Rupert Thomson - Soft

On Sunday afternoon, when Glade came home from work, she walked in through the door to see Sally standing at the top of the stairs with the phone. Sally held one hand over the receiver and mouthed the words It’s him.

‘Who?’ Glade said.

Sally rolled her eyes. Tom.

‘I’m not here.’

‘I told him you just got in.’

When Glade stared at her in disbelief, Sally whispered, ‘I thought the two of you were talking again.’

Sighing, Glade climbed the stairs.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sally said, her voice hardening. She sounded wounded suddenly, even angry, as if it was all Glade’s fault, somehow.

Glade took the phone from her and sat down on the floor with her back against the wall. Tom. More than two months had passed since the weekend in New Orleans, but she still didn’t feel ready to speak to him. Holding the receiver on her lap, she stared through the doorway ahead of her, into the living-room. The gas fire with its thin, metal bars twisted out of shape, the threadbare carpet, the junk-shop photographs of strangers peering dismally from behind their dusty glass. She saw it the way Tom must have seen it when he first visited — as an untended place, squalid, almost derelict. Cautiously, she brought the receiver to her ear. ‘Hello?’

‘Glade! Jesus, is that you?’ His voice, which she had forgotten — or rather, deliberately not thought about. There was warmth in it, sunlight. A kind of safety. ‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ he was saying. ‘Has your phone been out of order or something?’

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? How can you not know, Glade?’

She struggled to find words. ‘I’ve been busy.’

It wasn’t true.

‘That painting you gave me,’ Tom was saying. ‘I hung it in the bedroom.’

She nodded. Yes, the painting.

‘It looks good,’ he said.

‘I’m glad.’

‘You know,’ Tom said, ‘I’d like it if we could see each other.’

Suddenly she had to concentrate. ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to do that,’ she said carefully, as if repeating lines she had learned. ‘I thought we agreed.’

‘Glade,’ he said, ‘don’t take everything so seriously.’

It was then that she noticed the lack of echo on the line. There was no hollowness at all, in fact, and no delay — none of the usual difficulty of talking across an ocean. Her neck felt hot and damp; she lifted her hair away from it with her free hand.

‘Where are you?’ she said.

‘I’m in London.’ He told her the name of his hotel. ‘I was thinking of coming over.’

She had to put him off. Quick. What would he say?

‘I’ve got rather a lot on at the moment …’

‘It’s almost one in the morning, Glade.’

‘I told you. I’m really busy.’ She waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she said.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’

‘What about breakfast?’

‘Breakfast?’ Tom laughed humourlessly. ‘Jesus, Glade. OK.’ He gave her his room number, telling her to be there no later than nine.

After Glade had hung up, Sally appeared in the kitchen doorway, a cigarette held vertically just to one side of her mouth.

‘That was great,’ she said.

‘Was it?’

Sally nodded. ‘You handled it really well.’

Glade wasn’t so sure. She suddenly felt sorry for Tom, all alone in his five-star luxury hotel in Knightsbridge.

‘That colour doesn’t suit you.’

Glade glanced down at her orange silk shirt.

‘It doesn’t suit you at all.’ Tom tilted his head on one side, as if objectively appraising her. ‘Maybe if you had a tan …’

‘I like it,’ she said quietly.

Tom shook his head. ‘It’s not you.’

When Glade arrived at the hotel that morning she had asked reception to call Tom and tell him that she was downstairs in the restaurant. This was Sally’s idea. Don’t go to his room, she said. You know what’ll happen if you do. And get someone from reception to call him. If you call him yourself, he’ll make you change your mind. For once, Glade was grateful for the advice: she hadn’t wanted to go to Tom’s room, but she would never have been able to think of a way round it, not on her own.

It had upset Tom to have his plans altered, as she had suspected it might. He was frowning when he walked up to the table, and he had been frowning ever since. He had attacked the waiter for bringing him scrambled eggs that were too dry. ‘I asked for wet eggs. Wet. Do you know what that word means? In my country it means moist, damp. It means runny. These eggs are fucking dry.’ The waiter was bowing, blinking, murmuring apologies, his eyes dazed and slightly watery as if he might, at any moment, burst into tears. ‘The coffee’s weak as well. How does anyone wake up over here drinking shit like this? Maybe they never do. Jesus.’ All this in a normal voice, but with an edge to it. As a waitress herself, Glade had sometimes come across people who behaved like Tom. They frightened her. She stared at her plate until he had finished, stared at it as if it interested her, when actually all she was thinking was white china, white china. She wondered if a harmless question might change his mood. She lifted her head. ‘So what did you want to see me about?’

Tom leaned back in his chair and fixed her with a long, sardonic look. ‘I just wanted to see you, Glade. It wasn’t about anything.’

‘Oh.’

She read the menu again, even though they were already eating. When she asked for Kwench! with her breakfast, Tom had looked at her, shaken his head and said, ‘Now she’s going Mexican on me.’ She hadn’t understood what he meant by that. It was irrelevant, anyway, because they didn’t have Kwench!. She had ordered tea instead.

‘So what have you been doing with yourself?’ Tom reached for a piece of toast, examined it.

‘Nothing really,’ she said. ‘Just working.’

He began to talk about a case he had been involved in recently, something to do with tax fraud on an unimaginable scale.

‘What about that man,’ Glade said, interrupting, ‘the one you found in Venezuela?’

‘Colombia.’ Tom smiled. ‘He got life.’

In her head Glade instantly released the man. She watched him emerge from a small door in a high grey wall, walk out into dazzling American light. When he was at a safe distance, the prison blew up behind him. She saw flames leap into the sky.

‘One thing happened, actually,’ she said.

Tom looked up from a forkful of scrambled eggs, which were now, presumably, wet enough. ‘What was that?’

‘You know my cat?’

Yes, he knew.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it caught fire —’

‘Your cat caught fire?’

‘Yes. And you know what happened then?’

Tom was staring.

‘We had to put it out,’ she said. ‘Put the cat out.’ She began to laugh. Her tea slopped over, her napkin fell on to the floor. Soon she was laughing uncontrollably, and the sight of Tom’s face, bewildered at first, and then annoyed, made it impossible to stop.

Towards the middle of that week Glade was at the restaurant, slicing olive bread for lunch, when the phone rang. Betty had been sent out to buy vegetables and ice, and the maitre d’ was upstairs in the office, so Glade answered it herself. It was Charlie, calling from a phone-box in South London. He asked her if the journalist had contacted her. She said he hadn’t. Charlie muttered something under his breath. Then he said, ‘I need to see you. Tonight, if possible.’

Glade leaned on the bar, looking out into the sunlit street. The glitter of spokes as a bicycle slid past. The heatwave lasting. She suggested the rose garden in Regent’s Park, which was one of her favourite places in the summer. Charlie seemed to approve of the idea.