Hilary Mantel - Beyond Black

Al opened her eyes. “Col, are you there? I was dreaming that I was hungry.”

“I’ll ring down for a sandwich, shall I?”

She considered. “Get me ham on brown. Whole wheat. Dab of mustard—French, not English. Dijon—tell them cupboard on the left, third shelf. Ask them for—do they do a cheese plate? I’d like a slice of Brie and some grapes. And some cake. Not chocolate. Coffee maybe. Walnuts. It has walnuts on top. Two at the rim and one in the centre.”

In the night Al would be out of bed, her large outline blocking the light that leaked in from the hotel forecourt; it was the sudden darkness that woke Colette, and she would stir and see Al outlined, in her chiffon and lace, against the glow from the bedside lamp. “What’s the matter, what do you need?” Colette would murmur: because you didn’t know what was happening, it could be trivial, but then again … .Sometimes Al wanted chocolate out of her bag, sometimes she was facing the pangs of birth or the shock of a car crash. They might be awake for minutes or hours. Colette would slide out of bed and fill the plastic kettle, jerking its cord into its socket. Sometimes the water remained unboiled and Al would break off from her travail and say, “Plug switched on at the socket, Col?” and she would hiss, yes, yes, and shake the bloody thing so that water slapped out of the spout; and quite often, that would make it go: so temper, Al said, was just as good as electricity.

Then, while Al rolled towards the bathroom to retch over the bowl, she would forage for dusty tea bags and eventually they would sit side by side, their hands wrapped around the hotel cups, and Al would mutter, “Colette, I don’t know how you do it. All your patience. These broken nights.”

“Oh, you know,” she’d joke. “If I’d had kids …”

“I’m grateful. I might not show it. But I am, sweetheart. I don’t know where I’d be now, if we’d never met.”

At these times, Colette felt for her; she was not without feeling, though life had pushed her pretty far in that direction. Al’s features would be softened and blurred; her voice would be the same. She would have panda eyes from the night’s makeup, however diligent she’d been with the cotton-wool pads; and there was something childlike about her, as she made her apologies for the way she made her living. For the bad nights Colette carried brandy, to ward off fresh nausea and bouts of pain. Crouching to slide a hand into her overnight bag, she’d think, Al, don’t leave me, don’t die and leave me without a house and a job. You’re a silly cow, but I don’t want to do this world on my own.

So, after a night more or less broken, they would fight back to wakefulness, somewhere around seven-thirty, side by side in their twin beds. Whatever had happened during the night, however many times she had been up and down, Colette’s sheets were still tucked in tight, as if her body were completely flat. Al’s bed looked, more often than not, as if there had been an earthquake in it. On the floor by their slippers they would find last night’s room-service plates, with a pallid half tomato and some crumbled potato crisps; cold sodden tea bags in a saucer, and strange grey-white fragments, like the ghosts of boiled water, floating in the bottom of the kettle. Colette would put on breakfast TV to swamp the traffic noise beyond the window, the sigh of tyres, the rumble of distant aircraft approaching Luton—or Stanstead, if they had headed east. Al would lever herself, groaning, from the wreck of her bed, and begin the complex business of putting her persona in place; then she would go down for her breakfast. Colette would kick the remnants of room service out into the corridor, begin picking up after them and packing their bags. Al brought her own towelling robe, and now it was damp and perfumed after her bath, and bulked out the case; hotel robes didn’t fit her, she would have needed to tie two together in some sort of Siamese twin arrangement. She always travelled with two or three pairs of scissors, and her own sewing kit; as if she were afraid that she might begin to unravel.

Colette would pack these items away; then she would put the lucky opals in the case, count the bracelets, fit the makeup brushes snugly into their tabs and crevices, retrieve the hairpiece from where it was lying; pull from the closet her own insignificant crease-free outfits, flop them over her arm and drop them into her bag. She could not eat breakfast; it was because, when she had been with her husband Gavin, breakfast had been prime time for rows. She would forage for more tea, though often the allocation of room supplies was so mean that she’d be left with the Earl Grey. Sipping it, she would raise the window blind, on Home Counties rain or vapid sunshine. Al would tap on the door to be let in—there was only ever the one key, in these places—and come in looking fat, full of poached eggs. She would cast a critical eye over the packing, and begin, because she was ashamed of it, to haul her bed into some sort of shape, dragging up the blankets from the floor and sneezing gently as she did so.

Colette would reach into her bag and flip over the antihistamines. “Water,” Al would say, sitting down, as if exhausted, among the poor results of her labour. Then, “Steal the shower caps,” she would say, “because you can’t get them these days, you know, and they’re only good for twice.”

So Colette would go back into the bathroom to pocket the shower cap supplies; they left the shampoos and the slivers of soap, they weren’t cheap or petty in that way at all. And her mind would be running, it’s 8:30 A.M. and Morris not here, steal all shower caps, check behind bathroom door, 8:31 and he’s not here, out of bathroom looking cheerful, throw stolen shower caps into bag, switch off TV say are we right then; 8:32 and Al stands up, 8:32 she wanders to the mirror; 8:33 she is dropping the sodden tea bags from the saucer into the used cups, Al she says, what are you doing, can we not get on the road please—and then she will see Al’s shoulders tense. It’s nothing she’s done, nothing she’s said: it’s the banging and cursing, audible only to Al, that tells her they have been rejoined by Morris.

It was one of the few blessings Colette could count, that he didn’t always stay the night when they were away. The lure of strange towns was too much for him, and it was her job to provide him with a strange town. To stray up to a five-mile range from their lodging didn’t seem to bother him. On his bent, tough little legs, he was a good walker. But reservations at room-only motor lodges were not his favourite. He grumbled that there was nothing to do, stranded somewhere along the motorway, and he would sit in the corner of their room being disgusting. Al would shout at him for picking his feet; after that, she would go quiet and look furious, so Colette could only guess what he might be doing. He grumbled also if to get to his evening out he had to take a bus ride or find himself a lift. He liked to be sure, he said, that if need be he could get back to her within twenty minutes of the pubs’ closing. “What does he mean, if need be?” she’d asked. “What would happen if you were separated from Morris? Would you die?” Oh no, Al said; he’s just a control freak. I wouldn’t die, neither would he. Though he has already, of course. And it seemed that no harm came to him on the nights when he would fall in with some other lowlifes and drift off with them, and forget to come home. All next day they’d have to put up with him repeating the beery jokes and catchphrases he had picked up.

When she’d first joined Al, she’d not understood about Morris. How could she? It wasn’t within the usual range of experience. She had hoped he’d just lurch off one night and not come back; that he’d have an accident, get a blow on the head that would affect his memory, so he’d not be able to find his way back to them. Even now, she often thought that if she could get Al out of a place on the dot of 8:30, they’d outsmart him; hurtle back onto the motor-way and leave him behind, cursing and swearing and walking around all the cars in the car parks, bending down and peering at the number plates. But somehow, try as she might, they could never get ahead of him. At the last moment, Al would pause, as she was hauling her seat belt over her bulk. “Morris,” she would say, and click the belt’s head into its housing.