think.’ She turns back to her customer and takes his money.
Ester walks to the lift. Her cleaning cart is still in there. She goes first to their private apartment and finds Bernard’s holdall on the end of the bed. She looks in the bathroom, the kitchenette and the little sitting room, but Bernard is not there.
She goes back downstairs and into the bar, picking up her rubber gloves. She goes into the kitchen where the chef is pounding cheap cuts of beef, tenderising steaks for dinner, pulping apples, and smashing black walnuts with a rolling pin, beating them beneath a tea towel to keep the shells from flying, to prevent the juice from staining the work surface.
Ester goes up in the lift again with her cleaning trolley and her rubber gloves. She collects fresh bedding and returns to room ten, cursing quietly to herself. Opening the door, she sees Bernard, who is already walking away from the mess on the bed, the mess he has made of this man who did not leave in time. Passing her in the doorway, Bernard pauses, and she feels the heat of him through his shirt and his breath against her cheek as he leans close to say, ‘Don’t let there be a next time.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Coffee
Futh wakes at dawn and can’t get back to sleep. He is painfully hungry but knows that the hotel is not yet serving breakfast. He gets up and goes to the table where the coffee-making facilities are and eats the biscuits. Then he makes a cup of instant coffee – coffee whose volatile aromatics have been lost and then replaced during the manufacturing process; coffee to which the smell of coffee has been added – and goes out onto the balcony in his pyjamas to drink it, watching the sun rise, its reflection in the river.
He feels dreadfully stiff and his feet are tender. He thinks seriously about skipping
the final day of walking and instead going to Utrecht after all. It would mean arriving unannounced but, he thinks, he was invited. It should not be too difficult to remember the way to Carl’s mother’s house even without the address, but first he would have to pick up his car which is in Hellhaus. He wonders if he could get a bus to Hellhaus and then drive to Utrecht. He could take his suitcase with him on the bus rather than have it taken by transit and risk it arriving later than him and having to wait for it. If he did that he would not need to go to the hotel at all. He could telephone later from Carl’s mother’s house and explain his change of plan. If he left here straight after breakfast he might be in Utrecht by lunchtime. Carl, he recalls, would be home in the evening.
He drinks another cup of coffee on the balcony and then gets dressed and goes downstairs, hoping to find the proprietor to ask him for a bus timetable. There is no one about. He finds leaflets promoting places to visit, and a telephone directory in which he looks up his own name, finding other Fuths. But there are no bus timetables. The front door is open though and he wanders outside to look for a bus stop.
He walks slowly and has to go further than he intended, but he eventually finds what appears to be the right stop about a mile from the centre, near the river. He deciphers the timetable and discovers that there are three direct buses to Hellhaus each weekday – one in the morning, one in the early afternoon and one in the evening. He could catch the first one after breakfast.
Feeling pleased, he returns to his room and makes himself one more cup of coffee to see him through. He packs his suitcase, zips it up and puts it by the door. He will collect it after breakfast. With a little bit of time still on his hands, he makes the bed even though he knows it will only be unmade, stripped, when he is gone. Taking one last look around the room, he spots his watch on the bedside table and straps it onto his wrist. He is ready to go.
He heads downstairs, taking his rucksack with him. While he fills a plate from the breakfast buffet, he stashes in the pockets of his rucksack a few snacks for the bus ride.
He sits down. He is trembling slightly, perhaps from drinking so much caffeine on an empty stomach, but when the hostess offers to bring him a pot of coffee, he accepts. It is good, strong, fresh coffee and the smell brings to mind his mother’s grinder, the coffee beans poured into the top and crushed with a turn of the handle.
She always used nice china cups and hot milk poured from a little pan. She used to drink her coffee standing up, looking out of the window. Sometimes an aeroplane would fly overhead and she would watch it, following it across the otherwise empty sky, gazing after it even when it was too small to see and all that remained were the slowly vanishing contrails, lost in a world of her own, as if she were already gone, her coffee cup cold in her hand.
That was how it was when he came downstairs the morning after their return from Cornwall. The kitchen smelt of coffee and she was standing at the window. She was wearing a pink, summery dress which, after looking at her for a while, he recognised from his parents’ honeymoon photos – it was her going-away dress. By the back door he saw the garish suitcase from under the bed. His father was still upstairs. And then everything happened in a rush – her kissing him and taking her suitcase and leaving. It happened so quickly that when he picked up her coffee cup in the suddenly empty kitchen, he found that it was still warm.
Leaving the breakfast room, he finds himself shaking so badly that he needs to sit down. He cannot even contemplate climbing the stairs to his room. Being right by the lounge, he goes in. There is a television in the corner showing the news with no sound, and there are two sofas, neither of them occupied. He lies down on one and closes his eyes and, despite all the caffeine, drifts into a weird sleep.
