The Night Manager (64 page)

And when he was deep down and half asleep and wondering how he would make it back to the top of the crevasse, he regaled her with accounts of difficult climbs he had made in the Oberland--a north face of the Jungfrau that had gone seriously wrong; bivouacking in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. And Sophie, if she was bored, never showed it. She listened with her great brown eyes steadfastly upon him, loving and encouraging him: I am sure, that you will never again give yourself away so cheaply, Mr. Pine, she had told him. Our good manners can sometimes disguise our courage from us.

. Have you something to read on the plane back to Cairo? I think I shall read. It will help me to remember that I am myself. And then, to his surprise, he was back in the little flat in Luxor, watching her pack up her overnight bag, one object at a time and very deliberately, as if she were selecting companions for a much longer journey than the trip to Cairo.

And of course it was Sophie who had encouraged him to keep his silence. Had she herself not died without betraying him?

When they had pulled off the adhesive and removed the chamois bung, it was on Sophie's advice that he asked to speak to Roper personally. "That's the way, then, Tommy," said Tabby, out of breath from his exertions. "You have a natter with the Chief. Then we can all have a nice beer together like the old days."

And Roper in his own good time strolled down to see him, dressed in his cruise gear--including the white buckskin shoes with crepe soles that Jonathan had noticed in his dressing room at Crystal--and sat on the chair across the room from him.

And it passed through Jonathan's mind that this was now the second time that Roper had seen him with his face in a mess, and that Roper's expression on both occasions had been identical: the same wrinkling of the nose, the same critical assessment of the damage and of Jonathan's chances of survival. He wondered how Roper would have looked at Sophie if he had been around while they were beating her to death.

"All right, Pine?" he asked pleasantly. "No complaints? They looking after you all right?"

"Beds are a bit lumpy."

Roper laughed good-humouredly. "Can't have everything, I suppose. Jed misses you."

"Then send her to me."

"Not her scene, I'm afraid. Convent girl. Likes a sheltered life."

So Jonathan explained to Roper that during his initial conversations with Langbourne, Corkoran and others, the suggestion had repeatedly been aired that Jed was in some way involved in Jonathan's activities. And he wished to say categorically that whatever he had done, he had done it alone, unaided at any point by Jed. And that far too much had been made of a couple of social visits to Woody's House that had taken place when Jed was being bored to death by Caroline Langbourne and Jonathan was lonely. After that, he regretted he could not answer any further questions. Roper, normally so swift to take a point, seemed for a while stuck for words.

"Your people kidnapped my boy," he said at last. "You lied your way into my house, stole my woman. You tried to screw up my deal. Hell do I care whether you talk or not? You're dead."

So it's punishment, not just confession, thought Jonathan, as they bunged up his mouth again. And his sense of kinship with Sophie, if it was possible, grew stronger. I didn't betray Jed, he told her. And I won't, I promise. I shall remain as steadfast as Herr Kaspar with his wig.

Herr Kaspar wore a wig?

But didn't I tell you? Good heavens! Herr Kaspar is a Swiss hero! He gave up twenty thousand tax-free francs a year, just in order to be loyal to himself!

You are right, Mr. Pine, Sophie agreed gravely, when she had listened attentively to everything he had to tell her. You must not betray Jed. You must be strong like Herr Kaspar, and you must not betray yourself either. Now you will put your head on my shoulder, please, the way you do with Jed, and we shall sleep.

And from then on, as the questions continued without benefit of answer, now singly, now in a hail, Jonathan occasionally saw Roper back in the same chair, though no longer wearing the white buckskin shoes. And always Sophie stood behind him, not in a vengeful way but just to remind Jonathan that they were in the presence of the worst man in the world.

"They'll kill you, Pine," Roper warned, a couple of times. "Corky will go over the top and that'll be that. These queers never know where to draw the line. Quit before it's too late, my advice." After that. Roper would sit back, wearing that look of personal frustration that comes over all of us when we seem unable to help a friend.

