thirty perhaps, but it seemed that she had decided to think of the men around her as children; even though Eric said that they were accountable for her, and responsible for her thoughts.
“I shall still call you Fairfax,” she said. “You see, although we don’t know each other, I’ve been expecting you. Hasn’t Andrew explained?”
“We’ve been too busy talking shop,” Andrew said.
“Well, explain now. Excuse me, I must put the flowers in water.”
She went into the kitchen. She stood by the fridge and smiled, doing nothing, letting a moment pass. When she came back Fairfax had folded his spectacular height into a chair. He looked avian, but not predatory, both vulnerable and sharp: the best kind of salesman.
“As we never have flowers,” she said, “I haven’t a vase. You must drink up the contents of this carafe between you, and then I can put the flowers in it. The rest of the wine can come straight from the bottles. You must watch the sediment, Fairfax. This wine was made by Jeff Pollard.”
“Oh, Jeff,” Fairfax said. “What a man! Everybody’s talking about some poor girl he had an affair with, aren’t they? It’s beyond imagination. At least, it’s beyond mine. Do you know that poem? ‘Why have such scores of lovely gifted girls / Married impossible men?’ It’s just the same with affairs, isn’t it?”
“You shouldn’t waste your sympathy on Marion Smallbone,” Andrew said. “She wasn’t lovely. Or gifted.”
“Oh, but comparatively,” Fairfax insisted; he sat forward in his chair, and locked his long fingers together. “She must have been too good for Pollard. I’ve seen better things than Jeff in the Reptile House.”
“How does the rest of the poem go?” Frances said.
“Oh, it talks about idle men, illiterate men, dirty and sly, about men you have to make excuses for to casual passersby. Intolerable men, full of self-pity. But then the man who wrote it, he wonders if they can really be so bad after all, whether he overvalues women.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Fairfax thought about it, seeming surprised. “Perhaps I do.”
“You would never last the pace in Jeddah. This is no place for men who like women.”
“We’re not all like the Saudis,” Andrew said.
“No, but you seem to collaborate with them.” She had not known she thought it, until she heard it pop out of her mouth. “I had a letter from Marion, did you read it, Andrew? She’s taken the children back to her mother, who is elderly and has a small flat in Nottingham. Russel’s divorcing her, and she’s going to live on social security. The origin of the romance,” she explained to Fairfax, “was that he used to go round and unblock her lavatory. Oh well, I mustn’t get bitter about it. There’s probably no hope for people like that, separately or together. Do you know many poems, Fairfax?”
“I know a lot for an air-conditioning expert.”
“Why did you get lost? I sent you a map. Didn’t Andrew give it to you?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid I just can’t make any sense of this place. The traffic signs kept sending me places that I didn’t want to go.”
“You ignore them,” Andrew said.
“Do you? Is that right?”
“I used to be good at maps,” Frances said. “They were my living. I must be losing my touch.”
She went out, to bring the food to the table. The meat had dried out, and the vegetables were soggy, but Fairfax ate quite happily, his jacket slung over the back of his chair; he complimented her on her cooking. Andrew thought he was a groveler; you could see that by his expression. You could see that he wondered why a man who was in air-conditioning should have pretensions to charm. But Frances paid attention to her guest. In his presence she breathed more easily. The tension eased from her shoulders; Jeff’s wine was sweet, syrupy, harmless, quite unlike his usual acid brew. It was soothing, like warm black currant juice, and yet it had a certain potency; she felt languid, as if she would sleep well, and wake up somewhere better. She put her elbow on the table, and rested her cheek on her open hand. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
Fairfax looked modest about it, putting back a strand of his featherlike hair. “People always say I’m a breath of fresh air. But that is our trade joke. We only have one. We are a somber lot, in air-conditioning.”
Then Fairfax talked about his work; about the central air-conditioning plant for Andrew’s building. A sort of ersatz reverence took him over, a weightless gravity; he looked like a schoolboy who had been given the task of imitating, in a pantomime, a governor of the Bank of England. Andrew was impressed, in spite of himself. He sat over the cheese and coffee, and pictured his building finished, its fountains of fire, its indoor forests deep and lush, its model of the solar system, its iceberg walls; he reached forward, his eyes blank and inward-looking, and refilled Fairfax’s glass; he breathed the silent, circulating air that Fairfax would create—dust-free, perfumed, Alpine. Fairfax broke off. “Are we boring you?” he said to Frances. “We could talk about this in the morning.”
“That’s all right.”
“I bet I know what they were saying, those blokes on the plane. Around our office I’m regarded as the resident imbecile.”
“I’m regarded as the errand boy,” Andrew said. He opened another bottle of wine. “Ribena, Fairfax?” He said, “This isn’t like Jeff’s wine. He must have stolen it from somebody.”
“Anyway, I’m only here at all because the chap who should have come is more incompetent still. He filled in the form for his visa, and where it said RELIGION he put LATTER-DAY SAINT. The Saudis thought it was some kind of piss-take, I suppose. Now he’ll never get in. You’re supposed to put CHRISTIAN, is that right?”
“Yes. They’re not interested in any finer distinctions,” Andrew said. “They ban atheists as well.”
“They told me all sorts of stories about this place before I came. ‘You’ll like it, Fairfax,’ they said. ‘It’s just like the
