Never Mind Miss Fox (8 page)

“Well,” Clive said, “if you won't do that, then—” He spread his hands.
If you won't help yourself, then I can't help you.
Clive's gesture was as familiar as his argument—they both repeated these assertions to each other once a month.

Clive had gone, now, in a taxi to the airport. He had pulled a wheeled case from a cupboard, asking, “Can I take this?”

Looking at it, Martha had recognized a suitcase that had once belonged to her. When she had worked, she had flown in and out of the country so often that the case had never gone back in the cupboard—putting it away and fetching it out had felt like too much of a hassle. Since it was always either being packed or unpacked, in those days, it had shared their bedroom with them, like a baby's cot.

From the sanctuary of his Manhattan hotel Clive stared out at the city which unrolled away from his window to the pale, winter's horizon. He had never been here before and here was everything:
New York.
He hovered in the air above a glorious, limitless, glittering planet, the same as his own and yet not. He considered the wealth of his position: separated from wife and baby and with designated free time.
I can do anything I want.

His imagination flared and died like a struck match. There was nothing he wanted; nothing he would do. He was obedient, cheap and reliable—it was why Belinda had brought him. “Please,” Justin had begged, his forehead resting on the desk and his eyes closed, “please. Do something bad, while you're there. Something you regret. Something to tell me about when you get back. Something. Anything.”

Behind Clive the hotel bedroom promised nothing: a bed tucked tight like a fancy napkin; a wipe-clean menu of television channels; a chained rail of coat hangers in an echoing closet. Pursed lips, clasped hands and a tight collar. Clive did not want to turn around and face it.

Instead he leaned his forehead on the window and placed one palm beside his face, the fingers spread, as if he were making a forlorn, farewell signal to a person on the sidewalk far below. He thought of Eliza.

That morning she had bumped from chair to table in the bedroom—tottering on two legs—fingers outstretched as if she were feeling her way to a light switch—and then pitched forwards and rumbled about on her hands and feet again. Clive wished he could take her everywhere with him and watch her, just for the pleasure of it. What would she be doing now? His heart tripped and recovered itself.

Belinda Easton, who was now in the room next door, had two children of her own but Clive knew no more than that—he did not know their names or their ages. She did not speak of family or friends, only work. Once Clive had asked how old her children were and she had replied, “Enormous.”

Clive wondered what she was doing this minute while he stood with his hand on the window. Sleeping? He pictured a water glass on the bedside table and her plain face twitching as she slept. All at once he felt absurd; embarrassed; peculiar, and he thought of Justin. “Mate,” Justin would have said, “you're a dirty perv.”

In a flurry Clive remembered his duty: not to waste this precious time away from home. He emptied his bag on the bed and made a mess of the room—this was what Justin would have done—before taking a long shower, using all the towels and wrapping himself in a heavy robe. He pulled beer and snacks from the fridge and flung himself onto the hotel counterpane to stare at the television and finger the remote control. This would have been the moment, he noted, when Justin would have watched porn and had a wank but Clive turned—with another kind of shame—to the news channel and lay in a soggy cocoon of linen and litter until it was time for his meeting.

Sluggish and woozy he dragged himself off the bed and into his leaden clothes. He had eaten every snack in the minibar. Under his feet the carpet was a gravel of pistachio shells. In the bathroom he stepped into a puddle and cursed aloud. He heard a cough from the next-door bathroom: Belinda. He froze. She could hear his every movement and—what was worse—Clive could imagine hers. She might at this very moment be tucked up on the loo like a pixie, those famous tights bound around her knees and her face a concentrating triangle. He tiptoed from his bathroom. On the edge of the bed he slumped into a defeated half-moon, peeled off his socks and filled in a laundry slip. It was almost more than his brain could accomplish. When he straightened up he heard his vertebrae click like a rosary and the dirty maggot of a headache wriggled up his neck. He did not want to go to work; he wanted to go home.

