When you emerged from the crowd at Brussels international railway station, with a red paisley handkerchief fitted behind your ears and tied under the fall of hair at your neck, my relief was strained with fear and anxiety. The scarf had been adjusted like a cowl around your face—a face in shadow. You were wearing your blue jeans with frayed white ends and the pale green flowery smock you’d made yourself; you were carrying a grey frame rucksack through the crowd that funnelled towards the barrier, and fanned out across the station foyer. Coming clear from among them, not noticing anyone standing beside the black wood kiosk, you took a few steps further, were beginning to turn around, when a sign of recognition flashed across your face.
‘Let me help you with that bag,’ I offered.
‘No need—I’ve carried it this far,’ you said. ‘Have you found a hotel?’
Directed out into the nine o’clock dark of that September night, you turned and blankly gazed into my face. Then you strode towards the exit, leaving my hand behind.
‘I’ve booked a place over on the far side of the square. No distance at all.’
Outside Brussels station, as we headed towards the hotel, traffic came pounding over the cobbles, cars veering past at the junctions. Beyond the railway lines, backs of dilapidated housing blocks loomed up out of the night, a rare lit window against the surrounding darkness.
‘How was the ferry?’ I asked.
‘Rough. People being sick everywhere,’ you said. ‘I had the snack bar all to myself. We were late docking. There was just time to run for the last train to Brussels. It was actually moving when I got on. Count yourself lucky I’m here.’
‘Have you eaten dinner?’
‘In the restaurant car.’
The picture of a thick, white table cloth, a few scattered crumbs of fresh bread, an empty wine glass with a pale red stain, a wiped-clean plate and a railway waiter hovering to refill a coffee cup came over me like a pang of more than hunger.
‘I haven’t had a thing to eat since breakfast.’
But there was only further silence as we crossed the nighttime square. Raised railway lines were overarched by a mast-work of signals and gantries. Beneath that confusion ran tunnels with approaching car headlights that were picking us out, silhouetted in the glare interrupting urban darkness.
‘Because I ran out of money … I’m glad you came. I wouldn’t even have been able to pay the hotel bill.’
Leaving most of my holiday savings for you to change into traveller’s cheques had seemed a convenient arrangement. Why risk carrying all that money around in Holland? Why not give you that assurance I would be here in Brussels?
‘Alice not with you then?’
You must have been imagining your worst nightmare.
‘No, most likely she’s in Amsterdam …’
Dropped off by a travelling salesman near the centre of Brussels not long before midday, I had stumbled over temporary surfaces for pedestrians, along avenues congested by works in progress. They were building a new metro system. Past pleasant-smelling cafés, I headed by guesswork for the railway terminus in its enormous square. The room’s window gave on to a vast empty space with the station, a large clock face on its tower, in one far corner.
So then, as we stood waiting in the dark, waiting for a gap in the traffic at another tunnel under its railway tracks, I was letting you know that the room had a shower, but, unfortunately, it didn’t seem to work.
‘Oh great,’ you said, and it seemed better not to let you know why it didn’t.
That morning, when I walked into its lobby with travel agents’ posters for decoration, the hotel had seemed cheap enough. One of the images showed a man cheerfully chasing a blonde girl in a swimsuit through sand dunes, while the other was of a black waiter serving a cocktail to a richly dressed woman at a boulevard café.
Now the first thing to do was take a shower. The equipment stood in the same room as the bed. Water was carried from a fitting mounted on the wall, with flow and temperature controls, up a flexible tube and into the spray, attached by a bracket to the ceiling. I took off my clothes, stepped onto the plastic tray, and was trying to adjust the hot and cold tap, but couldn’t seem to get it right. Suddenly, pressure forced the flexible tube off the shiny spray fitting above my head. A spout of lukewarm water gushed up from its free end. It splashed across the grimy white ceiling. It was raining all over my head and shoulders, drenching my hair in its downpour. It overflowed the shower tray, sluiced the plastic curtains, and sprayed onto the carpet that blossomed with a sodden, dark stain.
The double bed’s soft-sprung mattress groaned. The hotel room had been emulsion-painted pale yellow many years before. Scales of pigment were flaking away at the angle of wall and ceiling, and there was a small heap of flakes on the worn brown linoleum in the corner near the door. After throwing a few clothes back on, I took a look at the shower attachment. Its plastic tube wouldn’t stay fixed to the nozzle. The peeling emulsion told me to make something of that. The thin bit of damp grey carpet spoke wearily of all the other transients who had occupied the room. A frilly plastic lampshade, roses printed on its side, signally failed to cheer up the ceiling. With nightfall, it would try in vain to diffuse a weak, cold light. And it was too late now to look for another hotel.
By the railway station clock, the time was just twenty-three minutes past two. For some while now, across its intersections, the cars had seemed miraculously to be avoiding accidents, even though there appeared to be no markings on the roads. Vehicles continued nonetheless to wander around each other. The station’s square was edged with small hotels with unlit neon adverts built on latticework above their roofs. The timetabled expresses would arrive and leave, and when a train roared outside the bedroom, the loose brass and enamel bed-head clattered against the radiator behind it. On the enormous clock face, large steel hands moved imperceptibly around.
All that afternoon I would raise my reading glasses as attention drifted from Gombrich’s Art and Illusion to the long and short hands on the clock, then back to the closely argued text. Each detail in the day’s altering light altered its aspects under my half-absorbed regard, and each was interfused with a spreading uncertainty as slowly but surely the horizon darkened and the clock became obscured.
Now it was nearly black outside. The drivers below had turned on their headlights. Through the gloom, I could no longer make out how long there was to wait. There seemed no need for me to wear a watch back then. Soon it would be time to go down and walk across the square once more to see what time it was. The shower nozzle leered from the wall. And what if you’d missed your connection?
But there was no need to worry. Here you were, and peering at the hotels round that Brussels’ square, illuminated now with flickering neon. A sliver of moon shone a blur through the patches of drifting, darker-blue cloud. The frontage of our hotel grew more distinct, its name unlit, unreadable below the first floor windows. In silence, we entered the haven of the lobby’s electric light, and presented ourselves at the varnished wood reception desk. A night porter gestured to the book where you were to sign your name. Behind the late-shift receptionist, a youngish woman was eating a mouth-watering cheese and lettuce sandwich.
‘Passport,’ he said, and reached out his hand.
You found the blue booklet in one of the small pockets of your rucksack and handed it over. He nodded us into the hotel. Then I led you up the two narrow flights of stairs to the room.
‘Sorry it’s no better. There’s the shower. And every time a train goes by that brass bed-head rattles against the radiator.’
‘Why don’t we move it away from the wall then?’
You put down your backpack and examined the offending object.
‘Look, it’s just resting against the bed,’ you said. ‘If you give me a hand we can shift it somewhere else.’
After the heavy brass object had been leant against the wall by the door, you pulled back the shower curtain and took a look at the broken attachment.
‘No, this looks like it can’t be fixed.’
Alone with you again, I felt your unfamiliarity like an accusation. Your sunburnt face, averted eyes, and the stillness of your lips were not as I had pictured them during those hours of waiting. It was as if we were tentatively reading each other, moving uneasily about the confines of that hotel room—as if it were the first night of an old-fashioned marriage, as if we’d never seen each other without clothes on, as if I didn’t know how to kiss you. Oh but I needn’t have fretted.
‘All I want to do is sleep,’ you murmured as you turned away.