The Night Manager

TWENTY-ONE

The friendship between Jonathan and Roper that, as Jonathan now realised, had been budding throughout the weeks at Crystal burst into flower the moment the Roper jet cleared Nassau International Airport. You might have thought the two men had agreed to wait for this shared moment of release before they acknowledged their good feelings for each other.

"Christ," Roper shouted, gleefully unfastening his seat belt. "Women! Questions! Kids! Thomas, good to have you aboard. Megs, bring us a pot of coffee, darling. Too early for shampoo. Coffee, Thomas?"

"I'd love some," said the hotelier. And added winningly: "After Corky's performance last night, I could do with rather a lot of it."

"Hell was all that stuff about you having a Roller?"

"I've no idea. I think he must have decided I was going to steal yours."

"Ass. Sit over here. Don't lurk across the aisle. Croissants, Megs? Red jelly?"

Meg was the stewardess, from Tennessee.

"Mr. Roper, now when did I ever forget the croissants?"

"Coffee, hot croissants, bread rolls, jelly, all round. Get that feeling sometimes, Thomas? Free? No kids, animals, servants, investors, guests, inquisitive women? Got your world back? Free to move? Weight on your back, women are, if you let 'em. Happy bunny today, Megs?"

"Sure am, Mr. Roper."

"Where's the juice? Forgotten the juice. Typical. Sacked, Megs. Fired. Better leave now. Jump."

Unperturbed, Meg set out their two breakfast trays, then brought the fresh orange juice and coffee and hot croissants and red jelly. She was a woman of about forty with the trace of a harelip and a bruised but gallant sexuality.

"Know something, Thomas?" she asked. "He always does this to me. It's like he has to psych himself up before he earns his next million. Do you know I have to make the red jelly? I sit home, I make red jelly for him. That's all I do when we're not flying. Mr. Roper won't eat anybody's red jelly but mine."

Roper let out a raw laugh. "Next million? Hell are you talking about, woman? Million wouldn't pay for the soap on this plane! Best red jelly in the world. Only reason she's still here."

He crushed a bread roll in his fist, using all his fingers at once.

"Good living's a duty. Whole point of it all. Living well's the best revenge. Who said that?"

"Whoever he was, he got it absolutely right," said Jonathan loyally.

"Set a high standard, let chaps strive for it. Only way. Turn the money over, world goes round. You worked in smart hotels. You know the score. Jelly's off, Megs. Fizzy. Right, Thomas?"

"To the contrary, it's to die for," Jonathan replied firmly, with a wink for Meg.

Laughter all round. The Chief is on a high; so is Jonathan. Suddenly they seem to have everything in common, including Jed. Gold lace lines the cloudbanks, sunlight streams into the plane. They could be on their way to heaven. Tabby is in the tail seat. Frisky has placed himself forward by the bulkhead, covering the pilots' door. Two MacDanbies sit in the middle of the plane, tapping at their laptop computers.

"Women ask too many questions, right, Megs?"

"Not me, Mr. Roper. Never."

"Remember that hooker I had, Megs? Me sixteen, her thirty, remember?"

"I surely do, Mr. Roper. She gave you your first lesson in life."

"Nervous, you see. Virgin." They were eating side by side, able to confide without the threat of eye contact. "Not her. Me." Another shout of laughter. "Didn't know the form, so I played the earnest-student type. Decided she had to have a problem: 'Poor you, where did it all go wrong?' Thought she was going to tell me her old dad had the big C and her mum had run off with the plumber when she was twelve. Looks at me. Not a friendly look at all. 'What's your name?' she says. Little Staffordshire terrier. Broad-arsed. Five foot nothing. I'm Dicky,' I said. 'Now, you listen to me, Dicky,' she says. 'You can fuck my body, and that'll cost you a fiver. But you can't fuck my mind, because that's private.' Never forgot it, did I, Megs? Marvellous woman! Should have married her. Not Megs. The tart." His shoulder nudged up against Jonathan's again. "Want to know how it works?"

