Back in the bedroom, he dresses, returning the silver lighthouse to his trouser pocket. He goes around collecting up the complimentary items — a Biro, sachets of coffee and sugar and individual portions of UHT milk, the remaining toiletry miniatures, a shower cap, the plastic cup — and packs them in his overnight bag. He can make use of all these things in his new flat.
He leaves his cabin, taking his bag and his anorak with him, not wanting to have to come back. He goes to look for some breakfast, but when he is standing at the edge of the restaurant, eyeing the queue and smelling the warm egg, the warm meat, he changes his mind. Instead, putting on his anorak and shouldering his bag, he heads for the outer deck.
It has been raining and is still raining behind them, mizzling into the sea. The metal steps are slippery and he has to go carefully. The sky overhead is a pale grey but it is clearing up over Holland as they draw near. He stands with his hands on the wet railings, watching the ferry’s arrival into the Dutch terminal, and on the other side of the deck, the man in the raincoat who lost his hat does the same.
Futh moves his watch on an hour. Now he will go down to the car deck. When he is waved forward, he will drive out onto the continent, behind the wheel in another country for the first time.
‘Not long now.’
Futh turns and finds the man standing beside him.
‘Where in Germany are you going?’ asks the man.
‘Hellhaus,’ says Futh. ‘Near Koblenz. It’s quite a long drive.’
‘Oh, it won’t take you long,’ says the man. ‘A few hours.’
‘If I don’t go wrong,’ says Futh, picturing the pristine European road atlas on his passenger seat. Angela has always done the long-distance driving and is also the better navigator.
The ferry is docking. ‘We should head down to the car deck,’ says Futh.
‘I’m on foot,’ says the man.
‘Where did you say you’re going?’
‘Utrecht. It’s not far from here. You’ll go right past it on your way to Koblenz. You should stop there for coffee if you have time.’
Futh looks at the man’s damp coat, smells the rain trapped in its weave. He looks at the residue of rain on the man’s eyelashes, on his eyebrows, on his bare head. He imagines this man in his passenger seat, reading the map and knowing the roads. He says, ‘Would you like a lift to Utrecht?’
The man beams. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you’re going there anyway, that would be very kind. You can have coffee at my mother’s house.’
‘I’d like that,’ says Futh, ‘very much.’
The man holds out his hand and says, ‘Carl.’
Carl’s hand is big and tanned and, Futh finds as he takes it, warm. Futh’s own hand — slim and pale and cold — seems lost inside it. ‘Futh,’ he says in reply. Carl leans closer, turning one ear towards him as if he has not quite caught it, and Futh has to say again, ‘Futh.’
The two men turn away from the railings to head inside together. The boat’s wet surfaces gleam in the early morning sunlight, and Futh wonders how long the ferry will stay in the brightening port before turning around and going out again, back out into the cold, grey sea.
CHAPTER TWO. Breasts
Ester gets herself comfortable on her high stool at the bar and removes her rubber gloves. She adds a little tonic to the shot of gin in front of her and drinks it down. She likes to have her first drink of the day when she finishes the downstairs rooms.
It is just after eleven. It is always quiet at this time, just before lunch. There is only herself and the new girl and one customer, a man at the other end of the bar. She is aware of him staring at her but she does not turn and look at him, not yet.
When she puts down her glass, she spots a smear on the rim, a red lipstick stain which is not hers. She calls the new girl over, holding out the glass for her to see, but the girl just takes it, thinking only that she is being given Ester’s dirty glass.
Ester sits with one foot resting on the crossbar of her stool and the other foot touching the floor, a position which makes her look as if she is on the point of going somewhere, but she is not. She can see herself reflected in the mirrors behind the bottles on the shelves. She spent a long time that morning at her dressing table trying to get her face right, but she can see, looking at herself now in the space between two bottles of mediocre red wine, that the make-up around her right eye and on her cheekbone is too heavy.
Her vest top shows off the bruises on her upper arms, rows of dark ovals like smudgy police station fingerprints, as well as her slackening bosom and the tattoo above her left breast — a rose, fully open, the petals loose and beginning to drop. Her top’s thin straps sink into her flesh, which is pale and doughy like uncooked pastry.
Now she looks at him, at the lone customer, a middle-aged man standing a few metres away. His broad shoulders are rounded, hunched over the bar. With his flat backside and short, thin legs, he makes the shape of a question mark. He is drinking a cup of coffee and peeling a hard-boiled egg, still watching her.
Ester, speaking German, says, ‘You’re not a guest here.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I came in for breakfast.’ Making small talk, he moves up the bar towards her with his naked egg, the white giving between his broad thumb and his short fingers. He stands so close that his foot is touching hers, but she doesn’t move hers away. He bites into his egg and she hears it being wetly masticated inside his mouth.
She fingers her hair, which is yellowy like the rubber gloves, like the crumbly egg yolk. She says, ‘I have to get back to work. I’m just taking a break.’
‘I have places to be as well,’ he says, and Ester sees the eggy, claggy inside of his opening and closing mouth. ‘I’m just passing through.’
She notices the butterfly tattoo on the back of his other hand, the hand which is not holding the egg, the thumb of which is hooked into his belt at the buckle. She gets down from her stool and walks to the internal door which leads to the guest rooms, glancing back at him before going through.
The man puts the last of the egg in his mouth and follows her, leaving the broken eggshell behind him on the bar.
He lies on his back in a bed which was vacated that morning by an American couple, whose dark hairs Ester can still see on the pillowcases. He is looking brazenly, unblinkingly, at her breasts and nothing else.
In her flat-chested youth, Ester collected pictures of other young women’s breasts in a scrapbook — breasts in bras from the underwear pages of her mother’s catalogues, breasts in bikinis from travel brochures, bare breasts from the plastic surgery adverts at the back of her mother’s magazines and from the magazines her father kept under his side of the mattress. As a teenager, she spent a great deal of time poring over these pictures of coveted breasts. Now nearing forty, she has almost forgotten this phase, but this man’s gaze reminds her of herself in her bedroom with her scrapbook on her lap. She gets onto the bed, and he does not take his eyes off her breasts, and she does not really look at him at all, looks near him, past him. When he has finished, he closes his eyes and falls asleep.
He was quick, but that’s just as well. Ester still has two rooms to do before lunchtime. There are toilets and sinks and baths to be cleaned, floors to be mopped, carpets to be vacuumed, beds to be made, including the one they are lying in.
In the past, she always used beds she had already changed, but since receiving complaints about the sheets, she makes sure to use rooms she has not yet cleaned. Or she uses rooms whose occupants are out for the day, brushing off and straightening up the bedding afterwards, and sometimes, while she is there, browsing the contents of drawers and suitcases, picking up perfumes and lipsticks, testing them on herself. If guests ever notice their possessions, these small items, going missing, they rarely say anything.