“One for the road?”
I hate that expression. I don’t quite know what it means.
He poured. The purplish wine formed a tongue against the inside of my glass as it filled. I lit a cigarette and held the smoke until he went back to the bar.
I had been coming here every night for the last week, much as I disliked it. The Gaststätte was deep in the woods, yet it was the nearest place to me. The ‘town’ was merely three narrow houses clustered around a Church. The mistress of my rooming house started drinking at breakfast, for which she was jovial and entertaining. By the evening, she was angry and desperate for attention. On my first evening I had mistakenly assumed she would surely soon pass out and had been quite savagely manhandled by her. So now I went to the Gaststätte, when the day’s work was done.
I tossed off my wine and paid. One of the waiter’s eyes was larger than the other but perhaps did not see too well for all that. It hung immobile, perhaps fixed on matters that most of us could not see, while the little one darted around the material world.
“My greetings to Mrs Harber,” he said.
The door closed after me. The dizziness of alcohol can do strange things to time, and I soon worried that I had chosen a wrong turn somewhere. The trees rustled around me in a way I, as a city man, did not like. Finally, I glimpsed the glow of the candle that Mrs Harber put in the window so that I should find my way back.
The door was locked when I reached it. I cursed. Every other night I had been able to get in and reach the safety of my room without waking her. But the rustling was getting louder. It was cold, and I had paid for a room. I knocked. And again. Hoary feet on floorboards inside the house answered me. I would be quite firm when she opened.
She wouldn’t look at me, and I passed quickly through the downstairs room to the stairs. I lay fully clothed on my bed and was quickly asleep.
I examined myself carefully the next morning in the sliver of mirror that was provided with my shaving water. I looked pale and felt poorly. Mrs Harber ignored me when I came down for breakfast.
There was a knock at the door and my friend the waiter came in.
“Come on,” he said. He fixed me with his big eye. I followed him back to the Gaststätte for another day.
I recently read a book of fairy tales (Angela Slatter’s A Feast of Sorrows, very good) which I think might have rubbed off on me for this one.
