The Night Manager полностью

"It isn't the unfaithfulness I mind, Thomas, it's the lying. I don't know why I'm telling you this, except you're straight. I don't care what he says about you, we all of us have our problems, but I know straightness when I see it. If he'd only say to me, 'I'm having an affair with Annabelle' ― or whoever he's having an affair with at the time ― 'and what's more I'm going to go on having an affair with her,' well, I'd say, 'All right. If that's the way we're playing it, so be it. Just don't expect me to be faithful while you're not.' I can live with that, Thomas. We have to if we're women. I just feel so furious I've let him have all my money and practically kept him for years, and let Daddy pay for the children's education, only to find that he's been lavishing money on any little trollop he happens to meet, leaving us, well, not penniless, but certainly not flush."

During the rest of the day, he had spotted Jed twice: once in the summerhouse, wearing a yellow caftan and writing a letter, once walking with Daniel in the surf, her skirts pulled to her waist while she held his hand. And as Jonathan left the house, passing deliberately beneath her bedroom balcony, he heard her talking on the telephone to Roper: "No, darling, he didn't hurt himself at all, it was just fuss, and he got over it very quickly and did me an absolutely super painting of Sarah doing her airs above the ground right on top of the stable roof, you'll absolutely adore it...."

And he thought: Now you tell him, That was the good news, darling. But guess who I found skulking in our bedroom when I got upstairs....

* * *

It was only when he reached Woody's House that time refused to pass. He let himself in cautiously, reasoning that if the protection had been alerted, their most likely course of action would be to go to his house ahead of him. So he entered by the back door and patrolled both floors before he felt able to extract the tiny steel cassette of film from his camera and, with a sharp knife from the kitchen, make a bed for it inside the pages of his paperback copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

After that, things happened very much one by one. He had a bath and thought: About now, you'll be having your shower, and nobody will be there to hand you your towel.

He made himself a chicken soup from leftovers that Esmeralda had given him, and he thought: About now, you and Caroline will be sitting on the patio eating Esmeralda's grouper with lemon sauce, and you'll be listening to another chapter of Caroline's life while her children are doing crisps and Coke and ice cream and watching Young Frankenstein in Daniel's playroom, and Daniel lies reading in his bedroom with the door shut, hating the pack of them.

Then he went to bed, because it seemed a good place to think about her. And remained in bed until twelve-thirty, at which time the naked close observer slid soundlessly to the floor and picked up the steel poker that he kept beneath it, because he had heard a furtive footfall on his doorstep. They've come for me. he thought. She's blown the whistle to Roper, and they're going to do a Woody on me.

But another voice in him spoke differently, and it was the voice he had been listening to ever since Jed had discovered him in her bedroom. So that by the time she tapped on his front door, he had put away the poker and knotted a sarong round his waist.

She too had dressed for the part: in a long dark skirt and a dark cape, and it would not have surprised him if she had turned up the Father Christmas hood, but she hadn't; it hung becomingly behind her. She was carrying a flashlight, and while he rechained the door she set it down and drew the cape more tightly round her. Then stood facing him with her hands crossed dramatically at her throat.

"You shouldn't have come," he said, quickly drawing the curtains. "Who saw you? Caroline? Daniel? The night staff?"

"No one."

"Of course they did. What about the boys at the lodge?"

"I tiptoed. No one heard me."

He stared at her in disbelief. Not because he thought she was lying but because of the sheer foolhardiness of her behaviour.

"So what can I get you?" he said in a tone that implied: since you've come.

"Coffee. Coffee, please. Don't make it specially."

Coffee, please. Egyptian, he remembered.

"They were watching television," she said. "The boys in the lodge. I could see them through the window."

"Sure."

He put on a kettle, then lit the pine logs in the grate, and for a while she shivered and frowned at the sputtering logs. Then she looked round the room, getting the idea of the place, and of him, taking in the books he had managed to assemble, and the spruceness of everything ― the flowers, the watercolour of Carnation Bay propped on the chimneypiece beside Daniel's painting of a pterodactyl.