Frisky the blazer has stationed himself at a telephone in the landing and is murmuring orders to someone he disdains. Major Corkoran, armed with a fresh cigarette but minus his camel hair, is in the dining room, talking slow French on another line for the benefit of somebody whose French is worse than his. His cheeks are fluid as a baby’s, the dabs of color very high. And his French is French French, no question. He has slipped into it as naturally as if it were his mother tongue, which perhaps it is, for nothing about Corkoran suggests an uncomplicated provenance.
Elsewhere in the suite, other lives and conversations are unfolding. The tall man with the ponytail is called Sandy, we learn, and Sandy is talking English on another telephone to somebody in Prague called Gregory, while Mrs. Sandy sits in a chair with her overcoat on, glowering at the wall. But Jonathan has banished these secondary players from his immediate consciousness. They exist, they are elegant, they revolve in their far periphery around the central light of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper of Nassau, the Bahamas. But they are chorus. Jonathan’s guided tour of the splendors of the palace is complete. It is time he took his leave. A graceful wave of the hand, an endearing exhortation—“Please to be sure to enjoy every bit of it”—and in the normal way he would have descended smoothly to ground level, leaving his wards to enjoy their pleasures by themselves as best they could at fifteen thousand francs a night including tax, service and continental breakfast.
But tonight is not the normal way, tonight is Roper’s night, it is Sophie’s night, and Sophie in some bizarre way is played for us tonight by Roper’s woman, whose name to everyone but Roper turns out to be not Jeds but Jed—Mr. Onslow Roper likes to multiply his assets. The snow is still falling and the worst man in the world is drawn toward it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes. He stands cavalry-backed at the center of the room, facing the French windows and the snow-clad balcony. He holds a green Sotheby’s catalogue open before him like a hymnal from which he is about to sing, and his other arm is raised to bring in some silent instrument from the edge of the orchestra. He sports a learned judge’s half-lens reading spectacles.
“Soldier Boris and his chum say okay Monday lunchtime,” Corkoran calls from the dining room. “Okay Monday lunchtime?”
“Fix,” says Roper, turning a page of the catalogue and watching the snow over his spectacles at the same time. “Look at that. Glimpse of the infinite.”
“I adore it every time it happens,” says Jonathan earnestly.
“Your friend Appetites from Miami says why not make it the Kronenhalle—food’s better.” Corkoran again.
“Too public. Lunch here or bring his sandwiches. Sandy, what does a decent Stubbs horse make these days?”
The pretty male head with the ponytail pokes round the door. “Size?”
“Thirty by fifty inches.”
The pretty face barely puckers. “There was a good’un went at Sotheby’s last June. Protector in a Landscape. Signed and dated 1779. A lulu.”
“Quanta costa?”
“You sitting comfortably?”
Come off it, Sands!”
“A million two. Plus commish.”
“Pounds or bucks?”
“Bucks.”
From the opposite doorway, Major Corkoran is complaining. “The Brussels boys want half in cash, Chief. Bloody liberty, if you ask me.”
“Tell ’em you won’t sign,” Roper retorts, with an extra gruffness that he apparently uses for keeping Corkoran at arm’s length. “That a hotel up there, Pine?”
Roper’s gaze is fixed on the black windowpanes where the childhood snowflakes pursue their dance.
“A beacon, actually, Mr. Roper. Some sort of navigational aid, I gather.”
Herr Meister’s treasured ormolu dock is chiming the hour, but Jonathan for all his customary nimbleness is unable to move his feet in the direction of escape. His patent evening shoes remain embedded in the deep pile of the drawing room carpet as solidly as if they were set in cement. His mild gaze, so at odds with the pugilistic brow, remains fixed on Roper’s back. But Jonathan sees him in only a part of his mind. Otherwise he is not in the Tower Suite at all but in Sophie’s penthouse apartment at the top of the Queen Nefertiti Hotel in Cairo.
