David Szalay - Spring

When she emerged, wrapped in a towel, she squatted down next to her nylon holdall with her knees together and patiently extracted some things from it. She withdrew to the wetroom to put them on.

Fraser, when it was his turn, took a markedly different approach. He left the four-poster in an unhurried state of flagrant nudity and had a shower with the door open. Still provocatively naked, he stood in front of the sink shaving.

‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ she shouted from the far side of the room.

And he stood there full-frontally, his face foolishly white-foamed—in a way that tended to emphasise his otherwise total nakedness—and said, ‘You’re not going to wait for me?’

‘I’m starving,’ she said, looking him specifically in the face. His torso was flaccid and his stomach was pendulous. However, his penis, she had not failed to notice, had in full measure its old solidity and weight, its statesmanlike presence.

‘You can’t just wait a few minutes?’ he said, his eyebrows frowning over the white mask.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait a few minutes.’

‘Thank you.’

She took off her shoes and sat on the bed.

When he finally put something on, they went down to the dining room, where he ate heartily of the terrific spread. Arbroath smokies and poached eggs, whisky marmalade on toasted muffins. The fire quietly informed the morning of its pinesmoke smell—the same tree as last night probably, now falling apart in a mass of white ash. Walking the length of tartan to the table, she felt underdressed in her jeans and zippered fleece. A sadness was stealing over her—worse, in its quiet way, than anything she had felt since they left London. And she had felt okay upstairs just now. She had even said to herself, as she sat there hugging her knees, ‘It’s okay. I feel okay. ’

‘So,’ Fraser said. (What was he so jovial about?) ‘What’re we gonna do this morning?’

‘What do you want to do?’ she said plainly.

‘I want to do,’ he said, using a napkin to wipe his fingers individually, ‘whatever you want to do.’

She shrugged. ‘I dunno. What is there?’

‘There’s the whole fair city of Edinburgh to explore.’ He smiled, tossing the napkin onto the table.

The joviality did not last long. The weather may have had something to do with that—a travelling mist of drizzle that hid the surrounding hills and filled the Nor’ Loch with an obscurity pierced only by the weakly echoing voice of the Waverley tannoy. They spent the morning sightseeing. The streets of the old town, tangled like wet string. Holyrood House. The elegant, unexcitable probity of the headquarters of the Bank of Scotland. The National Gallery.

Towards lunchtime it did stop raining. The sky went white, with a soft luminance that suggested the sun was up there somewhere. They had a pizza. Pizza Express. It was profoundly uninspired—might as well have been in London—but then the whole morning had felt uninspired. Fraser just seemed sad, with nothing interesting to say. When he did speak, she found him tedious. She found him irritating. He had said things in the National Gallery that made her want to tell him to shut up. Once, as he struggled to say something impressive in front of Veronese’s Mars, Venus and Cupid (in the past he would have made a joke; now he seemed to feel a simpering need to impress her), she laughed at him—she just laughed in his face, and then went on to the next painting. It had not been a nice thing to do, and she wondered shamefully why she had done it as she sliced up her pizza. He had said less after that. He had followed her in silence, in fact, only nodding when she tried, in a spirit of penitence, to solicit his views about this or that picture, about da Vinci’s dog paws or Botticelli’s Madonna.

*

After lunch she wanted a ‘proper walk’, a two-hour tramp up to Arthur’s Seat or something like that. He did not, which was in keeping with his increasing listlessness, if not his willingness until then to do whatever she wanted. So they went for a walk in Princes Street Gardens instead, and it was there that he said it. The station tannoy started to quack, the sound floating through the treetops, and when it was finished she heard the rain—it was so quiet that you had to stop and listen for it. It sounded like soap suds subsiding. It was as quiet as that. ‘You don’t love me anymore.’ That was Fraser’s sudden insight, and he said it as if it was a sudden insight, pulling up on the tarmac path. She herself said nothing. She was so struck that she just stood there as he started to sob, and once he had started there was no stopping him.

Some hours later she lay in the long tub listening to the same sound—the sound of soap suds subsiding. The wetroom was luxurious and well equipped. It was warmly lit and windowless. Except for the sound of the suds, and the womby hum of the extractor, and the occasional watery statement when she stirred, there was silence. There was silence in her heart as well.

She had just stood there on the path with her hands in the pockets of her fleece—it was not warm, there was a face-numbing, hand-hurting wind—and watched him sitting sideways on the bench, shaking like a diesel engine, with his fingers wrapped over his eyes. She was thinking, How like him, how like everything that was unworthy about him to see the situation in those terms: You don’t love me anymore. How like him to be so surprised by that! There was something almost solipsistic about it. The strange thing was, she was surprised by it too.

Finally she did sit down next to him and pat his shaking back. She did quietly suggest that they find somewhere warmer. It took a while to shift him. Eventually they stood up and walked out of the park. He had stopped sobbing, though he started again on the pavement of Princes Street, wandering among the shoppers. She did not know what to do with him. It was two o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

Lying in the tub two hours later—four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, time was passing slowly—she wished she was at home. It was one of those situations where the obvious thing to do—drive to London, immediately—had not occurred to her until it was too late; until they had had too much to drink, sitting in a pub in the New Town. Instead, while he lay in a foetal position on the four-poster (he had not even taken his jacket off), she locked herself in the otherworldly silence of the wetroom, and submerged her frigid extremities in the thickly steaming tub. She had not said that she didn’t love him any more. That she had not said. She had said nothing. With languid hands she stirred the water in the vicinity of her sunken stomach. She had seen written somewhere—probably in some leaflet she had looked at while she was waiting for him that morning—that among the many other luxuries offered by the suite was the fact that it was equipped with ‘anti-steam mirrors’. Now, with her head lolling on the edge of the tub, hair neatly piled on top, she saw through the warm fog that the mirrors were indeed mysteriously untouched by it, and wondered how it was done. Heated somehow, was the most obvious explanation. Or perhaps they used some sort of special substance…

She stood up, and stepped out, and towelled her flushed self while the tub slowly emptied. She stood in front of the unsullied mirror, kneading moisturiser into her face with her two middle fingers. She tidied up one of her eyebrows. She would have liked to stay there in the warmth of the halogen lights, in the humming silence, until it was time to leave for London the next morning. She felt safe there. Insulated from something. She lingered for a few unnecessary minutes, then she pulled on one of the white towelling robes that the hotel had so thoughtfully provided and stepped out in a whirl of steam.