Chapter Five
Enid wasn’t sure if she approved or not of the halting return to normality which could be felt, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, as she prodded her egg in the lunchroom. It seemed to sort of relax—the egg—and wriggle, joyously buoyant in its hard-boiledness, luxuriating in its firm yet supple flesh, while the spoon teased and indented it. Enid’s knees nudged closer together, when the chair across from her squeaked, a hand gripped its top, and Glen Stoupes appeared, asking, as if from another dimension: “May I?” Enid could not very well, with any politeness, refuse, and so nodded—a bodily gesture Glen interpreted, correctly, as an assent, and proceeded to do exactly that which they were now both expecting him to do: sit down.
Enid, her mind, as we have endeavoured to illustrate, elsewhere, was consequently lagging a little behind the rest of reality, and so, a moment after Glen had taken his seat, squeaked a little closer to the table, taken a napkin and spread it on his lap, she added: “Please sit.” He looked at her, and laughed, and she laughed as well, although that was only to hide the fact that she had no idea what they were laughing about (even this fact that she was laughing to hide her ignorance was lost on her, you see).
Turning away in mild disgust from Glen’s vulgar penetration of a grapefruit with his spoon, Enid scoped out the room, which was practically monochromatic amidst the glades and pools of sunlight splashed from the windows, casting some diners as blanched, ethereal mannequins, while others, faceless in the shadows, raised their forks to their mouths in seeming slow motion.
Gilda Hühnerbeinstein was laughing at a table with some burping Slav, whose name Enid had forgot, draping her arm over his shoulder and pawing at her own wig in shameless flirtation. This—this was the woman Pluck had desired? She boasted a figure, which rolled through her dress and over the chair like choppy waves, Enid could never hope to match, she knew, and she cursed Pluck for his superficial approach to the other sex, then cursed herself for loving such a man.
The duchess was sitting with her footman, the latter coldly cutting up her fish for her, with proper, dainty little slices of the knife, whilst she glowered at the side of his head, intoxicated with some tension the origins of which Enid knew not, and didn’t particularly care about, but it was interesting to watch him purposely avoid his mistress’s glance, lifting and depositing the plate before her with the utmost propriety in a vacuum of emotional regard.
Enid and Glen lunching together like this, meanwhile, was as if another lap on a circuit they had begun only—how long had it been? A week? Two? It seemed so long ago, and as if in another world, or as hazily recalled from an impossibly unrealistic tale desultorily scanned on the downstream drift into sleep.
“They must have stocked all this fruit in the freezer, in case of such an eventuality as being snowed in like this,” Glen observed, bathetically wrenching Enid back to the plane of the prosaic, juice dripping revoltingly over his lower lip, before he slurped it back up, “although from the pleasing taste, you certainly wouldn’t know it.”
Enid was for some reason reminded of their drunken kiss, the night of the masquerade, and felt sick.
“Are you all right?” Glen noticed. “You don’t look well.”
“I’ve never looked well.”
Glen smiled. “That’s hardly what I meant. In fact, since you brought it up, I think you’re looking perfectly divine—even if I fear there’s a small chance you might at any instant expel your half-digested egg all over my shirt.”
“Glen—may I ask you something?” She realised she’d seized his hand.
“Of course. . .”
“Why do we—why do we love those whom we love?”
He looked at her earnestly for just a moment before he laughed. “Well, I imagine I could make quite a pretty penny if I had answers to questions like those! But I don’t suppose you actually thought I had the answer, did you?”
She let go his hand. “No.”
“I suppose, rather, it was your way of trying to convey, consciously or not, that you’re still in love with. . .our late friend. Am I wrong?”
She held her head in her hands and looked down at what remained of her egg. “No,” she whispered.
“. . .And that, adjunctively, you could never love, say, for example, me.”
“I don’t know, I don’t. . .” She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, now. “Whatever could you see in me, Glen?”
His jaw quivered, but, manfully, he hardened it. “There we are, back to the same age-old question. To which my answer is: Who cares? Why do you like eggs? Why do I like grapefruit? Let the aestheticians waste their hours trying to map their longings—I just want to live!”
Equally manfully, she fought not to let herself whimper. “I’m not so sure I do.”
“That’s nonsense! Come away with me! Forget this place, forget him! Why, when all this is over—”
“I’m not so sure it will be over.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’re speaking as if the blizzard will finally cease, civilisation’s reign will be re-imposed, and we’ll all be free to leave this place and go back to our everyday lives.”
He laughed, unintentionally. “Well, won’t it? Won’t we?”
“How do you know we won’t be stuck here forever?”
He looked at her, amused, but also worried for her. “Well—we’ll eventually run out of grapefruit, for one thing.”
She looked at the faces in the shadows, empty thumbnails in the gloom. “I think that might be for the best. To starve. . .I might see some things I’ve missed. And who knows? In our absence from the outside world, God Almighty might have, for all we know, laid waste to all lands. We might be all that’s left, in here, maddeningly preoccupied with our grubby little troubles. We’d better purge ourselves, if He’s on His way. Excuse me, Glen—I’ve got to—” She stood up. “I don’t think I can keep this egg down, after all.”