An Unwanted Guest

‘I knew it,’ he says coldly.

‘I wanted to find out if you’ve been unfaithful to me.’ She waits a beat and then continues. ‘I managed to figure out your password.’ She looks at Henry, who seems surprised. ‘I bet you didn’t think I’d be able to do that, did you?’ She tries a smile but stumbles, unnerved by the expression on his face. But she has to keep going; she has to do this. Maybe Henry will see how ridiculous his affair is. She also wants to hurt him just a little – if only to show him how terribly hurt she is. Maybe she wants to shame him into dropping this girl. ‘I found the texts between you and your … girlfriend.’ When he doesn’t respond, she can’t help it, her annoyance shows. ‘It was very illuminating! I saw pictures of her. I even know what she looks like naked.’ She says this quietly, her eyes on her husband, while he sits frozen. ‘She’s considerably younger than you, isn’t she?’ She tries to keep a lid on her disgust. ‘I can’t believe what you call me, you two lovebirds.’ The outrage has crept into her voice, even though she has done her best to keep it under control. ‘The nag. You call me the nag.’ She tries to look into his eyes, but he shifts his gaze away. The coward. ‘How do you think it makes me feel to know that the two of you are having sex behind my back, and calling me the nag? I have to go away for the weekend with the nag.’ He still won’t look at her.

‘Do we have to do this here?’ Henry asks her now, his voice tight. ‘Can’t it wait till we get home?’

‘Actually, yes. We do. Why wait? Why pretend? It feels good to get this off my chest.’ She’s getting carried away now. ‘Do you know what I call you? I call you the man-child. Because you’re a grown man, facing the sad fact of ageing and mortality and disappointment just like the rest of us, but you’re having the childish, selfish reaction that so many men in midlife get – and it’s … sad. Sad and unnecessary.’ She pauses for a moment, gathering her thoughts. ‘You don’t love her, Henry – it’s just a phase.’ She lets that sink in. At least she hopes it sinks in. ‘You think you can run off with this young woman and it’s going to be fabulous. You’ll move into her apartment, maybe buy yourself a convertible. No more people carrier for you, ferrying the kids to soccer three nights a week! You’ll see the kids at weekends – when you feel like it – and renege on your support payments, like most men do. It’ll be all sex and dinners out and vacations and no obligations. Well, think again, because that’s not how it’s going to be.’ She waits a moment to let that sink in, too, and then pauses for a long moment and says in a more conciliatory tone, ‘It won’t last. You’ll get tired of her. She’ll get tired of you. You’ll miss me and the kids. There won’t be enough money. You’ll regret it – I’m sure of it.’ Her husband lifts his eyes and looks at her at last. ‘Henry, don’t destroy what we have. Forget her.’

This is his chance to choose her, Beverly thinks. She waits, holding her breath. But he doesn’t say anything at all. Her heart plummets, a body going over the falls in a barrel.

Suddenly she remembers how she felt the evening before, when they arrived here at the inn – it seems so long ago now. How foolish, how wrong she’d been to think that they’d merely drifted apart and needed only to spend time together to recall what they liked about each other. She remembers how he didn’t even come up to the room with her with the luggage, how he’d stayed down here, in the lobby, looking at excursions to keep them busy so they wouldn’t have time to think, to talk.

She remembers how he looked at her in her new negligee.

He’d known all along that he was in love with someone else.

Well, she won’t accept it. Infatuation isn’t love. He just needs time to come to his senses. This is a kind of middle-aged madness. He will come back to her. It will be fine. She must be patient, that’s all.

‘Think it through, Henry,’ she says. She slowly rises and makes her way back to her room, leaving Henry alone by the fire.

Saturday, 3:30 PM

Candice’s laptop battery is dying. She curses out loud to the empty library. She saves her work again and then decides to shut down while she still can. She needs to save some battery – in case she needs to refer back to something in her draft. She should have printed it out and brought it with her. Fuck. She won’t ever make that mistake again. From now on, she promises herself, she will always print the manuscript and bring it with her whenever she goes anywhere. She gets so little undisturbed time to work.

She looks down at the closed laptop and thinks about what to do next. She will have to write longhand, she supposes. It’s too bad her handwriting is so illegible – even she has trouble reading it. And of course she didn’t bring any paper with her. The paperless society. Ha! She looks up and scans the room around her. She gets out of her comfortable chair by the fire and approaches the desk in the corner of the room next to the door. It must be original to the hotel – the age is about right. Its surface is almost pristine – just an old-fashioned leather blotter with an elegant letter opener on its surface. She tries the top drawer. It opens easily. There is nothing inside but a single, lonely paper clip. With her frustration rising and her hopes falling in equal measure, she tries the side drawers next. My kingdom for a pen and paper she mutters under her breath. Nothing. Shit.

Then she recalls the writing desk in her room. Surely there was a folder with full-sized notepaper printed with the hotel letterhead sitting on the side of the desk. Of course! Most hotels provide notepaper, and a pen. And if she runs out of paper, she can borrow more from the other guests. No one else will be using it. She hopes she doesn’t have to rely on quill and ink in this quaint hotel.

She hastens out of the library with her laptop hugged to her chest. It’s still warm, which she appreciates. She turns to her right and starts to walk back to the lobby and the main staircase, but then she remembers that there’s a servants’ staircase near the kitchen. Curious, she turns back and finds the hall that runs along the back of the hotel. At the end of the hall, outside the closed kitchen door, is the door to the servants’ staircase. She pushes it open.

She’s shocked at how dark it is inside the stairwell. It’s like falling to the bottom of a well. She thinks about retreating, but then takes her mobile phone out of her pocket and turns on the torch, noticing with resignation that her phone, too, is almost out of battery. She climbs up the narrow, plain wooden staircase, slowly making her way to the top, feeling tense. Perhaps she would have been better off going back to the lobby and taking the main staircase, after all, sheeted corpse or not. At last she makes it to the top and opens the door onto the second floor. With relief, she finds herself in the dim corridor, lit only by the narrow window at the end. Her room, number 206, is across the hall. She hurriedly inserts the key and enters the room, not bothering to close the door – she’s planning on getting what she needs and going right back down to the fire in the library. The chill up here makes her bones ache.

Her eyes fall on the writing desk across the room nestled under the windows. She spies the folder of notepaper. She crosses the thick rug – so thick it muffles all sound – and opens the folder eagerly. It contains several sheets of creamy, good-quality A4 writing paper, and a pen. She smiles with relief.

Chapter Seventeen

Saturday, 4:00 PM