got Joe wrong. He feels things as strongly as me. I don’t see him face to face enough, that’s all.’
‘He’s only a flight away,’ she said gently.
It wasn’t a discussion she wanted to get into. Joe Proffitt, head of the Ashur-Proffitt Corporation, wasn’t a man she liked very much, but she didn’t feel able to speak out too strongly against him. Last September she knew that every instinct in Tony Kafka’s body had told him to head for home, permanently. But with Helen three months pregnant, he’d known how his wife would feel about that. So Tony was still here and, as far as she could detect, Joe Proffitt’s business certainties had hardly been dented at all.
‘Yeah, I ought to go more often. It’s as quick going to the States as it is getting to London with these goddam trains,’ he grumbled. ‘Look at me, up with the dawn so I can be sure to be in time for lunch barely a couple of hundred miles away.’
‘You’ll have time for some breakfast?’ she said.
‘No thanks. I’ll get some on the train. What time you get back last night?’
‘Late. Two o’clock maybe, I don’t know. You didn’t wait up.’
‘What for? You may not need sleep but I do, specially with an early start and a long hard day ahead speaking a foreign language.’
‘I thought it was just Warlove you were meeting?’
‘That’s the foreign language I mean.’ They smiled at each other. ‘Anyway, last night when you rang, you didn’t think there was anything there to lose sleep over. Has anything changed? I’ll get asked.’
‘You think they’ll know already?’
‘I’d put money on it,’ he said.
‘It’s cool,’ she said pouring herself some coffee. ‘Domestic drama, that’s all. Main thing is Helen’s fine and the twins don’t seem any the worse for being a tad early.’
‘Good. Born in Moscow House, eh? There’s a turn-up.’
‘Like their mother. Nature likes a pattern. She wants to call the girl Kay.’
‘Yeah, you said. And the boy?’
‘Last night she was talking about Palinurus. Of course she’s very upset over what happened and later she might get to thinking …’
‘A bit ill-omened? Right. And your fat friend is quite happy, is he?’
‘Copycat suicide, no problems.’
‘Copycat suicide? He doesn’t find that a bit weird?’
‘I think in his line of business he takes weird in his stride. I’m having a drink with him later, so I’ll get an update.’
‘Who was it said an update was having sex the first time you went out?’
‘You, I’d guess. No passes from Andy. He is, despite appearances, a kind man.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, as if unconvinced.
Silence fell between them broken by the distant chime of the old long-case clock standing in the main entrance hall. Though it looked as if it had been there almost as long as the house, in fact it had come later than its owners. Kay had spotted it in an antique shop in York. When she’d pointed out the inscription carved on the brass dial – Hartford Connecticut 1846 – Tony had laughed and said, ‘Real American time at last!’ She’d gone back later and bought it for his birthday. He’d been really touched. It turned out to have a rather loud chime which she’d wanted to muffle, but he’d refused, saying, ‘We need to make ourselves heard over here!’ In return, however, he’d conceded when she resisted his proposal to set it five hours behind Greenwich Mean Time.
Now its brassy note rang out eight times.
‘Gotta go,’ said Kafka. ‘Let me know how you get on with Mr Blobby, if you’ve a moment.’
‘Sure. Tony, you’re not worried?’
‘No. Just like to show those bastards I’m on top of things.’
‘You’re sure they’re not getting on top of you?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I don’t know … sometimes you get so restless … last night when I got in you were tossing and turning like you were at sea.’
For a moment he seemed about to dismiss her worries, then he shrugged and said, ‘Just the old thing. I dream I hear the fire bells and I know I’ve got to get home but I can’t find the way …’
‘Then you wake up and you’re home and everything’s fine, Right, Tony? This is our home.’
‘Yeah, sure. Only sometimes I think I feel more foreign here than anywhere. Sorry, no. I don’t mean right here with you. That’s great. I mean this fucking country. Maybe all I mean is that America’s where all good Americans ought to be right now. We are good Americans, aren’t we, Kay?’
‘As good as we can be, Tony. That’s all anyone can ask.’
‘I think a time’s coming when they can ask a fucking sight more,’ he said.
Abruptly he stood up, removed his black robe and stood naked before her except for the thin gold chain he always wore round his neck. On it was his father’s World War Two Purple Heart, which he wore as a good-luck charm.
‘Pay me no heed,’ he said. ‘Male menopause. I could pay a shrink five hundred dollars a session to tell me the same. Give my best to Helen.’
He turned away and dived into the swimming pool.
He was in his late forties, but his stocky body, its muscles sculpted into high definition by years of devoted weight training, showed little sign yet of paying its debt to age.
He did a length of crawl, tumble turned, and came back at a powerful butterfly. Back where he started, his final stroke brought his flailing arms down on to the lip of the pool and he hauled himself out in one fluid movement.
When he stops that trick, I’ll know he’s over the hill physically, thought Kay.
But where he was mentally, even her penetrating gaze couldn’t assess.
She watched him walk away, his feet stomping down hard on the tiled floor as if he’d have liked to feel it move. When he vanished through the door, she turned the laptop towards her and began to read.
ASHUR-PROFFITT & THE CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY
A Modern Fairy Tale
Once upon a time some cool dudes in the Greatest Country on Earth decided it would be real neat to sell arms to one bunch of folk they didn’t like at all called the Iranians and give the profits from the sale to another bunch of folk they liked a lot called the Contras. At the same time across the Big Water in the Second Greatest Country on Earth some other cool dudes decided it would be real neat to sell arms to another bunch of folk called the Iraqis that nobody liked much except that they were fighting another bunch of folk called the Iranians that no one liked at all. But it didn’t bother the cool dudes in either of the two Greatest Countries on Earth to know what the other was doing because in each of the countries there were people doing that too and as Mr Alan Clark of the second G.C.O.E. (who was so cool, if he’d been any cooler he’d have frozen over) remarked later, ‘The interests of the West were best served by Iran and Iraq fighting each other, and the longer the better.’
But the really amazing thing about all these dudes on both sides of the Big Water was that they were totally invisible – which meant that, despite the fact that everything they did was directly contrary to their own laws, nobody in charge of the two Greatest Countries on Earth could see what they doing!
She scrolled to the end, which was a long way away. Tony was right about the style. Once this kind of convoluted whimsicality had probably seemed as cool as you could get without