‘I want to see the Pavilion, that’s all.’
‘Why? You can come by daylight. Much better.’
Some iron tables are scattered on the ground in front of the Pavilion, a graceful three-storey building with a quaint gilded frieze above the first level of the facade.
Bill parks the car near the others, some of which are occupied by amorous couples. Lise jumps out as soon as the car stops. She takes with her the hand-bag leaving the zipper-bag and her book in the car. He runs after her, putting an arm round her shoulders, and says, ‘Come on, it’s getting late. What do you want to see?’
She says, ‘Will your rice be safe in the car? Have you locked it?’
He says, ‘Who’s going to steal a bag of rice?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Lise, making her way along the path which leads to the Pavilion. ‘Maybe those young people might feel very intensely about rice.
‘The movement hasn’t got started yet, Lise,’ says Bill. ‘And red beans are also allowed. And sesame-flour. But you can’t expect people to know about it till you tell them.’
The ground floor of the Pavilion is largely glass-fronted. She goes up to it and peers in. There are bare cafe tables and chairs piled high in the classic fashion of restaurants closed for the night. There is a long counter and a coffee machine at the far end, with an empty glass sandwich-bar. There is nothing else except an expanse of floor, which in the darkness can only be half-seen, patterned in black-and-white chequered pavements. Lise cranes and twists to see the ceiling which obscurely seems to be painted with some classical scene; the hind-leg of a horse and one side of a cupid are all that is visible.
Still she peers through the glass. Bill tries to draw her away, but again she starts to cry. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you’re sitting in a cafe, the last one left.’
‘You’re getting morbid, dear,’ says Bill. ‘Darling, it’s all a matter of chemistry. You’ve been eating toxic foods and neglecting the fact that there are two forces in the world, centrifugal which is Yin and centripetal which is Yang. Orgasms are Yang.’
‘It makes me sad,’ she says. ‘I want to go home, I think. I want to go back home and feel all that lonely grief again. I miss it so much already.’
He jerks her away and she calls out, ‘Stop it! Don’t do that!’ A man and two women who are passing a few yards away turn to look, but the young group pays no attention.
Bill gives a deep sigh. ‘It’s getting late,’ he says, pinching her elbow.
‘Let me go, I want to look round the back. I’ve got to see how things are round here, it’s important.’
‘You’d think it was a bank,’ Bill says, ‘that you were going to do a stick-up in tomorrow. Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am?’ He follows her as she starts off round the side of the building, examining the track. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
She traverses the side of the building and turns round to the back where five large dust-bins stand waiting for tomorrow’s garbagemen, who will also find Lise, not far off, stabbed to death. At this moment, a disturbed cat leaves off its foraging at one of the half-closed dust-bins and flows into an adjacent blackness.
Lise surveys the ground earnestly.
‘Look,’ says Bill, ‘Lise, darling, over by the hedge. We’re all right.’
He pulls her towards a hedge separating the back yard of the Pavilion from a foot-path which can be seen through a partly-open iron gate. A band of very tall fair young men all speaking together in a Scandinavian-sounding language passes by and stops to watch and comment buoyantly on the tussle that ensues between Bill and Lise, she proclaiming that she doesn’t like sex and he explaining that if he misses his daily orgasm he has to fit in two the next day. ‘And it gives me indigestion,’ he says, getting her down on the gravel behind the hedge and out of sight, ‘two in one day. And it’s got to be a girl.’
Lise now shrieks for help in four languages, English, French, Italian and Danish. She throws her hand-bag into the hedge; then, ‘He’s taken my purse!’ she cries in four languages. ‘He’s gone off with my hand-bag!’ One of the onlookers tries to creak open the stiff iron gate, but meantime another has started to climb it, and gets over.
‘What’s going on?’ he says to Lise in his own language. ‘We’re Swedes. What’s wrong?’
Bill who has been kneeling to hold her down gets up and says, ‘Go away. Clear off. What do you think’s going on?’
But Lise has jumped to her feet and shouts in English that she never saw him before in her life, and that he is trying to rob her, and rape her. ‘I just got out of my car to look at the Pavilion, and he jumped on me and dragged me here,’ she screams, over and over again in four languages. ‘Get the police!’
The other men have come into the yard. Two of them take hold of Bill who grins, trying hard to convince them that this turmoil is Lise’s joke. One of them says he is going to find a policeman. Lise says, ‘Where’s my bag? He’s got rid of it somewhere. What has he done with it?’ Then, in a burst of spontaneous composure she says, quietly, ‘I’m going to find a policeman, too,’ and walks off to the car. Most of the other parked cars have gone, as have also the young loiterers. One of the Swedes runs after her, advising her to wait till his friend brings a policeman.
‘No, I’m going to the police-station right away,’ she says in a calm voice as she gets in and shuts the door. She has already made off, already thrown the bag of wild rice out of the window, when the police arrive on the scene. They hear the Swedes’ account, they listen to Bill’s protests, they search for Lise’s bag, and find it. Then they ask Bill what the girl’s name was since she was, as he claims, a friend of his. ‘Lise,’ he says. ‘I don’t know her other name. We met on the plane.’
They take Bill into custody anyway, mercifully for him as it turns out, since in the hours logically possible for the murder of Lise on that spot Bill is safely in a police cell, equally beyond suspicion and the exercise of his diet.
SEVEN
It is long past midnight when she arrives at the Hotel Tomson which stands like the only living thing in the shuttered street. Lise parks the little black car in a spot near the entrance, takes her book and her zipper-bag and enters the hall.
At the desk the night-porter is on duty, the top three buttons of his uniform unfastened to reveal his throat and the top of his under-vest, a sign that the deep night has fallen and the tourists have gone to bed. The porter is
