The Beauty Room

by Regi Claire

  That’s what Alex has been waiting for; he snatches her hand with the palm smothered in gauze and says, ‘Kiss it better, shall I?’

  ‘Mm, this feels good,’ Celia sighs, inching closer to him. ‘If only that assistant of yours wasn’t here …’

  Suddenly an icy blast comes whirling down the corridor from the spare room – where Dominic must have opened the windows – and joins forces with the draught from the stairwell. At the same instant his voice calls out, ‘Problems, Alex?’ Perhaps she merely imagines it, but his tone seems more strident than normal, with a curtness that reminds her of an other event, so similar and yet so different, years and years ago and in this very same corridor. She shivers violently. Then the bedroom door slams.

  Alex folds her in his arms, wondering whether Dominic has smelt a rat. He’ll sound him out afterwards, maybe drop a few unflattering remarks about Celia, just in case. As for the newly painted bathroom, he’ll say her finicky specifications included doing it over a weekend when she was away – double time, of course. He quickly kisses Celia on the mouth and, before she can kiss him back, holds her a little away from him to scrutinise her face – she really has caught the sun, and there’s defiance in her eyes, mixed with fear. Lifting her hair free from the poncho in one big cascading fall, he loops a few strands together under her chin, like the strings of a hat. ‘That should keep you safe,’ he says, ‘my little mermaid.’

  Celia isn’t used to this kind of behaviour. Soppy and romantic, it appears to her, especially in a man. Franz would never have dreamt of saying or doing anything like that.

  Without warning she kicks the front door shut behind them. Her unhurt hand makes a grab for Alex’s groin – the simplest expedient, in her experience, to return a relationship to a less emotional state.

  There’s a sharp intake of breath, then Alex’s lips brush against the crown of her head. God, she couldn’t cope with being affectionate. Mechanically her hand rubs up and down, up and down. No, ‘couldn’t’ isn’t right: she can’t, and that’s the truth. Or is it possibly more a question of not wanting, in both senses of the word? Not yet at any rate, she decides and unbuttons his overalls. Because accepting a want would mean letting go. She has started to rub harder, nipping him gently through the jeans, the way she knows he likes it. It would mean letting go so entirely she’d be sure to drown in the process. Or get stuck forever in a bottomless mire of feelings. A tragic demise for anyone, not least a mermaid.

  ‘No belt today?’ she asks lightly as she unzips him. His tongue is nuzzling her ear now with urgent thrusts. Her index finger traces circles round the polished tip of flesh that’s strained free of his underwear, round and round, towards the wet centre which has begun to ooze thick slow drops, making him groan.

  She tilts up her head, smiles a pouting smile.

  His tongue is inside her mouth when the door opens at the other end of the corridor. ‘Alex? Ready if you are!’

  Alex eases her hand away. ‘Be … right … with you,’ he gasps.

  Celia giggles and starts to untangle the loops of hair under her chin. ‘Phone me while he’s out getting your mid-morning rolls,’ she whispers. The kiss aimed at Alex’s cheek is lost in the stubble of his Vandyke. ‘Okay, Bluebeard?’

  She has left before he’s zipped himself up.

  Outside it’s frosty, an oyster sky glowing in the early sunlight. The snow has almost vanished during her trip to the Alps; scrappy and scummy, it lies under the beech hedge like the dregs of winter.

  Schildi has been snoozing on a cushion of snowdrops under the ash tree; now she stretches and arches her back, gazing wistfully at the abandoned bird feeder above. ‘Puss, puss, puss,’ Celia coaxes. She bends to stroke the cat, feeling the softness of its fur squirm against her legs. Suddenly exuberant, she begins picking the snowdrops at her feet and smelling them – so very fragrant they are, such delicate bells of spring. Schildi is fawning around her knees with reproachful miaows. Celia has no idea who the flowers are for, not for herself anyway; they’re too meek and pretty. Then it occurs to her that they might help mollify Eric after her last-minute day off. It’s worth a try. Behind her some military jeeps are droning past, but for once she isn’t bothered about the soldiers.

  Holding the bunch of snowdrops in one hand, she checks the letter box. No squashed black tulip heads or staring passion-flowers, thankgod. Just three thick wads of her daily paper, a council circular, a letter from the bank, another from the insurance company. And, Celia catches her breath, an unstamped envelope with her name printed in block capitals dead centre.

