“IF you have to be unhappy,” Cyril said, “you must admit that there couldn’t be a better place for it.”
He was speaking to Elizabeth Tchirikoff, who sat on his right at the breakfast table. His wife, Greta, was at his left. They were seated this way, in a row, because the table was on the terrace and commanded across the lake a fine view of the Alps. At their back, past the side of the house, the garden merged into fields and vineyards on the flat green plateau and appeared to stretch, with the interruption of scarcely a single house, to the range of the Jura. On the Jura, this magnificent September, there was no snow whatever. Even on the Alps the snow line was exceptionally high, revealing great jagged precipices of black rock that had seldom seen the sun. Along the lake, the bathing places were still crowded in the afternoons, the weekend traffic was still lethal on the Route Suisse, the tourists still sat outside in the cafés of Geneva. It was weather more
majestic, less distracted than summer, and untouched by decay—the improbably fine weather, without evocation or presentiment, that is sometimes arrested in a colored photograph.
Greta looked up warningly at Cyril, but Elizabeth had smiled—as he meant her to—and even made an uncompleted gesture of touching his hand with hers. As if he had set off some small mechanism in her, she made a few more motions with her hands—brushing a wasp away from the strawberry jam and placing the melting butter in the shadow of a loaf of bread—before settling back again in the white wooden chair and closing her eyes against the sun. She had been staying with the Stricklands for three weeks and was very brown, browner than she had ever been in her life. The brown of her breast and back and shoulders fitted exactly to the cut of the blue-and-white striped sun dress she wore almost every day. Her feet were patterned with the lines of sandal straps, and the outline of sunglasses was palely imprinted over her cheekbones. “I feel quite well,” she told herself as the sun made circles of yellow and mauve through her eyelids. “If I feel anything, it is that: quite well.”
“But then I really don’t feel anything,” she had told Greta on the day of her arrival, driving back from the Geneva airport. “At the beginning there was the shock, but now I don’t feel anything.” And when Greta explained in a lowered voice to visitors—the women who came for tea in little pale-blue or gray cars, and the couples who
came for dinner—that she was still suffering from the shock (“They had only just been married. He was killed in an accident”), Elizabeth had a sensation of receiving their concern under false pretenses—and of spoiling their visits, since no one could decently enjoy themselves in her presence. For I don’t feel anything at all, she told herself. Before leaving New York, she had been given prescriptions for pills that would stimulate her, or calm her, or help her to sleep. In plastic containers, the pills (green and triangular, white and circular, red and cylindrical) lay in a pocket of her suitcase, along with tablets for airsickness and a bottle of cold-water soap. She had not needed any of them.
She opened her eyes a little and looked at the sky, which was now violet, cloudless. A hawk had risen from the pines bordering the road that ran toward the lake; it plunged and soared over the house, dispersing smaller birds, its flight sustained on still, spread wings. It looked, Elizabeth thought, like a child’s kite on a string. Will I ever feel anything again, she wondered. Unfeeling, she felt strangely imperiled, as though she might now perpetrate any crime, commit any indiscriminate act, say any unspeakable thing, unless she consciously applied a restraint that had formerly been instinctive—as people who have lost the sense of heat and cold will touch fire and burn themselves, uninhibited by pain.
“There’s the postman,” said Greta, rising from her chair and wrapping her dressing gown of much-washed turquoise
chenille about her. The postman was coming up the road —a young boy in a dark uniform and cap tenaciously weaving his bicycle over the slight incline. Elizabeth sat up and leaned her elbows on the table, watching him. She did not herself understand her interest in the mail, which was delivered twice a day. Nor did she understand why her interest should make the Stricklands so uneasy; after all, she thought, they can hardly imagine that I expect a letter from him. The letters addressed to her still expressed sympathy, enumerated the virtues of the dead, emphasized the importance of his brief life. Vaguely, she felt a resentment at being left to answer them all—just as, previously, she had been obliged to acknowledge the letters of good wishes and congratulation, and the receipt of wedding presents. Trying to find something different to say for every one of her short replies, she wondered that the event did not fully strike her now that it was commemorated in other people’s words and her own. But she wrote, each time: “Your sympathy has meant so much to me,” or, “I was very touched by your kind letter,” not easily but without real pain. Once, she turned her writing pad over and wrote on the back: “He is dead,” and watched the letters turn fuzzy on the gray cardboard, hoping to comprehend them. But she remained as numb as before, and after a moment stroked the words out heavily with her pen so that they were indistinguishable. If Greta saw it, she told herself, she would think I had gone out of my mind.
