At the opposite end of the corridor, just past room ten, there is a door marked ‘PRIVATE’, and it divides the guest rooms from those occupied by Ester and her husband.
Bernard, coming through this door, sees his wife hurriedly leaving room six and heading downstairs. Moments later, a man appears in the doorway of the same room, leaning out and looking towards the stairs. The man is partially hidden behind the door, but Bernard sees a bare shoulder, the knobbles of the man’s spine, a white leg, a blue-veined foot on the hallway carpet. The man turns his head and sees Bernard and withdraws into his room looking embarrassed. The door clicks shut and a key is turned in the lock.
In the night, there will be a storm. It will be brief, if a little violent, and hardly anyone will even realise it has occurred, although they might hear it raging, thundering, in their dreams.
In the morning, by the time people are up and about, the sun will be out again, and the rain-soaked pavements will be dry, and there will be very little evidence of damage.
CHAPTER FIVE. Sun Cream
In the small, low-ceilinged bathroom, Futh fills his tooth glass at the sink and takes big gulps before realising that he is drinking water from the hot tap. He has heard the stories about people finding dead pigeons in hot water tanks. He pours away what is left and refills his glass with cold water, which he still does not much like the taste of. He goes back to the bedroom. It is very early — he woke, thirsty, long before his alarm — but it is light and he could do with an early start anyway.
The night before, his supper miraculously appeared in his room while he was taking a shower. He ate in his pyjamas, standing at the window, looking out at the river.
He has got into the habit of always determining an escape route from a room in which he is staying, imagining emergency scenarios in which his exit is blocked by fire or a psychopath. This began, he thinks, when he was in his twenties and living in an attic flat. His Aunt Frieda, worrying about stair fires and burglars, gave him a rope ladder. It seems important that he should always know a way out.
Putting down his supper plate, he opened the window — looking, in the dark, for a roof to climb on to, a pipe to hold on to, a soft landing — and a moth flew in. Underneath the window, there was pavement, and it looked a long way down. He wondered if it was possible to jump from such a height without breaking anything.
Having finished his meal, he brushed and flossed his teeth and went straight to bed. Finding a mint on his pillow, he heard his Aunt Frieda in his head warning him about tooth decay, the dangers of sweets, but he ate it anyway, sucking it down to nothing.
He opened a book and tried to read but could not concentrate, kept reading the same lines over and over and reaching the bottom of the first page without having taken it in. He was distracted by the moth flying at his lamp. He got out of bed again and opened the curtains and the window to let it out, knowing that this disoriented moth was really after the moon, its navigational aid, although Futh could not see the moon from where he was standing. Getting back into bed, he turned over his pillow to get the cool side and noticed the stain of a stranger’s mascara like a spider on his pillowcase. He resumed his reading and the moth flew away from the lamplight, the artificial light, towards the open window.
Still his thoughts drifted, towards home and Angela and where he had gone wrong. She had always been irritated by his awkwardness around people, around women in particular. He knew her mother found him strange. He was introspective, insufficiently aware, Angela often said, of other people and how they might see things.
The moth flew out of a fold in the curtains and back towards the lamplight, bumping and fluttering against the hot bulb. Futh shut his book and put it down on the bedside table. He got up to find the map he would need for the next day’s walk and lay down again to study his route. But he could not stop thinking about all the ways in which he had annoyed his wife during their marriage.
He was a bad listener, apparently, bewilderingly incapable sometimes of following simple instructions. He was always late leaving the house, late arriving anywhere, even when he had to meet Angela. And he never apologised, even when he was clearly in the wrong. These were small things but he supposed they built up, amounted to something. He imagined things being different. He had a reverie in which he said and did the right thing and Angela did not leave him. But it was too late, it had already happened.
Having nodded off with the light on, and having slept deeply before waking early with the map creased under his cheek, Futh now stands once more at the window looking down at the quiet street below. There is not yet anybody about and nothing is open. It is, he realises, not only early, it is also a Sunday.
He turns away from the window and in the early morning light he notices the colour of the bedroom walls, which are painted a deep pink — the colour of rare meat, the colour of his sunburnt arm.
He dresses for the day’s hiking, strapping his watch onto his unburnt wrist and putting the silver lighthouse in the pocket of his shorts. He goes downstairs, taking his supper plate with him. The landlady is sitting on her stool at the bar with her back to him, drinking a cup of coffee and eating an orange. He approaches her, putting his dirty plate down on the bar in front of her, thanking her in German. She turns, and he sees the new bruise on her face, despite the make-up she has applied. He thanks her again and she nods. He stands for a moment just smiling. He thinks to ask her about breakfast but before he has put the sentence together in his head she has climbed down from her stool and is walking away with the empty plate. He stands there watching her go. He can smell the zest of her orange, and good coffee, and an undernote of disinfectant.
Futh looks around, taking in the various bare tables and vacant chairs, the bar stools and the padded window seats, wondering where he should sit. There is a man standing behind the bar and Futh walks over to him. On the wall, there is an oversized clock. Futh did not see it last night when he arrived and he can’t believe he missed it. It is enormous. The bar reeks of furniture polish and Futh detects a note of camphor. The man has his hands flat on the bar, his fingers splayed, his manicured nails like the display of eyes on a peacock’s tail. He is well-dressed, although there is a fly, Futh notices, on the collar of his shirt. Futh recognises him as the man he saw in the corridor the night before. He took him for another guest but clearly he is a member of the hotel staff. Futh, speaking carefully in German, asks about breakfast.
Bernard shakes his head.
‘What time is breakfast?’ persists Futh.
Bernard looks him silently in the eye for a moment and says, ‘You should go.’
Futh does not understand. He is not certain what the man has just said, does not know his tenses. He thinks he might know what was said but it makes no sense. He has paid the bed and breakfast rate but there appears to be some problem which he can’t comprehend. He tries again to get an answer to his query, but the man only stares at him, saying nothing more.
Futh gives up, returns to his room and packs.
His suitcase will be collected from his room after he has left. It will — unless there is some problem with this service too — be taken to the next hotel on his circuit and be waiting for him when he arrives this afternoon.
Although good weather is forecast, Futh packs his waterproofs in his rucksack. He has maps and a compass, a guidebook and an English-German dictionary; he has drinks and snacks; he has a spare pair of walking socks and first-aid supplies; he even has cutlery and an emergency sewing kit. He already has his silver lighthouse in his pocket and can think of nothing else he needs. At the last moment, he remembers his book which is still lying on the bedside table underneath the lamp. Fetching it, he finds, lying on the cover, last night’s moth.