Loose Ends

by Susan Moody

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Dinner with me tonight.’

  ‘It’s a bit unorthodox.’ In fact, she thought, it’s bloody stupid going off with a total stranger. On the other hand, Jefferson Andrewes breathed safety, reliability, responsibility. ‘But as long as you see it as a strictly business appointment, I’ll accept.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Andrewes leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Where shall we meet, then?’ Kate said.

  ‘For this . . . um . . . business appointment? Let’s say Benito’s, at seven o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there.’

  She watched him leave, despite the gum-chewing, ear-ringed, shaven-headed bloke who took his place, with a brochure for one of their more expensive holidays in his hand. Jefferson’s broad shoulders only just got out through the door. He must be at least six three, and built like a rugby player. Tight-head prop, she thought, rather vaguely, wing-three-quarter, envisioning Andrewes on the rugby pitch, tackling a forward on the opposing side, strong as a train, body muscled under his clinging team jersey, mmm, yes, lovely, but somehow she couldn’t really see it. She remembered those endless games of soccer (‘it’s called football these days’) which Brad used to watch on the TV every Saturday – and any other time there was a match on. The boredom of it, the incomprehensible stupidity of it, the moronic . . . but it was only a game (why did they call it ‘the beautiful game’?) and not worth getting worked up about. She saw Andrewes cross the road and stand on the pavement opposite the agency, clamp his briefcase between his legs, fish a mobile from his pocket and press in a number. As he spoke into it – work colleague, girlfriend? – he nodded and smiled, rock-like among the afternoon crowd of shoppers, mums fetching children from school, besuited stragglers returning to offices after overlong lunches.

  As she discussed the pros and cons of getting married in the Bahamas (‘my girlfriend’s Mum’s from there’) with the gum-chewer, she couldn’t help wondering what exactly she was doing, fantasizing about a complete stranger, when for all she knew, he had never played anything more strenuous than chess or bridge.

  ‘Janine,’ she said later, during a break in the stream of customers coming in to discuss their holiday plans. ‘I said I’d have dinner tonight with that big guy who came in this afternoon – don’t know if you noticed him?’

  ‘You could hardly miss him.’

  ‘He wants us to custom-make a holiday for him . . .’

  ‘Go for it, girl.’

  ‘I’d be glad to but he doesn’t seem to have the slightest idea what he’s looking for, though he must do, really, when you think about it. Hence the dinner. Is that OK?’

  ‘What, to have dinner with him? Of course it is.’

  ‘I just wondered if I was breaking some travel-agency code of ethics. Having inappropriate relations with a punter or something.’

  ‘Sweetie, I’ve no idea how appropriate or not your relations with this guy are likely to be, but as far as I’m concerned, if it means another commission, you can do what you like. Is he nice?’

  ‘I’d imagine he is, though there’s something slightly unusual about him, as though what you see is definitely a lot less than you get.’

  ‘Well, watch your back, as they say. And keep me informed, Fullerton.’ Janine adopted a sergeant-major pose, and Kate came to attention, clicked her heels, saluted.

  ‘Yes, sah.’

  She called a taxi to pick her up at the back of the TaylorMade offices, giving her time to redo her face, brush her hair and change out of her working clothes (that awful turquoise cravat!) into something more suitable for dining at one of the best Italian restaurants in the town.

  Andrewes was waiting for her at the bar, a glass of wine in front of him.

  ‘You look lovely,’ he said, eyeing her up and down. ‘But since this is a business meeting, that probably counts as sexual harassment in the workplace.’

  ‘I’ll overlook it this time.’

  Once they had been seated, Andrewes picked up the menu and scrutinized it. ‘My friends tell me that the osso buco here is particularly good, and all the fish dishes.’

  ‘You seem to rely an awful lot on other people for information.’

  ‘My friends, my colleagues.’ He grinned at her and spread his hands in a gesture that made him seem more continental than English, as though any moment he might burst into a verse or two of Nessun Dorma.

  ‘So, about your holiday . . .’

