Finally, like someone who has got his bearings, he straightened himself up and put back his rather wasted shoulders until he resembled an old soldier on Remembrance Day, chose a particularly fast oncoming bus, and threw himself under it. And really on that particular stretch of road, at that time of night, and the streets like a skating rink from the pouring rain, there was absolutely nothing the poor driver could do. And Palfrey would have been the last to blame him.
A will, handwritten but legally phrased, if somewhat battered, was found in Palfrey’s pocket. It forgave all debts and appointed Goodhew his executor.
29
The Iron Pasha, 1,500 tons, 250 feet long, steel-built by Feadship of Holland in 1987 to the specifications of her present owner, interior by Lavinci of Rome, powered by two 2,000-horsepower MWM diesel engines and equipped with Vosper stabilizers, Inmarsat satellite-telecommunications-systems radar, including an anti-collision set and Radar Watch—not to mention fax, telex, a dozen cases of Dom Pérignon and a live holly tree in a tub in anticipation of the Christmas festivities—sailed out of Nelson’s Dockyard, English Harbour, Antigua, the Antilles, on the morning tide, bound for her winter cruise of the Windward and Grenadine islands, and ultimately by way of the islands of Blanquilla, Orchila and Bonaire, for Curaçao.
A smattering of the better names and faces from Antigua’s fashionable St. James’s Club had assembled at the dockside to see her off, and there was much sounding of air horns and ships’ whistles as the ever-popular international entrepreneur Mr. Dicky Onslow Roper and his elegantly attired guests stood astern of the departing vessel, waving their farewells to cries of “God speed” and “Have a simply marvelous time, Dicky, you’ve deserved it” from the shore. Mr. Roper’s personal pennant, portraying a glittering crystal, fluttered from the mainmast. Society-watchers were gratified to observe such familiar favorites of the jet set as Lord (Sandy to his intimates) Langbourne on the arm of his wife, Caroline, thus discounting rumors of a breakup, and the exquisite Miss Jemima (Jed to her friends) Marshall, Mr. Roper’s constant companion since more than a year and renowned hostess of the Roper Xanadu in the Exumas.
The other sixteen guests constituted a carefully selected company of international makers and shakers and included such social heavy-weights as Petros (Patty) Kaloumenos, who had recently attempted to purchase the island of Spétsai from the Greek government, Bunny Saltlake, the American soup heiress, Gerry Sandown, the British racing driver, and his French wife, and the American film producer Marcel Heist, whose own yacht, the Marceline, was presently under construction in Bremerhaven. No children were of the company. Guests who had never sailed on the Pasha before were likely to spend their first days swooning over her luxurious appointments: her eight staterooms, all with king-sized beds, hi-fi, telephone, color television, Redouté prints and historic paneling; her softly lit Edwardian salon in red plush, with antique gaming table and eighteenth-century bronze heads, each in its domed recess of solid walnut; her maple dining room, with sylvan paintings after Watteau; her pool, Jacuzzi and solarium; her Italian afterdeck for informal dining.
Of Mr. Derek Thomas of New Zealand, however, the gossip columnists wrote nothing at all. He featured on no Ironbrand public relations handout. He was not on deck waving to the friends on shore. He was not at dinner, delighting his companions with his sensitive conversation. He was in the Pasha’s nearest thing to Herr Meister’s fine-wine cellar, chained and gagged and lying in the dark, in a bloody solitude relieved by visits from Major Corkoran and his assistants.
The combined strength of the Pasha’s crew and staff was twenty, including captain, mate, engineer, assistant engineer, a chef for the guests and a chef for the crew, a head stewardess and housekeeper, four deckhands and a ship’s purser. The company also included a pilot for the helicopter and another for the seaplane. The security team was augmented by the two German-Argentinians who had flown with Jed and Corkoran from Miami and, like the ship it protected, was lavishly equipped. The tradition of piracy in that region is by no means extinct, and the ship’s arsenal was capable of sustaining a prolonged fire-fight at sea, deterring marauding aircraft or sinking a hostile vessel venturing alongside. It was stored in the forward hold, where the security team also had its quarters, behind a seaproof steel door that in turn was protected by a grille. Was that where Jonathan was being kept? After three days at sea, such was Jed’s distraught conviction. But when she asked Roper he seemed not to hear her, and when she asked Corkoran he threw up his chin and made a stern frown.
