The Night Manager полностью

This is where you get yourself across the bridge, Burr had said.

They'll have to mark the goods, Rooke had said. You can't just walk up to them with the boy in your arms to everyone's applause.

Fracture of the skull and cheekbone, Marti had said. Concussion, eight on the Richter scale, ten years' solitary in a darkened room.

Three cracked ribs, could be thirty.

Severe bruising of the testicles following attempted castration with the toe cap of a heavy training boot.

For it seemed that once Jonathan had gone down under the pistol whipping, it was his groin that the man had attacked, leaving among other traces the perfect imprint of a size-twelve boot in his inside thigh, to the raucous amusement of the nurses.

A black-and-white figure flitted across his vision. White uniform. Black face. Black legs, white stockings. Rubber-soled white shoes with Velcro fastenings. At first he had thought she was one person; now he knew she was several. They visited him like spirits, mutely polishing and dusting, changing his flowers and his drinking water. One was called Phoebe and had a nurse's touch.

"Hi, Mist' Thomas. How're you today? I'm Phoebe. Miranda, just you go fetch that brush again, and this time you sweep right under Mist' Thomas's bed. Yes, ma'am."

So I'm Thomas, he thought. Not Pine. Thomas. Or perhaps I'm Thomas Pine.

He dozed again, and woke to find Sophie's ghost standing over him, in her white slacks, shaking pills into a paper cup. Then he thought she must be a new nurse. Then he saw the broad belt with the silver buckle, and the maddening line of the hips, and the tousled chestnut hair. And heard the Mistress-of-the-Hunt voice, bang on station, no respect for anyone.

"But, Thomas," Jed was protesting. "Somebody must love you terribly. What about mothers, girlfriends, fathers, chums? Really nobody?"

"Really," he insisted.

"So who's Yvonne?" she asked, as she placed her head within inches of his own, spread one palm on his back and the other on his chest to sit him up. "Is she absolutely gorgeous?"

"She was just a friend," he said, smelling the shampoo in her hair.

"Well, shouldn't we be telling Yvonne?"

"No, we shouldn't," he replied, too sharply.

She gave him his pills and a glass of water. "Well, Dr. Marti says you're to sleep for ever. So don't think of anything except getting better extremely slowly. Now, how about distractions ― books, a radio or something? Not quite yet, but in a day or two. We don't know anything about you, except that Roper says you're Thomas, so you'll just have to tell us what you need. There's a huge library over in the main house, with masses of frightfully learned stuff ― Corky will tell you what it all is ― and we can get anything you want flown over from Nassau, You just have to yell." And her eyes big enough to drown in.

"Thanks, I will."

She laid a hand on his face to feel his temperature. "We just never can thank you enough," she said, keeping it there. "Roper will say it all far better than I can when he gets back, but honestly, what a hero. Just so brave," she said from the door. "Shit" the convent girl added, catching the pocket of her slacks on the handle.

* * *

Then he realised that it wasn't their first meeting since he had arrived here, but their third, and that the first two were not dreams either.

Our first time you smiled at me, and that was fine: you kept quiet and I could think, and we had something going. You had jammed your hair behind your ears, you were wearing jodhpurs and a denim shirt. I said, "Where is this?" You said, "Crystal. Roper's island. Home."

The second time I was feeling vague, and I thought you were my former wife, Isabelle, waiting to be taken out to dinner, because you were got up in a perfectly ridiculous trouser suit with gold frogging on the lapels. "There's a bell right beside your water jug if you need anything," you said. And I said, "Expect my call." But I was thinking: Why the hell do you have to dress up like a pantomime boy?

Her father ruined himself keeping up with the county, Burr said with contempt. He was serving vintage claret when he couldn't pay the electricity bill. Wouldn't send his daughter to secretarial college because he thought it was infra dig.

* * *

Lying on his safe side, facing the tapestry, Jonathan made out a lady in a broad-brimmed hat and recognised her without surprise as singing Aunt Annie Ball.