Hotel de Dream (14 page)

As the afternoon wore on, and the effort to control Johnny and Melinda grew more and more exhausting, Cecilia Houghton found that each time she put her head in her hands at the typewriter she fell into a strange sleep. At first she half-welcomed the beautiful place that took shape as soon as her eyelids closed: the architecture of the broad streets, a soft blue sky that made her yearn for a holiday in the Mediterranean as soon as this wretched book was over, a fine park where fruit and blossom were magically intertwined on the branches of the trees. She liked the dress she was wearing, too—rather formal, perhaps, for a daytime stroll, but she could see the gold thread which danced in stars and moons on the soft white silk was real gold, and that hundreds of hours of work accounted for the simple look—she wondered if she were dreaming herself dead, and rewarded for her thankless life by wearing this splendid robe. She was an angel; and in the lovely garden towards which she seemed to be drawn every time she found herself in the City
there was an admiring crowd, composed mainly of women in flowered hats, who applauded her and gave little gasps of admiration at every step she took. The garden was filled with water, and in the iridescent droplets which rose and fell around her she saw admiration and approval as well, as if the place had been constructed solely with her happiness in mind. The only drawback was that Mr Poynter was there—ridiculously got up in tails too small for him—and also that every time she saw him she had the unpleasant feeling of having been here with him before. He stood beside her and from time to time eyed her possessively. Cecilia grew uncomfortable, and on several occasions forced herself awake; but there was something compelling about the dream and whenever she closed her eyes she was back in it again. She had a premonition she was about to get married, and as it was impossible to believe that even the most foolish dream would suggest Mr Poynter as the bridegroom, she allowed herself to remember her own wedding so long ago. Johnny and Melinda, abandoned in mid-sentence in a borrowed Ford Anglia on the way to Dorset, faded from her mind. Dozing, against a half-formed background of the chapel at Mr Poynter's residence and the swell of the wedding march as it floated out over the herbaceous borders, Cecilia rocked gently in her chair and summoned up memories of her poor husband and the joyful days before his fatal illness, which had been bravely borne. (She had commemorated him in a short novel,
On Second Thoughts,
and won a prize of one hundred guineas for the slow painful description of his last hours.) She saw herself and Mr Houghton at the altar, he already leaning heavily on a stick and a nurse discreetly tucked away at the back of the church, and heard his faint stumbling acceptance of the marriage tie. A soft smile spread over her features as she remembered the honeymoon, the hotel chosen for its proximity to one of the best hospitals in the south of England, the quiet walks along the top of the cliffs and the curious but sympathetic glances of the passing tourists as
she struggled with the heavy wheelchair on the rough grass. Mr Houghton, even in the terminal stage, had continued to dictate his memoirs to a secretary at the bedside—the Houghtons had been an artistic pair, always poor but never swerving in their dedication to the Arts—unfortunately, because of a mistaken obsession with the secretary and certain damaging revelations about herself, she had had to suppress these, preferring to give an account of his life and work in
On Second Thoughts
than to suffer the humiliation of his posthumous publication. She remembered the little house in Eastbourne where they had lived, and the ground floor bedroom that rang with Mr Houghton's cough as she typed upstairs—and as the wedding reception at Mr Poynter's residence got under way and she found her hand on the knife, the elegant cake yield its first slice at her touch, she saw her husband's last, unsuccessful operation (she insisted on witnessing this, the better to be able to describe it in her future works); and she felt again the sweet sadness of her early widowed years. A lump came into her throat. If her characters knew how she had suffered! When she lavished all her attention and compassion on them and they were thoroughly spoilt by it by now. If only she could suddenly insert an autobiographical passage into the narrative at this point, how ashamed of themselves they would be! But that was quite against the rules. She must continue to pander to their whims—perhaps, when this trilogy was done, she would indulge herself in a fuller and more heart-rending account of her life and sorrows than
On Second Thoughts
had dared to be.

