Evensong (21 page)

He flashes his smile. “Won’t you stay for coffee, Ms.—?”

She sees he’s also switched on his I’m Listening expression in preparation for her reply. She doesn’t want to be drawn into a conversation, especially not with him, so she answers hastily, “Taylor. Olive Taylor. Thank you, but I can’t stop, I have to go now.” She almost adds, “Because my cat’s waiting for me,” but just manages not to. She shudders inwardly; at least she’s avoided giving him that clue.

But it doesn’t matter. Taber studies her as she walks hurriedly away. He is thinking about her.
Olive, Olivia. And Sarto means Tailor. It can’t be. It can’t be.

The pale wood door of the Boardroom stood impassively before him. Kicking it down, he decided, would be too theatrical, so he merely opened it (though without knocking) and strode in.

She was standing in the middle of the room, waiting for him. Gaetano stood behind her and to one side. She was wearing a long velvet dress in her usual style, this one in dark blue. He took in the fitted bodice almost painted over her slender upper body, and the long voluminous skirt that he somehow found more arousing than a short tight one. The front of his trousers started to tent.

“This pantomime!” shes pat. “You’ve taken five days out of our summit preparations!You’ve openly cancelled my orders! In my Cathedral! And,” pointing behind her at Gaetano, “do you know what he
did
to me when I tried to get into that damn room?”

Anwar glanced at Gaetano, who remained expressionless.

“I don’t know. Or care.”

“Have you any idea what stories we’ve had to tell the media? And at the end of it all, you got us nothing. You had us check the Patel people, yet again, and we got nothing. You spent five days in the Signing Room while they tore it apart, and you got nothing. You gave us five days of disruption, five days of the media laughing at us and Zaitsev’s people screaming at us, and you haven’t got shit. I was right about you the first time, you’re a—”

“Don’t call me a fucking autistic retard. I didn’t like it the first time you said it. If you say it again, I might forget who I am.”

“When did you last remember who you are?”

He looked at her, long enough for her to look away. Then she gathered herself, stared back at him, and said, “Oh no, you do not do that to me. You do not stare me down reproachfully.”

“I remember who I am,” he said quietly. “I’m the thing you rented for your protection. I may not be enough, because you haven’t told me enough about who’s trying to kill you; but I’m all you’ve got.”

She didn’t reply, but neither did she look away; she wouldn’t be stared down.

“And I remember who you are,” he went on. “You stand for things I admire, but inside you’re ugly.” He looked her up and down. “A velvet bag of shit.”

He heard Gaetano stifle a gasp.

She continued to return his gaze, but addressed Gaetano. “The retard speaks out for itself. What’s happened to it? It seems to have changed.”

“And,” Anwar continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “in the Signing Room I was...”

“Yes, yes, I get that. You were trying to find what they’re sending to kill me.”

“And I made sure...”

“Yes, I get that too. You made sure it isn’t there yet, and you can make sure it won’t be there before the summit. But you didn’t
ask
anyone. You camped out in the Signing Room while they ripped it to pieces and caused five days of fucking chaos and you didn’t
ask
anyone!”

“Would you have asked anyone?”

“Of course not.”

“Exactly. I did what you do every day: leave people running around in your wake, clearing up after you.”

Again, without leaving his eyes, she spoke to Gaetano. “Hear that? It identifies with me. With my methods. Just because for once it does something a bit decisive, it thinks it’s turning into me.”

He threw out a hand, spread into a Verb configuration, at her throat. It stopped maybe a tenth of an inch before touching her. He was frighteningly fast. If he’d wanted to, he could have completed the blow and left her headless before Gaetano had even started to move. Before she had even started to register the shock she was now registering.

Molecules had rearranged to harden his fingers into striking surfaces. He allowed himself to brush her throat lightly, then withdrew his hand. He’d put his hands all over her before, over parts much more private than her throat, but this touch was different. It caused something between them to shift.