“Stormy waters old love,” said Corkoran through set lips. “Be seen not heard, my advice. Bed and board and a low profile. Safer for all. Don’t quote me.”
The transformation she had observed in Corkoran was by now complete. A ratlike intensity had replaced his former sloth. He smiled seldom and issued snappish orders at male members of the crew, whether they were plain or pretty. He had pinned a row of medal ribbons to his mildewed dinner jacket and was given to grandiose soliloquies about world problems whenever Roper was not there to shut him up.
The day of Jed’s arrival in Antigua was the worst in her life. She had had plenty of other worst days till now—her Catholic guilt had supplied her with a whole bunch. There had been the day the mother superior marched into the dormitory and told her to pack her things, her taxi was waiting at the door. That was the same day her father ordered her to go to her bedroom while he took priestly advice on how to handle a sixteen-year-old virgin whore caught stark naked in the potting shed with a village boy doing his unsuccessful best to deflower her. There had been the day in Hammersmith when two boys she had refused to sleep with had got drunk and decided to make common cause, taking it in turns to hold her down while the other raped her. And there had been the too-wild days in Paris before she stepped over the sleeping bodies, straight into Dicky Roper’s arms. But the day she boarded the Pasha in English Harbour, Antigua, had knocked the others off the scoreboard.
On the plane, she had managed to ignore Corkoran’s veiled insults by escaping into her magazines. At Antigua airport he had thrust his hand officiously under her arm, and when she tried to shake free he had clutched her in a clawlike grip while the two blond boys trod on her heels. In the limousine, Corkoran rode up front and the boys sat too close either side of her. And as she climbed the Pasha’s gangway, all three made a phalanx round her, no doubt to demonstrate to Roper—if he was watching—that they were obeying orders. Frog-marched to the door of the state apartments, she was obliged to wait while Corkoran knocked.
“Who is it?” Roper demanded from within.
“A Miss Marshall, Chief. Safe and moderately sound.”
“Show her in, Corks.”
“With luggage, Chief, or was it without?”
“With.”
She stepped inside and saw Roper sitting at the desk with his back to her. And he remained there, still with his back to her, while a steward parked her luggage in the bedroom and withdrew. He was reading something, checking it with a pen as he went along. A contract, a whatever. She waited for him to finish, or put it down and turn to her. Even get up. He didn’t. He reached the end of the page, scribbled something—she thought his initials—then passed the next page and went on reading. It was a thick, typed document, blue, with a red ribbon and a red-ruled margin. There were quite a few pages to go. He’s writing his will, she decided. And to my former mistress Jed I leave absolutely sod all. . . .
He was wearing his navy blue tailored silk dressing gown with rolled collar and crimson piping, and usually, when he put it on, it meant either that they were about to make love, or just had. While he read he occasionally shifted the angle of his shoulders inside it, as if he sensed she was admiring them. He had always been proud of his shoulders. She was still standing. She was six feet from him. She was wearing jeans and a knit vest and several gold necklaces. He liked her to wear gold. The carpet was puce and brand-new. Very expensive, very deep. They had chosen it together from samples, in front of the fire a
t Crystal. Jonathan had lent his advice. This was the first time she had seen it in position.
“Am I disturbing you?” she asked, when he had still not turned his head.
“Hardly at all,” he replied, while his head remained bowed over the papers.
She sat on the edge of a chair, clutching her tapestry bag on her lap. There was such over-control in his body, and such harnessed tension in his voice, that she presumed that at any moment he was going to get up and hit her, probably all in one movement: a spring and a sweeping backhand swipe that would knock her into the middle of next week. She’d once had an Italian boy who’d done that to her as a punishment for being witty. The punch had carried her clean across the room. It should have felled her outright, but her riding balance helped her, and as soon as she had grabbed her things from the bedroom, she let the punch carry her out of the house.
“I told them lobster,” Roper said, as he again initialed something on the document before him. “Reckoned you were owed one after Corky’s little number at Enzo’s. Lobster all right for you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Chaps tell me you’ve been having a bit of a tumble with Brother Thomas. Likee? Real name’s Pine, by the way. Jonathan to you.”
