She blocked any escape and her posture, with her feet a little apart, almost intimidated him. And it was an interruption. As he always did at the parties, he had been listening hard for little morsels of information. He sucked in trifles of indiscretion, was a carrier of tales and confidences, and his hidden existence was the sole pleasure he took from life: it gave him power. He was forty-seven years old. He had been christened Samuel Algernon Laker Bartholomew – his father had taken two weeks' holiday a year, one for the Guildford cricket festival, one for the annual Oval Test match, and his third given name came from the cricketer who had done something to the Australians in the year of his birth. As a schoolboy, with pudgy jowls and a slack stomach, he had detested organized sports. His maxim, then and now, was not to run if he could walk, not to walk if he could ride. Others at the party would jog on the pavements round the compound walls in the early morning before the heat became intolerable or would work out in an air-conditioned gymnasium. His late father had believed that cricket gave a man a code of decent disciplines for life – he would have turned in his grave if he had known his son traduced the trust given him.
'I'm Bethany Jenkins.'
'Pleased to meet you, Miss Jenkins.'
Bart always used old-world manners… It was the start of his third year as a general practitioner in the Kingdom. He acted as a link man between patients with real or imagined symptoms and the expensive foreign consultants at the King Fahd Medical City, or the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, or the King Khalid Eye Hospital. He passed them on and received a cut of the fees, smoothed the way and was rewarded. He was losing the drift of a conversation to his right: two men from a British company's aerospace software division in earnest talk about the failure of in-flight radar in the Tornado strike aircraft sold to the Air Force. He tried to refocus on the conversation, but her hand was held out.
He shook it limply, but she held his hand too tightly for him to ignore her.
'I've booked an appointment with your secretary for a couple of day's time. I'm up from the south, going on to Bahrain tomorrow, a bit of shopping, then I'm coming to see you before I go back down.'
'I'll look forward to it, Miss Jenkins.'
There didn't look to be much wrong with her. She was different from the other women in the room: she was tanned hard, her legs and ankles, arms and wrists, her face below the cropped blonde hair weatherbeaten from winds and sun. Late twenties, he thought, but an obvious outdoors life had aged her skin. The other women in the room fled from exposure to the sun, anointed themselves with protective creams when they had to go out, wore headscarves and carried parasols. And she was different also in her clothing – the other women wore cocktail dresses, but she was in a blouse that was clean but not ironed and a shapeless denim skirt that hung on her hips. She was stocky but he thought that there was no flab under the blouse and skirt, only muscle. Other women wore gold chains, pendants and bracelets bought in the souk, but she had no jewellery.
'Mind if I say something, Dr Bartholomew?'
'Bart, please – feel free.' He'd lost the conversation on in-flight radar failure. He smiled sweetly. 'Please, say what you want to, Miss Jenkins.'
'OK, Bart.' She looked directly at him, one of those wretched people who had no disguise. He detested honesty. She reached out and picked up his glass, took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and wiped the base, then rubbed hard at the ring on the bookshelf.
His grin was as limp as his handshake. He disliked women who fixed him in the headlights of their eyes. He was the rabbit. He shuffled. The Tornado people had split and moved on. He was fearful of women, particularly those who seemed to strip him down, leave him naked. It was a long time, so long, since he had been close to a woman – then there had been tears, his, and arguments, hers, and the overwhelming sense of private failure. He did not know where Ann was now, where she lived with the children, and the shield he used to safeguard himself from that failure was that he did not care.
'You don't look like a man who enjoys being a guest of the Kingdom.'
It was an extraordinary remark. She knew nothing – nothing of his past and nothing of his present… He frowned, then downed the contents of his glass and slapped it back on to the bookshelf. 'It is, Miss Jenkins-'
'I'm called Beth.'
'It is, Miss Jenkins, almost a privilege to be a humble part of this fulcrum of the sophistication and technological excellence of Saudi Arabia. Actually, I hate the bloody place, and all who sail in her – yourself, of course, excepted.'
Her eyebrows arched. She laughed richly, as if at last he interested her. She followed with a flood of questions. When had he come here?
Why had he come? What were his hobbies? Where did he live? How long was he staying? His answers were staccato. He deflected her with responses that were rude in their brevity, but she seemed not to recognize it. He was frightened of close questioning. In the expatriate community he avoided the endless discussions about family, work conditions, terms of service, anything that might expose the lie with which he lived.
'You don't want to mind me, Bart. Where I live, down south, I don't get too many chances to talk to people. It's like one of those monasteries with a vow of silence.' She touched his hand, was smiling
… Then rescue came, of sorts…
He hadn't seen Wroughton arrive, hadn't seen him among the guests. Wroughton's fingers pulled at his sleeve, his head gesturing towards the door. No apology at the interruption, but Edward -
Eddie to his female friends – Wroughton never apologized, wouldn't have bloody known how to. Bart blundered away from the young woman, followed Wroughton into the hall and down towards the kitchen.
Wroughton leaned against the wall. Then his finger poked in a tattoo on Bart's chest. 'You cut our last meeting, Bart.'
'I was busy.'
'You don't cut meetings with me.'
'Just pressure of work.'
'I waited two hours, wasted two hours.'
'And I hadn't anything to give you.'
'Then just pedal a bit bloody harder.'
'Sorry about that, Eddie.'
'Mr Wroughton to you. Got me?'
'It won't happen again, Mr Wroughton,' Bart whined.
'Listen to me – I don't want to be fucked about here. It's not pleasant, believe me, but I have you by your shrivelled little balls, and I will squeeze and I will twist and -'
'What I just heard, there's problems on the in-flight radar of the Tornado aircraft they've got.'
'Which squadron?'
'Don't know.'
'Jesus, you're a useless piece of shit. Have you been listening?
You're going to have to do better or I'll be squeezing and twisting.'
Wroughton was gone.
Bart stood in the corridor and gasped. Little spurts of breath bubbled on his lips. He mopped the sweat from his forehead. When he had composed himself, when his breathing was regular, he went back down the corridor. The noise from the room bayed at him. His host barked in his ear, 'Not got a glass, Bart? More champagne? Or are you going to hang around for a bit and have something better?'
A nod and a wink… Bart smiled weakly. He was looking for the hostess. A guest, a woman in a bright floral dress, tried to intercept him and he started to hear her query on the best preventive tablets for diarrhoea, but he slipped her his card, pointed to his surgery number and moved on. He saw Bethany, Miss Jenkins, her hand easily on her hip, talking to oil people.
The hostess said, 'Not going yet, Bart, surely not? It's just warming up.' He said he had a call-out, embellished the excuse with a casual mention of septicaemia, and thanked her for a wonderful party, quite lovely.