The White Hotel

by D. M. Thomas

  He was amused, though, when the black cat sprang out of the prostitute’s arms and bolted down the path as if seven devils were after it. It was soon lost to sight, on the path back to the hotel. Summoned to vespers, thought Mori; for the bells of the church that stood behind and above the white hotel had started to chime; the sound carried dimly across the lake, and a lone fisherman in the middle of the lake started taking off his hat. The mother of the little girl, to his right, crumpled to the ground, and, as if on cue, other women fainted in the line. That was the trouble with having a mixed funeral service, thought Mori: it went on too long, it was too great a strain.

  A thunderclap smote in their ears, and Lionheart, looking up, knew that the end had come. He had heard even louder thunderclaps, in his time, and had threaded through safely; but now there was no escape. The mountain peak had dissolved, and giant boulders were rumbling down the mountainside. The mourners had broken into a sustaining hymn, and for a little while it looked as if the music was holding the boulders in mid-air. The ground was opening under their feet.

  The young woman saw the mourners fall, one by one, into the trench, as if intolerable grief afflicted them, one by one. She watched as they twitched a little and the earth and rocks began settling on top of them. Darkness fell very suddenly that evening, and they lay, listening to the silence again after the thunderclap. Cold under the mountain’s shadow, the air was still warm around the white hotel, and they kept the window open. The lake drank the sunlight in one draught, and there was no moon to take its place. They all felt very thirsty, and the young man rang the bell for the maid. The little Japanese girl was startled when she saw three heads on the pillow, and they chuckled at her bewilderment. She brought them a litre bottle of wine and three glasses.

  The full-bodied wine revived them. The experience had been unique, for all of them, and they talked about it happily. Madame Cottin was pleased to see the young lovers showing unharmed affection for each other by their kisses and playful nibbles.

  Far from damaging their love, the experience had strengthened it; or so the young woman believed. Generosity always rewards the giver, and their kindness to the lonely, bereaved woman had drawn them closer to each other. So she felt happy. And her lover was happy because he lay snugly in between them, the tasty meat between two fresh slices of bread. He drank, lit a Turkish cigarette for Madame Cottin and gave it into her hand; lit another for himself, took a draw, exhaled with a sigh of pleasure, turned to give his mistress an affectionate kiss.

  Madame Cottin envied them their firm young bodies, for at thirty-nine she knew she was well past her best. And the church bells, sounding as if they came from the room above, made her gloomier. Probably the most she could hope for, at her time of life, were a few brief adventures like this one; but for the most part, solitude. She reached for the wine bottle and poured herself another glass; but the wine stopped pouring when her glass was only half full. “Is this all there is?” she asked, apologetically.

  “It’s all we know about,” said the young woman, in thoughtful tones. “It’s all we can be sure of. Fairly sure.”

  Since they had finished the wine, the young man started fondling Madame Cottin’s plump, rather slack, breasts. Parting her thighs he clambered on to her again. The young woman offered her a nipple, because the wine had gone into milk and her breasts felt full and painful again. She took it into her mouth gratefully. At the same time he began to suck at her own breast, and the circle of pleasure was almost complete. The young man was very excited, very erect, and thrust so hard that Madame Cottin screamed; and, as she screamed, brought her teeth together and bit the young woman’s breast, drawing blood mingled with milk. It was late before Madame Cottin dressed and went back to her room. The hotel was dark, silent.

  The dozing night porter was woken by the night bell. When he opened the door it was Bolotnikov-Leskov and Vogel; they slid in looking tired, unkempt and dirty. They each ordered a pot of coffee, a large brandy and a round of sandwiches to be sent to their rooms, and ordered their usual newspapers for the morning. Bolotnikov-Leskov gave Vogel a curt good night as they parted on the first floor. He did not even like the fellow, but they shared the same general principles in life. Besides, Vogel was a survivor, like himself, and such men are worth a thousand virtuous losers.