Then Corkoran would reappear and, leaning eagerly forward in the same chair, would fire his questions like commands, and count to three while he waited to be obeyed. And on three, Frisky and Tabby went to work again, until Corkoran was tired, or appeased.

"Well, if you'll excuse me, old heart, I'll slip into my sequined sari, pop a ruby in my navel and tuck into a few peacock's tongues," he said as he bowed his way, smirking, to the door. "Sorry you can't be part of the fun. But if you won't sing for your supper, what can one do?"

Nobody, not even Corkoran, stayed long. If a man refuses to speak, and sticks to his resolve, the show acquires a certain sameness. Only Jonathan, roaming his internal world with Sophie, was blessed with any sense of profit. He owned nothing he did not want to own, his life was in order, he was free. He congratulated himself on having discharged his institutional commitments. His father, his mother, his orphanages and single Aunt Annie, his country, his past and Burr--all had been paid in full and on the nail. As to his sundry female creditors, they could no longer touch him with their accusations. And Jed? Well, there was something rather wonderful in paying in advance for sins that he had yet to commit. He had deceived her, of course--Mama Low's, getting himself smuggled into the castle, offering a faulty version of himself--but he had a sense that he had also rescued her, which was Sophie's view entirely.

"And you don't think I'm too shallow?" he asked Sophie, in the way young men consult wise women about their loves.

She pretended to be cross with him. "Mr. Pine, I think you are playing a little bit the flirt. You are a lover, not an archaeologist. Your Jed has a nature that has not been touched. She is beautiful, so she is used to being fawned on and adored, and occasionally misused. That is normal."

"I have not misused her," Jonathan replied.

"But you have not fawned on her either. She is not confident of you. She comes to you because she wishes your approval. But you withhold it. Why?"

"But, Madame Sophie, what do you think she does to me?"

"You are joined by a friction that you both resent. That is also normal. It is attraction's dark side. You have both got what you wanted. Now it is time to find out what to do with it."

"I'm just not ready for her. She's banal."

"She is not banal, Mr. Pine. And I am sure you will never be ready for anybody. However, you are in love, and that is that. Now let us get some sleep. You have work to do, and we shall need all the strength we can muster if we are to complete our journey. Was the fizzy-drink treatment as bad as Tabby promised?"

"Worse."

He nearly died again, and when he woke, Roper was there with his interested smile. But Roper was not a climber and did not understand the fixity of Jonathan's determination: why else do I climb mountains, he explained to Sophie, if not to reach the peak? On the other hand, the hotelier in him had every sympathy for a man who has run away from feeling. Jonathan really wanted to reach out his hand to Roper, and as a gesture of friendship pull him down here into the abyss, just so that the Chief could get an idea of what it was like: you who are so proud of believing in nothing, and me down here with my faith in everything intact.

Then he dozed off for a while, and when he woke, he was in the Lanyon, walking on the cliffs with Jed, not wondering anymore who would be round the corner, waiting for him, but content with himself and with the person at his side.

But he still refused to speak to Roper.

His refusal was becoming more than a vow. It was an asset, a resource.

The very act of withholding was giving him renewal. Every word he didn't speak, every juddering fist or foot or elbow that rocked him off to sleep, every new and separate pain, went into him like fresh supplies of energy to be hoarded against a future day.

When the pain became unbearable, he had visions of raising himself toward it to receive and store away its life-giving powers.

And it worked. Under the cover of his agony, the close observer in Jonathan assembled his operational intelligence and prepared his plan for the deployment of his secret energy.

Nobody carries a gun, he thought. They are following the law of all good prisons. Warders do not carry guns.

THIRTY

Something amazing had happened.

Something good or terrible. Either way it was decisive, it was terminal, it was the end of life as Jed had so far known it.

The phone call had roused them in the early evening. Person-to-person and confidential, Chief, the skipper had said cautiously. It's Sir Anthony, Chief; I'm not sure whether you want me to put it through. Roper growled and rolled on his side to take it. He was wearing his robe again. They were lying on the bed after making love, though God knew it was not love they had been making but something closer to hate. His old appetite for screwing in the afternoons had recently revived.

