"Well now, I don't believe that, as a matter of fact, Jonathan. I've been following you very closely these weeks and thinking about you in some depth. Let's talk army a bit more, can we? Because I was very impressed by some of the things I read about your military career."
Great, thought Jonathan, now very lively in his mind. We're talking Sophie, so we're talking hate. We're talking hate, so we're talking hoteling. We're talking hoteling, so we're talking army. Very logical. Very rational.
All the same, he could find no fault with Burr. Burr was from the heart, which was his saving. He might be clever. He might have mastered the grammar of intrigue, he had an eye for human strength and failings. But the heart still led, as Goofhew knew and Jonathan could feel, which was why he permitted Burr to wander in his private kingdom, and why Burr's sense of mission was beginning to throb like a war drum in Jonathan's ear.
SIX
It was mellow time. Confidence time. They had agreed on a glass of plum spirit to wash down their coffee.
"I had a Sophie once," Burr recalled, not altogether truthfully. "Surprised I didn't marry her, come to think of it. I usually do. My current one's called Mary, which always strikes me as a bit of a comedown. Still, we've been together, oh, must be five years now. She's a doctor, as a matter of fact. Just a GP, parish priest with a stethoscope. Social conscience the size of a somewhat enlarged pumpkin. Seems to be panning out quite well."
"Long may it last," said Jonathan gallantly.
"Mary's not my first wife, mind. She's not my second, to be frank. I don't know what it is about me and women. I've aimed up, I've aimed down, I've aimed sideways; I never get it right. Is it me, is it them? I ask myself."
"I know what you mean," said Jonathan. But inside himself he had become watchful. He had no natural conversation about women. They were the sealed envelopes in his desk. They were the friends and sisters of the youth he had never had, the mother he had never known, the woman he should never have married, and the woman he should have loved and not betrayed.
"I seem to get to the root of them too fast and wear them out," Burr was complaining, once again affecting to open his heart to Jonathan in the hope of receiving the same favour in return. "It's kids are the problem. We've each got two of our own, and now we've got one between us. They take the spice out of it. You never did kids, did you? You steered clear of them. Wise, I call that. Shrewd." He took a sip of Pflumli.
"She wasn't mine. She was Freddie Hamid's."
"But you screwed her," Burr suggested equably.
* * *
Jonathan is in the bedroom of the little flat in Luxor, with the moonlight sloping between the half-closed curtains. Sophie is lying on the bed in her white nightgown, eyes closed and face upward. Some of her drollness has returned. She has drunk a little vodka. So has he. The bottle stands between them.
"Why do you sit the other side of the room from me, Mr. Pine?"
"Out of respect, I imagine." The hotelier's smile. The hotelier's voice, a careful composite of other people's.
"But you brought me here to comfort me, I think."
This time, no answer from Mr. Pine.
"Am I too damaged for you? Too old perhaps?"
Mr. Pine, normally so fluent, continues to preserve a dread silence.
"I am worried for your dignity, Mr. Pine. Perhaps I am worried for my own. I think you sit so far away from me because you are ashamed of something. I hope it is not me."
"I brought you here because it was somewhere safe, Madame Sophie. You need a pause for breath while you work out what to do and where to go. I thought I could be helpful."
"And Mr. Pine? He needs nothing, I suppose? You are a healthy man, assisting the invalid? Thank you for bringing me to Luxor."
"Thank you for agreeing to come."
Her large eyes were fixed upon him in the moonlight. She did not easily resemble a helpless woman grateful for his help.
"You have so many voices, Mr. Pine," she resumed, after too long. "I have no idea anymore who you are. You look at me, and you touch me with your eyes. And I am not insensitive to your touch. I am not." Her voice slipped a moment; she straightened herself and seemed to regroup. "You say one thing, and you are that person. And I am moved by that person. Then that person is called away, and somebody quite different takes his place. And you say something else. And I am moved again. So we have a changing of the guard. It is as if each person in you can only stand a little while of me, and then he has to go and get his rest. Are you like this with all your women?"
"But you are not one of my women, Madame Sophie."
"Then why are you here? To be a boy scout? I don't think so."
She fell silent again. He had a sense that she was deciding whether to abandon pretence. "I would like one of your many people to stay with me tonight, Mr. Pine. Can you arrange that?"
"Of course. I'll sleep on the sofa. If that's what you wish."
"No. It's not at all what I wish. I wish you to sleep with me in my bed and make love to me. I wish to feel that I have made at least one of you happy and that the others will take heart from his example. I cannot have you so ashamed. You accuse yourself much too much. We have all done bad things. But you are a good man. You are many good men. And you are not responsible for my misfortunes. If you are part of them" ― she was standing now, facing him, her arms at her sides ― "then I should wish you to be here for better reasons than shame. Mr. Pine, why do you insist on keeping yourself so far away from me?"
In the fading moonlight her voice had become louder, her appearance more spectral. He took a step toward her and found that the distance between them was no distance at all. He stretched out his arms to her, tentatively because of her bruises. He drew her carefully to him, slid his hands under the halter of her white nightgown, spread his palms and lightly flattened them against her naked back. She laid the side of her face against his; he smelled the vanilla again and discovered the unexpected softness of her long black hair. He closed his eyes. Clutching each other, they toppled softly onto the bed. And when the dawn came, she made him draw the curtains so that the night manager no longer did his loving in the dark.
"That was all of us," he whispered to her. "The whole regiment. Officers, other ranks, deserters, cooks. There's no one left."
"I don't think so, Mr. Pine. You have hidden reinforcements, I am sure."
* * *
Burr was still waiting for his answer.
"No," said Jonathan defiantly.
"Why ever not? Never pass one up, me. Did you have a girl at the time?"
"No," Jonathan repeated, colouring.
"You mean mind my own business?"
"Pretty much."
Burr seemed to like being told to mind his own business.
"Tell us about your marriage, then. It's quite funny, actually, thinking of you being married. It makes me uncomfortable, I don't know why. You're single. I can feel it. Maybe I am too. What happened?"
"I was young. She was younger. It makes me uncomfortable too."
"She was a painter, wasn't she? Like you?"
"I was a Sunday dauber. She was the real thing. Or thought she was."
"What did you marry her for?"
"Love, I suppose."
"You suppose. Politeness, more likely, knowing you. What did you leave her for?"
"Sanity."
No longer able to keep the flood of memory at bay, Jonathan abandoned himself to the angry vision of their married life together dying as they watched it: the friendship they no longer had, the love they no longer made, the restaurants where they watched happy people chat, the dead flowers in the vase, the rotting fruit in the bowl, her paint-caked easel propped against the wall, the dust thick on the dining table while they stared at each other through their dried tears, a mess not even Jonathan could tidy up. It's just me, he kept telling her, trying to touch her and recoiling as she recoiled. I grew up too quickly and missed women on the way. It's me, not you at all.