To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories Volume One

‘Well, of course, my darling, if you’re tired.’

One morning she announced she was going to have a birthday party; it would be her fortieth birthday soon. The way she said it made George feel uneasy.

On the morning of her birthday she came into his study where he had been sleeping, carrying his breakfast tray. He raised himself on his elbow and gazed at her, appalled. For a moment he had imagined it must be another woman. She had put on a severe navy blue suit, cut like a man’s; heavy black-laced shoes; and she had taken the wisps of black hair back off her face and pinned them into a sort of clumsy knot. She was suddenly a middle-aged woman.

‘But, my darling,’ he said, ‘my darling, what have you done to yourself?’

‘I’m forty,’ she said. ‘Time to grow up.’

‘But, my darling, I do so love you in your clothes. I do so love you being beautiful in your lovely clothes.’

She laughed, and left the breakfast tray beside his bed, and went clumping out on her heavy shoes.

That morning she stood in the kitchen beside a very large cake, on which she was carefully placing forty small pink candles. But it seemed only the sister had been asked to the party, for that afternoon the three of them sat around the cake and looked at one another. George looked at Rosa, the sister, in her ugly straight, thick suit, and at his darling Bobby, all her grace and charm submerged into heavy tweed, her hair dragged back, without make-up. They were two middle-aged women, talking about food and buying.

George said nothing. His whole body throbbed with loss.

The dreadful Rosa was looking with her sharp eyes around the expensive flat, and then at George and then at her sister.

‘You’ve let yourself go, haven’t you, Bobby?’ she commented at last. She sounded pleased about it.

Bobby glanced defiantly at George. ‘I haven’t got time for all this nonsense any more,’ she said. ‘I simply haven’t got time. We’re all getting on now, aren’t we?’

George saw the two women looking at him. He thought they had the same black, hard, inquisitive stare over sharp-bladed noses. He could not speak. His tongue was thick. The blood was beating through his body. His heart seemed to be swelling and filling his whole body, an enormous soft growth of pain. He could not hear for the tolling of the blood through his ears. The blood was beating up into his eyes, but he shut them so as not to see the two women.

The Woman (#ulink_70502c67-7ec7-508f-916d-92d5aee38dee)

The two elderly gentlemen emerged on to the hotel terrace at the same moment. They stopped, and checked movements that suggested they wished to retreat. Their first involuntary glances had been startled, even troubled. Now they allowed their eyes to exchange a long, formal glare of hate, before turning deliberately away from each other.

They surveyed the terrace. A problem! Only one of the tables still remained in sunlight. They stiffly marched towards it, pulled out chairs, seated themselves. At once they opened newspapers and lifted them up like screens.

A pretty waitress came sauntering across to take the orders. The two newspapers remained stationary. Around the edge of one Herr Scholtz ordered warmed wine; from the shelter of the other Captain Forster from England demanded tea – with milk.

When she returned with these fluids, neatly disposed on similar metal trays, both walls of print slightly lowered themselves. Captain Forster, with an aggressive flicker of uneasy blue eyes turned towards his opponent, suggested that it was a fine evening. Herr Scholtz remarked with warm freemasonry that it was a shame such a pretty girl should not be free to enjoy herself on such an evening. Herr Scholtz appeared to consider that he had triumphed, for his look towards the Englishman was boastful. To both remarks, however, Rosa responded with an amiable but equally perfunctory smile. She strolled away to the balustrade where she leaned indolently, her back to them.

Stirring sugar into tea, sipping wine, was difficult with those stiff papers in the way. First Herr Scholtz, then the Captain, folded his and placed it on the table. Avoiding each other’s eyes, they looked away towards the mountains, which, however, were partly blocked by Rosa.

She wore a white blouse, low on the shoulders; a black skirt, with a tiny white apron; smart red shoes. It was at her shoulders that the gentlemen gazed. They coughed, tapped on the table with their fingers, narrowed their eyes in sentimental appreciation at the mountains, looked at Rosa again. From time to time their eyes almost met but quickly slid away. Since they could not fight, civilization demanded they should speak. Yes, conversation appeared imminent.

A week earlier they had arrived on the same morning and were given rooms opposite each other at the end of a long corridor. The season was nearly over, the hotel half empty. Rosa therefore had plenty of time to devote to Herr Scholtz, who demanded it: he wanted bigger towels, different pillows, a glass of water. But soon the bell pealed from the other side of the corridor, and she excused herself and hastened over to Captain Forster who was also dissatisfied with the existing arrangements for his comfort. Before she had finished with him, Herr Scholtz’s bell rang again. Between the two of them Rosa was kept busy until the midday meal, and not once did she suggest by her manner that she had any other desire in this world than to readjust Captain Forster’s reading light or bring Herr Scholtz cigarettes and newspapers.

