Jonathan held the letter to the oil lamp in order to read it.
What is he? Burr wondered for the hundredth time, studying the hard-soft contours of his face. I thought I knew. I don't.
"Think about it," Burr urged. "Whitehall did. I've had them rewrite it twice." He had one last try. "Just tell me for myself, will you? 'I, Jonathan, am sure.' You know what you're about, you've worked it through. And you're still sure."
The smile again, putting Burr still less at ease. Jonathan was holding out his bandaged hand again, this time for Burr's pen.
"I'm sure, Leonard. I, Jonathan. And I'll be sure tomorrow morning. How do I sign? Jonathan Brown?"
"John," Burr replied. "In your usual handwriting." The image of Corkoran the signer with his drawn fountain pen flitted across Burr's inner eye as he painstakingly wrote John Brown.
"All done," he said brightly to console him.
But Burr still wanted more of something. Drama, a greater feeling of occasion. He stood up, making an old man's labour of it, and let Jonathan help him out of his coat. They walked together to the parlour, Jonathan leading.
The dining table was set for ceremony. Linen napkins, Burr noticed indignantly. Three lobster cocktails in their glasses. Silver-plate knives and forks like a three-star restaurant. A decent Pommard uncorked to breathe. A smell of roasting meat.
What the hell's he trying to do to me?
Rooke was standing with his back to them, hands in pockets, studying Marilyn's latest watercolour.
"I say, I rather like this one," he said in a rare effort at flattery.
"Thanks," said Jonathan.
* * *
Jonathan had heard them approaching long before he saw them. And even before he heard them he knew they were there because alone on the cliff the close observer had learned to hear sounds in the making. The wind was his ally. When the fog came down and all he seemed to hear was the moaning of the lighthouse, it was the wind that brought him the chatter of the fishermen out to sea.
So he had felt the trembling of the Rover's engine before ever its growl rolled down the cliff to him, and he braced himself as he stood waiting in the wind. When its headlights appeared, aimed straight at him, he aimed back at them in his mind, estimating the Rover's speed by the telegraph poles and calculating the distance ahead that he would have to aim if he were sighting a rocket-propelled grenade. Meanwhile a corner of his vision waited on the hilltop in case they had a chase car or were sending in a decoy.
And when Rooke parked and Jonathan walked smiling through the gale with his torch, he had imagined shooting his two guests down the torch's beam, blowing off their green faces in alternate bursts. Players successfully negotiated. Sophie avenged.
But now as they left he was calm and saw different things. The storm had vanished, leaving torn-off shreds of cloud. A few stars lingered. Grey bullet holes made a spray pattern round the moon. Jonathan watched the Rover's tail-lights pass the meadow where he had planted his iris bulbs. In a few weeks, he thought, if the rabbits don't get through the wire, that meadow will be mauve. The taillights passed a bull warren, and he remembered how one warm evening, returning from Falmouth, he had surprised Jacob Pengelly and his girlfriend there, stripped of everything except each other, Jacob in transport straining back from her, the girl arched to him like an acrobat.
Next month will be a blue month on account of the bluebells, Pete Pengelly had told him. But this month now, Jack, this one is a gold month getting golder, with the gorse and cowslips and wild daffodils winning against all comers. Just you see if they don't, Jack. Cheers.
To complete me, Jonathan rehearsed to himself. To find the missing parts of me.
To make a man of me, which was what my father said the army did: one man.
To be useful. To stand upright. To rid my conscience of its burden.
He felt sick. Going to the kitchen, he gave himself a glass of water. A brass ship's clock hung above the door, and without pausing to think why, he wound it up. Then he went to the drawing room, where he kept his treasure: a grandmother long-case clock in fruitwood with a single weight, bought of Daphne's in Chapel Street for a song. He pulled the brass chain till the weight was at the top. Then he set the pendulum in motion.
"Reckon I'll go up my Aunt Hilary's in Teignmouth for a bit, then," Marilyn had said, no longer weeping. "Be a break, Teignmouth will, won't it?"
Jonathan had had an Aunt Hilary too, in Wales beside a golf club. She had followed him round the house putting the lights out, and prayed aloud to her dear Lord Jesus in the dark.
* * *
"Don't go," he had begged Sophie, in every way he knew, as they waited for the taxi to take them back to Luxor airport. "Don't go," he had begged her on the plane. "Leave him, he'll kill you, don't take the risk," he had begged her as he saw her into the cab that would take her back to her apartment, and Freddie Hamid.
"We both have our appointments with life, Mr. Pine," she had told him with her battered smile. "There are worse indignities, for an Arab woman, than being beaten by her lover. Freddie is very wealthy. He has made me certain practical promises. I have to consider my old age,"
NINE
It is mother's day as Jonathan walks into Esperance. His third cement truck in four hundred miles has dropped him on the crossroads at the top of the Avenue des Artisans. The signs as he strides down the sidewalk swinging his Third World air bag read merci maman, bienvenue á toutes les mamans and vaste buffet chinois des meres. The northern sun is an elixir to him. When he breathes, it is as if he is breathing light as well as air. I'm home. It's me.
After eight months of snow, this easy-living gold town in the province of Quebec is hopping in the evening sunshine, which is what the town is famous for among its sister townships strewn along the largest greenstone mineral belt in the world. It hops higher than Timmins to the west in stodgy Ontario, higher than Val-d'Or or Amos to the east, higher by a mile than the dreary white-collar settlements of hydro-electric engineers up north. Daffodils and tulips strut like soldiers in the garden of the white church with its leaden roof and narrow spire; dandelions as big as dollars cover the grass slope below the police station. After their winter's wait beneath the snow, the flowers are as rampant as the town. The shops for the suddenly rich or merely hopeful ― the Boutique Bebe with its pink giraffes, the pizza cafes named after lucky miners and prospectors, the Pharmacie des Croyants, which offers hypnotherapy and massage, the neon-lit bars named after Venus and Apollo, the stately whorehouses after vanished madams, the Japanese sauna house with its pagoda and plastic pebble garden, the banks of every colour and persuasion, the jewellery stores where the high-graders used to melt the miners' stolen ore and occasionally still do, the wedding shops with their virginal wax brides, the Polish delicatessen advertising "films super erotiques XXX" as if they were a culinary event, the restaurants open all hours for shift workers, even the notaries with their blackened windows ― all sparkle in the glory of the early summer, and merci Maman for all of it: on va avoir du fun!
As Jonathan glances into shop windows or gratefully upward at the blue heaven and lets the sunlight warm his hollowed face, motorcyclists with beards and dark glasses roar up and down the street, racing their engines and flicking their leather backsides at the girls who sip their Cokes at outdoor tables on the sidewalk. In Esperance the girls stand out like parakeets. The matrons of stodgy Ontario next door may dress themselves like sofas at a funeral, but here in Esperance the hot-blooded Québécois make a carnival every day, in radiant cottons and gold bracelets that smile at you across the street.