While Mrs Houghton dreamed and reflected, Johnny and Melinda climbed out of the car on the edge of the motorway and stood in impotent fury beside ten lanes of westbound holiday traffic. Without thinking, the author had set them off on a Friday evening just when the jam was at its worst, and they had been crawling for over three hours now through the false countryside of the outer suburbs: golf courses so green and neat they looked as if the grass had been sprayed
on them and then varnished down, ornamental lakes with a bitter poisonous sheen and dead weeds sticking out like fingers. The few birds sat in clumps in the bushes, and the sun appeared in short bursts between the bellies of the great planes as they came down to land a few miles away. Melinda walked up and down on the verge, her sense of claustrophobia at the impending incarceration with Johnny and the interminable line of cars expressed by her taut shoulders and downturned mouth. Johnny sat by the rear wheels of the Ford Anglia, smoking and gazing at her with the good-humoured contempt he knew she found insufferable. When she had turned, and was walking back towards him, he called out:

“We've made a mess of this one, ain't we? I thought you said you were going to get her while you were packing and she was giving you the last inner thoughts before setting off. What the hell happened?”

“She was too strong for me.” Melinda shot a glance of hatred at him and settled on the grass by the exhaust pipe. They had not spoken since leaving west London and she felt an angry relief that he had broken the silence, although she might attack him at any minute with one of the weapons reserved for Mrs Houghton in the back of the car—the air pistol (but he would soon grab that from her) or the ceremonial sword they had found in a glass case on their earlier visit to Miss Briggs's room. “She made me sorry for her,” Melinda went on, for she knew that if she and Johnny were to survive they must remain united against their creator. “It was awful!” She managed a wry laugh at this and the atmosphere improved slightly.

“She made you sorry for her? How the hell?”

“When she was giving me the thoughts. I knew they were hers really and she was just putting them into my mouth. All about happiness and grasp it while you can and how lucky I am to have you.” Melinda sighed. “We are born and we suffer and we die,” she recited in a flat tone as Johnny
stared at her in perplexity. “She's had a bad time you know, Johnny. I'm beginning to wonder if she shouldn't be allowed to have her way after all.”

“Well I'm damned!” Johnny inserted a blade of grass between his teeth, frowned at the metallic taste and threw it under the car. “One of the things that's wrong with our Mrs Houghton is that she believes all that old crap. Maybe in the old days people thought they were born for the purpose of suffering, but who thinks that nowadays? We're all supposed to enjoy ourselves, aren't we?”

“She says we have no morals. We're not turning out as she expected. She doesn't know what to do with us, we're not developing as we should.”

“I don't see that it's our fault,” Johnny said crossly. “She made us, didn't she? Goddammit, when is the fucking traffic going to get a move on?”

“That's the point,” Melinda began, then stopped. She felt utterly miserable and confused, and the fumes from the waiting cars were making her sleepy and sick, as if a giant extermination chamber had been set up by a willing population on the pretty wasteland surrounding the city. “I mean, she says we're behaving as if we didn't believe she
did
make us. As if we had made ourselves. She's afraid for us, Johnny.”

“What did she make you think?” Johnny asked suspiciously. He got up and strolled to the bonnet of the car and leaned on it in a romantic attitude, so that for a moment Melinda saw him in a Gothic landscape, the polished metal around him gleaming blue and black as rocks and the haze of the exhaust rising at his feet like vapours from a valley far below. She quoted a few lines:

I deserve, and so does he and so do all the rest of us, a changing in our attitudes to this sick world we live in. If we cannot find God again, then we must learn to love and trust one another. This century has seen enough pain
and strife to last out the millennium. Johnny has changed, from the brash youth …

“Oh God, not that again!” Johnny lit up a cigarette and gazed furiously at the traffic, as if hoping to detect a current in the still metal, a whirlpool where he might plunge and disappear for good. “No wonder we've had a hard time of it, Melinda. People used to blame God for all this sort of thing and now we've only each other. She asked too much of us, that's what. Next time I see her she goes, and that's an end to the matter.”

A faint roar in the distance signalled the starting up of a thousand engines, the roll of wheels as the traffic started to move again. Melinda climbed into the car, and Johnny got in beside her and switched on the ignition. In front of them cars laden with boats and camping equipment and food began to edge forward. Johnny laughed and pushed a cassette into the player. The voices of the Supremes flooded from their windows on to the golf course and the rows of low houses beyond.