“Where is he?”
“Thought you’d ask that.” Turn a page. Raise an arm. Fuss the half-lens reading glasses. “Been going on long, has it? Quickies in the summerhouse? Knickers off in the woods? Bloody good at it, both of you, I must say. All those staff around. I’m not stupid either. Didn’t spot a thing.”
“If they’re telling you I slept with Jonathan, I didn’t.”
“Nobody said much about sleep.”
“We are not lovers.”
She had said the same to the mother superior, she remembered, but it hadn’t cut much ice. Roper paused at his reading but still didn’t turn his head,
“So what are you?” he asked. “If not lovers, what?”
We’re lovers, she conceded stupidly. It made not one whit of difference whether they were physical lovers or some other kind. Her love for Jonathan and her betrayal of Roper were accomplished facts. The rest, as in the potting shed, was technical.
“Where is he?” she demanded.
Too busy reading. A shift of the shoulders as we amend something with our six-foot-long Mont Blanc.
“Is he on the boat?”
A sculptured stillness now, her father’s pensive silence. But her father was afraid the world was going to the devil and, poor love, hadn’t the least idea how to stop it. Whereas Roper was helping it on its way.
“Says he did it all by himself,” Roper said. “That true? Jed didn’t do any of it. Pine’s the baddie, Pine did it all. Jed’s snow white. Too thick to know what she’s about, anyway. End of statement for the press. All his own work.”
“What work?”
Roper shoved his pen aside and stood, still contriving not to look at her. He crossed the room to the paneled wall and pressed a button. The electric doors of the drinks cupboard rolled back. He opened the refrigerator, fished out a bottle of the Dom, uncorked it and filled himself a glass. Then, as a kind of compromise between looking at her and not, he spoke to her reflection in the minored interior of the cupboard, what he could see of it between a row of wine bottles and the vermouths and Camparis.
“Want some?” he asked, almost tenderly, lifting the bottle of Dom and offering it to her reflection.
“What work? What’s he supposed to have done?”
“Won’t say. Asked him to, but he won’t. What he’s done, who for, who with, why, starting when. Who’s paying him. Nothing. Could save himself a hell of a lot of aggro if he did. Gallant chap. Good choice you made. Congratulations.”
“Why should he have done anything? What are you doing to him? Let him go.”
He turned and walked toward her, looking at her directly at last, with his pale, washed eyes, and this time she was certain he would hit her, because his smile was so unnaturally at ease, his manner of such studied unconcern, that there had to be a different version of him inside. He was still wearing his reading glasses, so he had to lower his head to look at her over the top of them. His smile was sporting, and very close to her.
“Simon-pure, is he, your lover boy? Lily-white, is he? Mister Clean? Utter balls, dear. Only reason I took him in was because some hired lout held a pistol at my boy’s head. You telling me he wasn’t part of the caper? Horseshit, sweetheart, frankly. You find me a saint, I’ll pay the candle. Till then, I’ll keep my money in my pocket.” The chair she had chosen was dangerously low. His knees as he bowed over her were at the level of her jaw. “Been having my thoughts about you, Jeds. Wondering whether you’re quite as dumb as I supposed. Whether you and Pine aren’t in it together. Who picked who up at the horse sale, eh? Eh?” He was tweaking her ear, making a mischievous joke of it. “Bloody clever chaps, women. Clever, clever chaps. Even when they’re pretending they haven’t got anything between their ears. Make you think you chose them, fact is they chose you. Are you a plant, Jeds? Don’t look a plant. Look a bloody pretty woman. Sandy thinks you’re a plant. Wishes he’d had a tumble with you himself. Corks wouldn’t be surprised if you were a plant”—he gave an effeminate simper—“and your fancy boy ain’t saying nuttin’.” He was tweaking her ear to the rhythm of each accented word. Not painful tweaks. Playful ones. “Level with us, Jeds, will you, darling? Share the joke. Be a sport. You’re a plant, aren’t you, sweetheart. A plant with a lovely arse, aren’t you?”
