She ushered the girl to a bedroom where rose-coloured lamps gave off tiny pools of blushing light. The walls were covered in a velveted indigo paper and the window and four-poster bed were draped in thick folds of violet lace surmounted by an overdress through which gold ribbon had been intricately threaded.
Having noted the lightness of the case, the aunt left the girl to unpack to avoid embarrassing them both by witnessing the paucity of her possessions. Her sister had clearly made a worse marriage than she had feared. She smiled in pity at the girl over a late supper laid out on gold-rimmed plates. There was a silver pot of hot chocolate, rich cream puffs, jam horns, sugary slices and little sandwiches. The girl ate one corner of a cucumber and lettuce sandwich, and when pressed to try a paste sandwich, explained politely that she did not eat meat.
‘But these are only fish,’ the aunt said, taking a bite from one of the sandwiches. She was discomfited to be so frankly watched, but the girl made no comment, other than to ask if she might go to bed soon. In a gush of guilty relief, her aunt promised a shopping expedition on the morrow.
In the bedroom, the girl removed her outer clothes and laid them aside. She was wide awake, for her body told her that it was early morning. Wanting to taste the air of the city, she struggled until she opened the window, which had been painted shut. Gazing through it, she stared at the city beyond, blanketed in shadows and pricked here and there by light. There was a breeze and she watched her hair float up in tendrils that seemed to quest as blindly and voraciously as the tentacles of a sea anemone. She thought of the icy wind that slipped up through the cracks in the bone-pale floorboards of her old bedroom, shuddering the window glass in the frame as it tried to get out again. Sometimes it was so strong that when you opened the drawers in the kitchen, the wind blew out into your face, so loud that people telephoning would ask who was screaming. If one looked through the windows at night, there were not the thousand and one lights visible from this lean window, but only darkness laid like a film over shadowy trees, and beyond them the lines of foam that trimmed the relentless waves. If she opened a window, the air would fly like a dervish into her room, smelling of icebergs and open grey seas.
There was nothing green or wet or wild in the air of this city. It was heavy with the odours of people and their machines. She imagined it as weary and sour as the breath of an old man who had lived too long. She thought that she would find it hard to breathe or move quickly in this dense air with so many people and their lives pressed up against her, but she was not afraid. If she felt anything, it was curiosity to see how she would manage it.
The following day, the aunt came bustling into the room and shut the open window at once in a fluster of incoherent warnings. She did not believe in fresh air. In fact, moving air of any kind troubled her. She bade the girl rise, for she meant to keep her promise: they were to go shopping. First they caught a taxi to a market of little stalls to buy food. This expedition was undertaken with great seriousness. The girl had never seen fruit laid out with such reverence. Apples gleamed a wicked, tempting red, and each flawless cherry seemed to have been polished to gleaming crimson. Pears and mangoes glowed gold, and there was a mound of queer intricately spiked green orbs she had never seen before. The aunt discussed everything with the stallholder and they seemed to come to a joint decision about what should be bought. They went to a bread stall and a cheese stall, and again the aunt spoke with the proprietors, who were assertive but courteous. They carried nothing from the stalls, for their purchases were to be delivered to the apartment where the maid, D’lo, waited to put them away.
They ate lunch at a restaurant where, the aunt said, a man had once come with a gun to shoot his lover’s wife. She relished the details of the anecdote in the same way she had enjoyed dissecting