David Szalay - Spring

‘Sangfroid,’ Fraser said. ‘Should’ve been a war photographer.’

She smiled. She looked at the time. It was twenty past eight. She had finished work well over an hour ago, and she was still there, in the institutional light, listening to him.

‘I suppose I should go,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

She didn’t move, though. ‘How long do you stay here? Do you ever go home?’

‘Never,’ he said, smiling.

She looked at him sceptically. ‘Well, I’m going home,’ she said. She stood up and started to put on her coat. He watched her. ‘You can stay here if you want.’

‘If that’s okay.’

‘M-hm.’ She opened the door, letting in noise from the lobby. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Sleep well.’

‘You too. If you do sleep.’

It was hard to say whether the pills were having any effect on her heart. It was still thumping with unwarranted force as she walked to the tube station. She wondered why he still wore his wedding ring if his marriage was over.

The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, someone phoned him on his mobile. Something short and to the point. ‘Yes, okay,’ Fraser said, and hung up. ‘She’s on her way down,’ he said, starting to prepare his equipment.

‘Through the lobby?’

‘Possibly.’

There was nothing unusual happening in the lobby. The other paps—standing in their notional pen near the entrance—did not seem to know that their long days of waiting were almost at an end. When one of the lifts pinged and the doors parted, Fraser moved urgently forward. It was not ‘Jane Green’. The other paps had noticed him, however, and were themselves now starting to prepare. Though life in the lobby went on as normal, the sudden tension of the paps seemed to be spreading to other people. The security guards sensed that something was afoot—they seemed to be moving into position, in fact—while some of the doormen and porters had stopped what they were doing and were trying to see what it was that had unsettled the paps. This in turn had some of the more perceptive members of the public doing the same thing. She stood at the front desk and watched the numbers over the lift doors slowly descend.

When it happened, it happened quickly. Two lifts pinged simultaneously and some people poured out of each. At first this tightly knit dozen merely walked, quickly and with purpose, towards the doors, where two long silver Mercedes had pulled up outside. When the paps fell on them, however, they started to move faster. There was suddenly a lot of shouting. There was pushing and shoving. The paps had scattered from their pen and were everywhere. As soon as the lifts opened, Fraser had sprung forward and was now where the fighting was fiercest. Other paps were walking backwards towards the doors, firing off flashes as they went. And they walked straight into still more paps, arriving at a sprint from their futile vigil in Park Street. These ones too were snapping as soon as they arrived. Voices were shouting Jane Green’s real name. Shouting, ‘Over here! Here!’ Katherine heard one man shout, ‘Oi! You fucking whore!’ (Fraser would later explain, when she mentioned it, that this man had not meant anything nasty—he had simply been trying to get her attention and perhaps provoke some sort of interesting facial expression.) It had turned into a scrum in the vicinity of the doors. As they poured into the lobby, the influx of sweating, panting paps from Park Street was pushing against the security guards and Jane Green’s now furious entourage. There was even a policeman involved. Some hapless members of the public were knocked over as the scrum wheeled to one side. More security guards arrived at speed, sprinting through the lobby in their blue blazers. A pap was knocked over too—his camera, which may have taken a kick, went skittering over the marble. Immediately he was on his feet shouting threats to sue, but by then the entourage had forced its way out, and moments later the two Mercedes were pulling away, even then being pestered by paps on foot, stumbling through the flower beds in front of the hotel, holding their cameras over their heads to fire off a last flickering fusillade as the mopeds appeared from nowhere and tore off into the traffic in loudly nasal pursuit.

Fraser was triumphant. His face was shining with joy. She loved that. She loved the way his face was shining with joy. It made her feel joy herself. Needless to say, her heart was pumping frenziedly. Flushed with victory, having spontaneously picked her up and spun her around—she shrieked, then laughed—he was showing her the shots he had taken. Throughout the whole mad half-minute—or maybe it was even less—she herself had not seen ‘Jane Green’.

And now, excitably, Fraser was saying something else.

‘What?’ she said. She had not heard. There had been some furious shouting—a pap and a security guard were still having a private feud.

‘I want to buy you a drink,’ he said. ‘What time do you finish work?’ His face was still shining with joy.

‘Eight,’ she said.

‘I’ll meet you here at eight. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ she said, and he jogged off, whooping and waving to some of the others.

He was early. At ten to eight she saw him waiting in the lobby. No longer in his photographer’s fatigues, he was wearing a suit with an open-necked shirt and two-tone shoes. (Those shoes made her smile.) And he looked touchingly nervous. He was nervously pacing.

As soon as they were out of the hotel he surprised her by lighting a cigarette. A Silk Cut. It seemed an effeminate choice of smoke for him. He offered her one and she shook her head. Then she said, ‘Yes, okay.’ He lit it for her—together they made a tulip of their hands in the fresh night wind. She was so intensely aware of the points at which their fingers were touching that for a second she felt slightly faint. The frail flame steadied. They started to walk towards Hyde Park Corner. ‘I don’t really smoke,’ she said.

‘No, me neither.’

He told her that a London tabloid had snapped up his pictures of ‘Jane Green’, and they were selling well in other territories too.

‘How much for?’ she asked.

‘Quite a lot.’

‘How much?’ she insisted.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not that much.’ He was smiling, very pleased with himself. ‘Enough for a drink in one of these places.’

They went to one of the other handsome Park Lane hotels for their drink, and there, in the very first lull, with her poor heart moving into overdrive, she lifted her eyes to his and said—‘I find you very attractive.’ It was not the sort of thing she was in the habit of saying to men she had only just met. It was not the sort of thing she was in the habit of saying at all. That she said it was part of the intense strangeness, the strange intensity of those days. It was what she was thinking, and she felt a sudden vertiginous freedom just to say it. So she did.

For a moment he seemed less sure of himself. There was in his smile for the first time a shadow of self-doubt. It was not what she had said—that or things like it he had heard many times. It was the essentially unflirtatious way that she said it. She said it as if it was something important. She looked very serious. It was very intense. He smiled—the shadow of self-doubt—and seemed to be about to say something himself, he was not sure what, when she leaned through the elegant light and kissed him.

Without saying a word, she then placed herself entirely in his hands, and he seemed happy to take the initiative. The luxurious mojitos finished, and paid for without her noticing when or how, she found herself in a throbbing taxi, then in a street somewhere south of the river—perhaps Battersea—then in a tiny lift, and then in an equally tiny flat, then on a sofa that seemed still to wear the plastic wrapping in which it was shipped, with his tousled head between her white thighs (his hair was thinning on top), and then naked on an enormous bed, and all the time her heart was pounding. He would not let her lift a finger. She loved the way he would not let her lift a finger, the way he let her lose herself again and again in her own passivity. Her fantasies were mostly fantasies of passivity, for instance of medical examinations, of white-smocked professionals straying from their task and starting to touch her in ways they were not supposed to.