The Night Manager полностью

"Well, thanks, Corky," said Jonathan, making a joke of it. "Thanks very much indeed. Having you and Roper baying for my blood would just about complete my luck. Where did he find her, anyway?" he asked, fetching more beer.

"Legend has it, at a French horse sale."

So that's how it's done, thought Jonathan. You go to France buy a horse and come away with a convent girl called Jed. Easy.

"Who did he have before?" he asked.

But Corkoran's gaze was fixed on the pale horizon. "Do you know," he complained in frustrated marvel, "we tracked down the captain of the Star of Bethel, and even he can't prove you're lying in your fucking teeth?"

* * *

Corkoran's warning is a waste of breath. The close observer has no protection from her. He can watch her with his eyes shut. He can watch her in the candlelit bowl of a silver spoon by Bulgari of Rome, or in the silver candlesticks by Paul de Lamarie that must appear on the Roper dinner table whenever he comes back from selling farms, or in the gilt mirrors of Jonathan's own imagination. Despising himself, he explores her night and day for confirmation of her awfulness. He is repelled by her and therefore drawn to her. He is punishing her for her power over him ― and punishing himself for giving way to it. You're a hotel girl! he yells at her. People buy space in you, pay you and check out! Yet at the same time he is consumed by her. Her very shadow taunts him as she saunters half-naked across the blushing marble floors of Crystal on her way to swim, sunbathe, caress oil onto her skin, turn crookedly onto her hip, her other hip and then onto her belly, while she chats with her visiting friend Caroline Langbourne or gorges herself on her escapist bibles: Vogue, Taller, Marie-Claire or the Daily Express, three days old. And her jester Corkoran in his Panama hat and rolled-up trousers, sitting ten feet from her, drinking Pimm's.

"Why doesn't Roper take you with him anymore, Corks?" she asks lazily over her magazine, in one of the dozen voices Jonathan has noted down for permanent destruction. "He always used to." She turns a page. "Caro, can you imagine anything more awful than being the mistress of a Tory minister?"

"I suppose there's always a Labour minister," suggests Caroline, who is plain and too intelligent for leisure.

And Jed's laugh: the choking, feral laugh from deep inside her, which closes her eyes and splits her face in impish pleasure, even when everything else about her is trying its damnedest to be a lady.

Sophie was a whore too, he thought dismally. The difference was, she knew it.

* * *

He watched her as she rinsed her feet under the electronically controlled tap, first stepping back, then lifting one painted toe to produce a jet, then shifting to the other foot and the other perfect haunch. Then, without a glance for anyone, walking to the poolside and diving in. He watched her dive, over and again. In his sleep he replayed the slow-drawn act of levitation as her body rose without movement and, everything in line, tilted itself into the water with a splash no louder than a sigh.

"Oh, do come on in, Caro. It's divine."

He watched her in all her moods and varieties: Jed the clown, gangly-bodied, legs splayed, cursing and laughing her way round the croquet lawn; Jed the chatelaine of Crystal, radiant at her own dinner table, enchanting a trio of fat-necked bankers from the City with her deafening Shropshire small talk, never a cliché out of place:

"But I mean, isn't it simply heartbreaking living in Hong Kong and knowing that absolutely everything one's doing for them, all the super buildings and shops and airports and everything, are just going to be gobbled up by the beastly Chinese? And what about the horse racing? What's going to happen to that? And the horses? I mean, honestly."

Or Jed being too young, catching a cautionary glance from Roper and putting a hand to her mouth and saying, "Down!"

Or Jed when the party ends and the last of the bankers has waddled off to bed, climbing the great staircase with her head on Roper's shoulder and her hand on his bottom.

"Weren't we absolutely gorgeous?" she says.

"Marvellous evening, Jeds. Lot of fun."

"And weren't they bores?" she says with a great yawn. "God, I do miss school sometimes. I'm so tired of being a grownup. Night, Thomas."

"Good night, Jed. Good night, Chief."

* * *

It is a quiet family evening at Crystal. Roper likes a fire. So do six King Charles spaniels who lie in a floppy heap before it. Danby and Mac Arthur have flown in from Nassau to talk business, dine and leave at dawn tomorrow. Jed perches on a stool at Roper's feet, armed with pen and paper and the circular gold-rimmed spectacles Jonathan swears she doesn't need.