Hotel de Dream (10 page)

Cridge was rowing on the shallow waters of the Creek. He realised Mrs Houghton had put him in a flashback, and he gritted his teeth with rage as he steered the little boat out over the flats, making for a spit of land that was covered at high tide and where the lovers would have been trapped and nearly drowned if he had not come to save them. He had no desire to save them this time (he had been naïve when Mrs Houghton had first caught him in her net, and had expected money for his efforts, rather than a dubious immortality); and he scowled at the blue-cold faces of Johnny and Melinda in the stern of the boat. The passage in which the writer described his veined hands and gnarled face was pounding somewhere near him, mixed in with the waves in the open sea a few hundred yards ahead. Presumably there would be some change in the scene soon, but it seemed to Cridge that she was just copying out what she had written before. He knew the scene by heart. Although he wasn't supposed to listen to their dialogue, it was almost impossible, at such close proximity, not to; and he remembered that the last time, when he had made little grunts of disgust, or given a snort of laughter, there had been a grinding feeling in his chest at the succeeding, inevitable deletion and painting over of the typing error with a brush covered in white paint. Despite his dislike of the sensation—and if he spoke he imagined the rows of black xxxs that would come down on him—he determined to suggest escape to Johnny and Melinda, and a speedy revenge on their creator. He despised them, but had to remind himself that their unpleasant
characters were Mrs Houghton's fault, and not theirs. Accordingly, he looked up at just the moment when his closed, concentrated expression was being described, his medieval face and uncomprehending silences extolled, and directed a large wink at his fellow victims. They looked back at him, evidently startled. Johnny moved uneasily on his seat. Then Cridge saw a knife—a kitchen knife, plain one side of the blade and serrated the other, lying on the seat under his raincoat. Melinda was looking down at it too. Thoughtful, he rowed on in silence.

The day, as Mrs Houghton had gone to lengths to point out in the first volume, had started bright and fresh with an easterly wind tugging at the wallflowers in the garden of the hotel where Johnny and Melinda were staying, tiny scraps of white cloud sailing across the eggshell-blue sky, the tide out and the sea lying like a carpet at the far edge of the brown waterless creeks and estuaries. The sea had come in slowly, poking fingers into the waiting channels, gathering volume in the creek outside the hotel and nudging the boats of the weekend sailors upright as it grew in mass. Cridge (only briefly described so far in the old boathouse where he sat mending ropes and waiting for custom) bumped up alongside the quay in his yellow boat and Johnny and Melinda climbed in. The boat nearly sank at Mrs Houghton's weight, but she had insisted on coming with them, and sat in the bows with a preoccupied expression—directing their every move and thought, Cridge later realised—although she asked Melinda and Johnny where they wanted to go and nodded to him when they suggested the treacherous promontory.

As he rowed out, the wind blew stronger and even in the sheltered creek a fair swell rose and fell under them. The open sea looked hard and grey as corrugated iron, and foam from the waves flew at them like spittle. With difficulty Cridge nosed the boat in to the side of the bank they had pointed out to him. It was shaped like a camel's back, and
he remembered they would make love in the dip between the two humps, oblivious to the encroaching sea. He heard himself say, as he had the first time:

“Ye'll watch for the tide, then? I canna wait here for ye.” (For some reason Mrs Houghton had given him a Scottish accent; perhaps she was unfamiliar with the Norfolk brogue.)

“Come back in an hour,” Melinda said. “We'll be careful. But don't forget us!”