At times, she wondered whether it was simply too soon
for her to miss him. He had been dead little more than a month. Six weeks ago, they had eaten their meals together, made love, driven about in a car. It was no time at all. During his lifetime, they had quite often been parted for several weeks because of his work, and once for almost three months when he had gone on business to the Far East. But she had missed him, then. Missed him unbearably, wept at the airport when he set out and again when he came home—thin and exhausted, having been ill and overworked in the Hôtel des Indes or the Raffles or whatever it happened to be. And how, she asked herself, could I have missed him then and not now? Testing herself a little at a time, she found that she could think with equanimity about any aspect of their life together, although she expected continually as she pursued these thoughts that at some point her stillness would be shattered, and grief and anguish would begin.
But the identical days broke, hung suspended, and were absorbed into the green plateau between the Alps and the Jura. Every weekday, and sometimes on Saturday, Cyril walked half a mile to a tiny station overgrown with roses and took the train to Geneva. He worked for an international organization and had a solid-looking office in the Palais des Nations with a view of the gardens. Greta would begin the day with some housework and, at eleven, tea in the kitchen with Elizabeth and the maid, Charlotte. The house had just been built; there were interminable difficulties with newly installed electrical appliances, and a
procession of mechanics came to the back door in the mornings on their bicycles—young men with perfect manners and unbelievably high, clear coloring, who lay on the kitchen floor with their heads in the oven, or under the dishwasher, or otherwise obscured according to their particular competence, and were made the object of untimely demonstrations of affection by Aurélien, the Stricklands’ spaniel.
Greta and Elizabeth usually lunched on the terrace and sat there in the sun, watching the mechanics and the electricians depart. There was scarcely any traffic on the narrow road, which led only to this house. Occasionally, a farm laborer with that same high coloring, and wearing deep-blue overalls and cap, crossed the fields beyond the garden. Some plowing was going on, discreetly, at a distance. The newly laid lawn that sloped down from the outer edge of the terrace ended in a series of raw garden beds. After lunch, Greta and Elizabeth worked in the garden, bringing fresh black earth from boxes in the garage to cover the exposed clay. Greta worked bareheaded, her coarse black hair pinned up, but Elizabeth wore a straw hat she had found in the closet in her room. Even so, the sun burned through, and when she took the hat off, her brow always showed a red crease and small painful imprints from the rough straw.
At four o’clock, they stopped work and went inside to bathe and dress. Unless visitors were expected to tea, Greta got the car out and they drove to Geneva. In the town
they did a little shopping and had café crème and pastel-colored cakes outside the Hôtel des Bergues. Tall, delicate women in pretty dresses came and went at the hotel, or walked their small dogs in and out of shops. The avenue along the lake was full of traffic on those beautiful afternoons. Foreign cars drew up at the hotel; elderly men rode slowly past on bicycles, holding limp brief cases over the handlebars. It could be seen from the way in which people drove, or rode, or walked, that everyone was conscious of the weather. Weather was the chief topic of conversation in the café—it was incredible, it wouldn’t last, it was warm, it was too warm; the Mont Blanc had been visible every day for a week. No one could recall such a September.
When it was time to pick up Cyril, Greta and Elizabeth took their packages to the car and drove to the Palais. In the stream of people issuing from the main building, Cyril would be the only man without a brief case, the only person without sunglasses. He was not tall; he had blue eyes and receding yellow hair, and a curious rolling walk. ( “You are the only human being I know who limps with both legs,” Greta had once told him.) His greeting was always the same. “Move over,” he would say, as he squashed them into the remainder of the front seat and kissed Greta abruptly on the side of the head. They would sit there, squeezed in the hot car, deciding how to spend the evening. Sometimes they crossed the lake and had dinner in the Old City. Occasionally, they crossed the border into France and dined at the inn of some village in the hills.
