One of the terrace lights was flickering.
It was blinking in and out, buzzing ominously every time it panned out. Every time the strip of darkness fell on her left shoulder, she felt the cold more strongly. And when the light remerged, she did not feel any warmer.
Elizabeth knew she shouldn't have wandered around the house like a ghost. It was hardly productive in her situation. And it wasn't the polite thing to do at social gatherings, was it?
Perhaps she should find Charlotte. Either way, she couldn't stay anymore. It would be too painful to sit through another infernal chat on car insurance with five elderly men she did not know, only then to be mercilessly insulted by some casual onlooker as she innocently made her way to the ladies' room.
Because that is how it had transpired.
She had just passed by his chair when he had remarked fleetingly:
"...her for example, in the green dress. Desperation is written plainly across her face. Look at the way she tries to inspire interest and mystery. But she is just like all the others in reality, another sad effort to..."
She did not catch the rest of the conversation because she almost walked into a wall.
She had managed to catch his face from afar, but only vaguely. She only remembered a pair of green eyes and a black curl looming over a tall forehead.
One thing was certain, though; she would always remember that voice. Dissecting with perfect precision and leaving nothing to argument. There was no doubt, no sympathy, no second-thoughts and no real interest in that voice. His opinion once fixed was fixed forever, but not because he believed in it, but because he could not bother to change it.
It's true she had barely heard him speak, but it was enough to gather everything she thought she needed.
After that she had tried to go back to her table, but it had been in vain. She could not walk across the room, because she did not want, on the off-chance that it might happen, for him to see her again and vice versa.
And she could not stay in the bathroom anymore. She had looked at her dark circles for too long and she had indeed seen desperation in her eyes but it was of a different, more natural kind, the kind everyone gets at one point during the day.
So then, she decided to walk about the house for the rest of the evening. It's not that she was angry; she was too tired to be angry, too fed up with the entire ordeal. She didn't have the strength to sum up enough righteous indignation. It was almost as if reacting in any way would already admit defeat.
She lingered in every room, trailing her fingers over the dust and the china, inspecting the paintings and the furniture. They were all rather cheap. The house was spacious, but it was filled with odd nothings.
She sat in a window niche and counted the trees in the distance, trying to guess where the forest ended and where the sky began. The surrounding lands had never looked emptier.
She tried to remember where she had parked her car.
She even started to draw up lists for what to do the following day after breakfast. Anything to occupy her mind and distract herself from what was stirring inside.
It was only when she had finally found the white terrace, the island in the sea of dark, and the lighthouse, the ominous flickering light, that she let her shoulders sag for the first time and a sort of melancholy swept over her, reminding her that she did in fact care.
She felt humiliated. Nothing, no foreign beauty, no silent nature, could take that away from her. It was etched to her dress and her skin. The night would turn into day, but the words would remain intact. She might forget the entire thing in a couple of weeks, the glass of memory would turn opaque and everything would become another roll of film in her head. But there was always the chance that she might revisit the moment on a bad day and then she would flinch, recalling how at least one person in the room had seen her as small and sad.
It didn't matter if she wasn't really small or sad, because in the external view of a stranger she was just another petty individual, desperately seeking attention of any kind or at least some form of human contact. It was visible and palpable.
It was humiliating, even though it was not the truth, because it might become the truth someday, or it was a truth she had not yet seen.
Maybe that is what haunted her; not the prejudice itself, but the possibility of it becoming a reality, a world...her world.