I demurred out of politeness.
“I don’t have a problem with individuals,” I said, casting a thoughtful glance in Mr. Newberg’s direction, “just humanity en masse.”
“Yes,” she agreed vaguely. “I think I prefer animals as well.”
She had a habit of using non sequiturs, and I did wonder once or twice if she wasn’t quite “with it.” But if that were the case, I thought, how on earth had they found their way to this remote place when Mr. Newberg had trouble negotiating the tables in the bar? The answer was straightforward enough. The hotel had sent a car to collect them from the airport.
“Wasn’t that very expensive?” I asked.
“It was free,” said Mrs. Newberg with dignity. “A courtesy. The manager came himself.”
She tut-tutted at my look of astonishment. “It’s what we expect when we pay full rate for a room.”
“I’m paying full rate,” I said.
“I doubt it,” she said, her bosom rising on a sigh. “Americans get stung wherever they go.”
During the first week of their stay, I saw them only once outside the confines of the hotel. I came across them on the beach, wrapped up in heavy coats and woolen scarves and sitting in deck chairs, staring out over a turbulent sea which labored beneath the whip of a bitter east wind from Siberia. I expressed surprise to see them, and Mrs. Newberg, who assumed for some reason that my surprise was centered on the deck chairs, said the hotel would supply anything for a small sum.
“Do you come here every morning?” I asked her.
She nodded. “It reminds us of home.”
“I thought you lived in Florida.”
“Yes,” she said cautiously, as if trying to remember how much she’d already divulged.
Mr. Newberg and I exchanged conspiratorial smiles. He spoke rarely but when he did it was always with irony. “Florida is famous for its hurricanes,” he told me before turning his face to the freezing wind.
After that I avoided the beach for fear of becoming even more entangled with them. It’s not that I disliked them. As a matter of fact, I quite enjoyed their company. They were the least inquisitive couple I had ever met, and there was never any problem with the long silences that developed between us. But I had no wish to spend the daylight hours being sociable with strangers.
Mrs. Newberg remarked on it one evening. “I wonder you didn’t go to Scotland,” she said. “I’m told you can walk for miles in Scotland without ever seeing a soul.”
“I couldn’t live in Scotland,” I said.
“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten.” Was she being snide or was I imagining it? “You’re looking for a house.”
“Somewhere to live,” I corrected her.
“An apartment then. Does it matter?”
“I think so.”
Mr. Newberg stared into his whiskey glass. “
“Does it work?” I asked.
I watched him smile secretly to himself. “Only if you shed blood.”
“I’m sorry?”
But his eyes were awash with alcohol and he didn’t answer.
“He’s tired,” said his wife. “He’s had a long day.”
We lapsed into silence and I watched Mrs. Newberg’s face smooth from sharp anxiety to its more natural expression of resigned accept-ance of the cards fate had dealt her. It was a good five minutes before she offered an explanation.
“He enjoyed the war,” she told me in an undertone. “So many men did.”
“It’s the camaraderie,” I agreed, remembering how my mother had always talked fondly about the war years. “Adversity brings out the best in people.”
“Or the worst,” she said, watching Mr. Newberg top up his glass from the liter bottle of whiskey which was replaced, new, every evening on their table. “I guess it depends which side you’re on.”
“You mean it’s better to win?”
“I expect it helps,” she said absentmindedly.
The next day Mrs. Newberg appeared at breakfast with a black eye. She claimed she had fallen out of bed and knocked her face on the bedside cabinet. There was no reason to doubt her except that her husband kept massaging the knuckles of his right hand. She looked wan and depressed, and I invited her to come walking with me.
“I’m sure Mr. Newberg can amuse himself for an hour or two,” I said, looking at him disapprovingly.
We wandered down the esplanade, watching seagulls whirl across the sky like windblown fabric. Mrs. Newberg insisted on wearing dark glasses, which gave her the look of a blind woman. She walked slowly, pausing regularly to catch her breath, so I offered her my arm and she leaned on it heavily. For the first time I thought of her as old.
“You shouldn’t let your husband hit you,” I said.
She gave a small laugh but said nothing.
“You should report him.”
“To whom?”
“The police.”
She drew away to lean on the railings above the beach. “And then what? A prosecution? Prison?”
I leant beside her. “More likely a court would order him to address his behavior.”
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“He might have a different perspective on things if he were sober.”
“He drinks to forget,” she said, looking across the sea toward the far-off shores of Northern Europe.
I turned a cold shoulder towards Mr. Newberg from then on. I don’t approve of men who knock their wives about. It made little difference to our relationship. If anything, sympathy for Mrs. Newberg strengthened the bonds between the three of us. I took to escort-ing them to their room of an evening and pointing out in no uncertain terms that I took a personal interest in Mrs. Newberg’s well-being.
Mr. Newberg seemed to find my solicitude amusing. “She has no conscience to trouble her,” he said on one occasion. And on another:
“I have more to fear than she has.”
During the second week, he tripped at the top of the stairs on his way to breakfast and was dead by the time he reached the bottom.
There were no witnesses to the accident, although a waitress, hearing the crash of the falling body, rushed out of the dining room to find the handsome old man sprawled on his back at the foot of the stairs with his eyes wide open and a smile on his face. No one was particularly surprised, although, as the manager said, it was odd that it should happen in the morning when he was at his most sober. Some hours later a policeman came to ask questions, not because there was any suggestion of foul play but because Mr. Newberg was a foreign national and reports needed to be written.
I sat with Mrs. Newberg in her bedroom while she dabbed gently at her tears and explained to the officer that she had been sitting at her dressing table and putting the finishing touches to her makeup when Mr. Newberg left the room to go downstairs. “He always went first,” she said. “He liked his coffee fresh.”
The policeman nodded as if her remark made sense, then inquired tactfully about her husband’s drinking habits. A sample of Mr.
Newberg’s blood had shown a high concentration of alcohol, he told her. She smiled faintly and said she couldn’t believe Mr. Newberg’s moderate consumption of whiskey had anything to do with his fall.
There was no elevator in the hotel, she pointed out, and he had had a bad leg for years. “Americans aren’t used to stairs,” she said, as if that were explanation enough.
He gave up and turned to me instead. He understood I was a friend of the couple. Was there anything I could add that might throw some light on the accident? I avoided looking at Mrs. Newberg, who had skillfully obscured the
