Herbert would turn at once to little Bert. His deepest feelings were linked to the child. He sometimes could reveal anguish, of which only the child was the source. His first move was always to draw the sheet over Christine, to protect little Bert from the shock of female nakedness. Without a breath of reproach he would collect his dressing gown, glasses, watch, cigarettes, and lighter and take little Bert by the hand.
“I’m sorry,” quavered the child.
“It’s all right.”
Then she would hear the two of them in the bathroom, where little Bert made the longest possible incident out of drinking a glass of water. The next day Herbert could not always recall how he had got from one bed to the other, and once, during the water-drinking rite, he had sleepily stuck a toothbrush in his mouth and tried to light it.
On their last night in Paris (which little Bert was to interrupt, as he had all the others) Herbert said he would never forget the view from the window or the shabby splendor of the room. “Both rooms,” he corrected; he would not leave out little Bert. That day the Paris airports had gone on strike, which meant they had to leave by train quite early in the morning. Christine woke up alone at five. The others were awake too — she could hear little Bert’s high-pitched chattering — but the bathroom was still empty. She waited a polite minute or so and then began to run her bath. Presently, above the sound of rushing water, she became aware that someone was pounding on the passage door and shouting. She called out, “What?” but before she could make a move, or even think of one, the night porter of the hotel had burst in. He was an old man without a tooth in his head, habitually dressed in trousers too large for him and a pajama top. He opened his mouth and screamed, “Stop the noise! Take all your belongings out of here! I am locking the bathroom — every door!”
At first, of course, she thought that the man was drunk; then the knowledge came to her — she did not know how, but never questioned it either — that he suffered from a form of epilepsy.
“It is too late,” he kept repeating. “Too late for noise. Take everything that belongs to you and clear out.”
He meant too early—Herbert, drawn by the banging and shouting, kept telling him so. Five o’clock was too early to be drawing a bath. The hotel was old and creaky anyway, and when you turned the taps it sounded as though fifty plumbers were pounding on the pipes. That was all Herbert had to say. He really seemed extraordinarily calm, picking up toothbrushes and jars and tubes without standing his ground for a second. It was as if he were under arrest, or as though the porter’s old pajama top masked his badge of office, his secret credentials. The look on Herbert’s face was abstract and soft, as if he had already lived this, or always had thought that he might.
The scented tub no one would ever use steamed gently; the porter pulled the stopper, finally, to make sure. She said, “You are going to be in trouble over this.”
“Never mind,” said Herbert. He did not want any unpleasantness in France.
She held her white toweling robe closed at the throat and with the other hand swept back her long hair. Without asking her opinion, Herbert put everything back in her dressing case and snapped it shut. She said to the porter in a low voice, “You filthy little swine of a dog of a bully.”
Herbert’s child looked up at their dazed, wild faces. It was happening in French; he would never know what had been said that morning. He hugged a large bath sponge to his chest.
“The sponge isn’t ours,” said Herbert, as though it mattered.
“Yes. It’s mine.”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“Its name is Bruno,” said little Bert.
Unshaven, wearing a rather short dressing gown and glasses that sat crookedly, Herbert seemed unprepared to deal with sponges. He had let all three of them be pushed along to Christine’s room and suffered the door to be padlocked behind him. “We shall never come to this hotel again,” he remarked. Was that all? No, more: “And I intend to write to the Guide Michelin and the Tourist Office.”
But the porter had left them. His answer came back from the passage: “Dirty Boches, you spoiled my holiday in Bulgaria. Everywhere I looked I saw Germans. The year before in Majorca. The same thing. Germans, Germans.”
Through tears she did not wish the child to observe, Christine stared at larches pressing against the frame of the window. They had the look they often have, of seeming to be wringing wet. She noticed every detail of their bedraggled branches and red cones. The sky behind them was too bright for comfort. She took a step nearer and the larches were not there. They belonged to her school days and to mountain holidays with a score of little girls — a long time ago now.
Herbert did not enlarge on the incident, perhaps for the sake of little Bert. He said only that the porter had behaved strangely and that he really would write to the Guide Michelin. Sometimes Herbert meant more than he said; if so, the porter might have something to fear. She began to pack, rolling her things up with none of the meticulous folding and pleating of a week ago, when she had been preparing to come here with her lover. She buckled the lightest of sandals on her feet and tied her hair low on her neck, using a scarf for a ribbon. She had already shed her robe and pulled on a sleeveless dress. Herbert kept little Bert’s head turned the other way, though the child had certainly seen all he wanted to night after night.
Little Bert would have breakfast on the French train, said Herbert, to distract him. He had never done that before.
“I have never been on a train” was the reply.
“It will be an exciting experience,” said Herbert; like most parents, he was firm about pleasure. He promised to show little Bert a two-star restaurant at the Gare de l’Est. That would be fun. The entire journey, counting a stopover in Strasbourg and a change of trains, would take no more than twelve hours or so; this was fast, as trains go, but it might seem like a long day to a child. He was counting on little Bert’s cooperation, Herbert concluded somberly.
After a pause, during which little Bert began to fidget and talk to his bath sponge, Herbert came back to the subject of food. At Strasbourg they would have time for a quick lunch, and little Bert had better eat his …
“Plum tart,” said little Bert. He was a child who had to be coaxed to eat at every meal, yet who always managed to smell of food, most often of bread and butter.
… because the German train would not have a restaurant car, Herbert went on calmly. His actual words were, “Because there will be no facilities for eating on the second transport.”