Read Online The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas - Free Book Online

boy. The hill was covered in ferns, and he had played hunter and hunted with a cousin. He remembered the fearful pleasure of stalking or being stalked through the stiff ferns with their heavy summery smell. It was the only time he had ever felt really close to the earth.
    “My father says there are four people present whenever lovemaking takes place,” he said. “They are here now, of course. My parents.”
    The young woman saw the stern figure of Freud, beside his timid wife, at the bed’s foot. Freud’s black suit and his wife’s white nightgown dissolved and melted into her dress, lying shadowily on the floor where he had flung it.
    They loved the sunsets best. The mountains spun pink clouds out of themselves, like flowers. (The old nurse, in fact, one evening saw the whole sky turn into a huge crimson rose, with endlessly inwoven petals; and dutifully she went straight to the major to report it.) The rose, though eternally still, seemed to spin within itself, and the lovers had the eerie impression that the whole earth was turning. So were her breasts turning, in his hands, as night stole over them; and his tongue turned too, as it delicately tilted at her sex, or tried to get deeper and deeper in, as if wanting to force her into the mountainside. She was opening up so much that she felt her vagina hollowing into a cave, so that it expelled air in a way that was like breaking wind and brought a blush to her face, though she knew and he knew it was not.
    Time, with his bland surgeon’s hands, was quietly healing Madame Cottin. While the lovers spent their day in the stuffy room, she was out walking around the lake with Father Marek, the kindly old Catholic priest. His certainties were a great comfort to her. He urged her to return to the Church, likening its effect to one of her stout corsets. The Church’s dogmas, he said, smiling, were the whalebone of the soul. The analogy delighted her, and she chuckled. After a beautiful long morning’s walk through woods and wildflowers, the priest and the corsetière stopped at a pleasant lakeside inn, miles from anywhere, forrefreshment. Carrying their bread and cheese out to the lakeside tables, they spotted Vogel and Bolotnikov-Leskov. They felt bound to join them, though neither party relished the meeting. Bolotnikov-Leskov was midway in a political peroration, and had built up too much momentum to stop. The problem, he explained (while Madame Cottin smiled sadly and let her gaze stray over the lake), was that his party was best for the masses but unfortunately the masses could not see this. The only answer, he feared, was the bomb.
    Vogel’s eagle eye noticed the tremor in the priest’s hand as he drank his plum juice; noted also the red complexion. His legal training told him that the priest had been sent on a vacation to dry out. The male and female corseters finished their bread and cheese quickly and apologized for their haste in leaving. They wanted, they said, to walk the circuit of the lake.
    The young lovers were having their second disagreement, a more serious one. He was interrogating her jealously about her sexual relationship with her husband; which irritated her, because all that was so far in the past, and so irrelevant. The argument brought out, for the first time, his immaturity; the few years’ difference in their ages had never before seemed significant. Indeed she had never even noticed it. But it was all too clear now, in this childish outburst of jealousy over the dead. It made her irritated with other things, such as the foul Turkish cigarettes he kept smoking, filling the room with stale scent and no doubt ruining her singing voice forever.
    In the end, of course, it was even more enchanting than before. Lying joined in love, gazing into each other’s eyes, they could not believe unfriendly words had passed between them. But she had to show that she thought more of him than she had of her husband by doing something strange—taking his penis