He followed her up the stairs. He was ill at ease. He was worried about the hotel detectives.
“It’s a lovely room, Kevin. Wait till you see the view, like a Flemish painting. And so warm. They leave the heat on all night. In Paris …”
From the doorway, looking around, he took in the half-drained basin with its greasy rim, the carton she used as a wastebasket, her underthings drying on a wire hanger, the table covered with a wine-stained cloth, the unmade bed. Lottie thought he was admiring her anemones. “My crazy neighbor gave them to me,” she said. “The old boy from the military hospital. The one who’s been writing the poem for Vera and me.”
“No,” said Kevin. “You never mentioned him. You mentioned this Vera just once. Then you stopped writing.”
“I wrote all the time.”
“I never got the letters. One of mine was returned. I guess the mail system here isn’t exactly up to date.”
“It must have been returned when I was too sick to go to the post office. You have to show your passport.”
“I know, but I got just this one letter. If Vera hadn’t been writing and telling your mother not to worry, I’d have been over before. It was a long time of nothing — not even a card for Christmas. Vera said how hard you were working, how busy.” He left the door ajar but consented to sit on the unmade bed. “So, when I got the chance of a free hop to Zurich, a press flight …” He looked as if he would never grow old. The lines in his face might deepen, that was all. “I knew you’d had this flu. That can take a lot out of you.”
“Yes. It was good of you to come and see how I was. How long can you stay?”
“One, two days. I don’t want to interfere with your work.”
Vera had said, “You’ve kept him on the string since you were sixteen. You’ll bring it off.” Ah, but it was one thing to be sixteen, pretty but modest, brilliant but unassuming. Her frail health had been slightly in her favor then. She had made the mistake of going away, and she had let Kevin discover he could get on without her. She held his hands and pretended to be as conscious as he was of the half-open door. They had never been as alone as at this moment and might never be again. They were almost dangerously on the side of friendship. If she began explaining everything that had taken place, from the moment she saw the holly in Paris and filled out her first police questionnaire, then they might become very good friends indeed, but would probably never marry.
“What I would like, Kevin — I don’t know if you’ll think it’s a good idea — would be to go back with you. If I stay here, I’ll get pneumonia. It’s a good thing you came. Vera was killing me.”
“Her letters didn’t sound like it. Who is she, anyway?”
“A girl from home. A Ukrainian. She got in trouble, and they sent her away. Forget Vera.”
“They could have just sent her to Minneapolis,” said Kevin.
“Too close,” said Lottie. “She might have slipped back.”
“I guess you’ll be glad to get out of here,” said Kevin, as the bells struck the hour. He left her and returned to the hotel near the station, where he had taken a room. He could not rid himself of the fear that there might be detectives.
As she had promised, Lottie accompanied Vera to Germany. Kevin was with them. Once her passport was stamped, Vera thought she would go to Paris and help Al out of whatever predicament he was in, perhaps for the last time. “I liked it in Rome, where it was sort of crazy, but Paris is cold and dirty, and now he’s twenty-six,” said Vera.
“You mean, he should settle down,” said Kevin, not making of it a question, and without asking what Vera imagined her help to Al could consist of.
Vera was hypocritically meek with Kevin, though she smiled when he said “Ukarainian,” in five syllables. Lottie saw that if Vera had for one moment wavered, if she had considered going home because Lottie was leaving, the voice from home saying “Ukarainian” had reminded her of what the return would be. That was Vera’s labyrinth. Lottie was on her way out. Kevin held Lottie’s hand when Vera wasn’t looking. He was friendly toward Vera, but protective of Lottie, which was the right imbalance. Lottie guessed he had made up his mind.
They walked on a coating of slush and ice — they had left the sun and the rivers on the other side.
In a totally gray village nothing stirred. Beyond it, on the dirty, icy highway by some railway tracks, they came upon a knot of orphans and a clergyman. The two groups passed each other without a glance. In a moment the children were out of sight. Answering a remark of Kevin’s, Vera said they were ten or eleven years old, and unlikely to remember the air raids eight years ago. The sky was low and looked unwashed. On the horizon the dark blue mountains were so near now that Lottie saw where they rose from the plain. “Appenweier” — that was the name of the place. It was like those mysterious childhood railway journeys that begin and end in darkness.
“Are you girls by any chance going anyplace in particular?” said Kevin.
They turned and looked at him. No, they were just walking. Vera was not even leading the way.
“Well, I’m sorry then,” said Kevin, “but as the saying goes, I’ve had it,” and he marched them to the bombed station, and onto a train, and so back to France.
If that was Germany, there was nothing to wait for, expect, or return to. She had not crossed a frontier but come up to another limit.
Vera packed some things and left some, and departed for Paris. She and Lottie did not kiss, and Vera left the hotel without looking back. Her room — because it was cheaper — was instantly taken over by the mad neighbor. Kevin spent the evening, supperless, and part of the night with Lottie. Vera also must have been an inhibiting factor for him, Lottie decided — not just the phantom detectives. He might have taken Lottie to his hotel, which was more comfortable, but he thought it would look funny. They had given Vera a day’s start. Kevin and Lottie were leaving for Zurich in the morning, and from Zurich flying home. Lottie did not think this night would give her a claim on Kevin, but when she woke, at an hour she could not place — woke because the Arabs were quarrelling outside the window, got up to shut the window and, in the dark, comb her hair — she thought that a memory of it could. Vera had left a parcel of food. If she had not been afraid of disturbing Kevin, she would have spread it on the table and eaten a meal — salami, pickles, butter, and bread, half a bottle of Sylvaner.
Kevin now rose, obsessed by what the people who owned the hotel might be supposing. He smoked a cigarette, refused the wine, and put on his clothes. He and Lottie were to meet next morning at the station; there was some confusion about the time. Kevin remarked, with a certain pride, that as far as he was concerned it was now around seven at night. He had brought a travelling clock to lend to Lottie so that she could wake up in plenty of time to pack. He set it for six, and placed the clock where she could reach it.
Lottie made a list not of what she was taking but of what she was leaving behind: food, wilted anemones, medicine, all Vera’s residue as well as her own. The hotel maid would have a full day of it, and could not get away with saying “À quoi bon?” Lottie could not make herself believe that someone else would be sleeping in this room and that there would be no trace of Lottie and Vera anywhere. She rose before the alarm rang, and stood at the window with the curtain in her hand. She composed, “Last night, just at the end of the night, the sky and the air were white as milk. Snow had fallen and a thick low fog lay in the streets and on the water, filling every crack between the houses. The cathedral bells were iron and muffled in snow. I heard drunks up and down the sidewalk most of the night.”