  ‘Morning,’ a voice shouts from the street and she recoils, having to steady herself against the gatepost. Deli-Doris is pedalling past on her mountain bike, waving cheerfully.

  Celia grimaces her mouth into the semblance of a smile. Then she puts the snowdrops down on the letter box and rips open the envelope. Inside is a card, yellowed at the edges.

  The message is short and commanding: ‘Meet me at the Hölloch – guided tour, this Tuesday lunchtime.’

  Hell Cave? Today? She is expected at the office, dammit.

  There’s no address, no date or signature.

  But the handwriting looks familiar. It’s her uncle’s.

  Her uncle’s?

  The scent of the snowdrops mingles with the winter jasmine, sickeningly sweet. The apartment block opposite looms. The overhanging roof of Frau Müller’s farmhouse is like a giant hat pulled low to hide a face.

  Back in the flat again, Celia flings herself into the upholstered chair. Alex is nowhere in sight. She laughs and laughs. Uncle Godfrey! She is shaking with laughter. The Hölloch! Her head makes small jerky movements she has no control over. Her father has been dead more than thirty years – what’s he got to do with this? The heels of her boots grind into the discarded silk petals on the floor without her noticing. Her hands clench and unclench and she never even feels the pain from the cuts.

  Uncle Godfrey must have gone stark raving mad. Which explains his odd behaviour on Friday night. Howinhell does he hope to negotiate the slippery underground passages of a dark bloody cave? He can barely climb the stairs in his own house! And the memorial service has been arranged for this evening – they need to attend, both of them.

  Celia shifts in her chair, sits up straight with sudden determination. She’ll phone him. Yes! There’s no reason they should drive all the way to that cave. Can’t they deal with things in a more civilised fashion, like grown-ups?

  NO! She crashes the receiver back down.

  Perhaps she could call Lily? Lily must have received her letter by now and might be able to shed some: light or offer advice.

  No! Yes! No! YES! Halfway through punching out the numbers she realises she can’t see what she’s doing, her eyes are blind with tears.

  She doesn’t know anything any more. Doesn’t understand either. At least that’s what she wants to believe. She DOESNTDOESNTDOESNT want to understand. DOESNTDOESNTDOESNT want to know. Anything beyond the obvious is beyond her.

  Then she feels the touch of someone’s hand on her shoulder. ‘Celia, what’s wrong?’

  Uncertainly she raises her head and Alex kisses her brow, her wet eyes. ‘Won’t you tell me?’ He leans closer, fondles her hair. ‘Won’t you?’

  But she only cries harder and buries her face in the roughness of his overalls to stifle the sobs. She doesn’t want Dominic to hear. She couldn’t bear his grin, couldn’t bear that sly glance which seems to see right through her. The overalls are soaked where she’s been burrowing into them; the dampness has an acrid smell of paint and industrial-strength washing powder that tingles and bites, and makes her sneeze.

  She wipes her nose on the poncho, then probes her contact lenses with her fingertips because everything around her appears so bleary and stained. ‘Ssssorry,’ she sniffs. Alex plucks a strand of damp hair from her lips and cradles her head in the crook of his arm.

  For a while neither of them speaks.

  Eventually she motions
towards the envelope on the telephone table. ‘My uncle,’ she says. ‘My UNCLE! Ijustcantbelieveit.’

  What happens next blurs into a sequence of film clips which flash past her as if she wasn’t involved at all. As if she was a spectator watching herself and Alex act out scenes written and directed years ago.

  … Alex fending off Dominic’s unwanted attentions, asking him to carry on with the work on his own and giving the necessary instructions …

  … Herself inside the Beauty Room, prising open a half-empty tin from the stack in the corner with a screwdriver, the way she’d seen Dominic do. Then seizing the nearest paint brush, dunking it up to the hilt into the puddingy greasy-looking mass. The wall getting covered in splintering strokes of azure that burst like jets of wild sea water from the doorway and make the room flounder and sway. Like a ship cut loose from its anchor. Dancing on the waves. Up and down, roundandroundandround. Dancing …

