The Night Manager (18 page)

The track rose, the mist vanished. Suddenly all they saw through the windscreen was canyons of white cloud. A salvo of raindrops rattled against the car's left side. The car rocked, then tipped over the edge in a free-fall, its nose pointing at the Atlantic. They made the last turn, the steepest. A gust of warring birds clattered over them. Rooke braked to a crawl until the fury passed. A fresh burst of rain hit them. As it cleared, they saw the grey cottage crouching on a saddle of black bracken.

He's hanged himself. Burr decided, catching sight of Jonathan's crooked silhouette as it dangled in the porch light. But the hanged man lifted an arm in greeting and stepped forward into the blackness before switching on his torch. A patch of granite chip made a crude parking place. Rooke climbed out, and Burr heard the two men hailing each other like a pair of travellers. "Good to see you! Great! Christ, what a wind!" Burr in his nervousness stayed stubbornly in his seat, grimacing to heaven while he forced the top button of his overcoat through its hole. The wind was booming round the car, shaking the aerial.

"Get a move on, Leonard!" Rooke yelled. "You can powder your nose later!"

"You'll have to wriggle across, I'm afraid, Leonard," Jonathan said through the driver's window. "We're evacuating you to leeward, if that's all right."

Grabbing his right knee with both hands, Burr navigated it over the gear lever and the driving seat, then did the same for the left. He lowered one city shoe onto the gravel. Jonathan was shining the torch straight at him. Burr made out boots and a seaman's knitted cap.

"How've you been?" Burr shouted, as if they hadn't seen each other for years. "Fit?"

"Well, yes, I think I really am, actually."

"Good lad."

Rooke went ahead with his briefcase. Burr and Jonathan followed him side by side up the hacked path.

"And that went all right, did it'?" Burr asked, nodding at Jonathan's bandaged hand. "He didn't amputate it by mistake, then."

"No, no, it was fine. Slice, stitch, wrap it up--didn't take above half an hour, the whole job."

They were standing in the kitchen. Burr's face was still stinging from the wind. Scrubbed pine table, he noticed. Polished flagstones. Polished copper kettle.

"No pain?"

"Not beyond the call of duty," Jonathan replied.

They laughed shyly, strangers to each other.

"I've had to bring you a piece of paper," Burr said, coming as usual straight to what was weighing on his mind. "You're supposed to sign it, with me and Rooke as witnesses."

"What does it say, then?" said Jonathan.

"Humbug's what it says"--laying the blame on a convenient bureaucracy. "Damage limitation. Their insurance policy. We didn't push you, you'll never sue us, you have no case against the government for neglect, malfeasance or rabies. If you fall out of a plane it's your fault. Et cetera."

"Getting cold feet, are they?"

Burr caught the transferred question and turned it back, "Well, are you, Jonathan? That's more the point, isn't it?" Jonathan started to protest, but Burr said, "Shut up and listen. This time tomorrow you'll be a wanted man. Unwanted is more like it. Anyone who ever knew you will be saying, 'I told you so.' Anyone who didn't will be studying your photograph for evidence of homicidal tendencies. That's a life sentence, Jonathan. It'll never go away."

Jonathan had a stray memory of Sophie among the splendours of Luxor. She was sitting on a plinth, arms around her knees, staring down the aisle of columns. I need the comfort of eternity, Mr. Pine, she said.

"I can still stop the clock, if that's what you want, and no harm done except to my ego," Burr continued. "But if you're wanting to pull out and haven't the bottle to say, or if you're being too nice to your Uncle Leonard or some such idiocy, I'll trouble you to get up your courage and declare yourself now, not later. We can have a nice supper, goodbye, drive home, no hard feelings, none that last. We can't do that tomorrow night, or any night after."

Heavier shadows in the face, Burr was thinking. The watcher's stare that stays on you after he's looked away. What have we spawned? He glanced round the kitchen again. Wool pictures of ships in full sail. Bits of treen, Newlyn copperware. A luster plate that read "Thou see'st me, God."

"Are you sure you don't want me to put this stuff in store for you?" Burr asked.

"No, honestly. It's fine. Just sell it. Whatever's easiest."

"You could want it one day, when you settle down."

"Better to travel light, really. And it's all there still, is it--the target, I mean? He's still doing what he's doing, living where he lives and so on? Nothing's changed?"

