She finds it upsetting to upset people. That is her weakness. That is why she let him leave this morning thinking that everything would just go on as if nothing had happened. That is why the idea that maybe she was wrong to want not to see him for a while so easily tempted her as she sat propped on her skinny elbow in the dark and turned her face slightly away from his halitosis. She had nearly not said anything. Nearly not even said, ‘James! So… What are we going to do?’ And then, oppressed by his silence—standing there like a sullen shadow—and her own sudden uncertainty, ‘Just carry on as before?’ She had not meant the words to convey the sense that that was what she thought they should do. She had meant them more as the sceptical starting point for a conversation on the subject. That was not how they had sounded. They had sounded like a straightforward suggestion, and he was obviously willing to take them as one. So he left, and she lay there for a few minutes, feeling that he had somehow been unpleasantly sly—which made her dislike him—and then she fell asleep.
She was hurt by his lack of emotion when she said she did not think they should see each other for a while. The way he was silent for a few seconds and then just said, ‘Okay.’ When he said that, she suddenly wondered what he felt. He did not seem to feel anything. And if he did, why did he not show it? Why did he not express it in words? Why did he not even try?
She pours herself some more water from the plastic jug and someone sits down at the table, as far away from her as possible. Ernő. When she looks in his direction, he just nods. They do not speak to each other, not even a few pleasantries, which seems odd. He must be ten years younger than her. He might be no more than twenty. Sometimes she thinks that if he simply walked up to her and suggested they take the lift upstairs and have sex in a vacant room—as he presumably wants to—she would just say, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and start setting up a suitable key. The trouble is, if he did that, he would no longer be Ernő, with his shy, lusty innocence. His unspoken, obvious longing. He would be something else.
‘How are things today?’ he says suddenly.
It is a tedious question and his tone is tediously sincere and she just shrugs and says, ‘They’re okay. Fine.’ He has no sense of humour, or does not seem to. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she says, and stands up with her tray.
‘Okay, see you,’ he says.
She smiles at him.
Well, she ‘smiles’ at him. It is a smile she sometimes does—a momentary flexing of her mouth—which does not even pretend to be sincere. To that extent it is, in its way, a sincere expression. It expresses something. She knows this, and wonders as she leaves and wanders up to the lobby, what it does express. She tends to do it when she is nervous, when she does not know what else to do. It is a sort of surrender to the pressure of social niceties, to the pressure of pretending—a sort of helpless shrug.
She starts to walk up the service stairs, with their strip-lit landings. She finds it impossible to pretend. She is not sure why. Other people seem to be able to do it so easily. Once—and they have been together just long enough for there to be ‘once’—James said it was impossible for him to imagine her acting, acting in a play for instance. Impossible to imagine her playing someone else. If she had to, he said, she just wouldn’t take it seriously, she’d turn it into a joke. It was not something she had thought about. He was very pleased with himself for having had what he thought was an insight into her personality—and one which she had not had herself. She is still sometimes astonished that anything much has happened with him at all, after that first—or was it the second? — night at his flat. The fiasco. That was the word she used for that episode of pure sexual misery, which a sort of politeness had led her into. It was a problem, the way she let men polite her into things. And that night, when he was suddenly all over her in the hall of his flat, it was a sort of politeness which pressured her into letting him do what he wanted with her—a feeling that perhaps it would not be polite to stop him, that he might be offended, that there might be a scene, with her somehow in the wrong. When she thought she was pregnant the following week and he seemed unable to understand what she was suffering, she hated him as much as she had ever hated anyone. He was in his own world and seemed to have no understanding of hers—and no interest in having such an understanding. That was what she found so strange. His two-dimensionality. He was, however, the first man she had felt a strong attraction to since Fraser, and she had started to fear that she would never feel very attracted to anyone else again. That was probably what had made the fiasco so painful—it had been surprisingly painful. And that was probably what had made it so hard just to end it, as for a week afterwards she had fully intended to, even when it turned out that she was not pregnant.
She visits the Ladies, and while she is in there she tries to tidy up her hair. She splashes water on her pasty face, and nurses her shot eyes. Then she takes up her post at the front desk and stands there facing the hours of the afternoon. From the heart of the lobby, the huge London outside and the weather, which is increasingly wild, seem like another world. It is difficult not to think of Fraser here. It was here, in this lobby, that she met him. It was this time of day. An afternoon like this one—a dark sky through the distant, attended doors. He had been hanging around for some time, since the morning. First outside. Then, when the downpour arrived, in the lobby. He was not the only photographer; there were a few others, all waiting for someone upstairs—she did not know who. The sort of person they were waiting for never used their own name, so to look at the long list of people staying in the hotel was pointless. She had not been given any special instructions; there were no special security people in evidence.
The photographers were matey with each other, but it was obvious from their eyes—she had plenty of time to watch them in the quiet hours of the early afternoon—that they were plotting against each other too. (As he later explained to her, any edge over the others, however marginal, might make the difference between a massive payday and a total waste of time. The point was—if they all got the same shots, they would all be worthless.) He was the most talkative. He seemed the happiest—he was always smiling, and made the others laugh. He was also the tallest. And also, she noticed, the most determined. It was he who quietly detached himself from the others and tried to slip into the lifts, until he was spotted and held up his hands like a football player. When he tried it a second time the security guards evicted him from the lobby. She found, standing at the desk, that—while she had watched its noisy slapstick progress with a sort of smile—she did not welcome his eviction. The lobby seemed more tedious with him not there. And something had happened as he was being ejected—their eyes had momentarily met and, from the middle of his melee with the security men, he had smiled at her. She was not sure whether she had smiled back. There might not have been time. The other paps did not entertain her. They stood in a little sour-faced huddle, pacing up and down the strip of marble to which they were now limited—the security guards had seemed to want to throw them all out, there had been a long negotiation—and not speaking much.