Sophie too has her back to him, and it is as beautiful as he always knew it was, white against the whiteness of her evening gown. She is gazing, not at the snow, but at the huge wet stars of the Cairene night, at the quarter-moon that hangs from its points above the soundless city. The doors to her roof garden are open; she grows nothing but white flowers—oleander, bougainvillea, agapanthus. The scent of Arabian jasmine drifts past her into the room. A bottle of vodka stands beside her on a table, and it is definitely half empty, not half full.
“You rang,” Jonathan reminded her with a smile in his voice, playing the humble servant. Perhaps this is our night, he was thinking.
“Yes, I rang. And you answered. You are kind. I am sure you are always kind.”
He knew at once that it was not their night.
“I need to ask you a question,” she said. “Will you answer it truthfully?”
“If I can. Of course.”
“You mean there could be circumstances in which you would not?”
“I mean I might not know the answer.”
“Oh, you will know the answer. Where are the papers that I entrusted to your care?”
“In the safe. In their envelope. With my name on it.”
“Has anybody seen them except myself?”
“The safe is used by several members of the staff, mostly for storing cash until it goes to the bank. So far as I know, the envelope is still sealed.”
She allowed her shoulders to slump in a gesture of impatience but did not turn her head. “Did you show them to anyone? Yes or no, please. I am not judgmental. I came to you on an impulse. It would not be your fault if I made a mistake. I had some sentimental vision of you as a clean Englishman.”
So did I, thought Jonathan. Yet it did not occur to him that he had a choice. In the world that mysteriously owned his allegiance, there was only one answer to her question.
“No,” he said. And he said again, “No; no one.”
“If you tell me it is the truth, I shall believe you. I wish very much to believe there is one last gentleman on earth.”
“It’s the truth. I gave you my word. No.”
Again she seemed to disregard his denial or find it premature. “Freddie insists I have betrayed him. He entrusted the papers to my care. He did not want them kept in his office or at home. Dicky Roper is encouraging Freddie in his suspicions of me.”
“Why should he do that?”
“Roper is the other party to the correspondence. Until today, Roper and Freddie Hamid were proposing to become business partners. I was present at some of their discussions on Roper’s yacht. Roper was not comfortable to have me as a witness, but since Freddie insisted on showing me off to him, he had no choice.”
She seemed to expect him to speak but he kept his silence.
“Freddie visited me this evening. It was later than his usual hour. When he is in town, it is his custom to visit me before dinner. He uses the car park lift, out of respect for his wife, he stays two hours, then he returns to dine in the bosom of his family. It is my somewhat pathetic boast that I have helped to keep his marriage intact. Tonight he was late. He had been talking on the telephone. It appears that Roper has received a warning.”
“A warning from whom?”
“From good friends in London.” A spurt of bitterness. “Good for Roper. That is understood.”
“Saying what?”
“Saying that his business arrangements with Freddie are known to the authorities. Roper was careful on the telephone, saying only that he had counted on Freddie’s discretion. Freddie’s brothers were not so delicate. Freddie had not informed them of the deal. He was wishing to prove himself to them. He had gone so far as to set aside a fleet of Hamid trucks under a pretext in order
to transport the merchandise through Jordan. His brothers were not pleased about that either. Now, because Freddie is frightened, he has told them everything. He is also furious to be losing the esteem of his precious Mr. Roper. So no?” she rehearsed, still staring into the night. “Definitely no. Mr. Pine has no suggestions about how this information could have reached London or come to the ears of Mr. Roper’s friends. The safe, the papers—he has no suggestions.”
“No. He hasn’t. I’m sorry.”
Until then she had not looked at him. Now at last she turned and let him see her face. One eye was closed entirely. Both sides were bloated out of recognition.
“I would like you to take me for a drive, please, Mr. Pine. Freddie is not rational when his pride is threatened.”
No time has passed. Roper is still absorbed in the Sotheby’s catalogue. Nobody has smashed his face into a pulp. The ormolu clock is still chiming the hour. Absurdly Jonathan checks its accuracy against his wristwatch and, finding himself able to move his feet at last, opens the glass and advances the large hand until the two agree. Run for cover, he tells himself. Flatten. The invisible radio is playing Alfred Brendel playing Mozart. Offstage, Corkoran is once more talking, this time in Italian, which is less assured than his French.