  Towards evening of the next day he became restive, and suggested they get out of bed and take a walk up in the mountains. She felt tired, and would rather have taken a short stroll by the lake: perhaps with Madame Cottin. But he had in mind a bigger expedition, just the two of them.

  He rang the bell, summoning the maid to bring tea and to open the curtains. Adjusting to the flood of sunlight, the young woman saw that the little Japanese maid had been crying. She inquired if anything was the matter, and the maid told her of the disastrous landslide that had buried the mourners. She was very upset because she had grown fond of the English major who was one of the victims. To her surprise, she had discovered that he had visited her homeland, and even knew a little of her language. Lonely, waiting for the arrival of his nephew, an army lieutenant, he had asked her to go with him on walks, during her hours of freedom in the afternoons. He had been very interested in her studies, and altogether had proved a kind, intelligent friend. She would miss him.

  Grateful for the young woman’s sympathy, the maid excused herself for a few moments, and returned clutching to her heart a slim book, which she said the major had given her only yesterday, on their last walk together. The young woman took the book and saw, on the plain cover, “Meadowsweet, Poems by Harold Lionheart.” She flipped quickly through the twenty or so little poems in the volume, and gave it back, with a sympathetic nod. “It’s something to remember him by,” she said. The maid, her eyes moistening, opened the book at the title-page and handed it back. The young woman saw some lines of verse written out in copperplate, and signed “With love from Major Harold Lionheart.” The maid explained that she had spoken to him some little verses which she had been ordered by her teacher to write during her vacation. And yesterday, on taking him his morning tea, he had presented her with this book, his translations of her verses written out on the first page. She had been so touched she had burst into tears. The young woman read the copperplate lines:

  At sunset, even

  the stone of the plum can turn

  the green lake crimson.

  The plum who marries

  an ox can anticipate

  great sorrow, great joy.

  Like biting a plum

  to reach the stone, is passion

  for this hour only.

  When the plum ripens

  the swan flies. When my love is

  nigh me, my heart sings.

  Behind the hotel, the path up the mountain was steep and stony, winding between clumps of larches and pines. At first they walked with their arms around each other’s waists; but as the path narrowed and grew steeper he let her climb ahead. She was in quite the wrong clothes for a mountain climb, but it was the only dress she had. In the lifeless heat her sweat made the dress cling to her buttocks and thighs; and he could not resist the temptation to slide his hand, now and again, up the cleft between her thighs. They came to a cool, grassy terrace where the church spire nestled among yew trees. Stopping to breathe, he put his arms around her waist and turned her face so that he could kiss her throat, her lips. He pulled her down on to the cropped grass.

  “Someone might come,” she whispered, as his hand tugged her dress up around her waist. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I want you. Please. Please.”

  A donkey, tethered, was grazing the short grass, twisting the rope round a fence post and drawing his domain smaller and smaller. The animal belonged to an order of nuns who lived and worshipped in the convent house attached to the church. Unknown to the lovers, an old and stooping nun had hobbled out with a basket of linen to wash; for near where they lay there was a spring. They thought they heard the noise of falling rocks above them, but it was the old nun
flailing the dirty clothes with a stout stick.

  Embarrassed, the young woman slid away from her lover and flustered her dress down. The old nun stopped her flailing for a moment and flashed a toothless grin in their direction. “It’s all right,” she said. “Nothing is sinful here because of the spring, you know. Have a drink before you leave. But don’t hurry. I’m sorry I interrupted you. I won’t be long.” She explained that the nuns needed fresh linen for the memorial service for Father Marek and the other Catholics who had died in the avalanche. She crossed herself piously.

  The lovers resumed their lovemaking, pausing again to smile their thanks as the nun wished them good day and good luck, and hobbled off with her heavy basket of wet clothes. The lovers cupped their hands and drank from the spring. The water was ice-cold and refreshing. As they brushed the grass off their clothes they looked down at the lake, amazed how red it was, like the juiciest of plums.