"If it's not a state secret."

"Fig leaf operation. You're the fig leaf. Straw man, the Germans call it. Joke is, you're not even straw. You don't exist. All the better. Derek Thomas, merchant venturer, regular guy, quick on his feet, personable, wholesome. Decent record in commerce, no skeletons, good crits. It's Dicky and Derek. Maybe we've done deals before. Nobody's business but ours. I go to the clowns ― the brokers, the venture boys, flexible banks ― and I say: 'Got a very smart cookie here. Brilliant plan, quick profits, needs backing, mum's the word. It's tractors, turbines, machine parts, minerals, it's land, it's what the hell. Introduce you to him later if you're good. He's young, he's got the connections, don't ask where, very resourceful, politically hip, good with the right people, opportunity of a lifetime. Didn't want you missing out. Double your money in four months max. You'll be buying paper. If you don't want paper don't waste my time. We're talking bearer bonds, no names, no pack drill, no connection with any other firm including mine. It's another trust-Dicky deal. I'm in but I'm not there. Company's formed in an area where no accounts need to be prepared or filed, no British connection, not our colony, somebody else's mess. When the deal's done, company ceases trading, pull the plug on it, close the accounts, see you sometime. Very tight circle, few chaps as possible, no silly questions, take it or leave it, want you to be one of the few.' All right so far?"

"Do they believe you?"

Roper laughed. "Wrong question. Does the story play? Can they sell it to their punters? Do they like the cut of your jib? Are you a pretty face on the prospectus? Play our cards right, answer's yes every time."

"You mean there's a prospectus?"

Roper let out another rich laugh. "Worse than a bloody woman, this chap!" he told Meg contentedly as she poured more coffee. "Why, why, why? How, when, where?"

"I never do that, Mr. Roper," said Meg severely.

"You never do, Megs. You're a good scout."

"Mr. Roper, you are patting my behind again."

"Sorry, Megs. Must have thought I was at home." Back to Jonathan. "No, there's no prospectus. Figure of speech. By the time we've printed the prospectus, with any luck we won't have a company."

* * *

Roper resumed his briefing, and Jonathan heard him and replied to him from within the cocoon of his other meditations.

He was thinking of Jed, and his images of her were so vivid it was a wonder that Roper, sitting a few inches from him, did not receive some telepathic inkling of them. He felt her hands on his face while she studied him. and he wondered what she saw. He remembered Burr and Rooke in the training house in London, and as he listened to Roper describing the energetic young executive Thomas, he realised that once again he was conniving in the manipulation of his character. He heard Roper say Langbourne had gone ahead to smooth the way, and wondered whether this might be the moment to warn him that Caroline was betraying the cause behind his back and so earn further credit in Roper's estimation. Then he decided Roper knew this anyway: how else would Jed have been able to tax him with his sins? He pondered, as he pondered constantly, the intractable mystery of Roper's notions of right and wrong, and he remembered how, in Sophie's judgment, the worst man in the world was a moralist who gained stature in his own eyes by disregarding his perceptions. He destroys, he makes a great fortune, so he considers himself divine, she declared in angry mystification.

"Apo will recognise you, of course," Roper was saying. "The bloke he met at Crystal ― used to work at Meister's ― chum of Dicky's. No problem there that I can see. Anyway, Apo's the other side."

Jonathan turned quickly to him, as if Roper had reminded him of something.

"I wanted to ask you, actually, who is the other side? I mean, it's great to be selling, but who's the buyer?"

Roper let out a false shout of pain. "We've got one, Megs! Doubts me! Can't leave a good thing alone!"

"Now, I don't blame him one bit, Mr. Roper. You can be very mean when you want to be. I've seen it before, you know I have. Mean and devious, and very, very charming."

Roper dozed, so Jonathan obediently dozed too, listening to the chirrup of the MacDanbies' laptops over the roar of the engines. He woke, Meg brought the ritual champagne and smoked-salmon canapés, there was more talk, more laughter, more doze. He woke again, to find the plane circling above a Dutch toy town shrouded in a white heat haze. Through the haze he saw the slow bursts of artillery fire as the flare stacks of Willemstad's oil refinery burned off their surplus gas.

