So now, with a sinking heart, I listened to the adventures of Pooh and Eeyore and Piglet, knowing that the moment would soon come when sterner things would have to be faced. The moment came. The sheet was thrown off, the book put aside, and I lay patiently on my back. The book was within reach; I longed for nothing more than to be allowed to continue quietly reading. I studied the jacket. It remains imprinted on my mind and whenever I see it I am irritated by a little feeling which presently defines itself as deprivation. Then the inevitable happened; I had feared that it might. I began to fail. The figure above me was pathetically frenzied; I wished I could help her. Later, when failure was absolute, the childish face was blank with disappointment and unforgiving anger. It was the end. No relationship, especially a play-relationship like ours, recovers from such a failure.
And really it was time to go, to leave the city of fantasy; to leave the fairyland of the hotel, no longer fairyland. But it was a good thought of Stella’s to send the paperback of The House at Pooh Corner to my hotel.
7
IT was time to leave. But there was no need for me to return to Isabella. That, however, I didn’t see until it was too late, until, in fact, our aeroplane was a few minutes from Isabella and we were fastening safety belts. The city and snow, the island and the sea: one could only be exchanged for the other. So my mind ran; departure implied a destination. I was calm. It was the calm that comes to so many in moments of crisis; and I was still infected by Stella’s attitude to experience, her special hubris, as I saw it, the gift perhaps of her class or race, her prodigal’s conviction that what is will continue to be. Fulfilment creates its own illusions. Sandra had been made careless of the wealth she had longed for; now I easily turned my back on the city which I had at last seen to glitter. It was only at the airport, where I had arrived in good time, that I became aware of my calm. And instantly began to question it. Error! Questioning, self-examination, reassurance: the process quickly became continuous, and I feared I was launched on the familiar switchback of neurosis. It seemed to me at the time it was this fear alone which was working on me. I feared and saw that my fear was justified. Within minutes my world was spoilt — so recently whole — and my calm was gone.
Even then I did not ask myself whether a return to Isabella was necessary. I wished only to delay it, to make a detour, to have a momentary escape. To recover my calm and that limpid vision of the world: this was now all my concern. Everything else dwindled: Stella, Isabella and what awaited me there. I was a student in the city again. I needed new sights, new landscapes, an unfamiliar language. Northern Spain in a snowstorm, the brown earth whitening, the light suddenly grey; Provence on a sunny morning, green and yellow and hazy, the big Wagon-Lit coffee cup kept steady by a heavy spoon.
Stopover: the word from the airline advertisements came to me. Not easy at this stage. But my frenzy ignored rebukes and overcame difficulties. And a few hours later I was walking, as in a dream, through the streets of a city, I thought I didn’t know, which yet now revealed little points of familiarity, abrupt half-remembered areas: so that reality was disturbed, sounds curiously muted, and for stretches I had the sensation of witnessing and performing actions for the second, third, fourth time. I drank the drinks I had first tasted twelve years before, nibbled at the same savouries; they rested as heavily on my stomach. A glimpse of sawdust on a tiled floor of a familiar pattern, the eye-straining fluorescent light in a dark corner, a face, snatches of conversation in a language I could only partly follow: my disturbance was complete. For the second time that day I was frantic with airline officials. But there were no aeroplanes to Isabella that day. Tomorrow, yes: a fresh sticker was gummed to my ticket. Sixteen intransit hours awaited me.
I went into bookshops and looked through expensive, difficult-to-handle editions of the country’s classics until assistants became over-attentive. Then even the shops closed and the streets had nothing to hold me. I dawdled about the hotel, in the lounge, in my room. On the cream-coloured plastic bell-push a flat-footed maid stared placidly and a slender steward raced, tray aloft, coat tails flying. Promise of delight! I rang for snacks I didn’t want and drinks I couldn’t finish. I exhausted the services of the hotel. I had a bath and got into bed. After some time I got out of bed. It was only nine o’clock. I dressed with an effort, and went out into the streets.
I took small drinks from tired barmen in little tiled bars; each drink added to the weight in my stomach. A conjunction of streets, a building, a slope, a turning: a remembered area. A woman walked slowly ahead of me and turned into a café entrance. Memory stirred. I followed the woman through the revolving door. I was strained with more than drink; I was exhausted; it was the last thing I was looking for. But my stomach lightened with an old excitement. I felt I had been guided to this place: the light, the low tables and low chairs, the slender half-filled glasses, the solitary intense young men in double-breasted suits, the carefully made-up women, in twos and threes, so cool, concealing such skills, such energy.
It is for faces I go on such occasions. The body doesn’t interest me, one body being so much like another. The excitement I feel is enough; what follows is perversity or, oddly, duty. I went for a fresh, appealing, witty face, unusually thin for the country, though to this face was attached a body as plump as any. She was friendly and gentle, as such women invariably are; and as we left the café on foot for the hotel she chatted of this and that with such ease that the observer might have believed we were old friends. Her good humour was not out of place even in the hotel. The thin elderly lady at the desk, though businesslike and brisk in her starched apron, greeted my companion effusively. She said it was good to see my companion again, and looking so well; was she better? My companion replied that she was. The lady at the desk, studying the register I had signed, said that she was not surprised; she playfully reproached my companion with her earlier despair and said that in all circumstances we would be wiser to leave everything in the hands of God. And so we went up the dimly-lit carpeted stairs. No word had been said to me, it being the gracious custom of the ladies of these hotels to pay no attention to the clients of their clients. My smiling companion, appreciating my unspoken alarm at the talk of illness, explained that she had been slimming. Making a face of satire, and holding her hands wide apart, she said she had been fat, oh, but enormous.
The curtained room was warm; red-shaded bedside lamps made it cosy; at the same time it was somewhat surgical with its white, polished wash-basin, two small towels lying across its spotless bidet, and other towels lying neatly folded on the edge of the bed. I paid my companion the sum we had laughingly agreed on in the café. She stroked my cheek and said she didn’t like taking money beforehand — it was modern and rapacious — but she had had unpleasant experiences. Her courtliness delighted me. She left the room, doubtless to hand over some fraction of the sum I had given her to the lady of the hotel; I heard animated conversation between them. Presently my companion returned, somewhat out of breath, apologizing as to a child for her absence. I had undressed and was lying on the bed. I was beginning to know the depth of my exhaustion. Whatever excitement I had felt on entering the cosy, surgical room had subsided; and the smiling willingness of the young girl to please — I now saw that she was young — seemed remote, slightly touching, slightly absurd.