Back in a taxi at the end of the day, Clive rehearsed the excuses he would use to get him out of a dinner-for-two with Belinda: headache, nausea, jet lag—the old favorites. He knew he was being cruel, but an upholstered booth in the hotel restaurant, piano tinkling in the corner, was an evening he could not face.

He might have been prepared to be persuaded into a drink, but he was not given the chance: Belinda turned to face him across the slippery seat of the cab and announced that she would be spending her evening alone. “Room service, a bath and a movie on telly,” she said. “That's what hotels are for.” She must have caught a glimpse of hurt in Clive's expression for she added, surprised, “You don't mind, do you?”

“Of course not—I agree. I think I'll do the same.” Clive turned to look out of the window.

“You? Stay in?” Belinda teased him. “Not likely. We all know what a
player
you are, Clive.” She was joking of course, and Clive laughed along.

Back in the hotel he wondered what he would do. It was too late to telephone home, but too early to cut his losses and go to bed. His room had been swept clean of wet towels, discarded food and detritus—to make a new impression he would have to repeat the solitary pantomime he had conducted earlier. He stood in the center of the room and drank a cold beer from the fridge, wondering if perhaps he would go to bed after all. Neither Martha nor Justin need ever know.

The ring of the telephone gave him a fright. It was Belinda. “These people are
paranoid,
” she said. “Clive, can you run round to Lynton's suite at the Arcturus and fetch a bundle of stuff out of his safe? He doesn't trust a courier. It's only a matter of showing your face, picking it up and coming straight back.”

“Of course,” said Clive, untwisting the telephone cord with his free hand. Something to do! An errand. He swelled with self-importance.

“If you meet him, don't say anything—you'll make him nervous. Shake his hand and call him ‘sir' if you get the chance. I know it's ludicrous but this is the sort of thing they care about. When you get back I'll put the documents into the safe.”

Clive threw back his shoulders, walked nine blocks to the Arcturus and bowled up to reception feeling necessary and important. Placing both hands on the chest-high marble surface of the desk, he spoke to a manicured girl in a headset who looked straight through him until he had finished speaking and then said, “Go on up,” and pointed to a lift, in the corner of the lobby, which served the penthouse suite alone. Once inside Clive checked his teeth in the mirror as red numbers flicked to twenty on a little dark screen.

After only a few seconds the doors opened—slowly; gingerly—to reveal not the usual hotel arrangement of landing, fire extinguisher and rubbish bin but instead a fully furnished room in which the elevator seemed to be both incongruous and incidental. Each marble-topped surface gleamed a different shade of mottled pink. Across the largest table a Prince tennis racquet was wrapped in a matte black sheath and it seemed to point and stare at Clive until he quavered on the carpet. The lift doors remained open a moment, as if they too were encouraging him to return to the lobby where he belonged, and then with a sigh of resignation they slid together. Clive was left alone. He felt as if he had made the villain's entrance—from beneath the stage—and that his appearance would be met by jeers and catcalls.

The air and the carpet seemed both to be thicker up here, and Clive plowed from one room to the next with the shuffling steps of a polar explorer. It was quiet, but for the distant sound of a television. He waded toward the noise through a kitchen, a scullery and a dining room—each more of a gap than a destination—and came to a halt in the chilled atmosphere of a gym, where CNN boomed at a cluster of petrified equipment.

Clive cursed himself and the machines before trailing a sorry path back to the lift. From the table the Prince racquet mocked him and he stood before it for a moment, penitent, before setting out again in a different direction. He traced another sound—the hysterical babble of a sports commentary—across a plush, puffed sitting room in which a shining black piano made a glossy puddle on the white carpet. Hurrying now—he must have been in this labyrinth for a thousand years—he approached an open doorway.

Before he could check his progress Clive had arrived in a bedroom. A roaring television hung on the wall and three huge men were perched on stools, looking up. Behind them stood an enormous bed and at its center lay a quill-shaped man—narrow-shouldered and neat—with socked feet crossed and a celestial spread of pillows behind his head.

Knowing he had come too far, Clive teetered on the brink. Beyond the bed—beyond the window—lay the sparkling city, black and white at night. He imagined leaping out of this chamber and into the Milky Way.

