“Yes, it’s me,” he replied quietly into the red receiver. “And you’re you, by the sound of you. How’ve you been?”
As he spoke, his spare hand slowly rose above his head until the whole arm was stretched toward the shut-off sky. All was forgiven. God was in His heaven. Jonathan was calling his controller on his magic box.
“They won’t have me,” Palfrey told Goodhew with satisfaction, as they rode round Battersea in a taxi. Goodhew had picked him up at the Festival Hall. We’ll have to make it quick, Palfrey had said.
“Who won’t?”
“Darker’s new committee. They’ve invented a code name for themselves. Flagship. You have to be on their list, otherwise you’re not Flagship cleared.”
“So who is on the list?”
“Not known. They’re color-coded.”
“Meaning?”
“They’re identified by an electronic band printed into their office passes. There’s a Flagship reading room. They go there, they shove their passes into a machine, the door opens. They go in, it shuts. They sit down, read the stuff, have a meeting. The door opens, and they come out.”
“What do they read?”
“The developments. The game plan.”
“Where’s the reading room?”
“Away from the building. Far from prying eyes. Rented. They pay cash. No receipts. Probably the upstairs of a bank. Darker loves banks.” He kept talking, anxious to unload and go. “If you’re Flagship cleared, you’re a Mariner. There’s a new insider-speak based on sea lore. If something’s a bit wet for circulation, that means it ought to be Flagship classified. Or it’s too nautical for non-Mariners. Or somebody’s a dry bob, not a wet bob. They’ve got a kind of outer rampart of code names to protect the inner bailey.”
“Are all the Mariners members of the River House?”
“Purists, bankers, civil servants, couple of MPs, couple of makers.”
“Makers?”
“Manufacturers. Arms makers. For Christ’s sake, Rex!”
“Are the makers British?”
“Near enough.”
“Are they American? Are there American Mariners, Harry? Is there an American Flagship? Is there an equivalent over there?”
“Pass.”
“Can you give me one name, Harry? Just one way into this?” But Palfrey was too busy, too pressed, too late. He hopped onto the curb, then ducked back into the cab to grab his umbrella.
“Ask your master,” he whispered. But so softly that Goodhew in his deafness was not absolutely sure.
17
There was Crystalside and there was Townside, and though the two were separated by a mere half-mile as the frigate bird flew, they could have been different islands, because between them sat the hillock proudly called Miss Mabel Mountain, the highest point of all the islands far around, which wasn’t saying much, with an apron of haze hoisted round her midriff, and the broken-down slave houses at her feet, and her forest where shafts of sun shone like daylight through a broken roof.
Crystalside was meadowed as an English shire, with clusters of umbrella trees that from a distance could have been oak, and English cattle fences, and English ha-has, and vistas of the sea between soft English hilltops artfully landscaped by Roper’s tractors.
But Townside was dour and blowy like Scotland with the lights on, with scraggy goat fields on the slant, and tin shops, and a cricket field of blown red dust, with a tin pavilion, and a prevailing easterly that flicked the water in Carnation Bay.
And around Carnation Bay, in a crescent of pastel-painted cottages, each with its front garden and steps leading to the beach, Roper accommodated his white staff. Of these cottages, Woody’s House was unquestionably the most desirable, by virtue of its stylishly fretted balcony and its unspoiled view of Miss Mabel Island in the middle of the bay.
Who Miss Mabel was, God alone knew, though she had left her name on a presumptuous hillock, an uninhabited island, on a defunct bee farm, an abortive cotton industry and a type of lace doily nobody knew how to make anymore. “Some fine old lady from slavin’ times,” said the natives shyly when the close observer asked. “Best let her memory sleep.”
