The Glass Ocean(121)
I did not take her hand.
Sound of amusement at the back of the throat. The hand withdrawn.
You’re like your father in that, she said. He was stubborn, too.
Of course it was she: I had recognized her immediately. It was Anna, my aunt.
She knew me, too, of course, there was a conflict of eyes between us then, as we sought and found in each other that which was familiar conflated with that which was strange; then she took me by the arm, and moved me away from the crowd. They were glancing at me curiously now that she’d made me visible by acknowledging me; they were gawping at my ginger frizz, all right, judging me, surreptitiously, over their shoulders, through their lorgnettes, from beneath the glittering brims of their holiday hats, oh yes, they were taking me in, every inch, with a smirk, and finding me lacking. So I performed the curtsey my mother taught me, holding out, with the tips of my fingers, the edges of my ill-mended colorless skirt, so as to expose my laddered stockings, and taking a bow, low and deep, and holding it, that bow, right foot forward, left knee bent, just as Clotilde showed me, until, in consternation and embarrassment, they were forced one by one to look away, and hotly to reconsider the bubbles in the depths of their champagne.
She, of course, did not look away, but instead looked more closely, with an ironical lift of a single, darkly penciled eyebrow eloquent as a hieroglyph incised on pale marble.
I hoped you’d come, she said, quite calm, as if she’d assumed it all along.
Which was presumptuous: for I had debated, when I received her letter. More than six months my father had been gone, by the time she finally wrote me.
You should have come to me, said I, tartly I fear, after all, I’m the one who’s orphaned and alone, my world emptied out of protectors and friends, and I only sixteen—
She said nothing in answer to this, but her grip on my arm tightened, and I felt, in the place where we touched, a soft shudder, by which I knew my remark had struck home. She looked down, hair sliding forward to hide her eyes, large and dark, which so resembled my father’s. Come, she said, and began to propel me, not quite against my will, through the glittering public rooms of the Ravenscar Hotel. Each room was a new chapter of festivity, here diners tucking into venison and chestnuts, there dancers moving together at a leisurely pace, like dreaming, ladies’ gloved hands on gents’ arms, all of us somnambulating, they and we, through a sweeping diminuendo that took Anna and me all the way to the broad, red-carpeted staircase, then up, through and around a complication of hallways like lovers’ knot. Mirrors blazed along the walls, reflecting, as if at a great distance, pale intimations of movement that I recognized as ourselves, mounting yet another flight of stairs. Finally Anna paused, fumbled at the wall, and disappeared into a rectangle of light.
With only a moment’s hesitation, I followed.
Behind the door of Room 301 I found her, once my eyes had adjusted to the glare of the gaslight, sprawled out on a bed richly wrapped in softly ambiguous undulations of vermillion and gold; she had taken off her shoes, and comfortably stretched her toes in the direction of the hearth, where a fire fiercely blazed.
Relax, she said. It’s all mine; I’ve rented the entire floor. Make yourself at home.
A gesture urged me to come join her in that luxuriant wilderness of pillows, but I chose, instead, a nearby upright chair of red velveteen that clashed brilliantly with my hair.
She laughed. You’re just like him, she said, he wouldn’t have sat next to me neither, at least not yet. Though you don’t look like him much, nor much like her, for that matter.
There was something, I thought, derogatory in the way she’d pronounced that her, which, for all that it was justified, caused me to jut out my chin, pridefully as I could. I’m like my grandfather, I said, the explorer, Felix Girard.