I was apprehensive walking in — I’d eaten there before, with friends — but no one recognised me, no one called my name. Once we were seated at our table, I relaxed. I looked around and nodded. It was all as I remembered it.
‘That’s odd,’ Nina said.
I smiled. ‘What?’
‘Everyone’s cigarette smoke’s blowing in the same direction.’
I told her that the draughts were famous. Part of the experience, in fact. One Easter my parents took me to the Metropole for lunch. There was such a draught that day, my mother’s hair lifted off her shoulders and flew horizontally in the air behind her; she looked as if she was riding in a speedboat or an open car. (I was exaggerating, but only slightly.) Another time a friend of mine sat too close to the door. He didn’t notice anything at first. But, gradually, as the evening wore on, he lost all feeling in one side of his body. After the meal he had to be carried out of the hotel, like a footballer who’s just pulled a hamstring.
Nina was laughing. I took a small box out of my pocket and slid it across the tablecloth towards her.
‘What’s this?’ she said.
‘It’s a present.’
‘You’re always giving me things.’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just something small.’
It was a silver-plated cigarette-lighter that used to belong to my father. I’d had it engraved: FROM M TO N — LOVE IS BLIND (a bit obvious, perhaps, but anyway). She looked down at it and shook her head. Light caught the gold in her dark-brown hair.
‘It’s lovely,’ she said. And then, a few moments later, ‘You shouldn’t give me things.’
A band played while we ate. The saxophonist was slope-shouldered, shifty-eyed. His gaze kept sliding sideways and lingering on Nina. And no wonder. She was more beautiful than ever — her hair loosely pinned, a long black dress clinging to her body, a smile lurking at the corners of her mouth as if she’d just thought of something illicit.
The main course arrived. My roast pork with plums smelled like a piece of old carpet. Tasted like it, too. The keyboard-player sneezed eight times during one song. Nobody danced. Another vintage night at the Metropole.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold,’ Nina said. ‘Well, maybe once.’
‘When was that?’ I asked her.
She told me that when she was seventeen she’d had an affair with a married man. They had flown to a city in the south together. He was on a business trip, and they’d stayed in a luxury hotel. But something she said had upset the man. He’d thrown her out. She had no money and no coat. It was February.
She found herself standing next to a park. Snow had fallen early that morning and the streets were still soft with it. Cars came creeping up behind her. You could hardly hear them. If you wanted to make the sound, she said, you had to take a piece of cardboard — an empty cereal packet or the back of a letter-writing pad — and you had to hold it close to your ear and tear it very slowly. That was cars on snow. There was a fairground in the park, she remembered, but it was shut for the winter. There was a Big Wheel. Freezing fog hid the top of it. She stood on the road, clutching her ribs in both hands. She had no idea what to do.
A car went by, more stealthy than the rest. Its wheels fat, its white exhaust fumes flapping. Some foreign make. It slowed down, pulled up just beyond her. She ran towards it. The window on the passenger side slid down. She stooped, that position you see whores in — a figure seven; she could feel the tendons taut in the back of her thighs. The man looked warm, though — that was all she could think of. She stood there looking in at him, his round glasses and his overcoat, the sound system playing opera, the seats of pale leather, and she thought how warm he looked. He was foreign, like the car, but he spoke to her in her own language.
‘How much?’
She said the first amount that came to mind. He didn’t understand her. She had to draw the number on the outside of his windscreen, in mirror-writing. She didn’t know whether it was a little or a lot; she didn’t have any idea of the prices. He looked at the number and smiled faintly. Reaching across, he unlocked the door and pushed it open.
‘Your coffee.’ A waitress had appeared at our table. Late forties, with a moustache. As she set the coffee down in front of me, it slopped over, spilled into the saucer. She shrugged her shoulders, walked away.
I turned back to Nina. ‘Then what?’
‘We drove,’ she said.
Through the city and out into the country. Women were sitting under umbrellas along the roadside, selling apples out of wooden boxes. The land was black and white, the sky a heavy, even grey. She saw three deer cross a rising, snow-covered field.
They arrived at a small house on the edge of a village. It had mustard-yellow shutters and a dark, thatched roof. When they were standing inside, he held her gently by the shoulders and said something which she took to mean, Stay here. Then he drove away. She made herself a cup of hot chocolate. Through the kitchen window she watched two children skating on a pond. In the afternoon she went to bed and slept.
That evening he returned. He cooked supper for her, then they spent the night together. In the morning he drove her back to the city. When he let her out of the car, he handed her an envelope. She didn’t open it until he’d gone. There was money inside, almost twice the amount she’d asked for. She bought a coat with it, and two pairs of woollen tights, and she still had enough to catch a train home.
I watched her light a cigarette and sit back in her chair.
At first I thought she might have made the whole thing up. But then it seemed so like her — drawing an amount of money on a stranger’s windscreen, drinking hot chocolate in a stranger’s house — that I decided it had to be true. I still wasn’t sure what it meant to her, though. Was she proud of her resourcefulness, her spontaneity, the fact that she could make her own luck? Or was it some kind of talisman in itself, proof that the world could treat her well?
‘So,’ she said eventually, tapping her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, ‘that’s the coldest I’ve ever been.’ She paused and looked round, then she said, ‘Though I have to admit, this comes pretty close.’
Smiling, I asked our waitress for the bill.
Afterwards Nina took me to a bar she knew. We both drank whisky, to warm up.
‘I hear you’re seeing someone,’ Gregory said.
I looked across at him. ‘No smoke without a fire, Smoke.’
Loots chuckled.
We were in Leon’s, the three of us. It was early December, and the walls were covered with shiny paper decorations, red and green and gold, many of them already curling in the humid atmosphere. Bunches of balloons clustered in the top corners of the room. Above the counter, suspended from the ceiling, was a sign: SEASON’S GREETINGS TO ALL OUR CUSTOMERS.
‘So it’s true,’ Gregory said.
I nodded.
‘So who is she?’ He was like an old dog who was trying to gnaw on a bone, but couldn’t seem to get it into the right position between his paws.
‘Her name’s Nina.’
‘Because you know Inge liked you …’
‘What is it about you?’ Loots said. ‘What’s the secret?’