That afternoon Captain Forster happened to open his door; and he found he had a clear view into the room opposite, where Rosa stood at the window smiling, in what seemed to him charming surrender, at Herr Scholtz, who was reaching out a hand towards her elbow. The hand dropped. Herr Scholtz scowled, walked across, indignantly closed his door as if it were the Captain’s fault it had been left open … Almost at once the Captain’s painful jealousy was erased, for Rosa emerged from that door, smiling with perfect indifference, and wished him good day.

That night, very late, quick footsteps sounded on the floor of the corridor. The two doors gently opened at the same moment; and Rosa, midway between them, smiled placidly at first Herr Scholtz, then the Captain, who gave each other contemptuous looks after she had passed. They both slammed their doors.

Next day Herr Scholtz asked her if she would care to come with him up the funicular on her afternoon off, but unfortunately she was engaged. The day after Captain Forster made the same suggestion.

Finally, there was a repetition of that earlier incident. Rosa was passing along the corridor late at night on her way to her own bed, when those two doors cautiously opened and the two urgent faces appeared. This time she stopped, smiled politely, wished them a very good night. Then she yawned. It was a slight gesture, but perfectly timed. Both gentlemen solaced themselves with the thought that it must have been earned by his rival; for Herr Scholtz considered the Captain ridiculously gauche, while the Captain thought Herr Scholtz’s attitude towards Rosa disgustingly self-assured and complacent. They were therefore able to retire to their beds with philosophy.

Since then Herr Scholtz had been observed in conversation with a well-preserved widow of fifty who unfortunately was obliged to retire to her own room every evening at nine o’clock for reasons of health and was, therefore, unable to go dancing with him, as he longed to do. Captain Forster took his tea every afternoon in a café where there was a charming waitress who might have been Rosa’s sister.

The two gentlemen looked through each other in the dining room, and each crossed the street if he saw the other approaching. There was a look about them which suggested that they might be thinking Switzerland – at any rate, so late in the season – was not all that it had been.

Gallant, however, they both continued to be; and they might continually be observed observing the social scene of flirtations and failures and successes with the calm authority of those well qualified by long familiarity with it to assess and make judgments. Men of weight, they were; men of substance; men who expected deference.

And yet … here they were seated on opposite sides of that table in the last sunlight, the mountains rising above them, all mottled white and brown and green with melting spring, the warm sun folding delicious but uncertain arms around them – and surely they were entitled to feel aggrieved? Captain Forster – a lean, tall, military man, carefully suntanned, spruced, brushed – was handsome still, no doubt of it. And Herr Scholtz – large, rotund, genial, with infinite resources of experience – was certainly worth more than the teatime confidences of a widow of fifty?

Unjust to be sixty on such a spring evening; particularly hard with Rosa not ten paces away, shrugging her shoulders in a low-cut embroidered blouse.

And almost as if she were taking a pleasure in cruelty, she suddenly stopped humming and leaned forward over the balustrade. With what animation did she wave and call down the street, while a very handsome young man below waved and called back. Rosa watched him stride away, and then she sighed and turned, smiling dreamily.

There sat Herr Scholtz and Captain Forster gazing at her with hungry resentful appreciation.

Rosa narrowed her blue eyes with anger and her mouth went thin and cold, in disastrous contrast with her tenderness of a moment before. She shot bitter looks from one gentleman to the other, and then she yawned again. This time it was a large, contemptuous, prolonged yawn; and she tapped the back of her hand against her mouth for emphasis and let out her breath in a long descending note, which, however, was cut off short as if to say that she really had no time to waste even on this small demonstration. She then swung past them in a crackle of starched print, her heels tapping. She went inside.

The terrace was empty. Gay painted tables, striped chairs, flowery sun umbrellas – all were in cold shadow, save for the small corner where the gentlemen sat. At the same moment, from the same impulse, they rose and pushed the table forward into the last well of golden sunlight. And now they looked at each other straight and frankly laughed.

‘Will you have a drink?’ inquired Herr Scholtz in English, and his jolly smile was tightened by a consciously regretful stoicism. After a moment’s uncertainty, during which Captain Forster appeared to be thinking that the stoicism was too early an admission of defeat, he said, ‘Yes – yes. Thanks, I will.’

Herr Scholtz raised his voice sharply, and Rosa appeared from indoors, ready to be partly defensive. But now Herr Scholtz was no longer a suppliant. Master to servant, a man who habitually employed labour, he ordered wine without looking at her once. And Captain Forster was the picture of a silky gentleman.

