they liked. It was sherry, he repeated, that was very popular in the locality. She nodded and mounted the stairs, not hearing much of what he said, feeling that as she pushed one leg in front of the other her whole body would open and tears would gush from everywhere. Why did she have to put up with talk like that on the first morning of her honeymoon? Why had he casually gone out fishing with his old headmaster? Why had he brought her to this terrible place and then made her drink so that the tension would leave her body? She sobbed on the stairs, causing Doyle to frown and feel concerned for her.
‘Are you all right?’ Jackson Major asked, standing in the doorway of their room, looking to where she sat, by the window. He closed the door and went to her. ‘You’ve been all right?’ he said.
She nodded, smiling a little. She spoke in a low voice: she said she thought it possible that conversations might be heard through the partition wall. She pointed to the wall she spoke of. ‘It’s only a partition,’ she said.
He touched it and agreed, but gave it as his opinion that little could be heard through it since they themselves had not heard the people on the other side of it. Partitions nowadays, he pronounced, were constructed always of soundproof material.
‘Let’s have a drink before lunch,’ she said.
In the hour that had elapsed since she had left Mrs Angusthorpe in the bar she had changed her stockings and her dress. She had washed her face in cold water and had put lipstick and powder on it. She had brushed her suede shoes with a rubber brush.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a little drink.’
He kissed her. On the way downstairs he told her about the morning’s fishing and the conversations he had had with his old headmaster. Not asking her what she’d like, he ordered both of them gin and tonic in the bar.
‘I know her better than you do, sir,’ Doyle said, bringing her a glass of sherry, but Jackson Major didn’t appear to realize what had happened, being still engrossed in the retailing of the conversations he had had with his old headmaster.
‘I want to leave this hotel,’ she said. ‘At once, darling, after lunch.’
‘Daphne –’
‘I do.’
She didn’t say that Mrs Angusthorpe had urged her to leave him, nor that the Angusthorpes had lain awake during the night, hearing what there was to hear. She simply said she didn’t at all like the idea of spending her honeymoon in a hotel which also contained his late headmaster and the headmaster’s wife. ‘They remember you as a boy,’ she said. ‘For some reason it makes me edgy. And anyway it’s such a nasty hotel.’
She leaned back after that speech, glad that she’d been able to make it as she’d planned to make it. They would move on after lunch, paying whatever money must necessarily be paid. They would find a pleasant room in a pleasant hotel and the tension inside her would gradually relax. In the Hurlingham Club she had made this tall man look at her when he spoke to her, she had made him regard her and find her attractive, as she found him. They had said to one another that they had fallen in love, he had asked her to marry him, and she had happily agreed: there was nothing the matter.
‘My dear, it would be quite impossible,’ he said.
‘Impossible?’
‘At this time of year, in the middle of the season? Hotel rooms are gold dust, my dear. Angusthorpe was saying as much. His wife’s a good sort, you know –’
‘I want to leave here.’
He laughed good-humouredly. He gestured with his hands, suggesting his helplessness.
‘I cannot stay here,’ she said.
‘You’re tired, Daphne.’
‘I cannot stay here for a fortnight with the Angusthorpes. She’s a woman who goes on all the time; there’s something the matter with her. While you go fishing –’
‘Darling, I had to go this morning. I felt it polite to go. If you like, I’ll not go out again at all.’
‘I’ve told you what I’d like.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ He turned away from her. She said:
‘I thought you would say yes at once.’
‘How the hell can I say yes when we’ve booked a room for the next fortnight and we’re duty-bound to pay for it? Do you really think we can just walk up to that man and say we don’t like his hotel and the people he has staying here?’
‘We could make some excuse. We could pretend –’
‘Pretend? Pretend, Daphne?’
‘Some illness. We could say my mother’s ill,’ she hurriedly said. ‘Or some aunt who doesn’t even exist. We could hire a car and drive around the coast –’
‘Daphne –’
‘Why not?’
‘For a start, I haven’t my driving licence with me.’
‘I have.’
‘I doubt it, Daphne.’
She thought, and then she agreed that she hadn’t. ‘We could go to Dublin,’ she said with a fresh burst of