But everyone knew who Woody was. He was Mr. Woodman from England, a predecessor of Major Corkoran from way back, who had come with the first wave when Mr. Roper bought the island, a charming friendly man to the natives till the day the Chief ordered him locked up in his house while the protection asked him certain questions and accountants from Nassau went through the books, tracing Woody’s rackets. The whole island was holding its breath by then, because one way or another the whole island had been a partner in Woody’s operations. Finally, after a week of waiting, two of the protection drove Woody up Miss Mabel Mountain to the airstrip and Woody needed both of them because he couldn’t walk well. To be exact, his own mother could have been forgiven for stepping over him on the pavement without recognizing her little boy from England. And Woody’s House with its fretted balcony and fine view of the bay had stayed empty ever since, as a warning to everyone on the island that while the Chief was a generous employer and landlord and a fine Christian man to the virtuous, not to mention donor and life chairman of the Townside Cricket Club and the Townside Boys Club and the Townside Steel Band, he could also be relied upon to beat the living shit out of anybody who ripped him off.
The combined role of savior, escaped murderer, convalescent house-guest, Sophie’s avenger and Burr’s spy is not an easy one to master with aplomb, yet Jonathan with his limitless adaptability assumed it with seeming ease.
You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself.
Each morning after an early jog and swim, he put on a T-shirt and sneakers and a pair of slacks and set off to make his ten o’clock appearance at Crystal. The walk from Townside to Crystalside took him barely ten minutes, yet each time he made it, it was Jonathan who set out and Thomas who arrived. The route led him along a bridle path cut in Miss Mabel’s lower slopes, one of half a dozen Roper kept open through the woods. But for most of the year it was a tunnel because of the overhanging trees. A single rain shower left it pattering and dripping for days.
And sometimes, if his intuition had guided him correctly, he would meet Jed on her Arab mare, Sarah, returning from her morning ride in the company of Daniel and Claud the Polish stablemaster and maybe a couple of houseguests. First he would hear the sound of hooves and voices from higher in the woods. Then he would hold his breath as the party trekked down the zigzag path until it appeared at the opening to the tunnel, where the horses broke into a homebound trot, the equestrienne leading and Claud bringing up the rear, and Jed’s flying hair turning red and gold in the light patches and making an absurdly beautiful match with Sarah’s blond mane.
“Gosh, Thomas, isn’t it absolutely gorgeous?” Jonathan agrees it is. “Oh, Thomas, Dans was pestering about whether you’d take him sailing today—he’s so spoilt. . . . Oh, will you really?” She sounds almost despairing. “But you spent the whole of yesterday afternoon teaching him how to paint! You’re a darling. Shall I tell him three o’clock?”
Take it down, he wanted to tell her, as a friend. You’ve got the part, so stop overacting and be real. All the same, as Sophie would say, she had touched him with her eyes.
And other times, if he took an early run along the shore, he might chance to meet Roper in shorts, plowing barefoot through the wet sand at the edge of the surf, sometimes jogging, sometimes walking, sometimes pausing to face the sun and do a few exercises, but all with the mastery he brought to everything: this is my water, my island, my sand, my speed.
“Morning! Marvelous day,” he would call, if he was of a mood to play. “Run? Swim? Come on. Do you good.”
So they would run, and swim in parallel for a while, talking sporadically till Roper would suddenly wade ashore, collect his towel and, without a word or backward glance, stride off in the direction of Crystal.
“Of every tree you may
freely eat,” Corkoran told Jonathan as they sat in the garden of Woody’s House watching Miss Mabel Island darken with the sunset. “The serving wenches, parlor maids, cooks, typists, masseuses, the lady who comes to dip the parrot’s claws, even the guests, are yours for the discreet plucking. But if you ever try to lay so much as a you-know-what on Our Lady of Crystal, he’ll kill you. So will I. Just for deep background, old love. No offense.”
“Well, thanks, Corky,” said Jonathan, making a joke of it. “Thanks very much indeed. Having you and Roper baying for my blood would just about complete my luck. Where did he find her, anyway?” he asked, fetching more beer.
“Legend has it, at a French horse sale.”
So that’s how it’s done, thought Jonathan. You go to France, buy a horse and come away with a convent girl called Jed. Easy.
“Who did he have before?” he asked.
But Corkoran’s gaze was fixed on the pale horizon. “Do you know,” he complained in frustrated marvel, “we tracked down the captain of the Star of Bethel and even he can’t prove you’re lying in your fucking teeth?”
