The Night Manager

Now Jonathan loathed the dark. Why else does a man elect to work at night? As a boy he had read Edgar Allan Poe and shared every hell endured by the victim of "The Cask of Amontillado." No mining disaster, no collapsed tunnel or story of alpinists trapped in a crevasse, but had its separate gravestone in his memory.

He stood motionless, deprived of orientation. Was he upside down? Had he had a stroke? Had he been blown up? The mountaineer in him braced himself for impact. The blinded sailor clung to the wreckage. The trained combatant edged toward his invisible adversary without the comfort of a weapon. Wading like a deep-sea diver, Jonathan began feeling his way along the wine racks, in search of a light switch. Telephone, he thought. Did the cellar have a telephone? His habit of observation was a hindrance to him. It was retrieving too many images. The door had the door a handle on the inside? By brute mental force he managed to recall a buzzer. But the buzzer needed electricity.

He lost his hold upon the cellar's geography and began circling the racks like a fly inside a black lampshade. Nothing in his training had equipped him for anything as awful as this. No endurance marches, hand-to-hand-combat courses or deprival exercises were of the least avail. He remembered reading that goldfish had such short memories that each circuit of the bowl was a brand-new thrill for them. He was sweating, he was probably weeping. He yelled several times: Help me! It's Pine! The name tinkled to nothing. The bottles! he thought. The bottles will save me! He contemplated hurling them into the darkness as a means of rousing help. But even in his dementia his self-discipline won the day, and he could not muster the irresponsibility to smash bottle after bottle of Chateau Petras at four and a half thousand a go.

Who would notice he was missing? So far as the staff knew, he had left the hotel for his monthly six days off. The inventory belonged technically to his free time, a bad bargain wheedled out of him by Herr Meister. His landlady would assume he had decided to sleep at the hotel, a thing he did occasionally when there were spare rooms. If no chance-millionaire came to his aid by ordering a bottle of fine wine, he would be dead before anyone noticed his absence. And millionaires were grounded by the impending war.

Willing himself into a calmer state, Jonathan sat to attention on what felt like a cardboard crate and strove with all his might to make order of his life till now, a last tidying before he died: the good times he had had, the lessons he had drawn, the improvements he had wrought upon his personality, the good women. There were none. Times, women, lessons. None. None but Sophie, who was dead. Look at himself how he might, he saw nothing but half-measures, failures and undignified withdrawals, and Sophie was the monument to all of them. In childhood he had struggled night and day to be an inadequate adult. As a special serviceman he had cloaked himself in blind obedience and, with occasional lapses, endured. As a lover, husband and adulterer, his record was quite as thin: a burst or two of wary pleasure, followed by years of abuse and craven apology.

And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.

He would leave Meister's.

He would buy a boat, something he could manage single-handed.

He would find the one girl he cared about and love her in present time, a Sophie without the betrayal.

He would make friends.

He would find a home. And, for want of parents of his own, become a parent himself.

He would do anything, absolutely anything, rather than cringe any longer in the gloom of servile equivocation where, as it now seemed to him, he had wasted his life, and Sophie's.

His saviour was Frau Loring. With her customary vigilance, she had noticed him through her net curtains on his way to the cellar, and realised belatedly that he had not returned. When the posse arrived to release him, shouting "Herr Pine! Herr Jonathan!" and led by Herr Meister wearing a hair net and armed with a twelve-watt car lamp, Jonathan was not, as might have been expected, mad-eyed with terror but at his ease.

Only the English, they assured one another as they led him to the light, were capable of such composure.

FOUR