“It’s beautiful,” Patricia said, leaning forward to smile at the house through the windscreen. “It’s a fairy tale.”
Sir Denis smiled. A house of this design, nestled alone in the woods, always made people think of fairy tales. He normally responded to comments like that by saying, “If you owned it, you wouldn’t think so. For me, it’s plumbing problems, mildew, cracking plaster, field mice, and outrageous taxes.” But with Patricia he forbore; he wasn’t of a mind to spoil the mood.
The Kenwyns were a local farm couple who leased some of his land and who also took care of the house during those long periods when neither he nor his daughter was in residence. Sir Denis had phoned them from London this morning, so when he and Patricia entered the house, it had been aired out to some extent (though the mustiness of disuse remained faintly discernible) and most of the surfaces were dusted. The central heating (still considered a luxury in this corner of England) had been turned up, and a fire had been laid in the beam-ceilinged living room. Mrs. Kenwyn having asked if Sir Denis was bringing a guest, two of the bedrooms upstairs would have been readied; to avoid shocking local sensibilities, he would have to remember to muss up the guest-room bed before departure on Monday.
They carried the luggage upstairs, where Sir Denis pointed out the woods visible from the master-bedroom windows, stretching away for more than a mile into the countryside. “Later on,” he said, “if you feel like it, we can go for a walk. I’m sure I have wellies you could wear.”
“That’s later,” she said. “Right now, I very much want to be made love to.”
“I am at your command,” he said, and she took him at his word.
They never did get outdoors again that day. Between napping and lovemaking, Saturday was nearly at an end before they came back downstairs, he in his mildew-tinged old maroon silk robe, Patricia looking like a sexy, wayward little girl inside the massive quilted pink folds of an ancient robe of Alicia’s. They made a supper out of tins, and Sir Denis lit the fire the Kenwyns had prepared in the living room. Seated on the long sofa facing the fire, they drank a Saint-Émilion from his cellar and talked about their lives from before they’d known each other, and the darkness beyond the windows was unbroken by any sort of light.
When she opened his robe and lowered her head to his lap he was no longer even astonished at the frequency with which she could arouse him. She stayed there, and drew the lightning out of him like drawing a wasp’s sting out of one’s flesh, and then they both fell asleep in that position, awakening much later, cold and stiff and giggling, the fire nearly out. Laughing and touching one another, they made their way upstairs to bed, and awoke to a wonderfully sunny Sunday. “Now,” she said, “I’ll take that walk in the woods.”
In the mud room by the rear door he had an assortment of wellingtons, knee-high lined rubber boots. She found a pair that fit well over her walking shoes, and they tramped through the spring-boggy woods hand in hand. She kissed him as a reward for finding a sweet-singing bird whose name he did not know.
They went for a drive in the afternoon, and stopped in a pub where the mackintoshed-locals clearly couldn’t tell whether they should be astounded by the black woman herself or by her choice of companion. That was funny, too, and on the drive back they made up the dialogue that must have taken place around that bar after their departure.
There was a restaurant in a town fifteen miles away—good plain food—where once again they were a sensation, but the proprietors and other customers were too well bred to make an obvious fuss. Returning to the house after dark, the black sky flung with high tiny stars and a gibbous moon, they found that the unseen Kenwyns had set a new fire in the living room that awaited only Sir Denis’s match.
Patricia had completed her business at the American Embassy on Friday—the permission, about which there would be no problem, would be forthcoming to the computer supplier in the States—and would be taking an afternoon plane Monday to Rome, transferring there to an overnight flight for Tripoli and Entebbe. All her luggage and her new purchases (including a third suitcase, as threatened) were with her now, and Sir Denis would drive her straight to Heathrow tomorrow. In bed tonight he already felt her loss, felt nostalgic for the weekend even before it was over, and he slept with her head nestled on his shoulder, his arm curled around her back.
They were in the process of loading the car and closing the house on Monday morning when the phone rang for the first time all weekend. There was only one phone in the house, in the kitchen, and Sir Denis was a bit out of breath when he got to it.
It was Bentley, one of the men from the International Coffee Board’s London office. “Forgive my calling you at your weekend retreat,” he said, “but I wanted to get hold of you before you made any plans.”
“Of course. Not to worry.”
“The fact is,” Bentley said, and Sir Denis could hear an uncharacteristic awkwardness in the man’s voice, “you won’t be involved with the Uganda transaction any longer.”
His heart seemed to stop. In the other room, Patricia was humming some tune as she made a last stroll around the house. I’ll lose her, he thought (not acknowledging to himself even then what the thought implied, what knowledge about her he was denying), but he kept his voice steady when he said, “I won’t? Why on earth not?”
“Um,” Bentley said. “I’m supposed to fob you off with some sort of answer, you know, but I can’t help asking a question of my own. What’s the relationship between you and Emil Grossbarger?”
“Emil—? I—I hardly know how to answer that. We get along; we work well together.” I’ll lose her. “What are you trying to say, man?”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Bentley told him, “in fact you don’t know this at all, but you’re out at Grossbarger’s request.”
“That’s impossible!” But even as he said it he could feel the floor of the world shift beneath his feet, could sense the stage sets of reality being reordered into a new perspective.
“I can tell from your voice,” Bentley said, “that you don’t know what this is all about.”
“Am I that obvious? All right, then, I don’t know what it’s all about.”
“Grossbarger went out of his way,” Bentley said, “to assure us that he had no fault to find with you, either personally or professionally. He said he wanted to make the change for reasons of his own, and would always be happy to work with you again in the future.”
“Then it makes no sense,” Sir Denis said. I’ll lose her. “Who’s replacing me?”
“Walter Harrison.”
Sir Denis knew him; an American, with a special interest in the Mexican coffee business. “Still someone from the Bogotá Group, then,” he commented.
“I was rather hoping you could explain it.”
In that instant the penny dropped, and Sir Denis could have explained it, but he did not. “I’m as baffled as you are,” he said.
“As it now stands,” Bentley told him, “you can go home at any time.”
Meaning São Paulo, of course. “Thank you.” Sir Denis said. “I’ll talk to you before I go.” I’ll lose her.
Very hesitantly he returned to the living room, where the ashes in the fireplace were cold and dead. Patricia rose from an armchair, her expression concerned, saying, “What is it? It must have been bad news.”
Staring at her more intently than he realized, willing the awfulness to be over as quickly and cleanly as possible, he said, “Emil Grossbarger has asked the Coffee Board to replace me on the Uganda sale.”