Cristine glared and the waiter shuffled away on his tired, waiter's feet, his shoulders crestfallen, so that she felt stupidly guilty because he was not a young man and his admiration was purely artistic. There had not been the indistinct hint of a pass in his stare.
She sat for some time drinking coffee, wishing it was not Italian, because she wasn't fond of their coffee. She preferred her coffee milky flavor. The waiter came back and she asked if there was any liquors. He cheered up at this and rushed off to get her a Drambuie, pouring it for her into her next coffee in a grandiloquent ritualistic way, as though she had asked for it just to please him, which, in a sense, she had. She sipped and smiled at him and he glowed with delight before he vanished again.
It improved the coffee, anyway. Cristine yawned, her hand over her mouth, feeling dull and sleepy now. The food had a drowsy effect. It was the effect of the journey, really. She had been able to cry with people all round her, though. That was what she had thought. She would have to keep a bright face, look ordinary. So she had fled across Europe to escape pain and taken it with her like an invisible companion.
The hall porter was just going off duty. "Sleep well, miss." he said as she passed and the man replacing him gave her a toothy smile and a bow as he handed her her room key.
She ordered rolls and coffee for breakfast in her room. "And newspaper?" she was asked.
"The times." she said because that was usually the only English paper one could be sure of getting abroad. The others often arrived much too late for breakfast.
As she turned away she bumped into someone. He steadied her with both hands on her arms. Cristine glanced up, a polite smile ready, but it withered on her mouth.
"Feeling bette?"
"Thank you, yes." She couldn't pretend to be pleased to see him. He reminded her of the panic and fear she had half forgotten. And she increasingly didn't like the amusement in his blue eyes.
She was moving away as he said, "No bad dreams, I hope." he was laughing but Cristine wasn't. She knew she was going to have bad dreams. Get lost, she wanted to say and every line of her body said it for her as she carefully did not look back at him.
The hotel had one of those old fashioned lifts with wrought iron caged painted gilt. The curling, baroque patterns gave one a view of the whole foyer as the lift rose and one looked down through the open ironwork. Cristine looked down and felt a sting of pure rage as she saw the tall, dark haired man watching her from below. He was eyeing her legs with a thoughtful appraisal. His glance lifted and she glared at him, briefly, before she went out of sight.
There were flowers on the table in her room. She paused to smell their faint scent and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror behind them. Her face was flushed and her eyes had a hard shine to them. She looked aggressive, ready to do battle with someone. It was some improvement on the grey misery on which she had been sunk for days. It would close in on her again, like the Venetian mist, but for the moment she was alive, awake.
The flowers had the forgettable, plastic perfection of hothouse blooms. Harry had once sent her red roses like this long stemmed, exquisite blooms which yet seemed unreal. "Beautiful." she had told him because she had wanted to please him but she would have preferred a bunch of violets bought from a basket of squashed flowers in the street. Harry was a man of impulse. He did things without reckoning the cost, for himself or anyone else. He liked to live at random, rushing after anything that caught his eye. "Don't take me seriously." Harry refused to take life itself seriously and Cristine once thought that admirable but now she saw it very differently.
It was all a question of point of view. The place where you are standing dictates what you see and how you see it.
She lay in the bed, trying to sleep, watching mist drift about the room like a homeless ghost. The sound of water lapping crumbling stone steps came from the canal beyond the window. She had a little balcony outside her room. "Don't walk on it, please." The porter had urged. "It is not safe." She had wanted until he had gone and then she had opened the french windows and stepped out on to the unsafe balcony. The smell of the canal had been stronger then it always smelt strongly during hours of sunlight. The wall opposite had a few tiny windows in it all of which were barred as though to stop the people inside form leaping out into the canal. Was it a hotel? Or a prison, perhaps? Or a covenant which had to guard against escaping nuns? She had stared at the windows expecting to see sad faces behind them but they had given no clues.
It wasn't as though Harry was the first man she had ever been in love with she knew love could go as lightly as it had come. She was twenty four now. She had been eighteen the first time she fell in love. Before that she had tried love on like a possible hat, yet always in fun, playing at it. When she did fall in love at last that had been fun, too except that one day the fun had drained out of it and the young man who had seemed a mixture of Adonis and Harry had come into focus as himself, a boy of twenty with a quick temper and a liking for his own way. Cristine couldn't even remember what he looked like.
- To be continued..