More often, they had dinner at home, where they sat at the kitchen table, by the windows, and watched the sun dying in the fields and the Jura flickering with high and lonely lights. They talked all the time. Cyril entertained them with outrageous impressions of bureaucracy, his office having apparently been designed to provide him with a daily supply of absurdities; or he read aloud from the evening paper accounts of the local crimes passionnels—a remarkable number of which were apparently committed at the foot of Calvin’s statue. Elizabeth got used to the sound of her own laugh, which she had at first found faintly improper. She discovered that she could speak about her life in New York without any awkwardness. If the occasion demanded it, she said “we” or “us” with no hesitation, and in a voice that sounded to her completely natural.
Now, leaning back in her chair at the breakfast table and considering the stability of her emotions as a doctor might survey the course of a fatal disease, she found that her behavior throughout these weeks had been quite normal. I’m a bit odd in the evenings, she conceded, but that’s because of the dreams. Since she had come here, she had repeatedly dreamed a stifling, fearful dream of her own death. For that reason, she stayed up long after the Stricklands had gone to bed, reading, or playing the same records over and over again on the phonograph. When at last she went to bed, exhausted, she slept immediately. Each time that she had the dream, she cried out in her sleep and awoke to find the light on and Greta beside her, calling her
name. Greta would sit on the bed and take her in her arms, and Elizabeth, unable to speak or weep, pressed her face into the strong, chenille-covered shoulder and trembled. (For months afterward, she could not see turquoise chenille without feeling vaguely reassured.) She did not tell her dream to Greta, from horror and from a kind of shame; she thought that the Stricklands attributed the dreams to grief—and how can it be that, she asked herself, when I never dream of him? When it is not his death I dream of, but my own?
She saw that the Stricklands had put their own concerns aside on her behalf. Their own pleasures, sorrows, quarrels had all been submerged in an effort to help her. She had never felt so protected and consoled. In spite of the calamity that brought her there, the time assumed a simple perfection, so that years later, when she and the Stricklands had become, nonsensically, estranged, that September remained in her memory as something like happiness. It was as if the world had become, briefly, a place where suffering could only occur in dreams, or by accident.
She sat up once more with her elbows on the table and shielded her eyes with her cupped hands. “What shall I put on?” she asked. “Will it be cold?”
It was Saturday, and they were going for a drive in the Alps. Elizabeth was surprised to find herself mildly excited by this prospect. Friends of the Stricklands, Georges and Eugénie Maillard—a short, round, ginger couple who lived in Geneva—were coming over in their car, with a visitor
from Paris, at ten o’clock. They would drive together into the mountains and lunch at a restaurant the Maillards had discovered, high up in Savoy. Elizabeth had been in the Alps only once before, in a train. She remembered the long, black tunnels, and the gorges suddenly opening onto Italy. One sees nothing from a train, she thought.
“You’ll need a jacket,” Greta was saying. “And a sweater. And something for your head. We go so high, you see.”
The Maillards led the way, in an ancient Austin. On the other side of the lake, the two cars crossed the border and began climbing into the French Alps. Etienne, the Maillards’ friend, sat in the back of the Stricklands’ car to keep Elizabeth company. He was a dark, attenuated man who looked like an anarchist (she though, never having seen one). His hair rose into the air above a prominent forehead, his eyes were serious, even sorrowful. He was staying with the Maillards, on his way back to Paris from Italy, to recover from a road accident. A truck had overturned his car on a mountainside near Domodossola. The car, miraculously, had not tumbled into the ravine and he had tried to continue his journey by train. He had, however, been unable to go farther than Geneva.
“It is the shock, you see,” he explained. “One doesn’t realize. When I first got on the train in Italy, I read a magazine, had my dinner, and so on. But in a little while the tunnels bothered me, and then the sound of the train. By the time we got to Lausanne, I was shaking from head
to foot—had a fever of thirty-nine degrees.” For Elizabeth’s benefit, he added in a solemn aside: “I am speaking in centigrades, of course.”
“But that was the same day?” she asked. “The day of the accident?”
