The Wine-Dark Sea (42 page)

‘Even to a lost soul like me, it still means something to find another English gentlewoman.’ Mrs. Slater glanced again at Margaret’s somewhat ungentle womanly costume. ‘Most of the people here are, naturally, foreigners; people with whom one has merely this one, dreadful thing in common. The only other English at the moment are two very old women, so old that they are both more than a little dotty. As soon as it is four o’clock, you and I must have tea together, Mrs. Sawyer.’

A young man in a black suit and wearing a black tie, had appeared; and then a dark, swarthy woman, who looked like a middle-aged stage gypsy. They had each taken up a table, so that five tables were now occupied, but in the manner of a continental café, there were still many more tables that were empty. Margaret noticed that none of the residents greeted any of the others – or, for that matter, acknowledged her own arrival. They all sat quite silent, and, it seemed to Margaret, almost motionless; though ideas of that sort, she at once reflected, were probably morbidity on her part.

‘Thank you very much,’ said Margaret to Mrs. Slater. ‘If you’ll forgive me, I must first go and wash.’ She rose and picked up her anorak.

‘As you wish,’ said Mrs. Slater, in her tiresomely resigned way. ‘I shall sit here and wait for you. It will be nice to talk about the London shops, which I shall never see again.’

‘Actually, I live near Manchester.’ It was doubtless silly to be unkind, but, whatever happened, Margaret did not intend her friendship with Mrs. Slater to ripen.

Coming down the Kurhus steps was a girl who looked hardly more than a child. She was tiny and slender, with very pale, fair hair, hanging to her shoulders. She wore the
simplest
possible white cotton dress, without sleeves, and
showing
almost no figure. Her legs were bare, but white sandals were on her feet. As she descended, her eyes met Margaret’s. They were exceedingly blue eyes, but singularly lifeless; more like screens than like pools. Margaret would have expected sleeplessness to manifest most of all in the eyes, but these were the first unusual eyes she had seen in the Kurhus, and it was inconceivable that this very young girl could be among Mrs. Slater’s insomniacs; even if all the other people were, about which Margaret felt considerable doubt.

Margaret fancied that self-pity might not be Mrs. Slater’s only aberration – or, to say the least, hyperbole; but she knew with certainty that the Kurhus was now spoiled for her, Margaret, and that she wanted to escape from it. She wanted not least to escape from Mrs. Slater personally.

The big hall was quite full of people, who seemed to be converging from all directions, but still without speaking. There were many assorted ages, and various palpable indicia of different nationalities. All the same, it was a perfectly
commonplace
group; seemingly remarkable only for its silence. The silence, however, chilled Margaret’s nerves. Escape she must. The crowd rambled forward to the sunny terrace.

‘I’ve decided to follow your example,’ said a voice in Margaret’s ear: actually a voice; but, unfortunately, it was the voice of Mrs. Slater. ‘I’m going to spruce myself up before we have tea together.’

Margaret could only nod. Mrs. Slater passed her and ascended the staircase between the wood-nymphs that were half trees.

There was now a young Swede behind the hotel desk. It was he who had booked her in and taken away her passport when she arrived. He had fair hair with tight curls, and looked like a boxer or a bison.

Margaret decided not to beat about the bush. She told the hotel clerk that though she had known the Kurhus was partly a sanatorium, she had not realised that so many of the inmates would be patients rather than guests, and that she wanted to go elsewhere. This would surely be understood, though it might not be popular. She thought she would just make off in a taxi; and, if she could devise nothing better, merely return to the hotel in Sovastad.

The first difficulty proved to be that the reception clerk seemed to have very little English, so that he was unable properly to understand her. Margaret had met few Swedes with whom she had been so unable to communicate. But she recognised that her message was unusual and her request arbitrary. So she concentrated on the essential: immediate departure.

‘Your passport,’ said the clerk. ‘It has gone. It will not be back until tomorrow. I told you.’

It was true that he had. It was the kind of thing that often happened in continental hotels, and Margaret, knowing that she was booked in for two days, had not worried about it.

‘Where is it?’ she asked the clerk.

‘Gone. It has gone. I told you.’ The clerk stared at her, faintly pugilistic, faintly bovine.

