The Extremes

  At the bottom of the message were printed the names of the four GunHo executives on whose behalf the booking was being made. Amy stared at these for a moment, then went upstairs with the fax. Nick was still asleep.

  The day went by, and although Nick did appear at midday he was obviously in another bad mood. Amy knew better than to try to get through to him.

  In the afternoon she went for a brief walk, annoyed with herself for allowing him to control her with his moods, even, as things now stood, with her own anticipation of his moods. It wasn’t as if the news was bad: it promised a sudden increase in business, with nearly half the hotel’s rooms occupied, probably for the first time since the media circus had left town last summer. The further news, that the people from Taiwan would be staying half-board—which meant they would be in the hotel for dinner every evening—suggested that she and Nick could now afford to take on extra staff, at least on a temporary basis. As she walked through the Old Town park, Amy was already making calculations about how much help would be needed in the kitchen, in the restaurant, and also for servicing the rooms. She knew Nick would baulk at first at the idea of paying more staff, but the other side of the equation indicated that the hotel would be profitable for the next two weeks at least, and possibly afterwards.

  When Amy returned to the hotel she noticed that Nick’s car was missing from its parking place, so she was able to stay out of his way for the rest of the day. His moods still mystified her. She had seen many sides of him in the past, when they were younger, but this destructive moodiness had not been one of them.

  That evening, after she had cooked and served Teresa Simons’ dinner, Amy went down to the bar, where she knew she would find Nick. He was there, propped up on the stool behind the counter, a paperback novel on his knee. Half a dozen customers were drinking at one of the tables by the window. The jukebox was playing.

  ‘I thought you’d like to see this,’ she said, trying to make it sound casual. She gave him the original fax message on its curl of thermal paper, and then used one of the cloth towels to wipe down the counter needlessly, while he read the fax.

  ‘Two weeks,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘The hotel will be busy.’

  ‘It’ll be a lot of work. And what sort of food will Chinese guests expect?’

  ‘That’s mentioned.’ She leaned over, and pointed out the sentence. ‘They say they expect international cuisine.’

  ‘That could be anything. Pity we don’t have a chef.’

  ‘We can manage, Nick! Come on…say you’re pleased!’

  ‘I’m pleased. I really am.’ He twisted his hand round the back of her neck, and gently pulled down her face for a kiss. ‘But do we have four rooms free with double beds? There are only ten rooms in the whole place, and six of those are singles or twin-bedded. Mrs Simons is in one of the doubles, isn’t she?’

  ‘That’s something I wanted to ask you about,’ Amy said. ‘I was wondering what you would think if we asked her to change rooms?’

  ‘Have you mentioned it to her?’

  ‘Not yet. The booking only came through today. I thought until the people in Taiwan made it definite we shouldn’t do anything.’

  ‘But this is a firm booking.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t think she likes this place,’ Nick said. ‘She never complains, but I’m certain she finds it uncomfortable. Just little things she lets slip.’

  ‘That’s what I think too. Maybe she would like to move out. This would give her an excuse.’

  ‘Do you think she needs one?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. She’s so polite it’s impossible to work out what she really means.’

  Nick put the fax message on the counter, where the curl of its paper made it stand up like a shallow arch. Amy picked it up again.

  ‘These don’t sound like Chinese names to me,’ she said. ‘Kravitz, Mitchell, Wendell, Jensen.’

  ‘GunHo Corporation,’ Nick said. ‘That doesn’t sound Chinese either. A bit oriental, but who can tell any more, and does it matter anyway? If they pay, we let them in.’

  ‘Did you notice? Two of these people are women?’

  ‘Yes, I did notice,’ Nick replied. ‘What do you think, Amy? Can we manage on our own, or should we think about getting a couple of extra staff in?’

  CHAPTER 11

  Nick was in the bar, waiting for something or other to happen, with not much hope that it would. Dick Cooden and his girlfriend June were playing pool; three men who he knew worked in a garage in Bexhill were standing at the far end of the bar, putting away a lot of pints of bitter; one of the tables near the door had a group of five youngsters perilously close to the minimum legal age, but he didn’t feel like checking. Other people had been in and out earlier, and there were always one or two who would straggle in shortly before closing time. Sitting in the bar was what he did, what he liked to do. Amy had gone to bed. He would close the bar in half an hour, once the Bexhill men had given up and gone home.

  Then Teresa Simons came in and ordered a bourbon and ice. He put in a single measure, and reached down the counter for the ice. When he turned back she had drained the glass in one gulp without waiting for the ice. He hadn’t known Americans would drink anything without ice.

  ‘You people serve small shots,’ she said. ‘Let me have another.’ He went to take the glass from her but she tightened her hold on it. ‘Would you make me one the way I like it? Let me show you, and then after that whenever I ask for a bourbon, you can fix it that way.’

  When he agreed she asked for a tall glass with several large chunks of ice, two shots of bourbon, and then some soda.