  … Herself cleaned up and sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of instant coffee. Alex lounging by the balcony door with his blue-eyed smile, ready to come to her rescue yet again, though the danger’s over now, she won’t mess around with his paint any more. She is talking to him. Telling him things – haltingly at first, in bits and pieces she has to wrench from herself, until it feels like she’s bleeding and it all begins to flow – about her uncle, her mother and father, about Walter, Lily, the lock of Margaret’s hair in her mother’s bedside drawer, the black-tulip Valentine cards …

  … Later the phone call to the office with Angelina relaying her mother’s prediction that Celia will soon reach the end of the tunnel, and herself thinking: Tunnel? What damn tunnel? just as the girl adds, a little embarrassed, that her mother has the gift of seeing people’s auras – and yours was very strong yesterday evening, Celia, very bright. Then the unexpected voice of Handsome Henry saying how he didn’t mean to disturb her neighbours last weekend, sorry, he’d simply stopped by on the spur of the moment and, hey presto, the main door was unlocked. Finally Eric himself, clicking his tongue in concern at hearing of her family trouble and wishing her well for the memorial service tonight – and look forward to having you back with us tomorrow …

  … Still later Alex ringing the tourist information to inquire whether the Hölloch is indeed open today, and do they offer a guided tour at lunchtime, which they do, at one o’clock. So, into the bedroom and on with her jeans-and-jersey outfit from the travelling bag; take her father’s old map from the night table; then over to the chest of drawers and get the key from under the African violet; hunker down, a quick turn in the lock, and here are her gemstones in all their glory, the small tourmaline figurine of the naked woman like an image of herself, to be grabbed and deposited in the left breast pocket of her blouse, underneath the jersey, more than counterbalancing the map in the other. Out into the corridor with her mother’s ‘Arctic gear’ jacket slung over one arm; don’t forget the torch – it served its purpose before, didn’t it? – and Alex grinning meaningfully when he sees it in her hand …

  … Next thing she finds herself waiting in the passenger seat of her Golf, parked in the yard of Alex’s workshop at the back of his solid grey two-storey house. She’s using yet another of the small boxful of silk handkerchiefs while he is inside getting changed, her very own knight donning his shining armour to go with her to the centre of the earth.

  Once they’re on the motorway heading towards Zurich and the heartlands beyond, Alex relaxes. He has a shrewd notion of what’s going on. There’s more at stake than meets the eye, that’s for sure. Celia’s confidences earlier had felt like someone dismantling a room, hedgehogging the wallpaper, tearing and scraping it off to expose the holes underneath. Skeletons all right Invisible ones. Not too difficult to pick the guilty party, as it were, with half of them dead already. At first he’d been tempted to contact Celia’s uncle, but she had absolutely refused, and he didn’t want to force the issue. She seems to have calmed down now, thank Christ. Still distressed, he can tell by the clumsy snuffling way in which she keeps blowing her nose. Poor little mermaid. She’s certainly not in the mood for any tender-loving-care.

  ‘You warm enough?’

  She twitches her shoulders. Could mean yes or no. He slides the temperature lever up a bit, just in case. Then glances over. She is clutching her left breast and staring straight ahead. Seeing her profile in the harsh snow-brightness of the surrounding fields, he’s struck for the first time by the exaggerated bone structure of her face. Like she’d been held in a vice at some point in her life. He shudders at the thought and stamps on the accelerator. The car shoots forward, past a convoy of lorries which are hammering downhill, hard at the speed limit.

  He gestures towards the radio, ‘All right if I put it on?’

  Another twitch and the handkerchief’s fluttering about her face again.

  The ten o’clock news summary is just finishing. The weatherman forecasts a fair share of sunshine and ‘unseasonably mild temperatures’ for central areas. No more snowfalls until the weekend, Alex is relieved to hear, though the Golf is fitted with winter tyres.

  This is his first real adventure in years. He has never been down a big cave before, only read about accidents occasionally. The third-largest in the world, the woman from the tourist information had said proudly. Road tunnels are different of course, no comparison. Lights at regular intervals, SOS sites, ventilation tubes, the constant rumble and hum of traffic. If he’s honest with himself, well, he’s kind of apprehensive – apprehensive enough to have stuffed two bars of chocolate, a smoked Landjäger sausage and a small bottle of Kirsch into the outer pockets of his parka.

