Invisible

‘When?’

‘In three weeks.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘No. The website does rather fudge the issue. Can’t be seen to be advertising failure,’ he says, apologetically, and within a minute he is complaining about the lackadaisical stewardship of the Beltram Group. ‘Things took a turn for the worse in the year the bypass was cut. It costs money, a lot of money, to maintain a hotel of this type, but they just let it drift. The foot and mouth outbreak was the nail in the coffin. Now they’re selling up, to a London property developer, who’s going to turn the Oak into a rural getaway for overstressed high-flyers on a members-only basis. There’ll be a cinema and a gym and a sauna. Aromatherapy, yoga, massage, manicure, pedicure. A room full of video games. And the pool, apparently, is going to be wired up so the burned-out whizz-kids can float to the soothing sounds of tropical surf or a rainforest or the wind in the trees, relayed from microphones in the garden.’

And soon he is leading Mr Morton down the flight of steps below the dining room, along the corridor, past the boiler room and the laundry. Nearing the angle where the corridor turns and slopes downward, he attempts half a dozen steps with his eyes shut, guided by memory and the report of their footsteps on the concrete floor. At the foot of the ramp he unfastens the cabinet and turns the bakelite dials inside, while Mr Morton, raising his face into the dim radiance of the 40-watt bulb, inhales deeply, as if the bulb were an exotic flower from which a bewitching perfume is falling. With a push of his back he opens the door, putting out a hand to help Mr Morton over the raised wooden strip on the threshold.

Some of the lanterns are still quivering into life, sending flashes across the turquoise tiles. In the pool, hemispheres of blue light shine like fantastic sea anemones and at the farther end of the pool there is a vein of turbulence, a colourless plait, where fresh water flows from the pipe, creating an infinitesimal swell that expires before it can reach the mid-point of the pool, where the wall lanterns are reflected as if in a block of quartz. It has always delighted him, this place, especially at night, when it’s absolutely quiet and still, and you emerge from the dingy corridor into this subterranean cave, with its glistening walls and the dark blue ceiling that curves above the water like a night-coloured tent. He imagines bringing Stephanie here at night, then he presents the room to Mr Morton. ‘This is another of Walter Davenport Croombe’s improvements,’ he tells him. ‘When the Oak opened for business there was a little pavilion in the grounds, in which guests and visitors could drink the water that was pumped up from the spring farther down the valley. Croombe, on one of his tours of the Continent, came across Europe’s first indoor thermal swimming pool, at a hotel called the Quellenhof. Five years later the Oak had its pool. A bigger shaft was sunk into the hill and machines were made in Bristol to draw the water and filter it, and to raise the temperature a little. To take the spartan edge off it.’

Crouching by the side of the pool, Mr Morton dabbles a hand in the water. A low wave travels slowly across the pool and on the opposite shore it spills into the gutter, lifting into view a small dark object, a leaf it looks like. ‘Invigorating,’ Mr Morton remarks, stirring his hand.

Jostled by the succession of wavelets, the object in the gutter rises and falls. ‘Will you excuse me for a second?’ he asks. ‘There’s a bench here, behind you, beside the door,’ he says, rapping the wood. He walks round the pool and kneels on the floor above the spot where the piece of debris is caught. Leaning out, he peers along the gutter and sees the corpse of a mouse. ‘I just have to fetch something,’ he calls to Mr Morton. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

Mr Caldecott’s voice rebounds from a roof that sounds low. Amplified by the space, the footsteps of Mr Caldecott move to the left, on the opposite side of the pool, and at a distance of fifteen yards or so they stop, whereupon a heavy door closes with a thump like a slack bass drum. Edward shakes the water from his hands. The air smells like an autumn morning. He drags his hand through the water to listen to the lick of the wave he has set in motion. Touching a wet finger to his tongue he tastes limescale faintly, and something else, a subtle and unpleasant ingredient that he cannot identify. He tries to match the taste in his memory, but his search is encumbered by tiredness and by the thoughts that are pressing upon him. While Mr Caldecott talked in the garden he had recalled the sullenness with which he had spoken to his mother. In his fingers he could feel the trembling of his mother’s hand and he can feel it now, as he hears the pitying cadence of her voice, pronouncing his name, and then he hears what Claudia said to him this evening. ‘Your sense isn’t my sense,’ she said, as though acknowledging a difference she had striven to overcome. ‘For me there is one thing more important than all, and I thought for you it was the same. But it is not the same. I misunderstood,’ she admitted, and he was surprised to feel angry with her. ‘You are a German inside an Englishman’s skin,’ she told him. ‘Wearing an Italian suit,’ he joked, but she did not think that was funny. He hears his father saying ‘You know best, son,’ saying it with a sadness that may be misremembered, and he tightens his hand, as though to steady his mother’s. Then the door opens and Mr Caldecott is back. Something light strikes the water, followed by a sprinkling of droplets.

