seeing what other women see every day. Then he had gestured to her—his torso transparently white, like a saint’s robe—that she should turn back the covers for him and switch off the lamp. Reduced to a dim outline, he shed the rest of his clothes, and they fell on to the floor, beside hers. Gliding over the Axminster without a sound, he arrived at the bed.
When she reached out, and folded her arms around his body, she felt that she was closing them on air. Her eyes opened wide, her lips pressed together in fear of pain, she fell back against the pillows, her neck outstretched. She turned her head and watched the wall, the curtain, their shadows moving across the wall. Every possession is a loss, Fludd said. But equally, every loss is a possession.
Later, while she slept, her cropped head buried deep in the feather pillow, Fludd slipped from the bed and stood watching her, and listening to the sounds of the city at night. He heard the mournful shunting and the calls of trains, the feet of night porters on the stairs, the singing of a drunk in St. Peter’s Square: he heard ragged breathing from a hundred rooms, the Morse chattering of ships at sea, the creak and scrape of the pivot as angels turned the earth. He splashed water on his face and rubbed it with the white towel; then he crawled back into the bed beside her, and fell asleep as his eyes closed, overcome by the power of his dreams.
The next day, Roisin O’Halloran didn’t want to go out. She was ashamed of her clothes, and of her hair too, without the checked headscarf. Fludd said he would take her to a department store and she could get something in the fashion, but she hardly felt she could face a saleswoman; they would trick her out of her money, she felt, turn her out in some clownish way.
For years she had never thought of her body; swathed inside her habit, it seemed to have developed its own secret way of life. You put one foot in front of the other and that was how you walked. You rolled, you shambled, the habit hiding your gait. You got along as best you might; but now you must study moving. Last night she had caught a glimpse of women in the hotel corridors, stepping along on bird-like legs. They were alive with a contained tension, their eyes smiling under painted brows; in the echoing cathedral nave of the foyer, they pulled on gloves with tiny pecking movements of their fingers. They snapped open their handbags and fumbled inside them, and took out little handkerchiefs, and powder compacts.
“I ought to have all that,” she said, incredulous. “Lipsticks.”
“And scent,” Fludd said.
“Face-powder.”
“Furs,” Fludd said.
He tried to coax her out of the room, out of the bed; but she sat up against the pillows, with the linen sheets, which had crackled with starch last night and now felt limp and damp, pulled up to her chin. She could not explain to him that she felt that she already had new clothes, that with the loss of her virginity she had put on another skin. People say, “loss,” she reflected, but they do not know what innocence is like. Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is armour; and she felt already clad.
She had woken at five, the convent hour, and found herself ravenously hungry. She had to contain and soothe her hunger in the dark, lying beside Fludd’s sleeping form. She could not see him breathe; sometimes she leant over him to see if he were dead.
At seven o’clock Fludd woke up. He ordered breakfast to be sent to their room. She pulled the sheets over her head and hid when the knock came at the door, and for minutes afterwards she cowered there in case the hotel person should have forgotten something and come back again. Fludd plied the EPNS teapot; she heard the little clink the china made, when cup was set on saucer. “Sit up,” he said. “Here is an egg for you.”
She had it on her knees, on a tray. She had never had breakfast in bed before, but she had read about it in books. It seemed a dangerous business, keeping the tray wedged just so between ribs and navel, not breathing too much, not moving your legs. Fludd picked up sugar lumps in little tongs, and dropped them into her tea, and stirred it for her; each cup and saucer had its own spoon.
“Just try it,” Fludd urged, as she half-sat, half-lay looking dubiously at what was put before her. “Let me butter some toast for you, and you can have marmalade too. Eat up your egg, it will make you strong.”
She took up her cutlery; hesitated. “Which is the better side of the egg to cut into, do you think?”
“It’s a matter of personal preference.”
“But which do you
“Doesn’t matter what I think. You must do as you like. There’s no rule, you see.”
“At the convent we didn’t get eggs. We got porridge.”
“You must have had eggs at home. In Ireland. I thought you were from off a farm.”
“We had eggs on the farm, yes, but not to eat. To sell. At least,” she added, after some thought, “we did eat them sometimes, but not so often that you worked out your own way of going on.”
Fludd’s egg was already pithed, demolished. She hadn’t seen him open it up, much less eat it, and yet she could swear that for five minutes she hadn’t taken her eyes from his face.
Later they needed more food. When she unpacked her Gladstone bag she realized that Sister Anthony had secreted, in the folds of Sister Polycarp’s sailor dress, a number of small, gritty buns. She thought they might subsist on these, but Fludd had other ideas.
He sent downstairs again. A large oval plate came, with a doily on it, with very small sandwiches with the crusts cut off; and there was another plate, which had buns with frosted icing, some white and some pink, topped with angelica leaves and tiny candied flowers.
The day passed. She was tired, so tired. Fludd took the trays away, and she leant back against the pillows. All the weariness of her convent years, all the weariness of her early-rising childhood, seemed to visit her at once, like a tribe of unexpected relatives. “I could drink sleep,” she said, “I could eat it, I could roll around in my dreams like a pig in mud.” When she was awake, they talked, in a desultory way; she told him her childhood, but he did not tell her his. Later, he telephoned for wine. Money seemed no problem to Fludd.
And the wine—a sweetish, straw-coloured wine, the first she had tasted—went to her head. She closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself to think of next day. Fludd said it would be all right about her hair, that if she liked he would go himself to Paulden’s on Market Street and buy her a silk scarf, which they would arrange around her head in some artistic way; or if she preferred, he said, some kind of smart toque. But she did not know
