Hotel de Dream by Emma Tennant Page B

Houghton wrote bravely) as if it were impossible for two human beings to be joined together in this way, as if he was afraid to possess her and by possessing her make his mark on the great, free expanse all round them. She quivered a little …
    The knife came down to the nape of Mrs Houghton’s neck. Cridge licked his lips. A voice sounded behind him. He turned guiltily and saw that the grey sea and sky had become a door, grey too and with a greasy handle stickingout of the waves like a lifebuoy. The voice was reprimanding him.
    â€œI thought I told you to fetch Mrs Houghton down for lunch, Cridge! The others have finished and gone to their rooms and I’m afraid we can’t keep the stew a minute longer!”
    â€œI’m so sorry, Mrs Routledge!” (The pounding noise had stopped and there was silence. Cridge looked round him hopelessly at Mrs Houghton’s room with Johnny and Melinda disappeared into thin air, and Mrs Houghton smiling apologetically at Mrs Routledge. He bowed his head and shuffled to what was now very clearly a door, hard and sticky to his touch.) “I got rather carried away! But I’m not much of a luncher! Don’t worry about me!”
    Mrs Routledge still stood with her arms folded over her stomach. She wondered what Cridge had been doing up here all this time, and it crossed her mind that Mrs Houghton might be trying to take him on as a servant. Her air of suspicion deepened.
    â€œI would like to invite you to a small party I’m giving here in the hotel,” she said nevertheless, for it was important to her that Mrs Houghton should come to it. “To meet Mr Rathbone—our proprietor, you know. I do hope you’re free?”
    Mrs Houghton packed away her manuscript. She looked preoccupied and tired after the scene, and her tone was vague when she answered.
    â€œI’d simply love to. How very kind. About six-thirty tomorrow?”
    â€œAnd any relatives of yours if you’d care to,” Mrs Routledge added in spite of herself. “Mr Rathbone is being knighted today, you know. I had no idea, but Miss Briggs pointed it out to me in the papers. So modest, the dear man made no mention of it at all!”
    â€œI’ll see. They may have gone away for a little breath of air in the country.”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œThank you anyway.”
    Mrs Routledge realised she was being elbowed out of the room. Mrs Houghton was taking fresh paper and now she inserted a page in the typewriter and sat down in front of it. To show her respect, Mrs Routledge tiptoed noisily out into the corridor and down the stairs to the hall. She looked embarrassed as she went: Mr Poynter’s afternoon snores were particularly loud today.

Chapter 14
    Mr Poynter was in his El Dorado. The City was as beautiful and as calm as ever, but he could see, since his morning visit and the interruption of lunch, that trouble was brewing underneath: a battalion of soldiers had just finished pushing the walls of the ghetto back into place—from the blood and trampled roses in the streets he could see it had been a violent night—and the workers who stood back respectfully from his car as he passed looked pale and preoccupied. He also noticed a strange whining sound, and wondered at first if it came from his own ear. Repeated proddings proved it did not, and he leaned forward to tap the chauffeur’s shoulder and enquire whether the main transmitter of the City—in the glass radio station where he made his most important pronouncements—had somehow gone haywire and was producing this disturbing noise. The chauffeur shook his head in answer to the question.
    â€œNo one here has had any sleep with the whine going on, sir. We think it’s coming from underground, it might be voices, sir.”
    â€œVoices?” Poynter wound down the window of the Rolls and stuck out his head. He saw that the blossom on the trees in the Central Park had gone, and