He moved his hand to her chin. Taking it between his thumb and forefinger, he raised her head to look at her. She saw the merriment in his eyes that she had so often mistaken for kindness, and she supposed that once again the man she had been loving was somebody she had put together out of the bits of him she wanted to believe in, while she ignored the bits that didn’t fit.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I let you pick me up. I was scared. You were an angel. You never did me wrong. Not till now. And I gave you my best shot. You know I did. Where is he?” she said, straight into his eyes.
He released her chin and walked away down the room, holding his champagne glass wide.
“Good idea, girl,” he said approvingly. “Well done. Spring him. Spring your lover boy. Put a file in his French loaf. Shove it through the bars on visiting day. Pity you haven’t brought Sarah along with you. Two of you could ride away on her into the sunset.” No change of tone. “You don’t know a fellow called Burr at all, do you, Jeds, by any chance? First name Leonard? North Country oaf? Smelly armpits? Gospel trained? Come your way at all? Ever have a tumble with him? Probably called himself Smith. Pity. Thought you might have.”
“I don’t know anyone like that.”
“Funny thing. Nor does Pine.”
They dressed for dinner, back-to-back, choosing their clothes with care. The formal madness of their days and nights aboard the Pasha had begun.
The menus. Discussion with the steward and the cooks. Mrs. Sandown is French, and her opinion on everything is therefore regarded by the kitchen as gospel, never mind she eats only salads and swears she knows nothing about food.
Laundry. When guests are not eating they are changing, bathing and copulating, which means that every day they must have clean sheets, towels, clothes and table linen. A yacht sails on its food and its laundry. A whole section of the service deck is got up with banks of washing machines, dryers and steam irons, which two stew-ardesses tend from dawn till dusk.
Hair. The sea air does terrible things to people’s hair. At five every evening the guest deck is humming to the sound of hair dryers, and it is their peculiarity to fail when guests are halfway through their toilet. Therefore at ten to six exactly, Jed may count on the sight of a belligerent, half-dressed lady guest lurking in the gangway with her hair stuck up like a lavatory brush, brandishing a defunct hair dryer and saying, “Jed, darling, could you possibly?”—because the housekeeper is by now supervising the final touche
s to the dinner table.
Flowers. Every day, the seaplane visits the nearest island to fetch flowers, fresh fish, seafood, eggs and newspapers, and to post letters. But the flowers are what Roper cares about most, the Pasha is famous for its flowers and the sight of dead flowers, or flowers not adequately arranged, is likely to cause serious tremors below decks.
Recreation. Where shall we put in, swim, snorkel, whom shall we visit, shall we dine out for a change, send the helicopter or the seaplane for the Somebodys, take the Somebody Elses ashore? For the guests on the Pasha are not a static population. They change from island to island according to their negotiated length of stay, bringing new blood, new banalities, a new approach to Christmas: how terribly behind one is with one’s preparations, darling, I haven’t even thought about my presies, and isn’t it time you and Dicky got married, you look so absolutely yummy together?
And Jed in the madness goes along with this mad routine, waiting for a chink. Roper’s references to putting files into bread loaves is not inaccurate. She would fuck all five guards and Langbourne and even Corkoran, if he were so disposed, in order to get alongside Jonathan.
Meanwhile, as she waits, all the rituals of her strict childhood and convent school—the rules of grit your teeth and smile—entwine her in their humiliating embrace. While she obeys them, nothing is real, but also nothing comes adrift. For both these blessings she is grateful, and the possibility of a chink remains. When Caroline Langbourne treats her to a discourse on the pleasures of marriage to Sandy now that the slut of a nanny is safely back in London, Jed smiles dreamily and says, “Oh, Caro, darling, I’m so awfully pleased for you both. And for the children, naturally.” When Caroline adds that she probably said some absolutely barmy things about the business deals Dicky and Sandy were getting up to, but she’d talked it all through with Sandy and she really had to admit she’d seen things rather blacker than they were—and honestly, how can one make one’s pennies these days without getting one’s fingers the weeniest bit grubby?—Jed is pleased about that too and assures Caro that she can’t remember a thing that Caro said about all that anyway, with Jed and business it’s just in one ear and out the other and thank God for it. . . .
The Night Manager Page 50
