But what was I doing there, in her living room, in my scratchy suit, on a Sunday, in the dying days of that summer—what? So often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing.
Although I grew up in that world of transience and hidden presences, and married a woman who grew up there too, I still find hotels uncanny, not only in the stillness of the night but in the daytime, too. At mid-morning, especially, something sinister always seems to be afoot under cover of that fake, hothouse calm. The receptionist behind the desk is one I have not seen before, and gives me a blank look as I drift past and does not smile or offer a word of greeting. In the deserted dining room all the tables are set, the gleaming cutlery and the sparkling napery laid out just so, like an operating theatre where multiple surgical procedures will presently be carried out. Upstairs, the corridor buzzes with a breathless, tight-lipped intent. I pass along it soundlessly, a disembodied eye, a moving lens. The doors, all identical, a receding double procession of them, have the look of having been slammed smartly shut one after another a second before I stepped out of the lift. What can be going on behind them? The sounds that filter out, a querulous word, a cough, a snatch of low laughter, seem each the beginning of a plea or a tirade that is cut short at once by an unheard slap, or a hand clapped over a mouth. There is a smell of last night’s cigarettes, of cold breakfast coffee, of faeces and shower soap and shaving balm. And that big trolley thing abandoned there, stacked with folded sheets and pillow-cases and with a bucket and a mop hooked on at the back, where is the chambermaid who should be in charge of it, what has become of her?
I stood outside Dawn Devonport’s door for fully a minute before knocking, and even then I barely brushed my knuckles against the wood. There was no response from within. Was she sleeping again? I tried the knob. The door was not locked. I opened it an inch and waited again, listening, and then stepped into the room, or insinuated myself, rather, slipping in sideways without a sound, and closed the door carefully behind me, holding my breath as the catch caught. The curtains were not drawn and although the air was chill there was more brightness than I had expected, almost a summer radiance, with a broad beam of sunlight angling down from a corner of the window, like a spot, and the net curtain a blaze of gauzy whiteness. Everything was tidied and orderly—that missing maid had been in here, anyway—and the bed might not have been slept in. Dawn Devonport lay on top of the covers, on her side again, with a hand under her cheek and her knees drawn up. I noticed how shallow an indentation in the mattress her body made, so light is she and how little of her there is. She still had her coat on, the fur collar making an oval frame for her face. She was looking at me from where she lay, those grey eyes of hers turned up to me, larger and wider than ever. Was she frightened, had I alarmed her by sliding into the room in that sinuous and sinister way? Or was she just drugged? Without lifting her head she extended her free hand to me. I clambered on to the bed, shoes and all, and lay down, face to her face, our knees touching; her eyes seemed larger than ever. ‘Hold on to me,’ she murmured. ‘I feel as if I’m falling, all the time.’ She drew back the wing of her coat and I moved closer and put my arm over her, inside her coat. Her breath was cool on my face and her eyes were almost all I could see now. I felt her ribs under my wrist, and her heart beating. ‘Imagine I’m your daughter,’ she said. ‘Pretend I am.’
So we remained for some time, there on the bed, in the cold, sunlit room. I felt as if I were gazing into a mirror. Her hand lay lightly, a bird’s claw, on my arm. She talked about her father, how good he had been, how cheerful, and how he would sing to her when she was little. ‘Silly songs, he sang,’ she said, ‘“Yes, We Have No Bananas”, “Roll Out the Barrel”, that sort of thing.’ One year he had been elected Pearly King of the Cockneys. ‘Have you ever seen the Pearly King? He was so pleased with himself, in that ridiculous suit—he even had pearls on his cap—and I was so ashamed I hid in the cupboard under the stairs and wouldn’t come out. And Mum was Pearly Queen.’ She cried a little, then wiped at the tears impatiently with the heel of a hand. ‘Stupid,’ she said, ‘stupid.’
I withdrew my arm and we sat up. She swung her legs off the bed but remained sitting on the side of it, with her back turned to me, and lit a cigarette. I lay down again, propped on an elbow, and watched the lavender smoke curling and coiling upwards into the shaft of sunlight at the window. She was crouching forwards now, with her knees crossed and an elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. I watched her, the slope of her back and the set of her shoulders and the outline of her shoulder-blades folded like wings and her hair wreathed in smoke. A drama coach I once took lessons from told me a good actor should be able to act with the back of his head. ‘Roll out the barrel,’ she sang softly, huskily, ‘we’ll have a barrel of fun.’
Had she really intended to kill herself, I asked. Had she wanted to die? She did not answer for a long time, then lifted her shoulders and let them fall again in a weary shrug. She did not turn when she spoke. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t they say the ones who fail weren’t serious in the first place? Maybe it was just, you know, what we do, you and I.’ Now she twisted her head and looked at me at a sharp angle over her shoulder. ‘Just acting.’
I said we should go back, that we should go home. She was still regarding me from under her hair, her head on one side and her chin resting on her shoulder. ‘Home,’ she said. Yes, I said. Home.
___
Somehow it seems to me it was the thunder-clap that did it, I mean I think it was by some dark magic our undoing. Certainly it presaged the end. The storm caught us at Cotter’s place. There is something vindictive about that kind of rain, a sense of vengeance being wrought from above. How relentlessly it clattered through the trees that day, like artillery fire showering down on a defenceless and huddled village. We had not minded rain, before, but that was the gentler kind, mere grapeshot compared to this barrage. At Cotter’s place it even used to give us a game to play, running here and there to set a pot or a jam-jar on the floor under each new leak in the ceiling as it sprang. How Mrs Gray would squeal when a plummeting cold drop fell on the back of her neck and slithered down along her bare skin under her flowered dress. By happy chance the corner where we had set out our mattress was one of the few dry places in the house. We would sit there together contentedly side by side, listening to the susurrating rain among the leaves, she smoking one of her Sweet Aftons and I practising jackstones with the beads from a necklace of hers the string of which I had broken unintentionally one afternoon in the course of a particularly energetic bout of love-making. ‘Babes in the wood, that’s us,’ Mrs Gray would say, and grin at me, displaying those two endearingly overlapping front teeth.
It turned out she was terrified of thunder. At the first crash of it, directly overhead and at what seemed no higher than the level of the roof, she went ashen-faced on the instant and crossed herself rapidly. We had been just short of the house when the rain came on, sweeping down on us through the trees with a muffled roar, and although we had sprinted the last few yards along the track we were thoroughly wet by the time we tumbled in at the front door. Mrs Gray’s hair was plastered to her skull, except for that irrepressible curl at her ear, and her dress was stuck to the front of her legs and moulded around the curves of her belly and her breasts. She stood flat-footed in the middle of the floor with her arms out at either side and flapped her hands, scattering drops from her fingertips. ‘What’ll we do?’ she wailed. ‘We’ll catch our deaths!’