His mother looked exasperated. “I’m sorry,” she said to JJ before answering the kid. “Jack, you could at least wait for JJ to leave before you petition me to be excused.”
He looked confused for a second but then turned to JJ and said, “Sorry. It’s not you. It’s like, dinner and stuff, you know? And I have like, plans, which my mom kind of knows about.”
“No need to apologize,” JJ replied. “If I was fourteen I wouldn’t want to have dinner either.” Jack smiled at Susan, as though he’d just been vindicated, and Susan smiled back, a brief silent conversation of playful facial expressions passing between them.
Ed spoke then, saying like he’d just remembered it, “Oh, I have to go down to Washington in the morning, just for a day or two. Someone’s in town and I want to see him before he goes again.”
“Which reminds me,” JJ said to Ed before Susan could respond, “I’ll go and get that phone number for you, while I think of it.”
“Thanks,” said Ed.
“Well this all sounds very intriguing,” Susan said, looking at Ed for an explanation.
“That’s why you wouldn’t have made a spy, Susan. Don’t see connections when they’re not there. See, the phone number JJ has for me is an old friend from Berlin who lives in Paris nowadays.” She asked if it was anyone she knew, and JJ excused himself as Ed answered.
He went back through into the inn and up to his room, picking up the passports and putting them in his pocket, finding a piece of paper and writing what looked like a Paris number on it. When he got back to the kitchen though, Ed wasn’t there. Susan looked up from her paperwork to say, “He’s gone up to his room, third door on the left-hand side.”
“Thanks,” said JJ and walked up to Ed’s room, a guest room that looked similar to JJ’s a little way beyond the partition.
Standing in the open doorway, he went through the form of giving him the phone number, chatting inanely while handing over the passports. Ed responded likewise, talking about nothing as he flicked through them and put them away. They parted then, saying they’d see each other at dinner, Ed closing his door.
As JJ walked back toward the top of the stairs he noticed one of the other doors he’d passed half open, giving a view of the room from that direction, a narrow glimpse of what looked like the girl’s room, a few posters on the wall. He slowed down, staring in as he passed, suddenly noticing the reflection in the mirror above the cluttered dressing table, the girl herself and her boyfriend, asleep on the bed like two entwined children, a spellbound sense of stillness about them.
Seeing them there reminded him of a winter afternoon years before when he’d been about her age, sleeping fully clothed with his girlfriend, waking a little and watching the light fade, feeling her close, one of those rare moments that had been beautiful at the time and not just in the recollection.
He hadn’t thought of it in years but did now because of seeing them, the sleeping September-lit room pumping blood back into that part of his memory. And he felt envious too, of their youth, their clean slate, or perhaps just of the boyfriend, for having someone or something to hold on to, for having her.
Because despite what Ed had said, it still seemed hard to believe that he’d ever find a balance like that again. There had been Aurianne for a while, and for a while that had felt like something stable, but he hadn’t even loved her, and the worst part of that was knowing how devastated he’d have been now if they had been in love.
No doubt Ed would have countered that the present situation was a one-time thing, nothing to govern life choices by, but they worked in a business that had a way of throwing up one-time situations like that. If it was just him that wouldn’t matter, but he didn’t see how he could ever invest in a life beyond himself, not fully invest, not knowing what he knew.
Bostridge perhaps had been lucky. He’d been an amateur, not a real player. So it had been only Bostridge himself who’d been killed. Apart from his death, as much of a loss as that must have been, his family had been immune, to the extent that here they were blindly playing host to two people intimately involved with the killing and yet able to continue with life as normal: boyfriends, discussions about work and school, dinners with the friends of friends.
Following Jack’s exit JJ had reckoned on just the three adults having dinner, but when he got there the kitchen table was set for four. There was no food cooking, though. Susan brusquely dismissed her own cooking skills, explaining that the meal would be brought in, double-checking that JJ liked beef.