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 realized 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 labor of it, and let Jonathan help him out of his coat. They walked together to the parlor, 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 watercolor.
“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. Gray 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 tail-lights 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’s 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.”
9
It is Mother’s day as Jonathan walks into Espérance. 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 À TOUTES LES MAMANS and VASTE BUFFET CHINOIS DES MÈRES. 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 bopping 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 w
est in stodgy Ontario, higher than Val-d’Or or Amos to the east, higher by a mile than the dreary white-collar settlements of hydroelectric 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 Bébé with its pink giraffes, the pizza cafés 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 color and persuasion, the jewelry 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-érotiques 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 Espérance the girls stand out like parakeets. The matrons of stodgy Ontario next door may dress themselves like sofas at a funeral, but here in Espérance the hot-blooded Québecois make a carnival every day, in radiant cottons and gold bracelets that smile at you across the street.
There are no trees in Espérance. With forests all around, the townspeople see open space as an accomplishment. And there are no Indians in Espérance, 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 supermarché. One of them stays aboard the truck to guard it, while the rest hang close.
There are no vulgar emblems of wealth in the town either, if you discount the seventy-five-thousand-dollar power yachts in the parking lot beside the Château Babette’s kitchens, or the herds of Harley-Davidson motorcycles clustered round the Bonnie and Clyde Saloon. Canadians—French or any other sort—don’t care for display, whether of money or emotion. Fortunes are still made, of course, by those who strike it lucky. And luck is the real religion of the town. Everyone dreams of a gold mine in his garden, and a couple of the lucky ones have found just that. Those men in base-ball hats and sneakers and bomber jackets who stand about talking into mobile phones: in other towns they would be drug pushers or numbers boys or pimps, but here in Espérance they are the quiet millionaires of thirty. As to the older ones, they eat their lunches out of tin boxes a mile below ground.
Jonathan devours all this in the first minutes of his arrival. In his state of bright-eyed exhaustion, he takes in everything at once, while his heart bursts with the gratitude of a voyager setting foot on the promised shore. It’s beautiful. I worked for it. It’s mine.
He had ridden out of the Lanyon at daybreak without looking back, and headed for Bristol for his week of lying low. He had parked his motorbike in a run-down suburb where Rooke had promised to have it stolen, he had taken a bus to Avonmouth, where he found a seamen’s hostel run by two elderly Irish homosexuals who, according to Rooke, were famous for not collaborating with the police. It rained all day and night, and on the third day, while Jonathan was eating breakfast, he heard his name and description on the local radio: last seen West Cornwall area, injured right hand, ring this number. While he listened he saw the two Irishmen listening too, their eyes fixed on one another. He paid his bill and took the bus back to Bristol.
Vile cloud rolled over the wrecked industrial landscape. Hand in pocket—he had reduced the dressing to a simple adhesive bandage—he walked the damp streets. Seated in a barber’s chair, he glimpsed his picture on the back of someone’s evening paper, the photograph that Burr’s people had taken of him in London: a likeness deliberately unlike, but still a likeness. He became a ghost, haunting a ghost town. In the cafés and billiard halls he was too white and separate, in the smarter streets too ragged. The churches, when he tried to enter them, were locked. His face when he checked it in mirrors scared him with its hostile intensity. Jumbo’s faked death was like a goad to him. Visions of his supposed victim unmurdered and unhunted, carousing serenely in some secret haven, taunted him at all odd moments.Nevertheless, in his other persona, he determinedly shouldered the guilt of his imaginary crime. He bought a pair of leather gloves and threw away his bandage. To buy his air ticket he spent a morning inspecting travel agents before he chose the busiest and most anonymous. He paid in cash and made the booking for two days later, in the name of Fine. Then he rook the bus to the airport and changed his booking to the flight that same evening. There was one seat left. At the departure gate a girl in mulberry uniform asked to see his passport. He pulled off a glove and gave it to her with his good hand.
“Are you Pine or Fine, then?” she demanded
“Whichever you prefer,” he assured her, with a flash of the old hotelier’s smile, and she grudgingly waved him through—or had Rooke squared them?