“That’s how easy it would be for me to put an end to this mission, and this conversation, and you. And the people I’m supposed to be protecting you from have apparently got something that kills people like me. And still you won’t tell me the truth about them.”

She seemed to be having trouble breathing. He turned to Gaetano, shrugged an apology, and turned back to her.

“You see, I really don’t buy what you’ve told me. Not all of it. These people who threaten you, they’re serious enough for you to get Rafiq to give you a Consultant, but not serious enough for you to tell me everything about them. Who, where, and why. All I’ve got is conspiracy theories. A cell of mega-rich movers and shakers operating indirectly through the founders, passing you handwritten notes. The rest of it, you just hint at. Almost coyly, like it’s some second virginity you might let me have one day.”

He paused, glanced again at Gaetano, and continued. He still spoke quietly, but his voice took on an edge.

“And there’s something else you haven’t told me. Not world-picture stuff about the founders, but something quite specific.Afinaldetailwhichoverturnseverythingelse.Iknow it’s there.
What is it?
”

“I never said...” She stopped, caught her breath, and began again. “I never said anything about some final detail.”

“No, you didn’t. That was me.”

“Then you’re putting words in my mouth.”

“No. Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth…”

She looked up at him, as if reminded of something she’d forgotten. An instant of scalding attention, then she turned to Gaetano. “Leave us,” she said hoarsely.

Gaetano was almost relieved to do so. He didn’t know what he’d been doing there in the first place.

As the door closed behind Gaetano, they faced each other.

“You still haven’t answered my question. After we’ve done here, I’ll ask you again.”

“After we’ve done here, I’ll give you an answer.”

They started circling.

“I should get showered and cleaned up first.”

“No you shouldn’t. I want it now.”

“I haven’t shaved or washed,” he told her, “in five days. Or cleaned my teeth, or changed my clothes.” They were only token objections. He was surprised at how much he’d been looking forward to returning to his routine. Nothing else with her was simple or uncomplicated, but sex was.

“Yes,” she said, “you smell like shit. The suit still looks good, though.”

“You get what you pay for,” he said, lifting her onto the table. He pulled up her skirt, carefully and tidily. She was wearing silk knickers which, with equal care, he pulled down and left around her knees; an encumbrance, but the essence was to disarrange, not denude.

She waited, patiently but uninterested, while he did all this, even while he made some final adjustments of her skirt upwards and her knickers downwards; then, after pausing to admire his handiwork, he entered her. That was his part done, and now she began hers, taking him inside her voraciously. Such particular intimacies, to a normal couple, might have meant something; but Anwar and Olivia were neither normal nor a couple. It was an arrangement, simple and self-contained, where each party did what he or she wanted, without regard for the feelings of the other. Masturbation for two.

By now she was well into her part. Where he’d been painstaking and obsessive, she was greedy. After five days, greedier than ever. For a moment he felt she’d never let him out again, at least not the way he’d come in. Eventually she did, but only to go another time, and another.

Who was it she was taking into herself like this? Not a real person but a device, a designer dildo. And who was it that he was entering like this? Not a real person but a container, into which he was pumping his contents. It suited both of them perfectly: only a Consultant would have the constitution and stamina to match
her
appetites.

Afterwards, they sat at opposing places on the table. She smoothed down her skirt; so careful had he been in his preliminaries that it looked no tidier rearranged than it had been when he’d pulled it up.

She usually looked at him without noticing, or noticed him only in passing, and he realised he’d been doing the same to her. But now he noticed. Her face looked drawn, as if she too had spent the last five days in the Signing Room. There was a feverishness in her stare and a downturn, accentuated by lines, at the corners of her mouth. A sort of desperation about her. Arden never looked like this.

“Not enough,” she said hoarsely.

He hoisted her up on the table again, and was about to restart his ritual, but she stopped him. “No. You prefer it naked, don’t you?”

Surprised, he nodded. They started undressing.

Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth…
He did put it in her mouth. Then her hands. And then her vagina, and that surprised him, because this time she took it less greedily.
She’s trying to share
, he thought incredulously. She was clumsy at it because it was alien to her, and it made him feel embarrassed; and also uneasy, at the apparent shift from their previous routine.

“Don’t do that again,” he said afterwards. “It didn’t work.”

“The other way wasn’t enough.”

“That way was too much.”

She looked away. Then she gathered herself, like she’d done when he tried to stare her down. “I said it wasn’t
enough!
Go again. It’s not enough any more.”

Like the Reith Lecture
, he thought, a small animal baring its teeth. But none of the attacks in the Reith Lecture had unsettled her like this. Not even the one on her life.

They went again, and it still didn’t work.
Still trying to share,
and she still wasn’t much good at it—her reciprocal movements were clumsy and unsynchronised to his, and she didn’t pick up quickly enough on what he liked her doing. He preferred it when she didn’t care what he liked. This way gave him nothing. He didn’t think to wonder what she might have wanted from it, only that gave
him
nothing.It didn’t work and it wasn’t the same. Something had shifted.

He stood up abruptly, and started dressing. After watching for a while the play of his almost nonhuman musculature, she too started dressing.

“What’s this about?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.

“What do you...”

“Don’t say, ‘What do you mean.’ You know what I mean. Why isn’t it enough? Why does it have to be different?”

“Something you said in Brighton, about if I hated people less and understood them more.”

“What has that got to do with what happened here? I was talking about fundamentalists, about how you treat your enemies.”

“You were talking about how I treat everyone. I can deal with media and mass audiences, but not with individual people, whether they’re enemies or friends. I’ve never noticed them. I’ve never had a relationship that works both ways, not with any of them. So...”

“So you decided to practice on
me
?”

“Not practice. Start.”

He laughed out loud. “Start a
relationship,
with a
Consultant
?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, not that kind of relationship.” She hurried on, conscious that she’d immediately backed down at the first sign of derision, and was now fighting only for her fallback position. “And I have to start with someone. And I got Rafiq to send you here, and I never really stopped to notice you. And when I asked you things about yourself, I’d forget your answers even before you finished speaking. And—” She was conscious of too many Ands, as if she was scrambling for anything she could find. She took a breath and began again. “—And you’d be only the first. I have to start somewhere.” She knew how lame it sounded, and added “After you I could go on to real people.” She’d meant it to cover her retreat, but it sounded worse; gratuitous, and ugly.

He stopped laughing. “Then skip the part with me and go straight to real people, because
this
didn’t work. It was embarrassing.”

He wasn’t merely embarrassed, he was burning with embarrassment.It was knotting his stomach. A woman in her thirties trying to learn the elements of courtship, of pleasing a partner.
Sucking me into herself.
Or, if he believed her fall-back position, trying to learn how to notice and value people. Either way she had years to make up, and he couldn’t see beyond mid-October.

He strode over to the full-length Boardroom window. The early evening view of the Brighton foreshore and the i-360 Tower was beguiling as always, but he wasn’t really looking at it; only turning his back on her.

This mission had threatened to overturn his life, and he’d staved that off by the change that had come over him since meeting Rafiq—the change that had made him take decisive action and let others do the worrying and pick up the pieces. And now that change, and her reaction to it, was in turn threatening to overturn his life. The same threat, from another direction.

“You’re different since you’ve come back,” she said, and immediately knew how fatuous it sounded; she’d only said it to avoid saying other things. When he didn’t reply, shea dded, “Was it your meeting with Rafiq?”

“Yes.”

“What happened there? Tell me about it.”

He told her. As with Gaetano, he omitted references to the names and number of Consultants, and left out the conversation with Arden Bierce, but he was grateful to be able to retreat into the detail. It stopped him saying other things.

“Well,” she said when he’d finished, “it checks out.”

“What checks out?”

“Gaetano told me all that yesterday, and his account was almost exactly the same as yours. He practices—” she hurried over the word “—eidetic techniques. He works very hard at it.”