He wakes feeling anxious. He looks at his watch and is disappointed to see that he has missed the first bus to Hellhaus. He will have to catch the second one after lunch. He will not be in Utrecht, then, before the end of the afternoon, but, he thinks, he is sure to be there in time for his dinner. He rouses himself and goes upstairs to his room.
When he sees that his suitcase has gone, he realises that it must have been taken for transit while he was asleep. He goes back downstairs and asks the proprietor about it and is assured that his suitcase is already on its way to Hellhaus. Well, thinks Futh, if it is already on its way perhaps it will arrive before him. So he will, after all, have to go to the hotel to ask for it and explain what he is doing but that is all right. He might not even have bothered if it had not been for the fact that the silver lighthouse is in it.
He leaves the hotel with some time to kill before catching the afternoon bus. He goes into a shop, thinking of buying a newspaper. He has not looked at one all week and is feeling somewhat detached from reality. The shop has only German papers and Futh, testing his understanding of written German, which is better than his understanding of spoken German, looks through a few but, not making much sense of them, leaves without buying one.
He walks down to the river and sits alone under some trees, appreciating the cool breeze coming off the rushing water. Closing his eyes, he consciously notes the smells around him, the smell of the outdoors, so that he will be able to return later, in his mind, to this oasis.
He has often wondered what it would be like to have an impaired sense of smell. He loves to wake to the smell of fresh coffee, but when Angela was pregnant she became suddenly unable to bear the stink, she said, of the coffee machine, and of Futh unwashed first thing in the morning, for the brief duration of each of her pregnancies. He thinks about things he would prefer not to be able to smell, like alcohol on other people, and he thinks about the potential dangers of being unable to detect certain things, like gas or bad food. Some people cannot smell cyanide. Some people can simply not recognise smells, smelling one thing and interpreting it as something else entirely. It is possible to imagine a smell. He himself, recently, suffering from the flu, found himself smelling coffee which was not there.
He takes out his snacks and eats them for lunch. Seeing some ducks, he breaks up a bread roll and throws the pieces into the water, but the ducks don’t notice and the bits of bread are carried away by the current.
When he stands up and leaves his quiet spot between the trees, there is plenty of time to get to the bus stop. His ruined feet go slowly but still he arrives in time and sits down, expecting to see the bus soon.
The minutes go by and he assumes at first that the bus is running late. Then he wonders whether he is standing at the wrong stop, and wanders to the stops either side to have a look at their timetables. Thinking that he might have read the time wrong, or got the wrong day, he looks again at the first timetable, but if he has made a mistake he does not see it. After almost an hour, he decides that either the bus just is not coming or that he arrived a fraction too late – perhaps his watch is a little slow – and the bus had already been and gone by the time he got to the stop.
There is a third and final bus leaving in the evening. He considers whether it will still be possible to go to Utrecht. His hosts, who would not be expecting him, would have had their dinner by the time he got there, although he should not be too late for some supper. He thinks about hitchhiking. He goes to the kerb and stands there for a while with his thumb out, but no one stops. He has not seen a taxi either, and Futh does not really want to walk all the way back into town to try to find one, and besides, it would be expensive, an extravagance for which he has not budgeted. The next bus will be along in a few hours and he decides to wait.
He waits near the bus stop, wishing that he had bought a newspaper after all or that he had not taken the novel out of his bag. He finds some shade, although it moves. He strays into the full heat of the day only when he feels the need to go back to the bus stop and check the timetable again. He catches the evening bus and sits near the back feeling pleased, watching the world go by.
Getting off at what turns out to be the wrong stop, he has a little walking to do before he finally gets into Hellhaus. He sights th
e hotel from behind as the sun is going down, the sunset blazing on its whitewashed wall, glaring from the windows. It is dazzling, almost painful to look at, but he cannot take his eyes off it.
Before going to the hotel to ask about his suitcase, he goes to check his car. He finds it just where he left it, but it has a flat tyre. Crouching down to investigate, he sees the broken glass in the gutter. Perhaps, he thinks, the glass was already there when he arrived and he parked without noticing it. But, feeling practical now, knowing that he can change a tyre, he opens his boot. Expecting to see his spare, he is dismayed to find instead an old, flat tyre, the same one he removed by the side of the road before driving home to find Kenny coming out of his house.
With a sigh, he gives up his plan to go to Utrecht. He will have to sort his car out in the morning. He walks on towards the hotel to spend the night as per his itinerary, eager anyway for a quiet bar with padded seats and chilled drinks; a bedroom door and a key, a soft carpet and a clean bed and pillows and blankets; a deep bath and a little kettle, a plate of cold sausages and a packet of complimentary biscuits; his suitcase, his silver lighthouse, his pyjamas and rest.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Moths
Bernard, lying on his side in the grass, touching a cornflower to Ester’s cheekbone and comparing its blue to the blue of her eye, said, ‘Come away with me.’