It was several hours later that she suddenly found herself facing him. She had more or less forgotten about him, though the other paps were still there, on their strip of marble. They had been there for such a long time that she no longer noticed them. And she did not have time to notice them. It was early evening and the lobby hummed with purposefully moving people. She turned to the next person waiting there. ‘Hello,’ she said, and only then saw who it was. To her irritation, she immediately felt nervous. He too seemed nervous, however. When he smiled—and he was smiling nervously at her—his eyes shrank to laughing slits. He was in his mid-forties probably and his face was pleasantly weathered. It was the face of someone who smiled a lot, and who spent a lot of time outside. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this,’ he said. Was he American? ‘And I quite understand if you call security on me straight away.’ She did not move. ‘But I really need this shot and there’s no way I’m going to get it out there.’ No, not American—he had just said what sounded like ‘oot there’. He tilted his head quickly in the direction of the doors, and through them the sodden London evening, still just streaked with light, where a mush of fallen plane seeds and soppy leaves was choking the drains of Park Lane. It was October. ‘So I was wondering,’ he was saying, ‘if I could wait in there for a bit.’ He had noticed the staff cloakroom, a door to the side of the front desk, the wood of which discreetly matched the wood of the section of wall in which it was set, with a sign saying, ‘STAFF ONLY’. Or maybe he knew about it already. He was probably very familiar with the layout of the hotel. This was probably not the first time he had done this. ‘I quite understand if you say no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get you in trouble.’
And of course she would get in trouble if he was found in there.
‘Okay,’ she said quietly.
She let him into the cloakroom—‘Thank you so much,’ he said—and went back to her post at the desk.
An hour or two later, she went into the cloakroom herself. It was windowless, and except for a hanging-rail with some wire hangers—one of which held her coat—and a few stained chairs withdrawn from public service, it was empty.
He was on the phone. As soon as he saw her, he said, ‘Listen, can I call ya back? I’ll call ya back. Okay.’ He smiled at her. ‘I don’t know how to thank you for this,’ he said. ‘My name’s Fraser, by the way.’ He stood up and held out his hand.
She shook it and told him her name.
‘Who are you waiting for?’ she asked.
He said the name of a very famous singer, an American. ‘She’s checked in as Jane Green,’ he said. ‘She’s staying until Friday or Saturday. It’s supposed to be a secret that she’s in London. She’s here to see…’ He named a film star, also American. This film star was famously married to someone other than ‘Jane Green’. ‘He’s shooting a film in London. She’s here to see him, and nobody’s supposed to know. A shot of them together would be…’ He laughed. ‘Priceless. Just priceless. I don’t imagine they’ll be seen in public together, though, and just a shot of her in London would do almost as well.’
‘If you’re in here,’ Katherine said, ‘how will you know when she comes down?’
He said he had a spy on the hotel staff who would phone him when she was on her way. Then he smiled and said, ‘I know it’s silly. All this skulduggery.’
‘Who’s your spy?’
‘I shouldn’t say.’
She shrugged and was about to say, ‘Okay,’ when he said, ‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘Sometimes.’
He laughed. ‘Sometimes?’
It was strange—she had never been so aware of her own pulse in her life. ‘If you don’t want to tell me…’ she said.
He did tell her. The spy was a man. She knew his name, knew him by sight—one of the senior security staff, who would presumably be able to see ‘Jane Green’ and her entourage emerge from their suites on his wall of CCTV monitors in the sub-basement.
‘Do you pay him?’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said, still squinting as he smiled. ‘That is a secret, I’m afraid.’
He said that he wanted to be a landscape photographer. This was the next day—he and the other paps were still there. There had been no sign of ‘Jane Green’. He said that he loved nothing more than to travel to remote places—northern Norway, Kamchatka, Patagonia—and spend a week or two in the wilderness taking shots of nature. That is, Nature. He talked of walking for days, or even weeks, through unpeopled mountains to find the perfect shot; of setting up the equipment and waiting while the sun, in its own sweet time, moved into position. Then the exposure, a fraction of a second. That fraction of a second was the whole point. It was what justified all the waiting, the walking, the weeks of sleeping under nylon. That fraction of a second was all that mattered. It was something, he said, that made you think about the nature of time.
She had not expected this. Now, incredibly, he was saying something about T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. ‘Yes, I know them,’ she said, and smiled imperceptibly as she thought—A philosopher pap! A philosopher King!
‘Do you know Ansel Adams?’ he said. ‘Do you know his work? The stuff he did in Yosemite?’
‘I’ve heard of him,’ she said. Her heart was pounding.
‘I’d like to do stuff like that…’
‘Are you married?’ she said, surprising herself.
The question took him by surprise too. He smiled and looked at the thing on his thick finger. ‘I was,’ he said. ‘Well, strictly speaking I still am. We’re separated. Why?’
She shrugged. ‘Do you live on your own?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately. I wish I didn’t.’
He was looking her in the eye when he said that. In the frayed, neglected space, she felt her pulse swell with terrible energy in her throat. For the past twenty-four hours it had been like that.
The next morning she was late into work. She had been to the doctor—the incessant heavy tambour of her heart had started to frighten her. He made her unbutton her shirt and placed the heatless milled-steel head of his stethoscope on the skin where it started to slope into her left breast. He pumped up the sleeve of the sphygmograph until it was fiercely tight on her arm. He said it was nothing serious, and prescribed her some pills.
The paps were still there, on their strip of marble. Fraser was with them now—the security men seemed to have forgiven him—and to her surprise she found herself swerving off her path towards the front desk and walking up to him. She had no idea what she was going to say. Stepping away from the others, he spoke first. ‘Morning,’ he said, smiling. He looked at his watch. ‘Late, aren’t you?’ The other paps eyed her with interest—the shortish skirt, the slightly saucy shoes. She had taken time, that morning, to decide what to wear.
‘I’ve been to the doctor,’ she volunteered.
‘Nothing serious, I hope.’
She shook her head. ‘Any sign of Jane Green?’
‘Not yet,’ Fraser said. He was still smiling.
She stood there for a few seconds.
‘Well…’ she said.
The fact was, now that the security men were willing to have him in the lobby, there was no point him hiding in the staff cloakroom.
‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, and walked the twenty metres, under the twinkling inverted wedding cake, to the front desk.
She wondered whether she would see him later. For the next hour or so her eyes kept sliding towards the posse of paps. He was never looking at her, though two or three times her eyes met those of one of the others—a younger man, with well-gelled hair and pointy sideburns, and white leather shoes that were pointy too. Eventually she stopped looking, fearful of meeting the pointy-shoed man’s eyes again.