‘If it was any longer,’ she went on, ‘it would hardly be worth it.’
There. She had said it for him. And it had been so easy that she thought she might as well go further.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that we should just forget about it completely?’
He seemed to wince at the idea.
‘You can leave me. It’s all right. I won’t make a fuss.’
What else could she say?
‘I won’t cry.’
She had used up all her words. If she opened her mouth again, nothing would come out. She decided she would wait for him to speak. However long it took.
‘Maybe it’s best,’ he said eventually, ‘for both of us.’
‘It’s good for me.’ She took a deep breath and looked into the distance, the place where the landscape vanished, not the horizon exactly, more like a kind of haze. ‘I’d like a drink of something.’
Tom stood over her. ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’
She suddenly remembered the words she had noticed in a shop window on her first night, while they were driving to the Garden District. She could see the exact shape and colour of the letters, and the way the sign tilted, as if a poltergeist had been at work.
‘Hot Wings Are Back!’ she said, and laughed. She still didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant.
Tom’s eyes darkened, and he turned away and ran one hand through his hair. She leaned back on the bench, looked up into the sky. This was something she had always done, ever since she was a child. She never ceased to be astonished by the quality of that blue. All depth. No surface to it whatsoever.
‘How do you feel now?’
She could hear no tenderness in his voice, no real concern. He just wanted information. Facts. She nodded to herself. ‘Better. Much better.’
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘maybe we should go back in.’
That evening, while Tom was downstairs in the bar, Glade called the airline and asked if she could bring her flight forwards, from Tuesday afternoon to Monday morning, early. If she’d been holding a discount ticket, she wouldn’t have been allowed to change it, the man told her, but since it was Apex, there was absolutely no problem. Seats were still available on the seven-thirty to New York. She should check in no later than six-thirty.
At nine o’clock that night Tom took her to a restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter. He ordered two dozen oysters and a bottle of Dom Perignon. The waiter smiled, saying it was his wife’s favourite champagne. Glade was staring at her glass; it was so tall, so slender, that it looked like a vase designed to hold a single flower. Throughout dinner Tom talked about a case he’d been working on, which involved narcotics and embezzlement. They’d had to employ a detective agency to track the defendant down. They had located him, eventually, in a small town in Colombia. Tom raised his eyebrows, then lowered them again and reached for his champagne. Glade found herself wishing that the defendant, whoever he was, had got away.
They returned to the hotel and Glade ran a bath while Tom called San Francisco and LA. Lying in the water, she could hear him talking, a low murmur in the next room. Is that what I’ll remember, she wondered, the sound of him talking to other people? By the time she finished in the bathroom, it was almost one in the morning. Wrapped in a hotel bathrobe, she turned out the lights and opened the door. Tom was lying on the bed, watching MTV. The whole room flashed and flickered. When she fell asleep, he was still watching.
She woke just after five and slipped into her clothes. She didn’t need to switch the lights on; she’d already packed her case the night before. Standing by the door, she looked back into the room. ‘Tom?’ she said.
He didn’t answer.
‘Tom, I’m leaving now.’
‘Where are you going?’ he murmured.
She felt stupid saying London, but she said it anyway.
He sat up in bed, one shoulder edged in cold grey light, and she thought for a moment that he might try and stop her. Then he said, ‘It’s early,’ and fell back among the pillows.
In the lobby the clock above reception said 5:25. A porter in a red tail-coat carried her case out to the semi-circle of driveway at the front of the hotel. He spoke to her kindly, but kindness wasn’t something she could think about. A taxi curved towards her out of the darkness. The porter held the door for her. She thanked him and climbed in.
‘The airport, please.’
She wound the window down and settled back. A thin stream of air washed over her, cool and slightly stagnant. To the east the sky had cracked open, and pale-pink light showed through. Above it and below it, only dark blue-grey. She had been tempted to leave Tom a note, but at the last minute she’d decided against it. She didn’t want him thinking she was going to kill herself.
Three
The Executioner
Waiting for the tube at Tottenham Court Road one Monday morning, Jimmy noticed a man standing further down the platform. The man was in his late forties. Dressed in a cream-coloured raincoat and a dark-grey suit, he was reading a copy of the Telegraph, which he had folded until it was small enough to hold in his left hand. His right hand moved rhythmically, almost mechanically, between the pocket of his raincoat and his face. It took Jimmy a few moments to realise that the man was eating. What, though? Curious, he circled round behind the man, edged into a position at his shoulder. Then, peering down, he saw three glistening, chocolate-coated spheres. Maltesers! He watched them bounce and jostle in the man’s cupped palm, almost as if they were being weighed. He watched them being lifted swiftly towards the man’s lips, which had already parted, bird-like, in anticipation. He heard their crisp pale-yellow interiors surrender to the man’s determined teeth. Sometimes there was a slight delay, the man’s hand unable to find the opening in the packet, perhaps, and a look passed across his face, the troubled look of a child dreaming, but he never took his eyes off the paper he was reading and in the end his hand always emerged again and moved unerringly towards his mouth. How much of what we do is automatic? Jimmy wondered as the westbound tube pulled in.
Inside the carriage, he glanced at his watch. Seven-forty-five. It was an early start, but with a job like his he could always use the extra hour. He worked for the East Coast Soda Corporation — ECSC, as it was known in the trade — a soft-drinks company with its head-quarters in Chicago. For the past five years ECSC had been developing a new product, a soft drink known as Kwench! (the exclamation mark being part of the registered name, part of the logo). Jimmy hadn’t known what to make of the name at first. The K seemed slightly cheap, somehow, and as for the W, wouldn’t that cause problems for people who didn’t speak English? It certainly communicated refreshment, though, and as time passed, the name began to grow on him: it had a crunch to it, a succulence, something beautifully onomatopoeic working in its favour. In any case, they had launched the drink in America, and it had been a marketing sensation. They had shifted three hundred and forty-five million litres in the first twelve months. You couldn’t hope for better sales than that. Now, predictably, the company wanted to reproduce the phenomenon in the UK and, as Senior Brand Manager, the launch would be Jimmy’s responsibility. Everything depended on it: his key performance indicator for that year would be the successful entry of Kwench! into the British marketplace.
His stop came. He left the train and rode a long, slow escalator to the street. Outside the station he turned left, past the woman selling flowers, and walked quickly towards the ECSC building, which gleamed like a solid block of platinum in the bleak October light. Since it was only ten-past eight, he was alone as he passed through the revolving doors and on into the lobby. He said good morning to Bob, the security man, and waited outside the lifts. He could taste the fifteen or twenty Silk Cut he must have smoked the night before. Some friends had come round — Marco, Zane, Simone. He could still see them, sprawled at the dark oak table in his dining-room: Marco with his shaved head and his air of truculence, Zane in a purple velvet shirt, Simone’s red hair falling forwards as she leaned over the mirror. In the end he had been forced to throw them out. Still, he’d been in bed by three. He yawned. The lift doors parted. Stepping inside, he pressed the button that said 9 and felt a kind of cushioned power hoist him skywards.