With Ester’s zip undone, Bernard walks round to his side of the bed. He closes the curtains but the room remains light. He sits down on the edge of the mattress to unlace his shoes, unbuckle his belt, unbutton his shirt. He looks at Ester and looks away. She steps out of her shoes and slips off her dress and stands by the bed in her knickers. Bernard pulls back the covers so that she can get under. She can feel where he held her, where his fingers pressed into her skin, where the evidence, the small, round bruises, will be later. The heel of one foot, rubbed by her new shoes, bleeds lightly into the bedsheet.
Bernard, naked now, takes off his watch, stopping to wind it before putting it down on the bedside table. He gets into bed and turns towards Ester. He looks at her as if she reminds him of someone, as if he is trying to remember who. It’s me, she wants to say to him, I remind you of me.
His camphor smell fills her nostrils, and his eyes close.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. Disinfectant
Futh takes his breakfast to his table by the window. It is, he notices, brightening up a bit. Settling down, picking up his cutlery, he looks around the room. He sees a woman in her thirties entering, going to the bar. She orders coffee and opens the book she is carrying, reading it where she stands. Futh, working his way through an enormous helping of salami, notices that she has good skin. She is careful, he thinks, in the sun. Angela always wears face cream with built-in UV protection and he wonders if this woman does too. She sips her coffee and Futh glances at the cover of the book she is reading, recognising it as a novel which he has seen in Angela’s possession.
Polishing off his salami, Futh stands up and crosses the room, carrying his plate back to the buffet which is laid out at one end of the bar. He would like more. There is a short queue and he joins it, finding himself standing next to the woman at the bar.
‘Hello,’ he says.
The woman does not respond.
He tries again, asking, ‘Enjoying the book?’
She moves her gaze to the top of a new page, turning her head slightly away from him.
Even though the title of this woman’s book, like Angela’s, is in English, he rephrases the question in German. ‘Good book?’ he says, and then stands there awkwardly, his plate held out in front of him like a begging bowl. His hand goes to his pocket, seeking out and wrapping itself around the silver lighthouse.
He says, going back to English, ‘You wear the same perfume as my wife.’
She looks up, and her gaze drops down to his trousers, to the hand which is deep inside his pocket, gripping the silver lighthouse, his thumb anxiously circling its smooth, warm dome. Futh, noticing that the queue for the buffet has gone, moves on.
Back in his room, Futh sits on his bed and touches the painful parts of his feet. Seeing his sandals in his suitcase, he takes them out and tries them on with a pair of socks. Even without plasters, the sandals are heavenly; they do not rub his wounds.
When he leaves the hotel, he leaves his walking boots behind in the porch, not even glancing back at them. He is not expecting to see any more rain.
He crosses the river again and enters woodland. It is good, he thinks, striding out, to leave things behind. He almost wishes that his suitcase, which is more than half full of dirty washing, was not being sent on to the next hotel. He could manage, he thinks, with what he is wearing and carrying. He could hand-wash his clothes every night in soap in the sink and hang them out of the window to dry.
He could even manage with less than this, he thinks. There are all sorts of things in his rucksack which he could jettison — he does not really need a spare pair of walking socks or a travel sewing kit. He has never used his spork or his compass. He has been carrying a novel around all week and has not even opened it since Hellhaus. He has brought along his swimming trunks and a towel, thinking that he might have a dip in the Rhine, just to be able to say to his father, to Kenny, to his Aunt Frieda, that he did it. But it all looks too deep and fast flowing and far too cold. He does not even think that there is anywhere to paddle.
He has not read his great big guidebook — he never looks to see where he is going. He will read it later, on the ferry home, or he will not read it at all. He once went to Rouen and spent some hours awestruck by the medieval houses, breathing in the history, only discovering later, reading the guidebook on the way back, that the houses were imitations, built after the war.
He is very aware of the silver lighthouse being in his pocket. It has never bothered him before but now he wishes it wasn’t there, poking at his groin with every step he takes, its little weight constantly against his leg. It could travel in the suitcase instead, he decides, and then he would be all the lighter.
In his back pocket, he has condoms, ‘protection’ as his Aunt Frieda used to call them. He does not appear to need any.
He thinks of all the boxes which are no doubt already waiting for him in his new flat. He wishes they were not there. He would have preferred, at the end of the week, to let himself in and find only the neutrally painted walls, the expanse of stain-resistant carpet and the basic furniture, and not all this stuff which belongs to the past and to a marriage which is over. He wishes he had just left it all behind, let Angela have it or let it be thrown out. In fact, he thinks, he would have preferred not to be going back at all.
As a child, he often fantasised about running away, changing his appearance and his name so that he would not be found, could just disappear. The thought still appeals to him, and he could even do it, he thinks; he could go anywhere, start a new life. He could stay in Germany or go to New York. He could just never go home and Angela and his father and Gloria would wonder what had become of him. He wonders who would be the first to notice his absence.
When his mother left, his father got rid of everything which had belonged to her, anything she had not taken with her. He built a bonfire and lit it before Futh woke up, throwing onto it all her books, photographs still in their frames, the pictures she had never hung, folders full of her Open University work, her pin board with indecipherable lists still attached, even furniture which he smashed first, even clothes and the kitchen curtain material, even her walking boots, and Futh’s, adding something to the fire to help it devour these things so that the air stank, filled with searing fumes. He pulled up the flowers and weeds in the bed she had planted and then neglected, in between the climbing frame and the fence. And then, while the bonfire blazed in the garden, he cleaned the house, hoovering and scrubbing until there was nothing left of Futh’s mother, only a lingering smell of disinfectant in every room. Although, Futh supposed, there had to be microscopic particles which his father had missed, and there were the books hidden under Futh’s mattress — his mother’s banned literature — and there was the silver lighthouse which Futh still carried with him everywhere he went.
Looking at his watch, he sees that it is lunchtime. He ate all that salami for breakfast and then, after that awkward exchange with the woman at the bar, he went back to the buffet table and got some more, but when he thinks about it, he could eat again. He wants to eat plenty of meat and carbohydrates, to build up his strength. What he would really like is a big ham sandwich and a homemade cake or pastry, but he only had room in his pockets for a plain roll and a small banana from the buffet. But, he thinks, does he really need any more than that? He could live like this, surely, eating only as much as he really needs to, spending very little, getting by. He sits down in a clearing to eat his lunch and two minutes later it is gone and he feels hungrier than he did when he started. But is it not good, he thinks — a little bit of hunger, fasting — for the soul?