Briholme in Winter

A long time afterward they found themselves staying at the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon, and at the same time of year, in the dead days between Christmas and New Year’s Day. An odd time for a wedding, as Harriet and Robert were always the first to admit, when all the pretty, glittering things were put away, and there was nothing much left of celebration but the chemists’ shop windows, laced with colored paper streamers; artfully half-spilled boxes of confetti standing among the hot water bottles and the displays of Evening in Paris.

Briholme had not changed at all. And neither have I, thought Harriet, overcome by depression and dismay as they drove up to the hotel, even though she had chosen to stay there, as she had chosen it for their honeymoon. Made, in fact, the same deliberate mistake. The bored doorman, like the other—the original—bored doorman, tucked his chewing gum behind the triangular scales of the palm tree, before he opened the door of the car. The fact that it was a Daimler made no impression on him, but he brightened at the sight of Harriet’s emerald-green leather coat, and promised to have the car put away in the garage behind the hotel.

There was a wheelchair in the lobby, and several pairs of crutches stood in a sort of umbrella stand. Through the double doors of the lounge, decorated in a thin, half-hearted fashion with four blue paper streamers that curled from the overhead lighting fixture to the four corners of the room, Harriet could see the old ladies, moving about a little restlessly because it was close to dinner time, picking up magazines and putting them down again, showing one another knitting patterns, and gossiping with what she vividly remembered to be clicking teeth and a tiny drool in the corner of the mouth. Every now and then one of them cast her eyes skyward in an odd manner that Harriet knew meant she was looking at the clock on her side of the doorway.

“Do I have time to bathe before dinner?” she asked her husband. He had just finished signing the register.

“Dinner’s at 7.00,” he said, in the hushed and respectful voice suitable to the hotel. “It’s five to, now.” They followed a wizened “boy” up the carpeted stairs, and along a carpeted corridor. There was no elevator at the Palm Gardens Hotel.

“And not a single other place in the town,” said Harriet. “You’d think, after all these years . . . But no. Just the same as it was.”

“I asked,” said Robert. “She said The Copper Kettle serves a very nice tea. Scones, sardines on toast. You know. But it closes at 5.30. There’s a sort of snack bar at the station. Ham sandwiches and cake, from 11.00 to 1.00. And there’s a coffee bar on the Esplanade, but it’s closed from September to May.”

“That’s an improvement,” said Harriet. “In our day there wasn’t anything at all on the Esplanade, except cripples, wrapped in red hospital blankets. Anything else?”

“Nothing at all,” said Robert.

“Stone dead,” said Harriet. “But never mind. I’ll just wash my face and hands. And maybe we could go for a walk, after dinner.”