And worse, there was never any way to predict if this time he was in favour with the marketing department, and therefore chosen to sit with them.
So, as everyone in the foyer gathered in murmuring clusters, Nathan decided to avoid the stress of discussing it.
He stopped, patting himself down as if confused - perhaps looking for the expensive lighter that should be right there, in his pocket. With a scowl of consternation, he walked off, still patting his pockets as if expecting the lighter to weirdly materialize. Then he ducked to the right, and into a lift, and pressed UP.
Nathan liked hotel rooms. In them, he could pretend that he really was the person he'd made himself into. He liked the tautness of the bedding and the bright sterility of the bathroom; he liked the constant hum of air conditioning. He liked the unquestioned might of the Do Not Disturb sign. He liked turning it to read Please Make Up My Room when he left in the morning, straightening his tie. And he liked the transgressive feeling of closing the door and loosening the tie, then removing his suit and lying in socks and boxer shorts on the bed with his rumpled clothes in a pile alongside him, flicking through the television channels.
Doing this, he fell into a doze with the remote control clasped in his hand. He woke with a jolt, glued to the bed by a line of spit that had dried to a fine, flaky crust on his chin.
He'd turned up the air conditioning too high: his legs were cold.
He drew into himself. It was dark outside. He had no idea what time - it was; he thumbed the volume on the remote control. The national six o'clock news was just beginning. So there was plenty of time to wake up properly, have a good shower and still be changed and ready for dinner.
He crawled under the covers and lay with his eyes closed, listening to the headlines, the usual catalogue of metropolitan calamity and international speculation. The thing in him that, long ago, had been moved and enraged and scared by the television news had long gone.
After the major headlines, he heard this: And, almost four years after her disappearance, the family of missing Elise Fox launch a new appeal for information. Nathan sat up.
In this unhaunted hotel room, the blue television light flicked and lashed at his face and naked body. At 6.15, the headlines were rounded up. After this, the newsreader addressed the camera: The family of Elise Fox, who disappeared almost four years ago after a party in Gloucestershire, have today relaunched an appeal for information which might help to find her.
Nathan watched as, on screen, three people filed into a flashing room and took seats behind a desk. A trim, refined man. A woman in a wine-red suit. And a younger woman - a little older than Elise would have been, had she lived.
She was Elise's older sister.
They sat before a blown-up snapshot of Elise. She looked young and beautiful and careless. Nathan wouldn't have recognized her. His Elise was a flickering series of snapshots: the white-faced bundle by the tennis courts; her white breasts in the darkness of Bob's car; the shocking warmth inside her; the way her dead foot twitched on Bob's naked lap. A naked shape, face down in a scooped-out grave.
As the cameras flashed, the man spoke from a prepared statement.
'If somebody out there, anybody out there, knows what happened to Elise, or if someone out there knows where Elise might be, we beg you to please, please, get in contact.'
His voice broke on the word 'please' and his daughter reached up and touched his elbow, squeezing gently.
'We beg you,' she said. Elise's sister.
She was staring into the camera and through it.
Nathan jumped out of bed and turned on all the lights - the ceiling lights, the standard lamps, the bedside reading lights; the lights in the bathroom and in the wardrobe. Then he removed a miniature bottle of whisky from the minibar. His hands were shaking too badly to break the seal - he opened it with his teeth and tipped the bottle into his gullet.
The phone rang. Nathan snatched it up, not thinking.
'Hello?'
'Hello, mate,' said Justin, who was Nathan's boss. Justin thought himself an old school salesman: at conference dinners he drank whisky and loosened his tie and rolled his sleeves and smoked cigars into the early morning.
Justin and Nathan didn't trust one another. Because of this, they pretended to everyone -- including each other -- to be very close friends.
Justin said, 'Where are you?'
Nathan looked at his watch, then glanced at the TV. They'd moved on to another story now. Global warming or something.
'Sorry, mate. I must have fallen asleep.'
'You'd better get down here. The drinks have started.'
'When's dinner?'
'In forty minutes. But I need you down here, soon as poss.'
Nathan realized that he'd broken an arcane rule -- that the sales reps should never be left to mingle and speak freely. Instead they should be vexed by someone from head office whom they did not like, and who had nothing to say to them.
Nathan hurried to the shower. He stood under the water and tested his fingers, to see if he could feel them. He shampooed his hair and washed himself with the expensive soap he'd brought along. He put on fresh boxer shorts and socks and shirt and a fresh suit, and shoes and cufflinks. Today's suit he hung from the shower rail, where the shower steam would ease the creases from it.
He saw himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator. Smart suit and perfect hair. Bloodless lips.
He went to the formal dinner.
Two weeks before, Nathan had argued with Amrita about the cost effectiveness of an advert she'd placed in the Oldie magazine -- Amrita had called him a pompous wanker. So Nathan's long-term favoured status had taken a setback. He didn't get to sit with the marketing department.
The Foxes were on television again that night, and in the morning they were in the newspapers.
Over the next two weeks, he became almost accustomed to seeing them on the news, or in magazines and newspapers: the father's fine boned face, the mother's air of bewildered efficiency. And the clear-eyed directness of Elise's sister, who featured in many of the print interviews.
Her name was Holly.
Nathan read and reread these interviews until he'd memorized them.
He didn't know why he did this; familiarity with Elise's name in print didn't relieve the dread of seeing it again - or make it possible to sleep with the lights off.
But he connected with something in Holly Fox's clear-eyed gaze, and was greatly moved. It felt like a kind of love, forged in the same smithy.
He wished that things could be better for her - that Holly Fox could be happy.
Nathan wished that he could be happy, too.
Eventually, he wondered if their possible happiness, like the fact of their unhappiness, might not somehow be linked.
That's when he decided to find her.
13
He had to wait until after Christmas.
It was the worst time of year. Even when he came home drunk following some work-related function - work-related functions amounted to the whole of Nathan's social life - it was necessary to drink a bottle of wine and double-check all the lights before attempting to sleep. It was also necessary to check the spare long-life bulbs were stacked in a pyramid in the kitchen, next to the kettle.
Over the utilitarian mirror in the bathroom, he nightly secured a thick blue towel - hanging it firmly from nails hammered into the wall for the purpose, such that it was impossible for the towel to work its way loose during the night and fall. If it had -- if Nathan heard that sudden, slithering noise behind the closed door in the empty flat -- he would simply and immediately lose his mind. The second mirror, full length, he kept inside the wardrobe door -- and he secured the wardrobe door with two simple sliding bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom. He would not risk it swinging open during the dark hours.