The Night Manager

TWO

Herr Kaspar again lifted his famous head. The throb of a powerful motor became discreetly audible above the beating of the wind. He rolled up his bulletins from the beleaguered Zürich stock exchange and slipped an elastic band over them.

He dropped the roll into his investment drawer, locked it and nodded to Mario, the head chasseur. He eased a comb from his back pocket and skimmed it through his wig. Mario scowled at Pablo, who in turn simpered to Benito, the ridiculously pretty apprentice from Lugano, who was probably favouring both of them. All three had clustered inside the lobby for shelter, but now, with Latin bravado, they breasted the storm, buttoning their capes at the neck as they grabbed their umbrellas and trolleys and vanished, swallowed by the snow.

It never happened, Jonathan thought, watching each signal of the car's approach. There is only the snow, racing over the forecourt. It's a dream.

But Jonathan was not dreaming. The limousine was real, even if it was floating on a white void. A stretch limousine, longer than the hotel, was berthing at the front entrance like a black liner nosing into dock, while the chasseurs in their capes scurried and pranced to make it fast, all but the impertinent Pablo, who in a moment of inspiration had unearthed a curling broom and was delicately picking the snowflakes from the red carpet. For one last blessed moment, it was true, a gust of snow did blank everything out, and Jonathan was able to imagine that a tidal wave had swept the liner back to sea, to founder against the crags of the surrounding hilltops, so that Mr. Richard Onslow Roper, and his officially licensed bodyguards, and whoever else made up the party of sixteen, had perished to a man in their private Titanic in the memorable Great Storm of January 1991, God rest their souls.

But the limousine had returned. Furs, well-grown men, a beautiful long-legged young woman, diamonds and gold wristbands and castles of matching black luggage, were emerging like plundered booty from its plush interior. A second limousine had joined it, now a third. A convoy of limousines. Already Herr Kaspar was propelling the swing doors at the speed best suited to the party's progress. First an untidy brown coat of camel hair loomed into the glass and was cautiously rotated into focus, a grimy silk muffler dangling over its collar, surmounted by a soggy cigarette and the pouchy stare of a scion of the English upper classes. No fifty-year-old Apollo he.

After the camel hair came a navy blue blazer in his twenties, the blazer single-breasted for the cross-draw, and eyes shallow as paint. One OBG, thought Jonathan, trying not to answer their malign stare; one more to follow, and a third if Roper's scared.

The beautiful woman had chestnut hair and wore a quilted coat of many colours that reached almost to her feet, yet she managed to appear slightly underdressed. She had Sophie's comic slant to her, and her hair, like Sophie's, fell to either side of her face. Someone's wife? Mistress? Anyone's? For the first time in six months, Jonathan felt the devastating, irrational impact of a woman he instantaneously desired. Like Sophie she had a jewelled brilliance and a kind of dressed nakedness. Two strings of splendid pearls set off her neck. Diamond bracelets peeked from her quilted sleeves. But it was the vague air of shambles, the raggedy smile and unselfconscious carriage that appointed her an instant citizen of Paradise. The doors swung open again, disgorging everyone at once, so that suddenly an entire leftover delegation of the English affluent society was ranged under the chandelier, each of its members so sleekly groomed, so sun-rich, that together they seemed to share a corporate morality that outlawed sickness, poverty, pale faces, age and manual labour. Only the camel hair coat, with his disgracefully battered suede boots, remained a voluntary outcast from their ranks.

And at their centre, yet apart from them, The Man, as only The Man could be after Sophie's furious descriptions of him. Tall, slender and at first glance noble. Fair hair stirred with gray, swept back and flicked into little horns above the ears. A face to play cards against and lose. The stance that arrogant Englishmen do best, one knee cocked, one hand backed against the colonial arse. Freddie is so weak, Sophie had explained. And Roper is so English.

Like all deft men, Roper was doing several things at once: shaking hands with Kaspar, then clapping him with the same hand on the upper arm, then using it to blow a kiss to Fräulein Eberhardt, who went pink and waved at him like a menopausal groupie. Then finally fixing his overlord's eye on Jonathan, who must have been strolling toward him, though Jonathan himself had no direct evidence of this except that Adèle's dummy had been replaced first by the newsstand, then by the flushed features of Fräulein Eberhardt at the reception desk, and now by The Man himself. He has no qualms, Sophie had said. He is the worst man in the world.

He's recognised me, thought Jonathan, waiting for the denunciation.

He's seen my photograph, listened to my description.

In a minute he'll stop smiling.

"I'm Dicky Roper," a lazy voice announced as the hand closed round Jonathan's and briefly owned it, "My chaps booked some rooms here. Rather a lot of 'em. How d'you do?" Belgravia slur, the proletarian accent of the vastly rich.

They had entered each other's private space.

"How very good to see you, Mr. Roper," Jonathan murmured, English voice to English voice. "Welcome back, sir, and poor you, what a perfectly ghastly journey you must have had. Wasn't it rather heroic to venture aloft at all? No one else has, I can tell you. My name's Pine. I'm the night manager."

