“Thanks, I will.”
She laid a hand on his face to feel his temperature. “We just never can thank you enough,” she said, keeping it there. “Roper will say it all far better than I can when he gets back, but honestly, what a hero. Just so brave,” she said from the door. “Shit,” the convent girl added, catching the pocket of her slacks on the handle.
Then he realized that it wasn’t their first meeting since he had arrived here, but their third, and that the first two were not dreams either.
Our first time you smiled at me, and that was fine: you kept quiet and I could think, and we had something going. You had jammed your hair behind your ears, you were wearing jodhpurs and a denim shirt. I said, “Where is this?” You said, “Crystal. Roper’s island. Home.”
The second time I was feeling vague, and I thought you were my former wife, Isabelle, waiting to be taken out to dinner, because you were got up in a perfectly ridiculous trouser suit with gold frogging on the lapels. “There’s a bell right beside your water jug if you need anything,” you said. And I said, “Expect my call.” But I was thinking: Why the hell do you have to dress up like a pantomime boy?
Her father ruined himself keeping up with the county, Burr said with contempt. He was serving vintage claret when he couldn’t pay the electricity bill. Wouldn’t send his daughter to secretarial college because he thought it was infra dig.
Lying on his safe side, facing the tapestry, Jonathan made out a lady in a broad-brimmed hat and recognized her without surprise as singing Aunt Annie Ball.
Annie was a valiant woman and sang good songs, but her farmer husband got drunk and hated everyone. So one day Annie put on her hat and sat Jonathan beside her in the van with his suitcase in the back, and said they were going for a holiday. They drove late into the evening, and sang songs till they came to a house with BOYS carved in granite over the door. Then Annie Ball started weeping and gave Jonathan her hat as a promise she’d come back soon to get it, and Jonathan went upstairs to a dormitory full of other boys and hung the hat over the corner of his bed to show Annie which boy he was when she returned. But she never did, and when he woke in the morning the other boys in the dormitory were taking it in turns to wear her hat. So he fought for it, and won it against all comers, and rolled it up in newspaper and posted it, with no address, in a red pillar box. He would have preferred to burn it, but he hadn’t a fire.
I came here by night as well, he thought. White twin-engined Beechcraft, blue interior. Frisky and Tabby, not the orphanage guardian, searched my luggage for forbidden tuck.
I hurt him for Daniel, he decided.
I hurt him to get me across the bridge.
I hurt him because I was sick of waiting and pretending.
Jed was in the room again. The close observer had no doubt of it. It wasn’t her scent because she wore none or her sound because she made none. And for a long time he couldn’t see her so it wasn’t sight. So it must have been the sixth sense of the professional watcher, when you know an enemy is present but don’t yet know why you know.
“Thomas?”
Feigning sleep, he listened to her tiptoeing toward him. He had a notion of pale clothes, dancer’s body, hair hanging loose. He heard a shifting as she drew back her hair and put her ear close to his mouth to hear him breathe. He could feel the warmth of her cheek. She stood again, and he heard slippered feet disappearing down the passage, then the same feet outside, crossing the stableyard.
They say that when she went up to London she scared herself, Burr said. Got in with a crowd of Hoorah Henries and screwed the field. Bolted to Paris for a rest cure. Met Roper.
He listened to the Cornish gulls and the long echoes from outside the shutters. He smelled the brown salt smell of weed and knew it was low tide. For a while he let himself believe that Jed had taken him back to the Lanyon and was standing barefoot on the floorboards before the mirror, doing the things women do before they come to bed. Then he heard the plop of tennis balls and leisured English voices calling to each other, and one of them was Jed’s. He heard a lawn mower, and the yell of rude English children quarreling, and surmised the Langbournes’ offspring. He heard the buzz of an electric motor and decided on a skimmer cleaning the surface of a pool. He slept again and smelled charcoal and knew by the pinkish glow of the ceiling that it was evening, and when he dared to lift his head he saw Jed in silhouette before the shuttered window as she peered through it at the last of the day outside, and the evening light showed him her body through her tennis clothes.
