“I know. Anyway, good luck again. What’s your girl’s name?”
“Andrea.”
“Andrea,” his mother said, testing it out. “Well, my love to both of you.”
“Goodbye, Mama. I’ll ring you from London.”
When he put the receiver down he saw Andrea waiting by the luggage trolley. “All set?” she asked.
“Yes. That was my mother.”
“Oh.” She turned the trolley toward the ramp which led to the departure area. “What’s she like?”
“She sends you her love,” he said. “That’s what she’s like.”
Andrea laughed, pleased and embarrassed. “That sounds promising. You’re very fond of her, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes. But I don’t know her.”
He took the trolley and began to push it up the ramp toward the ticket counters. There seemed to be extra police on duty. Four of them stood by the baggage detection devices, watching as travelers’ hand luggage was passed through. The shuttle was due to leave in twenty minutes and as he finished ticketing and went through the security check, he could see the British Airways plane waiting on the runway. Cleared through security, they were now in a lounge for passengers only.
Four policemen came into the lounge escorting a man in a blue pinstripe suit. The man carried an official-looking briefcase. The airline staff on the departure gate opened the gate and the man, accompanied by the police, went out of the building, walked across the tarmac and went, solitary, up the steps of the ladder leading to the waiting plane.
The police came back into the lounge. “Some big shot,” Andrea said. “British, I guess.”
Suddenly, he wished he were like that special passenger, already safely on the plane. The four policemen, laughing and talking as though their job were done, went over to the small bar and ordered cups of tea. He was glad the police were close. He looked at the other people in the lounge. Was there someone watching him, someone who would get on the phone once the plane took off? But then he thought of his visitor this morning, saw the priest’s red face and uneasy smile. They would already know that he was going to England. They would know he had promised to identify Kev. Sooner or later, they would discover that he was working at the Ormonde. They would find him there.
Yet, when the flight was called and he boarded with Andrea and sat, looking down on the green Antrim hills and the sweep of the lough as the plane began its climb, he felt again the elation of escape. The plane turned toward the Irish Sea, the shoreline reeling away at an angle, and now he saw only the illimitable gray anonymity of ocean, and, far below, a solitary ship, tiny as a toy.
Drinks were served. He sat, holding Andrea’s hand, waiting for that other coast to appear. When it did and they were over England, he looked down at the well-kept fields, the busy roads, the towns meshing into suburbs which soon became more towns. Already Ireland seemed a small empty island, lost in the shadow of this land with its millions of people and its history linked to a larger world. He was going back now to that larger world. He had ended a part of his life, his marriage to Moira, his work at the Clarence, his stay in Belfast. With Andrea he was beginning something new. Don’t think about Kev, about the priest, about any of that. It’s over.
An hour later he stood in Heathrow terminal watching the Ulster passengers collect their luggage and move off into the crowd, swallowed up in this kaleidoscope of different sights and sounds. He and Andrea found a taxi and drove to the Hampstead address where her friends had their flat. It was on the upper floor of a large Victorian house in a street just off Primrose Hill. The flat itself was large with a drawing room filled with paintings and books, many of them familiar volumes of poetry and fiction by writers whose work he admired. The house was in a quiet street and outside the front window a large oak tree reared up incongruously from the small patch of yard. It was the sort of London flat he had always wanted to have and being in it now gave him a feeling of pleasure and security.
“How long did you say we could stay in this place?” he asked Andrea, lifting her up and whirling her around in the hallway.
“Six weeks. I think they’re coming back at the end of August. It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“It’s great. They must be rich.”
“No, they’re Canadian academics. He’s from Montreal. Why did you think they were rich?”
“Because no professor I know could afford a flat like this as a pied-à-terre.”
“Really? I never thought of that. They’re people like my parents. I suppose it’s different in Canada.”
How different was it? he wondered later as they walked up Primrose Hill. People like her parents. Her father was an engineer with his own consulting firm. He was probably the sort who wouldn’t be very keen on his daughter marrying the lowly assistant manager of a London hotel. He had not thought of Andrea as rich. In Belfast she had lived like a student, the attic room, the secondhand bed, the broken-down furniture, the flat shared with three other girls. But what if she were the child of rich parents, used to comforts he could not provide? And in London, working for the BBC, she would become part of the intellectual establishment, entering a world he had once hoped to join. Would she be ashamed of him?
“By the way,” he said. “I think it would be a good idea if we don’t mention this IRA thing or what I’m doing here. I mean, to people we meet in London.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said, but she did not seem to be listening. They had reached the lookout on top of the hill. She pointed to the London skyline, blurred and distant in the afternoon haze. “Isn’t that the Post Office tower?”
“Yes, that’s it. The funny thing sticking up there.”
“Aren’t you excited?” she said. “Living here? Of course, I forgot. You lived here before. This is where you met Moira, isn’t it?”
“Yes. She didn’t like London.”
“Do you know, I sort of hate her now,” Andrea said. “If anything happens to you, it will be her fault. I think if it did I’d go back and kill her.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” he said.