  The path upwards lost itself in boulders and deceiving patches of snow, and they had to go carefully. Sometimes they had to scramble on hands and knees; and the rapidly falling darkness only made it more difficult. “I’ve torn my dress,” she observed; and he said that tomorrow they would check at the station, and maybe her suitcase would have turned up. If not, perhaps they could ask the maid if there was a shop where they could buy dresses. “And a toothbrush,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind if I only had a toothbrush.”

  The object of their climb was a small observatory which had been built on this mountain but later abandoned. They found it just as the sun dropped behind a peak, bringing instant night. It was fearfully cold, and the young woman wished she had brought her coat. They entered the black shell. There was nothing inside except a slit in the roof for the telescope that had never been installed.

  He had badly misjudged the time it would take to climb the mountain. There was no chance of making the descent that night. “I’ll keep you warm,” he said; and they lay on the icy floor and he held her tightly in his arms. Wisps of snow fell on them, through the slit in the dome.

  “Please, you mustn’t make me pregnant,” she whispered. He could see the whites of her eyes, whiter than the snowflakes. She thought, This is the way it could so easily happen. Not, ironically, in a warm bed in a fall of roses and orange trees, but on a freezing night when the stars fall as snowflakes through a tiny slit. A cold wisp fell on her cheek and she thought, These are the seeds of God. The fierceness of his lovemaking warmed her. She heard mountain cascades, faintly, not on this mountain only, but from all the mountains surrounding the lake and the white hotel. And the cascades sang, because the night and the snow allowed the mountains to meet; they sang as the whales had sung, at dawn, unheard, when the office secretary and Vogel’s sister had glimpsed them.

  The young woman was warmed, also, by the depths of snow that fell, half burying the igloo. The whole sky fell in the night, all the stars and constellations. She listened to the very beginning of the universe, a very soft, sighing sound.

  By morning they were rimed with frost, and famished; but had to content themselves with gathering up snow, a whole cluster of white stars, and drinking it as it melted. They broke through the wall of stars that had piled up in the doorway, and gasped to see how everything was white below them. Even the lake was ice-covered. Only the dark green of some of the pines and firs showed through the snow and ice. The white hotel itself was lost in white. There was simply deep snow where they thought the white hotel must be.

  “We must try to find the path back,” he said hopelessly.

  “You know that’s not possible,” the woman said. “We can’t retrace our steps; and anyway why should we? Remember what the nun said, that here there is no sin.”

  The young man made no reply; just touched his neat moustache as if to reassure himself that he still existed, and set off floundering. As the sun broke through and the clouds swiftly parted they felt more cheerful. The labour of wading through the snow sent the blood coursing again; they tingled with warmth and energy. They could see the ice of the lake breaking up into floes, and the floes vanishing into the blue water. A few birds were whistling. Snow slid, hissing, off the church spire, and—aiming for that—they found it not so difficult to keep to the path. Midway between the observatory and the church, there was a flat resting place with a wooden seat and a telescope, through which you could watch climbers attempting the sheer mountain face across the lake.

  They sat on the seat, and happily pecked a kiss. The day was turning fine; the melting snow was tumbling from a thousand cascades into the lake, and there was, by now, not a cloud in the sky. Still they could not see the white hotel.

  The young man stood up and went to the telescope. He trained it down in the general direction of the hotel, and, as a patch of snow broke off and fell on to a veranda, he saw their bedroom window. For there were the words she had traced with her breath and her finger, just before leaving, a phrase of Heine. He called her to come and look. She smiled in relief as she saw, vaguely inside, his hair brushes and the uncollected tea tray, and the unmade bed. She began to worry, though, at not having explained to the maid about the bloodstains on the sheet. Yet she must be used to chaotic beds, the diaries of people’s loves.

  She let her lover take the telescope from her, and he started turning it at random. He could see edelweiss rippling in the breeze, probably ten miles away. Turning the telescope away from the distant mountain to the blue over the lake, he caught reflected sunlight and had to pull his eyes away. He looked again, more cautiously, and saw it was the reflection of a metal clasp on a white corset suspender. The metal had slightly frayed the elastic, and, thinking he recognized it, he drew breath sharply.

