The Night Manager

She stepped inside and saw Roper sitting at the desk with his back to her. And he remained there, still with his back to her, while a steward parked her luggage in the bedroom and withdrew. He was reading something, checking it with a pen as he went along. A contract, a whatever. She waited for him to finish, or put it down and turn to her. Even get up. He didn't. He reached the end of the page, scribbled something ― she thought his initials ― then passed the next page and went on reading. It was a thick, typed document, blue, with a red ribbon and a red-ruled margin. There were quite a few pages to go. He's writing his will, she decided. And to my former mistress Jed I leave absolutely sod all....

He was wearing his navy blue tailored silk dressing gown with rolled collar and crimson piping, and usually, when he put it on, it meant either that they were about to make love, or just had. While he read he occasionally shifted the angle of his shoulders inside it, as if he sensed she was admiring them. He had always been proud of his shoulders. She was still standing. She was six feet from him. She was wearing jeans and a knit vest and several gold necklaces. He liked her to wear gold. The carpet was puce and brand-new. Very expensive, very deep. They had chosen it together from samples, in front of the fire at Crystal. Jonathan had lent his advice. This was the first time she had seen it in position.

"Am I disturbing you?" she asked, when he had still not turned his head.

"Hardly at all," he replied, while his head remained bowed over the papers.

She sat on the edge of a chair, clutching her tapestry bag on her lap. There was such over-control in his body, and such harnessed tension in his voice, that she presumed that at any moment he was going to get up and hit her, probably all in one movement: a spring and a sweeping backhand swipe that would knock her into the middle of next week. She'd once had an Italian boy who'd done that to her as a punishment for being witty. The punch had carried her clean across the room. It should have felled her outright, but her riding balance helped her, and as soon as she had grabbed her things from the bedroom, she let the punch carry her out of the house.

"I told them lobster," Roper said, as he again initialled something on the document before him. "Reckoned you were owed one after Corky's little number at Enzo's. Lobster all right for you?"

She didn't answer.

"Chaps tell me you've been having a bit of a tumble with Brother Thomas. Likee? Real name's Pine, by the way. Jonathan to you."

"Where is he?"

"Thought you'd ask that." Turn a page. Raise an arm. Fuss with the half-lens reading glasses. "Been going on long, has it? Quickies in the summerhouse? Knickers off in the woods? Bloody good at it, both of you, I must say. All those staff around. I'm not stupid either. Didn't spot a thing."

"If they're telling you I slept with Jonathan, I didn't."

"Nobody said much about sleep."

"We are not lovers."

She had said the same to the mother superior, she remembered, but it hadn't cut much ice. Roper, paused at his reading, still didn't turn his head.

"So what are you?" he asked. "If not lovers, what?"

We're lovers, she conceded stupidly. It made not one whit of difference whether they were physical lovers or some other. Her love for Jonathan and her betrayal of Roper were accomplished facts. The rest, as in the potting shed, was technical. "Where is he?" she demanded.

Too busy reading. A shift of the shoulders as we amend something with our six-foot-long Mont Blanc.

"Is he on the boat?"

A sculptured stillness now, her father's pensive silence. But father was afraid the world was going to the devil and, by Jove, hadn't the least idea how to stop it. Whereas Roper was helping it on its way.

"Says he did it all by himself," Roper said. "That true? Jed didn't do any of it. Pine's the baddie, Pine did it all. Jed's snow white. Too thick to know what she's about, anyway. End of statement for the press. All his own work."

"What work?"

Roper shoved his pen aside and stood, still contriving not to look at her. He crossed the room to the panelled wall and pressed a button. The electric doors of the drinks cupboard rolled back. He opened the refrigerator, fished out a bottle of the Dom, uncorked it and filled himself a glass. Then, as a kind of compromise between looking at her and not, he spoke to her reflection in the mirrored interior of the cupboard, what he could see of it between a row of wine bottles and the vermouths and Camparis.

"Want some?" he asked, almost tenderly, lifting the bottle of Dom and offering it to her reflection.

"What work? What's he supposed to have done?"

"Won't say. Asked him to, but he won't. What he's done, who for, who with, why, starting when. Who's paying him. Nothing. Could save himself a hell of a lot of aggro if he did. Gallant chap. Good choice you made. Congratulations."