"I'll be hanging on to your passport for you, if you don't mind, Tommy," Frisky said quietly as they walked across the shimmering runway. "Just pro tem, right? How are you off for cash at all?"

"I haven't any," said Jonathan.

"Oh, right, then. We needn't bother. Only, those credit cards old Corky gave you, they're more for show, you see, Tommy. You wouldn't get a lot of joy, not using them, know what I mean?"

Roper had already been spirited through customs and was shaking hands with people who respected him. Rooke was sitting on an orange bench, reading the inside pages of the Financial Times through the horn-rimmed glasses he wore only for distance. A travelling team of girl missionaries was singing "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" in baby sound, conducted by a man with one leg. The sight of Rooke brought Jonathan halfway back to earth.

* * *

Their hotel was a horseshoe of red-roofed houses at the edge of town, with two beaches and an outdoor restaurant that looked onto a choppy, windswept sea. In the centre house ― the proudest of them ― in a run of large rooms on the top floor, the Roper party made its village, with Roper in one corner suite and Derek S. Thomas, executive, in the other. Jonathan's drawing room had a balcony with a table and chairs, and his bed room had a bed big enough for four, and pillows that did not smell of wood smoke. He had a bottle of Herr Meister's complimentary champagne, and a bunch of complimentary green grapes, which Frisky ate in handfuls while Jonathan settled in. And he had a telephone that was not buried two feet underground and rang while he was still unpacking. Frisky watched him pick up the receiver.

It was Rooke, asking to speak to Thomas.

"Thomas speaking," Jonathan said in his best executive voice.

"Message from Mandy. She's on her way up."

"I don't know Mandy. Who is this?"

Pause while Rooke on the other end of the line affects to do a double take. "Mr. Peter Thomas?"

"No. I'm Derek. Wrong Thomas."

"Sony about that. Must be the one in 22."

Jonathan rang off and muttered "Idiot." He showered, dressed and returned to the drawing room, to find Frisky slouched in an armchair, combing the in-house magazine for erotic stimulus. He dialled room 22 and heard Rooke's voice saying hullo.

"This is Mr. Thomas in 319. I've got some laundry to be collected, please. I'll leave it outside the door."

"Right away," said Rooke.

He went to the bathroom, took a bunch of handwritten notes that he had wedged behind the tank, wrapped them in a dirty shirt, put the shirt in the plastic laundry bag, added his socks, handkerchief and underpants, scribbled a laundry list, put the list in the bag and hung the bag on the outside door handle of his suite. Closing the door, he glimpsed Millie from Rooke's training team in London stomping down the corridor in a stern cotton dress to which was pinned a name badge saying "Mildred."

* * *

The Chief says to kill time till further orders, Frisky said.

So to Jonathan's delight they killed time ― Frisky armed with a cellular phone and Tabby trailing sulkily behind for added killing power. But Jonathan, for all his fears, felt lighter of heart than at any time since he had set out from the Lanyon on his odyssey. The improbable prettiness of the old buildings filled him with a joyful nostalgia. The floating market and the floating bridge enchanted him exactly as they were supposed to. Like a man released from prison, he gazed dotingly on the boisterous throngs of sun-pink tourists and listened in marvel to the native chatter of Papiamento mingling with the startled accents of the Dutch. He was among real people again. People who laughed and stared and shopped and jostled and ate sugar buns in the street. And knew nothing, absolutely nothing, of his business.

Once, he spotted Rooke and Millie drinking coffee at a pavement restaurant and, in his new mood of irresponsibility, nearly gave them a wink. Once, he recognised a man called Jack who had shown him how to use impregnated carbon to make secret writing at the training house in Lisson Grove.

Jack, how are you? He glanced round, and it was not Frisky's head or Tabby's that was bobbing along beside him in his imagination, but Jed's chestnut hair fluttering in the breeze.

