Up to now they had met in public, but without much in the way of the public to witness it.
Randall had spent the evening before reading over lists of names. ‘I see no one from your section has put themselves forward for the retraining programme,’ he said in lieu of a hello of his own.
Her mouth side-on looked lipless. ‘It appears America holds bad memories for some of them.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Taking on the unspecified sins of an entire nation. ‘What about you?’
She turned to face him, her eyes as narrowed almost as her mouth, though the sun was at her back.
‘I’m not going, if that’s what is bothering you,’ he said, because something evidently was. ‘I just thought maybe if you were thinking in the future of advancement…’
Liz shook her head. ‘You still don’t get it, do you, the way things work in this country? Men earn more than their women, that’s the deal. It was enough for my husband to swallow me getting a job at all, never mind bringing home more than he was. I can just imagine how he would react to me “advancing”, and as for me waltzing in and telling him I was taking off to the States for a couple of weeks on my own…’
‘Hardly on your own.’
‘Do you seriously think that makes it better?’ She stood up suddenly. He was reminded of the very first time they met here, all those months of Sundays ago: same raincoat, despite the improvement in the weather, same belt, which she tugged on, hard, before offering him her hand. He didn’t know whether to laugh or not, but in the end followed her lead: not. He put his hand in hers (a vein in her wrist pulsed). She shook it once.
‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘Wait a second, you’re not telling me…’
‘I’m telling you we’ll not do this again.’
He felt an odd sense of relief. He had thought at first she meant goodbye to the job and everything.
‘If you say so.’
‘I do say so.’
He went to get up.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He sat back, spreading his arms as wide as they would go along the top of the bench: look at me not getting up. He watched her walk along the path in the direction of the river, take a quick step back to avoid an errant Frisbee travelling between students who had given up all pretence of study, then carry on, shoulders even from a distance set, round a bend and out of sight.
Randall let out a long, slow breath and hauled himself to his feet.
So that was that, whatever it was.
*
She had said his name the night before. Robert had stopped dead, mid thrust, pushing her back off him, holding her at trembling arms’ length. ‘What?’ His chest was heaving, hers too: hers even more so. God, she had been so nearly there, so caught up she didn’t know she didn’t know what she was saying. But the echo of it reverberated now. She moved his palms from her shoulders on to her breasts, pressing down hard. ‘Hands all over me,’ she slurred the words. It wasn’t all put on. She raised her hips an inch, raised them another, took him by the right wrist, fitted his fingers into the gap she had made, as much on him as in her. ‘I want your hands’ — guiding the left one the length of her back, shoulder blades to tailbone, on down from there — ‘all over me.’
He started again — couldn’t help himself — took back the inches she had temporarily denied him, strained then to find one… inch… more. It was over in seconds. Her before him.
That’s how close she was.
And that’s how close she was.
She couldn’t risk anything like that happening again.
The Frisbee, checking her stride, nearly broke her resolve, but she put her head down, held tight to the strap of her shoulder bag and ploughed on.
*
Randall awoke two nights later from a nightmare of scudding over jungle scrub taking fire on all sides to find that it was no dream at all — he was actually there or it was actually here — the clatter of the rotors, the sky’s untimely orange, the fizzes, the pops, the dreadful bangs. He rolled off the bed on to the floor, and kept rolling, looking for a place to hide.
*
What Liz heard first was bin lids. She swung her legs out of bed and crossed the floor barefoot to the window, opening it a fraction, as quietly as the latch would allow, which was not quite quietly enough.
Robert sat up, knocking over the bedside lamp as he tried to switch it on… righting it again at the second attempt.
‘What is it?’
‘Listen.’
‘What?’
Distant, distant.
‘Listen. Bin lids. He must be dead.’
Robert reached for the lamp again, still squinting against its light. ‘If he is it’s nobody’s fault but his own.’
‘I know, but…’
‘But what?’ He rolled over. ‘You have your work in the morning. I have mine. Close that window and get back into bed.’
She listened a few moments longer then did as he said.
*
When he had reoriented himself sufficiently to understand that he was not under direct attack Randall ventured to wriggle out of the corner into which he had rolled and raise the window blind an inch or two with the backs of his fingers. All was confusion: overlit, overloud confusion, much of it concentrated on a point about five hundred yards to his right, beyond the trees, corresponding to the Twinbrook entrance to the factory.
Six feet to his left, at the other end of the window, the telephone sat on a glass table. He felt along the join of the baseboard and the carpet for the cable, yanked, bringing the handset crashing to the floor then reeled it in, dial tone buzzing angrily.
It took ten minutes and four numbers — the last passed on to him by the housekeeper in Pauma Valley — to get through, to another house — ranch, Randall supposed — where a party was in full swing; a further ten while DeLorean was located, the phone so far as Randall could tell brought to him, elbowed through a dozen bellowed conversations and sudden bursts of laughter, rather than he to it.
‘Edmund?’ he said, and you just knew he had a finger in one ear.
‘I’m sorry to be phoning, it’s all gone crazy here.’ Randall pushed the receiver under the blind, held it to the window for half a minute. The glass throbbed. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘It’s hard for me to hear anything with this music,’ DeLorean said, or shouted. Randall was getting it too. Yvonne Elliman, if he was not mistaken, singing as though she was standing by DeLorean’s side.
‘Hold on, hold on, let me see,’ he said. A door slid open in California, slid shut, and Yvonne was gone, the backing track of voices, ice against glasses, pool water being efficiently displaced, was gone. ‘There.’
Randall did not bother a second time with the phone to the window. ‘I’m guessing two, three hundred people, right in front of the gates. It’s to do with that hunger strike,’ he said. ‘Has to be.’
He thought for a moment or two that DeLorean still hadn’t heard properly, so unhurried was his reply.
‘You know that’s why I have you there, right? I figured if anyone knew what to do in a situation like this it would be you. This is your moment, Edmund. You call it.’
These last words were barely out of his mouth when he spoke again, over his shoulder as it sounded, and as though taken entirely by surprise. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’ Then ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘is that…?’ The rest of the sentence was smothered by his hand on the mouthpiece. When he removed it again — a matter of seconds — the pitch of his voice had changed.
‘I’m back in New York tomorrow,’ he said, chords stretched tight, something more immediate he did not want to betray: whoever, or whatever, it was he had seen trumped for a moment the spectacle Randall was trying to describe. ‘We’ll talk then.’