Hotel Ambrose

Chapter 12.5

The woman who opened the door was barely recognisable.

"Juno?"

She had always seemed enormous to him; now her flesh hung from her bones in curtains. The skin below her eyes was grey. She nodded, as if she had expected him, then turned around and walked back into the house. He followed her. There was an unbearable smell in the close hallway. James's father had died when he was fifteen. James had been allowed to visit him a couple of times. The smell of Juno brought him back to that stifling little room in which his father had rotted away.

She led him to the door of his mother's room. "You could've wrote," she whispered.

"What would I have said to her?" he whispered back.

"You could've wrote me." Her white eyes flashed at him, then she hobbled away down the dark corridor. James watched her until she vanished into the gloom.

He knocked on the door.

"Come in."

His mother was sitting on a chair by the window. His earliest memory was of her sitting on this same chair by this same window. It was how he would remember her long after. When asked about his mother he would draw up this image of her in his mind, reply that she was a stern woman, and change the subject.

The window looked out over the grounds that sloped away past a dark windbreak that was like a brow on the hillside and down to the river. The light from the window was the only light in the room. The dark shapes in the room were familiar to him: the chest with his great-grandfather's initials on it, a man of whom James had heard only terrifying stories; the gramophone that opened out like a tropical flower; the big black typewriter his mother hardly ever used; the lamp that as a child he had fancied was a flamingo, but a dark and unpleasant one; the ancient cabinet in the corner that was always locked; the clock that sat upon it like a brightly-coloured hat. And the familiar smell of the room: camphor and pyrethrum and lavender and smoky candles burned down to nubs.

"Close the door James," she said, without turning from the window.

He closed the door.

"Is the war over?"

"I'm sorry?"

Her chair was on castors. She swivelled it halfway around so that she could see him by tilting her head to the side. "The war. Is it over?"

"Surely you'd know if it -"

"I'm isolated here. I mightn't have heard about it. The maid," (she never called Juno by her name) "is as worldly as the rest of her kind."

"The war isn't over."

"Then why," she said, leaning forward now and arching her eyebrows innocently at him, "are you back?"

He glanced down at his lame leg.

She nodded sagely. "When do you go back?"

"I'm not going back."

"Does your leg prevent you from firing a gun?"

"I wasn't infantry."

"Neither was your useless father in his war. What did you do anyway?"

"Radio operator."

"Radio operator. Your father was a colonel. Sent boys out to die. Courage must run in the family. Your friend Robert. Was he a radio operator too?"

James shifted some of his weight over onto his cane.

"I read about it in the paper yesterday."