He's heard of me, he thought, waiting. Freddie Hamid told him my name.

"What's old Meister up to these days?" Roper asked, his eyes slipping away to the beautiful woman. She was at the newsstand, helping herself to fashion magazines. Her bracelets kept falling over her hand, while with the other she continually pushed back her hair. "Tucked up with his Ovaltine and a book, is he? Hope it's a book, must say. Jeds, how you doing, darling? Adores magazines. Addict. Hate the things m'self."

It took Jonathan a moment to realise that Jeds was the woman. Not Jed a single man, but Jeds a single woman in all her varieties. Her chestnut head turned far enough to let them see her smile. It was puckish and good-humoured.

"I'm just fine, darling," she said bravely, as if she were recovering from a knock.

"Herr Meister is unavoidably tied up tonight, I'm afraid, sir," said Jonathan, "but he does enormously look forward to seeing you in the morning when you're rested."

"You English, Pine? Sound it."

"To the core, sir."

"Wise man." The pale gaze wanders away again, this time to the reception desk, where the camel hair coat is filling in forms for Fräulein Eberhardt. "You proposing marriage to that young lady, Corky?" Roper calls. "That'll be the day," he adds to Jonathan in a lower tone. "Major Corkoran, my assistant," he confides with innuendo.

"Nearly there, Chief!" Corky drawls, and lifts a camel hair arm. He has squared his legs and pushed out his rump like somebody about to play a croquet shot, and there is a tilt to his haunches that, by nature or intent, suggests a certain femininity.

A heap of passports lies at his elbow.

"Only got to copy a few names, God's sake. Not a fifty-page contract, Corks."

"It's the new security, I'm afraid, sir," Jonathan explains. "The Swiss police insist. There seems to be nothing we can do."

The beautiful Jeds has chosen three magazines but needs more. She has perched one slightly scuffed boot pensively on its long heel, with the toe pointing in the air. Sophie used to do the same. Mid-twenties, Jonathan thinks. Always will be.

"Been here long, then, Pine? Wasn't here last time round, was he, Frisky? We'd have noticed a stray young Brit."

"No way," said the blazer, eyeing Jonathan through an imaginary gun slit. Cauliflower ears, Jonathan noticed. Blond hair, going on white. Hands like axheads.

"I make it six months, Mr. Roper, almost to the day."

"Where were you before that?"

"Cairo," Jonathan replied, light as a spark. "The Queen Nefertiti."

Time passes, like time before a detonation. But the carved mirrors of the lobby do not shatter at the mention of the Queen Nefertiti Hotel, the pilasters and chandeliers hold still.

"Likee, did you? Cairo?"

"Loved it"

"What made you leave the place, then, if you were so high on it?"

Well, you did, actually, Jonathan thinks. But he said instead: "Oh, wanderlust, I suppose, sir. You know how it is. The drifting life is one of the attractions of the trade."

Suddenly everything was in motion. Corkoran had detached himself from the reception desk and, cigarette held wide, was advancing on them with high steps. The woman Jeds had chosen her magazines and was waiting, Sophie-like, for someone to do something about paying for them. Corkoran said, "On the room bill, heart." Herr Kaspar was unloading a wad of mail into the arms of the second blazer, who ostentatiously explored the bulkier packages with his fingertips.

"High bloody time, Corks. Hell's happened to your signing hand?"

"Wanker's colic, I should think. Chief," said Major Corkoran. "Could be limp wrist," he added, with a special smile for Jonathan.

"Oh, Corks" said the woman Jeds, giggling.

Out of the corner of his eye Jonathan spotted Mario, the head doorman, wheeling a stack of matching luggage to the service lift, using the paddling gait with which porters hope to imprint their images on the fickle minds of clients. Then he saw his own fragmented reflection passing him in the mirrors, and Corkoran's beside him, carrying his cigarette in one hand and the magazines in the other, and he allowed himself a moment of officious panic because he couldn't see Jeds. He turned and saw her and caught her eye and she smiled at him, which in his startling resurgence of desire was what he craved.

He caught Roper's eye also, because she was hanging from Roper's arm, holding it in both her long hands while she almost trod on his feet. The bodyguards and the affluent society trailed behind them. Jonathan noticed a blond male beauty with his hair tied at the nape, a plain wife scowling beside him, "Pilots'll be along later," Corkoran was saying. "Some crap about the compass. If it's not the compass, it's the bogs worn flush. You a permanency here, darling, or just a one-night stand?"

His breath smelled of the day's good things: the martinis before lunch, the wines with it and the brandies afterwards, washed down by his foul French cigarettes.

"Oh, I think as permanent as one can be, in this profession, Major," Jonathan replied, altering his manner a little for an underling.

"Goes for us all, heart, believe me," said the Major fervently.

"Permanently temporary. Jesus."

