Free Storm Glass by Jane Urquhart

entered our room at about four in the afternoon. Even though we had had seven different kinds of cheese, a loaf of very good bread, some regional pâté, and a full bottle of red Burgundy at our picnic lunch, I was definitely hungry. Besides, I could smell activity in the kitchen below, could even hear utensils being moved around. All that stainless steel.
    The room was familiar, one-star, French. Charm verging on kitsch, floating roses on the wallpaper, the inevitable bidet, and a bed, supposed to be a double but with an indentation in the middle, where I imagined hundreds of lonely single men had slept, leaving their permanent mark.
    “Why not women?” he asked when I pointed this out to him.
    “Women don’t go to hotels when they’re lonely,” I said, “at least not alone.”
    Outside, the town was very busy. Diesel fumes hung in the air. Trucks delivered merchandise, waiters rushed from table totable at the café across the street, swarms of motorcycles buzzed like angry bees.
    “They sound like bees,” I said.
    “Who?” he replied.
    I looked at the lace curtains. They were as precise as snow-flakes on either side of the glass and as indistinguishable from each other, except at close range. I knew that when we went for a walk (we always went for a walk), I would be unable to pick out our window from the opposite side of the street. That’s the way it always was. I would try and be wrong, because the curtains always looked the same.
    He called the desk and asked about dinner. “Eight o’clock,” he said as he hung up the phone. At that moment, the table in the hotel restaurant presented itself to my imagination; those plates in front of me, two, sometimes three on top of each other, sometimes with flowers painted on them, sometimes with peacocks. And heavy tableware, almost too large for my mouth, so that soup could be finished in three spoonfuls. I tried not to spill. But he didn’t care, left evidence of each course on the table-cloth. Nothing much, but still I noticed and wondered about hotel laundries.
    I opened the door of the large wooden wardrobe, looking for real pillows. We could never sleep with our heads propped on those funny loglike bolsters that the French somehow managed to wrap the bottom sheet around. As I reached up to the top shelf where two square feather pillows were waiting, empty hangers jangled on a wooden pole. This hotel doesn’t care about their hangers, I thought. I had been in other, less trusting establishments where the hangers were made out ofstainless steel and could not be removed without a hacksaw. Until then I had never considered stealing a hanger, but when I saw them dangling there, irremovable, I could suddenly imagine myself slinking across a parking lot at two o’clock in the morning, delicate metal objects jingling like wind chimes in my hand. Sirens in the distance.
    “Shall we go for a walk?” he suggested.
    Going somewhere from one of those hotels always meant down. Returning always meant up. So we went down the hall, down the stairs, and down the street. Down, down, into the centre of town. Here, as in most other French towns of any size whatsoever, was a narrow, park-like area situated in the centre of the main boulevard. It was edged by a series of strange trees, pollarded into grotesque shapes. In front of these, facing the traffic, green benches were placed at regular intervals. The ground was covered with a thin layer of gravel from which a workman, dressed in blue, was industriously raking footprints and the outlines of a child’s game. The low sun threw the shadows of iron wastebaskets to such a length that they touched as if reaching hands toward each other.
    Walking through the middle of this towards the end of town, he decided that he liked the trees.
    “I like these trees,” he said, “because they do not look to me at all like trees. They look like the skeletons of umbrellas in the dump. They look like they have had arthritis for a long, long