The Night Manager

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."