Yes, he knew.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it caught fire —’
‘Your cat caught fire?’
‘Yes. And you know what happened then?’
Tom was staring.
‘We had to put it out,’ she said. ‘Put the cat out.’ She began to laugh. Her tea slopped over, her napkin fell on to the floor. Soon she was laughing uncontrollably, and the sight of Tom’s face, bewildered at first, and then annoyed, made it impossible to stop.
Towards the middle of that week Glade was at the restaurant, slicing olive bread for lunch, when the phone rang. Betty had been sent out to buy vegetables and ice, and the maitre d’ was upstairs in the office, so Glade answered it herself. It was Charlie, calling from a phone-box in South London. He asked her if the journalist had contacted her. She said he hadn’t. Charlie muttered something under his breath. Then he said, ‘I need to see you. Tonight, if possible.’
Glade leaned on the bar, looking out into the sunlit street. The glitter of spokes as a bicycle slid past. The heatwave lasting. She suggested the rose garden in Regent’s Park, which was one of her favourite places in the summer. Charlie seemed to approve of the idea.
‘The rose garden,’ he said. ‘At half-past seven.’
Later, as she smoothed butter into small china pots, she couldn’t help thinking that there had been a tightness in Charlie’s voice, a tightness that was unfamiliar. Throughout lunch the strained sound stayed with her. She found it difficult to keep her mind on things. When the woman wearing the gold hoop earrings wanted to know what was in the duck confit soup, she just went blank.
‘Confit of duck,’ she began, then faltered.
‘Well, obviously,’ the woman snapped.
Glade had to ask Betty to come over to the table and run through the ingredients for her — cavolo nero, dried haricot beans, carrots, and so on.
Not long afterwards, there was another awkward moment, this time with the man sitting by the window. He was in his late fifties, early sixties, and dressed conventionally in a dark-blue blazer and grey trousers. When she first saw him, she was sure she knew him; she couldn’t remember how, though, or from where. She must have waited on him recently, she thought. Yes, he was probably a regular. She smiled as she passed his table and asked him how he was, but he looked at her with such detachment, such a complete absence of recognition, that she realised she must have made a mistake. Just then, luckily, a much younger man arrived at the table. The man in the blazer stood up, saying, ‘There you are, James,’ and she was able to slip away, unnoticed.
At last her shift came to an end. She walked through Soho and over Oxford Street, enjoying the sunshine, the bustle of the crowds. At five-thirty she stopped at a pub on Great Titchfield Street where she ordered a double gin-and-tonic. For the next hour she sat outdoors, allowing all the tension to drain out of her. As she sipped her drink she began to think about Charlie’s friend, the journalist. She found herself imagining an office, with long corridors, fluorescent lights. The smell of radiators that had just been bled: that stifled, gassy air. She saw the journalist hurrying towards a door, which rattled when he knocked on it. He was a small, slightly agitated man, and he was wearing a brown suit with a mustard-yellow cardigan underneath. When he disappeared through the door, closing it quietly behind him, she remained outside, in the corridor, alone.
She finished her drink and left the pub. Instead of walking north, towards Regent’s Park, she decided to take a roundabout route. Near Portland Place the streets felt still and warm and dead, like rooms in a house that’s been locked up for the summer. She kept going west. On Marylebone High Street she called in at a small supermarket and bought a baguette, some French cheese and a bottle of white wine. As she passed the cooler, she noticed half a dozen bright-orange cans. She opened the door and took out three of them. ‘Kwench it!’ she muttered, moving up the aisle towards the counter.
By half-past seven she was crossing the park. There had been no rain for weeks and the grass had a scorched look; it crunched and crackled under her feet like straw. The rose garden seemed green, almost lavish by comparison. She loved the layered fragrance you breathed in there — the way it hypnotised you, slowed you down. You would often see people stoop over a rose and just go still, their heads at a slight angle; they could have been trying to listen to a sound. Then, after a while, they would step back, stare up into the sky, entranced, transformed. Though by August, of course, the scented roses had already bloomed, their petals brown at the edges, as if they had been dipped in coffee.
She found Charlie sitting on a wooden bench with his hands in his pockets. He smiled at her, but she could see that something was worrying him. It showed in his forehead, which was twisted, and in the paleness of his face. He looked cold, despite the weather.
She sat on the ground in front of him and unpacked the provisions she had brought with her.
‘A feast,’ he exclaimed. But his voice had no life in it; it sounded hollow, bleak.
‘What’s the matter, Charlie?’ she asked.
He sighed. ‘I’m not sure.’
She passed him the bottle of wine, which he opened with the corkscrew on his Swiss Army penknife. They began to eat. On the next bench along, under an archway that was smothered in voluptuous pink roses, a couple were kissing.
‘The journalist,’ Charlie said, then stopped.
Glade looked round. ‘What about him?’
‘He still hasn’t called you, has he.’
‘No.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of.’ Charlie swallowed some wine from the bottle, then offered it to her. She shook her head. His eyes veered away from her, up into the trees. ‘I can’t get hold of him,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried him at work, at home …’
Glade frowned. Every time she thought about the journalist she saw a man in a brown suit and a yellow cardigan disappearing through a door. She chewed thoughtfully on a piece of bread. Behind Charlie’s shoulder, the couple were still kissing.
‘No one seems to know where he is.’ Charlie reached for the bottle again and drank. ‘You see, if he was away on an assignment, I’d know about it. He would have told me.’ He was staring at the grass now. When he lifted his head, his pupils had dilated. ‘Something’s going on.’
She smiled. She couldn’t help it.
‘I’m serious,’ he said.
‘But, Charlie —’
‘I want you to be careful, that’s all. Be careful.’
‘Careful?’ she said. ‘What of?’
He peered out into the encroaching darkness. ‘I don’t know.’
Sometime later, she noticed that the bench the lovers had been sitting on was empty. At the same moment she remembered the man in the restaurant at lunchtime, the man wearing the blazer, and she realised that, although she didn’t actually know him, she had seen him before. It was during the two days she had spent in the sleep clinic. He was one of the researchers who had been standing in the doorway to her cubicle, and who had backed away, startled, when she woke up. No wonder he hadn’t recognised her. She was probably just one of thousands of people that he used in his research.
She was on the point of telling Charlie about the coincidence when she heard a rumble coming from beneath her, from under the ground. She couldn’t think what it might be. She glanced at Charlie, who seemed equally perplexed. There was a sudden, vicious hiss, and something landed on her. She jumped up, brushing at her dress. It was water. They had turned the sprinkler system on, and water was being flung in great loops from the tops of the rose arbours.
She had cried out the first time, in shock, but then the water kept landing on her, and it was so cold and violent against her skin, so like being slapped, that she cried out every time it happened. She tried to dodge it, find a place where the sprinklers couldn’t touch her, but the system was too efficient. Each square-inch of grass seemed to be accounted for.