Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

Sophal arrived early for her lesson, while Robert was still at Vong collecting his clothes. She went into the busy lunchtime restaurant and sat at a table and ordered a coffee and then asked the boys to go up and alert Mr. Beauchamp. “He’s out,” they said at once, and she nodded quietly and resigned herself to a salad. She was early, it was true, but it was still a little odd. She looked out at the brilliant pool and the dark-skinned boys with nets skimming its surface. Her mind soon emptied and grew out of its irritation. She had spent the morning being interviewed at a clinic and she felt she had done well, but in the end it was of no interest. There was a futility about trying for such things. In the back of her mind she had a growing sense that her efforts were going to yield nothing down the line. Even in the last few weeks the future — the feeling of the future — had become foreshortened. It had narrowed and dimmed, just a little but enough to make her anxious. A suffocation had come upon her. What if she had no future at all?

She had been in Paris for a year and now Phnom Penh felt alien and small. Just as once there had seemed no way out if it, now there seemed no way into it. Even her command of Khmer had weakened a little — it was strange how that happened, as if the brain could handle two languages at a time, but never three. All her friends had what they called “language partners,” those fairly well-to-do foreigners who liked to spend a few hours a week with a pretty girl pretending to hone their English skills. It was usually their fathers who went out and found them — it was more seemly that way. She thought of herself as too old for these kinds of childish games, but sometimes there was nothing for it, one had to play by the local rules. Why care too much?

She impaled the cherry tomatoes lazily on her fork and wondered about Simon Beauchamp. He was good-looking all right. Young and nicely aloof and undesperate. He had been quite a surprise when he appeared the other night since, she idly supposed, she had been expecting a goofy desperado in shorts and flip-flops. When he walked in in his nice linens and his clean-shaven cheeks she had been pleasantly surprised. So what was he doing in Phnom Penh? she had wondered even as she was turning away from the piano and getting a good look at him. He was not an English teacher, for one thing. Nor was his name Simon: she felt it in her bones.

His eyes were spacious and pretty and you could open their doors and enter on light feet. A man of wide-open portals, but what was he expecting? A man didn’t float around a foreign city for no reason whatsoever, not at the age of twenty-eight. A Khmer boy would never do that unless he was working at a large company in Germany or the United States. Yet there was no aura of leisure about Mr. Beauchamp. He was far from being a pathless wanderer. He bustled and bristled and his eyes were quiet and malicious.

He was a bit Heathcliff, wasn’t he?

She smiled and wondered if she should have a drink. Her hands were itching to do it, to rise and click the fingers and say “Drink!”

But she waited. There might be someone there she knew, but there wasn’t. She continued thinking about Simon. She was a little tired of men, in reality, because one could only go through the process a given number of times and suddenly one came to the realization that the repetitions were not only dull but toxic. And her parents were so desperate for her to get married and worse. She was almost twenty-six and, to their eyes, the danger zone was approaching.

For her part, she felt no such thing. All she felt was fatalistic curiosity and a desire to return to the outside world. Maybe even London, given how affluent his family seemed to be. It was a sin to think like that — and stupid, too — but it crossed her mind anyway as she finished her salad and ordered a gin and tonic out of boredom. It came with a sprig of mint and a pile of ice.

Her father would be shocked but she drank them quite a lot these days. They went down well in the hour before lunch, the black hour before consciousness arose. She had given up rising early like her parents. Now, with nothing to do but study and wait, she could get up when she wanted and go to bed when she wanted. It was contemptible but she wasn’t yet twenty-six and she had her excuses. Everyone knew the future would be different.

—

Meanwhile, as she was sipping her freezing gin and tonic, Robert was watching Vong folding his clothes and looking at the clock on the wall. He would be back just in time.

“Now that I think about it,” the tailor was saying with his back turned to him, “I remember your friend Mr. Simon. He came in six months ago to get some shirts. My assistant said he was the most dashing man in Phnom Penh. I don’t know why I forgot him. He is an antiques dealer, isn’t he?”

“I never ask him about his work,” Robert said.

“I think he said he was an antiques dealer. I might have his card somewhere. These ones will fit you better than the ones you are wearing. It’s always a problem wearing another man’s clothes.”

“It certainly is. Did Mr. Simon say where he was living these days?”

“Not a word. You’d know that better than me. I just remember his shoes — he was wearing a remarkable pair of shoes.”

“Oh?”

“I thought he must be a man of taste.”

Vong turned with the package neatly tied up and handed it to him. There was nothing more to say between them and Robert let the awkward conversation die where it was. He went out hurriedly and rode back to Colonial Mansions on a motodop.

When he came through the lobby he immediately saw Sophal sitting alone by the window and it was too late to go up and change into his new clothes. It was too bad but he had to make the best of it. He came up to her table and she was sucking on a straw inserted into a gigantic gin and tonic and her eyes had gone askew. But he was not late at all. He apologized anyway and held up the tailor’s bag and sat down opposite her and asked her if that was indeed a gin and tonic.

“It’s the real thing,” she said.

“Then I’ll have one too.”

When it came he touched her glass with his and they agreed that their English lesson had gotten off to a flying start, by Buddha.

“I don’t expect you to give me an English lesson,” she said. “I’ve been speaking it since I was five. I thought — I thought I’d show you around the city a bit since my father is paying you anyway. So who cares. He’s not going to know.”

“You know, I used to be a teacher,” Robert said slowly. “It wouldn’t be any sweat for me. I know how to do it.”

“Yes, but it’s a bore anyway. I just thought — I don’t know, I thought you might be interesting. In some way.”

“Interesting?”

“A foreigner is always interesting. Even if he isn’t.”

“But I’m not interesting.”

“It’s not for you to say though. Were you really a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Why?”

“You don’t seem like a teacher.”

She ate the mint sprig and looked at him calmly.

He said, “It’s not the first time someone has said that. I think I have teacher written all over me.”

“No, you don’t. You look like something else. I don’t know what. A cattle rustler.”

“Oh?” He laughed, but she didn’t.

“Something like that,” she said. “Something slippery.”

“I’m not slippery,” he snorted. “I wish I were.”

“You’re slippery enough. My father doesn’t think so though.”

“Your father is a good judge of character.”

“He’s anything but that. But I look out for him. Shall we go for lunch somewhere else? I have a feeling someone I know is going to walk in and I don’t want them to.”