When she reappeared with the wine they were so deep in good fellowship they might have been saying aloud how foolish it was to allow the sound companionship of men to be spoiled, even for a week, on account of the silly charm of women. They were roaring with laughter at some joke. Or rather, Herr Scholtz was roaring, a good stomach laugh from depths of lusty enjoyment. Captain Forster’s laugh was slightly nervous, emitted from the back of his throat, and suggested that Herr Scholtz’s warm Bavarian geniality was all very well, but that there were always reservations in any relationship.

It soon transpired that during the war – the First War, be it understood – they had been enemies on the same sector of the front at the same time. Herr Scholtz had been wounded in his arm. He bared it now, holding it forward under the Captain’s nose to show the long white scar. Who knew but that it was the Captain who had dealt that blow – indirectly, of course – thirty-five years before? Nor was this all. During the Second World War Captain Forster had very nearly been sent to North Africa, where he would certainly have had the pleasure of fighting Herr, then Oberst-leutnant, Scholtz. As it happened, the fortunes of war had sent him to India instead. While these happy coincidences were being established, it was with the greatest amity on both sides; and if the Captain’s laugh tended to follow Herr Scholtz’s just a moment late, it could easily be accounted for by those unavoidable differences of temperament. Before half an hour was out, Rosa was dispatched for a second flask of the deep crimson wine.

When she returned with it, she placed the glasses so, the flasks so, and was about to turn away when she glanced at the Captain and was arrested. The look on his face certainly invited comment. Herr Scholtz was just remarking, with that familiar smiling geniality, how much he regretted that the ‘accidents of history’ – a phrase that caused the Captain’s face to tighten very slightly – had made it necessary for them to be enemies in the past. In the future, he hoped, they would fight side by side, comrades in arms against the only possible foe for either … But now Herr Scholtz stopped, glanced swiftly at the Captain, and after the briefest possible pause, and without a change of tone, went on to say that as for himself he was a man of peace, a man of creation: he caused innumerable tubes of toothpaste to reach the bathrooms of his country, and he demanded nothing more of life than to be allowed to continue to do so. Besides, had he not dropped his war title, the Oberst-leutnant, in proof of his fundamentally civilian character?

Here, as Rosa still remained before them, contemplating them with a look that can only be described as ambiguous, Herr Scholtz blandly inquired what she wanted. But Rosa wanted nothing. Having inquired if that was all she could do for the gentlemen, she passed to the end of the terrace and leaned against the balustrade there, looking down into the street where the handsome young man might pass.

Now there was a pause. The eyes of both men were drawn painfully towards her. Equally painful was the effort to withdraw them. Then, as if reminded that any personal differences were far more dangerous than the national ones, they plunged determinedly into gallant reminiscences. How pleasant, said that hearty masculine laughter – how pleasant to sit here in snug happy little Switzerland, comfortable in easy friendship, and after such fighting, such obviously meaningless hostilities! Citizens of the world they were, no less, human beings enjoying civilized friendship on equal terms. And each time Herr Scholtz or the Captain succumbed to that fatal attraction and glanced towards the end of the terrace, he as quickly withdrew his eyes and, as it were, set his teeth to offer another gauge of friendship across the table.

But fate did not intend this harmony to continue.

Cruelly, the knife was turned again. The young man appeared at the bottom on the street and, smiling, waved towards Rosa, Rosa leaned forward, arms on the balustrade, the picture of bashful coquetry, rocking one heel up and down behind her and shaking her hair forward to conceal the frankness of her response.

There she stood, even after he had gone, humming lightly to herself, looking after him. The crisp white napkin over her arm shone in the sunlight; her bright white apron shone; her mass of rough fair curls glowed. She stood there in the last sunlight and looked away into her own thoughts, singing softly as if she were quite alone.

Certainly she had completely forgotten the existence of Herr Scholtz and Captain Forster.

The Captain and the ex-Oberst-leutnant had apparently come to the end of their sharable memories. One cleared his throat; the other, Herr Scholtz, tapped his signet ring irritatingly on the table.

The Captain shivered. ‘It’s getting cold,’ he said, for now they were in the blue evening shadow. He made a movement, as if ready to rise.

‘Yes,’ said Herr Scholtz. But he did not move. For a while he tapped his ring on the table, and the Captain set his teeth against the noise. Herr Scholtz was smiling. It was a smile that announced a new trend in the drama. Obviously. And obviously the Captain disapproved of it in advance. A blatant fellow, he was thinking, altogether too noisy and vulgar. He glanced impatiently towards the inside room, which would be warm and quiet.

Herr Scholtz remarked, ‘I always enjoy coming to this place. I always come here.’

‘Indeed?’ asked the Captain, taking his cue in spite of himself. He wondered why Herr Scholtz was suddenly speaking German. Herr Scholtz spoke excellent English, learned while he was interned in England during the latter part of the Second World War. Captain Forster had already complimented him on it. His German was not nearly so fluent, no.