“The evening, yes.” He looked beyond her, out of the car window. Although they were still far below the snow line, the mountains rose all round them, green and black and peaked with white. Elizabeth, sitting on the side of the car that overlooked the drop, could not see the edge of the road—just tufts of grass, a few inclined shrubs and poplars, and the slit of the valley below.
Etienne gave a short, apologetic laugh. “Hardly the moment to discuss my accident. But, after all, one could as easily be killed on the streets of Geneva—or in an airplane.” There was an uneasy silence in the car; Elizabeth’s husband had been killed in a plane accident.
Elizabeth stretched her neck to see the road winding ahead, up the mountainside. At an incredible distance, the white peak overhung them. “Can we really get up there?” she asked.
“We can, but we will not,” he said. “There’s a pass, at about a kilometer, and we take another direction. Does the height trouble you?”
“Not now. It used to, at one time.” She spoke as if that were in the remote past rather than a few weeks earlier. “The mountains bother me more—I mean, the look of them.”
“The drama,” he said. “Yes. Because they have something
analogous to our emotions. They look like a graph of one’s experience. Isn’t that it?”
“I suppose so,” she agreed. “There’s a poem—
“0 the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.”
Having said this, she gave him a sunny smile.
There was a small fox on a long chain in the garden of the restaurant where they stopped for lunch. The house was built on a spur of the mountain projecting into an immense valley and surrounded by shoulders of the Alps. They had lunch sitting on the veranda in the sun, at a long table made of weathered boards, and the fox moved about on the grass below them, just out of reach, clinking his chain and watching them out of bright, despising eyes. There were very few people there, and they were served by the owners of the house, a gentle elderly couple who recognized the Maillards and were pleased that they had returned.
Elizabeth took off her jacket, and then her cardigan, and hung them over the back of a chair. She opened the neck of her blue cotton blouse. She sat on a bench at the table, between Cyril and Etienne. Etienne looked sadder than before and spoke to her in a less natural way, and she assumed that he had, in the meantime, been warned to stay off the subject of accidents. They had pâté and omelets and salad and cheese, and three bottles of wine. The sun moved slowly along the mountains opposite.
“I’ve never seen the Alps in such weather,” Etienne said. “I usually come here in winter.” To Elizabeth he added: “You should stay for the skiing.”
“Alas, I can’t,” she answered. “I have to be back at work early in October—I only have six weeks’ compassionate leave.” It seemed to her, as she said this, an odd excuse to offer for not going skiing.
After lunch, the Stricklands and the Maillards lay down in long green canvas chairs on the veranda and went to sleep, with their faces in the shade. Etienne and Elizabeth leaned on the veranda rail, looking at the mountains and scarcely speaking, and in a while they walked down the steps into the garden. Elizabeth carried her jacket on her arm, and Etienne hung a sweater over his shoulders, the sleeves cross on his chest. In his open shirt and thick, battered corduroy trousers he looked more like an anarchist than ever.
They walked through the garden, the little fox tinkling after them on his chain until he could follow no farther. The same path wound for some distance down the mountain ; they could see it grooved through the grass and wild flowers. There were no trees or shrubs on this part of the spur, only the bright-green grass and the tangled flowers. In the great valley, below the black belts of fir trees, a twisting road was lined with fields and farmhouses. Elizabeth kept her eyes lowered to the narrow track on which they walked, pausing now and then to look up at the mountains across the valley. The descent from the track was gradual. The ground sloped away so that the drop, though
very steep, was not precipitous. One would probably roll quite a long way, she thought indifferently, before falling into the ravine. She stopped, and Etienne, who was walking behind her, drew level and presented her with a frond of white heather he had picked.
She had nothing to pin it with, but she took it and arranged it in the pocket of her blouse so that it could be seen. She understood that it was the sort of offering a child makes, of the first, valueless thing that comes to hand, to show sympathy. She thought without interest that he was kinder than most people. The sun was in her eyes, and she turned her back to the valley and looked into his face. If he wants to kiss me, he may, she decided. For a moment it seemed almost essential that he should—for surely that, she thought, would shock her into realization; surely he (and she could only picture him in a Sunday-school Heaven not much higher than the mountains around them, not much higher than he had been when the plane exploded in the air) would find the means of making his indignation known to her. In the next instant, she was conscious that her head had begun to ache.
