She did not know what she would do when she got to the hotel. It was still early, and she would have to wait at least an hour before she could think of announcing her arrival. She would not mind waiting in the lobby, but she was not sure the hotel people would even let her come inside at such an early hour. The voices in her head started up then, as she had known they would, as they always did when she was uncertain or nervous, seizing their chance. It was as if a motley and curious crowd had fallen into step behind her, hard on her heels, and were discussing her and her plight among themselves in excited, fast, unintelligible whispers. She stopped for a moment and leaned against a shuttered shop window with a hand over her eyes, but with the world blacked out the din of voices only intensified. She took a deep breath and went on.
Dozing in the train she had dreamed of Harlequin in his half-mask. Then she had roused herself and brought out her notebook, her fountain pen. H. the headman, his mask and bat. Maistre on the executioner: "who is this inexplicable being…?" Rip the mask from his face to find – another mask. Father father father.
The phantoms behind her fell back.
And now already here was the hotel, with a laurel bush in a pot at the foot of the steps. The glass door swung open automatically before her, and she wondered if instead of approaching it at the measured pace that was demanded she had run at it full tilt would it have still managed to open in time or would she have been too quick for the mechanism. She saw herself sprawled there on the marble step, amid big lances of shattered glass, the blood pumping from her throat and wrists. It struck her how like hospitals hotels are. A young man in a smart black suit behind the reception desk smiled at her non-committally. She walked past him with her gaze fixed straight ahead and her back arched, trying to look as if she had a perfect right to be there. She had never understood exactly how hotels work, or what the rules of hotel living are. For instance, how would paying guests be distinguished from the other people who would drift in and out here during the day, casual visitors, people coming for lunch, or for assignations in the bar, suchlike? Would that young man at the reception desk know she was not staying here? She had not asked him for a key, but she might have one, all the same, might have got it earlier from one of his colleagues, before he came on duty, and taken it with her when she went out. There was her bag, of course, but it was not very big, and might be a shopping bag, for all he knew. But why would she have gone out with a shopping bag at dawn, when no shops were open, and how could she be coming back now with it full?
The lobby was all gleaming marble surfaces, with hidden lighting and a low ceiling. There was a sort of pond in the middle where water splashed among ferns, soothingly. She took off her coat and sat down at one end of an uncomfortable leather couch that she knew the backs of her legs would stick to even through her dress. A large, indifferent silence hung about her. She wondered if the ferns in the pond were real or made of plastic; they looked suspiciously genuine. She was trying not to think of the voices; often, just thinking of them was enough to set them going. The young man from the reception desk came and asked, in English, with cool politeness, if she wished for anything, some coffee, perhaps, or tea? She shook her head; she did not know what the procedure for paying would be; she imagined herself offering him money only to be met with an offended stare. He was handsome, like a film actor, dark and smooth and poised. He smiled again, this time with a shadow of irony, she thought. As he was turning away he glanced at her bag and lifted an eyebrow, in a way that told her he knew she was not a guest. She wondered enviously how he had decided. Perhaps everyone checking in was photographed in secret, and the pictures were kept in a file under the desk, and he had gone through it and not found hers. More likely he had known just by the look of her, the way she was sitting, so straight, with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap; that, and the fact that she had not gone up in the lift, to her room, the room that she did not have. She looked at her watch and sighed. A single, gloating voice began whispering in her head.
Here I am, asleep again, and dreaming. In the dream I am in an aeroplane, or on it, rather, for the cabin is open to the sky, with a metal floor and a rounded metal canopy above supported on thin steel struts. There are other passengers on board but I cannot see them, the headrests of the seats are set too high. The air is gushing against my face, wonderfully cool and mild. Far below, through breaks in the cloud, I can see fields and rivers, little puffs of green that must be trees, and houses, and highways, a whole toy world laid out and stretching off to the curved horizon on all sides. As I fly along, feather-light and free, I am myself and also someone else, and this is all right, and natural. A stewardess comes and leans over me, telling me something, but when I look up at her I see that she has a bearded, pained face, the face of a man, gentle but not effeminate, the eyes lightly closed as in death, the lids stretched like paper or silk over the bulging orbs beneath. She is handing me something, a folded sheet of paper, a letter, perhaps, which I try not to accept, but she insists, still with that gentle, kindly, suffering expression. Signore, she is saying, with soft urgency, pointing to her bearded face, signore, signore. I push at her to make her stand aside, the paper crackling in my hand, and try to rise from my seat, but cannot, my leg will not let me. I know that the plane is going to crash, I can feel it dipping out of its headlong course, can feel the metal floor shivering with the strain. The world was rushing up to meet me, the objects in it growing bigger in sudden, ratcheted expansions, like a series of photographic enlargements being laid rapidly one over the other. At last I got myself upright, my leg severing itself painlessly at the hip and releasing me, and as I hopped bleeding down the aisle I saw that it was not an aeroplane I was travelling in but the open back of a lorry that bucked and swayed as it hurtled driverless through the smoke and blare of the midday traffic. There was a cry, and someone shouted something, and I woke, cold with sweat and clutching the edge of the mattress, my teeth clenched and my legs tangled in the sheets.
I rose unsteadily and went and shut the window, seeking to block out the noise of the street. It was not yet seven and already the day was in full, clamorous swing; I thought wistfully of Arcady 's somnolent mornings. On the bedside table behind me the telephone rang. I grew up without telephones, and have never managed to become accustomed to the instrument, the way it sits there, the same in every house and hotel room, ready to break out at any moment without warning, petulant and demanding as a wailing infant. I went back and sat on the side of the bed and picked up the receiver cautiously, and cautiously applied it to my ear, and for a moment saw myself as my father, with all his wariness of the world's machinery. My father. How strange. I had not thought about him in… how long? A voice was speaking in my ear, from the reception desk, to inform me that "una persona" was waiting for me downstairs. I nodded, as if the receptionist were standing in front of me. Then I put the receiver down again, exhaling a breath. So.
I ate breakfast in my room, unhurriedly, and afterwards lay in a scalding bath for a long time. Now that she was here, now that the moment of confrontation had arrived, I had drifted into a state of lethargy and lazy contemplation. That momentary vision of my father had stirred up all manner of unexpected memories from the far past, of my childhood, of my family, of the Vander household with its many cousins, uncles, aunts. It was as if I were drowning, calmly, with my life not so much flashing before me as playing out selected scenes for me in dreamy slow motion. At length I rose and towelled myself briskly and put on my linen suit, hopelessly wrinkled now, and my stubby tie. Grimly I grinned at myself in the mirror: the drowned man dresses for his own funeral. In the corridor there was a mortal hush. The lift arrived with its clangings and mashings and I stepped into the box and descended, with one hand in my pocket rubbing a coin – the ferryman's levy! – between a finger and thumb.