The Prize (94 page)

She swung back and forth before his eyes, like a metronome, and he made one desperate effort at courtliness. He removed his hat, he thought, and said, ‘Miss Lilly—’ and could not remember her last name.

‘Come in, please.’

Her tone was so beseeching that he obeyed at once. His impaired vision could only furnish part of the single room: a mosaic on the wall over a pinewood divan with striped cushions; a glass coffee table on a black tubular frame; two wicker chairs; a small television set; a double bed pulled down from a recess in the wall. Somehow, he reached the bed, and came down on the fat eiderdown.

She was before him, he knew.

He tried to explain. ‘Lilly, I—I’m very drunk—and very old—and don’t care—except—tonight—I wanted to be with someone who would know and not mind—and I thought of you, Lilly. Do you mind?’

She knelt before him. ‘Oh, Mr. Craig. I am happy for me that you came.’

‘I’ll just rest a little and go back to the hotel.’

She took his chilled hands and rubbed them, transmitting her warmth into him. ‘You will stay. I will take care of you. Lie down, lie down and sleep.’

He felt satisfied and welcomed, and then realized that she had taken off his overcoat and jacket and that his head was deep in the feather pillow and that his legs had been lifted on the bed. She was undoing his collar and shirt, he thought, and she was above him, tending him, and perhaps what had brushed his cheek was her breast. It was wonderful to imagine this before sleep, and then, at once, he slept.

He became conscious behind his eyelids, and he waited, motionless, while gradual awakening crept downward through his outstretched body.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the thin drapes, and he saw that the city was still dark behind them. The room in which he lay was partially illuminated by some night lamp out of sight, and from a far corner came the hushed purr of radiator heat. He had expected to find himself in his upstairs bedroom at Miller’s Dam, and then remembered that he was in the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, and then, with increasing bewilderment, he understood that he was in a room unknown to him.

Against the gravity of sleep weight, he sat up with effort, pushing off the blanket. Except for his shorts, he was naked. He had no memory of undressing for bed, when suddenly the last memories of the night flooded into his brain. The image came clear—the cascade of golden hair, the lavender robe—and he swivelled from his sitting position to fill in the rest.

Lilly Hedqvist, curled beneath the blanket, slept a few feet from him on the double bed. She slept with the easy innocence of a child girl, strands of her tangled hair across her cheeks, hiding all but the beauty mark above her mouth. The blanket was drawn to her shoulders, so that only the flimsy white straps of her nightgown were visible.

Studying her in this unguarded moment of inanimateness, Craig was touched. He had invaded her privacy, a stranger, a foreigner, a drunk, and she had taken him in with unreserved kindness and open trust, and offered him her care and her bed. Craig owed her much, he knew, and what he owed her first was to leave her undisturbed and to remove himself from her presence.

Reluctantly, he eased himself off the bed, wishing he had been given this meeting before the time of his disintegration. But then, he told himself, this meeting would not have occurred, for it had been born of pity—hers for him, and his for himself.

He padded after the bathroom, opening a cupboard by mistake, and then finding the bathroom. With the fluorescent light on, and the inevitable mirror before him, he tried to see in the reflection what Emily Stratman had seen before midnight and Lilly Hedqvist had seen since midnight. He saw a gaunt and angular face ravaged by weakness, and it sickened him. Turning on the tap, he doused his face in cold water and then washed. He rinsed his mouth. Briefly, he felt revived. He was sober and, incredibly, without a hangover. He took a silent vow: a new leaf, no more drink, no more self-destruction, no more anti-life.

Tiptoeing into the living-room, he picked his shirt and trousers off the chair beside the bed, and then, suddenly, as he stood there, he was too fatigued to dress. He wanted only the bed again, that and an infinity of warmth and peace, and a later awakening to a world where something mattered. Weary and dispirited, he lowered himself to the edge of the bed. He sat hunched, inert, knowing it was almost nine of a dark winter’s morning, knowing Leah waited and the Nobel committees waited and the programme waited, and he was not ready for celebrations.

‘Where are you going, Mr. Craig?’

Lilly’s voice startled him, and he spun around. She was on her back, beneath the cover, head turned towards him, one hand brushing the hair from her eyes and the other holding the blanket to her throat.

‘To the hotel,’ he said. ‘I wanted to get away without awakening you.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t want to compromise you.’ He considered this. ‘No, that’s not it at all. I was ashamed to face you.’

‘There is no reason for shame.’

‘The way you saw me—’

‘I saw a man who drank too much and was tired. I did not care. I had thought of you—the funny time we had on the Malmِ ferry—and I was glad you thought of me and came to me.’

‘Yes, I did think of you.’