Another film cut, and they were traversing the great hall to the tune of "When I Take My Sugar to Tea," played by Maxie the pianist to two old ladies in grey silk. Roper and the woman were still entwined. You're new to each other, Jonathan told them sourly, out of the corner of his eye. Or else you're making up after a quarrel. Jeds, he repeated to himself. He needed the safety of his single bed.

Yet another cut, and they were standing three deep before the ornate doors of Herr Meister's new Tower Suite lift, the affluent society twittering in the background.

"Hell happened to the old lift, Pine?" Roper was demanding. "Thought Meister was a sucker for old things. Bloody Swiss would modernise Stonehenge if they got a chance. Wouldn't they, Jeds?"

"Roper, you can't make a scene about a lift" she said in awe.

"Try me."

From far away, Jonathan hears a voice not unlike his own, enumerating the advantages of the new lift: a security measure, Mr. Roper, but also an attractive extra feature, installed last autumn for the sole convenience of our Tower Suite guests...

And as Jonathan talks, he dangles between his fingers the golden master key created to Herr Meister's personal design. decked with a golden tassel and capped with this rather amusing golden crown.

"I mean, doesn't it remind you of the pharaohs? It's quite outrageous, really, but I can assure you that our less sophisticated guests adore it," he confides, with a camp little smile that he has never vouchsafed to anyone before.

"Well, I adore it," says the Major, off-screen. "And I'm bloody sophisticated."

Roper balances the key in his palm as if to cost its melt weight. He studies both sides, then the crown, then the tassel.

"Taiwan," he pronounces and, to Jonathan's alarm, slings it at the blond blazer with cauliflower ears, who catches it low down and fast on his left side, shouting "Mine!" as he dives.

Beretta .09 automatic with safety catch at the "on," Jonathan records. Ebony finish, holster-carried under the right armpit. A left-handed OBG, with a spare magazine in his belt bag.

"Oh, well played, Frisky, heart. Good catch," Corkoran drawls, and there is relieved laughter from the affluent outfield, led by the woman, who squeezes Roper's arm and says honestly, darling, though in Jonathan's clouded ear it at first sounds like policy, darling.

Now everything is in slow motion, everything is happening under water. The lift takes five at a time; the rest must wait. Roper strides in, drawing the woman after him. Roedean and model school, Jonathan is thinking. Plus a special course that Sophie had also taken in how to do that with your hips when you walk. Then Frisky, then Major Corkoran without his cigarette, finally Jonathan. Her hair is soft as well as chestnut. She is also nude. That is to say, she has slipped off her quilted coat and slung it over her arm like an army greatcoat. She wears a man's white shirt with Sophie's puffy sleeves rolled to the elbows. Jonathan starts the lift. Corkoran stares disapprovingly upward like a man peeing. The girl's hip rides carelessly against Jonathan's flank in cheerful friendship. Get off, he wants to tell her irritably. If you're flirting, don't. If you're not flirting, keep your hip to yourself. She smells not of vanilla but of white carnations on Commemoration Day at cadet school. Roper stands behind her, wide hands resting possessively on her shoulders. Frisky gazes blankly downward at the faded bite mark on her neck, at her unsupported breasts inside the expensive shirt. Like Frisky, no doubt, Jonathan has a disgraceful urge to scoop one out.

"Now why don't I go ahead and show you all the new goodies Herr Meister's put in for you since your last visit?" he suggests.

Perhaps it's time you gave up manners as a way of life, Sophie had said to him as she walked beside him in the dawn.

He went ahead, indicating the suite's priceless advantages; the amazing low-flush bar... the thousand-year-old fruit... the very latest in superhygienic Jetstream loos, does everything for you except clean your teeth.... All his whimsical little jokes, whisked out and polished for the delectation of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper and this long-waisted, funny-faced, un-pardonably attractive woman. How dare she be so beautiful at a time like this?

* * *

Meister's legendary Tower hovers like an inflated dovecote over the magic peaks and valleys of the hotel's Edwardian roof. The three-bedroom palace inside it is built on two floors, a pastel experience in what Jonathan confidingly calls Swiss Franc Quatorze. The luggage has arrived, the chasseurs have received their largesse, Jeds has retired to the master bedroom, from which issue the far sounds of female singing and running water. The singing is indistinct but provocative, if not downright bawdy. 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 colour 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 splendours 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 centre 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 clock 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, bougainvillaea, 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 whisky, 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 further. "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 rosti," 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 patronising 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 Perignon, and wrenches.

"Corky!"

"Right here, Chief!"

The moment's hesitation. The corrected voice. "Give Danby and Mac Arthur 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 glace with vegetables of three colours, this hotel silver with its bruised old face, twinkling wisely up at me from the damask cloth.

Dining alone had always been his particular pleasure, and tonight, in deference to the war's depletion, Maitre 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 grey-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 comer. 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 Maitre Berri about a forgotten duty, and made it just in time to the men's room.