Midnight is a Lonely Place

XXIII

‘I hope it doesn’t snow too hard. I’d hate for you to miss your last talk,’ Sam Wannaburger, Jon’s American editor, said apologetically as he hefted up the heavy case. ‘I’m just so glad you agreed to come out and see us.’ He had collected Jon from his hotel in a pickup the size of a pantechnicon and driven him in the general direction of south-west. They had stopped at last at a white-painted clapboard house set back from the main street in a small town somewhere in deepest Massachusetts. The floodlights had been switched on, illuminating the graceful lines of the house and its surrounding fir trees, making it look ethereal, floating in a sea of whiteness – for here the grass and the sidewalks were already covered in two or three inches of soft white fluffy snow. ‘Anyway, it’s too late to worry about it now. We’ll have good booze, good talk, good food. It won’t matter how hard it snows! And if we can’t get back to the big city in the pickup we’ll leave it to AmTrak to get us there!’ Sam clapped Jon on the back and pushed him none too gently up the path towards the front door.

It was a wonderful house. Huge, converted, so Sam told him proudly, from an early-nineteenth-century carriage house. The fireplace alone was about twelve feet across, the logs burning in it cut to scale; the huge, soft sofas and chairs around it built obviously for seven-foot Americans. The house smelled of hothouse flowers and – Jon hid a smile as he raised his head and sniffed surreptitiously like a pointer – could that really be apple pie?

Sam’s wife was thin to the point of emaciation, and so elegant she looked as though she would break if she moved too fast. Her hand in Jon’s was dry and twiglike, her life force, he thought vaguely as he smiled into her bright birdlike eyes, hovering barely above zero. She was one of those Americans who filled him with sadness – dieted, corseted, facelifted and encased in slub silk which must have cost old Sam a few thousand bucks, and looking so uncomfortable that he hurt for her. It was so incredibly sad that, for all her efforts – perhaps because of them – she looked years older than dear old rumpled, slobby Sam with his beer belly and his balding scalp and his huge irrepressible grin. I wonder, he thought idly as he saw her stand on tiptoe and present her rouged cheek to her husband for kissing – a kiss which left a good two inches of cold air between them – if she ever kicks off her shoes and has a good giggle. The thought reminded him of Kate and he frowned. Worried about the burglary he had tried to ring her three times from Boston after his last quick call and on none of them had she picked up the phone. Automatically he glanced at his watch and did the calculation. Six p.m. in Boston meant it was eleven or so in the evening at home. He glanced at Sam. ‘Could I try and call Kate one last time. It’s eleven over there. I’m sure she’ll be at home by now.’

‘Sure.’ Sam beamed. ‘Let me show you your room. You’ve your own phone in there.’ He lifted Jon’s case and led the way up a broad flight of open stairs which swung gracefully from the main living room up to a corridor as wide as a six-lane motorway. Jon’s bedroom was not as large as he had feared but it was luxurious beyond his wildest dreams – bed, chairs, drapes, carpet, toning, matching, blending greens, until he had the feeling he was walking in a woodland womb. He smiled to himself at the metaphor. Ludicrous. Overblown. Outrageous. Like the room. Like his host. And wonderfully welcoming. He sat on the bed as Sam left him and pulled the phone towards him.

Twenty minutes later, showered and dressed in a clean shirt and a cashmere sweater Kate had given him for his birthday last year, Jon ran downstairs and accepted a large whisky mac from his host. His call had been a dead loss. After a great deal of hassle and toing and froing between the ladies of AT &T and the British exchange, they had established that the phone at Redall Cottage had gone suddenly and totally dead.