Margaret knew from experience what a hopeless morass this sort of thing could be, even at the best of times; even when it was only that Henry’s business compelled the two of them suddenly to go elsewhere.

‘I’m not leaving Sweden. I’ll come back in a taxi and collect my passport tomorrow. I want to go now just the same. I’m sorry about it, but all these sick people depress me. I quite understand that I shall have to pay. I am prepared to pay for the whole reservation now, if you’ll get me a taxi.’ She
produced
a wad of notes from her other trouser pocket. Suddenly her mountain costume, which for a brief time had meant so much to her, had become a middle-aged folly, and a
conspicuous
one. All the other, rather horrible people were dressed with utter conventionality.

‘No taxi,’ said the reception clerk, sulky but firm.

‘What do you mean?’ cried Margaret; less and less
dignified
, as she all too well knew.

‘No taxi after four o’clock,’ said the reception clerk.

‘Why ever not?’ cried Margaret; even while she knew it was not the way to put it if she wanted to get results.

‘Not after four o’clock,’ repeated the reception clerk.

Margaret began a foolish altercation; feeling all the time like an English innocent abroad in some banal farce. Quite protracted the dispute must have been, as well as foolish; because in the middle of it, Margaret realised, with something not far short of alarm, that Mrs. Slater had reappeared on the staircase in a pink silk tea gown with polka dots; with too much rouge on her cheeks; and with her grey hair so frizzed up that it all stood on end.

‘Mrs. Slater, please,’ shouted the reception clerk. ‘Please explain to this lady –’

But Margaret was saved from final public shame. At this moment, a senior personage appeared from a room behind the desk. He was, like his subordinate, a noticeably
muscular-looking
man, but his thick black hair was greying, his face was still and worn.

‘Forgive me, madam,’ he said to Margaret, in more or less perfect English. ‘I have been listening, and I have to give you my personal assurance that tonight nothing can be done.’

Mrs. Slater had put her hand on Margaret’s left elbow, and was standing expectantly. Margaret would not have
hesitated
to offend her, had there seemed any real prospect of departure from the Kurhus; but, as things were, she was rather glad that nothing the Manager had said, and that Mrs. Slater could have heard, had been particularised.

‘Come on and let’s have our tea,’ said Mrs. Slater breezily.

Margaret could only turn away from the desk and follow her; quite unwashed.

*

Margaret had noticed on other occasions how differently one can feel about a group of people seated around a picturesque hotel terrace after one has come to learn a little more about them; after the hopeful, even happy, expectation one feels at first sight, has been tempered by some degree of real contact.

Emerging down the Kurhus steps, with Mrs. Slater’s red hand pressed lightly against her forearm as if to guide her, Margaret recollected that these were the people who had looked so gay when three days before she had sped past in the superlatively hospitable Volvo.

Mrs. Slater guided her back to the same table; which she had ‘reserved’ by leaving copies of
Vogue
and
The
Lady
lying about.

‘Please call me Sandy,’ said Mrs. Slater.

There
was
something queer about the look of the people sitting on the terrace, though it was nothing obvious. To a passerby, they would still be a perfectly average assembly of respectable citizens. Their oddity lay in their quietness and aloofness. By now, some of them were occasionally
exchanging
a few words, but the words were palpably functional, connected with the tea, the coffee, the fluffy, flaky cream cakes, or the heat of the afternoon: Margaret felt that they had long ago said absolutely everything they could possibly say. She had a frightening glimpse into how long they had probably had in which to say it. In any case, most of them were solitaries, as Mrs. Slater had remarked: scattered about one at a table, often with head sunk, and in no case making any attempt at communication or affability. An unusual
proportion
of the whole group was, however, reading, including, in several cases, two at the same table; and reading, almost always, not merely glossy ephemerae, as in Mrs. Slater’s case, but heavy, austerely bound volumes with many hundreds of pages. That was only to be expected, Margaret supposed, recollecting the remarkable little library in her own bedroom. There was more and more evidence that Mrs. Slater had not drawn as long a bow as Margaret had assumed and hoped.

‘Please call me Sandy,’ said Mrs. Slater a second time.

