‘You?’ spluttered Gaby.
‘Darling,’ said Mrs Zahir, with the weary finality of a matador dispatching a sickly bull, ‘though I’m not saying you couldn’t be pretty if you made an effort, you don’t have the necessary presence for this kind of public appearance. You should really think about brightening yourself up a little. It would probably help you in your work.’
Gaby found herself spitting swear-words at the woman’s departing back. Mrs Zahir strode through reception, batting a hand at a set of mounted stag’s antlers which got mixed up in her hair. She drew the bolt on the main door, swung it open and announced herself to the world outside.
‘Listen to me,’ she instructed it in a ringing tone. ‘I am Faiza Zahir. The mother.’
There was a pause, then the flashguns started firing, bathing her in epileptic sparkle. Absurdly she started to wave. Gaby stamped upstairs to her room and slammed the door. To hell with this, she thought. To hell with their film and to hell with Scotland. She was going back to London.
But first she was going to bed. She shut the curtains, dumped her clothes in a puddle on the floor and crawled under the covers. After a while she switched on the TV and spent a desultory hour channel-hopping between episodes of Friends and the local news, which seemed to consist entirely of arguments about fish. Finally she took an airline mask and a pair of earplugs from her bag and determined to shut out the world for as long as possible. Certain she had some Valium somewhere, she got up again and squatted on the bathroom floor with the contents of her upturned washbag in front of her. She was in luck. Thirty milligrams later she returned to bed and stretched out.
The next thing she knew it was dark, her mouth was parched, and there was an insistent buzzing sound in her right ear. The sound resolved itself into a ringing telephone, which cut off as she groped for it, leaving her in a state of semi-conscious confusion. She had just retreated back into sleep when someone knocked on her door, calling out her name.
‘Who is it?’ she croaked.
‘It’s Davey from front desk, Miss Caro.’
‘Go away.’
‘Could you open the door?’
‘I said go away.’
‘Miss Caro?’
Finally, she wrapped a kimono round herself and asked the embarrassed night clerk what he wanted. There was a package for her. No, he couldn’t have kept it until morning because the courier needed her signature. He was sorry to wake her. She shut the door in his face.
Looking at her alarm clock, she saw it was 1 a.m. She had slept for about five hours. Grumpily she padded downstairs in her bare feet, signed for the package, came back and threw herself down on her bed. When she saw Guy’s address on the waybill, her mood worsened. She tore off the wrapping and opened the box.
The collar was beautiful. Beautiful and tacky and slightly sad. For a moment she almost felt affection for Guy, for his absurd conviction that money could make everything all right. Then she saw the note.
And that put the awfulness of her life into perspective. She had spent three years with this man. He had nothing to say to her.
The old feeling came surging back, the need to break and run. She would leave here tomorrow. Then she would leave London and leave Guy. Start again. She was thinking about planes and packing when there was another knock on her door. She ignored it, but the person on the other side carried on hammering.
She swung it open and found Rajiv Rana. He looked dishevelled.
‘You? Don’t think for a moment you’re coming in. You can go to hell, you arrogant bastard.’
‘Is she with you?’
‘What are you talking about? Go and pick on one of the dancers if you’re feeling horny.’
‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘Is she with you?’
‘Who’s gone?’
‘Her. Leela. There’s no one in her room.’
‘She’s probably out taking a walk. She goes to smoke by the lake. Why are you bothering me with this?’
She slammed the door. But all the same she went to the window. There was the castle, floating like a mirage over the lake. There was the mournful plantation of pine trees. The lawn stretched away into the darkness.
In the EU quarter of Brussels, like all areas devoted to government and administration, the physical has been ruthlessly subordinated to the immaterial, to the exigencies of language. It is a zone of discreet office spaces and muted parks, of affluence without ostentation, expenditure without visible waste. Diplomats from 160 embassies mingle with representatives of 120 governmental organizations and 1,400 different NGOs, all seeking to perfect the most modern of European arts: the exercise of control without the display of power.
Accordingly there is no hint of fascist grandiosity in the EU quarter, though a trace of unhappy classicism remains in its architecture and oddly also in the marmoreal atmosphere which pervades life here at the heart of the new Europe. The restrained anonymity of the built environment is the outward manifestation of something deeper, which has its origin in the Union’s noble but somehow sinister aim of a final consensus, a termination to the Continent’s brutal Dionysiac history.
Regulations, statistics, directives and action plans; in the EU quarter language is order and with order comes violence, coded into the harsh planes of the Berlaymont Building, the uniforms of the bored police on security detail outside parliament. It is a violence that has been coated in language, incrementally surrounded and domesticated by it, until it has taken on the soft hue and low light of the rest of the European project. Discreet violence, like surveilled privacy and humanitarian war. Typically European paradoxes.
Guy was driven at speed down the Rue de la Loi. The passenger seat of Yves’s Porsche smelled of leather and the admiration of his peers. ‘I am so stoked,’ said Yves, and at the wheel of his yellow car with the streetlights shining on his face he looked like the future in human form. Guy wondered when he had first learned this American phrase, during what teen movie or holiday to Florida he had heard it and filed it away for use in conversation.
‘Me too,’ Guy said. He meant it. He had taken all the rest of the coke before he got on the plane. His heart felt like it was about to punch through his chest wall.
They parked the car on the street and made their way into the hall of a nineteenth-century townhouse which had been turned into a boutique hotel. The redesign, Yves announced, was the work of a revolutionary. Guy was not sure if this meant the designer was political or just very good at designing things. The lobby was certainly extreme, in an understated way. The walls seemed to glow with a soft internal luminescence, and the staff wore long white tunics, like representatives of a benevolent higher civilization in a science-fiction movie.
The restaurant, Séraphim, was set under a glass canopy on the roof. The maître d’ greeted them beside a bust of a heavily bearded man. Guy looked at King Leopold II. King Leopold looked back at Guy, who checked his tie to see if it was straight. He was sweating.
Elegant waiters floated between tables occupied by groups of quietly conversing people. The patrons, men and women, wore the charcoal-greys and navy-blues of trust and probity, a visual field of sober business clothing broken very occasionally by a patterned tie or piece of silver jewellery. A more astute observer than Guy might have noticed the indecipherable quality of these small personal touches, as if instead of being the products of genuine quirks of taste or outlook their function was merely ritual, gestures of support for the idea of individuality rather than examples of its practice.