“Now, Thomas, what about a little more food in your life?” she proposed in a school matron’s voice. She must have heard him move his head. “Esmeralda’s made you some beef broth and bread and butter. Dr. Marti said toast, but it goes so floppy in the humidity. Or there’s chicken breast, or apple pie. Actually, Thomas, there’s pretty much anything you want,” she added, in the startled accents he was becoming accustomed to. “Just whistle.”
“Thanks. I will.”
“Thomas, it really is odd, you not having a single person to worry about you in the world. I don’t know why it should, but it makes me frightfully guilty. Can’t you even have a brother? Everyone’s got a brother,” she said.
“Afraid not.”
“Well, I’ve got one gorgeous brother and one absolute pig. So that cancels them out, really. Except I’d far rather have them than not. Even the pig.”
She was coming across the room to him. She smiles all the time, he thought in alarm. She smiles like a television commercial. She’s afraid we’ll switch her off if she stops smiling. She’s an actress in search of a director. One small scar on her chin, otherwise no distinguishing marks. Maybe somebody swiped her too. A horse did. He held his breath. She had reached his bed. She was stooping over him, pressing what felt like a piece of cold sticking plaster to his forehead.
“Got to let it cook,” she said, smiling more broadly. Then she sat on the bed to wait, tennis skirt parted, bare legs carelessly crossed, the muscles of one calf gently swelling against the shin below. And her skin all one soft tan.
“It’s called a fever tester,” she explained in a stagy, top-hostess accent. “For some extraordinary reason this entire house has no proper thermometer. You’re such a mystery, Thomas. Were those all your things? Just one small bag?”
“Yes.”
“In the world?”
“I’m afraid so.” Get off my bed! Get into it! Cover yourself! Who the hell do you think I am!
“God, you are lucky!” she was saying, this time sounding like a princess of the blood. “Why can’t we be like that? We take the Beechcraft to Miami just for one weekend, and we can hardly get our stuff in the hold.”
Poor you, he thought.
She talks lines, he recorded in his misery. Not words. Lines. She talks versions of who she thinks she ought to be.
“Perhaps you should use that big boat of yours instead,” he suggested facetiously.
But to his fury she seemed to have no experience of being laughed at. Perhaps beautiful women never had.
“The Pasha? Oh, that would take far too long,” she explained condescendingly. Reaching a hand to his forehead, she unpeeled the plastic strip and took it to the shutters to read. “Roper’s away selling farms, I’m afraid. He’s decided to slow down a bit, which I think is a frightfully good idea.”
“What does he do?”
“Oh, business. He runs a company, actually. Who doesn’t these days? Well, at least it’s his own,” she added, as if she were apologizing for her lover being in trade. “He did found it.But mainly he’s just a lovely, darling man.” She was tilting the strip, frowning at it. “He’s also got masses of farms, which is rather more fun, not that I’ve ever seen any of them. All over Panama and Venezuela and places where you have to have an armed guard to go on a picnic. Not my idea of farming, but it’s still land.” The frown deepened. “Well, it says normal, and it says clean with alcohol when dirty. Corky could do that for us. No trouble at all.” S
he giggled, and he saw that side of her too: the party girl who is the first to kick off her shoes and dance when things warm up.
“I’ll have to be hitting the road pretty soon,” he said. “You’ve been terribly kind. Thanks.”
Always play hard to get, Burr had advised. If you don’t, they’ll be bored with you in a week.
“Go?” she cried, making her lips into a perfect O and keeping them there for a moment. “What are you talking about? You aren’t nearly ready to go anywhere till Roper gets back, and Dr. Marti said specifically that you’ve got to have simply weeks of convalescence. The least we can do is build you up. Anyway, we’re all dying to know what on earth you were doing saving life and limb at Mama’s after you’d been someone totally different at Meister’s.”