Malcolm teases the dead mouse into the net. Its body, belly to the mesh, bends like a piece of soft mud. He looks across at Mr Morton: he is running his fingers over a section of the wall, with his cheek almost brushing the tiles, as if he were listening for something behind them. It is nearly half past ten. Stephanie will be coming home from the cinema about now.

‘What’s this?’ Mr Morton calls.

‘A medallion of carnations, white and tomato-red, on a turquoise background, with a frame of tulips. A Turkish theme,’ he explains, and he describes for Mr Morton the decoration of the walls and the star-scattered ceiling. ‘Shall we go out this way?’ he suggests, then he puts a hand under Mr Morton’s elbow to lead him back up to the ground floor, past the drinking fountain with the marble lattice, and the side room that houses the copper tubs in which guests could lie for hours in the restorative water.

five (#ulink_1aa340bc-fdad-5d2e-b09c-a4553d922af9)

I’m unhappy about last night’s call. My tone upset you, and I apologise. The telephone is not the ideal medium in these circumstances. Disembodied speech is too slippery, too susceptible to imprecision and misunderstanding. I should have waited until your return, but the damage is done now, and I have to repair it. Besides, we’ve skirted around the subject for too long. Neither of us has been inclined to talk openly about the situation until now, with the crisis almost upon us. So let me clarify my thoughts for you, without sound this time. Just words on a screen. My thoughts, with no objectionable tone, I hope.

The first fact, Claudia, is that I love you. You should not question this. It is the truth. I love you, but I do not need you. This also is the truth. I should not have said it, but it is true. I do not need you and I do not want to be in need of you, because that would be a diminution of my love for you. You say that you need me, but is that true? I don’t think that you need me, and I wouldn’t want you to need me. Your self-sufficiency is one of the qualities – one of the many, many qualities – I love in you. And it is important for me to remain as self-sufficient as I can. In London, at home, I can do that. In my rooms I know where everything is, precisely, and when I go outside I know where I am. It’s so many steps to one junction, so many steps to another. I can get to the park without anyone’s help; I know where the gates are, where to find the benches, which way the paths go. When I walk along the streets near my house, I know which voices I can expect to hear and where I can expect to hear them. I know which people are likely to talk to me, and I know something about them. I have friends here as well, of course, and these friends are especially valuable to me, because it’s hard to make new friendships: the blind can never choose whom to meet, only whom to pursue, as I did with you. On unfamiliar terrain, every step requires attention. But I am never entirely lost in England, even in places I have never been before, because I know what the sounds that surround me signify, and the most significant of these is the sound of people talking, of people speaking English. Overhearing the exchanges of strangers, I can generally understand what they are talking about – by which I mean that I understand the references they make, the allusions, the assumptions. I know that so-and-so plays football for Arsenal or that so-and-so is a disgraced MP. Every aspect of their speech makes sense to me. I can tell where they come from, I can infer relationships between the people speaking, can distinguish between the goodbye of close friends and the goodbye of acquaintances or of people who don’t much care for each other. It’s not much information, very little sometimes, but it gives me a degree of engagement with what’s outside me. It gives me material with which to construct a world for myself. In Italy I would be profoundly a stranger, knowing nobody but you, having to learn my environment by heart – an environment in a foreign language. In time I’ll learn it, you may say: we’ll make a home for ourselves, a place with which I’ll be as comfortable as I am in my London flat. I’ll learn the streets, sooner or later. I’ll make friends, I’ll understand what’s happening. Yes, I reply, the anxiety will lessen. But it will take a long time, I fear, and I will always be a far more remote outsider in Italy than I am in England. I comprehend several thousand Italian words, but I will never be Italian. With Leopardi I slog away for days at a single page. It’s a struggle, and I know that I am still missing undertones that would be obvious to any Italian schoolchild. Even if I spend the rest of my life pestering people for explanations, subtexts will always elude me. You have to understand that when I try to envisage this new life what I see is a condition of greater passivity and dependency, and I’m concerned – extremely concerned – that such a condition would not be good for us. You see? It’s not that I have any doubts about us as we are. I have none at all. If I did, the dilemma would not be as acute as it is. I love you. Which is where I started, so I’ll move on.