The Comfort of Strangers Read Online Free Page B

told them thathe had business interests, that he had grown up in London, that his wife was Canadian. When Mary asked how he met his wife, Robert said it was impossible to explain that without first describing his sisters and his mother, and these in turn could be explained only in terms of his father. It was clear he was preparing the way to telling them his story. ‘Ha ha ha’ was winding up to another crescendo, and at a table near the juke-box a man with curly hair sank his face in his hands. Robert shouted across the bar for another bottle of wine. Colin snapped the breadsticks in halves and shared them with Mary.

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    T HE SONG ENDED , and all around the bar conversations were beginning, softly at first, a pleasant hum and susurration of the vowels and consonants of a foreign language; simple observations evoked in response single words or noises of assent; then pauses, random and contrapuntal, followed by more complex observations at a greater volume and in turn more elaborate replies. Within less than a minute, several apparently intense discussions were under way, as though various controversial subjects had been allotted and suitable adversaries grouped. If the juke-box were to have been played now, no one would have heard it.
    Robert, staring at the glass which he held down on the table with both hands, seemed to be holding his breath, and this caused Colin and Mary, who watched him closely, to breathe with difficulty. He appeared older than he had in the street. The oblique electric light picked out a set of almost geometrical lines like a grid across his face. Two lines, running from the base of each nostril to the corners of his mouth, formed a near-perfect triangle. Across his forehead were parallel furrows, and an inch below them, set at a precise right angle, was a single line at the bridge of his nose, a deep fold of flesh. He nodded to himself slowly and his massive shoulders drooped as he exhaled. Mary and Colin leaned forwards to catch the opening words of his story.
    ‘All his life my father was a diplomat, and for many, many years we lived in London, in Knightsbridge. But I was a lazy boy’ – Robert smiled – ‘and still my English is not perfect.’ He paused, as though waiting to be contradicted. ‘My father was a big man. I was his youngest child and only son. When he satdown he sat like this’ – Robert adopted his previous tense and upright position and rested his hands squarely on his knees. ‘All his life my father wore a moustache like this’ – with forefinger and thumb Robert measured out an inch width beneath his nose – ‘and when it turned to grey he used a little brush to make it black, such as ladies use for their eyes. Mascara.
    ‘Everybody was afraid of him. My mother, my four sisters, even the ambassador was afraid of my father. When he frowned nobody could speak. At the dining-table you could not speak unless spoken to first by my father.’ Robert began to raise his voice above the din around them. ‘Every evening, even when there was to be a reception and my mother had to be dressed, we had to sit quietly with our backs straight and listen to my father reading aloud.
    ‘Every morning he got out of bed at six o’clock and went to the bathroom to shave. No one was allowed out of bed until he had finished. When I was a little boy I was always next out of bed, quickly, and I went to the bathroom to smell him. Excuse me, he made a terrible smell, but it was covered with the smell of the shaving soap and his perfume. Even now, for me eau-de-Cologne is the smell of my father.
    ‘I was his favourite, I was his passion. I remember – perhaps it happened many times – my older sisters, Eva and Maria, were fourteen and fifteen. It was dinner and they were pleading with him. Please, Papa. Please! And to everything he said No! They could not go on the school visit because there were going to be boys. They were not permitted to stop wearing white socks. They could not go to