  ‘The truth is, Kate – may I call you Kate? I noticed the name on your desk this afternoon – the truth is, this trip isn’t really going to be a holiday, more of a fact-finding mission.’

  She half-rose. ‘So this isn’t a business meeting after all.’

  ‘It is, it is. I mean I could easily be persuaded to include the holiday bit, if you can make it sound interesting enough.’

  ‘OK, Mr Andrewes—’

  ‘Jefferson, please.’

  ‘All right. Now, Jefferson, I need more information before I can do anything useful for you.’

  ‘Ecuador,’ he said. ‘I want – I need to go to Ecuador.’

  She stiffened. ‘Ecuador . . . why?’ Was this some kind of an elaborate joke?

  ‘It’s a place I’ve always wanted to go to.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?’

  ‘This . . . um . . . mission, like I said, plus a . . . um . . . kind of family connection.’

  Kate raised her eyebrows. ‘Really?’ She wasn’t going to tell him about her own connection, bring Dad and Luisa and Annie out into the open and display them for a stranger’s momentary curiosity, his fake concern. She felt a sudden longing for the singing air of Santa Cruz, alive with the songs of finches and warblers.

  ‘Not so much Ecuador in general as the Galápagos Islands in particular,’ Andrewes said.

  ‘Oh yes?’ He had to be having her on.

  ‘I want to tie a red scarf round my neck and run with those turtles.’

  ‘It’s bulls that people run with, not turtles. In Pamplona, not the Galápagos.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Take a red scarf with you by all means, but turtles don’t do a lot of running, though I’m quite sure you knew that already.’ She leaned towards him and lowered her voice. ‘How do you feel about naked men?’

  His eyes, the exact shade of chocolate fudge, narrowed slightly. ‘Are you trying to find out if I’m gay? Because I’m not – not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, of course. Lots of people are, some of my best friends, all that, five per cent of the population, isn’t it? Hell, I even live in Babylon, and very nice too, if that’s—’

  ‘Ssh.’ Kate put her finger across her lips to stop him. She adopted a serious expression. ‘It’s just that if you’re not dead set on the Galápagos, there’s this Shinto religious festival in Japan that you might find interesting. Ten thousand more or less naked guys, all pissed as farts, racing after someone called the Spirit Man, who’s this kind of Judas Goat – if they can touch him, he absorbs all their bad luck.’

  ‘Why would I find it interesting?’

  ‘It’s unusual, you have to admit.’

  Andrewes looked apprehensive. ‘Would I have to be naked too? Or – Lord! – be the Spirit Man? Because leaping along the Great Wall of China in my birthday suit is not really the kind of holiday I had in mind.’

  ‘The Great Wall of China isn’t in Japan.’

  ‘I knew that.’

  The idea of a jay-bird-naked Andrewes pursued by a horde of skimpily clad Japanese was so absurd that Kate threw back her head and laughed. As she did so, she caught sight of someone peering in through the window of the restaurant. The laughter died instantly. It was Stefan Michaels, and from where she sat, it looked as though he was staring directly at her, just as he had the other night, looking grim. Looking ragingly jealous. What right did he . . . She gritted her teeth; this was no coincidence, the man was definitely stalking her.

  ‘What?’ Andrewes reached
across and put a hand on top of hers. ‘What’s the matter? You’ve gone pale.’

  ‘I feel pale.’ Kate took a gulp of wine from her glass. ‘That bloody man . . .’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one staring in at us.’

  Andrewes leaned back, let his napkin slide off his lap, bent to pick it up. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  Kate looked at the window again, but Stefan had gone. ‘He’s following me.’

  ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Only as someone I served a drink to in a bar . . .’ She explained about Plan A and her job there, told him of her fears about Stefan, the way he seemed to show up wherever she was, like tonight, though as she talked, the story seemed increasingly thin, almost negligible.

  ‘You know there are laws to protect you against this kind of harassment,’ he said.

  ‘If that’s what it is. Trouble is, so far he hasn’t done enough for me to go to the police. All in all, it doesn’t add up to much.’

