The White Hotel (9 page)

She was delighted, she said, to have some company. Her husband had perished in the flood, and solitude did not come easy to her. She took out a handkerchief and dabbed a tear from her eye; but was soon, in her turn, apologizing to them for forcing her grief upon them. “I try not to cry very often,” she said. “At first I was inconsolable, and I’m sure I made everybody’s life a misery. But I told myself I had to pull myself together. It wasn’t fair to others, who are here to have a good time.”

The young man said he admired her bravery very much. He had noticed her on the previous occasion when they dined; had seen her laughing and dancing, the life and soul of the party. Madame Cottin gave a wry smile. “It wasn’t easy,” she said. In fact, it had been terribly painful, to be pretending jollity while her heart was there in the coffin with her husband.

It had become a little easier, she added, since the awful tragedy of the fire. Seeing the fresh grief of others had had the effect of putting distance between her and her bereavement. And besides,
in comparison with being burnt, drowning was a kind and merciful death. You could always see someone worse off than yourself, she said. She dabbed her eye again; but then, not wanting to make their evening a misery, she grew cheerful, and started telling hilarious stories, especially about her customers. They both fell in love with Madame Cottin. She had the tears streaming down their cheeks, with her droll tales of fitting ladies (and even gentlemen) with corsets. Having eaten heartily, she smacked her well-supported stomach, saying that she was a living advertisement for her goods. “I’m really out here!” She laughed, spreading her hands like a fisherman recounting his catch. In fact the baker, catching her eye across the room, misunderstood her gesture and capped it with a full spread of his arms, grinning delightedly. The evening sped by, as though the watchmaker, at the next table, had trebled the speed of all the clocks and watches.

The lovers escorted Madame Cottin to her room—which was actually the one next to theirs, behind their bed-head. Night after night they had overheard heart-rending sobs from that room. Their admiration and respect for her increased still further—they sensed the cost to her of bottling up her grief all day. And again, tonight, as they fell into each other’s arms and began undressing each other impatiently, they heard the sound of Madame Cottin’s grief, behind the wall. They quickly lost the sound, however, in their own hunger.

Later, they had their first lovers’ quarrel. It was very good-humoured, and never rose above a whisper. He was convinced that stars were falling through the black sky outside their window, and she argued that they were white roses. But then something that was unquestionably a grove of oranges floated down past,
and they gave up whispering, in the wonder of watching it. The brilliant oranges glowed in the dark rustling foliage. The lovers went on to the balcony to see the orange grove fall in the lake. Each separate fruit hissed and was extinguished as it touched the calm water.

Hidden from their view, Madame Cottin was at the same time standing on her balcony. She was unable to sleep. She saw that there were hundreds of lanterns on the lake, and one by one they were covered by a black cloth. She had cried herself out for another night. Having undressed and put on her cotton nightgown, she poured away the almost-full glass phial of her tears.

Entirely spent, the couple lay side by side in bed. It was strange and refreshing not to have to listen to any sounds of grief. They had no idea what time it was. Time, that had raced during the evening, now dragged for Madame Cottin, lying open-eyed in the dark; and did not exist, in different ways, for the sleeping guests, for the dead down in the cool store rooms, and for the lovers. Their souls, balancing on the edge of sleep, like someone oppressed by heat who makes his bed perilously on the balcony, attuned themselves to total silence. Her hearing was keener than his, and she heard silences he was unaware of. Not even their fingers touched. Occasionally his hand tiredly brushed the tangled mound of her pubic hair, in affection rather than lust; she liked him doing that.

He broke the stillness by whispering that it reminded him of a hill he had often played and picnicked on as a boy. The hill was covered in ferns, and he had played hunter and hunted with a cousin. He remembered the fearful pleasure of stalking or being stalked through the stiff ferns with their heavy summery smell. It was the only time he had ever felt really close to the earth.

“My father says there are four people present whenever lovemaking takes place,” he said. “They are here now, of course. My parents.”

The young woman saw the stern figure of Freud, beside his timid wife, at the bed’s foot. Freud’s black suit and his wife’s white nightgown dissolved and melted into her dress, lying shadowily on the floor where he had flung it.