Corkoran’s warning is a waste of breath. The close observer has no protection from her. He can watch her with his eyes shut. He can watch her in the candlelit bowl of a silver spoon by Bulgari of Rome, or in the silver candlesticks by Paul de Lamarie that must appear on the Roper dinner table whenever he comes back from selling farms, or in the gilt mirrors of Jonathan’s own imagination. Despising himself, he explores her night and day for confirmation of her awfulness. He is repelled by her and therefore drawn to her. He is punishing her for her power over him—and punishing himself for giving way to it. You’re a hotel girl! he yells at her. People buy space in you, pay you and check out! Yet at the same time he is consumed by her. Her very shadow taunts him as she saunters half-naked across the blushing marble floors of Crystal on her way to swim, sunbathe, caress oil onto her skin, turn crookedly onto her hip, her other hip and then onto her belly, while she chats with her visiting friend Caroline Langbourne or gorges herself on her escapist bibles: Vogue, Tatler, Marie-Claire or the Daily Express, three days old. And her jester Corkoran in his Panama hat and rolled-up trousers, sitting ten feet from her, drinking Pimm’s.
“Why doesn’t Roper take you with him anymore, Corks?” she asks lazily over her magazine in one of the dozen voices Jonathan has noted down for permanent destruction. “He always used to.” She turns a page. “Caro, can you imagine anything more awful than being the mistress of a Tory minister?”
“I suppose there’s always a Labor minister,” suggests Caroline, who is plain and too intelligent for leisure.
And Jed’s laugh: the choking, feral laugh from deep inside her, which closes her eyes and splits her face in impish pleasure, even when everything else about her is trying its damnedest to be a lady.
Sophie was a whore too, he thought dismally. The difference was, she knew it.
He watched her as she rinsed her feet under the electronically controlled tap, first stepping back, then lifting one painted toe to produce a jet, then shifting to the other foot and the other perfect haunch. Then, without a glance for anyone, walking to the poolside and diving in. He watched her dive, over and again. In his sleep he replayed the slow-drawn act of levitation as her body rose without movement and, everything in line, tilted itself into the water with a splash no louder than a sigh.
“Oh, do come on in, Caro. It’s divine.”
He watched her in all her moods and varieties: Jed the clown, gangly-bodied, legs splayed, cursing and laughing her way round the croquet lawn; Jed the chatelaine of Crystal, radiant at her own dinner table, enchanting a trio of fat-necked bankers from the City with her deafening Shropshire small talk, never a cliché out of place.
“But I mean, isn’t it simply heartbreaking living in Hong Kong and knowing that absolutely everything one’s doing for them, all the super buildings and shops and airports and everything, are just going to be gobbled up by the beastly Chinese? And what about the horse racing? What’s going to happen to that? And the horses? I mean, honestly.”
Or Jed being too young, catching a cautionary glance from Roper and putting a hand to her mouth and saying, “Down!” Or Jed when the party ends and the last of the bankers has waddled off to bed, climbing the great staircase with her head on Roper’s shoulder and her hand on his bottom.
“Weren’t we absolutely gorgeous?” she says.
“Marvelous evening, Jeds. Lot of fun.”
“And weren’t they bores?” she says with a great yawn. “God, I do miss school sometimes. I’m so tired of being a grownup. Night, Thomas.”
“Good night, Jed. Good night, Chief.”
It is a quiet family evening at Crystal. Roper likes a fire. So do six King Charles spaniels who lie in a floppy heap before it. Danby and MacArthur have flown in from Nassau to talk business, dine and leave at dawn tomorrow. Jed perches on a stool at Roper’s feet, armed with pen and paper and the circular gold-rimmed spectacles Jonathan swears she doesn’t need.
“Darling, do we have to have that slimy Greek again, with his dago Minnie Mouse?” she asks, objecting to the inclusion of Dr. Paul Apostoll and his inamorata among the guests for the Iron Pasha’s winter cruise.
“Apostoll? El Apetito?” Roper replies in puzzlement. “Of course we do. Apo’s serious business.”
