The plane pitches about in the grey air. People are quiet, strapped to their seats. They ride the cliffs and troughs, the mountains and the sudden dizzying voids. In their tailored clothes, with their books and briefcases and laptop computers, they are like a platoon going forward in the name of civilisation. They hold on to their newspapers, to their gin-and-tonics. Their onward motion seems rational, even when the storm forces them off their path. The plane is thrown this way and that. The engine drones, a wavering line of sound. Tonie is not afraid. She is glad to be on the side of rationality. It is far worse to be the storm, to be tormented and hysterical, to be uncontrolled.
Amsterdam airport appears, low grey buildings in drifting horizontal veils of rain. There are box-like vehicles parked on the asphalt among shapeless patches of water creased by wind. Its anonymity is almost arousing. It too is rational, impersonal. It seems to lift Tonie out of the brawl of relationships. It seems to relieve her of everything that is private and particular, of emotion itself. By the time she gets a taxi it is dark. The storm drives unchecked across the flat landscape, across the port with its black shapes of cranes and containers, across the choppy waters and concrete isthmuses of the city’s outskirts. Scraps of litter bowl through the darkness; the wind warps the fragile vertical line of the alien streetscape, bending the skeletal trees, rocking the metal posts in their concrete moorings. It appears to come out of the infinity of the low horizon, out of black nothingness. For the first time, looking through the taxi’s rain-streaked windows, Tonie is frightened. It is the force of the horizontal, pouring unrestrained over the lip of the black earth, that frightens her.
The taxi driver doesn’t know where they are going. He too is from somewhere else. He is dark-skinned, vulnerable in his short-sleeved shirt. He pores over the address of the hotel where she has written it on the back of an envelope – he studies her handwriting, the cryptic, consonant-heavy words. He gets out of the car and shows the envelope to a passerby. They huddle over it in the rain, pointing and discussing. Tonie sits in the back seat, her hands folded in her lap. They are parked in the darkness of an empty street in an industrial-looking area, full of warehouses and unmarked modern buildings with their metal shutters down. The wind makes a plaintive sound as it comes off the sea. The rain spatters against the glass. The rough black water frets at the concrete esplanade. The driver comes back and they set off again slowly. They turn a corner and after a hundred yards or so they creep into the darkness at the side of the road and stop. The driver points. Tonie sees a big, gloomy factory building behind a wall. Suddenly she is exasperated.
‘That isn’t a hotel,’ she says. ‘That doesn’t look like a hotel.’
‘Yes, hotel!’
The driver points again. He is insistent. He is as full of certitude as a minute ago he was riven by doubt. He is capable, she sees, of leaving her here whether it is a hotel or not. A feeling of disenchantment passes over her, the feeling that she has been let down not by what she knows and trusts but by what is new and unfamiliar. She stays where she is on the back seat. She has always been susceptible to ill treatment: she becomes pliant, victimised. It is the driver’s masculinity that paralyses her. She is unable to deliver herself from it. He must release her, as a fisherman roughly releases a fish from his hook. Suddenly she sees people, three or four figures pulling suitcases up the front steps through the gloom to the building’s entrance. The big anonymous door opens and closes again behind them, showing a segment of orange light. The driver exclaims. He is happy. He springs from his seat and opens the car door for her. He gestures again towards the dimly lit entrance, lest she remain in any doubt. She gives him his money. She realises that he wouldn’t have abandoned her after all.
*
In her room she sits on the bed and goes through her notes. The room is big and bare and brightly lit, white like a gallery. The wind moans at the windows. The tall white shutters move and knock. She peers through the slats and sees again the flat black distances streaming with rain, the shapes of cranes and beyond them the darkness boiling indistinctly on the low horizon. It seems to be advancing on her across the desolation, to be bent on prising her out. But the room has a force of its own, with its enormous immaculate bareness, its strange long clusters of pendant lights, its futuristic untouched furniture. On the table there is a giant block of glass – a vase – with a sheaf of orchids and blood-coloured gladioli in it. The flowers are odourless, three feet tall with thick, poison-green stalks. They look synthetic, but when she touches them she finds that they are real.
Tonie is here to speak at a conference. The conference is tomorrow at ten o’clock; after that she will fly home. She forgot, when she left the house this morning, that she would be returning so soon. It was the rift, the departure, that concerned her, as the hurdle concerns the jumper, not the same continuous earth that lies on the other side of it. She remembers that Alexa was wearing a red dress when she stood at the door to say goodbye. Tonie had never seen the dress before: Thomas bought it for her. It made Alexa seem unreal, like a girl in a dream. In it, she seemed to have no further need of Tonie, except to be numbered among her accomplishments. Yet the mark of possession was Thomas’s: in the red dress Alexa was hallmarked, like a silver figurine. This, it struck Tonie, was what someone looked like who was taken care of by Thomas. In a sense it was what Tonie herself ought to look like. When she looked at Alexa she was looking at a version of her relationship with Thomas, at one of several possibilities, in which she was his cherished object, decked out in a dress he had chosen himself.
There is a restaurant downstairs. Tonie prepares herself in front of the mirror, trying on a different shirt. Who is she? What is she doing here in this room, with its sinister flowers, with its white shutters the wind and darkness seem to be trying to prise open? Her own body, the unit of herself, so sealed and single: it is all she is, and yet she lives in it so little. Away from home, she is only this unit of flesh. What experience can she offer herself? What physical event will justify this form and bring it into knowledge? Alone, she eats a plate of fish and drinks a glass of cold yellow wine. The waiter is young, attentive, so formal that she becomes awkward and strange when he approaches. She has brought her notes down with her and she finds herself looking at them, looking at what she wrote down at the kitchen table last night in Montague Street, when she sat and thought of her trip, imagined the great inviting sea of the unknown and herself plunging bodily into it. Now she doesn’t know what it was she thought she would find here. She notices a stain on one of the pages: it is gravy, from last night’s chicken pie. She looks at other people talking, eating, in the fashionable room.
Upstairs, she phones Thomas. He is distant-sounding, slightly curt. He doesn’t know that there is anything in her plight he ought to be moved by. And she can never explain it to him, for as a story it revolves around the disclosure of a desire for something that has no name and is itself nameless, that she could arrive at only by a path of negatives that would somewhere along the line have to pass through Thomas himself. But he doesn’t enquire. She is on a business trip, that’s all: he used to go on them himself. Afterwards did he complain of loneliness, of disenchantment? She thinks that perhaps he did. He complained about them as the conscript complains about the discomfort of his standard-issue boots. Perhaps he didn’t tell her everything either.
She sits on the bed. She both wants and doesn’t want to go home. She remembers this feeling from childhood, when she would go to her room after some family dispute; and lying on her bed would experience the same division of desire, the same choice that now she sees was no choice at all, between returning downstairs and staying where she was. Downstairs was the ongoing story, plot-filled and relentless, of everything she knew; but in her room there was silence, daylight, an absence of structure. By stepping out of the story she had come upon the emptiness that lay all around it. It was so transparent and silent in that place: it seemed to presage the creation of something, though the moment of realisation never occurred. There was only solitude, beautiful but sterile, unpollinated. She never found anything there. In the end, she always went back.
She goes to bed and is woken all night by the knocking shutters, and by the wind moaning across the Zuider Zee.