"Not that I know of, Jonathan," said Burr with a slightly puzzled smile. "And I keep pretty much in touch. He's just bought himself a Canaletto, if that's a guide. And a couple more Arab horses for his stud. And a nice diamond collar for his lady. I didn't know they called them collars. Sounds like a lapdog. Well, I suppose that's what she is."

"Perhaps it's all she can afford to be," said Jonathan. He was holding out his bandaged hand, and for a moment Burr thought he wanted him to shake it. Then he realised Jonathan was asking for the document, so he delved in his pockets, first his overcoat, then his jacket, and drew out the heavy sealed envelope.

"I'm serious," Burr said. "It's your decision."

With his left hand, Jonathan selected a steak knife from the kitchen drawer, tapped the sealing wax with the handle to break it, then cut open the envelope along the flap. Burr wondered why he bothered to break the wax, unless he was showing off his dexterity.

"Read it," Burr ordered. "Every stupid word as many times as you like. You're Mr. Brown, in case you hadn't guessed. An unnamed volunteer in our employ. In official papers, people like you are always Mr. Brown."

Drafted by Harry Palfrey for Rex Goodhew. Handed down to Leonard Burr for Mr. Brown to sign.

"Just never tell me his name," Goodhew had insisted. "If I've seen it, I've forgotten it. Let's keep it that way."

Jonathan held the letter to the oil lamp in order to read it.

What is he? Burr wondered for the hundredth time, studying the hard-soft contours of his face. I thought I knew. I don't.

"Think about it," Burr urged. "Whitehall did. I've had them rewrite it twice." He had one last try. "Just tell me for myself, will you? 'I, Jonathan, am sure.' You know what you're about, you've worked it through. And you're still sure."

The smile again, putting Burr still less at ease. Jonathan was holding out his bandaged hand again, this time for Burr's pen.

"I'm sure, Leonard. I, Jonathan. And I'll be sure tomorrow morning. How do I sign? Jonathan Brown?"

"John," Burr replied. "In your usual handwriting." The image of Corkoran the signer with his drawn fountain pen flitted across Burr's inner eye as he painstakingly wrote John Brown.

"All done," he said brightly to console him.

But Burr still wanted more of something. Drama, a greater feeling of occasion. He stood up, making an old man's labour of it, and let Jonathan help him out of his coat. They walked together to the parlour, Jonathan leading.

The dining table was set for ceremony. Linen napkins, Burr noticed indignantly. Three lobster cocktails in their glasses. Silver-plate knives and forks like a three-star restaurant. A decent Pommard uncorked to breathe. A smell of roasting meat.

What the hell's he trying to do to me?

Rooke was standing with his back to them, hands in pockets, studying Marilyn's latest watercolour.

"I say, I rather like this one," he said in a rare effort at flattery.

"Thanks," said Jonathan.

Jonathan had heard them approaching long before he saw them. And even before he heard them he knew they were there because alone on the cliff the close observer had learned to hear sounds in the making. The wind was his ally. When the fog came down and all he seemed to hear was the moaning of the lighthouse, it was the wind that brought him the chatter of the fishermen out to sea.

So he had felt the trembling of the Rover's engine before ever its growl rolled down the cliff to him, and he braced himself as he stood waiting in the wind. When its headlights appeared, aimed straight at him, he aimed back at them in his mind, estimating the Rover's speed by the telegraph poles and calculating the distance ahead that he would have to aim if he were sighting a rocket-propelled grenade. Meanwhile a corner of his vision waited on the hilltop in case they had a chase car or were sending in a decoy.

And when Rooke parked and Jonathan walked smiling through the gale with his torch, he had imagined shooting his two guests down the torch's beam, blowing off their green faces in alternate bursts. Players successfully negotiated.

Sophie avenged.

But now as they left he was calm and saw different things.

The storm had vanished, leaving torn-off shreds of cloud. A few stars lingered. Grey bullet holes made a spray pattern round the moon. Jonathan watched the Rover's tail-lights pass the meadow where he had planted his iris bulbs. In a few weeks, he thought, if the rabbits don't get through the wire, that meadow will be mauve. The taillights passed a bull warren, and he remembered how one warm evening, returning from Falmouth, he had surprised Jacob Pengelly and his girlfriend there, stripped of everything except each other, Jacob in transport straining back from her, the girl arched to him like an acrobat.

