But in fact, it was the moment when Henry went through the doorway, and I went through it with him as a breath of air. Into the dream of some female entirely unknown to me.
The door latched quietly behind us.
17
AT FIRST I thought I’d landed inside a blue-and-gold Fabergé egg, because the walls were curved, and a huge, glittering, domed roof rose above us. In fact, there was glittering, shimmering light coming at us from all sides. And splashing, trickling sounds, and the faint hiss of vapor escaping. On closer inspection, I saw that we were in some kind of spa, a very luxurious place with the atmosphere of a Turkish bathhouse. The floors were covered with mosaic tiles, midnight blue sprinkled with gold, while the walls had been plastered and then painted in tones of shining light blue. Gaps in the walls, with elaborately ornamented golden frames around them, led from one room to another, and everywhere there were pools for swimming and relaxation, exotic green plants, huge gilt-framed mirrors, mountains of folded towels, and a great many broad, well-upholstered lounge chairs.
And people. Any number of people. Some were wearing bathing things or a bathrobe, a few had just a towel wrapped around them, but most of them were naked. Like the man just getting out of a sauna who was red as a lobster. If I hadn’t been a breath of air, I’d have closed my eyes for a moment.
Who on earth would dream a thing like this? And—eeek!—what had happened to Henry’s clothes?
I’d been looking around with such interest that I hadn’t noticed how he did it—but anyway, now he was wearing a soft blue bathrobe, obviously just the thing for these surroundings. But he was far from being invisible. Hadn’t he recently told me that there wasn’t much point in walking around in a dream undisguised if you wanted to spy on someone? Because people can lie about themselves even better in dreams than in real life. As an invisible observer, you can learn a lot about people in their dreams, he had said. So what was he doing here if he didn’t want to spy on anyone? It looked to me almost as if he had a date to meet someone here.
He strolled slowly past a group of lounge chairs and toward a large whirlpool. I followed him, trying not to pay any attention to the lobster-red man, who had made himself comfortable on one of the chairs. Anyway, I had to concentrate much harder on floating than before, because in all the steamy vapors here, I had mutated from a breath of air to being a small cloud. No more hovering and swirling—and with my ease of movement, my high spirits had also left me. The sound track intensified that effect: whoever was dreaming this dream had ghastly taste in music. The sound of Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On” was coming from hidden loudspeakers. Lottie used to make us watch Titanic with her at least four times a year, so I knew the song much better than I liked. Lottie always wept buckets over that film, but she said that kind of crying was very healthy and important for your mental hygiene.
When I saw David Beckham sitting beside the whirlpool, dangling his legs in the water, I was relieved for a second or so. For that tiny second, I thought all this must be David Beckham’s dream, and the next moment Henry would out himself as a keen football fan and ask for his autograph, or something like that. Even Celine Dion seemed to fit the context—after all, David Beckham had married a Spice Girl, so anything in the matter of musical taste seemed possible.
But then, even before I could take a closer look at Beckham’s tattoos, someone said, in a husky voice, “Henry! Dear boy!” and it wasn’t David Beckham, but a naked woman stretching in the whirlpool. That is, I couldn’t really see if she was entirely naked—the water was bubbling too much for that—but she had nothing on from the waist up, anyway. With her smooth, slightly tanned skin, her golden-brown shining hair and her huge green eyes framed by long, thick lashes, she could easily have passed for a mermaid. Only her dark-red lipstick added a slightly vulgar touch.
Henry smiled at her. Not just as if he’d expected to find her here, as if he were happy about it. I felt myself getting a little heavier. I was slowly sinking toward the floor.
“Hello, B,” said Henry. He didn’t have even a brief glance to waste on Beckham. Bee, Bea, or B? Was it a code name? It wouldn’t have been her cup size if she’d been wearing a bra, anyway.
B poked one of her long legs out of the whirlpool. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d had a fish’s tail instead.