They loved the sunsets best. The mountains spun pink clouds out of themselves, like flowers. (The old nurse, in fact, one evening saw the whole sky turn into a huge crimson rose, with endlessly inwoven petals; and dutifully she went straight to the major to report it.) The rose, though eternally still, seemed to spin within itself, and the lovers had the eerie impression that the whole earth was turning. So were her breasts turning, in his hands, as night stole over them; and his tongue turned too, as it delicately tilted at her sex, or tried to get deeper and deeper in, as if wanting to force her into the mountainside. She was opening up so much that she felt her vagina hollowing into a cave, so that it expelled air in a way that was like breaking wind and brought a blush to her face, though she knew and he knew it was not.

Time, with his bland surgeon’s hands, was quietly healing Madame Cottin. While the lovers spent their day in the stuffy room, she was out walking around the lake with Father Marek, the kindly old Catholic priest. His certainties were a great comfort to her. He urged her to return to the Church, likening its effect to one of her stout corsets. The Church’s dogmas, he said, smiling, were the whalebone of the soul. The analogy delighted her, and she chuckled. After a beautiful long morning’s walk through woods and wildflowers, the priest and the corsetière stopped at a pleasant lakeside inn, miles from anywhere, for
refreshment. Carrying their bread and cheese out to the lakeside tables, they spotted Vogel and Bolotnikov-Leskov. They felt bound to join them, though neither party relished the meeting. Bolotnikov-Leskov was midway in a political peroration, and had built up too much momentum to stop. The problem, he explained (while Madame Cottin smiled sadly and let her gaze stray over the lake), was that his party was best for the masses but unfortunately the masses could not see this. The only answer, he feared, was the bomb.

Vogel’s eagle eye noticed the tremor in the priest’s hand as he drank his plum juice; noted also the red complexion. His legal training told him that the priest had been sent on a vacation to dry out. The male and female corseters finished their bread and cheese quickly and apologized for their haste in leaving. They wanted, they said, to walk the circuit of the lake.

The young lovers were having their second disagreement, a more serious one. He was interrogating her jealously about her sexual relationship with her husband; which irritated her, because all that was so far in the past, and so irrelevant. The argument brought out, for the first time, his immaturity; the few years’ difference in their ages had never before seemed significant. Indeed she had never even noticed it. But it was all too clear now, in this childish outburst of jealousy over the dead. It made her irritated with other things, such as the foul Turkish cigarettes he kept smoking, filling the room with stale scent and no doubt ruining her singing voice forever.

In the end, of course, it was even more enchanting than before. Lying joined in love, gazing into each other’s eyes, they could not believe unfriendly words had passed between them. But she had to show that she thought more of him than she had of her husband by doing something strange—taking his penis into her
mouth. It was horribly intimate to be eye-to-eye with that rich tulip bulb, that reeking dewy monster. Actually to take it in her mouth was as inconceivable as taking in a bull’s pizzle. But she closed her eyes and did it, fearfully, to show she loved him more than her husband. And it was not unpleasant, it was so far from unpleasant that she became curious; squeezing, caressing and sucking the shaft so that it swelled even bigger in her mouth and spurted into her throat. In his jealousy he abused her in foul terms, which stirred her most peculiarly.

It was a new excitement, just when they thought they had reached the end of novelty. By a curious transubstantiation, about the same time her breasts began to give out milk, so endlessly had they been sucked on.

When they went down to dinner, her breasts felt bursting. They enjoyed the hubbub of activity, the laughter of guests, the dash of waiters, the sparkle of the gypsy band, the aroma of dishes; her breasts, full and bouncing under silk as she walked between the tables, enjoyed all this. The atmosphere of the white hotel had been restored. Time had healed. Animal spirits had revived. The gypsy band had found an Italian guest who played the fiddle with one of the great orchestras and who was incomparably better than the fiddler who had died, and so, though they mourned their comrade, they rejoiced in the splendid sound they were making, because the new player challenged their own modest skills to fresh heights.

