Rupert Thomson - The Insult

The wedding was still weeks away and suddenly I could stand it no longer. I asked Karl and Eva if I could move into the hotel. In return, I’d be a chambermaid, a gardener — anything. Karl listened to me as if I was talking to him from somewhere very far away and when I’d finished he just nodded. He didn’t query my decision or my motives. All he said was, ‘We could use another pair of hands round here.’

They gave me a small, north-facing room on the first floor. It had a single bed; the headboard was plain, varnished wood — no fruit on it, no names. I had a wash-basin, too, and a tall wardrobe that leaned forwards, away from the wall, like a waiter taking orders. Standing at the window I could see the pool below me. There were fir trees at one end, to shelter bathers from the wind. A flight of steps led down to the water. The steps had been cut out of the rock and then reinforced with cement. Beyond the pool was a wooden terrace; this was where the famous people must have strolled in the past, with their silk dressing-gowns and their cigars.

I had more contact with Eva than with Karl and, though she could be remote at times, she couldn’t match his almost total lack of interest. Five years older than I was, she would sit me down at the kitchen table and question me. For instance, she wanted to know whether I’d fallen out with my family. I said I hadn’t. I told her that my brother Axel and his wife would be living in our house and I thought that, as newly-weds, they ought to have some privacy.

‘Then what’s that on your arm?’ Eva was pointing at the dark-red, wedge-shaped scar that ran in a straight line from the edge of my right hand towards the inside of my elbow.

‘I did it on the stove,’ I said. ‘I tripped and fell against it.’

‘It must’ve hurt.’ Drawing greedily on a cigarette with her pale, plump lips, she seemed to want it to have hurt.

I nodded.

It had happened the day I told my father I was leaving. Breakfast was finished and I was clearing the plates away. Axel had already left the room.

‘You’re walking out on us?’ My father’s eyes were pewter-coloured in the gloom of the kitchen and his hands lay on the table, red and swollen at the knuckle.

‘I’m going to live at Karl’s. He needs help with the hotel.’

‘There’s plenty of work around here.’

I shrugged. ‘That Poppel girl can do it.’

‘You’re walking out,’ he said, ‘just like your mother.’

‘I thought she died.’

His head turned slightly to one side, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. He was looking at me all the time, though, his anger rising, slowly rising. It was like watching milk come to the boil.

But I couldn’t stop myself. ‘She wasn’t my mother, anyway,’ I said. ‘I never even knew the woman.’

Through the window I watched Axel cross the clearing, carrying a struggling guinea fowl by its feet.

I said it again. ‘She wasn’t my mother. Your wife, maybe. But not my —’

I didn’t see the hand coming. I thought for a moment that I must have rushed forwards suddenly and hit my face on something. The room spun round and I fell against the stove. My right arm touched it first. I felt the flesh melt. I couldn’t tell if I’d screamed or not. There was a kind of echo of a scream, in the walls of the kitchen, somehow, up near the rafters. And the sweet, rotten smell of my own skin burning. Axel came running in. My father was standing over me. I could see the air between his trouser pocket and his hand.

He pushed Axel across the room. ‘Get some butter.’

‘We haven’t got any.’

‘Fat then.’

Axel came towards me with a scoop of white lard in a spoon. He sat on his haunches in front of me and let a whistle through his lips. ‘Nasty wound.’

Which wound? I almost said. The one you did, or the one done by the stove? But I kept silent. I took the spoon from him and melted the fat on to the burn myself.

‘What happened to your mouth?’ he asked.

‘Must’ve hit it when I slipped.’

My father hadn’t spoken at all. From where I was sitting, on the floor, I saw his right boot shift sideways, scrape at a mark made by the lightning years before.

‘Leaving,’ he muttered. ‘Usually it hurts the ones that stay behind.’

If there was any feeling of triumph in moving out, I don’t remember it. My life at the inn — the Hotel Spa, as it was now called — was lonely. Karl was eight years older than I was. He worked all through the day; in the evening he sat in the parlour with a beer. He rarely spoke to me and when he did, his voice had a kind of distance in it, as if I wasn’t family, but a stranger he felt he had to be civil to. Nights were the hardest, thinking Axel’s hand might reach across, wanting it so much, on my shoulder, in my hair, anywhere — and then remembering. I was eighteen and no one touched me any more. I’d get up before dawn and stand by the window, facing north; I’d watch the steam lift from the pool. Most mornings I was sick in the basin. It occurred to me that I might also be carrying Axel’s child. Then he’d have to marry me as well. I imagined two brides walking up the aisle in the village church. Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? I do. I do. I saw my smile in the wardrobe mirror, and it was not a pleasant one. But my blood came halfway through the month, as usual. And anyway, I was losing weight, not gaining it. It got to the point where it didn’t matter whether Karl spoke to me or not. But I only had to think of Axel’s face in the field that morning, his face just before I hit him with the branch, and the anger rose in me until my hands shook so hard that I couldn’t dress. My anger wasn’t unlike my father’s — slow-burning, rarely visible, but almost impossible to put out.

The day before the wedding I left the hotel early, walking along the road that led west out of the village. The leaves were red, and the high, baked grass of summer was beginning to soften with the frost. I passed Miss Poppel’s house. She was the only one of them I had any time for. She lived alone, with three stray cats and a car that had been painted an unusual shade of brown. When she drove down the street, all you could see was its huge, disappointed face and then, dimly, through the windscreen’s milky glass, her spectacles tilted upwards as she peered over the wheel and a headscarf which was actually a pair of old silk stockings. The front of her place was heaped with empty bottles and rusting engine parts the way all the Poppel family’s places were. With her, though, it was character, not squalor. She had chimes made out of door-hinges, each one the size of a man’s hand. She’d strung them together on a piece of wire and hung them from a withered crab-apple tree. They were so heavy, the wind didn’t move them much. But they did clang if a storm got up. I could sometimes hear them through the open window of my room at the hotel.

I crossed the bridge, looking down between the wooden slats at the coating of pale-green scum on the water below. Beyond the bridge, the road ran uphill to the horizon, three kilometres away. I took the first turning on the left, a narrow track of mud and leaf-mould. I passed the plough that had been there for years, half-grown over now. There was a keen edge to the air that quickened my muscles as I walked, and I forgot for a moment that it was anger I was carrying.

I saw the clearing ahead of me, the dun-coloured walls and black windows I knew so well. Instead of entering the house, I circled it, taking a path that struck off through the bracken-skirted trees just to the east. I parted brambles, then scrambled down a steep bank to the stream. There was the willow. And there, beneath it, was the flat place where we used to lie. I reached inside my coat and pulled out the folded manila envelope I’d taken from the hotel office. I began to strip one of the branches of its yellow leaves. When the envelope was full, I sealed it shut. I sat down on the bank and took out a pencil and wrote AXEL & EILEEN HEKMANN on the front, then I put the pencil away and laid the envelope beside me on the ground. I stared at the water for a long time. It ran as it had always run in the autumn, loud and purposeful, tumbling over the stones. You could sit there pretending that nothing had ever changed.