  A slow dark sandpapery voice has started up, and now the drums, melancholy brushstrokes. Blues. Not bad, but not his favourite. Nothing can beat a piece of madcap Madness. Gets into your blood, so you rip, strip and slap on the paint all the faster.

  Mad, mad, mad, he thinks, mad and bad. Just like him. Chauffeuring a woman he hardly knows around the country on a hunch – while his wife and kids believe he’s working his butt off for their creature comforts.

  He notices Celia clutch her breast again as if she’s in pain. Suffering from heartache, well and truly. What do they call this now, when the body hurts in place of the mind, psycho-something? At long last she must have allowed herself to acknowledge who is behind the whole business. Pretty obvious even to himself, a mere bystander, that the old man is being manipulated.

  Alex switches off the radio. Under his breath he says, ‘You know who you’re going to meet, don’t you?’

  There’s a draught of air as she nods, savagely.

  ‘Not your uncle.’

  In answer her head slumps forward and her hair swings between them like a curtain. For a moment he fears she’ll begin to cry again. But she says without a whiff of teariness, ‘No, not him.’

  After a pause he asks, ‘You sure you want to go through with this?’

  Her hand shuffles among the cassettes in the glove compartment. ‘Flowers is all I’ve received. No threats,’ she says. Then she snaps a cassette into the deck, hits the play button. ‘And you’re with me.’ She turns up the volume.

  Alex has heard the piece before; guitar warblings and the hoarse passion of Janis Joplin crooning and shouting. He decides to give it a rest. They should arrive well before one o’clock. Most of the journey is motorway and they’re beyond Zurich now, travelling beside the lake, which resembles a strip of cobalt blue stencilled here and there with white sails.

  Celia couldn’t say another word. She just sits, stiff and immobile yet sort of floating, hypnotised by the engine noise and the magic of the music. She feels like that night two weeks ago, after first meeting Alex, when the full moon was all over her. Like being sucked into a vortex.

  Already she is whirling towards the dead centre where he is waiting for her.

  26

  BUT SHE CAN’T see him. Hasn’t he come? Celia tries to survey the slope down below, then gives up, frustrated. The snow reflects back h
er gaze in a kaleidoscope of blinding winks as if to make fun of her. She and Alex are all set: they’ve panted up the path to the hut near the cave entrance in the dazzling winter brilliance; they’ve bought their tickets and in return been issued with rubber boots and battered carbide lamps.

  Not counting the guide with his handlebar moustache, there are six other people in their group. A discreetly elegant couple, the man with silverfox hair and loose tailored trousers folded umbrella-style round his legs, the woman a bit younger, good-looking in her red coat, soft black felt hat, black gloves and black scarf. Then a father and his two implike sons, the three of them wearing scuffed hiking boots, sheepskin jackets, red ski caps and big grins. The sixth member is ageless and colourless, his watery eyes huge behind thick glasses, his skin so transparent the veins show through.

  Celia doesn’t recognise anyone. Whereonearth is he? For a moment she seizes Alex round the waist and he responds by pressing his thigh against her. She isn’t really listening to what the guide is saying and feels a little giddy, despite having had some lunch at the Höllgrotte Restaurant. Tonight is the memorial service for her mother – and a new moon. And over thirty-two years ago her father died in the very place where she is now.

  * * *

  After the sun-and-snow glare the interior of the cave seems pitch black. The guide informs them that the name Hölloch is derived from an old dialect expression meaning ‘slippery’ and so, here he chuckles triumphantly, has nothing whatever to do with hell.

  Well, that’s one interpretation, Celia muses. Because it must have been hell for poor Father. Perhaps that’s how it happened, in the end: he slipped and just kept slipping, everything wet and sliding and cold and dark, so dark. So frighteningly dark.

  At first she can’t see much beyond the feeble yellow circle oozing out from her carbide lamp, only Alex’s shoulders a short way in front, almost within reach. The rock underfoot feels treacherous all right. Her hair is ruffled by a faint draught that’s slightly warmer than the air outside – some kind of chimney effect to do with further cave openings and apparently a clear sign there’s no danger of floods. Thankgodforthat. Still, Celia can’t help fumbling for the figurine below her heart to rally herself. Avoiding the map in the other breast pocket, at least for the present.