  “Isn’t that Madame Cottin?” he said.

  She put her eye again to the glass, and saw a pale, stout thigh against the dazzling blue, and a fading bruise. And there—tilting the glass up slightly—was a strained pink face.

  “Yes, it’s Denise,” she said. He looked again, and smiled. There were other people falling near her; yet with the naked eye nothing could be seen but a cable car crawling minutely along between two mountains. The bruise he had made on her fleshy thigh made him roll with his startled friend on the short, wet mountain grass. She tried to cry out that the air was too thin; his sudden passion made her gulp for breath.

  When the cable car had broken from one of its strands, and sent them screaming out through the open top and down through the air, the baker’s son had had the presence of mind to keep tight hold of the black cat that had crept aboard after him. Just because he had given it a stroke on the hotel steps, the cat had followed him all the way up the path to the cable car. The cat, now, was miaowing and scratching, but the boy kept hold.

  He was not sucking at her nipple but vibrating it rapidly with his tongue; like a child setting up ripples by skimming the sea with a flat stone. Their skirts blown up around their waists by the motion of the air, the women fell more slowly than the men. Madame Cottin, her heart in her mouth, saw a handsome Dutch lad falling only a few feet away from her, quite vertical, as was she, and she had the strange impression that she was not falling to her death but being lifted high by his strong arms. She had once, unforgettably, seen Pavlova dance; now, young and thin, she had become Pavlova. The men and boys struck the ground or the lake first. Madame Cottin saw the baker’s boy land in a pine tree, feet-first, and contriving somehow to turn on to his back (which instantly snapped) in a way that made sure the cat was safe. The black cat tore itself out of his arms and clawed its way down the trunk.

  The women and young girls fell next; and last of all, after what seemed an eternity, a hail of skis, glinting in the sunlight, tumbled into the pines and the lake.

  They rested again by the spring—where the donkey still browsed—and cupped their hands to drink the pure water. They visited the church, which had been filled with flowers for the memorial service, and then wandered into the walled graveyard which the local inhabitants preserved for their own. The graveyard, and
the tall yews, trapped the heat. Each grave carried a smiling photograph of the dead person, on the stone; and there were many glass jars holding immortelles. At one of the graves, an old woman in black was bending to look at a photograph, and the young woman felt ashamed to be seen in her torn dress. “I don’t like the immortelles,” she said, drawing her arm through his and leading him out of the cemetery.

  As the lake rose nearer, she could see the fish swimming around in it: millions of gold or silver fins twisting and turning aimlessly forever and ever. Or so it seemed to her. Actually they were not aimless; she could see they were hunting for food; their round, mindless eyes were staring curiously at the huge grey shapes drifting down through the water, to feast them. The wriggling fish reminded her of tadpoles in a pond, and then of sperm, a picture her governess had shown her, sperm magnified a thousand times. They wriggled with apparent aimlessness, yet were seeking.

  At dinner that evening the young man was puzzled because she was quiet and depressed. It was not on account of a depression in the general atmosphere, because on the whole cheerfulness prevailed. A whole new crowd of tourists had moved in, and naturally they could not be expected to eat their hearts out over misfortunes that had preceded them. On the contrary, they were in excellent spirits at the start of their holiday. There were only a few familiar faces left: Vogel, the older members of the Dutch family (eating in silence), Bolotnikov-Leskov, and the pale, sad, pathetically thin young woman with her elderly nurse.

  Both the gypsy band and the waiting staff tried to keep up an air of jollity, for the sake of the newcomers; though they themselves had suffered losses. The accordion player had persuaded the popular little Japanese maid to give skiing a try, on her free half-day. The young woman was upset when she heard about this from their waiter. She recalled one of the maid’s little verses, translated by the English major, and she repeated it to her friend: