by David Szalay
In a polo neck now, and extravagantly scented, Fraser emerged smiling from the wetroom. Something about her posture prevented him from putting his arms around her and taking it from there, as he had intended. ‘So, should we eat?’ he said. They took the lift downstairs—the hallways of the hotel were woollen in their windowless hush, with pools of halogen light on the floor—and were warmly welcomed into the dining room, where there was another spectacular open fire, another expanse of sombre tartan. They were shown to a table. She was suddenly feeling very depressed. She put down the menu and said, ‘I think this whole thing might have been a mistake, Fraser.’
He looked up from his own menu with a notch of worry in his forehead.
‘What are we doing here?’ she said. ‘This is just weird.’
‘What are we doing here?’ He put his hand over hers. ‘I’ll tell you what we’re doing here…’
She pulled her hand away.
He had started to say something else—something about falling in love again—when she interrupted him. ‘Should we order? I’m starving.’
He sighed. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure, let’s order.’
They sat in silence until the waiter had taken their order. Then they sat in silence some more. Fraser was looking at her. She was looking everywhere except at Fraser. The Monarch of the Glen-style paintings on the walls. The waiting staff in their long white aprons, their standard-issue tartan ties. The man in the tailcoat—presumably the whisky sommelier—squeaking from table to table with his wheeled tantalus of single malts. The whole tree flaming in the fireplace…
‘You’re very angry with me,’ Fraser said finally.
She looked at him.
Sitting opposite her, he looked somehow implausible in his auteur’s polo neck. His shoulders were still powerful. His head—the dimpled imperial jaw—was still fairly splendid. So what was it? It was his eyes. His squinting eyes, with whose joyously sexual merriment she had once fallen thuddingly in love, were polluted with sadness. They were polluted with sadness and fear.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am.’
‘Of course,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I understand. This will take time. It won’t be easy…’
‘What will take time?’ she said in a louder voice. ‘What do you think is going on here?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me. What is going on here?’
‘Fraser…’ she said, sighing exasperatedly. ‘Alright.’ She seemed to marshal her thoughts. She seemed to focus herself. ‘You made my life absolute fucking hell,’ she said. Then, in a very much less matter-of-fact tone, ‘Do you understand that? I sometimes wonder if you even understand that.’
‘I do…’
‘Do you? I’m not sure that you do…’
‘Of course I do…’
‘You made my life absolute fucking hell, and now you seem to think you can just take me to a posh hotel and everything will be fine. That we can just sit here and have a lovely time…’
‘No,’ he protested.
‘There’s something insulting about this. There’s something insulting about the way I’m supposed to be swept off my feet by all this…’
‘You’re not—’
‘It’s a fucking luxury hotel! Wonderful! I spend all my time in a luxury hotel. Didn’t it occur to you that I might not want to spend the weekend in a luxury hotel?’
‘Katie…’
‘No, of course it didn’t…’
‘Katie…’
‘What is the point of this? What are we doing here? What do you think this is? A nice romantic weekend? Is that your understanding of emotions? Is that how you think emotions are?’
‘I said it will take time…’
‘Your understanding of emotions is just so fucking limited, Fraser. You trample on other people and then all you feel is self-pity. You’re just so fucking selfish. I seriously sometimes wonder whether you’ve got some sort of problem. Otherwise how can you not see what you’re doing? How can you not see how you’re hurting people… ?’
She put her hand over her eyes to hide all the water that was suddenly there as the waiter solemnly put the starters on the table. Fraser looked on helplessly as he did. As soon as he had moved away, still hiding her face with her hand, she stood up and hurried out.
A few minutes later she sat down again.
‘Okay. I’m fine now,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
And she seemed fine in her new face. She started to eat.
‘Katie,’ Fraser said. ‘I understand what I put you through…’
‘Let’s not talk about it,’ she said. ‘Not now.’
Looking shattered, he said, ‘We need to talk about it.’
She nodded. ‘M-hm. How’s yours?’
‘I, uh… I haven’t tried it yet.’ He looked down at the slice of venison terrine, the redcurrant sprig, the four perfect triangles of toast. He wasn’t hungry.
She, on the other hand, seemed starving. She finished what was on her own plate and then ate most of what was on his.
He insisted, when they had finished the meal, on ordering two stupendously expensive whiskies from the tailcoated sommelier, and then—it was not even ten—they went for a short walk along Princes Street, as far as the floodlit Sir Walter Scott memorial.
When she stepped out of the wetroom in her silk pyjamas—and she had spent a long time in there—Fraser was lying nonchalantly propped on an elbow on the four-poster. He had taken off his shoes and socks.
‘Hey, nice PJs,’ he smiled.
‘They were a present.’
His smile wavered. It went out altogether in his pale eyes. ‘What—from… ?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not from him. From someone else.’
‘So…’ Fraser started tentatively. ‘Who, uh… who was he?’
She was able to see him in the mirror, staring at his own heavy-duty toenails. And then, when she said nothing, lifting his eyes warily towards hers. ‘Just… a person,’ she said. ‘Why? What difference does it make?’
‘None.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Okay.’
They had yet to touch each other in any significant way. It was one of the things that made the situation feel so strange. However, it felt no less strange—it felt stranger—when he stood up and perched his hands on the suave silk of her shoulders. ‘Fraser…’ He kissed her exposed neck. She shrugged him off. ‘Nothing’s going to happen tonight,’ she said. ‘Okay?’
‘Okay,’ he said, smiling at her in the mirror, trying to keep it light, his eyes all over the shining ivory silk.
‘Now I’m going to sleep,’ she said. ‘I’m very tired.’
‘Me too.’
She lay on the far side of the four-poster, on the luxurious solidity of the mattress, on the edge of its precipice, listening to him splashing and spitting in the wetroom. It went quiet for a while. Then he emerged and she felt him slide into the huge bed, sending a wave through the stiff linen. The lights went off. She was tense, expecting some sort of overture, an inquisitive hand…
‘Goodnight, Katie,’ he whispered, from quite far away.
Then stillness, silence.
Which made her feel that she had treated him unfairly, and she turned over and stretched out her own hand, stretched it out into the empty space of the sheets, until finally it found his flexed, naked knee. ‘Night, night,’ she said.
*
In the morning there was some smooching. He wanted more than that, of course. He was sharply desirous of more. There was something urgent about the way he started to unpick her pyjamas. He had undone half the iridescent little buttons of the silk jacket when she stopped him, seeing with sudden force as his eyes found the waxy scoop of her sternum how the situation would be transformed into something she did not want it to be if she let him undo them all, if she let him tug the silken trousers down. Fastening the jacket to her throat, she hurried into the wetroom and had a long shower
.
When she emerged, wrapped in a towel, she squatted down next to her nylon holdall with her knees together and patiently extracted some things from it. She withdrew to the wetroom to put them on.
Fraser, when it was his turn, took a markedly different approach. He left the four-poster in an unhurried state of flagrant nudity and had a shower with the door open. Still provocatively naked, he stood in front of the sink shaving.
‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ she shouted from the far side of the room.
And he stood there full-frontally, his face foolishly white-foamed—in a way that tended to emphasise his otherwise total nakedness—and said, ‘You’re not going to wait for me?’
‘I’m starving,’ she said, looking him specifically in the face. His torso was flaccid and his stomach was pendulous. However, his penis, she had not failed to notice, had in full measure its old solidity and weight, its statesmanlike presence.
‘You can’t just wait a few minutes?’ he said, his eyebrows frowning over the white mask.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait a few minutes.’
‘Thank you.’
She took off her shoes and sat on the bed.
When he finally put something on, they went down to the dining room, where he ate heartily of the terrific spread. Arbroath smokies and poached eggs, whisky marmalade on toasted muffins. The fire quietly informed the morning of its pinesmoke smell—the same tree as last night probably, now falling apart in a mass of white ash. Walking the length of tartan to the table, she felt underdressed in her jeans and zippered fleece. A sadness was stealing over her—worse, in its quiet way, than anything she had felt since they left London. And she had felt okay upstairs just now. She had even said to herself, as she sat there hugging her knees, ‘It’s okay. I feel okay.’
‘So,’ Fraser said. (What was he so jovial about?) ‘What’re we gonna do this morning?’
‘What do you want to do?’ she said plainly.
‘I want to do,’ he said, using a napkin to wipe his fingers individually, ‘whatever you want to do.’
She shrugged. ‘I dunno. What is there?’
‘There’s the whole fair city of Edinburgh to explore.’ He smiled, tossing the napkin onto the table.
The joviality did not last long. The weather may have had something to do with that—a travelling mist of drizzle that hid the surrounding hills and filled the Nor’ Loch with an obscurity pierced only by the weakly echoing voice of the Waverley tannoy. They spent the morning sightseeing. The streets of the old town, tangled like wet string. Holyrood House. The elegant, unexcitable probity of the headquarters of the Bank of Scotland. The National Gallery.
Towards lunchtime it did stop raining. The sky went white, with a soft luminance that suggested the sun was up there somewhere. They had a pizza. Pizza Express. It was profoundly uninspired—might as well have been in London—but then the whole morning had felt uninspired. Fraser just seemed sad, with nothing interesting to say. When he did speak, she found him tedious. She found him irritating. He had said things in the National Gallery that made her want to tell him to shut up. Once, as he struggled to say something impressive in front of Veronese’s Mars, Venus and Cupid (in the past he would have made a joke; now he seemed to feel a simpering need to impress her), she laughed at him—she just laughed in his face, and then went on to the next painting. It had not been a nice thing to do, and she wondered shamefully why she had done it as she sliced up her pizza. He had said less after that. He had followed her in silence, in fact, only nodding when she tried, in a spirit of penitence, to solicit his views about this or that picture, about da Vinci’s dog paws or Botticelli’s Madonna.