When he reached Paris he dared not risk the barrier at Orly, so he sat up in the transit area all night. In the morning he took a flight to Lisbon, this time in the name of Dine, for on Rooke’s advice he was trying to stay one jump ahead of the computer. In Lisbon he again made for the docks and again lay low.
“She’s called the Star of Bethel, and she’s a pig,” Rooke had said. “But the skipper’s venal, which is what you re looking for.”
He saw a half-bearded man trailing from one shipping office to another in the rain, and the man was himself. He saw the same man pay a girl for a night’s lodging, then sleep on her floor while she lay on her bed and whimpered because she was afraid of him. Would she be less afraid of me if I slept with her? He didn’t stay to find out but, leaving her before dawn, walked the docks once more and came upon the Star of Bethel moored in the outer harbor, a filthy, twelve-thousand-ton coaling vessel bound for Pugwash, Nova Scotia. But when he asked at the shipping agent’s, they said she had a full complement and was sailing on the night tide. Jonathan bribed his way aboard. Was the captain expecting him? Jonathan believed he was.
“What can you do, son?” the captain asked. He was a big, soft-spoken Scot of forty. Behind him stood a barefoot Filipino girl of seventeen.
“Cook,” said Jonathan, and the captain laughed in his face but took him as a supernumerary on condition he worked his passage and the captain pocketed his pay.
Now he was a galley slave, sleeping in the worst bunk and receiving the insults of the crew. The official cook was an emaciated Lascar, half dead from heroin, and soon Jonathan was doing duty for them both. In his few hours of sleep he dreamed the lush dreams of prisoners, and it was Jed without her Meister’s bathrobe who played the leading role. Then a sunny morning dawned and the crew were patting him on the back and saying they had never been better fed at sea. But Jonathan would not go ashore with them. Equipped with rations he had set aside, the close observer preferred to make himself a hideaway in the forward hold and lie up for two more nights before sneaking past the dock police.
Alone in an immense and unfamiliar continent, Jonathan was assailed by a different kind of deprivation. His resolve seemed suddenly to drain into the brilliant thinness of the landscape. Roper is an abstraction, so is Jed and so am I. I am dead and this is my afterlife. Trekking along the edge of the uncaring highway, sleeping in drivers’ dormitories and barns, scrounging a day’s pay for two days’ labor, Jonathan prayed to be given back his sense of calling.
“Your best bet is the Château Babette,” Rooke had said. “It’s big and sloppy, and it’s run by a harridan who can’t keep staff. It’s
where you’d naturally hole out.”
“It’s the ideal place for you to start looking for your shadow,” Burr had said.
Shadow meaning identity. Shadow meaning substance, in a world where Jonathan had become a ghost.
The Château Babette roosted like a tattered old hen amid the razzmatazz of the Avenue des Artisans. She was the Meister’s of the town. Jonathan spotted her at once from Rooke’s description, and as he approached her he remained on the opposite pavement so that he could take a better look at her. She was tall and timbered and decrepit and, for a former whorehouse, stern. A stone urn stood at each corner of her hideous porch. Flaking naked maidens cavorted on them in a woodland setting. Her hallowed name was blazoned vertically on a rotting wooden board, and as Jonathan started across the road, a sharp east wind made it clatter like a railway train, filling his eyes with grit and his nostrils with smells of frites and hairspray.
Striding up the steps, he confidently pushed the ancient swing doors and entered the darkness of a tomb. From far away, as it seemed to him at first, he heard male laughter and caught the stink of last night’s dinner. Gradually he made out an embossed copper postbox, then a grandfather clock with flowers on its face that reminded him of the Lanyon, then a reception desk littered with correspondence and coffee mugs and illuminated by a canopy of fairy lights. The shapes of men surrounded him, and it was they who were doing the laughing. His arrival had evidently coincided with that of a bunch of raunchy surveyors from Quebec, who were looking for a little action before taking off next day for a mine up north. Their suitcases and kit bags were flung in a heap at the foot of a wide staircase. Two Slavic-looking boys in earrings and green aprons picked sullenly among the labels.
“Et vous, monsieur, vous êtes qui?” a woman’s voice yelled at him above the hubbub.
The Night Manager Page 15
