The ladies were rather surprised by their ignorance but delighted that what they had come for was simply and entirely them. They hadn't been expected, of course — or not so many — but never mind, they were welcome anyway.
The more impressive of the two was definitely Elsa Fischer, a tall woman with a streak of steel-grey across her head. She was still handsome, and still preserved the assurance of what must once have been a remarkable beauty; but one felt she had long since dismissed that as a trivial gift and valued only the insights it had brought her. In learning to exploit her beauty she had learned how to deal with power; the one lasted after the other had become no more than good posture, good bones, and a little repertoire of gestures that still suggested availability — the promise of great sad occasions and moments of abandon. If she continued to play the game it was because men recognised in her a woman who knew the rules, and liked to experience, now that there was none, the sense of risk.
It was Cassie who saw all this. In her ugly-duckling way she valued beauty, had pondered the subject deeply, and was made aware of Elsa Fischer's great measure of that ambiguous gift in the effect it was having on Gordon. He had ceased to be plumply bored and was giving this sixty-year-old woman the sort of attention he reserved for churches, some paintings, and everything to do with himself.
Cassie was in anguish. She wanted her life, she wanted it at all costs. But she despised the means she had to use, and had been using, to get it — the humiliations, the pretence that she had no passion, no ambition of her own, no sense of honour. Most of all she was afraid that if it came to the point she might not be willing to suffer. She writhed in a dark and stolid silence.
The other woman, who was smaller in every way than Elsa Fischer, had red hair rather inexpertly coloured, red-rimmed eyes and a drooping nose, and seemed quite incapable of being still. She had wept when Michael greeted her and clung to his neck: he was so much like his father.
“Isn't he just like Arnold?” she had said.
Elsa Fischer, who kissed him on the forehead and was not tearful, looked at him with her wide blue eyes.
“No,” she said, "I do not see it. You already look American, Michael dear, and a good thing too. It's how you should look.” She kissed him again. “I hoped you'd come.”
“But of course,” he began.
“No, there is no of course. But you are here, that is what matters.” And immediately, since she was aware that she had given him all the attention so far, and since there were, after all, others, she had begun to ask questions, weigh answers, demand qualifications, put things together, and soon had them all clear; and since that is what plainly offered in Gordon's awakened interest, had settled her steady gaze on him. Cassie watched him respond, and grow alert and painfully attractive, and oh so youthfully promising as he took out all his little talents and made them shine.
She felt one of her black clouds, the one that had been riding just above her head all morning like a bleak halo, descend at last and smother her in gloom. She felt removed. She watched from a distance. And it occurred to her that if she ever stopped being under Gordon's spell she would hate him.
Was that the cloud?
The red-headed lady, in the meantime, had gone behind a partition, and Cassie, who might have been able to see through walls, saw her, at a little shelf, put slices of meat on pumpernickel and stand there in the half-dark pushing the stuff into one side of her face; vigorously working her jaws and gulping, so that her scalp, with its shock of coloured hair, moved up and down and her throat muscles formed stringy cords. She ate one slice, then another, then a third. Cassie was mesmerized. At last, after swallowing a difficult mouthful, she composed her features, swept her hair with a light hand, and came back into the room looking dignified. She sat, and when she caught Cassie looking at her, produced a smile that was all innocence.
Elsa Fischer, who looked untouchable and gave the impression of having always been so, had been speaking in a low concerned voice of Michael Pacher, his noble forms and glowing colours, while Gordon asked questions to which, Cassie reminded herself, he already knew the answers.
The questions blunt Cassie wanted to put were these. What about the suffering? How do you know if you can face it? Do you just go through it and come out the other side? Does time dull the pain and anger of it?
“Did you see?” Anick hissed, catching up with her on the lakeside path where they were walking to a restaurant. “She was eating. All by herself, behind the wall.”
“Oh, well,” said Cassie, as if there were extenuating circumstances. She hadn't Anick's clear notions of how people should and should not behave. People were extraordinary or plain odd, that was all.
“I was disgusted,” Anick declared. “I found it insulting. Now she will come to the restaurant and say she is not ‘ungree. I know such people. Orreeble!”
She was right. At the restaurant both ladies excused themselves and said they had already eaten, but Elsa Fischer drank a glass of wine and made recommendations and insisted they all try the local torte. It was uncomfortable, even Gordon looked uneasy. He didn't know how he should act, and felt that some situation he had been handling very well, very urbanely, just a while back had turned into something he couldn't handle at all. Only Michael seemed untroubled. He had done the right thing already, simply by coming. He smiled incessantly and looked softly angelic. He ate heartily, drank too much, and on the walk back tried to hold Anick's hand on the narrow path, and looked hurt when she shook him off.
Cassie's cloud refused to shift. Everything gave off a kind of blackness that added to it like smoke: the food they ate, the talk, the water, the damp meadows with the shadow of firs on them, the terrible peaks. It seemed to her that the lake might contain unbearable secrets— drowned babies, or the records, deep-sunk in leaden boxes, of an era— and that these made up the weather to which her cloud belonged, and enveloped her even in sunshine in deepest gloom. It might just be that she had stepped, back there, across a border into the rest of her life and it would go on like this for the next thirty, forty, fifty years — into another century.
AS THEY SPED back down the autobahn, through fields that threw off wave after wave of heat, she sat far back in the seat with her eyes closed and let the others, all of them, sink into the dark. Their faces faded, their voices. It seemed boundless, her depression, eternally deep; though in fact, ten years later, married to another quite different Australian, and with three exuberant daughters who liked to sing in the car as she drove them to and from school, she would not recall this particular gloom, or its cause, and had lost contact with all the members of their trip but Anick, who had started up a correspondence and then kept it going long after Gordon, the original reason, had departed from their lives.