So had hers. Their appetite for each other seemed to grow in inverse proportion to their affection. She was beginning to wonder whether sex had anything to do with love at all. "I'm a good fuck," she had told him afterwards, staring at the ceiling. "Oh, you are," he had agreed. "Ask anyone." Then this phone call, with his back to her: Oh, blast him, yes, I'll take it. Then the stiffening of his back, a freezing of the dorsal muscles through the silk, an uneasy shifting of the buttocks, the legs settling on each other for protection.

"Tony, you're out of court. Are you pissed again?... Who is? Well, put him on. Why not?... All right, talk, if you want. I'll listen. Nothing to do with me, but I don't mind listening. ... Don't give me sob stories, Tony, not my kind of music. ..." But soon these surly interjections grew shorter, and the spaces between them longer, until Roper was listening in total silence, and his body lay alert and dead still.

"Just a minute, Tony," he ordered suddenly. "Hold it." He turned to her, not bothering to put his hand over the mouth piece. "Run a bath," he told her. "Go into the bathroom, close the door, run the taps. Now."

So she went into the bathroom and turned on the taps and lifted the rubberized extension, but of course he heard the water running and bawled at her to get off the line. So after that she turned the taps to a trickle and pressed her ear to the keyhole, until the door exploded in her face and sent her flying across the Dutch-tiled floor, part of their recent decoration scheme. Then she heard Roper call, "Go on, Tony. Little local difficulty."

After that she listened to him listening, but that was all she heard. She got into the bath and remembered how once it was his pleasure to get in the other end and shove a foot between her legs while he read the Financial Times and in return she would tease him with her toes and try and give him an erection.

And sometimes he would haul her back to bed for another round, soaking the sheets with bathwater.

But this time he just stood in the doorway.

In his robe. Staring at her. Wondering what the hell to do about her. About Jonathan. About himself.

His face was set in that stony stay-away-from-me frown that he wore very rarely, and never in front of Daniel: the one that made and broke whatever was necessary for his preservation.

"You better get dressed," he said. "Corkoran will be here in two minutes."

"What for?"

"Just dress."

Then he went back to the phone, started to dial a number and changed his mind. He laid the receiver back on its cradle with such immense control that she knew he wanted to smash it into fragments, and the whole boat with it. He put his hands on his hips and stared at her while she dressed, as if he didn't like what she was putting on.

"Better wear sensible shoes," he said.

And that was when her heart stopped, because on board nobody ever wore anything but deck shoes or bare feet, except in the evenings, when dress shoes could be worn by the women, though they were not allowed stiletto heels.

So she dressed and pulled on a pair of sensible rubber-soled suede lace-ups she had bought at Bergdorf's during one of their trips to New York, and when Corkoran knocked on the door, Roper took him into the drawing room and spoke to him alone for as much as ten minutes, while Jed sat on the bed thinking of the chink she had still not found, that magic formula for Jonathan's salvation and her own. But it wouldn't come to her.

She had fantasised about blowing up the boat with the arsenal stored in the forward hold--a kind of African Queen job with everyone aboard, including Jonathan and herself; about poisoning the guards, or staging a dramatic denunciation of Roper's crimes before the assembled dinner guests, culminating in a search for the hidden prisoner; or simply holding Roper to ransom with a carving knife. Several other solutions that work so well in movies had occurred to her, but the truth was, the staff and crew were watching her all the time, several of the guests had remarked that she was in a nervous state, there were rumours she was pregnant, and there was not a single passenger on the boat who would believe her, do anything, or--even if she did convince them she was right--give a damn.

Roper and Corkoran came out of the drawing room and Roper threw on some clothes, not before stripping naked in front of them, a thing that had never bothered him, in fact he rather liked it, and for a bad moment she feared that he was going to leave her alone with Corkoran for some reason, and she couldn't think of a good one. To her relief Corkoran moved with him to the door.

"Stay in here and wait," Roper said as they left. As an afterthought he turned the lock on her, a thing he had not done before.