“I don’t think I’m different. I just felt I was getting in a rut. Time I threw away my striped pants and drifted for a while.”
“Well, jolly good for us you drifted our way, is all I can say,” said the equestrienne, in a voice so deep that she might have been tightening her horse’s girth while she spoke.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Oh, I just live here.”
“All the time?”
“When we’re not on the boat. Or traveling. Yes. This is where I live.”
But her answer seemed to puzzle her. She laid him flat again, avoiding his eye.
“Roper wants me to hop over to Miami for a couple of days,” she said as she was leaving. “But Corky’s back, and everyone’s absolutely dying to spoil you rotten, and the hot line to Dr. Marti is wide open, so I don’t think you’ll exactly fade away.”
“Well, remember to pack light this time,” he said.
“Oh, I always do. Roper insists on shopping, so we always come back with tons.”
She left, to his profound relief. It was not his own performance that had tired him out, he realized. It was hers.
He was woken by the sound of a page turning and made out Daniel in a bathrobe crouched on the floor, with his bottom in the air, reading a large book by a convenient shaft of sunlight, and he knew it was morning, which was why there were brioches and croissants and Madeira cake and homemade jam and a silver teapot beside his bed.
“You can get giant squid sixty feet long,” Daniel said. “What do they eat, anyway?”
“Other squid probably.”
“I could read you about them if you like.” He turned another page. “Do you like Jed, actually?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t. Not really.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t. She’s soppy. They’re all terrifically impressed you saved me. Sandy Langbourne’s talking about organizing a collection.”
“Who’s she?”
“It’s a him. He’s a lord, actually. Only there’s a question mark hanging over you. So he thought he’d better hold off until it’s removed one way or the other. That’s why Miss Molloy says I’m not to spend too much time with you.”
“Who’s Miss Molloy?”
“She teaches me.”
“At school?”
“I don’t go to school, actually.”
“Why not?”
“It hurts my feelings. Roper gets in other kids for me, but I hate them. He’s bought a new Rolls-Royce for Nassau, but Jed likes the Volvo better.”
“Do you like the Rolls-Royce?”
“Yuck”
“What do you like?”
“Dragons.”
“When are they coming back?”
“The dragons?”
“Jed and Roper.”
“You’re supposed to call him the Chief.”
“All right. Jed and the Chief.”
“What’s your name, anyway?”
“Thomas.”
“Is that your surname or your Christian name?”
“Whichever you like.”
“It’s not either of them, according to Roper. It’s made up.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“I just happened to hear it. Thursday probably. Depends if they stay on for Apo’s binge.”
“Who’s Apo?”
“He’s foul. He’s got a tart’s penthouse in Coconut Grove, which is where he does his screwing. That’s in Miami.”
So Daniel read to Jonathan about squid, and then he read to him about pterodactyls, and when Jonathan dozed off, Daniel rapped him on the shoulder to ask whether it would be all right to eat a bit of Madeira cake and would Jonathan like some too? So to please Daniel, Jonathan ate a bit of Madeira cake, and when Daniel shakily poured him a cup of tea he drank some tepid tea as well.
“Coming along, are we, Tommy? They made a right job of you, I will say. Very professional.”
It was Frisky, seated on a chair just inside the door, wearing a T-shirt and white ducks and no Beretta, and reading the Financial Times.
While the patient rested, the close observer used his wits.
Crystal. Mr. Onslow Roper’s island in the Exumas, one hour’s flying time from Nassau by Frisky’s right-handed watch, which Jonathan had managed to get a sight of as they loaded him on and off the plane. Slumped in the rear seat, his mind secret-bright, he had watched by white moonlight as they flew over reefs fretted like the tongues of a jigsaw puzzle. A solitary island rose toward them, a cone-shaped hillock at its center. He made out a neat, floodlit airstrip cut into the crest, with a helicopter pad to one side of it, and a low green hangar and an orange communications mast. In his peculiar alertness he looked for the cluster of broken slave houses in the woods that Rooke said marked the spot, but he didn’t see one. They landed and were met by a soft-topped Toyota jeep driven by a very big black man who wore string gloves with the knuckles left bare for hitting people.
