* * *
Battle bright.
Battle calm.
His father's son. Bury him in uniform.
Jonathan slid the camera into the pocket of his shirt and checked the desk for careless traces. With his handkerchief he wiped the desktop, then the sides of the filing trays. Daniel was yelling louder than Jed, but Jonathan couldn't hear what either of them was saying. In the stableyard one of the Langbourne children had decided it was time to join the chorus of complaint. Esmeralda had come out of her kitchen and was telling Daniel not to be a silly boy now, what would his Papa say? Jonathan stepped into the dressing room, closed the steel-lined door to the den and relocked it with the pick, which took a little longer than it should have done because of his anxiety about violating the escutcheon. By the time he reached the bedroom he could hear Jed stomping up the stairs in her riding boots, declaring to anyone who cared to hear that she would never never take Daniel riding again in her bloody life.
He thought of retreating to the bathroom or returning to Roper's dressing room, but hiding didn't seem to solve anything. A luxurious inertia was descending over him, a desire to embrace delay that reminded him of making love. So that by the time Jed appeared in the doorway in her riding gear, minus her crop and hard hat but flushed with heat and anger, Jonathan had placed himself before the coffee table and was arranging the shipping flowers because they had lost something of their perfection on the journey upstairs.
At first she was too angry with Daniel to be surprised by anything. And it impressed him that her anger made her real.
"Thomas, honestly, if you've got any influence over Daniel at all, I wish you'd teach him not to be so absolutely bloody wet when he hurts himself. One silly little fall, no damage to anything except his pride, and he makes an absolute ― actually, Thomas, what the fuck are you doing in this room?"
"I brought you some shipping flowers. From our climb yesterday."
"Why couldn't you have given them to Miss Sue?"
"I wanted to arrange them myself."
"You could have arranged them and given them to Miss Sue downstairs."
She glared at the unmade bed. At her yesterday's clothes flung over the chaise longue. At the open bathroom door. Daniel was still yelling. "Shut up, Daniel!" Her eyes returned to Jonathan. "Thomas, actually, flowers or no flowers, I think you've got a fucking cheek."
It's the same anger. You simply switched it from Daniel to me, he thought, while he went on tinkering distractedly with the flowers. He suddenly felt deeply protective of her. The lock picks were lying like a ton weight against his thigh, the Zippo camera was practically falling out of his shirt pocket, his story about the shipping flowers, dreamed up for Esmeralda's benefit, was wearing pretty thin. But it was Jed's appalling vulnerability that he was thinking of, not his own. Daniel's howling had stopped while he listened for the effect.
"Why don't you call up the bully-boys, then?" Jonathan suggested, not to her so much as to the flowers. "Personal attack button right there beside you on the wall. Or pick up the house phone if you prefer. Dial nine, and I'll pay for my fucking cheek in the approved manner. Daniel isn't making a scene because he hurt himself. He doesn't want to go back to London and he doesn't like sharing you with Caroline and her kids. He wanted you for himself.'"
"Get out," she said.
But the calm was on him, and so was his concern for her, and between them they gave him the supremacy. The rehearsing and blank shots were over. It was live-ammunition time.
"Close the door," he ordered her, keeping his voice low. "It's not a good moment to talk, but there's something I have to say to you, and I don't want Daniel hearing it. He gets enough through your bedroom wall as it is."
She stared at him, and he could see the uncertainty working in her face. She closed the door.
"I'm obsessed by you. I can't get you out of my head. I don't mean I'm in love with you. I sleep with you, I wake up with you, I can't clean my teeth without cleaning yours as well and most of the time I'm quarrelling with you. There's no logic to it, there's no pleasure to it. I haven't heard you express a single thought worth a damn, and most of what you say is affected bilge. Yet every time I think of something funny, I need you to laugh at it, and when I'm low, it's you I need to cheer me up. I don't know who you are, if you're anyone at all. Or whether you're here for the beer or because you're wildly in love with Roper. And I'm sure you don't know either. I think you're a total mess. But that doesn't put me off. Not at all. It makes me indignant, it makes me a fool, it makes me want to wring your neck. But that's just part of the package."
They were his own words. He was speaking for himself and nobody else. Nevertheless, the ruthless orphan in him could not resist shifting a little of the blame onto her shoulders. "Perhaps you shouldn't have nursed me so nicely. Lifting me up. Sitting on my bed. Let's say it's Daniel's fault for getting himself kidnapped. No, let's say it's mine for getting myself beaten up. And yours for making those spaniel eyes at me."
She shut her offending eyes and seemed to go to sleep for a moment. She opened them and lifted her hand to her face.
And he was afraid that he had hit her too hard and invaded the tender ground that each of them guarded against the other.
"That's the most fucking impertinent thing anyone has said to me ever" she said uncertainly, after quite a pause.
He let her dangle.
"Thomas!" she said, as if appealing for his help. But he still did not come to her aid.
"Jesus, Thomas... oh, fuck. Thomas, this is Roper's house!"
"It's Roper's house, and you're Roper's girl for as long as you can take it. My senses tell me you won't be able to take it much longer. Roper's a crook, as Caroline Langbourne has no doubt been telling you. He's not a buccaneer, or a Mississippi gambler, or a romantic adventurer, or however you decided to cast him when you picked each other up. He's an arms crook and at least a bit of a murderer." He took an outrageous step. He broke all Burr's rules and Rooke's in a single sentence. "That's why people like you and me end up spying on him," he said. "Leaving traces an inch deep all over his office. 'Jed was here.' 'Jed Marshall, her mark, her hair stuck in his papers.' He'd kill you for that. That's what he does. Kills."
He paused to observe the effect of his backhanded confession on her, but she had frozen. "I'd better go and talk to Daniel," he said. "What's he supposed to have done to himself, anyway?"
"God knows."
She did a strange thing as he left. She was still at the door, and as he approached her, she took a step back to let him pass, which might have been normal courtesy. Then on some impulse that she could probably not have explained, she reached in front of him, turned the door handle and gave the door a shove, as if his hands were laden and he needed help.
Daniel was lying on his bed, reading his book on monsters.
"Jed just overreacted," he explained. "All I did was act up a little. But Jed went berserk.'"
NINETEEN
It was evening of the same day, and Jonathan was still alive. the sky was still in its place, no security gorillas fell on him out of the trees as he made his way back through the tunnel to Woody's House. The cicadas ticked and sobbed, the sun disappeared behind Miss Mabel's Mountain, dusk fell. He had played tennis with Daniel and the Langbourne children, he had swum with them and sailed with them, he had listened to Isaac on the subject of the Tottenham Hotspurs and to Esmeralda on evil spirits and to Caroline Langbourne on men, marriage and her husband: