“Here we are.” Douglas had appeared between them. He held out a glass of water. “Your husband is talking to some people just inside the door. I can fetch him, if you like.”
“No—no, I’ll be fine.” She took a sip from the glass. “Thank you so much. I have to go, Anthony.”
The way she had said his name. Anthony. He realized he was smiling. She was there, inches from him. She had loved him, grieved for him. She had tried to come to him that night. It was as if the misery of four years had been wiped away.
“Do you two know each other, then?”
Anthony heard, as if from a distance, Douglas talking, saw him motioning toward the doors. Jennifer sipped the water, her eyes not leaving his face. He knew that in the coming hours he would curse whichever gods had thought it amusing to send their lives careering away from each other, and grieve for the time they had lost. But for now he could only feel a welling joy that the thing he had thought lost forever had been returned to him.
It was time for her to go. She stood up, smoothed her hair. “Do I look . . . all right?”
“You look—”
“You look wonderful, Mrs. Stirling. As always.” Douglas opened the door.
Such a small smile, heartbreaking in what it told Anthony. As she passed him, she reached out a slim hand and touched his arm just above the elbow. And then she walked into the crowded ballroom.
Douglas raised an eyebrow as the door closed behind her. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Not another of your conquests? You old dog. You always did get what you wanted.”
Anthony’s eyes were still on the door. “No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t.”
Jennifer was silent during the short drive back to the house. Laurence had offered a lift to a business colleague she didn’t know, which meant she could sit quietly while the men talked.
“Of course, Pip Marchant was up to his old tricks, all his capital tied up in one project.”
“He’s a hostage to fortune. His father was the same.”
“I expect if you go far enough back in that family tree you’ll find the South Sea Bubble.”
“I think you’ll find several! All filled with hot air.”
The interior of the big black car was thick with cigar smoke. Laurence was garrulous, opinionated, in the way he often was when surrounded by businessmen or marinated in whiskey. She barely heard him, swamped by this new knowledge. She stared out at the still streets as the car glided along, seeing not the beauty of her surroundings, the occasional person dawdling on their way home, but Anthony’s face. His brown eyes, when they had fixed on hers, his face a little more lined, but perhaps more handsome, more at ease. She could still feel the warmth of his hand on her back.
How can I reach you?
Alive, these past four years. Living, breathing, sipping cups of coffee and typing. Alive. She could have written to him, spoken to him. Gone to him.
She swallowed, trying to contain the tumultuous emotion that threatened to rise within her. There would be a time to deal with everything that must have led to this, to her being here, now, in this car with a man who no longer thought it necessary even to acknowledge her presence. Now was not it. Her blood fizzed within her. Alive, it sang.
The car pulled up on Upper Wimpole Street. Eric climbed out of the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door. The businessman climbed out, puffing at his cigar. “Much obliged, Larry. You at the club this week? I’ll buy you dinner.”
“I’ll look forward to it.” The man made his way heavily toward his front door, which opened, as if someone had been waiting for his arrival. Laurence watched his colleague disappear, then turned back to the front. “Home, please, Eric.” He shifted in his seat.
She felt his eyes on her. “You’re very quiet.” He always made it sound disapproving.
“Am I? I didn’t think I had anything to add to your conversation.”
“Yes. Well. Not a bad evening, all in all.” He settled back, nodding to himself.
“No,” she said quietly. “Not a bad evening at all.”
Chapter 14
Your hotel, midday. J.
Anthony stared at the letter, with its single line of text.
“Delivered by hand this morning.” Cheryl stood in front of him, a pencil between her index and middle fingers. Her short, astonishingly blond hair was so thick that he wondered briefly if she was wearing a wig. “I wasn’t sure whether to phone you, but Don said you’d be coming in.”
“Yes. Thank you.” He folded the note carefully and put it into his pocket.
“Cute.”
“Who—me?”
“Your new girlfriend.”
“Very funny.”
“I mean it. I thought she looked far too classy for you, though.” She sat on the edge of his desk, gazing up at him through impossibly blackened eyelashes.
“She is far too classy for me. And she’s not my girlfriend.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot. You have one of those in New York. This one’s married, right?”
“She’s an old friend.”
“Hah! I have old friends like that. Are you whisking her off to Africa with you?”
“I don’t know that I’m going to Africa.” He leaned back in his chair, linked his fingers behind his head. “And you’re extremely nosy.”
“This is a newspaper, in case you hadn’t noticed. Nosiness is our business.”
He had barely slept, his senses hypersensitive to everything around him. He had given up trying at three and instead sat in the hotel bar, nursing cups of coffee, going over their conversation, trying to make sense of what had been said. He had fought the urge, in the small hours, to take a taxi to the square and sit outside her house for the pleasure of knowing that she was inside, a matter of feet away.
I was coming to you.
Cheryl was still watching him. He tapped his fingers on the desk. “Yes,” he said. “Well. In my opinion, everyone’s far too interested in everyone else’s affairs.”
“So it is an affair. You know the subs desk’s opened a book on it.”