  ‘Well, for tonight, don’t worry, I know the head waiter here pretty well,’ he said soothingly. ‘When we’re ready to go, I’ll get him to call us a taxi round at the back. If your friend is waiting outside, he’ll be foiled.’ He had assumed quite a different persona, in command, knowledgeable, solid.

  ‘Thank you.’ Kate took a more measured taste of her wine and was glad to see that however shaky she might feel inside, at least her grip on the stem of her glass was firm. ‘Now, since this is a business meeting and we’ve established that your destination is the Galápagos Islands . . .’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to watch those huge megalithic creatures lumbering up from the ocean to lay their eggs, the way they’ve been doing for thousands and thousands of years.’

  ‘There are many more types of turtles than the big ones – and a lot more to the Islands than just the turtles.’ It was all so clear in Kate’s head. ‘There’s . . . oh, where to start, flamingoes, volcanoes, lava formations, forests. Wildlife like boobies, birds with sky-blue feet and legs and marine iguanas, found nowhere else in the world, the only ones adapted to sea water. And, of course, Darwin’s famous finches, the little birds which sparked off the whole theory of evolution.’

  ‘Should I know about this?’

  ‘Darwin formed his theory of evolution after sailing into the Islands on the Beagle and noticing that although these finches all looked and behaved the same – they all build identical nests, for instance – the thirteen species which existed there had all adapted to the different food sources available to them.’ She could feel a shift of excitement in herself. ‘So, just as an example, there’s the cactus finch which has developed a long pointed beak in order to feed off the cactus plants without getting speared to death on the thorns, and the tree finch which has a beak like a parrot to get at the insects. And the woodpecker finch which uses its body to hammer at tree bark in order to dislodge insects and larvae and so on, and climbs up and down the tree branches.’ She leaned forward. ‘The amazing thing about the woodpecker finch is that it’s developed a tool-using mechanism – very rare among birds – by using a cactus spine which it snaps to the length it needs and then holds in its beak so it can probe for grubs in the deeper cracks in the wood.’ She paused for breath, then added, ‘Sorry, am I going on a bit?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I’m riveted. There’s a famous research institute there too, isn’t there?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Kate was going to mention her father, but bit it back.

  ‘How come you know so much about it?’

  ‘I wrote a paper on it when I was at school.’ It was part of the truth, but not all. ‘Anyway, the Islands are near an area of subterranean activity, and developed really from volcanoes which eventually pushed through the surface to form land from the constant streams of lava flows.’

  ‘Volcanoes . . . are they still active?’

  ‘Most of them, most of the time, no. But you never know with volcanoes, do you? And two of the islands actually consist of seven huge and active volcanoes – you absolutely have to go and see the extraordinary patterns made by the lava flows.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to come with me, would you?’

  ‘I’d love to go to the Galápagos, I must say.’

  ‘So that’s a no?’

  Kate smiled at him. ‘I can guarantee that you’d enjoy it if that’s where you decide to go.’ She didn’t tell him how many times she’d visited her family there in the school holidays, that she spoke Spanish, that she’d spent her gap year living and working in Guyaquil. Nor did she tell him about The Accident, though at the thought of her little sister, she bit down hard into her bottom lip. Funny how although she missed her father and Luisa like crazy, it was the loss of Annie which made her weep.

  ‘Now,’ she went on briskly. ‘The thing is, do you want us to do the lot for you – airline tickets, hotels everywhere, individually hosted tours of the major sights and so on – or do you want to retain a degree of autonomy so you can take off suddenly if you see something which looks interesting that you didn’t know about until you got there?’

  As she spoke, Kate kept glancing at the window. In the safely normal company of Andrewes, she felt less certain that she had actually seen Stefan Michaels glaring in at her. It could have been someone with a vague resemblance to him who was simply checking out the ambience, or the menu.

  ‘I’ll come in sometime next week and we can sort out the details.’ Andrewes beckoned for the waitress and ordered cappuccinos for them both. While they waited for the coffee to arrive, he said, ‘OK, that’s the business part over. Are we allowed to get a little more personal now?’

