Invisible. Jonathan Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ before the stalker can strike; jingly music begins, like synthesised wind-chimes. ‘You’ll visit us again, soon?’ his mother asks.

      ‘Of course,’ he says, and she squeezes his hand so tightly that the trembling in her fingers stops.

      

      Malcolm looks into the bar, where a young woman in a rhinestone tiara is sitting amidst a dozen friends. On the other side of the room a smartly dressed young man sits in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker, possibly asleep, with a mobile phone on his knee, and two women who may be sisters are tearfully hugging each other. He withdraws to the garden and strolls for a while, before resting on the bench by the night-scented stock. The weather will break tonight: the air is damp and inert, and a greenish tinge is seeping into the sky on the horizon. A canopy of cloud is sliding forward slowly over the hill, occluding the stars. The trees are motionless for now, but soon they will begin to stir, and then the rain will come. Watching the fans of light rising and falling on the bypass, he breathes the perfume of night-scented stock. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after, he will speak to Stephanie. He presses a hand against the pocket in which he carries her letter. The leaves are so still it’s as though the garden were encased in glass.

      A taxi draws up and he looks back over his shoulder. The young woman with the tiara is standing at the window of the bar, and at the sight of her he experiences a sudden upswelling of happiness, an ambivalent happiness, which vanishes almost at once. He looks at the sky, then again at the hotel, and immediately he understands: what he had seen when he glanced at the windows of the Oak was a vision of the Zetland, at night, when the windows would blaze gold against the sky. Crouching under the sill, he would peer into the smoky room, marvelling at the bottles that were ranged on the glass shelves behind the bar. Indescribable tastes must come out of these bottles, he used to think, because their colours were so extraordinary: a fragile butterfly blue, a radiant amber, a green like new leaves. He would wait, kneeling by the gutter of the terrace, and sometimes his father would appear, setting things right, exchanging a word with a member of his staff. They were like the crew of a ship, each with his role to perform, and the Zetland did resemble a ship, when you looked at it from below the road, especially when it was dark and the mist had risen, and the turret looked like the bridge of a liner, with the slender flagpole on its roof, half hidden in the mist, as though it were emerging from a fog-bank. Sitting on the bench, he gives himself up to his memory of his father’s hotel, to the image of the buildings of Saltburn’s seafront as it appeared from the pier, with the flat spools of foam unwinding on the black water below his feet. The beach was clammy under the light of the moon and the far-off street lamps, and he would stare to find the place where the sand blended into the water, or the seam where the sky became the coal-coloured sea. Some nights, looking out to sea, he could not tell which lights were stars and which were tankers, and the lights of the Zetland were almost extinguished by the mist that flowed around its windows. Before going home to prepare his father’s meal, he might stop at the terrace steps, lured by the burnished interiors of the hotel. Hunched on the terrace, he would gaze at the glossy wooden panels of the walls, at the lift’s dark veneered doors, at the wide stone fireplace of the lounge, at the waitresses who carried tureens and covered dishes as big as rugby balls to a dining room that had a Turkish carpet and a chandelier like a bush of ice hung upside down. Often, when he glimpsed his father moving purposefully across the foyer, alone, like a ship’s captain making sure that all was in order, he would try to imagine how it would be to follow his father around the building, becoming familiar with every room and corridor of it, learning how the Zetland worked. It would be better than any other job he could do, helping to run a building that existed only to give pleasure, a place to which people would return year after year in the certainty of being happy there. Everything seemed well made in the Zetland – there was that as well, and the sense that something of the town’s history was kept alive there, while everything around it changed at a faster speed. But now the Zetland has become apartments and the station is used only by a two-carriage train that shuttles along the coast to Darlington, where Stephenson’s Locomotion stands like a dinosaur in the museum.

      The roar of tyres on the gravel eradicates his reminiscence. Headlight beams swing across the grass in front of him and splay against the hotel’s façade. He sees Mr Morton get out of the car, smack the roof, and remain standing where he’s been left.

      ‘Mr Morton, good evening,’ he calls, crossing the lawn.

      ‘Mr Caldecott,’ Mr Morton replies pleasantly, raising a hand to give an incomplete wave.

      ‘Going in?’

      ‘Presently, yes,’ says Mr Morton, turning away again.

      ‘I’m sorry. I thought – Shall I leave you be?’

      ‘No, no. Please don’t. Just taking a last dose of country air,’ Mr Morton explains, with an appreciative sniff.

      ‘Same here,’ he says. ‘It’s been a fine day, hasn’t it?’

      ‘It has,’ Mr Morton distractedly agrees.

      ‘The storm is on its way, I think,’ he remarks. ‘A day behind schedule.’

      ‘I think so. Yes. The air’s very thick tonight.’

      ‘It is. Very heavy.’

      Mr Morton raises his face, smiling slightly, as if the moonlight felt as good as sunlight on his skin, and then he yawns. ‘I do apologise. It’s been a long day. An early start.’

      ‘Yes. I’d hoped to catch you after breakfast, but you were leaving as I arrived.’

      ‘My sister’s clock runs on medieval time. Her day starts at sunrise.’

      ‘Ah, your sister. I see. I had wondered. Sister or cousin, I thought. There’s a resemblance.’

      ‘Poor girl.’

      ‘So your visit to the Oak –?’

      ‘Filial duty, partly,’ Mr Morton replies, addressing the earth at his feet. ‘A family reunion.’

      ‘I see, I see.’

      Another taxi is coming up the drive; Mr Morton turns to track its progress to the porch. ‘Rarely satisfactory, family gatherings, don’t you find?’

      ‘I don’t think I’m in a position to comment.’

      ‘You have no family?’ he asks bluntly.

      ‘Not much of one. The parents have long gone. An aunt in Rhyl. That’s all for the older generation.’

      ‘And are you married, Mr Caldecott?’

      ‘Not any more.’

      ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

      ‘Quite all right. I’m thoroughly divorced. And you?’

      ‘No wife. Father, mother, sister, a phalanx of aunts and uncles, but no wife.’

      ‘I see,’ he says. They stand a yard apart, both facing the portentous expanse of slate-green cloud, as though they were awaiting together the appearance of something in the sky. ‘Is the room to your liking?’

      ‘Very comfortable,’ says Mr Morton.

      ‘Good.’

      ‘Positively sumptuous.’

      ‘Good.’

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