Ester did meet Bernard at Ida’s house again, but she did not go in. Ester remembers Ida opening the front door, turning away to call for Bernard and then turning back and looking silently at Ester until Bernard appeared in the hallway and took Ester away. Ida did not say, ‘You’ve got a nerve coming here.’ She did not say, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ She did not say, ‘The sight of you makes me sick.’
Even Bernard once said to Ester, ‘What kind of woman does that?’
‘It was you too,’ she reminded him. ‘He was your brother.’
‘Well, I never liked him,’ said Bernard, ‘but he was your fiancé.’
Opening one of her dressing table drawers, Ester rummages through the jumbled contents, until, at the back, at the bottom, she finds what she is looking for — the perfume which Bernard gave to her as a wedding present. The case, like the one she found in the suitcase in room six, is designed to resemble a lighthouse, but this one is wooden, cylindrical rather than squared beneath the domed top, and less detailed than the silver one, but it does still have its vial of perfume inside. She takes it out. On one side of the glass vial, ‘DRALLE’ is written in relief. On the other side there is a sticker which says, ‘Veilchen’. On the handle of the stopper there is an engraving of a dove, or a pigeon. She has not worn the perfume for years. She takes the stopper out of the bottle, puts it to her nose and smells the essence of violets.
Bernard married her quickly, as if he were afraid that she would change her mind, go back to his brother, or on to some other man. She went with him to the small town in which he was living. He liked, she was sure, to keep her far away from his brother and her old boyfriends and everyone she knew, as if loneliness were sure to keep her faithful.
Getting on for twenty years later, Bernard has aged well. He is a big man but he works out, lifts weights. He takes pride in his appearance. He is always well groomed. He smells of camphor, swearing by this essential oil which is, amongst other things, a disinfectant, a decongestant, an anaesthetic and a stimulant and which he adds to his bathwater every morning. He dresses nicely and wears polished shoes with segs in to make the soles and heels last, and his feet tippety-tap across the wooden floorboards.
She returns the perfume to her dressing table drawer and moves to the bed. Slipping off her shoes, she lies down on her side, sinks her head into the soft pillow and closes her eyes. Her breathing slows and her bare feet twitch as she falls quickly into sleep.
In her dreams, she hears the slow, teasing start of a tap dance, and when she wakes up there is a blanket over her, covering her exposed midriff and her bare legs.
CHAPTER SEVEN. Stewed Apples
Futh sleeps badly before waking early, aching and sweating in twisted bedclothes. Getting stiffly out of bed, he finds a radiator blazing despite the hot weather. The small room is stifling. He turns the radiator off and tries to open the French windows but they are locked and there is no key. Taking off his damp pyjamas, he gets back into bed. He is unused to sleeping naked. He remembers how naked he felt the first time he went back to Angela’s house and slept there without his pyjamas.
He had been in a bar. It was some months since he had seen Angela, since she had given him the lift home from the motorway service station. He had arrived at the bar with some people from work but they had all gone and he was alone with a woman. They were sitting on a very soft sofa which he found difficult to get out of. The soles of his shoes were stuck to the tacky floor. She was sitting close to him, this woman, leaning against him. She had syrupy gloss on her lips and glitter glue on her oily skin. Beneath the studs sparkling in her ear lobes, there were scars suggestive of earrings having been torn out.
‘You’re young,’ she said. He was thirty. ‘And you’re not married? I usually meet married men.’
‘No,’ he said, finishing his drink and reaching forward to put the empty cocktail glass down on the glass table in front of them, ‘I’m not married.’
‘You need another drink,’ she said.
Struggling to his feet, Futh went to fetch another round, but before he reached the bar he was surprised by the sight of Angela breaking away from a small group of people and crossing the room towards him.
‘I know her,’ she said when she reached him. ‘You don’t want to be with her. You don’t want to be here.’ She ushered him towards the exit and he went with her without asking any questions. They were almost at the door when it banged open and a small man darted in, glaring at Futh and Angela as he pushed past them. He made a beeline for the shiny, sticky woman sunk into the soft sofa on the far side of the room, kicking the glass table in front of her as he arrived, making the cocktail glasses jump, and shouting, ‘Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’ But Futh was already halfway through the door. The man began to harass bystanders, who backed away. The woman remained on the sofa sipping her drink and eating crisps.
Futh, outside on the pavement with Angela, his heart racing, said, ‘My jacket’s inside.’ It was lying over the arm of the sofa. There was nothing in the pockets though — his wallet was in his hand — and it was not a cold night. He could still hear the small man shouting. He could hear things breaking.
‘You’d better go,’ said Angela.
‘You’d better come with me,’ said Futh as the fighting grew louder, moving closer.
‘You could come back to my house,’ said Angela.
Futh, remembering that Angela lived with her mother, said, ‘I’d like that. I’d like to meet your mother.’
‘She’ll have taken her sleeping pill by now,’ said Angela. ‘She’ll be out like a light until morning.’
People had started spilling out of the doors, escaping up and down the street, dispersing in pairs and groups, and Futh and Angela, moving on too now, looked like any other couple walking away.
He wakes again having dreamt about Angela. He knows that he should get up so as not to miss breakfast but he can’t bring himself to move. He lies there naked and dozing and drifting back into his dream, and he is still there when he hears, through his semi-sleep, a knock at the door. He opens his eyes but he is not certain that the knock was at his door or whether there was a knock at all. After only a couple of seconds, he hears the door being unlocked, sees from his bed the door handle turning, the door opening, and then a maid standing in the doorway, stopped in her tracks. Futh raises himself up on his elbows and smiles at her. The maid says nothing but gives him a look which makes him shrink and then she leaves the room, pulling the door to behind her.
He gets up, washes at the sink and then dresses, putting on his shorts and a clean short-sleeved shirt. He goes down to breakfast in his socks, with big plasters over his raw heels. The kitchen is closed but people are still finishing what is already out and Futh helps himself to the scraps. He eats some bread and cheese and pockets a hard-boiled egg in its shell for his lunch.
There are little vases of mixed flowers on each table, and he recognises, amongst other things, violets. He takes one out of his vase and puts it to his nose but he can’t smell anything.
He planted violets in the garden when he and Angela first moved into their house. There was a huge bed of them and yet there was no scent at all.