I was not really made for spa vacations. Moderation had always been difficult for me, and with Bernard I felt I was playing a perpetual game of charades in which my immoderation was too often the winner. I was made for adventure holidays, or for glamorous tours, or for complicated business trips, or even for journeys home, but I was not made for spa vacations. I would like to be able to say simply that spa vacations bore me, but in fact, they do not bore me. They absolutely fascinate me. The travel other people cannot carry off comes as readily to me as desire, but the vacations that other people find blissfully easy remain somehow inaccessible. I had thought in the beginning that Bernard might teach me how to live at a spa, but it didn’t work; I always seemed to be turning the spa into an adventure, or at least a drama, and this too often defeated its whole purpose.

The next morning, I woke up feeling like half of myself, and not the better half. Bernard ate an impressive breakfast, the sight of which made me feel nauseated, and I sipped some weak tea. I then had a shower and got dressed and Bernard and I discussed what to do. It was raining out, and it was cold. We were not interested in golf anyway. So we got in the car and drove to a local town where Bernard had heard there were antiques, and we wandered through shops, half of which had broken furniture that was very old and not a bit attractive for extremely low prices, and half of which had beautiful antiques for the same out-of-the-question prices at which these items might have been purchased in London. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant furnished with the old broken furniture but priced for the people who came to shop in the out-of-the-question shops; Bernard had smoked salmon and I had some more tea. In the afternoon we went back to the hotel, and I slept and read while Bernard wandered through the garden identifying plants.

When we got upstairs that night, after dinner, Bernard was all for love, but I was still too queasy, and felt stretched to the limits by the physical exertion of brushing my teeth. How nice it would have been to find Bernard irresistible. Bernard was very good-looking, but we both had too many similar and incompatible bones that seemed to clank on each other. Under ordinary circumstances, I didn’t mind about sex with Bernard; indeed, in some sense it was very pleasant, in much the same way that repeating familiar stories to each other was pleasant. But as for love in the afternoon, love in the morning, love in the evening—it was just as well that I was in the last throes of my twenty-four-hour virus, and could only drift toward sleep.

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