Daylight by Elizabeth Knox

Author:Elizabeth Knox [Elizabeth Knox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-86-473726-7
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2011-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

A BAD CANDIDATE

Eve heard Ila and Dawn arrive at the Menton apartment in the early hours of the morning. She thought she heard her sister laughing and wondered what Ila—silent Ila—might have done to make Dawn laugh.

After breakfast Eve went out to Martine’s funeral—at which she was the sole mourner, Father Octave having failed to appear. She followed her friend up to the Moskelute tomb, oversaw the interment, and received its key from the undertaker. Eve thanked him and the priest and pallbearers. She pocketed the key and walked down through the old town.

She didn’t go back to the apartment but spent the rest of the day in a manner customary to other Mentonnais of her station. She went to a patisserie and had a pear tart and a coffee. She sat in the shade on a park bench, beneath the orange trees on the Avenue Verdun. She nodded or spoke briefly to people she knew and once went into a café to borrow an ashtray, into which she poured some mineral water to rehydrate a tiny white-haired troll of a dog who had been left tethered to the leg of a bench by its master, who was asleep but plugged into a radio giving a running commentary on a bicycle race.

Eve was too late for the markets, so she went into a shop opposite the entrance to her street, bought several overripe tomatoes, a baguette, and a cylinder of soft goat’s cheese coated with ash. She took her time considering wine—since she was choosing for Dawn and Ila as well as for herself.

When she left the shop she stood still for a moment, dazzled by reflections, the low, angled sunlight on the glossy patches of old chewing gum plastered to the pavement, then set off across the delta of roadway at the bus station. At the entrance to the steep street to her apartment block Eve paused to let a car go by. It was a long car and swung out in order to make the turn into the narrow entry. Its windows were mirrored, and Eve saw herself in its beetle green glass, foreshortened and as pale as a wraith. The car revved and ran up the hill.

Eve went slowly, stopping now and then to catch her breath. She trudged up the Palais Lutetia’s front steps. It had rained in Menton while she was up in the Roya Valley, for the recently trimmed red and purple bougainvillea on the balustrade had sprouted fresh, questing shoots. Eve waited a moment in the sun, panting and hitching her shoulders to free the fabric of her shirt from the patch of sweat on her back. She noticed the car that had passed her, stopped in the yellow-painted turning space of the palais’s inadequate parking lot. Its driver was still sitting in it. Eve had the impression he was watching her. She squinted but couldn’t penetrate the reflective glass to see who he might be.

Eve pushed herself up the steps and went into her building.

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