Fortnight of Fear Read Free Page A

the last ten years of marriage.
    It’s ridiculous, he said to himself. It’s just a moment of weakness. I’m tired, I’m suffering from stress. I’m lonely, too. Nobody ever understands how lonely it can be, traveling abroad on business. No wonder so many businessmen stay in their hotel rooms, drinking too much whiskey and watching television programmes they can’t understand. There is no experience so friendless as walking the streets of a strange city, with nobody to talk to.
    He closed the window and went to the mini-barto find himself a beer. He switched on the television and watched the news in Dutch. Tomorrow morning, after he had collected the signed papers from the Gemeentevervoerbedrijf, he would take a taxi straight to Schiphol and fly back to London. Against ferocious competition from Volvo and M.A.N. Diesel, he had won an order for twenty-eight new buses for Amsterdam’s municipal transport system, all to be built in Oxford.
    On the phone, Brian Taylor had called him “a bloody marvel.” Margaret had squealed in delight, like she always did.
    But the way the wind had lifted up that woman’s hair kept running and re-running in his mind like a tiny scrap of film that had been looped to play over and over. The revolving door had turned, her hair had lifted. Shining and dark, the kind of hair that should be spread out over silk pillows.
    It began to grow dark and the lights began to dip and sparkle in the river and the trams began to grind their way out to Oosterpark and the farther suburbs. Gil consulted the room-service menu to see what he could have for supper, but after he had called up to order the smoked eel and the veal schnitzel, with a half-bottle of white wine, he was taken with a sudden surge of panic about eating alone, and he called back and canceled his order.
    â€œYou don’t
want
the dinner, sir?” The voice was flat, Dutch-accented, polite but curiously hostile.
    â€œNo thank you. I’ve … changed my mind.”
    He went to the bathroom and washed his face and hands. Then he straightened his necktie, shrugged on his coat, picked up his key, and went down to the hotel’s riverside bar for a drink. The bar was crowded with Japanese and American businessmen. Only two women, and both of them were quite obviously senior executives, one lopsidedly beautiful, the other as hard-faced as a man. He sat up on a bar-stool and ordered a whiskey-and-soda.
    â€œCold wind today, hmh?” the barman asked him.
    He drank his whiskey too quickly, and he was about to order another one when the woman came and sat just one stool away from him, still dressed in white, still fragrant with Obsession. She smiled to the barman and asked for a Bacardi, in English.
    Gil felt as if he were unable to breathe. He had never experienced anything like it. It was a kind of panic, like claustrophobia, and yet it had an extraordinary quality of erotic compulsion, too. He could understand why people half-strangled themselves to intensify their sexual arousal. He stared at himself glassy-eyed in the mirror behind the Genever gin-bottles, trying to detect any signs of emotional breakdown. But did it show, when you finally cracked? Did your face fall apart like a broken jug? Or was it all kept tightly inside of you? Did it snap in the back of your brain where nobody could see?
    He glanced covertly sideways, first at the woman’s thigh, then more boldly at her face. She was looking straight ahead, at the mirror. Her nose was classically straight, her eyes were cobalt-blue, slightly slanted, very European. Her lips were glossed with crimson. He noticed a bracelet of yellow-and-white gold, intertwined, that must have cost the equivalent of three months of his salary, including expenses, and a gold Ebel wristwatch. Her nails were long and crimson and perfect. She moved slightly sideways on her stool and he noticed the narrowness of her waist, and the full sway of her breasts.