Lighthouse (19 page)

That was how it was when he came downstairs the morning after their return from Cornwall. The kitchen smelt of coffee and she was standing at the window. She was wearing a pink, summery dress which, after looking at her for a while, he recognised from his parents’ honeymoon photos – it was her going-away dress. By the back door he saw the garish suitcase from under the bed. His father was still upstairs. And then everything happened in a rush – her kissing him and taking her suitcase and leaving. It happened so quickly that when he picked up her coffee cup in the suddenly empty kitchen, he found that it was still warm.

Leaving the breakfast room, he finds himself shaking so badly that he needs to sit down. He cannot even contemplate climbing the stairs to his room. Being right by the lounge, he goes in. There is a television in the corner showing the news with no sound, and there are two sofas, neither of them occupied. He lies down on one and closes his eyes and, despite all the caffeine, drifts into a weird sleep.

He wakes feeling anxious. He looks at his watch and is disappointed to see that he has missed the first bus to Hellhaus. He will have to catch the second one after lunch. He will not be in Utrecht, then, before the end of the afternoon, but, he thinks, he is sure to be there in time for his dinner. He rouses himself and goes upstairs to his room.

When he sees that his suitcase has gone, he realises that it must have been taken for transit while he was asleep. He goes back downstairs and asks the proprietor about it and is assured that his suitcase is already on its way to Hellhaus. Well, thinks Futh, if it is already on its way perhaps it will arrive before him. So he will, after all, have to go to the hotel to ask for it and explain what he is doing but that is all right. He might not even have bothered if it had not been for the fact that the silver lighthouse is in it.

He leaves the hotel with some time to kill before catching the afternoon bus. He goes into a shop, thinking of buying a newspaper. He has not looked at one all week and is feeling somewhat detached from reality. The shop has only German papers and Futh, testing his understanding of written German, which is better than his understanding of spoken German, looks through a few but, not making much sense of them, leaves without buying one.

He walks down to the river and sits alone under some trees, appreciating the cool breeze coming off the rushing water. Closing his eyes, he consciously notes the smells around him, the smell of the outdoors, so that he will be able to return later, in his mind, to this oasis.

He has often wondered what it would be like to have an impaired sense of smell. He loves to wake to the smell of fresh coffee, but when Angela was pregnant she became suddenly unable to bear the stink, she said, of the coffee machine, and of Futh unwashed first thing in the morning, for the brief duration of each of her pregnancies. He thinks about things he would prefer not to be able to smell, like alcohol on other people, and he thinks about the potential dangers of being unable to detect certain things, like gas or bad food. Some people cannot smell cyanide. Some people can simply not recognise smells, smelling one thing and interpreting it as something else entirely. It is possible to imagine a smell. He himself, recently, suffering from the flu, found himself smelling coffee which was not there.

He takes out his snacks and eats them for lunch. Seeing some ducks, he breaks up a bread roll and throws the pieces into the water, but the ducks don’t notice and the bits of bread are carried away by the current.

When he stands up and leaves his quiet spot between the trees, there is plenty of time to get to the bus stop. His ruined feet go slowly but still he arrives in time and sits down, expecting to see the bus soon.

The minutes go by and he assumes at first that the bus is running late. Then he wonders whether he is standing at the wrong stop, and wanders to the stops either side to have a look at their timetables. Thinking that he might have read the time wrong, or got the wrong day, he looks again at the first timetable, but if he has made a mistake he does not see it. After almost an hour, he decides that either the bus just is not coming or that he arrived a fraction too late – perhaps his watch is a little slow – and the bus had already been and gone by the time he got to the stop.

There is a third and final bus leaving in the evening. He considers whether it will still be possible to go to Utrecht. His hosts, who would not be expecting him, would have had their dinner by the time he got there, although he should not be too late for some supper. He thinks about hitchhiking. He goes to the kerb and stands there for a while with his thumb out, but no one stops. He has not seen a taxi either, and Futh does not really want to walk all the way back into town to try to find one, and besides, it would be expensive, an extravagance for which he has not budgeted. The next bus will be along in a few hours and he decides to wait.

He waits near the bus stop, wishing that he had bought a newspaper after all or that he had not taken the novel out of his bag. He finds some shade, although it moves. He strays into the full heat of the day only when he feels the need to go back to the bus stop and check the timetable again. He catches the evening bus and sits near the back feeling pleased, watching the world go by.

Getting off at what turns out to be the wrong stop, he has a little walking to do before he finally gets into Hellhaus. He sights the hotel from behind as the sun is going down, the sunset blazing on its whitewashed wall, glaring from the windows. It is dazzling, almost painful to look at, but he cannot take his eyes off it.

Before going to the hotel to ask about his suitcase, he goes to check his car. He finds it just where he left it, but it has a flat tyre. Crouching down to investigate, he sees the broken glass in the gutter. Perhaps, he thinks, the glass was already there when he arrived and he parked without noticing it. But, feeling practical now, knowing that he can change a tyre, he opens his boot. Expecting to see his spare, he is dismayed to find instead an old, flat tyre, the same one he removed by the side of the road before driving home to find Kenny coming out of his house.