Without moving, Etienne had slightly withdrawn. He was no longer looking at her. Perhaps he had not the least desire for her—or perhaps, she told herself with conscious formality, he is respecting my grief. She turned away from him and said: “I don’t feel well. Can we go back?”
“It’s the altitude,” he replied, keeping pace with her and obliging her to take the inward side of the path.
In any case, she thought, I should not let him kiss me—it would be too disillusioning for him; knowing what has happened to me, he would think there was no loyalty left in the world.
That night she did not dream. She awoke before daylight, feverish and violently ill. Her head still ached. She took aspirin, and was immediately sick again. She lay down on her bed, moaning with pain and confusion, and waited for the night to pass. Her thoughts, although otherwise disconnected, were all concerned with the excursion into the Alps. She saw again, over and over, the thin leaning poplars blowing silently outside the car window, the steep turns of the road, the bright eyes of the fox. In detail, she repeated the descent from the mountain, which had seemed endless at the time, and recalled her own exhausted chatter in the car and the strangely anxious face of Etienne. (She considered his anxiety to be without foundation; knowing herself to be a little out of control, she had made a particular effort to behave naturally during the return journey.) More hazily, she remembered coming home and, for the first time, going to bed early. She also remembered that for the first time she had been struck by her solitude when she lay down.
Still, she reflected (as though feeling might attempt to take her unaware), these things have nothing to do with his death; it is all concern for myself. She raised herself on her elbows and hung her head, overwhelmed with nausea. She could hear her own quick breathing; her nightgown
clung to her damply about the waist. I am sick, she thought self-pityingly, and closed her. eyes. The pain in her head was almost intolerable.
When the wave passed, she lay down again on her side. She stayed this way, quite rigid, for a few moments, and then all at once pressed her face into the pillow, sliding her arm up to encircle her head. She thought suddenly and clearly of her husband, and was surprised to hear her own voice say his name aloud.
The doctor was speaking to Greta in Swiss-German—although, since he practiced in Geneva, he could doubtless speak French. It is so that I won’t understand, Elizabeth thought without resentment, glad to have this detail explained. Dizziness overcame her again, and when her mind had steadied itself the low voices were speaking French. Greta asked what Elizabeth’s temperature was, and the doctor told her. “Of course they are speaking in centigrades,” Elizabeth quoted to herself, and smiled. Greta said something about food poisoning. Opening her eyes a little, Elizabeth could see that the doctor’s national pride was involved; he was frowning—a slight, blond, youngish man with a rosy Swiss face.
“En Suisse, Madame,” he said incredulously, spreading his hands.
Perhaps it would help, Elizabeth thought, if he knew that we lunched in France yesterday. Was it yesterday? Then this was Sunday, unless she had slept through a
whole day. She thought she had been given an injection, but perhaps it had only been spoken of—she couldn’t be sure that she was not recollecting something in the future. Now they had gone out of the room, and she felt safe in opening her eyes again. The sun, through the gauze curtains, was immoderate, remorseless. Will it go on forever, this weather, she wondered irritably, with an effort putting her hand up to cover her eyes. Will it never rain, never be night, never be winter? If Greta would come, I could ask her to close the shutters. She felt helpless, victimized by the glare. Unwittingly, she had let herself in for all this. She had only meant to marry, settle down, have children—be safe, or a little bored; it came to the same thing. And here, instead, was all this derangement (she felt it, positively, to be his fault)—expense, journeys, illness, and now the sun glaring in at her. All this punishment simply because (she clasped her hand more tightly over her eyelids to shut out the sun) she had loved him. That was it. Because she had loved him.
She sighed. Her arm ached from being raised to her eyes.
“What is it, dear?” said Greta.
“The sun,” she explained. “Could you close the shutters?”
“But darling, it’s quite dark now.”
Elizabeth opened her eyes and found the room in darkness, except for a small lamp on the dressing table. Her hands were folded on the sheet. Greta was holding a tray.
“I can’t eat anything,” Elizabeth said immediately. The pain had gone from her head. “I feel better, but I can’t eat.”
“A piece of dry toast.”
No.
“Just tea, then.”
