they at last found themselves outside the shop at the moment the gates were being opened.
They go up, now, to the third floor where the toilets are, skimming up with the escalator from which they can look down to see the expanse of each floor as the stairs depart from it. ‘Not a great many gentlemen,’ Mrs Fiedke remarks. ‘I doubt if you’ll find your friend here.’
‘I doubt it too,’ says Lise. ‘Although there are quite a few men employed here, aren’t there?’
‘Oh, would he be a shop assistant?’ Mrs Fiedke says.
‘It depends,’ says Lise.
‘These days,’ says Mrs Fiedke.
Lise stands in the ladies’ room combing her hair while she waits for Mrs Fiedke. She stands at the basin where she has washed her hands, and, watching herself with tight lips in the glass, back-combs the white streak, and with great absorption places it across the darker locks on the crown of her head. At the basins on either side of her two other absorbed young women are touching up their hair and faces. Lise wets the tip of a finger and smooths her eyebrows. The women on either side collect their belongings and leave. Another woman, matronly with her shopping, bustles in and swings into one of the lavatory cubicles. Mrs Fiedke’s cubicle still remains shut. Lise has finished tidying herself up; she waits. Eventually she knocks on Mrs Fiedke’s door. ‘Are you all right?’
She says again, ‘Are you all right?’ And again she knocks. ‘Mrs Fiedke, are you all right?’
The latest comer now bursts out of her cubicle and makes for the wash-basin. Lise says to her, while rattling the handle of Mrs Fiedke’s door, ‘There’s an old lady locked in here and I can’t hear a sound. Something must have happened.’ And she calls again, ‘Are you all right, Mrs Fiedke?’
‘Who is she?’ says the other woman.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you’re with her, aren’t you?’ The matron takes a good look at Lise.
‘I’ll go and get someone,’ Lise says, and she shakes the handle one more time. ‘Mrs Fiedke! Mrs Fiedke!’ She presses her ear to the door. ‘No sound,’ she says, ‘none at all.’ Then she grabs her bag and her book from the wash-stand and dashes out of the ladies’ room leaving the other woman listening and rattling at the door of Mrs Fiedke’s cubicle.
Outside, the first department is laid out with sports equipment. Lise walks straight through, stopping only to touch one of a pair of skis, feeling and stroking the wood. A salesman approaches, but Lise has walked on, picking her way among the more populated area of School Clothing. Here she hovers over a pair of small, red fur-lined gloves laid out on the counter. The girl behind the counter stands ready to serve. Lise looks up at her. ‘For my niece,’ she says. ‘But I can’t remember the size. I think I won’t risk it, thank you.’ She moves across the department floor to Toys, where she spends some time examining a nylon dog which, at the flick of a switch attached to its lead, barks, trots, wags its tail and sits. Through Linen, to the down escalator goes Lise, scanning each approaching floor in her descent, but not hovering on any landing until she reaches the ground floor. Here she buys a silk scarf patterned in black and white. At a gadgets counter a salesman is demonstrating a cheap electric food-blender. Lise buys one of these, staring at the salesman when he attempts to include personal charm in his side of the bargain. He is a thin, pale man of early middle age, eager-eyed. ‘Are you on holiday?’ he says. ‘American? Swedish?’ Lise says, ‘I’m in a hurry.’ Resigned to his mistake, the salesman wraps her parcel, takes her money, rings up the till and gives her the change. Lise then takes the wide staircase leading to the basement. Here she buys a plastic zipper- bag in which she places her packages. She stops at the Records and Record-Players department and loiters with the small group that has gathered to hear a new pop-group disc. She holds her paperback well in evidence, her hand-bag and the new zipper-bag slung over her left arm just above the wrist, and her hands holding up the book in front of her chest like an identification notice carried by a displaced person.
Come on over to my place
For a sandwich, both of you,
Any time …
The disc comes to an end. A girl with long brown pigtails is hopping about in front of Lise, continuing the rhythm with her elbows, her blue-jeans, and apparently her mind, as a newly beheaded chicken continues for a brief time, now squawklessly, its panic career. Mrs Fiedke comes up behind Lise and touches her arm. Lise says, turning to smile at her, ‘Look at this idiot girl. She can’t stop dancing.’
‘I think I fell asleep for a moment,’ Mrs Fiedke says. ‘It wasn’t a bad turn. I just dropped off. Such kind people. They wanted to put me in a taxi. But why should I go back to the hotel? My poor nephew won’t be there till 9 o’clock tonight or maybe later; he must have missed the earlier plane. The porter was so kind, ringing up to find out the time of the next plane. All that.’
‘Look at her,’ Lise says in a murmur. ‘Just look at her. No, wait! —She’ll start again when the man puts on the next record.’
The record starts, and the girl swings. Lise says, ‘Do you believe in macrobiotics?’
‘I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,’ says Mrs Fiedke. ‘But that was after Mr Fiedke passed on. I have no problems any more. Mr Fiedke cut out his sister you know, because she had no religion. She questioned. There are some things which you can’t. But I know this, if Mr Fiedke was alive today he would be a Witness too. In fact he was one in many ways without knowing it.’
‘Macrobiotics is a way of life,’ Lise says. ‘That man at the Metropole, I met him on the plane. He’s an Enlightenment Leader of the macrobiotics. He’s on Regime Seven.’
‘How delightful!’ says Mrs Fiedke.
‘But he isn’t my type,’ Lise says.
The girl with the pigtails is dancing on by herself in front of them, and as she suddenly steps back Mrs Fiedke has to retreat out of her way. ‘Is she what they call a hippy?’ she says.
‘There were two others on the plane. I thought they were my type, but they weren’t. I was disappointed.’
‘But you are to meet your gentleman soon, won’t you? Didn’t you say?’
‘Oh,
‘I must get a pair of slippers for my nephew. Size nine. He missed the plane.’
‘This one’s a hippy,’ says Lise, indicating with her head a slouching bearded youth dressed in tight blue-jeans,
