The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

were gazing through them to the horizon. And the childish hands with their bitten fingernails. He pushed his plate aside — ‘Look, I don’t really feel hungry’ — and she smiled as though she understood such matters, the connections between physiology and emotion.
    They went to the same hotel as before. Maybe she was known there, although no one seemed to recognise her. There was the same man on the reception desk, the same porter who, with the same expressionless indifference, showed them to what may have been the same room. But this time they kissed almost like ordinary lovers, her lips just pressing against his, soft and fragile.
    ‘You’re married, aren’t you? Have you got kids?’ Her sharp talk, that Viennese accent moderated by other tones — the sounds of Slovakia, the hints of Magyar. He’d forgotten that, and the rediscovery delighted him.
    ‘A daughter.’
    ‘Lovely little thing, is she?’
    ‘Lovely,’ he agreed. ‘She’s called Ottilie.’
    She unbuttoned her blouse and hung it on the back of a chair. He sat on the bed and watched her step out of her skirt, suddenly transformed from the public figure to the private: the clumsy underclothes, the tapes and clips, the hips that seemed that bit wider than when she was clothed, the curve of her thighs and the narrowness of her knees, as vulnerable as a child’s. Her skin was white, almost luminous in the shadows of the room. ‘How old is she then?’
    ‘She’s just a baby. Seventeen months.’
    ‘I love babies.’
    It seemed an absurd conversation, the kind casual acquaintances might have had anywhere, in any public place. Yet he was having it here, in this narrow room, between the windows with their view, obscured by muslin curtains, of an anonymous Viennese street and the bed in which he was about to have illicit sex, sex that would have shamed him had it been with Liesel. ‘And how’s the work?’ he asked.
    She paused, looking at him, her hands at the buttons of her brassiere. ‘It’s okay.’
    ‘Hats.’
    ‘Yeah, hats. I’ve changed job, actually. Get a bit less but I can come and go as I please, more or less.’
    ‘Sounds ideal.’
    She tossed the brassiere aside. Her breasts were full and loose, fuller than Liesel’s. ‘Actually it’s working for myself. I’ve started taking work in, dressmaking stuff. Contacts, you know what I mean? It’s always like that in business, isn’t it?’
    ‘Contacts? Exactly.’
    He reached out and took her hands and pulled her towards him so that she stood directly in front of him. He could feel the warmth of her body. It carried with it her smell, a flowery perfume with, beneath it, something else that was dark and intimate and animal. ‘My little dressmaker,’ he called her. ‘You’re very lovely, aren’t you?’
    But she shook her head. ‘I’m just what you see. Nothing special. A bit of a bitch, at times.’
    ‘Not with me.’
    ‘But you’re paying me to be nice to you, aren’t you?’
    ‘Would you be horrid if I weren’t? Are you horrid to your boyfriend?’
    ‘I don’t have a boyfriend. Not at the moment. I’m off men, really.’
    He cupped one soft breast in his hand, surprised by its mass. ‘What about me?’
    She looked down on him with an expression that he thought might be regret. ‘You’re different. I can’t get someone like you, can I? Except like this. You want me to stay the whole night this time? Because I can, if that’s what you’d like. I’ve made arrangements, see?’
    Of course he did. He wanted to wake in the morning and find her there with him. If not love itself, he wanted the simulacrum of love.
     
Completion
     
    Work continued throughout the autumn — the fittings, the furnishings, those things that transform a shell into a house and a house into a home. Lorries drew up on Blackfield Road and men in grey overalls humped packages into the building while neighbours watched from nearby gardens. Word went round. The doors were hung, the bathrooms