“Good,” she said, and kissed him hard so he could feel the sweet salt of the blood inside his lip. And I like that too, he thought.
“Now I will comb my hair and make my mouth new and you can watch me.”
“Do you want me to shut the windows?”
“No,” she said. “We will do it all in the cold.”
“Who do you love?”
“You,” she said. “And we don’t have too much luck do we?”
“I don’t know,” the Colonel said. “Go ahead and comb your hair.”
The Colonel went into the bathroom to wash up for dinner. The bathroom was the only disappointing part of the room. Due to the exigencies of the Gritti having been built as a palace, there had been no site for bathrooms at the time of building, and, later, when they were introduced, they had been built down the corridor and those entitled to use them gave due warning before-hand and water was heated and towels laid out.
This bathroom had been cut, arbitrarily, from a corner of the room and it was a defensive, rather than an attacking bathroom, the Colonel felt. Washing, and forced to look in the mirror to check any traces of lipstick, he regarded his face.
It looks as though it had been cut out of wood by an indifferent craftsman, he thought.
He looked at the different welts and ridges that had come before they had plastic surgery, and at the thin, only to be
