'Of course, he'll deny he ever spoke to them,' he said.
'It's a direct quote, Don. And look how much detail there is. He can't deny he said it.'
Annie brought her coffee back and sat down at her desk, a vast asymmetrical affair in elm and walnut that a friend in England had made for her four years ago when, to everyone's surprise, she had given up writing to become an executive. It had followed her from that magazine to this much grander one, where it had won the instant loathing of the interior designer hired at great expense to restyle the deposed editor's office to Annie's taste. He had taken clever revenge by insisting that, as the desk clashed so badly, everything else should clash too. The result was a cacophony of shape and color that the designer, with no detectable sign of irony, called Eclectic Deconstructionism.
All that really worked were some abstract splatter paintings done by Grace at the age of three that Annie (to her daughter's initial pride and subsequent embarrassment) had proudly framed. They hung on the walls among all the awards and photographs of Annie smiling cheek by jowl with assorted glitterati. More discreetly positioned, on the desk where only she could see them, were the photographs of those she cared about: Grace, Robert and her father.
Over the tops of these Annie now surveyed Don Farlow. It was funny to see him not wearing a suit. The old denim jacket and hiking boots had surprised her. She'd had him down as a Brooks Brothers type - slacks, loafers and yellow cashmere. He smiled.
'So. You want to sue him?'
Annie laughed. 'Of course I want to sue him. He signed an agreement saying he wouldn't talk to the press and he's libeled me by saying I've faked the figures.'
'A libel that'll be repeated a hundred times over if we sue. And blown up into a much bigger story.'
Annie frowned.
'Don, you're not going soft on me are you? Fenimore Fiske is a bitter, twisted, talentless, spiteful old toad.'
Farlow put up his hands, grinning.
'Don't hold back Annie, tell me what you really think.'
'While he was here he did all he could to stir up trouble and now he's gone he's trying to do the same. I want to burn his wrinkled ass.'
'Is that an English expression?'
'No, we'd say apply heat to his aging fundament.'
'Well, you're the boss. Fundamentally.'
'You better believe it.'
One of the phones on Annie's desk clicked and she picked it up. It was Robert. He told her in a level voice that Grace had been in an accident. She'd been flown up to a hospital in Albany where she was in intensive care, still unconscious. Annie should stay on the train all the way to Albany. He would meet her there.
Chapter Two
Annie and Robert had met when she was only eighteen. It was the summer of 1968 and rather than go straight from school to Oxford University where she had been offered a place, Annie decided to take a year off. She signed up with an organization called Voluntary Service Overseas and was given a two-week crash course on how to teach English, avoid malaria and repel the advances of amorous locals (say no, loudly, and mean it).
Thus prepared, she flew to Senegal in West Africa and after a brief stay in the capital, Dakar, set off on the dusty five-hundred-mile ride south in an open-sided bus crammed with people, chickens and goats, to the small town that was to be her home for the next twelve months. On the second day, as night fell, they arrived at the banks of a great river.
The night air was hot and damp and clamorous with insects and Annie could see the lights of the town twinkling far across the water. But the ferry had shut down till morning and the driver and other passengers, now her friends, were concerned about where she would spend the night. There was no hotel and though they themselves would have no trouble finding a place to lay their heads, they clearly felt the young Englishwoman needed somewhere salubrious.
They told her there was a tubab living nearby who would surely put her up. Without the faintest idea of what a tubab might be, Annie found herself being led in a large posse bearing her bags along winding jungle tracks to a small mud house set among baobab and papaya trees. The tubab who answered the door - she later found out it meant white man - was Robert.
He was a Peace Corps volunteer and had been there a year, teaching English and building wells. He was twenty-four, a Harvard graduate and the most intelligent person Annie had ever met. That night he cooked her a wonderful meal of spiced fish and rice, washed down with bottles of cold local beer, and they talked by candlelight till three in the morning. Robert was from Connecticut and was going to be a lawyer. It was congenital, he apologized, eyes wryly aglint behind his gold-rim specs. Everyone in the family had been lawyers for as long as any of them could remember. It was the Curse of the Macleans.
And, like a lawyer, he cross-examined Annie about her life, forcing her to describe and analyze it in a way that made it seem as fresh to her as it did to him. She told him how her father had been a diplomat and how, for the first ten years of her life, they had moved from country to country whenever he was given a new post. She and her younger brother had been born in Egypt, then lived in Malaya, then Jamaica. And then her father had died, quite suddenly, from a massive heart attack. Annie had only recently found a way of saying this that didn't stop the conversation and make people study their shoes. Her mother had resettled in England, rapidly remarried and packed her and her brother off to boarding schools. Although Annie skimmed over this part of the story, she could see Robert sensed the depth of unresolved pain beneath it.
The following morning Robert took her in his jeep across on the ferry and delivered her safely to the Catholic convent where she was to live and teach for the coming year under the only occasionally disapproving eye of the mother superior, a kindly and conveniently myopic French-Canadian.
Over the course of the next three months, Annie met up with Robert every Wednesday when he came to buy supplies in town. He spoke Jola - the local language - fluently and gave her a weekly lesson. They became friends but not lovers. Instead, Annie lost her virginity to a beautiful Senegalese man called Xavier to whose amorous advances she remembered to say yes, loudly, and mean it.
Then Robert was transferred up to Dakar and the evening before he went, Annie crossed the river for a farewell supper. America was voting for a new president and the two of them listened in deepening gloom to a crackling radio as Nixon took state after state. It was as if someone close to Robert had died and Annie was moved as he explained to her in a voice choked with emotion what it meant for his country and the war many of his friends were fighting in Asia. She put her arms around him and held him and for the first time felt she was no longer a girl but a woman.
Only when he had gone and she met other Peace Corps volunteers, did she realize how unusual he was. Most of the others were dope-heads or bores or both. There was one guy with glazed, pink eyes and a headband who claimed he'd been high for a year.
She saw Robert once more when she went back up to Dakar to fly home the following July. Here people spoke another language called Wolof and he was already fluent. He was living out near the airport, so near that you had to stop talking whenever a plane went over. To make some virtue of this, he had got hold of a huge directory detailing every flight in and out of Dakar and, after two nights studying it, knew it by heart. When a plane flew over he would recite the name of the airline, its origin, route and destination. Annie laughed and he looked a little hurt. She flew home the night a man walked on the moon.