Margaret supposed she had again been rude in making no specific response.

‘If you wish,’ she said, trying to sound neither too ungracious nor too gracious. ‘So long as you don’t call me Molly.’

‘Oh but I want to do that,’ said Mrs. Slater. The tips of all her red fingers were on the edge of the white, wooden table.

‘You may call me Margaret.’ It sounded feeble, but the right note was so difficult to strike.

‘I have ordered a real English tea for both of us, Margaret. I have one every day. The two old ladies used to do the same, and we all had tea together, summer and winter; but now they don’t come down until nightfall. I don’t think they eat during the day any more.’

‘You make them sound like vampires,’ said Margaret. Really Mrs. Slater had to be regulated.

‘You are quite right, Margaret,’ replied Mrs. Slater
seriously
. ‘I have often thought that the origin of the vampire belief lies in the insomniacs. There is something not quite nice about us, as I have told you.’ Mrs. Slater actually giggled. It was a most unusual thing to do on the Kurhus terrace.

A young waiter in a linen jacket arrived with a double English tea on a heavy brass tray; including sandwiches,
near-Dundee
cake, and even hot scones in a silver calabash, from which the sun glinted and sparkled, like a tiny display of white fireworks.

‘Shall I be mother?’ enquired Mrs. Slater; already,
however
, in the act of pouring. The fluid streaming from the long, thin, silver spout, looked very pale. Probably there were not enough tea-bags in the pot.

None of the others was consuming a meal like this, though most of them seemed to be consuming something. Margaret noticed that the small, slim girl in the white dress was merely absorbing a proportionately small tumbler of water. At least, it was presumably water. She lay back at a table by herself, facing the sun; almost staring at it with her blue eyes. She was so very exiguous that her white dress looked as if inside it were merely a few pieces of straw and cardboard; leaving her head, legs, and arms as the only parts that were what they seemed. Two young men were sitting, each by himself, at tables quite near her. One would have expected them to show at least covert interest, but Margaret could see no sign of it. One was eating äggöra and drinking coffee, but both seemed far gone in melancholy.

‘That girl,’ asked Margaret. ‘Surely she is not here because she can’t sleep?’

‘That girl,’ replied Mrs. Slater, ‘has never been asleep in her life.’

‘I find it awfully hard to believe.’

‘In England perhaps. Here they’d know at once what she was.’

Margaret looked up from her second scone.

‘What do you mean by that? How would they know what?’

‘They’d know she doesn’t sleep,’ said Mrs. Slater in her calm, conclusive way. ‘There are more people like that here than there are in England, and of course the population’s much smaller, so everyone gets to know the signs. It’s how woods like this began. But won’t you take off your jacket again? You must be too hot, I’m sure.’

‘No, I’m not too hot.’

‘I expect you thought you were coming to some kind of skiing hotel?’

‘Not exactly, in the middle of the summer.’

‘I should be delighted to lend you a frock. We’re much the same size and much the same age, so that the same style should suit us, and all my clothes come from England. We’re quite a dressy party here at night.’

‘Thank you very much, but I’ve got several dresses. I’ve been wearing them ever since I’ve been in Sweden,’ Margaret added, unkindly once more. ‘I hoped things up here would be more informal and that I should get two or three days of mountain walking.’

‘Not days,’ said Mrs. Slater gently. ‘It’s by night that we walk the mountains here. We don’t wear special clothes for it. It’s our way of life, so to speak, our destiny. Nothing special about it for us. It’s why the wood was put here in the first place.’

‘What do you mean by “wood”?’ asked Margaret. ‘Which wood? There are trees as far as the eye can see, and almost all Sweden seems to be made up of them.’

‘Round the Kurhus is a wood,’ said Mrs. Slater, ‘with paths in it, paths everywhere, paths that have been there for hundreds of years. You saw me following one. It is a
Jamblichus
wood.’

‘I’m sorry to be rude, but I think that name sounds like Alice in Wonderland.’

Mrs. Slater smiled faintly. ‘I always thought it was more like Edward Lear,’ she said.

‘How can you tell, with all these trees, where your
particular
wood begins and ends?’