As the lovers disembarked with their constant companion and voyeur—Cridge remembered feeling a fleeting pity for them: he would not have found it easy to be natural with a woman like that overlooking—he tugged at his forelock and bent over the oars again. A fine rain was beginning to fall, and Melinda and Johnny and Mrs Houghton disappeared into the dip in the camel's back. He rowed out into the creek, and then doubled back the other side of the spit of land thus securing himself a good vantage point for the receiving of the signal when it came. He thought it was a good idea of Johnny's to kill Mrs Houghton in this isolated place. The sea would come up and swallow her body. The writer's death would be seen as a tragic accident, and they would all be free of her. As he sat rocking at the oars, Cridge even felt a surge of hope that he might be freed, soon, from his other servitude, his stretch of time with Mrs Routledge. But the feeling soon died away again. Mrs Routledge would only be succeeded by another jailor, as terrible and tyrannical as herself. Cridge had always been dominated by women, starting with his mild saintly mother (who had frightened him nearly to death all the same), going on through progressively more violent and demanding schoolmistresses to employers capable of destruction and vehemence beyond the scope of imagination. He expected, in the end, to be taken on in some humble capacity by a woman as vast and all-engulfing as the sea itself, and to drown in fear under her commanding gaze. He decided to try and adopt a more
cheerful attitude at this point in his gloomy thoughts, and looked up expectantly at the fast-sinking piece of land. There was no sign of life there, and he tried to remember how the passage in the book had gone. Perhaps Johnny had committed the murder without him. He rowed with short, tentative strokes back to the narrow beach where the characters had disembarked.

Mrs Houghton was having difficulty with her flashback. She wanted Johnny and Melinda to remember the romantic occasion of their lovemaking and to re-enact it in their minds, but they seemed tired and bored and were behaving self-consciously, as if they were capable only of producing a faint parody of their earlier emotions. She wrote:

They were a long way from the crowds and demonstrations of the last months. Their commitment was to each other now, and the sea that lay around them, the wide sky that stretched unchanging over them showed the extent of their impotence to alter the world, the necessity to understand each other and the materials of the world they hoped to change. They had been too urban, too concerned with theory and too little with the everlasting reality of things. A seagull flew overhead, and they clung to each other briefly.
Johnny unzipped his trousers and lunged towards Melinda, who pretended to encourage him, then turned away in disgust.

With an angry tut, Mrs Houghton scored out the last sentence and glared at her characters. Johnny zipped himself up and laughed. Melinda gave an echoing giggle. Then Mrs Houghton saw that Johnny was holding a knife.

“What on earth are you both doing? What's that knife for? I'm very disappointed at your lack of commitment, you know. This kind of half-hearted behaviour simply will not do … Please pull yourselves together at once.”

“I want out,” Johnny said succinctly. He stepped towards
Mrs Houghton and held the knife over her head. It must be said for the novelist that she did not flinch: she looked at him calmly instead, and a slight, maddening smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. Unperturbed, she wrote:

They fell apart again, but both knew they could not remain long apart from each other. If they could be one, here where sea and sky merged, if they could find a place for themselves in the Universe, their blood flowing together, their minds at peace …

Cridge appeared at the little beach between the two grassy humps and dragged the boat over the strip of shingle on to dry land. Behind him, the sea had risen considerably and Mrs Houghton saw to her annoyance that only a few minutes were left before the scene of the rescue. Anyway, it wasn't supposed to happen as smoothly as this—Melinda was to cry out, deep in Johnny's arms, at the rising tide, and Cridge was to come quite unexpected just when it seemed the lovers were indeed about to merge with the surrounding seascape. She waved at him vigorously.

“Go back at once, Cridge! Not yet!”

Cridge paused, looking to Johnny for instructions. The arm holding the knife began to descend slowly. Melinda gave a little scream of fear and pleasure.

He went into her, gently at first (Mrs Houghton wrote bravely) as if it were impossible for two human beings to be joined together in this way, as if he was afraid to possess her and by possessing her make his mark on the great, free expanse all round them. She quivered a little …

The knife came down to the nape of Mrs Houghton's neck. Cridge licked his lips. A voice sounded behind him. He turned guiltily and saw that the grey sea and sky had become a door, grey too and with a greasy handle sticking
out of the waves like a lifebuoy. The voice was reprimanding him.

“I thought I told you to fetch Mrs Houghton down for lunch, Cridge! The others have finished and gone to their rooms and I'm afraid we can't keep the stew a minute longer!”

“I'm so sorry, Mrs Routledge!” (The pounding noise had stopped and there was silence. Cridge looked round him hopelessly at Mrs Houghton's room with Johnny and Melinda disappeared into thin air, and Mrs Houghton smiling apologetically at Mrs Routledge. He bowed his head and shuffled to what was now very clearly a door, hard and sticky to his touch.) “I got rather carried away! But I'm not much of a luncher! Don't worry about me!”

