‘Why should I do what you’re asking?’ I said again to Stephen that evening in Folly Bridge Court. A moment earlier I had put down my glass on the side table and without speaking he reached across, lifted the glass, and slid a black leather coaster beneath it.
‘Because I’ve asked you in the nicest possible way. I’ve demonstrated how you would be doing me a great favor. I’ve given you, I have to say, a substantial amount of very expensive whisky over the course of the evening. What else can I or should I do now but threaten you if you refuse to be reasonable about it? You want money? That would be unwise. Money can always, but always be traced. Help me in this way and I will make your life easier than you can possibly imagine. Give me time, and I’ll even get you back to New York, which I know you miss more than you want to admit. I will look after your daughter and even your ex-wife in ways you would not think possible.’
‘Is this about something more sordid than just helping out the sister of a friend of yours?’
Again he spluttered. ‘This is about grace and doing the right thing in the right moment for someone who may be more important in the long run than we can now conceive.’
This was, I felt certain, about sex and nothing more: Stephen wanting to do a favor for a man with whom he was in love, or perhaps a man, this Saif character, who might himself have been threatening Stephen with exposure, or blackmail, or some darker vengeance.
I rose from my chair and began walking towards the door, hearing behind me the wheezing of a man unaccustomed to failure.
‘Can I trust you?’ he called out. ‘Can I rely on you? Or do I have to take other measures?’
I turned around, half expecting to find him holding a gun, but there was nothing in his hand apart from the glass of whisky. ‘No one has ever tried to intimidate me like this, not in my whole life.’
‘That is not an answer, Jeremy.’
In his expression I saw a quality of ruthlessness that made me afraid not only for myself, but for Meredith and my mother, even for Susan, for everyone I loved and had ever loved. There was no question that this was a man capable of delivering on his threats.
‘I promise to judge the candidate on her merits,’ I said, and knew I would not.
Outside, on the Abingdon Road, it was frigid and I didn’t find a cab until I had walked almost all the way back to Carfax and then, going home, drunk several times over but still trying to hold my mind together, I played back the conversation in my head, imagining other responses I might have given and ways I should have turned Stephen’s demands to my advantage. I went to bed but did not sleep, aware of all the sounds around me, bumps coming from the adjoining house, cars in the street, the whisper of the ring road encircling Oxford and the drone of military aircraft overhead, planes on their way to and from Brize Norton.
Those memories returned to me in New York with clarity and the recollection of our conversation kept me awake as much as my mother’s snores, rumbling across the parquet while I made my dark perambulation through the living room, fighting an insomnia that had come to stay over the course of recent days, as disobliging as an unwanted guest.
Out on Houston Street, in the lamplight, taxis braking and lurching, a man in black stood still, staring up at my window, and when I turned on the light, as if to acknowledge once more the fact of being watched, he turned around and ran.
~ ~ ~
The day after Thanksgiving my mother was up before dawn cleaning my kitchen, although it was immaculate, and intermittently reading The New York Times, which she had gone out to buy, while listening to Morning Edition on National Public Radio. An Egyptian pro-democracy blogger had been arrested, while a court in Alexandria had sentenced to prison a group of women and girls who had protested, armed only with balloons, in support of the deposed Islamist president. It was not what I felt like hearing first thing in the morning. I did not want to be reminded that people I knew — had once known — might be affected by such distant events. From world news, NPR switched without pause to reports of the Black Friday shopping frenzy that burned across America.
‘I hate all this consumerist craziness,’ my mother said. ‘People were lined up at Macy’s overnight! They opened at 8pm on Thanksgiving! What is the world coming to? What are we doing to ourselves? Everything for the almighty dollar! Do you want some coffee? I just made a pot.’
‘It’s not even seven. Our train isn’t until ten.’
‘I needed to get organized!’
‘There is nothing whatsoever to organize. I have organized everything already.’
I found myself watching my mother, anxious she might break a glass or complicate a process I felt I had perfected, for instance the making of coffee, and as I drank a cup of what she had made, I found it at once too weak and too acidic and then made a show of pouring out her pot and making a new one according to my own plan, and when she drank a cup of mine she grimaced, saying she preferred it her way.
‘Yours is too strong. Too bitter.’
‘If you don’t like it, you don’t have to drink it.’
‘Don’t be so goddamned huffy, Jeremy.’
I know that my time in Britain, my partial acculturation there, means that the emotional diffidence I internalized and accommodated to my own personality seems now, to my mother, like a form of rejection or a kind of filial abrasiveness, but there is little I can do to change it. Perhaps in time I will again be American in a way that I was once American, and yet I doubt such reversal is possible.
At eight-thirty we took a taxi to Penn Station, and throughout the ride my mother fidgeted, searching her purse.
‘What did you forget?’
‘Nothing, nothing.’
‘Are you missing something?’
‘No!’ She coughed, and it was clear she was lying. Then she leaned over and said in a low voice, ‘I just wish you would have let us leave half an hour earlier.’
‘Mom, it’s fine. We have plenty of time. If I were going alone I would’ve left half an hour later.’
As it was we had to wait in line for the better part of an hour, standing in the snake of people who know from habit which track the trains heading up the Hudson are likely to depart from, and though the station has changed somewhat over the years there was a great familiarity, even comfort, in standing once again in the same spot, checking over my shoulder at the Departures board and listening to the clacking changeover of times and destinations, the old-fashioned-sounding announcements of track numbers and stops along the various routes, and I noticed the way people bound for upstate New York, particularly those going north of Poughkeepsie, look more like Midwesterners than New Yorkers, so often unfashionably dressed as they are, or at least not dressed like people who live in the city, the businessmen in their poorly fitting khakis and navy blue blazers hiding ample waists, the frumpy government workers checking their smartphones and holding loud conversations, the older woman who arrives and asks if this is the train to Albany and then strikes up a conversation with my mother, assuring us she is not crazy but ‘waiting on line in Penn Station makes me so nervous, you know what I mean?’ and we all know that this old woman, who lives in Vermont and worries about terrorists without saying the word is voicing the fear so many of us have learned to contain in lives that demand travel, but this woman, this Vermonter who is expecting a niece to pick her up from the station in Rensselaer and drive her to Bennington where she and the niece both live, does not come to the city frequently, although she used to live here, was born and grew up in Brooklyn, spent all her professional life working in Manhattan, then retired to Vermont just after the attacks, deciding she did not want to spend the rest of her days worrying about being blown up when she was just minding her business, and the whole story spilled out as we stood there, ‘on line’ as New Yorkers say, the way she had come down simply to have Thanksgiving with her sister and brother-in-law, and that got my mother talking about Meredith and Peter, though she did so without giving their names or divulging where they live or what they do, since a great many people would recognize who they are or be interested in the glittering lives they lead and such knowledge could put them at risk because by revealing our proximity to Peter in particular we might be seen as useful targets for kidnapping or worse.