'And you have no idea what it could have been either, Peter.' I spoke directly to him now, it was more a statement than a question, but also, I realised, an attempt to elicit some verbal response from him about the blood or not blood that I had seen or not seen, something spoken in his own voice and not through the intermediary of Mrs Berry, who had commandeered the conjectures and responses. In a way, there was nothing strange about that, it was only logical, she was in charge of the upkeep of the house, of its spotlessness or cleanliness as well as of its imperfections and stains. She was what is known in English as the housekeeper, literally the person who tends or looks after the house.
'No.' Wheeler's negative was immediate, he wasn't miles away, he had, after all, been listening to what was being said. His gaze may have gone off travelling, but it had not got lost. 'That's very odd indeed,' he repeated, although he did not say this in the same categorical tone as his housekeeper. 'That's very odd indeed,' he said in English, as if it were just a conventional phrase, a more or less acceptable and inoffensive way of leaving the matter hanging in the air, or of packing it off to limbo, where everything is overruled and there is never any case to be answered, because no one cares what happens there. He picked up his sword, held it for a moment in both hands as if about to deal a two-handed blow, and then turned to go back to the table and finish dessert. For me this was a sign that I had better stop there, give up, resign myself. I came down the stairs, letting Mrs Berry go first, and as we followed him in, I made only one more comment on the subject: 'I had to use a lot of cotton wool to clean up the stain. There won't be much left, so you'd better buy some more. The same goes for the surgical spirit too.' That is what I said. I felt it was only fair to warn them, so that they would not go thinking that I had imagined or invented that too.
13
I thought of another possibility then, yes, another one occurred to me as I left the Ladies' toilet or, rather, afterwards, that same night, but some hours later, when I was trying in vain to get to sleep, managing at most a kind of meditative doze during which I was thinking how much had been revealed to me in the course of events and how much I had pushed to one side. Yes, it was probably afterwards, because when I left the toilet. I was in a hurry and my attention was focused on what was happening outside, although I must have had some inkling of it while I was in the Ladies, it was an idea that would never have crossed Wheeler's mind or Mrs Berry's for that matter, indeed, it didn't even cross mine until that moment, after I had seen the woman with the abundant thighs sitting on the toilet, no, abundant makes them sound fat, but they weren't, they were, how can I put it, magnificence, formidability, pure presence. A summons. 'A woman is wearing no knickers,' I thought, 'although she is wearing tights, possibly the sort you can get nowadays that come halfway up the thigh like stockings, but which are held up by elastic, a graceless substitute for old-fashioned garters, the kind worn by that imminent heiress-cum-spouse – the one who stayed the night and for breakfast as well and whose husband-to-be and cuckold-that-was appeared to be obsessed with her mobile phone or to consider it a military objective – at least she wore them on the one occasion when I saw her take them off or when I took them off for her, I can't really remember the incident in any detail.' I remembered and thought this while lying in bed, when I wasn't, in fact, particularly interested in remembering, it was entirely involuntary. 'A woman decides not to wear knickers to Wheeler's cold buffet, some women take a pride in doing without this particular item of clothing in order to feel terribly avant-garde and radical, or they do so only occasionally and provocatively in order to risk being seen if they wear a short or very short skirt and there are going to be a lot of witnesses present (a meeting, a banquet, a premiere, a class if they're students and the male teacher always stands in front), or to annoy a husband whom they inform of this intimate detail on the way to the party and who is troubled by it, or to provoke an outbreak of fleeting and very basic desire where it did not exist or perhaps never would have existed – a glimpse, a glimmer – and which might then become persistent or prolonged – a condensation, an increase – quite a few women learned this from that famous film starring Sharon Stone and Kirk Douglas's witch-faced son.
This woman goes up to the bathroom on the first floor, the one downstairs is occupied, or perhaps she goes up in search of an empty room in which someone is already waiting or where someone will join her after a minute or never does, an arranged meeting, but snatched and hurried, what is graphically and vulgarly known in Spanish as 'un mete y saca’ and in English as a quickie (very vulgarly: not that it matters, the thought is more vulgar than the word, or it is for those of us who tend to avoid verbal vulgarity so that it at least has some meaning when: we do resort to it), an absence of knickers in such situations is perfect, not that they need be an impediment, they just have to be pushed delicately aside with a couple of fingers – mind you don't pinch anything – at the right moment. This woman in the skirt goes upstairs, her high heels make a noise on the floorboards or no noise at all on the carpeted part, and as ill luck would have it – although, depending on your point of view, the host or the unusually sharp-eyed guest has the worse luck -just at the moment when she gets to the top of the stairs and pauses for an instant looking for the most suitable door or the one agreed upon, her period suddenly starts – she had doubtless had a feeling that it would, but not much or not a strong enough feeling – in the form of a drop that falls to the floor, there being no fabric to prevent it; but it's still in the very early stages and is only a drop, the first, a single drop, there's no trail because it isn't as yet a steady flow and does not immediately continue, and so she might not notice its arrival until a little later, when she has already gone into the bathroom and can improvise a temporary solution or when the man waiting for her notices this different, warmer moistness and has already stained himself the stain on the wooden floor remains there unnoticed, which is why it's not cleaned up until much later that night, when I go upstairs in search of a book and when I come down again carrying that book, I find the stain, I see it, and think that I mustn't leave it there now that I know it exists: it is up to me to remove it, otherwise Wheeler might slip on it in the morning – although, by then, it will have dried – and he can't be allowed to fall over at his age, best to avoid any risk and save him.’