“Cheryl . . .”
“Well, there’s not much copy going through at this time of the morning. And what’s in the letter? Where are you meeting her? Anywhere nice? Does she pay for everything, given that she’s plainly loaded?”
“Good God!”
“Well, she can’t be very practiced at affairs, then. Tell her that the next time she leaves a love note, she should take her wedding ring off first.”
Anthony sighed. “You, young lady, are wasted as a secretary.”
She lowered her voice to a whisper: “If you tell me her name, I’ll split the sweepstake with you. There’s a tidy sum.”
“Send me to Africa, for God’s sake. The Congolese Army Interrogation Unit is nothing compared to you.”
She laughed throatily and went back to her typewriter.
He unfolded the note. The mere sight of that looped script transported him back to France, to notes pushed under his door in an idyllic week a million years ago. Some part of him had known she would contact him. He jumped when he realized Don had come in.
“Tony. The editor wants a word. Upstairs.”
“Now?”
“No. Three weeks on Tuesday. Yes, now. He wants to talk to you about your future. And, no, you’re not for the chop, sadly. I think he’s trying to suss out whether or not to send you back to Africa.” Don poked his shoulder. “Hello? Cloth Ears? You need to look like you know what you’re doing.”
Anthony barely heard him. It was a quarter past eleven already. The editor was not a man who liked to do anything in a hurry, and it was entirely possible he would be with him for a good hour. He turned to Cheryl as he stood. “Blondie, do me a favor. Ring my hotel. Tell them a Jennifer Stirling is due to meet me at twelve, and ask someone to tell her I’ll be late but not to leave. I’ll be there. She mustn’t leave.”
Cheryl’s smile was laced with satisfaction. “Mrs. Jennifer Stirling?”
“As I said, she’s an old friend.”
Don was wearing yesterday’s shirt, Anthony noted. He was always wearing yesterday’s shirt. He was also shaking his head. “Jesus. That Stirling woman again? How much of an appetite for trouble have you got?”
“She’s just a friend.”
“And I’m Twiggy. Come on. Come and explain to the Great White Chief why you should be allowed to sacrifice yourself to the Simba rebels.”
She was still there, he was relieved to see. It was more than half an hour after their supposed meeting time. She was seated at a small table in the extravagantly frothy salon, where the plaster moldings resembled the icing on an overadorned Christmas cake and most of the other tables were occupied by elderly widows exclaiming in shocked, hushed tones at the wickedness of the modern world.
“I ordered tea,” she said, as he sat down opposite her, apologizing for the fifth time. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Her hair was down. She wore a black sweater and tailored fawn trousers. She was thinner than she had been. He supposed it was the fashion.
He attempted to regulate his breathing. He had pictured this moment so many times, sweeping her into his arms, their passionate reunion. Now he felt vaguely wrong-footed by her self-possession, the formality of the surroundings.
A waitress arrived, pushing a trolley from which she took a teapot, milk jug, some precision-cut sandwiches on white bread, cups, saucers, and plates. He realized he could probably fit four of the sandwiches into his mouth at once.
“Thank you.”
“You don’t . . . take sugar.” She frowned, as if she was trying to remember.
“No.”
They sipped their tea. Several times he opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He kept stealing glances at her, noting tiny details. The familiar shape of her nails. Her wrists. The way she periodically lifted herself from her waist, as if some distant voice was telling her to sit up straight.
“Yesterday was such a shock,” she said finally, placing her cup on the saucer. “I . . . must apologize for how I behaved. You must have thought I was very odd.”
“Perfectly understandable. Not every day you see someone risen from the dead.”
A small smile. “Quite.”
Their eyes met and slid away. She leaned forward and poured more tea. “Where do you live now?”
“I’ve been in New York.”
“All this time?”
“There wasn’t really a reason to come back.”
Another heavy silence, which she broke: “You look well. Very well.”
She was right. It was impossible to live in the heart of Manhattan and stay scruffy. He had returned to England this year with a wardrobe of good suits and a host of new habits: hot shaves, shoe polishing, teetotalism. “You look lovely, Jennifer.”
“Thank you. Are you in England for long?”
“Probably not. I may be going overseas again.” He watched her face to see what effect this news might have on her. But she merely reached for the milk. “No,” he said, lifting a hand. “Thank you.”
Her hand stilled, as if she was disappointed in herself for having forgotten.
“What does the newspaper have in mind for you?” She put a sandwich on a plate and placed it in front of him.
“They’d like me to stay here, but I want to return to Africa. Things have become very complicated in Congo.”
“Isn’t it very dangerous there?”
“That’s not the point.”
“You want to be in the thick of it.”
“Yes. It’s an important story. Plus I have a horror of being deskbound. These last few years have been”—he tried to think of an expression he could use safely: These years in New York kept me sane? Allowed me to exist away from you? Stopped me throwing myself on a grenade in a foreign field?—“useful,” he said finally, “in that the editor probably needed to see me in a different light. But I’m keen to move on now. Back to what I do best.”