Rupert Thomson - The Insult

‘There was something about it,’ Loots said. ‘I don’t know what.’ He was shivering. I could hear his teeth.

‘It was probably a guest,’ I said.

‘There aren’t any guests apart from us. I looked.’

‘Maybe you were dreaming.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’

After Loots had left the room, I went to the window. Leaned against it. I’d just remembered something. Tall and thin, with pale hair. They were more or less the same words Munck had used about the man in the railway station. The man who had stared at Nina. Followed her.

What was this, a coincidence?

I looked out of the window. The car-park was empty. Dead leaves blew over the gravel, moving in loose formations, like birds, or dancers.

I closed the curtains.

It had been a disconcerting evening. We checked into our rooms, which were next to each other, on the first floor. While I was unpacking, Loots called through my door, saying that he’d meet me in the dining-room downstairs; though we’d arrived too late for supper, Edith Hekmann had agreed to put something out for us. Nine o’clock was striking as I locked my door. Looking left, there was a window with a view of the car-park. In front of the window stood a small upholstered chair and a table which had a telephone on it. The main body of the landing stretched away to my right. I walked until I reached the top of the stairs, then, on impulse, I walked further, discovering two more rooms, numbers 6 and 7. At the far end of the landing there was a door with no number on it. I tried the handle; it was locked. Was this where Karin’s father had been kept? I bent down and put my nose to the keyhole, but all I could smell was dust and varnish.

‘Is there something I can help you with?’

It was Edith Hekmann’s voice. I straightened up, turned round. She was watching me from the top of the stairs.

‘I was lost,’ I said.

‘I thought I heard somebody fall.’

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘It’s always dark up here,’ she said. ‘We try and keep the lights turned off. It saves on electricity.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose it makes much difference to you.’

‘No difference at all.’ I smiled.

‘Were you looking for something?’

‘No, not really. Well, the stairs, I suppose.’

‘That door you were listening at,’ she said, ‘there’s a notice on it.’

‘Is there?’ I reached out with blind man’s hands. ‘What’s it say?’

‘It says Private.’

I started to apologise, but she was already walking back down the stairs, smoke trailing from her cigarette.

I saw her again in the dining-room, a large draughty space at the back of the building, with windows on two sides. The floor was made of creaking boards that gave under your feet. On the walls were several dismal paintings of farmyards, cottages and cattle. I joined Loots at a round table near the door. One low-voltage light bulb hung above the white-lace tablecloth. Shielded by a wide, pale-pink china shade with a scalloped edge, it gave me the feeling that I was looking up a woman’s skirt, at something that was glowing.

Loots spoke in a whisper. ‘It’s more like an old people’s home than a hotel —’

But he couldn’t elaborate because Edith Hekmann was walking across the room towards us. She served a plate of cold meat, some warmed-up cabbage and a few slices of stale bread, with tinned fruit to follow. Tap-water to drink. Though she’d already eaten, she sat with us throughout the meal. Between courses, she smoked a cigarette. Every once in a while, as I leaned close to her, I thought I could smell alcohol on her breath. She asked where we’d come from. Loots told her. She’d only been to the city once in her life, she said, making no attempt to hide her obvious distaste. She’d seen enough.

‘It must’ve changed a lot since you were there,’ Loots said.

‘It was six weeks ago.’ She left the room. I heard her talking to the girl who was washing dishes in the kitchen.

‘I was only trying to be polite,’ Loots whispered.

I imitated him. ‘It must’ve changed a lot since —’

He kicked me under the table.

Everything I’d eaten or drunk that night carried the flavour of slightly rotten eggs. I didn’t mention it. Instead, I complimented her on the meal. Her mouth widened and she touched the palm of one hand to her hair, feeling the shape of her hair rather than the hair itself. It was a gesture I recognised. My mother always used to do it. On her it seemed pretentious, neurotic. When Edith Hekmann did it, however, it betrayed a strangely haunting vanity. The vanity of a woman who had lived her life in isolation and had never been admired. She could believe that she was beautiful because she had nobody to contradict her. I realised that I was looking forward to being alone with her. Alone, I could indulge her, draw her out. Alone, we would get on; I was sure of it.

I leaned towards her, smelled the alcohol again. ‘You said not many people come here now. What about before?’

That was all the encouragement she needed. She launched into a history of the inn. It began when a man came from the city to study the water. Inside his suitcase were hundreds of tiny bottles no bigger than rifle cartridges. He collected samples, did tests, wrote reports. At the end of his stay he told the people of the village that the water had all kinds of beneficial powers and properties. He even listed the chemicals it contained, and in what proportions. Largely on the strength of what he said, a family called the Bohlins built the inn. It was a modest place, but each room had a balcony with its own hanging basket of geraniums, and there was a natural hot sulphur pool among the rocks at the back. To begin with, the inn was often full. Statesmen, actors, dukes — they all drove up from the city to take the waters; it was the fashionable thing to do (in Mrs Hekmann’s mouth, the word had a disdainful twist to it). During the day they lounged in the pool with their newspapers and their cigars, or played croquet on the lawn (there’d been a lawn back then). They spent the evenings on their balconies, sipping the foul-tasting water and telling each other how much better they felt. The inn had kept her father in work. A carpenter by trade, he’d built most of the furniture. He used to carry out repairs on the property as well. All this was before her time, of course. Though even when her older brother Karl took over, the place had been popular. By then it catered more to people who had read about it in books, or people who had genuine ailments, but somehow they weren’t made to feel welcome by Karl and his wife, and they seldom came back. Soon even the locals stayed away, and during the last few years it had become a lodging-house where old people from the village lived, people who had no family left, people who could afford to pay for bed and board.

‘Now, if someone comes,’ she said, ‘we wonder why.’

She left the table again. This time I heard a cupboard open and close. I thought I heard a cork spring from a bottle, too. There was no mistaking the smell clouding the air around her when she sat down. Something sweet, it was. Sherry, perhaps. Or a liqueur.

‘All those sick people we got,’ she said.

I smiled to myself, but she didn’t even notice.

People with skin disease, gallstones, rheumatism, they all came to the springs thinking they could cure themselves; sometimes they even left thinking they were cured, which was good for business, of course. In her opinion, they were fooling no one but themselves. All the water did was make your skin soft when you bathed in it, soft in a way that didn’t seem quite natural. In the end your mind went soft as well. She’d never spent much time in it. In fact, in her family, they’d never even learned to swim.