The Night Manager

But he still refused to speak to Roper.

His refusal was becoming more than a vow. It was an asset, a resource.

The very act of withholding was giving him renewal.

Every word he didn't speak, every juddering fist or foot or elbow that rocked him off to sleep, every new and separate pain, went into him like fresh supplies of energy to be hoarded against a future day.

When the pain became unbearable, he had visions of raising himself toward it to receive and store away its life-giving powers.

And it worked. Under the cover of his agony, the close observer in Jonathan assembled his operational intelligence and prepared his plan for the deployment of his secret energy.

Nobody carries a gun, he thought. They are following the law of all good prisons. Warders do not carry guns.

THIRTY

Something amazing had happened.

Something good or terrible. Either way it was decisive, it was terminal, it was the end of life as Jed had so far known it.

The phone call had roused them in the early evening. Person-to-person and confidential, Chief, the skipper had said cautiously. It's Sir Anthony, Chief; I'm not sure whether you want me to put it through. Roper growled and rolled on his side to take it. He was wearing his robe again. They were lying on the bed after making love, though God knew it was not love they had been making but something closer to hate. His old appetite for screwing in the afternoons had recently revived. So had hers. Their appetite for each other seemed to grow in inverse proportion to their affection. She was beginning to wonder whether sex had anything to do with love at all. "I'm a good fuck," she had told him afterwards, staring at the ceiling. "Oh, you are," he had agreed. "Ask anyone." Then this phone call, with his back to her: Oh, blast him, yes, I'll take it. Then the stiffening of his back, a freezing of the dorsal muscles through the silk, an uneasy shifting of the buttocks, the legs settling on each other for protection.

"Tony, you're out of court. Are you pissed again?... Who is? Well, put him on. Why not?... All right, talk, if you want. I'll listen. Nothing to do with me, but I don't mind listening. ... Don't give me sob stories, Tony, not my kind of music. ..." But soon these surly interjections grew shorter, and the spaces between them longer, until Roper was listening in total silence, and his body lay alert and dead still.

"Just a minute, Tony," he ordered suddenly. "Hold it." He turned to her, not bothering to put his hand over the mouth piece. "Run a bath," he told her. "Go into the bathroom, close the door, run the taps. Now."

So she went into the bathroom and turned on the taps and lifted the rubberized extension, but of course he heard the water running and bawled at her to get off the line. So after that she turned the taps to a trickle and pressed her ear to the keyhole, until the door exploded in her face and sent her flying across the Dutch-tiled floor, part of their recent decoration scheme. Then she heard Roper call, "Go on, Tony. Little local difficulty."

After that she listened to him listening, but that was all she heard. She got into the bath and remembered how once it was his pleasure to get in the other end and shove a foot between her legs while he read the Financial Times and in return she would tease him with her toes and try and give him an erection.

And sometimes he would haul her back to bed for another round, soaking the sheets with bathwater.

But this time he just stood in the doorway.

In his robe. Staring at her. Wondering what the hell to do about her. About Jonathan. About himself.

His face was set in that stony stay-away-from-me frown that he wore very rarely, and never in front of Daniel: the one that made and broke whatever was necessary for his preservation.

"You better get dressed," he said. "Corkoran will be here in two minutes."

"What for?"

"Just dress."

Then he went back to the phone, started to dial a number and changed his mind. He laid the receiver back on its cradle with such immense control that she knew he wanted to smash it into fragments, and the whole boat with it. He put his hands on his hips and stared at her while she dressed, as if he didn't like what she was putting on.

"Better wear sensible shoes," he said.

And that was when her heart stopped, because on board nobody ever wore anything but deck shoes or bare feet, except in the evenings, when dress shoes could be worn by the women, though they were not allowed stiletto heels.

So she dressed and pulled on a pair of sensible rubber-soled suede lace-ups she had bought at Bergdorf's during one of their trips to New York, and when Corkoran knocked on the door, Roper took him into the drawing room and spoke to him alone for as much as ten minutes, while Jed sat on the bed thinking of the chink she had still not found, that magic formula for Jonathan's salvation and her own. But it wouldn't come to her.