With a sigh, he gives up his plan to go to Utrecht. He will have to sort his car out in the morning. He walks on towards the hotel to spend the night as per his itinerary, eager anyway for a quiet bar with padded seats and chilled drinks; a bedroom door and a key, a soft carpet and a clean bed and pillows and blankets; a deep bath and a little kettle, a plate of cold sausages and a packet of complimentary biscuits; his suitcase, his silver lighthouse, his pyjamas and rest.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Moths

Bernard, lying on his side in the grass, touching a cornflower to Ester’s cheekbone and comparing its blue to the blue of her eye, said, ‘Come away with me.’

She waited only a moment before saying, ‘All right,’ and, as Bernard touched the cornflower to the blue of her necklace and the blue of the buttons on her blouse, she lay back in the fallen leaves.

She introduced him to her parents. Afterwards, her mother said to her, ‘Are you sure, Ester?’ and her father said, ‘You can still change your mind.’

But Ester did not change her mind. She went with Bernard to Hellhaus. While he ran the pub, she managed the accommodation, taking bookings, receiving guests, doing the housekeeping. There is a cleaner who comes very early each morning and does the bar, the public areas, before breakfast, but Ester takes care of the guest rooms herself.

There is not, in any case, a great deal to do. Of their ten bedrooms, they only ever have a few booked out at any one time. Sometimes rooms stand empty for entire seasons. She once left the light on and the window open in one of the bathrooms and did not go back for weeks. Eventually returning, she found the lightshade – a white glass bowl – full of moths.

When she was a girl, Ester was taken on a visit to the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. She was disturbed and fascinated by the museum’s extensive collections which included fish and invertebrates preserved in alcohol, stuffed mammals, and butterflies and moths pinned to display boards. A few days later, she was in her room at bedtime with the light still on, reading some romantic photo story in a magazine, when a moth flew in through the open window and began flittering around the lightbulb. This moth, which she pinned to the cork board in her bedroom, was the first in her collection, and the moth collection was the first of her various collections, although what she calls collecting, Bernard calls hoarding.

He is appalled by her bookshelves. He asks her, ‘Who needs so many Mills and Boons?’

‘I do,’ she says.

‘Why do you keep all these old lipsticks and perfume bottles?’ he says, opening her drawers, doing one of his spot checks. She has never known what he is looking for. Tipping out the contents of the envelope that she keeps in the drawer by her bed, the brittle remains of a dried-out flower falling to the floor, he says, ‘What’s all this crap?’

Not long after the day she spent lying in the grass with Bernard, Ester arrived in Hellhaus and sought out a doctor. She made an appointment, which was followed by another appointment at a clinic. And while she sat in the waiting room, she thought about those stilled creatures she had seen housed in the museum, an enormous number, and she thought about her own very small collection of night-flying moths. She still recalled the way that first one felt, the tickle of the powdery wings trapped between the palms of her hands.

A few years later, her father suffered a heart attack and died. When Ester went home, her mother said he’d been having palpitations. ‘Warning signs,’ she said, ‘which he ignored.’ And, she said, he’d already had one heart attack which had gone unnoticed.

‘He didn’t notice?’ said Ester. ‘How could he not notice?’

‘Sometimes you don’t,’ said her mother. ‘But the doctor said he’d had one. She could see the damage in his heart.’

At his funeral, Ester’s mother, cradling a relative’s baby boy in her arms, said to Ester for the first time, ‘Where’s my grandson?’ Since then, she has asked the same question, one way or another, each time she has seen Ester, until recently when she stopped talking about the grandchildren she did not have and instead began giving advice on preserving one’s looks in middle age.

Ester does not remember when she started drinking in the morning or sleeping in the middle of the day. She remembers her first infidelity, but she does not remember them all.

She wakes from her nap and sits for some time working on her face in her dressing table mirror, aware that her make-up fails to disguise the dark circles under her eyes and that it probably only draws attention to her crow’s-feet and the little lines around her mouth. Is she too old, she wonders, to have children?

She takes out the little wooden lighthouse which Bernard gave to her the morning after their wedding. She had asked Bernard for this vintage perfume, Dralle’s Illusion in a lighthouse case, a collector’s item, advertised in its day as ‘the most costly perfume sold in America’. There were two versions of the lighthouse case – a silver one and a smaller, cheaper wooden one. She was disappointed, on exchanging gifts, to find herself receiving the wooden version.

She applies the violet perfume, beneath which she still smells of the disinfectant with which she cleaned the guest bathrooms. Stoppering the vial, she picks up the silver lighthouse which is now standing beside the wooden one on her dressing table and which is missing its bottle. Putting her vial into the silver lighthouse, she returns the now empty wooden case to the drawer.

She hopes that Mr Futh will not notice his missing item, but if he does and if he mentions it she will tell him that she will talk to the people who transported the luggage. He will have to leave before there is any answer – in the morning, he will be gone.

She puts on her new dress which is beginning to look a little tired. She puts on her heels and some flashy earrings. Bernard does notice, she thinks, although he is barely speaking to her today.

She goes down to the bar and sits on her stool, waiting for Mr Futh, her only guest today. She is expecting him in the middle of the afternoon. She took receipt of his suitcase this morning and has put it at the end of his bed.

As she sips a drink, she notices Bernard looking her way, glancing repeatedly at her legs. Feeling flattered, she subtly adjusts her position so that her legs are well displayed, crossed towards him at the knee. After a while, just as her calves are going numb, the blood, she imagines, pooling in her veins, he heads in her direction and she turns towards him. Bernard, on his way into the back of the hotel, pauses beside her to suggest that she put on some hosiery.