The Night Manager полностью

Annie was a valiant woman and sang good songs, but her farmer husband got drunk and hated everyone. So one day Annie put on her hat and sat Jonathan beside her in the van with his suitcase in the back, and said they were going for a holiday. They drove late into the evening, and sang songs till they came to a house with boys carved in granite over the door. Then Annie Ball started weeping and gave Jonathan her hat as a promise she'd come back soon to get it, and Jonathan went upstairs to a dormitory full of other boys and hung the hat over the corner of his bed to show Annie which boy he was when she returned. But she never did, and when he woke in the morning the other boys in the dormitory were taking it in turns to wear her hat. So he fought for it, and won it against all comers, and rolled it up in newspaper and posted it, with no address, in a red pillar box. He would have preferred to burn it, but he hadn't a fire.

I came here by night as well, he thought. White twin-engined Beechcraft, blue interior. Frisky and Tabby, not the orphanage guardian, searched my luggage for forbidden tuck.

* * *

I hurt him for Daniel, he decided.

I hurt him to get me across the bridge.

I hurt him because I was sick of waiting and pretending.

* * *

Jed was in the room again. The close observer had no doubt of it. It wasn't her scent, because she wore none, or her sound, because she made none. And for a long time he couldn't see her, so it wasn't sight. So it must have been the sixth sense of the professional watcher, when you know an enemy is present but don't yet know why you know.

"Thomas?"

Feigning sleep, he listened to her tiptoeing toward him. He had a notion of pale clothes, dancer's body, hair hanging loose. He heard a shifting as she drew back her hair and put her ear close to his mouth to hear him breathe. He could feel the warmth of her cheek. She stood again, and he heard slippered feet disappearing down the passage, then the same feet outside, crossing the stable-yard.

They say that when she went up to London she scared herself, Burr said. Got in with a crowd of Hoorah Henries and screwed the field. Bolted to Paris for a rest cure. Met Roper.

* * *

He listened to the Cornish gulls and the long echoes from outside the shutters. He smelled the brown salt smell of weed and knew it was low tide. For a while he let himself believe that Jed had taken him back to the Lanyon and was standing barefoot on the floorboards before the mirror, doing the things women do before they come to bed. Then he heard the plop of tennis balls and leisured English voices calling to each other, and one of them was Jed's. He heard a lawn mower, and the yell of rude English children quarrelling, and surmised the Langbournes' offspring. He heard the buzz of an electric motor and decided on a skimmer cleaning the surface of a pool. He slept again and smelled charcoal and knew by the pinkish glow of the ceiling that it was evening, and when he dared to lift his head he saw Jed in silhouette before the shuttered window as she peered through it at the last of the day outside, and the evening light showed him her body through her tennis clothes.

"Now, Thomas, what about a little more food in your life?" she proposed in a school matron's voice. She must have heard him move his head. "Esmeralda's made you some beef broth and bread and butter. Dr. Marti said toast, but it goes so floppy in the humidity. Or there's chicken breast, or apple pie. Actually, Thomas, there's pretty much anything you want," she added, in the startled accents he was becoming accustomed to. "Just whistle."

"Thanks. I will."

"Thomas, it really is odd, you not having a single person to worry about you in the world. I don't know why it should, but it makes me frightfully guilty. Can't you even have a brother? Everyone's got a brother," she said.

"Afraid not."

"Well, I've got one gorgeous brother and one absolute pig. So that cancels them out, really. Except I'd far rather have them than not. Even the pig."

She was coming across the room to him. She smiles all the time, he thought in alarm. She smiles like a television commercial. She's afraid we'll switch her off if she stops smiling. She's an actress in search of a director. One small scar on her chin, otherwise no distinguishing marks. Maybe somebody swiped her too. A horse did. He held his breath. She had reached his bed. She was stooping over him, pressing what felt like a piece of cold sticking plaster to his forehead.

"Got to let it cook," she said, smiling more broadly. Then she sat on the bed to wait, tennis skirt parted, bare legs carelessly crossed, the muscles of one calf gently swelling against the shin below. And her skin all one soft tan.