“They’re not even Greeks, did you know that, Thomas? Greeks aren’t. They’re jumped-up Turks and Arabs and things. All the decent Greeks got wiped out yonks ago. Well, they can bloody well have the Peach Suite and put up with a shower.”
Roper disagrees. “No, they can’t. They get the Blue Suite and the Jacuzzi, or Apo will sulk. He likes to soap her.”
“He can soap her in the shower,” says Jed, affecting to show fight.
“No, he can’t. He’s not tall enough,” says Roper, and they all laugh uproariously because it is the Chief’s joke.
“Hasn’t old Apo taken the veil or something?” Corkoran asks, looking up from an enormous Scotch. “I thought he gave up nooky after his daughter topped herself.”
“That was just for Lent,” says Jed.
Her wit and bad language have a hypnotic draw. There is something irresistibly funny to everyone, including herself, about her convent-educated English voice enunciating the vocabulary of a navvy.
“Darling, do we actually give a fart about the Donahues? Jenny was pissed as a rat from the moment she came aboard, and Archie behaved like a total turd.”
Jonathan caught her eye and held it with deliberate lack of interest. Jed raised her eyebrows and returned his stare, as if to say, Who the hell are you? Jonathan returned her question at double strength: Who do you think you’re being tonight? I’m Thomas. Who the hell are you?
He watched her in fragments forced upon him. To the naked breast that she had carelessly granted him in Zurich he added a chance view of her entire upper body in her bedroom mirror while she was changing after riding. She had her arms raised and her hands folded behind her neck, and she was performing some sinuous exercise that she must have read about in one of her magazines. As to Jonathan, he had done absolutely everything in order not to look in the direction of her windows. But she did it every afternoon, and there are only so many times that a close observer can force himself to look away.
He knew the balance of her long legs, the satin planes of her back, the surprising sharpness of her athletic shoulders, which were the tomboy bits of her. He knew the white underneath to her arms and the flow of her hips as she rode.
And there was an episode that Jonathan scarcely dared remember when, thinking he was Roper, she called out to him, “Hand me the bloody bath towel quick.” And since he was passing their bedroom on his way back from reading Kipling’s Just So Stories to Daniel, and since the bedroom door was ajar, and since she had not mentioned Roper by name and he honestly believed, or nearly so, that she was calling him, and since Roper’s inner office on the other side of the bedroom was the constant target of the
close observer’s professional curiosity, he softly touched the door and made as if to enter, and stopped four feet from the peerless rear view of her naked body as she stood clutching a facecloth to her eye and cursing while she tried to rub away the soap. Heart thumping, Jonathan made his escape, and first thing next morning, uncaching his magic box, he spoke for ten excited minutes to Burr without once mentioning her:
“There’s the bedroom, there’s his dressing room and then on the other side of the dressing room there’s his little office. He keeps his private papers there, I’m sure he does.”
Burr took fright at once. Perhaps, even at this early stage, he had an intimation of disaster. “Stay away from it. Too bloody dangerous. Join first, spy later. That’s an order.”
“Comfortable, are you?” Roper asked Jonathan, on one of their jogs along the beach in the company of several spaniels. “Getting your health back? No cockroaches? Get down, Trudy, you silly tart! Hear young Dans did a decent sail yesterday.”
“Yes, he really put his heart into it.”
“You’re not one of these left-wing chaps, are you? Corky thought you might be a pink ’un.”
“Good Lord no. It’s never crossed my mind.”
Roper seemed not to hear. “World’s run by fear, you see. Can’t sell pipe dreams, can’t rule with charity, no good at all. Not in the real world. With me?” But he didn’t wait to discover whether Jonathan was with him or not. “Promise to build a chap a house, he won’t believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he’ll do what you tell him. Fact of life.” He paused to double-mark time. “If a bunch of chaps want to make war, they’re not going to listen to a lot of wet-eared abolitionists. If they don’t, doesn’t matter whether they’ve got crossbows or Stingers. Fact of life. Sorry if it bothers you.”
“It doesn’t. Why should it?”
“Told Corky he was full of shit. Nose out of joint, that’s his trouble.