Since several guests had moved out, the head waiter had been able to offer the young lovers a better, bigger table. They sat down to dinner with Madame Cottin and the priest. They were in a relaxed, jovial mood after a whole day in the sunshine and fresh air. The red-faced old man waved his hand in a permitting, approving gesture when the young woman opened the front of
her dress, explaining how sore and full her breasts were. He was sympathetic, because his mother had suffered from that trouble in her younger days. The young man, dabbing red wine from his lips with a napkin, leaned across to take the nipple into his mouth, but before he could do so her milk spurted out and landed on the table cloth. She blushed scarlet and was full of apologies, but Father Marek and Madame Cottin laughed deprecatingly and a waiter hurried up smiling and adroitly cleaned up the splash with his white towel, leaving just a faint stain. He asked if they would like another table cloth, but everyone said it was not necessary; it was only harmless milk.

The young woman saw the priest looking wistfully at her plump breast as her lover sucked. He was toying with his glass of water, and inwardly yearning for something a little stronger. She asked him if he would care to take out the other breast, and drink from it.

“Are you
sure
you don’t mind?” the old priest said, touched and flattered. “I admit it’s very tempting.” He glanced at Madame Cottin, who smiled agreement. “It
is
. Yes! We’ve had a long walk, after all.” She drained her wine glass and poured herself another. “It’ll do you good. Water is no drink for a man!” He still looked hesitant, embarrassed.

“I really wish you would,” said the young woman. “Please.” And the young man took his mouth from the fat nipple to say, “Please do. It’s too much for me, honestly.” The priest needed no further invitation, and was soon sucking away contentedly. The young woman leaned back, no less contented and eased, and stroked her lover’s thick glossy hair and the priest’s thin dome. The top of his head had caught the sun, she noticed. Over their heads she smiled at the people at the next table, the baker and his wife and their two young children. They were sipping glasses
of water. The baker had saved up for years for this holiday, but still could not afford to be extravagant. He smiled back, though, at the thirsty quartet.

“I don’t blame them, do you?” he remarked to his wife and children. “If you can afford it, why not enjoy it while you can?” His wife, her envy dowsed by the aroma of the roast duck placed before her at that moment, cut off the tart comment she was about to make, and said simply, “Well, it’s nice to see everyone looking cheerful.”

Indeed, there was not a doleful face in the whole big dining room. As if everyone had decided simultaneously to compensate, this evening, for the gloom of previous dinners. The waiters were in a holiday mood all of their own, doing little skips to the music as they scurried around, and pretending to juggle with their loaded trays. Even the portly cook quit his ovens to come through and see what all the fun was about. He was given a tremendous cheer, and he grinned his delight, wiping the streaming sweat from his round face. Madame Cottin stood up, walked across to him, and presented him with her empty wine glass. She indicated her engrossed friends, and tugged the chef’s arm. Shy, reluctant, he allowed his portly frame to be tugged across the room, his wide grin showing a gap where he had lost a tooth. There were cheers and the stamping of feet as Madame Cottin pulled him to their table. The young bare-breasted woman smiled and nodded at the shy, grinning giant, and gently detached her lover from her nipple—the priest went on sucking contentedly, not even noticing the good-humoured events taking place around him. The young man, his lips circled in white, smiled his willing agreement, and the chef, stooping, tenderly took the plump nipple between thumb and finger and milked it into the wine glass. When it was filled, he lifted the glass triumphantly and drank the sweet milk in one
satisfying draught. To grateful comments from all sides, on the quality of his cuisine, he rolled grinning back to his kitchen, the swing doors springing shut behind him.

At one of the other tables, a large one for a family of eight, the celebratory hubbub rivalled even the young lovers’ table for the other guests’ amused attention. Whole magnums of champagne were being got through in record time; glasses were being smashed; roaring toasts drunk; tuneless but joyful voices raised in the gypsy songs. Word spread that the head of the family, an ancient Dutchman, almost blind, had climbed the mountain behind the hotel and returned with mountain spiderwort, so named because it grows only in high places and in rock crannies accessible only to the spider. The old man had turned to botany late in life, and today’s find was the realization of his most cherished dream.