  ‘How much is “a little”?’

  ‘For instance . . .’ He glanced at her left hand. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, are you married?

  ‘No.’ Kate wasn’t about to drag in Bradleigh Fullerton III. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Er . . . no.’

  ‘You don’t sound too sure.’

  ‘I was, once.’

  ‘What happened?

  ‘She . . . died.’ He shrugged. ‘These things happen.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. What happened?’

  ‘Actually, she killed herself.’

  Kate tried to imagine the guilt a person would feel if their partner committed suicide. The dark hours of wondering what signs you’d missed, what cries for help had gone unnoticed, whether you could have done something to change things, whether it was your fault. ‘That must be much worse than . . . than cancer or an accident.’

  ‘Yes. She’d tried several times, long before she met me. I loved her, but I really don’t blame myself. Anyway, it was some time ago now . . .’ He took a deep breath. ‘Do you have any family?’

  ‘A brother, who I’m living with at the moment. An aunt and uncle and a couple of cousins, up in Edinburgh. Otherwise, no.’

  ‘No parents?’

  ‘They died, a long time ago. My father and stepmother, actually. I lost my mother when I was very young, I don’t remember anything about her.’ A scent, the softness of hair on her skin, murmurs of love which came back to her when she lay half-awake in the early morning. Nothing else. ‘Any girlfriends?’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you always this direct?’

  ‘I find that being direct avoids confusion.’

  ‘OK . . . there have been girlfriends since my wife . . . died. But none at the moment.’

  ‘What about your family?’

  ‘Stepmother, two half-siblings, a . . . um . . . stepfather.’

  ‘Where’s your mother?’

  His face twisted oddly. ‘She’s dead, like your parents.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘They were divorced.’ He swallowed. ‘And he . . . um . . . died a short while ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry – I know what it’s like to lose a parent.’

  ‘It’s because of him, really, that I need to go to Ecuador.’

  There was a silence between them, then Kate said,
‘You know what my job is, what about yours?’

  He grinned. ‘I used to work for the SAS . . .’

  Kate felt a familiar weariness close over her. Brad had told her the same thing when they first met, although he’d never been closer to a combat weapon than watching Dirty Harry. If there was one thing Jefferson Andrewes didn’t look like, it was SAS. It must be some kind of macho wet-dream that guys had, especially the dodgy ones.

  ‘. . . just a summer holiday job, then I did . . . uh . . . a degree, and now I mostly do . . . research, I suppose you’d call it, working for a big international company. Pushing bits of paper around the accounts department, for the most part.’ He laughed self-deprecatingly. ‘I probably look like an accountant, too, in this get-up.’

  A huge yawn was building up inside her. Accounts! Jeez! ‘Is it an interesting . . . uh . . . occupation?’

  ‘Sometimes, if you like that sort of thing. It sounds safe and boring – but there are times when a job like mine can be tremendously exciting.’

  ‘Really?’ Rebellion in the typing pool? A senior partner showing up in – gasp! – a pink shirt?

  ‘Sometimes even downright dangerous.’

  ‘Wow!’ Death by a thousand paperclips? She surveyed him. ‘If I’d had to guess, I might have put accountant in your top three most likely occupations.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that, though, is there?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she agreed, a little too heartily. ‘Can you really work for the SAS as a holiday job?’

  ‘It’s a joke. Can you really see me in the Special Air Service?’

  ‘Actually . . .’

  ‘Don’t answer that.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got the build.’

  ‘It was a kind of joke. During university vacations, I worked in the offices of Scandinavian Airlines, my father knew someone, adding up figures mostly.’

  The conversation drifted pleasantly off to other subjects as they skirted round each other, mapped each other’s territory: favourite books, favourite films, music, interests, very few of which they had in common. One thing she learned about her dinner-companion was that the diffident air he had worn earlier in the day was a deliberate mannerism, and that he was in fact decisive and quick-thinking, both qualities she liked.