On the slopes below them people were exercising their dogs in the English manner, letting their dogs off the lead, the dogs running to meet and sniff at other dogs, the owners walking on, confident that when they called, the dogs would come to heel. It was a scene pastoral as an eighteenth-century painting: the park, like all of London’s parks, open and serene, a place where people walked unafraid, shutting the city out. He turned to her. “Tomorrow, let’s get some food and come here for a picnic.”
“Oh, listen,” she said. “I forgot to tell you. Elsa Taylor, she’s a friend of mine, she’s arranged a little party for tomorrow evening, a sort of welcome-to-London thing. It’s for us.”
“What sort of party? I mean, who’ll be there?”
“I don’t know. People I’ll be working with, I guess. BBC types.”
“What do you do?” he said, putting on a plummy English accent. “I work in a hotel. Do you, indeed? Hmm.”
“Oh, darling,” she said. “Stop worrying about things that don’t matter.”
“But it does matter. Now that I’m with you, I wish I had a job I liked better.”
She looked at him strangely, he thought, as though he had said something she didn’t expect.
“Well, if you want to change jobs, it’s not too late, is it?” she said. “Look at the changes you’ve made in the past week. Listen, we’re together. That’s what matters, isn’t it? I’m happy. Aren’t you?”
He kissed her then, on Primrose Hill, high over London, and, as he did, her happiness flowed into him like a current. She was right. They were here. Everything had changed. Everything.
The party on Saturday evening was held in an ugly block of flats on the edge of Camden Town. Andrea suggested that they bring something, so he arrived at Elsa Taylor’s door carrying two bottles of wine in a brown paper bag, almost dropping them when Elsa, a very pretty girl in her twenties, hugged him, saying, “So you�
��re Michael. Welcome to London. This party’s for you, you know.”
The narrow entrance hall was already crowded with people and the people seemed young, noisy and untidy, not at all the sort who would give a damn what he did for a living. As Elsa led them around introducing them he began to enjoy himself as though, mysteriously, he had been transported back to his student days. Andrea, who did not know the people either, kept close to him and put her arm around him as they were drawn into conversations about films, ecological disaster, new books, most of it dealt with by hyperbole and jokes. There was food laid out on a table, and later, a little drunk, they sat in the bedroom with Elsa eating pizza from paper plates. When they had finished, he and Andrea went out on to a narrow back balcony. Below, in an empty site, a huge hole was being dug to lay the foundations of a building.
“Great view,” he said. “Looks like a bombsite.”
Suddenly, she turned to him, holding him, pressing her body against his. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’m having a great time. What about you?”
She looked back inside. The crowd was thinning out. “Yes. Elsa’s really nice, isn’t she? But listen. Let’s go home now.”
Twenty minutes later as they went up Haverstock Hill, he saw two policemen coming toward them, walking their beat. In their white summer shirts and old-fashioned helmets, they seemed young, innocent, unthreatening, no kin to the Ulster police. He realized then that for the past twenty-four hours he had not thought of the Chief Inspector, the priest, the voice on the phone. Was it over? Was it possible, here in London, to slip back into the safe anonymous river of ordinary life?
On Sunday morning they slept late. When they woke the street was quiet and birds chirped under the roof above their bedroom window. They made coffee, dressed, and walked up to the high street where they bought the Sunday papers and carried them to the park. They sat under a tree, reading in desultory fashion, then lay down together, side by side. He held her hand as they looked up at the empty summer sky. A squirrel ran up to them, stood on its hind legs, stared, then dropped down and scuttled off. Somewhere in the distance a clock struck twelve. She told him about Sundays in Toronto when she was a little girl: how her parents would take her for walks in an area of ravines which were, improbably, near the center of the city; how in summer they would sail on a lake and in winter skate on a pond. It seemed far away and in the past but, looking at her, he could see what she must have been like as that little girl. At one, they went and had lunch in the garden of a Hampstead pub and later walked down through Regent’s Park into the shut Sunday streets of the West End. Andrea did not know London as he did. He became her guide. They walked and walked, until they had reached Chelsea and the river. As they strolled along the Embankment the sky darkened. A sudden rain came down, drenching the streets. They sheltered in a shop doorway and, when he saw a taxi with its light lit, he ran out in the downpour, waving. In the taxi, going home from the long walk, wet from the rain, he sat with his arm around her, dulled with contentment.
That morning before going out they had closed all the windows in the flat. Returning, they found the rooms hot and airless. He went into the drawing room and opened the floor-length windows which looked down on the street. The rain had stopped. He could hear the tick of the grandfather clock in the passageway leading to the bedroom. She went into the bedroom and came out, drying her hair with a large white towel. She had taken off her wet dress and wore only a pair of blue cotton panties. She came into the drawing room and lay down on the long sofa. He looked at her, then went into the bedroom, stripped off his wet clothes, and came back naked to the drawing room. Cool damp air flowed through the open windows. She lay on the sofa, looking at him, seeing that he was aroused. He sat on the sofa and stroked her breasts and thighs, then, pulling down her blue panties, he eased them off her ankles. They began to make love.