“Please” she said, almost passionately. Why can’t anyone understand, she wondered. She didn’t quite know what they should understand—not merely that she should be let alone; rather, a sense of impending catastrophe that rendered absurdly insignificant all this taking of temperatures and bringing of tea. She had no way to describe to them the calamity that was about to befall, no way that would sufficiently prepare them for it. In that respect, it was like her dream.
When she next awoke, the light had returned, but dimly. She thought it must be dawn, but presently she heard Cyril leave for work. When Greta came in, Elizabeth was sitting up in bed. It’s still so dark,” she said. “It is morning, isn’t it?”
“It’s been raining,” Greta told her. She sat down on the bed. “Do lie down. How do you feel?”
“Better,” she said. She knew she was no longer sick.
“You look terrible,” Greta said, and smiled, and kissed her. “You poor thing. I’ll get you some toast and tea.”
When she had eaten, she lay down again and began to be aware of the room. There were bookcases facing her bed, all the way up to the ceiling. She decided that there
was nothing worse than to be sick in bed with a room full of books; the titles marched back and forth before her eyes. Her attention was repeatedly arrested by the same combinations of color and lettering, or by a design on a book’s spine. Hazlitt, Mallarmé, and twenty volumes of Balzac; Dryden and Robert Graves; Cicero and Darwin, and, between them, a brand-new copy of By Love Possessed. She closed her eyes, but the cryptic messages, vertical and horizontal, went on transmitting themselves under her eyelids.
She could hear, outside, the faint sound of the plow in the nearby fields. Charlotte was moving the furniture in the living room; one of the accredited mechanics called out from the kitchen. In a little while, there was the ring of the postman’s bicycle bell, and the sound of the front door being opened and closed. (Elizabeth was too tired to be interested.) Everything goes on and on, she thought, and did not know whether this reassured or isolated her. It was not, of course, to say that only she had been excluded from the current of life; perhaps others merely conducted themselves better in their exclusion—Charlotte, the mechanics, Greta. Besides, she reminded herself, it’s not even as though I were actually suffering; it is only this apprehension that troubles me—the uneasiness I brought down from the mountain.
In the afternoon, she got up and took a bath. The sun had come out, and she lay in a chair on the terrace, wrapped up in a woollen dressing gown of Cyril’s and
covered with a blanket, because the breeze blowing from the mountains was unexpectedly cool. The sun, too, was not quite so strong, and on the farther shore of the lake—less luxuriantly green today—the neat, opulent villas were slightly veiled. The dog, Aurélien, chased the smaller birds up and down the new lawn, and fled from the larger ones. From time to time, Greta came out of the house to see how Elizabeth was, and once she brought her sewing and sat beside her for a while. They said very little. Greta sat peacefully sewing, occasionally calling the dog away from the birds, or glancing up to smile at Elizabeth. Elizabeth felt bored with her own self-centeredness; she did not know how to stop studying her moods, or even to divert attention from them.
“I must go soon,” she said.
“Yes, it’s getting colder,” Greta said. “I’ll just finish this and we’ll go in.”
“I mean to America.”
Greta looked up. “Elizabeth darling, it’s only the end of September. Don’t think about it for a week or two. You aren’t able to go yet. I don’t mean because you’re sick—I mean because you’re … not yourself.”
She said: “I make no progress.”
“Toward what?”
“Toward him,” she said.
Elizabeth was allowed to stay up for dinner, which they were to have early on her account. When Cyril came home, he kissed her and, having ascertained that she felt better,
declared she had never looked worse. She thought she looked odder than she otherwise might because of her deep tan, which made a curious glaze over her pallor. Her hair hung lankly down on her shoulders in separate dark tails. “I’ll wash it tomorrow,” she said, pushing it back behind her ears. “If I feel up to it.”
They were in the kitchen, Greta standing by the stove and Cyril taking down glasses from a shelf. Elizabeth was sitting, still in Cyril’s woollen dressing gown, at the kitchen table, with her back to the window. It was almost fully light, although behind her the sky was reddening and the Jura darkening. Leaning her cheek on her hand, she felt more peaceful than she had all day. With her left hand she made a space for Cyril to put the glasses down among the places laid on the table.