Next month will be a blue month on account of the bluebells, Pete Pengelly had told him. But this month now, Jack, this one is a gold month getting golder, with the gorse and cowslips and wild daffodils winning against all comers. Just you see if they don't, Jack. Cheers.

To complete me, Jonathan rehearsed to himself. To find the missing parts of me.

To make a man of me, which was what my father said the army did: one man.

To be useful. To stand upright. To rid my conscience of its burden.

He felt sick. Going to the kitchen, he gave himself a glass of water. A brass ship's clock hung above the door, and without pausing to think why, he wound it up. Then he went to the drawing room, where he kept his treasure: a grandmother long-case clock in fruitwood with a single weight, bought of Daphne's in Chapel Street for a song. He pulled the brass chain till the weight was at the top. Then he set the pendulum in motion.

"Reckon I'll go up my Aunt Hilary's in Teignmouth for a bit, then," Marilyn had said, no longer weeping. "Be a break, Teignmouth will, won't it?"

Jonathan had had an Aunt Hilary too, in Wales beside a golf club. She had followed him round the house putting the lights out, and prayed aloud to her dear Lord Jesus in the dark.

"Don't go," he had begged Sophie, in every way he knew, as they waited for the taxi to take them back to Luxor airport.

"Don't go," he had begged her on the plane. "Leave him, he'll kill you, don't take the risk," he had begged her as he saw her into the cab that would take her back to her apartment, and Freddie Hamid.

"We both have our appointments with life, Mr. Pine," she had told him with her battered smile. "There are worse indignities, for an Arab woman, than being beaten by her lover. Freddie is very wealthy. He has made me certain practical promises. I have to consider my old age,"

NINE

It is mother's day as Jonathan walks into Esperance. His third cement truck in four hundred miles has dropped him on the crossroads at the top of the Avenue des Artisans. The signs as he strides down the sidewalk swinging his Third World air bag read merci maman, bienvenue á toutes les mamans and vaste buffet chinois des meres. The northern sun is an elixir to him. When he breathes, it is as if he is breathing light as well as air. I'm home. It's me.

After eight months of snow, this easy-living gold town in the province of Quebec is hopping in the evening sunshine, which is what the town is famous for among its sister townships strewn along the largest greenstone mineral belt in the world. It hops higher than Timmins to the west in stodgy Ontario, higher than Val-d'Or or Amos to the east, higher by a mile than the dreary white-collar settlements of hydro-electric engineers up north. Daffodils and tulips strut like soldiers in the garden of the white church with its leaden roof and narrow spire; dandelions as big as dollars cover the grass slope below the police station. After their winter's wait beneath the snow, the flowers are as rampant as the town. The shops for the suddenly rich or merely hopeful--the Boutique Bebe with its pink giraffes, the pizza cafes named after lucky miners and prospectors, the Pharmacie des Croyants, which offers hypnotherapy and massage, the neon-lit bars named after Venus and Apollo, the stately whorehouses after vanished madams, the Japanese sauna house with its pagoda and plastic pebble garden, the banks of every colour and persuasion, the jewellery stores where the high-graders used to melt the miners' stolen ore and occasionally still do, the wedding shops with their virginal wax brides, the Polish delicatessen advertising "films super erotiques XXX" as if they were a culinary event, the restaurants open all hours for shift workers, even the notaries with their blackened windows--all sparkle in the glory of the early summer, and merci maman for all of it: on va avoir du fun!

As Jonathan glances into shop windows or gratefully upward at the blue heaven and lets the sunlight warm his hollowed face, motorcyclists with beards and dark glasses roar up and down the street, racing their engines and flicking their leather backsides at the girls who sip their Cokes at outdoor tables on the sidewalk. In Esperance the girls stand out like parakeets.

The matrons of stodgy Ontario next door may dress themselves like sofas at a funeral, but here in Esperance the hot-blooded Québécois make a carnival every day, in radiant cottons and gold bracelets that smile at you across the street.

There are no trees in Esperance. With forests all around, the townspeople see open space as an accomplishment. And there are no Indians in Esperance, or not so that you'd notice, unless like Jonathan you spot one with his wife and family, loading a pickup with a thousand dollars' worth of provisions from the supermarche. One of them stays aboard the truck to guard it, while the rest hang close.