Defiance blared from her nostrils, and she was breathing quickly and noisily, as though she had been running or violently making love. Her face was flushed with passion. She looked wonderful. She looked appalling. Stephen was frightened out of his wits. At any moment a breeze might blow upon her and she would turn grey and fall apart and crumble into ash before his eyes. This too too solid, this too too vibrant flesh would melt. Molly had already melted. Hattie hung on there, panting. Molly Lansdowne blew her nose, firmly, on a lace-edged handkerchief plucked from her own bosom, took another gulp of gin and water, reassembled her features, and heroically took charge.
‘There, there, my dear,’ she said, in her droll social voice. ‘You’d better fasten yourself up again, Hattie darling. You can’t go to Marjorie’s looking like that.’ She paused, and gallantly added, ‘Unfortunately.’
Hattie smiled, and descended from her height, and struggled back into her gold. Stephen helped to zip her up. The smooth skin of her womanly back tingled beneath his fingers. She was charged with electricity. She had a dark mole on her left shoulder. She was still dangerous, but for the moment docile. And off they had all gone, to Marjorie Kinsman’s birthday party, where there had been more drinking, more talking, more excited provocations. He had lost Hattie in the Circean throng of toads and pigs and monkeys and foxes. She had been sucked into the revelry, but he remained conscious of her presence throughout the long evening, catching her voice, her laugh, from beyond the alcove, from the tiny terrace, from the drawing room upstairs. He had made no commitment to depart with her, and she was accustomed to getting herself back from parties, but nevertheless she continued to beam towards him through the chatter and cigarette smoke and smouldering of idle passions, and at about half past one in the morning, as he was thinking he really must leave, as he hovered in the hallway trying to detach himself from Selina Mountjoy and Bruce Gibbon, he heard her cry out from the stairway. She cried out, but not to him. She cried to the world. ‘Oh shit,’ she cried, as she fell forwards, tripping over the hem of her long gold gown, caught by the ready arm of squat little Ivan Warner, always at hand whenever disaster struck. And Stephen had known that he could not leave her there, to be torn to pieces by her enemies, and he had gone to the rescue in his white suit, and for the second time that night she put herself together again, and they had made their farewells together and staggered out on to the cool pavement beneath a racing moon to look for a taxi. She took her shoes off and stood barefoot as they waited. ‘You’d better come back with me,’ said Stephen, who never said such things, as he gave the driver the address of his one-room flat on Primrose Hill. She held on to his hand in the taxi, and rocked and swayed. He made her coffee when they arrived, and she turned suddenly ice sober, and sat there calmly as though a storm had passed. ‘You’re a good friend, Stephen,’ she said. ‘You’re a pal.’ And they had cuddled together in the narrow bed, and whispered of little things. They recalled their first meeting, a hundred years ago, in a dubbing studio off Wardour Street, and a party at the Round House, and the time when Hattie had in her turn rescued Stephen from the clutches of a voracious bejewelled Italian journalist. They spoke of the moment when they had become friends. Hattie, observing Stephen romantically lunching alone in a self-service Italian restaurant near the British Museum, and struggling incompetently with a plate of spaghetti and some galley proofs, had boldly advanced upon him and his table with her tray, and sat herself down, and offered him a glass of wine from her carafe. He had not resisted. The proofs had snaked all over the floor, and Hattie, rescuing them, had offered her services as personal organizer. They had laughed a lot, over that, and over the years.
There was no way they could ever make love to one another, these two. They were saved from that. They had remained good friends.
And that was how Harriet Osborne came to take possession of Stephen Cox’s apartment. In the small of the night they arranged it, and, both being mad, in the morning they kept their bargain. ‘We mad people should stick to our agreements,’ said Stephen, as Hattie thanked him in the green dawn. And off he flew to Bangkok, and vanished from her sight.
It is not surprising that Hattie looks back on this night with horror. She cannot remember all of it, but she remembers enough to know that she behaved atrociously, even for her. But then, Stephen is a gentleman, and will not tell. And she has got a very low-rent flat out of it. And maybe he is dead and will never be able to tell. Molly Lansdowne is dead, dead of a heart attack in a hotel in Spain. Only Hattie remembers. And she will never tell.
*
Stephen Cox sits strapped into his Club Class seat at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for take-off on the Air France flight to Thailand and Vietnam, with his new discreet professionless passport in his pocket. He does not regret handing over his key and his rent book and his last will and testament to Hattie Osborne. One should obey impulses. His impulses had not enabled him to comfort Hattie in the way she most needed, but an empty apartment, however small, was an acceptable offering. He wondered how she would get on with his mysterious and philanthropic landlord, the aptly named Mr Goodfellow. And would she remember to give the bank the note he had scribbled requesting cancellation of the standing order for rent? It did not matter much, one way or the other. The rent was very low, and Mr Goodfellow was too honest to allow himself to be paid twice over.
He had told Hattie he had no idea how long he would be away. He said this to everybody. It was the truth.
He was feeling surprisingly well after his white night. Alert, light in the body, fancy free. The flight from Heathrow to Paris had been on time, and now, on the main leg of his journey eastward, he had happily been allocated a place near the Emergency Exit, with extra leg space, and the seat next to him was still free. He stretched and spread himself and began to browse through the copy of The Times he had purchased in London. Already the British news seemed irrelevant, parochial. Who cared about phone-tapping and Swiss takeover bids for British firms? Who cared if the Queen Mother had attended a ceremony in Nuneaton or the Countess of Snowdon a luncheon in Leith? Who cared that Lady Philippa Carlisle was six years old today, or that Princess Anne had tinted her hair red? Even the long slow diminuendo of the defeated miners’ strike and the rise of the new star Gorbachev failed to interest. Stephen read on, complacently, already half elsewhere, noting in passing that Paul Whitmore, the Horror of Harrow Road, was to appeal against his sentence, and that little Sophal May, an eleven-year-old Cambodian refugee, had been reunited with her parents in New York after a decade of searching.
His attention was caught only when he came across the obituaries of two of his acquaintances. It seemed a dangerously high body count. Both had died prematurely. One had once been his publisher. He had died, though it did not say so, of the drink. The other had been a fellow-scholar at Oxford. Cancer had killed him. Stephen paid a silent tribute to Michael Rowbotham and Stuart Cross, and registered the fact that Death was already his companion. Death had joined the caravan early, even though Stephen’s visa would take him only as far as Bangkok.
An announcement in French followed by English declared that the plane would take off in twenty minutes, and that the name of the captain was Commandant Parodi. Stephen was pleased by this. Who better to fly one into the unknown? We live in the age of parody, reflected Stephen. He had known another Parodi, years ago, in Normandy. He had been the manager of the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, the hotel of Balbec, which Proust had made his own. Stephen had arrived there on his bicycle, and the manager had been at first suspicious of his credentials, then appeased. Monsieur Parodi. Was it a common name, were these two related? Stephen did not know. The curving wide beach of Cabourg returned to him, the blue-grey watercolour sky, the yellow sands, the girls forever on their bicycles. He had walked from his hotel room across a marble foyer into the sea, wearing a white bathrobe. And in the evenings, he had played roulette in the casino, and eaten from little oval platters of fruits de mer, silver platters heaped with oysters and winkles and urchins and prawns and razor shells and mussels and green weeds of the sea. Good Time, he had then inhabited. He had been young enough to lay his chips for luck upon the number of his own age. Now he had long since left the board, and played roulette no more.
But luck was still with him, and the seat next to him was still empty. He appropriated it with his books, his briefcase, his plastic-bagged purchase of a small duty-free radio. He thought himself free from company, for Captain Parodi was already