*
After lunch she wanted a ‘proper walk’, a two-hour tramp up to Arthur’s Seat or something like that. He did not, which was in keeping with his increasing listlessness, if not his willingness until then to do whatever she wanted. So they went for a walk in Princes Street Gardens instead, and it was there that he said it. The station tannoy started to quack, the sound floating through the treetops, and when it was finished she heard the rain—it was so quiet that you had to stop and listen for it. It sounded like soap suds subsiding. It was as quiet as that. ‘You don’t love me anymore.’ That was Fraser’s sudden insight, and he said it as if it was a sudden insight, pulling up on the tarmac path. She herself said nothing. She was so struck that she just stood there as he started to sob, and once he had started there was no stopping him.
Some hours later she lay in the long tub listening to the same sound—the sound of soap suds subsiding. The wetroom was luxurious and well equipped. It was warmly lit and windowless. Except for the sound of the suds, and the womby hum of the extractor, and the occasional watery statement when she stirred, there was silence. There was silence in her heart as well.
She had just stood there on the path with her hands in the pockets of her fleece—it was not warm, there was a face-numbing, hand-hurting wind—and watched him sitting sideways on the bench, shaking like a diesel engine, with his fingers wrapped over his eyes. She was thinking, How like him, how like everything that was unworthy about him to see the situation in those terms: You don’t love me anymore. How like him to be so surprised by that! There was something almost solipsistic about it. The strange thing was, she was surprised by it too.
Finally she did sit down next to him and pat his shaking back. She did quietly suggest that they find somewhere warmer. It took a while to shift him. Eventually they stood up and walked out of the park. He had stopped sobbing, though he started again on the pavement of Princes Street, wandering among the shoppers. She did not know what to do with him. It was two o’clock on Saturday afternoon.
Lying in the tub two hours later—four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, time was passing slowly—she wished she was at home. It was one of those situations where the obvious thing to do—drive to London, immediately—had not occurred to her until it was too late; until they had had too much to drink, sitting in a pub in the New Town. Instead, while he lay in a foetal position on the four-poster (he had not even taken his jacket off), she locked herself in the otherworldly silence of the wetroom, and submerged her frigid extremities in the thickly steaming tub. She had not said that she didn’t love him any more. That she had not said. She had said nothing. With languid hands she stirred the water in the vicinity of her sunken stomach. She had seen written somewhere—probably in some leaflet she had looked at while she was waiting for him that morning—that among the many other luxuries offered by the suite was the fact that it was equipped with ‘anti-steam mirrors’. Now, with her head lolling on the edge of the tub, hair neatly piled on top, she saw through the warm fog that the mirrors were indeed mysteriously untouched by it, and wondered how it was done. Heated somehow, was the most obvious explanation. Or perhaps they used some sort of special substance…
She stood up, and stepped out, and towelled her flushed self while the tub slowly emptied. She stood in front of the unsullied mirror, kneading moisturiser into her face with her two middle fingers. She tidied up one of her eyebrows. She would have liked to stay there in the warmth of the halogen lights, in the humming silence, until it was time to leave for London the next morning. She felt safe there. Insulated from something. She lingered for a few unnecessary minutes, then she pulled on one of the white towelling robes that the hotel had so thoughtfully provided and stepped out in a whirl of steam.
The late daylight had the quality of wet slate. She sat down on one of the tartan tub chairs. Fraser was still lying there. He seemed to be in a less tight position, and in fact he must have moved—he had taken his jacket off. Nor was he asleep. His eyes were open. The tired light picked them out like marbles, staring at nothing.
There was one small mercy. On Sunday morning the clocks went forward, shortening the weekend by an hour.
2
He woke up with a strange feeling. Sunlight like a shivered mirror in the area, and h
is watch an hour slow.
In the afternoon he took Omar to the zoo. James has no memory of ever having been to London Zoo. Omar, however, seemed to know the place well. The first things they saw were some lizards. The lizards were in a darkened hall, walled up in waterless fishtanks full of rubber foliage. Omar stood on tiptoe to peer into the tanks or James lifted him. Mostly the lizards just lay there, looking sad. Probably they weren’t actually sad, probably it was just something about the shape of their scaly mouths. Probably that’s how they would look in the wild. Though in the wild, James thought, the ever-present fear, the need to fend for themselves, might make them less lethargic, might pep them up a bit. Nothing was about to happen to them in those fishtanks; they had probably worked that out by now. They were just waiting for their next meal—and they only ate once or twice a week. It was muggy in the lizard house. For a while Omar was enthusiastic, pointing and whispering as if they might overhear him. Then he lost interest—they had not even looked at the most impressive specimens, in a sort of shop-window of jungle—and wanted to leave.
They wandered around in the sunshine. The animals were strangely elusive. You had to seek them out down winding paths. They saw some medium-sized monkeys, making a stink like the inmates of a prison staging a no-wash protest. They were screeching, making a lot of noise—in spite of which they were just not that interesting. Omar seemed to find them shrugworthy. The silverbacks had more mystique. Sitting very still, they looked at the world through startlingly human eyes, scratched their necks with startlingly human fingernails. More or less extinct in the wild—a few score in their shrinking jungle, waiting for the end—they and their kind were now, James thought, in effect a species of high-maintenance pets. Wards of the state. There was something surreal about the sight of them, just sitting there surrounded by toys (a tyre, for instance) while twenty twittering children pressed their faces to the perspex.