The Night Manager

The first time Marilyn Trethewey came to visit Jonathan was to deliver a case of mineral water that was too big to go on his motorbike. She was finely moulded like her mother, with a strict set jaw and jet-black hair the colour of Sophie's, and ruddy Cornish cheeks and strong high breasts, for she could not have been a day more than twenty. Spotting her striding behind her pram down the village street, always alone, or standing apart at the till in her mother's shop, Jonathan had wondered whether she was even seeing him, or merely resting her gaze on him while she saw something different in her mind.

She insisted on carrying the case of bottles to the front door, and when he made to take it from her, she shrugged him off. So he stood on his own doorstep while she went into the house and set the box on the kitchen table, then took a long stare round the living room before coming back outside.

"Dig yourself in," Burr had advised. "Buy a greenhouse, plant a garden, form life-long friendships. We need to know you had to tear yourself away. If you can find a girl to leave dangling, so much the better. In a perfect world you'd make her pregnant."

"Thanks very much."

Burr caught his tone and gave him a swift sideways glance. "What's the matter, then? Taken a vow of celibacy, have we? That Sophie really got to you, didn't she?"

A couple of days later Marilyn came again, this time without anything to deliver. And instead of her habitual jeans and scruffy top, she had got herself up in a skirt and jacket, as if she had a date with her solicitor. She rang the bell, and as soon as he opened the door she said, "You gon' leave me be, then, right?" So he took a step back and let her past him, and she placed herself at the centre of the room as if testing his reliability. And he saw that the lace cuffs of her blouse were shaking, and he knew that it had cost her a lot to get this far.

"You like it here, then, do you?" she asked him in her challenging way. "All by your own?" She had her mother's quick eye and untutored shrewdness.

"It's meat and drink to me," said Jonathan, taking refuge in his hotelier's voice.

"What d'you do, then? You can't watch telly all day. You haven't got none."

"Read. Walk. Do a bit of business here and there." So now go, he thought, smiling tensely at her, eyebrows raised.

"You paint, then, do you?" she said, examining his watercolours set out on the table before the seaward window.

"I try."

"I can paint." She was picking through the brushes, testing them for springiness and shape. "I was good at painting. Won prizes, didn't I?"

"Why don't you paint now. then?" Jonathan asked.

He had meant it as a question, but to his alarm she took it as an invitation. Having emptied out the water jar in the sink, she refilled it and sat down at his table, selected a fresh sheet of cartridge paper and, having tucked her hair behind her ears, lost herself to everything except her work. And with her long back turned to him, and her black hair hanging down it, and the sunlight from the window blazing on the top of her head, she was Sophie, his accusing angel, come to visit him.

He watched her for a while, waiting hopefully for the association to fade, but it didn't, so he went outside and dug in the garden until dusk. He returned to find her wiping down the table just as she had done at school. Then she propped her unfinished painting against the wall, and instead of sea or sky or cliff, it snowed a dark-haired, laughing girl ― Sophie as a child, for instance, Sophie long before she married her perfect English gentleman for his passport.

"Come again tomorrow, then?" she asked in her clipped, aggressive way.

"Of course. If you wish. Why not?" said the hotelier, making a mental note to be in Falmouth. "If I have to be out, I'll leave the door open."

And when he returned from Falmouth he found the painting of the girl completed, and a note telling him gruffly that it was for him. After that she came most afternoons, and when she had finished her painting she sat herself opposite him in the armchair across the fire and read his copy of The Guardian.

"World's in a damn good mess, then, in't it, Jack?" she announced, rattling the paper. And he heard her laugh, which was what the village was beginning to hear too. "It's a bloody pigsty, Jack Linden. You take my word for it."

"Oh, I do," he assured her, careful not to return her smile for too long. "I absolutely do, Marilyn."

But he began urgently to wish her gone. Her vulnerability scared him. So did his sense of distance from her. Not in a thousand years, he assured Sophie in his mind. I swear.

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