Mrs Routledge still stood with her arms folded over her stomach. She wondered what Cridge had been doing up here all this time, and it crossed her mind that Mrs Houghton might be trying to take him on as a servant. Her air of suspicion deepened.

“I would like to invite you to a small party I'm giving here in the hotel,” she said nevertheless, for it was important to her that Mrs Houghton should come to it. “To meet Mr Rathbone—our proprietor, you know. I do hope you're free?”

Mrs Houghton packed away her manuscript. She looked preoccupied and tired after the scene, and her tone was vague when she answered.

“I'd simply love to. How very kind. About six-thirty tomorrow?”

“And any relatives of yours if you'd care to,” Mrs Routledge added in spite of herself. “Mr Rathbone is being knighted today, you know. I had no idea, but Miss Briggs pointed it out to me in the papers. So modest, the dear man made no mention of it at all!”

“I'll see. They may have gone away for a little breath of air in the country.”

“Of course.”

“Thank you anyway.”

Mrs Routledge realised she was being elbowed out of the room. Mrs Houghton was taking fresh paper and now she inserted a page in the typewriter and sat down in front of it. To show her respect, Mrs Routledge tiptoed noisily out into the corridor and down the stairs to the hall. She looked embarrassed as she went: Mr Poynter's afternoon snores were particularly loud today.

Mr Poynter was in his El Dorado. The City was as beautiful and as calm as ever, but he could see, since his morning visit and the interruption of lunch, that trouble was brewing underneath: a battalion of soldiers had just finished pushing the walls of the ghetto back into place—from the blood and trampled roses in the streets he could see it had been a violent night—and the workers who stood back respectfully from his car as he passed looked pale and preoccupied. He also noticed a strange whining sound, and wondered at first if it came from his own ear. Repeated proddings proved it did not, and he leaned forward to tap the chauffeur's shoulder and enquire whether the main transmitter of the City—in the glass radio station where he made his most important pronouncements—had somehow gone haywire and was producing this disturbing noise. The chauffeur shook his head in answer to the question.

“No one here has had any sleep with the whine going on, sir. We think it's coming from underground, it might be voices, sir.”

“Voices?” Poynter wound down the window of the Rolls and stuck out his head. He saw that the blossom on the trees in the Central Park had gone, and shining red and green apples hung there in its place, and cursed the behaviour of time in dreams, where a carefully laid plan could be disrupted just like that by a jump in season or time of day. Serious rebellions might have been under way and he too late on the scene to execute anything other than a mopping up operation. (Otherwise, he had to admire the bright
autumn of his City. Tints from the calendar he and Mrs Poynter had ordered every year and hung over the mantelpiece at home shone deep russet and red in the park and tree-lined boulevards. The regulated nip in the air gave him a sudden sense of well-being.)

“They don't sound like voices to me,” he went on, and as soon as he had said this recognised the whine as just that: subterranean sirens, chained in dungeons beneath the foundations of the City, giving voice to their despair and grief in a language as familiar as echoes from the cradle and as impossible to understand. He wound the window back up again with a snap.

“Where are those women who were found in my Residence?” he asked sharply. “They've been dealt with presumably?”

“They're in the dungeons,” the chauffeur confirmed his worst suspicions. “Awaiting your pleasure, sir.”

Mr Poynter sat back and considered. There was no doubt the high wail was remarkably similar to the revolting sounds Miss Scranton had let out at the end of lunch. And as he approached HQ, and the great courtyard which formed an impenetrable ceiling to the prisons below, the noise grew louder. He dreaded the thought of seeing Miss Scranton again—naked, and probably disease-ridden by now—and the thought flashed through his mind to give an order to the firing squad and put an end to it. Then he reflected that this way of dealing with the problem would offend Mrs Houghton's concepts of moderation, and cancelled the thought. He had decided to marry Mrs Houghton in the City today, to prevent her from escaping him again, and a mass execution on one's wedding day was hardly to be tolerated. He stepped stiffly out of the car on arrival at the marble and gilt portals of HQ and stood to attention before his troops.