The three spectators continued to stare at the screen with parted lips, as if about to receive communion, but the man on the bed stopped murmuring into the telephone and turned his head to stare at Clive.

This was Belinda's client, Lynton, recognizable from the profile Clive had read in the
Financial Times
(“Gentleman—Yachtsman—Millionaire”) but also from his uniform—white sports socks and crisp white T-shirt; tracksuit trousers shaded the same expensive charcoal as his hair—which was standard leisurewear for billionaires and looked as if it had been bought at Saks today and delivered to the door of the bedroom in a fluttering nest of tissue. In a suit, Clive—like the seated thugs—could be identified as staff.

The laid-back pose was not convincing: Clive could tell that Lynton held in reserve the chilled athleticism of a leopard on a branch. With a flick of his tail, it was plain, he could be up and on you with his pointed teeth in the back of your neck. When he spoke—putting his hand over the receiver—it was in a tone of polite but lethal interest: “And who the hell are you?”

The three men—perched in a row like circus sea lions—turned their gaze from the screen, twitched at Clive and opened their mouths to bark.

Clive began, “I'm—”

But then—“Clive?”

It was a voice he knew, and he turned to face it. The city flickered beneath the window and the crowd bellowed from the television, but here in the room—half-dressed, half-dry, and halfway through hooking diamond earrings in her ears—stood Eliot Fox.

On the morning after Aiden's funeral, Clive had seen an otter. He had left Martha asleep in the cottage and gone for a run: into the woods behind the house, over the hill and along a track which took him down to a river. He had stopped to tie his lace beside a still, brimming pool, where branches hung their fingertips over the water and a lick of vapor skimmed away in a careless arabesque.

Straightening up, he had paused to look and taken in the perfect, balanced harmony of the moment. The water lay before him, its surface undisturbed: one chord would draw the ballerina from the wings to tiptoe a shy, tilted path towards center stage.

Clive had felt like an intruder. The previous day's wake had been long, liquid and emotional; a tight, sticky residue of alcohol—whisky and champagne—still hung about him like a drift of tiny flies. He had held his hot breath rather than cloud the air.

As he stood motionless a smooth, drenched head had emerged from the water in front of him. Streaked in brown and tan, it was as clean and washed as a handful of stones on the riverbed.

Otter.

It had not seen him but had swum, frowned into the depths, turned about, dipped and ducked. A swirl—a loosely written circle on the surface—and it had gone. Clive had waited—hoping—and it had come again, slipping through the water like a knife through silk. It was light and strong; serious and laughing; thinking and instinctive—all these things were bound together and buttoned inside its tawny coat.

Clive had been astonished and had felt—with a flash of something near joy—as if his sins had been forgiven and that this sight was the proof: here was a blessing, swimming before him. He had thought of himself—
what I did
—and then of Eliot—
what I did to Eliot.
She had swum into his mind's eye—he had kept her out for so long,
why today?
—and he had wanted to weep, to fall to his knees, to grind dirt from the path into his eyes.

Why think of her?
Because there was something of Eliot in that creature—rare, purposeful, tender, humorous—that worked as it played, and played as it worked. He had remembered Eliot's hands at the piano: swim, soar, dip, soothe, search. The privacy of that work which was play to her. He had begged out loud, “Oh, please—,” and the otter had heard him, looked and vanished.

Clive had finished the sentence in his head:
Oh, please let me begin again.

Back at the cottage he had picked his way upstairs to the bedroom through the mess of empty bottles and glasses left by the funeral party. He had found Martha still sleeping, her face a slide of makeup pressed into the pillow and her black dress dropped on the floor. Clive had woken her up and asked her to marry him.

But this was the living, breathing Eliot, here in this room. Not a forgiving spirit but a towering, fearsome person, standing before him with the might to judge him still. Clive knew at once he had not been right to forgive himself that morning, standing beside the river. Here stood the girl who had written in her felt-tip pen,
I hate your guts and I hope you rot in hell.
Whether she hated him still was for her to decide for herself.