I don't get it, Thomas. Do you love somebody for what he does for a living? I'm not into that.

What if he robs banks?

Everybody robs banks. Banks rob everybody.

What if he killed your sister?

Thomas, for Christ's sake.

If you could just call me Jonathan, he said.

Why?

It's my name. Jonathan Pine.

Jonathan, she said. Jonathan. Oh shit! It's like being sent back to the beginning at a gymkhana and made to start all over again. Jonathan... I don't even like it. Jonathan... Jonathan...

Maybe it'll grow on you, he suggested.

Returning to the hotel, they walked into Langbourne in the lobby, surrounded by a group of dark-suited moneymen. He was looking angry, the way he might look when his car was late or someone refused to sleep with him. Jonathan's good humour only added to his irritation.

"Have you seen Apostoll hanging around anywhere?" he demanded without so much as a hullo. "Bloody little man's gone missing."

"Not a dickybird," said Frisky.

The furniture had been cleared from Jonathan's drawing room. Bottles of Dom Perignon lay in a tray of ice on a trestle table. A couple of very slow waiters were unloading plates of canapés from a trolley.

"You press the flesh," Roper had said, "you kiss the babies, look wholesome."

"What if they come at me with business talk?"

"They won't. Clowns'll be too busy counting the money before they get it."

"Could you possibly bring some ashtrays," Jonathan asked one of the waiters. "And open the windows if you don't mind. Who's in charge?"

"Me, sir," said the waiter who wore the name Arthur.

"Frisky, give Arthur twenty dollars, please."

With ill grace, Frisky handed over the money.

* * *

It was Crystal without the amateurs. It was Crystal without Jed's eye to catch across the room. It was Crystal opened to the public and swamped by high-powered Necessary Evils ― except that tonight Derek Thomas was the star. Under Roper's benign eye, the polished former night manager shook hands, flashed smiles, remembered names, made witty small talk, worked the room.

"Hullo, Mr. Gupta, how's the tennis? Why, Sir Hector, how jolly nice to see you again! Mrs. Del Oro, how are you? How's that brilliant son of yours doing at Yale?"

A buttery English banker from Rickmansworth took Jonathan aside to lecture him on the value of commerce to the emerging world. Two pumice-faced bond sellers from New York listened impassively.

"I'll tell you bluntly ― I'm not ashamed of it ― I've said it before to these gentlemen. I'll say it again now. With your Third World today, what matters is how they spend the stuff, not how they make it. Plough it back. Only rule of the game. Improve your infrastructure, raise your social standards. Beyond that, anything goes. I mean it. Brad here agrees with me. So does Sol."

Brad spoke with his lips so close together that Jonathan at first didn't realise he was speaking at all. "You, ah. have expertise at all, Derek? You, ah. an engineer, sir? Surveyor? Something of. ah, that kind?"

"Boats are my best thing, really," said Jonathan cheerfully. "Not Dicky's sort. Sailing boats. Sixty foot's about as far as I like to go."

"Boats, huh? I love 'em. He, ah, likes boats."

"Me too," says Sol.

The party ended with another orgy of handshakes. Derek, it's been an inspiration. You bet. Take care, now, Derek. You bet. Derek, there's a job for you in Philly anytime you say.... Derek, anytime you're in Detroit.... You bet.... Enraptured by his performance, Jonathan stood on the balcony smiling at the stars, scenting the oil on the dark sea wind. What are you doing now? Supper with Corkoran and the Nassau set ― Cynthia who breeds Sealyhams, Stephanie who tells fortunes? Discussing yet more menus for the winter cruise with barely affordable Delia, the Iron Pasha's coveted chef? Or are you lying with your head in the white silk cushion of your arm, whispering, Jonathan, for Christ's sake, what's a girl to do?

"Time for the nosebag, Tommy. Can't keep the gentry waiting."

"I'm not hungry, actually, Frisky."

"I don't expect anybody is, Tommy. It's like church. Come on."

