Free Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant Page A

now, and as they had never found each other attractive in the first place—one of the writer’s most important misconceptions—it was a particularly agonising experience); and that she and her reluctant partner had not been made to be so politically aware, radical and impotent and middle class. If only she could have been a humble serving girl and Johnny a young Duke! Or Johnny a criminal even, an eighteenth-century dandy and rake with a mania for gambling and she a young heiress who fell prey to his designs. They would be married by now—or ruined, and rescued and revived in further volumes—at least this interminable soul-searching wouldn’t have to take place all the time. She had no idea as to how Mrs Houghton intended to complete the trilogy, but she had an unpleasant feeling that a quiet married life in Dorset—and however much she dreaded the idea, it would mean peace, a garden, old age—was not on the agenda at all. Somethingbitter and unhappy would come in the last chapter: the author wanted her readers and reviewers to be resigned and contemplative when they had finished her work, and not reassured by any kind of bland statement. She and Johnny would probably drift apart (she longed for this, but at the same time had become horribly emotionally dependent on him and was afraid of the future alone); it would be shown that their different political commitments, their inability to believe in anything, and the imminent collapse of the family made it finally impossible to be together. Melinda would go off into a void of tired promiscuity. Johnny would become a lecturer and would give up his ambition to write poetry. The last few pages would probably be devoted to a minor character, a sort of looker-on, who had plumped for a safe life and was sad and admiring in his condemnation of the couple. There might be some surprises of course—when Mrs Houghton was in one of her Blocks she frequently freed herself by introducing a scene of unexpected savagery—but Melinda was fairly certain of the outcome of the thing. All she hoped was that it would be over soon, and that they wouldn’t be left sitting in this room interminably while the nice summer weather was going on outside and their author’s imagination suffered from one of its disastrous failures.
    While Melinda pondered, Johnny got up and began to stride around the room. He tossed his hair back out of his eyes as he went to and fro, and Melinda was irresistibly reminded of the first volume, just after they had returned from abroad and were trying to involve themselves in London life once more. The passage went:
    This was the first time for Johnny, this questing sense that for all his attempts to reach her, the delicacy he had learned from Angela, the bond between them that they would care for others more than themselves, would reject with a new force the self-indulgence of their ageand their generation, that he could hardly know Melinda at all, that she was, to him, a mysterious entity: female to his male and yet not quite that. He went over to the sink to put the morning cornflakes in the bowl. His hair fell in his eyes and he thought of his father; upright; trim; so sure of his belonging and his aims. They were out of milk now. He would go for it, for this was decided between them: the household tasks were his; and yet he felt he might be emasculated by the trip, return to another spell of bad depression. There was rain flat against the window. And she was smiling at him, as if she knew perhaps the struggle in his soul for her. He ate the cornflakes dry, the sugar rasped against his tongue.
    â€œStop shaking your hair out of your eyes like that!” Melinda broke the silence on a bad-tempered note. “If you’re so bored, why don’t we go next door and see what that old nut is up to? As she’s dressed for a ball, maybe some guests have arrived and we could join in?”
    â€œI’m not interested in