Gil stood in the oak-paneled elevator as it took him up to the third floor and scrutinized himself in the brass-framed mirror with as much intensity as if he were a business partner whom he suspected of cracking up. He had never done anything in years as spontaneous as chasing after that woman. What the hell had come over him? He was married, with two children, he was right on top of his job. He had a six-bedroom house in Woking, a new Granada Scorpio, and he had been profiled in Business Week as one of the new breed of "totally committed" young entrepreneurs.
And yet he had hurried after that unknown woman as gauche and panicky as an adolescent autograph hunter.
He closed the door of his suite behind him and stood for a long time in the middle of the room with his briefcase still in his hand, thinking. Then he set the briefcase down and slowly took off his coat. "Pity about Gil, he's thrown a wobbly." He could almost hear them talking about him in the office. "He was absolutely fine until that Amsterdam business. Probably suffering from overwork."
He went to the window and opened it. The hotel room overlooked the Amstel River, wide and gray, where it was crossed by the wide elevating bridge called the Hogesluis. Trams rumbled noisily over the sluice, their bells ringing, on their way to the suburbs. The wind blew so coldly through the window that the net curtains were lifted, shuddering, and Gil found that there were tears in his eyes.
He checked his pulse. It was slightly too fast, but nothing to take to the doctor. He didn't feel feverish, either. He had been working for four days, Tuesday to Friday, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but he had been careful not to drink too much and to rest whenever he could. Of course, it was impossible to judge what effect this round of negotiations might have had on his brain. But he felt normal.
But he thought of her face and he thought of her hair and he thought of the way in which she had smiled at him; a smile that had dissolved as quickly as soluble aspirin; and then was gone. And against all the psychological and anthropological logic in the world, he knew that he had fallen in love with her. Well, maybe not in love, maybe not actually in love, not the way he loved Margaret. But she had looked into his eyes and smiled at him and wafted past in beguiling currents of Obsession, and in ten seconds he had experienced more excitement, more curiosity, more plain straightforward desire than he had in the last ten years of marriage.
It's ridiculous, he said to himself. It's just a moment of weakness. I'm tired, I'm suffering from stress. I'm lonely, too. Nobody ever understands how lonely it can be, traveling abroad on business. No wonder so many businessmen stay in their hotel rooms, drinking too much whiskey and watching television programs they can't understand. There is no experience so friendless as walking the streets of a strange city with nobody to talk to.
He closed the window and went to the mini-bar to find himself a beer. He switched on the television and watched the news in Dutch. Tomorrow morning, after he had collected the signed papers from the Gemeentevervoerbedrijf, he would take a taxi straight to Schiphol and fly back to London. Against ferocious competition from Volvo and M. A. N. Diesel, he had won an order for twenty-eight new buses for Amsterdam's municipal transport system, all to be built in Oxford.
On the phone Brian Taylor had called him "a bloody marvel." Margaret had squealed in delight, like she always did.
But the way the wind had lifted up that woman's hair kept running and rerunning in his mind like a tiny scrap of film that had been looped to play over and over. The revolving door had turned, her hair had lifted. Shining and dark, the kind of hair that should be spread out over silk pillows.
It began to grow dark and the lights began to dip and sparkle in the river and the trams began to grind their way out to Oosterpark and the farther suburbs. Gil consulted the room-service menu to see what he could have for supper, but after he had called up to order the smoked eel and the veal schnitzel, with a half-bottle of white wine, he was taken with a sudden surge of panic about eating alone, and he called back and canceled his order.
"You don't want the dinner, sir?" The voice was flat, Dutch-accented, polite but curiously hostile.
"No, thank you. I've… changed my mind."
He went to the bathroom and washed his face and hands. Then he straightened his necktie, shrugged on his coat, picked up his key, and went down to the hotel's riverside bar for a drink. The bar was crowded with Japanese and American businessmen. Only two women, and both of them were quite obviously senior executives, one lopsidedly beautiful, the other as hard-faced as a man. He sat up on a barstool and ordered a whiskey and soda.
"Cold wind today, hmh?" the barman asked him.
He drank his whiskey too quickly, and he was about to order another one when the woman came and sat just one stool away from him, still dressed in white, still fragrant with Obsession. She smiled to the barman and asked for a Bacardi, in English.
Gil felt as if he were unable to breathe. He had never experienced anything like it. It was a kind of panic, like claustrophobia, and yet it had an extraordinary quality of erotic compulsion, too. He could understand why people half-strangled themselves to intensify their sexual arousal, because as he sat there breathless he could feel himself stiffening inside his pants. He stared at himself glassy-eyed in the mirror behind the Genever gin bottles, trying to detect any signs of emotional breakdown. But did it show, when you finally cracked? Did your face fall apart like a broken jug? Or was it all kept tightly inside of you? Did it snap in the back of your brain where nobody could see?
He glanced covertly sideways, first at the woman's thigh, then more boldly at her face. She was looking straight ahead, at the mirror. Her nose was classically straight, her eyes were cobalt-blue, slightly slanted, very European. Her lips were glossed with crimson. He noticed a bracelet of yellow and white gold, intertwined, that must have cost the equivalent of three months of his salary, including expenses, and a gold Ebel wristwatch. Her nails were long and crimson and perfect. She moved slightly sideways on her stool and he noticed the narrowness of her waist and the full sway of her breasts. She's naked underneath that dress, he thought to himself, or practically naked. She's just too incredibly sexy to be true.
What could he say to her? Should he say anything? Could he say anything? He thought dutifully for a moment about Margaret, but he knew that he was only being dutiful. This woman existed on a different planet from Margaret, she was one of a different species. She was feminine, sexual, undomesticated, elegant, and probably dangerous, too.
The barman approached him. "Can I fix you another drink, sir?"
"I — unh —»
"Oh, go ahead" — the woman smiled — "I can't bear to drink alone."
Gil flushed, and grinned, and shrugged, and said, "All right, then. Yes." He turned to the woman and asked, "How about you?"
"Thank you," she acknowledged, passing her glass to the barman, although there was a curious intonation in her voice which made it sound as if she were saying thank you for something else altogether.
The barman set up the drinks. They raised their glasses to each other and said, "Prost!"
"Are you staying here?" Gil asked the woman. He wished his words didn't sound so tight and high-pitched.
"In Amsterdam?"
"I mean here, at the Amstel Hotel."
"No, no," she said. "I live by the sea, in Zandvoort. I only came here to meet a friend of mine."
"You speak perfect English," he told her.
"Yes," she replied. Gil waited, expecting her to tell him what she did for a living, but she remained silent.