The Night Manager

There is larceny to returning covertly to your own country after you have abandoned it. There is larceny to using a brand-new alias and being a new version of yourself. You wonder whose clothes you have stolen, what shadow you are casting, whether you have been here before as someone else. There is a sense of occasion about your first day in the part after six years as your undefined self in exile. Some of this freshness may have shown in Jonathan's face, for Mrs. Trethewey has always afterwards maintained that she observed a cockiness about him, what she called a twinkle. And Mrs. Trethewey is not given to romancing. She is a clever woman, tall and stately, not country to look at at all. Sometimes she says things that make you wonder what she might have been if she'd had the education they get these days, or a husband with more under his hat than poor old Tom, who dropped dead of a stroke in Penzance last Christmastime after a touch too much charity at the Masonic Hall.

"Jack Linden, he was sharp now," she will say in her didactic Cornish way. "His eyes was nice enough when you first looked at them; merry, I dare say. But they was all over you and not the way you're thinking, Marilyn. They saw you far and close at the same time. You'd think he'd stole something before he ever come in the shop. Well, he had. We know that now. Same as we know a lot else we'd sooner not."

It was twenty past five and ten minutes to closing, and she was running up her totals on the electronic till before watching Neighbours on TV with Marilyn, her daughter, who was upstairs minding her little girl. She heard his big motorbike  ―  "one of them real

growlers." She saw him bump it onto its stand and take off his helmet and smooth down his nice hair though it didn't need it, more a way of relaxing himself, she guessed. And she believed she saw him smile. An emmet, she thought, and a cheerful one at that. In West Cornwall emmet means foreigner, and a foreigner is anyone who comes from east of the river Tamar.

But this one could have been an emmet from the moon. She'd a good mind to turn the notice round on the door, she says, but his looks stopped her. Also his shoes, which were the same as her Tom's used to be, polished like conkers and wiped carefully on the mat as he came in, not what you expected from a motorcyclist at all.

So she went on with her totals while he drifted round the shelves without bothering to take a basket, which is men all over whether they're Paul Newman or plain as mud: come in for a packet of razor blades, end up with their arms full, anything but take a basket. And very quiet on his feet, soundless almost, him being so light. You don't think of motorbike people being quiet as a rule.

"You from up-country then, are you, my dove?" she asked him.

"Oh, well, yes, I'm afraid I am."

"There's no need to be afraid, my darling. There's plenty of nice people come from up-country, and there's plenty down here I wish would go up-country." No answer. Too busy with the biscuits. And his hands, she noticed, now he'd pulled his gloves off: groomed to a turn. She always liked well-kept hands. "What part are you from, then? Somewhere nice, I hope."

"Well, nowhere, really," he confessed, pert as may be, taking down two packets of digestives and a plain crackers and reading the labels as if he'd never seen them.

"You can't be from Nowhere Really, my robin," Mrs, Trethewey retorted, following him along the racks with her eyes. "You may not be Cornish, but you can't be just air. Where you from, now?"

But where the villagers tended to come smartly to attention when Mrs. Trethewey put on her stern voice, Jonathan merely smiled. "I've been living abroad," he explained, as if humouring her. "I'm a case of the wanderer returned."

And his voice the same as his hands and shoes, she recounts: polished like glass.

"What part of abroad, then, my bird?" she demanded. "There's more than one abroad, even down here. We're not that

primitive, though there's a lot may think we are, I daresay."

But she couldn't get past him, she says. He just stood there and smiled and helped himself to tea and tuna and oat cakes, calm as a juggler, and every time she asked a question he made her feel cheeky.

"Well, I'm the one who's taken the cottage at the Lanyon, you see," he said.

"That means you're barking mad, then, my darling," said Ruth Trethewey comfortably. "Nobody who wasn't mad would want to live out on the Lanyon, sitting in the middle of a rock all day."

And this farawayness in him, she says. Well, he was a sailor, of course, we know that now even if he put it to a bad use. This fixed grin he had while he studied the tinned fruits like he was learning them by heart. Elusive, that's what he was. Like soap in the bath. You thought you had him, then he'd slipped through your fingers. There was something about him, that's all she knows.