“What would you like to drink?” Cyril asked Greta.
“No,” she said absently, stirring the soup. “I mean, not a real drink. Just Perrier—something like that. Put some syrup in it, if there is any.”
“Disgusting,” he said. He found a bottle of raspberry syrup and made a pink, foaming concoction for her with mineral water. “What an infantile taste,” he remarked, setting it down at her elbow. Greta smiled without looking at him, took a long drink, and put the glass down again. She went on placidly stirring.
“What would you like?” Cyril asked Elizabeth, coming back to the table.
“The same,” she said. It occurred to her that she had
been thirsty all day. She could hardly take her eyes off the red glass on the stove.
“God,” he observed, putting an inch of syrup in a glass and reopening the bottle of Perrier.
“I’m so thirsty,” she said. She reached out her hand to take the drink from him.
Greta looked round abruptly. “But, Cyril, what are you doing? She can’t have that—she’s been sick. Have some sense.” She put the spoon down on the stove and looked at him reproachfully. Cyril made a face of comic apology to Elizabeth and turned away with the full glass in his hand.
Elizabeth kept her hand outstretched for a moment longer. Then she withdrew it and propped up her cheek again. The room, the white tabletop, the forks and knives, glasses and plates swam in her tears. The only motion of concealment she made was to turn her face a little into her palm, half covering her mouth. Otherwise, she wept resistlessly and almost silently, without attempting to find her handkerchief or even take her napkin from the table to wipe her eyes. She went on crying—for a long time, or so it seemed—while the Stricklands stood still in the middle of the kitchen, watching her, and not looking in the least astonished that a grown woman should cry because she was refused a glass of raspberry soda.
The sign, high up in the main hall of the airport, was decorated with an enormous cardboard watch and said in English
WELCOME TO GENEVA PATEK PHILIPPE
“Anyone would think they were expecting some foreign dignitary,” said Cyril.
Elizabeth smiled, and put her hand in Greta’s. They were sitting on a sofa covered with hard red plastic. Unnerved by the climate of departure, they spoke disjointedly and were rigidly silent when a flight was announced. Elizabeth had buttoned up her black coat and put a scarf around her neck. Like most of the people in the airport, she looked inordinately sunburned for the raw gray day.
“At least, there’s no fog,” Greta said. “Though the bise is still blowing.” The drear, chilly wind had gone on for days. “Do you have your pills?”
Elizabeth touched her handbag. “I took one just before we set out. There are only three left, but I’ll be able to get more tomorrow.”
“I hate the idea of your going back to work.”
“It’s the best thing, isn’t it?”
An elegant woman walked past with a poodle on a leash.
“We should have brought Aurélien,” said Greta. “He would have enjoyed it.”
Elizabeth felt reconciled to the journey; like someone facing an operation, she only hoped she would behave well. She could not envisage her arrival or make plans for the resumption of her ordinary life. For over a week now, she had been managing to contend with each separate circumstance as it arose, and could look no further. The flight
to New York at that time took sixteen hours, and she was ready to be overwhelmed by the prospect. Having taken the pill to stave off the worst of grief, she could not expect to sleep and must spend hours staring, upright, at the sky that was now to be associated with him always.
“Attention,” the voice said. They got to their feet, and Cyril picked up her overnight bag. They walked past glass cases filled with clocks and watches, and metal stands stacked with chocolate boxes.
“Would you like something?” Cyril asked her.
“Nothing. Thank you. Really.”
“Let me get you some chocolate.”
“But they feed you all the time on these planes.”
“You never know.” When he came back with the package in his hand, she was reminded of Etienne handing her the rough, useless flowers on the mountainside.
At the gate, they embraced her. A young man in uniform examined her passport and her ticket and gave them back to her. She held them in her right hand, with the packet of chocolate. Every action now seemed to her to involve an important and costly effort, as though she were being presented with obstacles which she must continually surmount. Irrationally, she believed that her departure itself represented such an undertaking, and that it would have been possible for her to stay, protected, in the flat green garden between the two lines of mountains without ever fully acknowledging what had brought her there. It was almost like consenting to his death, she thought, walking into the railed enclosure with the other passengers.