But Jonathan cannot run for cover. The enraging woman is coming down the ornamental staircase. He does not hear her at first, because she is barefooted and dressed in Herr Meister’s complimentary bathrobe, and when he does, he can hardly bear to look at her. Her long legs are baby pink from the bath, her chestnut hair is brushed out like a good girl’s over her shoulders. A smell of warm mousse de bain has replaced the Commemoration Day carnations. Jonathan is nearly ill with desire.
“And for additional refreshment, allow me to recommend your private bar,” he advises Roper’s back. “Malt whiskey personally selected by Herr Meister, the vodkas of six nations.” What else? “Oh, and twenty-four-hour room service for you and yours, naturally.”
“Well, I’m ravenous,” says the girl, refusing to be ignored.
Jonathan allows her his hotelier’s passionless smile. “Well now, do please ask them for anything you want. The menu is merely a compass, and they adore being made to work.” He returns to Roper, and a devil drives him one step farther. “And English-language cable news in case you want to watch the war. Just touch the green knob on the little box, then nine.”
“Been there. Seen the movie, thanks. Know anything about statuary?”
“Not much.”
“Me neither. Makes two of us. Hullo, darling. Good bath?”
“Gorgeous.”
Crossing the room to a low armchair, the woman Jed folds herself into it, picks up the room service menu and pulls on a pair of completely circular, very small and, Jonathan is angrily convinced, totally unnecessary gold-framed reading spectacles. Sophie would have worn them in her hair. Brendel’s perfect river has reached the sea. The hidden quadraphonic radio is announcing that Fischer-Dieskau will sing a selection of songs by Schubert. Roper’s shoulder is nudging against him. Out of focus, Jed crosses her baby-pink legs and absentmindedly pulls the skirt of her bathrobe over them while she continues to study the menu. Whore! screams a voice inside Jonathan. Tramp! Angel! Why am I suddenly prey to these adolescent fantasies? Roper’s sculpted index finger is resting on a full-page illustration.
Lot 236, Venus and Adonis in marble, seventy inches high excluding pediment. Venus with her fingers touching Adonis’s face in adoration, contemporary copy of Canova, unsigned, original at the Villa La Grange, Geneva, estimated price £60,000–£100,000.
A fifty-year-old Apollo wishes to buy Venus and Adonis.
“What’s roasty, anyway?” says Jed.
“I think you’re looking at rösti,” Jonathan replies in a tone laced with superior knowledge. “It’s a Swiss potato delicacy. Sort of bubble and squeak without the squeak, made with lots of butter and fried. If one’s ravenous, perfectly delicious. And they do it awfully well.”
“How do they grab you?” Roper demands. “Likee? No likee? Don’t be lukewarm—no good to anyone. . . . Hash browns, darling; had ’em in Miami. . . . What do you say, Mr. Pine?”
“I think it would rather depend where they were going to live,” Jonathan replies cautiously.
“End of a floral walk. Pergola over the top, view of the sea at the end. West-facing, so you get the sunset.”
“Most beautiful place on earth,” says Jed.
Jonathan is at once furious with her. Why don’t you shut up? Why is your blah-blah voice so near when you are speaking from across the room? Why does she have to interrupt all the time instead of reading the bloody menu?
“Sunshine guaranteed?” asks Jonathan, with his most patronizing smile.
“Three hundred and sixty days a year,” says Jed proudly.
“Go on,” Roper urges. “Not made of glass. What’s your verdict?”
“I’m afraid they’re not me at all,” Jonathan replies tautly, before he has given himself time to think.
Why on earth does he say this? Probably it is Jed’s fault. Jonathan himself would be the last to know. He has no opinion of statues; he has never bought one, sold one, scarcely paused to consider one, unless it was the awful bronze of Earl Haig looking at God through binoculars from the side of the saluting base on one of the parade grounds of his military childhood. All he was trying to do was tell Jed to keep her distance.