“Cheer up Melinda, don't lose your nerve! We're not going to settle down in Dorset, whatever she may think!”

The traffic gathered speed and Melinda sat back, glad now that the disturbing thoughts were fading from her mind and Johnny seemed to be in control again. She liked him best when he was like this—indeed it was their only hope of a future, that Mrs Houghton should vanish from their lives and leave them free to make their own decisions. She felt less frightened than before, confident almost that she would become a completely different person once the deed was done. She smiled at him, and laid a hand tentatively on his arm.

“Individual acts of violence
can
pay off,” Johnny shouted above the din of the Supremes. “Especially when there's no alternative, eh Melinda?”

“I get too used to things as they are and I stick to them,”
she admitted. “Johnny, where are we going to if it's not to Dorset?”

“You'll see.”

Soon the characters were in open country. The cars spread out over the great fan of motorways that cover the Southwest of England. Johnny and Melinda spoke only once for the rest of the drive—this when they saw a man walking slowly and determinedly along the verge in the direction of London. He was tall and gaunt and stripped to the waist, his grey hair gathered in a pigtail at the nape of his neck and his body tattooed with strange signs. He carried a placard, and as they rushed past Melinda read: THE TIDES HAVE TURNED, BEWARE THE TIDES … She turned to Johnny and burst out laughing.

“Isn't that strange, Johnny? I kept saying something about the tides in that last scene Mrs H. put us in. She couldn't understand it nor could I. What do you think this means?”

Johnny steered the car at maximum speed into an Exit marked Gate 39. They flew down the narrow road and into a maze of twisting lanes.

“No idea. Some freak from the Sixties I suppose. I thought they'd starved to death ages ago.”

Melinda sat silent and thoughtful as the car roared between the hedgerows and slowed at last in front of a white house set in a fringe of trees.

Mrs Houghton was beginning to realise she was in the process of marrying Mr Poynter. The pale, suffering features of the late Mr Houghton melted beneath Poynter's square, ordinary face, with its hint of stubbornness about the chin and the military blue eyes that sat perched on either side of his nose like monocles, the deep lines of experience and grief that ran down the sides of his face seeming to hold them there like black cords. Poynter's stern, narrow shoulders replaced those of her loved husband. An unpleasant nasal twang, reminiscent of Cridge at his most presumptuous, spoke the holy vows. She turned to him in horror, and found herself firmly kissed on the mouth. She screamed soundlessly, but was unable to wake up. Poynter kissed her again, this time to a discreet round of applause from the guests in the chapel, and they walked out into the sunlight and the congratulations. They went to the Front Room and cut the cake, and as Cecilia flinched from the furnishings, turning in her faintness from side to side, calling mutely for sympathy at the imposition of the aspidistra and the great draped piano and the antimacassars that bore the marks of heads also turning from side to side in boredom and despair at the institution of marriage, he clasped her hand and promised her the best interior decorator money could buy. She screamed inaudibly at him once more, and the photographer's flash went, recording her gape and Poynter's complacent smile. How could this have come about? She struggled to regain her room, and Johnny and Melinda somewhere by now on the motorway to the West, but the sun continued
to flood into the Front Room arid children and dogs ran about, and, most nightmarish of all, she thought she recognised the late Mr Houghton's aunt, dressed as she had been for the previous wedding and frowning disapproval over a glass of champagne. There was a toast, and speeches. Mrs Houghton gathered she had now become First Lady of this intolerable place, and cursed her early welcome of the dream. She swore, when she woke, that she would go and give the wretched little upstart a piece of her mind. Meanwhile, she found she was being led out on to the lawn again, and awarding a prize in the point to point, and discussing the honeymoon eagerly with her new groom. Apparently they were to go beyond the walls of the City and explore Mr Poynter's invented England. Nothing could have disgusted Cecilia Houghton more. Only a man like Poynter could have the audacity to tamper with the ancient monuments and lop off the tops of trees to suit his own convenience. She bitterly regretted her self-indulgence in the afternoon, and her weakness in abandoning her characters and daydreaming of the happy days that had led to the writing of
On Second Thoughts.
She threw out her arm, in a last attempt to fight off the inevitable ending of the wedding day, and struck Mr Poynter in the face.