She pushed herself upright, against the pillow, still holding the blanket before her. With her free hand, she patted the bed. ‘Come here, Mr. Craig.’

He dropped his clothes, and went around the bed, and sat beside her.

‘Why did you think of me last night?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know exactly, Lilly.’

‘You do know.’

‘I wanted to be alone at first, and I was beaten, and then I didn’t want to be alone—I wanted companionship—and you came to mind—I had enjoyed you—and somehow I came here.’

‘But you have not had companionship, as you say. You have slept, and now you go, but you are still alone.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this the way you want it—to still be alone?’

‘Lilly, for God’s sakes—’

‘No, you must be truthful with me and yourself. You must learn that. Why did you really come to me?’

‘All right, you asked—because I wanted you, dammit—’

‘You wanted me,’ she repeated, flatly, levelly, without the inflection of a question. ‘Yes, that is true. Then why are you afraid of it? Why do you make such complexity of loving and being loved? Why do you come alone and go alone?’

‘It takes two—’

‘We are two.’ She threw the blanket off her body and held out her arms. Immediately, he was beside her, in her arms, embracing her, kissing the hollow of her throat and neck and cheek.

‘Wait,’ she said softly, ‘we are still apart.’ She settled his head on the pillow, and bent and disrobed him completely. Then she took the hem of her white nightgown, and, gathering the nylon folds, she lifted it and pulled it over her head and dropped it to the floor. ‘There, now we are the same, both nudists.’

She was on her knees, posing for him, smiling. He studied her sensuous young body with pleasure. From the pink expanse of her chest her bust developed gradually, in a classical protruding curve, to the great circles of red nipples with their hardening points, and then the breasts rounded back into the full flesh of the body. The breasts were young and bursting, suspended straight outward, yet were not appendages but part of a symmetry of the whole, all faultlessly circular, like her rounding belly, the navel almost hidden, and the hips and thighs.

She came off her knees and stretched out full length, pulling his head down between her breasts. ‘You are tired, I can see, but now you will not rest alone.’

For a long time, he lay against her bosom, luxuriating in the pervading heat and knowing peace within himself, until slowly, slowly, tranquillity was kindled into desire. He began to kiss her, and could hear her heart as he heard his own. And now she had his head in her hands, and kissed his forehead and eyes, and at last, his lips.

‘Lie back,’ she whispered. ‘Yes—’

He felt his shoulder blades on the bed, but still held her waist, as she came over above him, encompassing him, burning her flesh into his until her flesh was fused to his trunk, and their corporeality was consummated.

All reason left him, and as he gave himself to sensation, he gasped, ‘Thank you, Lilly—’

Her voice was far away, and reached him from a distance, riding the surge and swell of a breaker. ‘Never—thank me—never,’ she whispered. ‘Lovers do not thank—’

And the rest was her sigh lost and suffocated by the onrushing whitecap of passion.

‘Lilly—Lilly—’

Her breath was on his cheeks and her oscillating murmurs were in Swedish, and he opened his heavy eyes and saw her, almost unreal with her tumbling flaxen hair and swaying breasts and creased belly, like some transported Norse goddess.

He wanted to tell her that she had come from heaven, but then she curled forward, closer and closer, her presence flowing over him, so that it was not a breaker that engulfed him but lava, and he could not speak. Her open mouth touched his, and he thought she whispered, ‘Freya.’

And he remembered Freya, Swedish goddess of carnal love, and he was shorn of control, and all gentleness was out of reach. He took her arms, and pulled her down, rolling her over to her side, so that they were side by side. The waves again buffeted him, and consciousness flickered low, but she managed to hold him to her. And suddenly he was released from the eddy, freed of the vortex, and lay spent in her arms.

‘Do not move,’ she said, and seconds later, she gave a convulsive shudder, and fell back, hands covering her eyes.

After a while, she removed her hands, and opened her eyes.

‘
Du
ن
r inte ensam
,’ she said. ‘You are not alone.’

But he had not heard her. He slept.

6

ITwas early afternoon when Andrew Craig returned to the Grand Hotel.

His mood had improved over the previous day. Physically, he felt cleansed of old poisons, and consequently rested and at ease. For the first time in several years, he had slept without drink or drug, and the sleep had been dreamless and relaxed.

When he had awakened, in a natural way, he had found the place beside him in bed empty. Of Lilly there had been left only a note pinned to the pillow:

DEARMR.CRAIG, the coffee is on the stove, and you can heat it. I am off to work. I hope we will meet again. LILLYHEDQVIST.

After dressing and coffee, he had added a line in reply to her note. ‘I’ll see you soon’, he had written—and then he had gone down into the street. Outside the entrance, the elderly
portvakt
, the Swedish doorkeeper of the apartment, had been kneeling, adjusting the Christmas lights. Craig had almost bowled him over. But the old man had not been annoyed, had even been friendly, as if Craig were one of his tenants, and Craig guessed that Lilly had spoken to the
portvakt
of him.