Roper’s fine features do not alter, but for a moment Jonathan does wonder whether after all he is made of glass. “You laughing at me, Jemima?” he asks, with a perfectly pleasant smile.
The menu descends, and the puckish, totally undamaged face peers comically over the top of it. “Why on earth should I be?”
“Seem to remember you didn’t much care for them either, when I showed ’em to you in the plane.”
She sets the menu on her lap and with both hands removes her useless glasses. As she does so, the short sleeve of Herr Meister’s bathrobe gapes, and Jonathan to his total outrage is offered a view of one perfect breast, its slightly erect nipple lifted to him by the action of her arms, the upper half golden-lit by the reading lamp above her.
“Darling,” she says sweetly. “That’s utter, total, unadulterated balls. I said her bum was too big. If you like big bums, have her. Your money. Your bum.”
Roper grins, reaches out and grabs hold of the neck of Herr Meister’s complimentary bottle of Dom Pérignon, and wrenches.
“Corky!”
“Right here, Chief!”
The moment’s hesitation. The corrected voice. “Give Danby and MacArthur a bell. Shampoo.”
“Will do, Chief.”
“Sandy! Caroline! Shampoo! Hell are those two? Fighting again. Bores. Give me the queers every time,” he adds, in an aside to Jonathan. “Don’t go, Pine—party’s just warming up. Corks, order up another couple of bottles!”
But Jonathan goes. Somehow semaphoring his regrets, he gains the landing, and as he looks back, Jed is flapping a zany goodbye at him over her champagne glass. He responds with his most glacial smile.
“Night night, old love,” Corkoran murmurs as they brush past each other on their separate ways “Thanks for the tender loving care.”
“Good night, Major.”
Frisky, the ash-blond OBG, has installed himself on a tapestried throne beside the lift and is studying a paperback of Victorian erotica. “Play golf, do we, sweetheart?” he asks as Jonathan flits by.
“No.”
“Me neither”
I shoot the snipe with ease, Fischer-Dieskau is singing. I shoot the snipe with ease.
The half-dozen dinner guests sat bowed over their candlelit tables like worshipers in a cathedral. Jonathan sat among them, basking in a determined euphoria. This is what I live for, he told himself: this half-bottle of Pommard, this foie de veau glacé with vegetables of three colors, this hotel silver with its bruised old face, twinkling wisely up at me from the damask cloth.
Dining alo
ne had always been his particular pleasure, and tonight, in deference to the war’s depletion, Maître Berri had promoted him from his single-seater by the service door to one of the high altars at the window. Gazing down over the snow-clad golf links to the city lights prickling along the lakeside, Jonathan doggedly congratulated himself on the satisfying completeness of his life till now, the early uglinesses he had left behind.
That wasn’t easy for you up there with the egregious Roper, Jonathan my boy, the school’s gray-jawed commandant told his best cadet approvingly. And that Major Corkoran is a real piece of work. So was the girl, in my opinion. Never mind. You were firm, you fought your corner. Well played. And Jonathan actually managed to bestow a congratulatory smile on his reflection in the candlelit window as he recalled his every fawning phrase and lustful thought in the order of its shameful appearance.
Suddenly the foie de veau turned to ash in his mouth and the Pommard tasted of gunmetal. His bowels writhed, his vision blurred. Rising from the table in a flurry, he mumbled something to Maître Berri about a forgotten duty, and made it just in time to the men’s room.
3
Jonathan Pine, orphaned only son of a cancer-ridden German beauty and a British sergeant of infantry killed in one of his country’s many postcolonial wars, graduate of a rainy archipelago of orphanages, foster homes, half-mothers, cadet units and training camps, sometime army wolf-child with a special unit in even rainier Northern Ireland, caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people’s languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination, sat in his sanitary Swiss office behind reception, smoking his third unusual cigarette and pondering the sage words of the hotel’s revered founder that hung framed alongside his imposing sepia photograph.