Later, as they lay on the carpet holding each other, looking up at the sky through the opened windows, the rain began again. Large drops, almost like hailstones, spattered into the room. He got up, closed the windows, and came back to her. Again, they made love. The rain stopped and, as they lay quiet in the room, the day dying, the sky turning dark, the grandfather clock ticking steady as a heartbeat, he turned to her. He wanted to say to her that he had never been so happy, that today was the happiest day in his whole life. But did it need to be said, or would saying it break the day’s spell? He kissed her instead.
At nine o’clock he went out alone, and walked, searching until he found a little Indian-run grocery where he bought bread, cold meat, potato salad, beer and a runny-looking chocolate cake. He came back to the flat, ducking into doorways to avoid the showers. When he rang the doorbell she came down to let him in. She was wearing a cotton frock, pale gray with pink stripes, looking very different from her usual jeans-and-blouse self. He thought what it would be like to come home to her every evening. He thought of their new life here in London. He thought of last night’s party and of the friends they would make, the concerts, the exhibitions they would go to, the trips they would take to Paris, Venice, Normandy and Provence. As they sat in the kitchen eating the food he had bought, they talked of these things. Then, suddenly weary from the long day’s walking, the lovemaking, the open air, they were sleepy, wanting bed. In the bedroom she fell asleep in his arms. He lay holding her, fighting his own drowsiness. It was like a time long ago, the time of his childhood. He did not want to close his eyes. He did not want this day to end.
TEN
“Of course I remember you,” Ronny Pomfret said. But Dillon knew he did not. When he had worked for Ronny nine years ago at the Ormonde he had been a lowly trainee just out of hotel school. Now, things were different. Ronny was receiving him in his private office at ten in the morning, had ordered coffee, and discussed the recent events in Belfast as though he and Dillon were equals in the Alliance hotel hierarchy. Again, he wondered if Ronny, who was close to retirement, was looking him over as a potential successor. But, almost as if he had spoken the thought, Ronny smiled at him and said, “Of course, being here is just a stopgap for you, isn’t it?”
“Is it? I don’t know what the plans are.”
“Well, I don’t have to tell you, they’re delighted at the way you turned things around at the Clarence. And between ourselves I think you’re going to be asked to do something similar again. Do you know a hotel called the Wellington? It’s in South Ken.”
He did know the Wellington. It had once been very well known indeed. “But it’s not ours,” he said.
“The rumor is, Dan Keogh is just about to buy it,” Ronny Pomfret said. “And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they wanted something similar to the job you did on the Clarence. On a grander scale, of course. Mind you, officially, I know nothing.”
“Of course.”
“Well, there it is,” Ronny said. “Just remember to be surprised if Dan brings it up. Meanwhile, I’m delighted to have you back here. Let’s go down now and I’ll introduce you to Johnny Harper. You’ll be taking over from him for the next few weeks.”
An hour later, walking through the Ormonde’s baroque public rooms with Harper, who was soon to go on leave, Dillon felt both elated and confused. Yesterday he had wanted to change his job. But if he had been asked what he would have liked to do in London, provided he stayed in the business, it would have been to make over and run some famous old hotel. Here in the Ormonde, even if one day he should inherit Ronny’s job, he would be part of something which did not need changing, a hotel too large to be under one man’s control. But the Wellington was of medium size, a place which had once been very grand, with a history of guests who were part of history. Did he really want to look for a job outside the hotel business? What did he know of other jobs when he had trained and spent his whole working life in this one? Remembering the pleasures of the weekend just ended he again felt a rush of hope. Was this the turning point he had so often dreamed of, the end of useless daydreams, of nostalg
ia for his student days, of that failed hope of writing poetry which, in Belfast, had been signposted for him daily in those familiar, remembered, unloved streets?
That morning Andrea had gone to the BBC in Portland Place to meet the people she would work with. He had arranged to telephone her after lunch. At three o’clock he rang her. “How did it go?”
“Great,” she said. “I’m pleased. It’s going to be an interesting job. And you, how was it?”
“I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said. But he did, he told her about the Wellington.
“You sound happy about it.”
“I am. I mean, if I’m not going to change jobs, this is as good a chance as I’m likely to get. Listen, when are you finishing today?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t really started work yet. I guess I’m free any time.”
“Let’s meet at five,” he said. “Here at the Ormonde. We’ll have a drink and then maybe we’ll snoop over to have a look at the Wellington. All right?”
“At five, then.”
“Ask for me at the desk,” he said. “I’ll be looking out for you.”
At four, having taken leave of Harper, he was free to go home. Instead, he went across the street for a walk in Hyde Park, and, at five, returned to the Ormonde to meet her. He looked around in the lobby and in the main lounges but she was not there. He then went to ask at reception and as he passed the concierge’s desk he saw her come out of a nearby cloakroom. As always, his heart raced. He went to her and kissed her. “It is grand,” she said. “It’s also enormous.”
“But boring,” he said. “Wait till you see the Wellington. Come, let’s have a drink!”
He led her into the large art deco bar which was just off the main lobby. As he did, one of the porters came up to him, handing him a telephone message slip. “We paged you, sir, but we must have missed you. We thought you’d gone home.”
He read the slip. “Something wrong?” Andrea asked. He gave her the slip, which read Please call Detective Inspector Randall. There was a telephone number with a Belfast prefix.
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