“He okay for sittin’, or you wan’ me pull out the back?”
“Just take him nice and slow,” Frisky had said.
They drove down an unmade snake track, and the trees changed from blue pine to lush green heart-shaped leaves the size of dinner plates. The track straightened, and by the jeep’s headlights he saw a broken sign saying PINDAR’S TURTLE FACTORY and behind the sign a brick sweatshop with the roof torn off and its windows smashed. And at the roadside, shreds of cotton hanging like old bandages from the bushes. And Jonathan memorized everything in order, so that if he ever got out of here and was on the run, he could count them in reverse: pineapple field, banana grove, tomato field, factory. By the burning white moon he saw fields with wooden stumps like unfinished crosses, then a Calvary Chapel, then a clap-board Highway Church of God. Go left at the Highway Church, he thought, as they turned right. Everything was information, everything a straw to clutch as he fought to stay afloat.
A circle of natives sat in the road, drinking from brown bottles. The driver maneuvered respectfully round them, his gloved hand lifted in a calm salute. The Toyota bumped over a plank bridge, and Jonathan saw the moon hanging to his right, with the north star straight above it. He saw flame-of-the-woods and hibiscus and, with the lucidity that was on him, remembered reading that the hummingbird drank from the back of the hibiscus, not the center. But then he couldn’t remember whether this made the bird remarkable or the plant.
They passed between two gateposts that reminded him of Italian villas on Lake Como. Beside the gates stood a white bungalow with barred windows and security lights, and Jonathan took this to be a gatehouse of some kind, because the jeep slowed to a crawl as the gates appeared, and two black guards made a leisurely inspection of its occupants.
“This the one the Major say comin’?”
“What do you think he is?” Frisky asked. “A fucking Arab stallion?”
“Just askin’, man. Ain’t no cause for perturbation. What they do to his face, man?”
“Styled it,” said Frisky.
From the gates to the main house was four minutes by Frisky’s watch at around ten miles an hour for the speed bumps, and the Toyota seemed to move in a left-handed arc with sweet-smelling water to the le
ft, so Jonathan reckoned a curved driveway about 1.5 kilometers long skirting the shore of a man-made lake or lagoon. As they drove he kept seeing distant lights between the trees and guessed a perimeter fence with halogen lamps, like Ireland. Once he heard the flutter of a horse’s feet scampering beside them in the dark.
The Toyota rounded another turn, and he saw the floodlit facade of a Palladian palace, with a central cupola and a triangular pediment supported by four tall pillars. The cupola had round dormer windows like portholes lit from within, and a small tower that shone like a white shrine in the moonlight. On the top of the tower stood a weather vane, with two coursing dogs pursuing a spotlit gold arrow. The bill for the house is twelve million pounds and more to come, Burr had said. Contents insured for another seven, fire only. The Roper doesn’t reckon on being robbed.
The palace stood on a grass mound that must have been shaped for it. There was a gravel sweep with a lily pond and a marble fountain, and a hooped marble stairway with a balustrade rising from the sweep to a high entrance with iron lanterns. The lanterns were lit and the fountain was playing; the double doors were made of glass. Through them Jonathan glimpsed a manservant in a white tunic standing under a chandelier in the hall. The jeep kept going across the gravel, through a cobbled stableyard that smelled of warm horses, past a spinney of eucalyptus trees and a floodlit swimming pool with a kids’ end with a slide, and two floodlit clay tennis courts, and a croquet lawn and a putting green, between a second pair of gateposts, less imposing but prettier than the first, to stop before a redwood door.
And there Jonathan had to close his eyes because his head was splitting and the pain in his groin was driving him nearly mad. Besides, it was time that he played dead again.