The Night Manager полностью

Dinner is in an ancient fort on a hilltop overlooking the harbour. Seen from here at night, little Willemstad is as big as San Francisco, and even the blue-grey cylinders of the refinery have a stately magic. The MacDanbies have taken a table for twenty, but only fourteen can be raised. Jonathan is being recklessly amusing about the cocktail party; Meg and the English banker and his wife are laughing themselves sick. But Roper's attention is elsewhere. He is staring down into the harbour, where a great cruise ship decked with fairy lights is moving between anchored cargo vessels toward a distant bridge. Does Roper covet it? Sell the Pasha, get something a decent size?

"Substitute lawyer's on his way, damn them," Langbourne announces, returning yet again from the telephone. "Swears he'll be here in time for the meeting."

"Who are they sending?" says Roper.

"Moranti from Caracas."

"That thug. Hell's happened to Apo?"

"They told me to ask Jesus. Joke of some sort."

"Anyone else decided not to show?" Roper asks, his eyes still fixed upon the cruise ship.

"Everyone else is on cue," Langbourne replies tersely.

Jonathan hears their conversation, and so does Rooke. seated with Millie and Amato at their table next to the protection. The three of them are poring over a guidebook of the island, pretending to wonder where they'll go tomorrow.

* * *

Jed was floating, which was what always happened to her when her life got out of sync: she floated, and she kept floating till the next man, or the next crazy house party, or the next family misfortune, provided her with a change of direction, which she then variously described to herself as fate, or running for cover, or growing up, or having fun, or ― less comfortably these days ― doing her own thing. And part of floating was to do everything at once, rather like the whippet she had had when she was young, who believed that if you ran fast enough round a corner, you were sure to put up something you could chase. But then the whippet was content that life should be a succession of patternless episodes, whereas Jed had for too long been wondering where the episodes in her own life were leading.

So in Nassau, from the moment Roper and Jonathan had left, Jed went straight to work doing everything. She went to the hairdresser and the dressmaker, she invited simply everybody to the house, she entered herself for the Windermere ladies' tennis competition and accepted every invitation that came her way, she bought files to contain her household bumf for the winter cruise, she telephoned the Pasha's chef and housekeeper and drew up menus and placements, even though she knew that Roper was certain to countermand her instructions because in the end he liked to do it all himself.

But the time scarcely moved.

She prepared Daniel for his return to England; she took him shopping and got in friends his age, even though Daniel loathed them and said so; she organised a barbecue for them on the beach, all the time pretending that Corky was quite as much fun as Jonathan ― I mean, honestly, Dans, isn't he a scream? ― and doing her absolute best to ignore the fact that ever since they had left Crystal, Corkoran had sulked and puffed and shot pompous scowls at her exactly like her elder brother William, who fucked every girl in sight, including all her friends, but thought his little sister should go virgin to the grave.

But Corkoran was even worse than William. He had appointed himself her chaperone, her watchdog and her jailer. He squinted at her letters almost before she had opened them, he earwigged her phone calls and tried to elbow his way into every bloody corner of her day.

"Corks, darling, you are being a bore, you know. You're making me feel like Mary, Queen of Scots. I know Roper wants you to look after me, but couldn't you possibly go and play on your own for some of the day?"

But Corkoran stuck doggedly at her side, sitting in the drawing room in his Panama hat and reading the newspaper while she telephoned; hanging around the kitchen while she and Daniel made fudge; writing out the labels for Daniel's homebound luggage.

Until finally, like Jonathan, Jed retreated deep inside herself. She gave up small talk, she gave up ― except when she was with Daniel ― her wearying efforts to appear on top of life, she gave up counting the hours and allowed herself instead to roam the landscape of her inmost world. She thought of her father and what she had always considered to be his useless and outdated sense of honour, and she decided it had actually meant more to her than all the bad things that had happened on account of it: such as the sale of the debt-ridden family house and the horses, and her parents' move to their present dreadful little bungalow on the old estate, and the perpetual rage of Uncle Henry and all the other trustees.