Page 221 - tender-is-the-night

pushed the passengers round and round in a corkscrew,
mounting, rising; they chugged through low-level clouds
and for a moment Dick lost Nicole’s face in the spray of the
slanting donkey engine; they skirted a lost streak of wind
with the hotel growing in size at each spiral, until with a vast
surprise they were there, on top of the sunshine.
In the confusion of arrival, as Dick slung his knapsack
and started forward on the platform to get his bicycle, Nicole
was beside him.
‘Aren’t you at our hotel?’ she asked.
‘I’m economizing.’
‘Will you come down and have dinner?’ Some confusion
with baggage ensued. ‘This is my sister—Doctor Diver from
Zurich.’
Dick bowed to a young woman of twenty-five, tall and
confident. She was both formidable and vulnerable, he de-
cided, remembering other women with flower-like mouths
grooved for bits.
‘I’ll drop in after dinner,’ Dick promised. ‘First I must get
acclimated.’
He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole’s eyes following
him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around in-
side him. He went three hundred yards up the slope to the
other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself wash-
ing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only
a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant
voices that did not know how much he was loved.

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