Their hands, a foot apart on the tablecloth, could not seem to make the junction.
The pianist sat back down and played “La Campanella.” More drinks came. Alistair packed his pipe—not making too bad a fist of it with one hand, Mary thought. A waiter arrived to light it from a cut-glass lamp. The staff at the Ritz had the quality of apologizing with a murmur for each of their perfect actions. They smelled of nothing and had faces that made no demands on the eye or on the heart. They melted into shade, not allowing themselves to be silhouetted against the chandelier. They eluded cognition entirely, like sorcerers, or fathers. At the tables all around them the guests chattered away as if life were not on the meter, while the waiters took away ash.
“I think I should warn you—” said Mary.
“I ought to let you know—” said Alistair.
“You go,” said Mary.
“Please, you first.”
Someone dimmed the chandelier further, until it seemed to cast a light that was darker than its absence. The high notes scattered from the piano. They glittered in that thin register where one heard the strings and hammers.
“What were you going to say?” said Alistair.
“Oh, it was nothing. You?”
“Only that . . . oh, it can wait.”
Drinks came. The pianist played some nocturnes of Chopin. Black-coated waiters appeared out of the black background to light Mary’s cigarettes. One had only to think of fire and fire came, as if the incendiary thought scorched the air. One had only to need a drink, and the pull of the need itself caused the drink to arrive on a heavy tray in a glass that had been handled with white cotton. It might carry on all night, Mary supposed: this matching of an equal and opposite solution to every resolvable human need—done with this exquisite precision that extended to the fullest extremity of the possible and therefore only made one ache all the more despairingly with doubts that could never be soothed by lackeys. It was the perfect antithesis of the war, this torment of solicitude. How strange, that the struggle and its absence should leave one equally afraid.
“Mary, are you quite all right?” Alistair had his hand on her arm.
“Thank you, darling, I am fine.”
And she would be fine, of course: she would make conversation when the air seemed the right shape for it, and she would laugh when laughter seemed a better fit. It was nice that the drinks kept coming, since the glow they gave was terrific.
He took his hand away. “What would you like us to do now?”
“Well, they do a nice dinner here—although it’s getting rather late—or we could go to one of the cafés on Haymarket, or if you’re not hungry we might even still make the cinema.”
“Yes,” he said. “But I suppose what I meant was, what would you like now, for us?”
Mary gripped the table. The room revolved around the chandelier. Their white planet spun through the plush black smoky space.
“I’m sorry,” said Alistair. “I’m ahead of myself. Ignore me—this is what I was like after France. That’s what I was trying to warn you about earlier on.”
“It’s all right. I’ve so looked forward to seeing you again. I thought I would know just what to do when you came. I’m sorry.”
He nodded and looked away, to the other tables where guests glowed in firmer orbits.
“On Malta, with the blockade, one doesn’t imagine that people live like this at home. It is hard to imagine how hungry everyone is on the island.”
“I can imagine it,” she said, feeling even as she said it what a foolish thing it was to blurt out.
He smiled kindly enough, but now she saw herself as he must. In the bright light of the chandelier, before he arrived, London’s circle had seemed quite equal to the earth’s equator. Now she saw the smallness of it. How vain she had been in her nest, feathering it with mirrors. She was a teacher nobody needed, a daughter whose parents despaired. And now here was Alistair, this man who had stood up to the enemy while she had been so proud of standing up to her mother. Did she really sit at this table, even now in her new feathered hat, wondering if she loved him?
“I’m sorry,” she said.
His face was pale with concern. “Whatever for?”
“Forgive me,” she said, standing abruptly so that the chair fell to the carpet. “Please, darling, forgive me . . .”
She fled into the blacked-out night, into the ruined city beyond the consolation of chandeliers.