Daylight had come to the city, and the air was windless and surprisingly mild, almost balmy. The sun hung high and bright in the cobalt sky, and Swedish pedestrians appeared gay and appreciative of the spring interlude.

Carrying his overcoat on his arm, Craig had made his way leisurely to the nearest square, noticing that the colours everywhere, and of everything—the women’s clothes, the pottery on a sill, the yellow furniture in a store window, the red-ribboned holiday packaging in a Tobak shop—were more vivid than before, either because of the sun or because of his own sobriety.

At the square, he had hailed a taxi and been driven back to the hotel that he had not seen in seventeen hours. Only when he was in the elevator, ascending, did he suddenly remember Leah and the new day’s official programme. He could not recall what the Nobel people had scheduled for this day, but he hoped, for their sake, it was not important, yet, for his sake, sufficiently interesting to have removed Leah from the premises. If Leah was in, he would have to have an excuse, and a plausible one—the more difficult to conceive, he told himself wryly, because he had not written fiction for so long—or suffer her chastisement. What he needed was a respite, time to think of a likely story, and he prayed fervently that Leah was out.

When he entered the suite, his agnosticism was confirmed. His prayer had not been answered. Leah’s handbag stood unyielding and stern, like a motorist’s warning sign, on the hall table.

Leah sat stiffly on the maroon chair in the living-room, holding the telephone in her lap, her bunched features as reproachful as those of a young widow.

‘Well,’ she snapped, ‘I see that you’re alive anyway. I’ve called everywhere but the morgue.’

Craig had crossed the room and dropped his coat on the sofa. ‘I’m sorry, Lee. I suppose I should have phoned.’

‘Should have phoned?’ she echoed shrilly. ‘How inconsiderate can any human being be of another? Here I am, a foreigner, an absolute stranger a million miles from nowhere, without a friend, with no one except you—what am I to think? It was bad enough leaving me flat at the palace last night—absolutely humiliating—but knowing you had gone out drunk as a lord, I stayed up half the night, until I fell asleep right in this chair, and since then, worrying—Did a car run you over? Did you fall in a canal?—God knows what I imagined.’

‘I couldn’t find you after the dinner,’ he said lamely. ‘I needed some air. Didn’t the Count give you my message?’

‘He didn’t say you’d disappear until the next afternoon.’

‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘You’re impossible,’ she scolded. ‘It’ll be so embarrassing now. What will they think? I called Count Jacobsson at the Foundation—Mr. Manker at the Foreign Office—I even talked to Professor Stratman.’

Craig flushed. ‘Stratman? What’s he got to do with me?’

Leah was less certain now, and immediately less aggressive. ‘I don’t know. I was frantic. I—after all—you had been with his niece last night. And then after I got the message that you’d gone, I saw Professor Stratman leave early with the girl, and I thought—well, maybe that you were meeting them—’

‘Or meeting her? Isn’t that what you mean?’ Craig was suddenly infuriated. ‘What if I had met them or her? Wouldn’t it be my business? Don’t I have any private life?’

‘Andrew, it’s not right to talk like that. I was worried about you, in your condition. Besides—besides, you’d brought me and—I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but—it’s etiquette, decent, to at least escort me back first.’

‘I just don’t like your notifying the whole place of every movement I make. You were worried about how I’d behave—a scandal. Well, if there is one, you’ll be the one who’s inviting it, with your hysterical calls.’

He was headed for the bedroom, when the telephone in Leah’s lap emitted a muffled ring. Leah started, almost dropping it, and Craig halted.

She was on the phone. ‘Oh, you’re very kind, Count Jacobsson. He walked in this minute. . . . He’s fine, yes. He’d gone to visit some old friends, people he’d known when he was here before. . . . What? Oh yes, yes, certainly, we’ll be ready. We’ll be in the lobby.’

She hung up, and looked at Craig unhappily. He wanted no victory such as this, and his anger evaporated. This was Sweden. When in Sweden, do as the Swedes do, invoke the Middle Way. Pacifism at any price.

‘Look, Lee, let’s not fight—’

‘I don’t want to fight. I just want you to be safe and well. I keep thinking of poor Harriet—I can’t help it.’

Inwardly, he winced. He had defences for all but this: his debts. Leah had again sent him the remainder of payment overdue and ever-mounting interest.

‘Lee, we were both wrong. You were wrong to churn up such a storm. I was wrong to have let you worry. I was terribly drunk, last night, and I did want to walk it off, so I went out and walked. It was cold and I wound up in a hotel bar for coffee, and then felt ill, and the barman saw that, and saw I was an American, and he packed me off on a cot in his back room to sleep it off. I suppose I needed that, because I slept through the night and morning.’

