‘Sleep then. It’s late.’ She pointed. ‘Through there. A bedroom, down the passage there’s a bathroom, I’ll light the water heater.’
Niemand looked around the room. He didn’t want to say it.
‘Jess,’ he said, ‘this place, they can connect it with you?’
‘Nice to hear you say my name,’ she said. ‘Con, who are they?’
‘I don’t know. The owners are your friends?’
‘Yes. I was at school with her sister.’
He was tired, he had trouble standing, legs weak, he had the feeling of not having feet. He put a hand on the back of a chair. ‘Who would know you could get the car, come here, this house?’
Jess touched her hair, pushed it back, he could see the tiredness in her.
‘I’ve been here with the owners,’ she said. ‘They’re in America. I keep an eye on their house in London. I don’t think anyone knows I’ve got these keys.’
Niemand tried to think about this but he gave up.
‘Listen, Jess,’ he said, ‘tomorrow I’ll go and you stay here and I’ll make sure they know you’re not with me, you’re not involved.’
‘Will you tell me what’s going on?’
‘Yes. In the morning. What I know.’
‘Go to bed,’ she said. ‘We’ll talk in the morning.’
For a moment, they stood looking at each other. Then he took a lamp and went to the bedroom, stripped. He walked down the narrow, short passage holding the lamp, almost bumped into her coming out of the bathroom, lowered the lamp to cover himself.
‘It’s too late for modesty,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’ve seen everything you’ve got.’
He showered, trying to keep the water off his bandage. Then he went back to the bedroom, dressed again and lay on the bed under the eiderdown, lay in the dark and listened.
Noise of the wind, hollow sound, lonely. He thought about the Swartberge, the survival course in the mountains, eyelashes frozen in the morning, lip cracks opening, the way human smells carried in the clean cold air.
They could find them here. There was no point in thinking otherwise. In the morning, he would ring the Wishart woman, tell her Jess knew nothing about the film, had never seen it, was only involved by accident. He would catch a bus, a train, go somewhere where he could work out how to get another passport.
The Irishman would help him. That was a possibility.
He drowsed, drifted away, not peaceful, exhausted.
54
…HAMBURG…
‘I’m regretting this,’ said Alex. ‘I was regretting it before I got into the car. It’s stupid of me. An imposition.’
She was holding two bottles of red wine and she offered them to Anselm.
‘To drink,’ she said. ‘Tonight.’
Even in the dim light, he could see that she was flushed. She had been crying and he thought she looked beautiful and desirable.
‘Welcome to the house of remorse,’ said Anselm. ‘Here we regret almost everything we do.’
He took the bottles, showed her into the study and went to the kitchen. It was a choice between a 1987 Lafite and a 1989 Chateau Palmer. He drew the corks of both bottles and went to the pantry for good glasses. He’d broken many Anselm wine glasses, glasses his great-great grandfather might have drunk out of. But there were enough left to see him out.
In the study, Anselm said, ‘This is kind of you but this wine’s too good for me.’
‘From my ex-husband’s collection,’ said Alex.
‘It’s nice of him to donate it.’
‘He killed himself in Boston yesterday.’
Anselm poured the Lafite. They sat in silence, each in a cone of lamplight, the wine dark as tar in their glasses.
‘I don’t know why I’m upset,’ said Alex. ‘For a long time I hated him. And then I came to terms with my feelings.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘A colleague of his rang an hour ago. I felt so…fuck, I can’t express it.’
‘Why would he do it?’
‘Apparently the woman he lived with left him about a month ago. His colleague says he was depressed, he’d been drinking a lot, not going to the university, missing classes.’
More silence. She finished her wine and he refilled her glass. She leant her head back, half her face in shadow. ‘He rang me about two weeks ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t let him speak. I told him I had nothing to say to him.’
Anselm wanted to say that it wouldn’t have made any difference but he could not bring himself to. ‘Would you have taken him back?’ he said.
‘No. Never.’
‘I wouldn’t dwell on it then. How long were you married?’
‘Six years. He left me for the American woman.’
Anselm rolled wine around his mouth, swallowed. ‘You can keep coming around with this stuff,’ he said.
‘Kai wouldn’t open a bottle except to impress. One day he brought his head of department home for a drink, a fat man, a medievalist, so self-important you wanted to kill him. But you would not be able to get your hands around that pig neck. And Kai opened a fifteen-year-old burgundy. The man couldn’t believe it.
She looked at him, she licked her lips, drank a lot of wine.
‘I took the marriage seriously. That was the end of serious relationships for me.’
She drank. ‘It had been going on for a long time before I found out. More than a year. He had all these trips, London, Copenhagen, seminars, that kind of rubbish. I believed him.’
All betrayals were the same, thought Anselm. The only tragedy was that, in the instant in which they became known, the life drained from everything that had gone before-like colour photographs turning into black-and- white.
Alex held out her glass. He half-filled it, added some wine to his.
Her quick drinking made him nervous. He was the quick drinker, that was his escape.
She studied the wine against the light, took a big mouthful. ‘He’d done it before,’ she said, not looking at him, looking around the room.
‘Done what?’
‘Left one woman for another without any warning.’
He knew what she was going to tell him.
‘He left his first wife for me,’ she said. ‘He sent her a telegram.’
Anselm went to the desk and found a cigarette. He could remember his grandfather sitting behind the desk smoking a cigar. The big brass cigar ashtray was still in position, to the right of the blotter in its embossed-leather frame.
He leant against the desk. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he probably intended to tell her in person, never got around to it.’
‘He was twelve years older,’ she said. She swilled the last of her wine, looking at the scarlet whirlpool, drained it. ‘More, please.’