* * *

Dinner is in an ancient fort on a hilltop overlooking the harbour. Seen from here at night, little Willemstad is as big as San Francisco, and even the blue-grey cylinders of the refinery have a stately magic. The MacDanbies have taken a table for twenty, but only fourteen can be raised. Jonathan is being recklessly amusing about the cocktail party; Meg and the English banker and his wife are laughing themselves sick. But Roper's attention is elsewhere. He is staring down into the harbour, where a great cruise ship decked with fairy lights is moving between anchored cargo vessels toward a distant bridge. Does Roper covet it? Sell the Pasha, get something a decent size?

"Substitute lawyer's on his way, damn them," Langbourne announces, returning yet again from the telephone. "Swears he'll be here in time for the meeting."

"Who are they sending?" says Roper.

"Moranti from Caracas."

"That thug. Hell's happened to Apo?"

"They told me to ask Jesus. Joke of some sort."

"Anyone else decided not to show?" Roper asks, his eyes still fixed upon the cruise ship.

"Everyone else is on cue," Langbourne replies tersely.

Jonathan hears their conversation, and so does Rooke. seated with Millie and Amato at their table next to the protection. The three of them are poring over a guidebook of the island, pretending to wonder where they'll go tomorrow.

* * *

Jed was floating, which was what always happened to her when her life got out of sync: she floated, and she kept floating till the next man, or the next crazy house party, or the next family misfortune, provided her with a change of direction, which she then variously described to herself as fate, or running for cover, or growing up, or having fun, or ― less comfortably these days ― doing her own thing. And part of floating was to do everything at once, rather like the whippet she had had when she was young, who believed that if you ran fast enough round a corner, you were sure to put up something you could chase. But then the whippet was content that life should be a succession of patternless episodes, whereas Jed had for too long been wondering where the episodes in her own life were leading.

So in Nassau, from the moment Roper and Jonathan had left, Jed went straight to work doing everything. She went to the hairdresser and the dressmaker, she invited simply everybody to the house, she entered herself for the Windermere ladies' tennis competition and accepted every invitation that came her way, she bought files to contain her household bumf for the winter cruise, she telephoned the Pasha's chef and housekeeper and drew up menus and placements, even though she knew that Roper was certain to countermand her instructions because in the end he liked to do it all himself.

But the time scarcely moved.

She prepared Daniel for his return to England; she took him shopping and got in friends his age, even though Daniel loathed them and said so; she organised a barbecue for them on the beach, all the time pretending that Corky was quite as much fun as Jonathan ― I mean, honestly, Dans, isn't he a scream? ― and doing her absolute best to ignore the fact that ever since they had left Crystal, Corkoran had sulked and puffed and shot pompous scowls at her exactly like her elder brother William, who fucked every girl in sight, including all her friends, but thought his little sister should go virgin to the grave.

But Corkoran was even worse than William. He had appointed himself her chaperone, her watchdog and her jailer. He squinted at her letters almost before she had opened them, he earwigged her phone calls and tried to elbow his way into every bloody corner of her day.

"Corks, darling, you are being a bore, you know. You're making me feel like Mary, Queen of Scots. I know Roper wants you to look after me, but couldn't you possibly go and play on your own for some of the day?"

But Corkoran stuck doggedly at her side, sitting in the drawing room in his Panama hat and reading the newspaper while she telephoned; hanging around the kitchen while she and Daniel made fudge; writing out the labels for Daniel's homebound luggage.

Until finally, like Jonathan, Jed retreated deep inside herself. She gave up small talk, she gave up ― except when she was with Daniel ― her wearying efforts to appear on top of life, she gave up counting the hours and allowed herself instead to roam the landscape of her inmost world. She thought of her father and what she had always considered to be his useless and outdated sense of honour, and she decided it had actually meant more to her than all the bad things that had happened on account of it: such as the sale of the debt-ridden family house and the horses, and her parents' move to their present dreadful little bungalow on the old estate, and the perpetual rage of Uncle Henry and all the other trustees.

She thought of Jonathan and tried to fathom what it meant to her that he was working for Roper's ruin. She wrestled, as her father would have done, with the rights and wrongs of her dilemma, but all she could really come up with was that Roper represented a catastrophic wrong turning in her life, and that Jonathan had some brotherly claim upon her that was unlike any other claim she had ever felt; and that she even found it companionable when he saw through her, provided he was also confident of the good parts of her, because those were the pails she wanted to get out and dust and put back into service. For instance, she wanted her father back. And she wanted her Catholicism back, even if it woke the tearaway in her every time she thought about it. She wanted firm ground under her feet, but this time she was prepared to work for it. She would even listen sweetly to her bloody mother.

Finally came Daniel's day of departure, which by then she seemed to have been waiting for all her life. So Jed and Corkoran together took Daniel and his luggage to the airport in the Rolls, and as soon as they arrived Daniel needed to dawdle alone at the newsstand in order to buy sweets and reading material and do whatever small boys do when they're going back to their bloody mothers. So Jed and Corkoran waited for him in the middle of the concourse, both suddenly miserable at the prospect of his departure, the more so since Daniel was on the verge of serious tears. And then to her surprise she heard Corkoran speaking to her in a conspiratorial whisper.

"Got your passport, heart?"

"Corks, darling, it's Daniel who's leaving, not me. Remember?"

"Have you got it or not? Quick!"

"I've always got it."

"Then go with him, heart," he begged, taking out his handkerchief and fussing his nose with it in order not to look as though he was talking. "Jump for it now. Corks never said a word. All your own work. Seats galore. I asked."

But Jed didn't jump for it. It never crossed her mind, which was something she was at once extremely pleased about. In the past she had tended to jump first and ask questions afterwards. But that morning, she discovered that she had answered the questions in her mind already, and she wasn't going to jump anywhere if it meant jumping further away from Jonathan.

* * *

Jonathan was dreaming deliciously when the phone rang, and still dreaming as he lifted it. Nonetheless, the close observer was swift in his reaction, stifling the first ring, then switching on the light, then grabbing a notepad and pencil in anticipation of Rooke's instructions.

"Jonathan," she said proudly.

He pressed his eyes shut. He jammed the phone to his ear, trying to contain the sound of her voice. Every practical instinct in him told him to say, "Jonathan who? Wrong number," and ring off. You stupid little fool! he wanted to scream at her. I told you, don't ring, don't try and get in touch, just wait. So you ring, you get in touch and you bubble my real Christian name straight into the listeners' ears.

"For Christ's sake," he whispered. "Get off the line. Go to sleep."

But the conviction in his voice was fading, and it was too late now to say wrong number. So he lay with the telephone at his ear, listening while she repeated his name, Jonathan, Jonathan, practising it, getting the hang of it in all its shades, so that nobody would send her back to the beginning of the course to start her round again.

* * *

They've come for me.

It was an hour later, and Jonathan could hear footsteps trying to be silent outside his door. He sat up. He heard one step, and it was sticky on the ceramic tiles, and he knew it was a bare foot. He heard a second, and it was on the carpet that ran down the centre of the corridor. He saw the corridor light go on and off in his keyhole as a body slipped past, he thought from left to right. Was Frisky sizing up to burst in on him? Had he gone to fetch Tabby so that they could do the job together? Was Millie returning his laundry? Was a barefoot boot boy collecting shoes to clean? The hotel does not clean shoes. He heard the click of a bedroom lock across the corridor and knew it was a barefoot Meg coming back from Roper's suite.

He felt nothing. No censure, no easing of his conscience or his soul. I screw. Roper had said. So he screwed. And Jed led the pack.

* * *

He watched the sky lighten in his window, imagining her head gently turning against his ear. He dialled room 22, let it ring four times and dialled again but didn't speak.

"You're bang on course," Rooke said quietly. "Now hear this."

Jonathan, he thought, as he listened to Rooke's instructions. Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan... when is all this going to blow up in your face?