She wanted to believe it, and she wanted peace, but she could not help but be herself. ‘Your clothes aren’t rumpled,’ she said.

‘I didn’t wear them to sleep,’ he said patiently. ‘The barman got me out of them and hung them up.’

‘What if someone had discovered who you were—a Nobel laureate without his clothes—passed out on a cot in the back room of a bar? It would be terrible.’

He agreed with a penitent nod, and thought of the sharp young lady at yesterday’s press conference, Sue Wiley of Consolidated Newspapers, and how she would savour such a story. But he reminded himself that the story was not true, and so Miss Wiley was no threat. Then he remembered what was true, and revived the fresh memory of Lilly Hedqvist, Nordic girl goddess, and her uncomplicated and lusty abandon, and he wondered what Miss Wiley would think of that, and, indeed, what Leah would think, also.

The full import of his position—he was in the international lime light this week and the big microscope of journalism waited to magnify and enlarge every move he made—meant that he would have to be cautious of his every action, if he cared about his future. Until this morning he had not cared at all, but now there was some self-concern, mysteriously motivated, and he determined to be discreet about public drinking and private fornication.

‘You’re right, Lee,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any headlines until the Ceremony is over, and we have the fifty thousand.’

‘It’s not just that.’

‘I’m kidding. I said you’re right, Lee. Now I’m sober and properly regretful, and I have vowed reform. Add to that a meteorological fact: the sun is shining—an exceptional thing for winter in Sweden, I’m told—and the day lies ahead. Let’s go out for lunch.’

‘I’ve had lunch, and we have a date. Don’t you know the programme, Andrew?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea. We’ve been to the palace. What else is there?’

‘We’re doing Stockholm today. I haven’t seen a bit of the city yet. Mr. Manker and Count Jacobsson are taking us and one other couple, one of the other laureates. And, oh yes, your Swedish publisher is going to be along.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Mr. Flink. Don’t you remember? He had a funny first name. Let me see—margin—setback—Indent! I was associating. That’s how I remember. Mr. Indent Flink. I think that’s another reason Count Jacobsson phoned back. He wanted to be sure you’d be here for the tour—because he wanted you to meet your publisher.’

‘Lee, I’ve already seen Stockholm with Harriet—’

‘That was so long ago. Besides, you should meet your publisher. In a way, his editions helped you win the prize.’

‘I can meet him, and make some apologies, and just skip out. You go on the tour. I’d rather kind of browse through the city on my own—’

‘No, Andrew, it would be rude.’

‘You’re getting to sound more like Harriet every day.’

‘I hope so.’

It was a lie, he knew, and he did not know why he had said it. Harriet would have conspired with him to avoid a formal tour. Or at least he thought so, as best as he could remember her. Suddenly, he was unsure.

‘Okay, Lee, you win.’ He started for the bedroom to change. ‘HSB, here we come.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’ll see,’ he said enigmatically, ‘you’ll see.’

‘Our first stop on this informal tour,’ said Mr. Manker, as he swung the Foreign Office limousine away from the kerb before the Grand Hotel, ‘will be the HSB co-operative housing units on Reimersholme island in the south section of the city. HSB, I am sorry to say, stands for Hyresg
ن
sternas Sparkasse- och Byggnadsfِrening, which means Tenants’ Savings and Building Society, a title I shall not further burden you with. Henceforth, I shall refer to this co-operative company as HSB.’

Craig squirmed in the jump seat, and glanced at Leah in the rear, and she acknowledged the clarification of enigma with a satisfied smile.

Mr. Manker fingered the brim of his fedora with his free hand. ‘If the ladies do not mind, I shall remove my hat and enjoy the full benefit of the sun, which Herr Professor Stratman has so recently tamed.’

‘No objections from Miss Stratman or Miss Decker, I am sure,’ said Stratman pleasantly.

Mr. Manker deposited his hat on the front seat, between Count Jacobsson and himself, exposing with relish his high pompadour, meticulously waved, to the solar rays.

Craig wished that Emily had not been seated behind him. His long legs were cramped in the jump seat, and it would take the limbs of a contortionist to wind around and speak to her.

The knowledge, received when he had entered the limousine with Leah, that Stratman and Emily were the other guests on the tour, disconcerted Craig completely. Without meeting Leah’s eyes, he sensed, from her greeting to the Stratmans, her immediate wariness. His own accosting of Emily had been cordial but brisk, as if to prove to her that he was a new man, the soul of sobriety, and that this was a new day. Her acknowledgment of him, in turn, had been distinct but detached, with no intimation of forgiveness or approval.