‘Now, if someone comes,’ she said, ‘we wonder why.’
She left the table again. This time I heard a cupboard open and close. I thought I heard a cork spring from a bottle, too. There was no mistaking the smell clouding the air around her when she sat down. Something sweet, it was. Sherry, perhaps. Or a liqueur.
‘All those sick people we got,’ she said.
I smiled to myself, but she didn’t even notice.
People with skin disease, gallstones, rheumatism, they all came to the springs thinking they could cure themselves; sometimes they even left thinking they were cured, which was good for business, of course. In her opinion, they were fooling no one but themselves. All the water did was make your skin soft when you bathed in it, soft in a way that didn’t seem quite natural. In the end your mind went soft as well. She’d never spent much time in it. In fact, in her family, they’d never even learned to swim.
‘My husband swam in it,’ she said, ‘but it didn’t do anything for him.’ She paused. ‘He’s dead, in case you’re wondering.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I can’t say I am.’ She laughed. ‘Towards the end, it was —’ She paused to light another cigarette and left the sentence dangling. ‘We never got on very well,’ she went on. ‘We never did see eye to eye about much.’
‘Do you live here alone then?’
She hesitated, as if the question had several answers and she had to choose between them. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I have a son.’
‘I haven’t seen him,’ Loots said.
‘He’s away.’ She tapped her cigarette against the edge of a saucer. We were drinking coffee by then, so weak you could taste the water in it. ‘I had a daughter, but she left. That was twenty years ago.’
Karin, I thought.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there’s just the two of us now. Everybody else is either dead or gone.’
What stayed in my mind, what was still there as I lay in bed, seeing nothing but the window and the rain on it, was the satisfaction in her voice. They were the last words she’d spoken before she left us, and they ran together, they were slightly slurred, but there was none of the self-pity or regret you might have expected. If anything, she seemed to be taking a kind of pleasure in what had happened. She was almost gloating.
After dinner I’d walked down to the pool with Loots. The night was cold and clear. In the moonlight his cheekbones looked more rounded than ever, and polished, too, like bedknobs. He stood on the terrace with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hoisted. He talked about the steam rising off the water, how odd it looked, almost artificial. I thought of Gregory’s bald head.
‘You didn’t mention Nina,’ he said suddenly. ‘You didn’t say you knew her.’
‘No, I know. I’m not sure why. And now it feels too late, somehow.’ I walked across the terrace to the wooden rail that bounded it. ‘Maybe it’ll just come up naturally,’ I said, ‘in conversation.’ I leaned my forearms on the rail. Beyond it, the ground plunged into darkness. In the distance, on the far side of the valley, I saw trees outlined against the sky. The sky was lighter than the trees, the division between the two uneven, serrated, as if a piece of torn black paper had been placed on a piece of paper that was grey. ‘They’re not a very close family,’ I went on, after a while. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t even know that Nina’s missing.’
Loots joined me at the rail. ‘She’s strange.’
‘You think so?’
‘It’s the way she looks at us.’
‘I didn’t notice anything.’
In the silence that followed I could hear the sulphur water rushing along its narrow channel in the rock and tumbling down into the pool. I thought Loots was being dramatic. Her prickly manner had to do with where she lived; it was as natural as a dialect. You couldn’t judge her for it.
‘She’s a country person,’ I told him. ‘You know what country people are like. They’re suspicious. They don’t like strangers.’
‘She runs a hotel.’
‘Yes, but nobody’s stayed here for ages.’
Loots didn’t say anything.
‘There’s just a couple of fucked-up old people to look after,’ I went on. ‘You’d be strange.’
‘Maybe.’ He didn’t sound convinced.
He stepped back from the rail and began to take off his clothes. I asked him what he was doing.
‘I’m going to take the waters,’ he said.
He stripped down to his underpants, which were baggy and misshapen. He was very thin: shoulderblades like triangles (I thought of the signs you see on the back of trucks sometimes, or outside nuclear facilities, the signs that mean CAUTION: RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL). I watched him spring into the air, turn over twice and slide into the water, exactly the kind of acrobatic dive that I would have predicted. There was no need to comment on it. Instead, I asked him what the water was like.
‘Warm,’ he said. ‘Kind of silky, too.’
‘Silky?’
‘Yes. Like there’s oil in it. Are you coming in?’
‘I don’t think so.’
I found a bench and sat down. Loots floated somewhere below me. I’d never liked swimming. Even before I was shot, I didn’t like it. And afterwards, it just got worse. I went swimming at the clinic once. Therapy, they called it. I panicked. It was the four sides of the pool — I didn’t believe they were there. When I stretched a hand out, there’d be no tiles, no ropes — nothing to hold on to. It was like being someone who thought the world was flat: the pool was something I could reach the end of and, when I did, I’d fall over the edge.
‘You’re sure you don’t mind me going tomorrow?’ Loots said.
‘I don’t mind at all. How long will you stay at your uncle’s?’
‘Till Wednesday.’
‘And you’ll come for me on your way back?’
A note of uncertainty must have crept into my voice, because he laughed.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t just leave you here, would I.’
I lay awake on the first floor of the hotel, rain still landing on the window, making the glass look torn. It was Saturday night. Wednesday wasn’t far away. And I had no sense of what might happen after that. I wasn’t sure that returning to the city was such a good idea, and yet I could hardly stay where I was. It was as if I’d found myself in the pool after all. I couldn’t keep swimming indefinitely, but how could I get out if I didn’t trust the edges?
Chapter 3
In the morning I walked to the local garage with Loots to buy petrol. A kilometre, Mrs Hekmann had told us, but it was more like three. Loots claimed she’d misled us deliberately, out of some perversity or spite. I disagreed. It was simply that the road was so familiar to her; she thought of it as shorter than it actually was. In the end, it didn’t matter. We enjoyed our walk. Loots described the countryside as we passed through it. There were pine forests, stands of silver birches. There were houses made of wood and painted the same colours as the land, green or brown or yellow, many with carved balconies and eaves. There were farmyards inhabited by geese with orange beaks, and barns weathered to an even grey, the skins of scavengers and rodents nailed to their walls. Loots was more observant than the day before, more specific, his descriptive powers honed, no doubt, by the knowledge that he would soon be gone. Once, though, his voice lifted in genuine excitement as he noticed a cow standing on a frozen stream and drinking from a hole in the ice.