Tom approached the Queen’s Hotel with a set mood of almost professional patience — like a paid mourner at a funeral — that did not touch himself. The Monday night streets of the city gaped; there were only a few black men, looking long and steadily into the windows of the outfitters’. The Queen’s had the cold sour smell of a drinking hotel — it was not a place where people went to dine or to live. Two or three tables in the bar lounge held up the elbows of men in striped blazers — perhaps some visiting bowlers’ team — and an elderly tart was arguing in drunken dead seriousness between two men, in a dingy corner.
When you have your home in a city, it is always a shock to enter the brutal homelessness of a place like this; Tom forgot, for stretches of years on end, that such places exist and are part of the true character of all cities. He went to the desk where a night porter with the deeply suspicious face of his kind picked up a telephone without a word when Fuecht’s name was pronounced. While he waited for the phone to be answered, the man moved his left hand strongly over his face, pushing his eyebrows up out of line and then down, rubbing his nose sideways, pulling over his mouth and chin, like the rough tongue of some animal going over its young.
“Second floor. One-nine-six.”
Tom went up in the lift, and, with the sense of being let deeper and deeper into places where neither dark nor daylight exists, but only the light of single bulbs gathered like beads of sweat on the ceiling, came out into a passage. Past doors and more doors; before he knocked, it seemed, the door opened, and there was a blazingly-lit room, yellow-walled, with the luggage heaped, as it had been dumped down, in the middle, and the figure of an old man drawn up like an exclamation point before it.
They looked, man and luggage, ready to take off for anywhere. The visitor was ready to back away before them.
“So I wait,” said Fuecht, without any greeting. “They will come for me soon.”
Tom would not have known him if he had seen him in the street. Was he really unrecognisable? He walked into the room and sat on the bed, under the chandelier that had been meant for grandeur and shone as a merciless inquisition of glare. No, Fuecht must be changed. He couldn’t possibly have looked like that; the way he looked was not something that could last for years.
He was ill, of course. But it wasn’t that. It wasn’t just the usual old men’s symptoms of the collar grown too big, the hollow, delicate-looking as the skin over an infant’s fontanelle, in front of each bloodless ear. He was blazing behind his line of tight mouth, behind his dark eyes made dominating, in the diminishing face, by his magnifying glasses; he was blazing like the chandelier. Something — a pulse, a convulsive swallowing — agitated all the time in the thin turkey-fold that connected his chin to his adam’s-apple.
“They told me a wait of forty-five minutes,” he was saying, without a pause. He gave the little unpleasant smile of a man who knows better than to expect efficiency in matters that are out of his hands. “I should get off the plane from Port Elizabeth and then go straight through the customs and so on to the plane for Europe. That was the information. No one would have known. You would not have heard from me, eh? I would have been,” he threw up his unsteady hands like a drowning man, but in triumph, “many miles away by now.”
“It’s very annoying to be delayed,” said Tom, but his eyes were on the luggage. “When did you decide to go to Switzerland?”
“Yes! I should have been gone!” The old man took a swift turn about the room. He checked himself abruptly; he moved with the incalculable rushes of a faulty clockwork toy, that jerks into action, moves with wild nimbleness, and then just as suddenly runs down and is arrested feebly in the middle of an uncompleted movement. He laughed, “Switzerland! Yes, begin with Zurich. I was a boy there, a young man, living as young men live. Zurich to begin with, but I won’t stay. Don’t think I’ll stay! I’m not crawling back to Zurich to …” He stopped. A close look came over his face, it was not so much as if he had lost the thread of what he was saying as that he had found himself saying something unexpected, something that lay in his mind ignored. He went on, “There are plenty of places in Europe where you can live, still. Well, I should have been gone already, I should have been on the way, eh?” He sat down suddenly, gleeful, shaken, on the chair.
A waiter came in with whisky and soda, that Fuecht must have ordered to be brought when his guest arrived. While the man was in the room, the old man did not speak, and had a curious air of impatient resentment. When the waiter had withdrawn, he made sure the door was properly closed behind the man, and then handed Tom a drink: “Whisky is all right, eh?”
“And Mrs. Fuecht—?” said Tom.
The old man drew the whisky round his mouth and then put the glass away from him. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “When she wakes up, she’ll find there isn’t a penny. I’ve got all my money out. Here, in my pocket — here’s a cheque book for the Zurich bank. I’ve taken it all out. There are ways, you understand. I know people, I managed it — never mind. It’s all there. All I have to do is write out a cheque.”
“It sounds as if someone’s going to have a good time.” It was impossible to remedy this conversation in which both were talking of different things, although their remarks appeared to follow one on the other in the parody of communication. Oddly, Tom was reminded of times when, talking to Jessie, he became aware that they were not talking about the same thing; she sometimes went through the motions of communication with her lips, while what she really was doing was to hug further and further into herself what it was she had to communicate.
“I’m sorry about Jessie. She wanted to come, she would’ve …”
Suddenly the old man seemed to realise Tom’s presence; he smiled a slow, grudging recognition, and the lie lay exposed between them.
The old man took up his glass of whisky and finished it at a gulp, getting it over with, like medicine, and his other hand was raised, calling for attention, promising. “She doesn’t know I’ve gone, and when she finds out — well, too late! That’s all.”
“Jessie had a letter from her last week. She said you were in a nursing home.”
“That’s all right!” said the old man, swaggeringly, grim, shrugging. “That’s right! They wanted me in a nursing home. But I tell you”—he stopped and leant forward as he might have done if he had wanted to use the name of someone with whom he had entered into conversation in a bar, only to remember that the man was a nameless stranger to him—“I tell you, they won’t get a penny from me, just the same! I’m going to spend it all. D’you follow me? I may not be young, but I’ve got money, and a man with money is never lonely. There’ll be women — you understand? I’m not finished with it all yet!”
His voice rose powerfully, as it had on the telephone, and came ringing back from the four walls of the room, shocking, so that it silenced even himself.
He sat back in his chair, fixing his eyes on Stilwell angrily. He looked once or twice round the room, like the circus lion puzzled and restless on its painted barrel. And then he said again: “Women. There are women who won’t say no to my money.”