clutching. They were also extremely good at disrobing others with an economy of movement, and when a man’s trousers are suddenly around his ankles, he feels very silly. He must decide immediately either to pull them up, or not. Several of them delayed the decision until too late, and very soon some kind of line was crossed. It was like a riot. I ran to the door, locked it and shouted that it was a gigantic disaster—things had gone terribly wrong, all the while unbuttoning my dress as though I couldn’t help myself. But it was unnecessary. By that time both of the Hartleby sisters—the plump ones who take attendance—were uniformly naked, and Eunice Plimstall—the one you were ogling today—had convinced herself she’d fainted, and the poor dear had fallen with her skirt up to her waist, so old Mr. Capshaw was giving her an esoteric form of artificial resuscitation. She came to herself rather quickly, I have to say, and then she was up in search of a comforter with more stamina. Mrs. Purvis went to her hands and knees to help the fallen, but within seconds the vicar had lifted her dress and was helping her to free herself of her underclothes. It didn’t seem to cure her hyperventilation, but she appeared to be grateful for the thought, and the orgy was fairly begun. Afterward, they considered having me arrested, but thought better of it and settled on a reprimand.”
“That’s a wonderful story,” he said, then sipped his tea.
She looked disappointed. “You don’t believe it, do you?”
He shook his head. “Not a word of it. But that doesn’t matter. I don’t know any of those people. Why would I care if it’s true?”
“The stories are better if you believe in them,” said The Honourable Meg. “I always tell them to be believed. I hope you aren’t going to mind.”
“Not at all,” he said. He looked at her thoughtfully. “It ensures a certain level of quality. A story has to be pretty good before you can tell it as a lie.”
It was at this moment that things were settled. The Honourable Meg had found someone who would listen with fixed attention to her stories, and she was content to spend the next two years cherishing him for it. The time simply happened, without anything unpleasant to make her notice its passing. Michael Schaeffer was competent and solid, an American businessman who had done something so thunderously dull to earn a living that as soon as he had gathered enough to satisfy the dictates of respectability, he had retired to England and stopped talking, or even thinking, about it. Of course, marrying a man like that would have been unthinkable.
The Honourable Meg, as a young, healthy, attractive member of the aristocracy, was the property of an invisible national genetic trust. Her only duty as a loyal subject was to be scrupulously careful not to be impregnated by the American. She helped him to assuage his curiosity about music, art and the other pursuits of the rich, but after the first year, she became accustomed to the fact that his curiosity wasn’t strong enough to lure him far afield. He wouldn’t go to London for the theater or even for the food. This was acceptable because it enabled her to move among her equals and let her life proceed unimpeded by the presence of an embarrassingly unacceptable lover.
It wasn’t that she was worried that one day he would show up in a terrible necktie and disgrace her before all England. He was without personal preference, and so he would pay the best shops to dress him in the way other people dressed. He was unacceptable only because of who
At the end of the two years, a morning came and Schaeffer opened his eyes to evaluate it. He’d had the window in his bedroom knocked out and replaced with glass bricks before he had allowed himself to sleep in the room. The effect had been to provide him with a view of the quality of the light without the distraction of objects or images. The position of the wall of light was high: a rifle shot would have to come from a helicopter, pierce the translucent glass bricks, and then would hit a lone man standing inside only by chance.
The gray ceiling of clouds that had covered Bath for the past week must have gone, because now the light was gold and blue. He sat up and looked around him. Nothing of the years of working had left him. When his eyes opened he was awake and alert. Without thinking about it, he knew at any moment where the nearest weapon was hidden. It had been a simple matter when he had established himself in the house to present himself as a gun collector. He had bought a collection intact at an estate sale: handmade Purdey shotguns, engraved presentation revolvers, the worn .455 Webley pistol that the former owner had carried in the trenches at Verdun, even a delicate set of dueling pistols that looked as though they would crack into fragments if they were fired. Thereafter he had been able to add a few more modern and functional weapons without alarming the housekeeper or her husband. The precautions he had taken had never been elaborate or inconvenient; they were simply the normal, sensible things he had been doing since the days when he had started working.
He remembered that Eddie Mastrewski would not sleep in a bed when he was working: he would rent a room, move the mattress to the floor and sleep there with a pistol beside him. Once he and Eddie had taken a motel room and slept in the car, and that night Eddie had been right. At three in the morning two men carrying shotguns had burst into the room. Until Eddie had started the car he could hear the two of them in the dark room blowing hole after hole in the twin beds—a blast, then a metallic slide and click, then another blast. Even as they pulled away, he could still hear the firing and see the muzzle flashes through the open doorway, lighting the walls and leaving a bright orange afterimage floating behind his eyes.
As Schaeffer stepped onto the floor he heard a quiet clicking sound, and realized that someone was trying to turn the handle on the bedroom door. He walked toward it and listened.
“Oh, damn.” It was the voice of The Honourable Meg. Then there was a small thump on the door. It was a steel fire door that he had bought from a restaurant-supply warehouse in London, so the sound of her fist on it carried no resonance. “Ouch. Damn it, Michael. I know you’re in there. Mrs. Satterthwaite said so. Get up and open this door.”
“Just a minute,” he called. It was only at times like this, when he had been asleep and had wandered in the places that dreams constructed for him, that the name still sounded strange to him. He put on his bathrobe and moved to the side of the door. There was no telling who she might bring: members of the entourage of overbred young aristocrats she swept along with her, or the regimental band of the Thirty-Eleventh Welsh Borderers in full battle regalia. He opened the door and saw that she was alone. She wore a wide picture hat and a thin, sleeveless dress of yellow cotton. She had calculated today’s costume as striking, the bold and direct look of the big-eyed young girls in nineteenth-century paintings who had such oddly curly hair. Was that Turner? No, he was the one where the sky looked as if a nuclear war were being fought somewhere in the suburbs. It was somebody else. As soon as he opened the door, she snatched the hat off her head and marched into the room, already talking.
“There’s not much time, so you’ll have to be quick about it. This place is ridiculous. You know that, don’t you? Of course you do, but you don’t care at all. It was a perfectly decent old house, and you’ve made it look as though Hitler had escaped and built a bunker in Arizona, then went even madder and moved it intact to Bath. How can anyone be expected to surprise you?”
“I don’t like surprises. I like sleep.”
She looked at him slyly. “It’s because you wake up with an erection, isn’t it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It is. Don’t deny it. You’re afraid Mrs. Satterthwaite will walk in and set a tea tray on it and you’ll be discovered. Hurry up, now. Your secret is safe with me.”
“Hurry up with what?”
“We’re going to Brighton for the races, and the horses are only going to wait so long for the likes of you.”
Schaeffer had only a vague notion of the whereabouts of Brighton. It was near the sea somewhere in the southeast. “Isn’t that a little far?”
“No problem. Jimmy Pinchasen has offered to take us all in his Bentley, and he drives as though he’d signed a suicide pact. His family was really named Pinchausen, but they changed it when they came here with George the First because he was German too, so Jimmy has a genetic desire to drive the way they do on the autobahn.”
He sat back down on the bed. “I don’t think so.”
