affable. Saul pours us all a drink and a conversation develops among the five of them to which I make no contribution. The utter pointlessness of getting to know new people, given my present situation, is palpable. Smells of garlic and wine drift in from the kitchen, where Saul goes from time to time to check on the food.
Toward eight o’clock, as we are standing up to go to the table for dinner, Dave asks me how I know Saul.
“Old school friends,” I tell him. “From way back.”
“Listen to him,” Saul interjects loudly from across the room. “From way back. You never used to say that, Alec.” He looks over at Katharine. “You two are turning him into an American. The other day on the phone he told me to have a nice day.”
“Oh bullshit,” I say, but the way this comes out it sounds angry and petulant. There’s a sudden embarrassed silence among us, and Saul grimaces, a joke gone wrong.
“All right, all right,” he says, and his face fills with disappointment. He has been growing more impatient with me in the last few months, knowing that something in our friendship has changed, but without any real knowledge as to why. I don’t telephone Saul as much as I used to and don’t have the time to send him jokes via e-mail. We haven’t been out for a drink, just the two of us, since Christmas of last year, and I have entirely lost track of his career, his girlfriends, his worries and concerns. This is how I imagined things would pan out, but now that something has gone wrong, the burden of secrecy feels suddenly overwhelming. With Kate gone, Saul is the one person I might trust to talk to about what happened this afternoon. I want to tell him the truth, I want to tell him exactly what is going on. This constant entanglement with bluff, double-bluff, second-guess, and guile is wearing. Any notion of trust or honor that I ever had has vanished. My life has become a wall of lies shored up against the possibility of capture. I cannot recall what it felt like just to sit around this flat in the old days, watching videos with Saul and pissing away our teens and twenties.
“Telecommunications,” Dave is saying, to no one but me. We are sitting beside each other at the dining-room table, Katharine and Fortner at either end, with Saul and Susannah opposite us.
“What about them specifically?”
“You know how they’re paying for the Internet and all the fiber optic networks?”
Has he been talking to me about this before now? Have I missed something? Have I just been nodding and mumbling at him, my mind drifted off elsewhere?
“No. How?”
“Answering machines.”
“What do you mean, ‘answering machines’?”
Dave leans forward, plucks a napkin from his side plate, and places it on his lap.
“Before answer phones came along, you just dialed a number and let it ring out, right? If somebody wasn’t in, you hung up and there was no charge for making the call. But all that’s changed now that everybody has an answering machine. Whenever you make a call, it kicks in after two or three rings. So a connection’s been made, right? And if a connection’s been made, then you’ve added to your phone bill. They have a minimum charge of four pence, so it adds up. How many answering machines do you think there are in the UK?”
“I have no idea.”
“Maybe fifteen million, conservative estimate. So every time somebody rings those machines, British Telecom is making sixty million pence, which is…which is…”
The night is still while Dave makes his calculation. I do it for him.
“Six hundred thousand pounds.”
“Exactly,” he says. “Thank you.”
Susannah is reacting to something Saul has said. She has a laugh like a broken fan belt. There’s some kind of mousse appetizer in front of me and I am already halfway through it.
“But of course the really smart thing about answering machines is that you have to call back if someone leaves you a message. So that’s another guaranteed call for BT, another four pence minimum. It’s no wonder they make the profits they do. What is it? About seven hundred and fifty pounds a minute?”
“Is that how much they make?” Katharine asks. Suddenly the entire table is listening to Dave’s monologue.
“Apparently. And it doesn’t just stop with answering machines. There’s call waiting now, too. That’s the most craven one of all. You ring up a friend, and even if he’s on the line talking to someone else you’re made to wait. Beep. Beep. Please hold the line while we try to connect you. The other person knows you are waiting. And it goes on and on. Fucking woman sounds like Margaret Thatcher. So you’re there, you’re holding the line, but they’re not trying to connect you. Like fuck they are. They’re just happy to let you run up your bill.”
“That’s right,” says Fortner. “They are.”
He looks relaxed and composed, a drink inside him, safe in the knowledge that the Abnex documents are in the next room.
“And let’s say they do.” Dave is speaking faster and faster, gesturing wildly, cutlery in hand. I look across at Susannah, but she has nothing but pride in her eyes as Dave swallows a mouthful of mousse and continues with his discourse. “Then the first person they were talking to has to run up their phone bill waiting for the other person to talk to the person who’s waiting. That can go on for hours. And even then, one of them will have to call the other back, which is another guaranteed call for BT. And then-and then -there are itemized phone bills. If you’re sharing a flat with somebody and he denies making that five-pound call to the number listed on the bill, you then have to ring that number up and embarrass yourself by asking who the fuck they are, just so that you can work out if it’s your bill or his. You ever done that, Alec?”
“I live alone.”
Again, silence settles around the table in the wake of my speaking. Saul frowns and then turns his head to face Katharine, his lips drawn together in a tight, disappointed line. Dave, looking pale and embarrassed, finishes eating, and for a while the only noise in the room is the tinkling of his fork against his china plate, the quick munch of his jaw as he chews and swallows. Saul is already up and collecting the plates before Dave has finished, stacking them noisily and making for the kitchen.
“Can I give you a hand?” I ask, and, without looking at me, he says, “Sure.”
“I’ll come too,” Katharine offers, but Saul gestures at her to sit down.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I only need Alec.”
Once we are in the kitchen, he turns on me.
“What’s the matter with you these days?”
What surprises me about my reaction to this is that I am grateful to him for asking. For a brief moment I consider not bothering to deny any unhappiness. I want the opportunity to unburden myself, but it’s untenable. I have to keep up the masquerade.
“I’m fine. Fine,” I tell him, managing a smile, but there can be nothing in either my voice or my attitude to convince him of this.
“You’re not fine, Alec,” he says, the weight of his body shifting forward, coming at me. “You’re hardly here. Most of the time I don’t even recognize you anymore.”
He is keeping his voice low, tinkering with a pan on the stove that has pasta boiling hard inside it. I am worried that Fortner, who is only across the corridor in the chair nearest the kitchen, will hear us, so I move away from the sink and close the door until it is ajar.
“Come on, Saul. Who has the will to listen to a guy they’ve never met before doing his party piece about answering machines and phone bills? I have a lot on my mind.”
“We all work hard, for fuck’s sake,” he says, but before I have time to reply he has carried a bowl of salad into the dining room and left me alone in the kitchen. I turn to the sink and begin rinsing the plates in a coughing stream of lukewarm water. One by one, I slot them into the dishwasher.
“Is the pasta ready?” he says, coming back in.
“I don’t know. Listen, why don’t I stay tonight? We can talk then, have a smoke, watch some TV.”
“Okay,” he says, forking a strand of tagliatelle out of the water. Then, more quietly: “Whatever.”
At half past ten, with the main course out of the way, Fortner makes his move.
Saul, Dave, and Susannah are having a conversation about the latest cinema releases, which to me is always the sign of a bad dinner party. Fortner interjects to ask if anyone has seen Mission Impossible, and Susannah says