  He wrote down the cost of this and the first drink on the account he was keeping beneath the counter.

  ‘Are you finding what you want in the town?’ he said, making barman’s conversation.

  ‘What makes you think I’m looking for something?’

  ‘You’re obviously not here on holiday, so I assumed you were on a business trip.’

  ‘Kind of. Do people come to Bulverton on vacation?’

  ‘Some do. Not as many now as in the past. They like the way the town looks.’

  ‘The town’s pretty enough, but it’s kind of depressing.’

  ‘Most local people think there’s a good reason for that. You must know what happened last year.’

  ‘Yeah…It’s why I’m here, I guess.’

  ‘Amy said she thought you might be a reporter.’

  ‘What gave her that idea? My interest is…I guess you could say it’s more personal.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, surprised, because Amy’s suggestion had sounded right. ‘I didn’t realize. Did you have a relative here who was involved?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  She turned away from him sharply, almost literally giving him the shoulder, and looked towards the window. The bottom halves of the bar windows were frosted; all that could be seen through them were the diffused and haloed lights of the passing traffic. The three men from Bexhill wanted another round of drinks, so Nick went to attend to them. When he returned, Teresa Simons was facing the counter again, resting her elbows on the top and cradling her now empty glass. She indicated she wanted a refill, which he poured her, using fresh ice and a clean glass.

  ‘What about you, Nick? You don’t mind me calling you Nick? Your parents were caught up in the shooting, weren’t they?’

  ‘They were both killed, yes.’

  ‘Do you ever talk about it?’

  ‘Not a lot. There isn’t much to say, when you leave out all the obvious stuff.’

  ‘This used to be their hotel, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You really don’t want to discuss it, do you?’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about any more. They left me the hotel, and here I am. What I went through was less traumatic than some of the people here.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  He thought for a moment, trying to articulate fe
elings that had always remained undefined. He remembered how, when he had realized that he couldn’t cope with the idea of what Gerry Grove had done, he had begun to think in clichés. Soon, he heard other people spouting the same empty phrases: reporters on television, vicars in pulpits, leader-writers in newspapers, well-meaning visitors. He knew that those phrases, so quickly becoming familiar, simultaneously missed the true point and captured the essence of it. He learned the benefits of non-thought, non-articulation. Life went on and he joined in, because that way he was spared the need to think or to talk about it.

  ‘There were all those people dead,’ he said carefully. ‘I didn’t know them personally any more, because I’d been living away from the town, but I knew of them. Their names went on lists, their stories were told. All that grief, all those people being missed. The relatives, the parents, the children, the dead lovers, and a couple of strangers. At first nothing surprised me: of course the survivors were going to be shocked. That’s what happens when other people get killed. But the more I thought about it, the more complicated it seemed. I couldn’t understand anything. So I stopped trying to think.’

  Teresa was looking away, twirling ice cubes as he spoke.

  ‘But in a funny kind of way, you know, they were the ones who escaped, the people who were killed. They didn’t have to live with it afterwards. In some ways surviving is worse than being dead. People feel guilty that they survived, when a friend or a husband or wife didn’t. And then there are all those who were injured. Some recovered quickly, but there were others who didn’t, who never will. One of those is a teenage girl.’

  ‘Shelly Mercer,’ said Teresa.

  ‘You know about her?’

  ‘Yes, I heard. How’s she doing now?’

  ‘She came out of the coma and she’s out of hospital, but her parents can’t look after her at home. They’ve had to put her in a special nursing home, in Eastbourne.’

  He had been to visit Shelly one day, while she was still in intensive care in the Conquest Hospital in Hastings. He went with a small group of people from the town, all drawn to her by whatever it was that seemed to unite them. The feeling of guilt, he supposed.

  The excuse was the radio and CD player that the people in the town had bought for her. She had been saving up to buy one like it before she was shot, and a collection was set up for her. They took it along to the hospital and there was a presentation while a photographer from the Courier took some pictures. Nick had been stricken by the sight of Shelly; she was just a kid, swathed in dressings, kept alive by drips and tubes, monitored constantly by electronics. He could hardly even see her face, and none of them knew if she was conscious or understood who they were and what they were doing. They left the CD player in its box, put down their cards and flowers, and they went away.

  ‘What’s your interest in all this?’ he said to Teresa.

  ‘Intense. How about yours?’

  The swiftness of her response, and its fierceness, took him by surprise again. She was staring at him steadily, her eyes just a couple of feet away from his, an unsettling gaze. In the mix of different lights in the bar he could not tell the colour of her eyes, except that they were pale. He had never thought about them before. Now they momentarily eclipsed everything else in the room.

  She picked up her glass and drank from it. He heard the cubes clinking as they shifted position in the long tube of the glass. The sound made him remember a bar in St Louis he’d been in while he was on holiday in the US a few years before. It was hot weather, deep summer. All around him, in the air-conditioned chill, Americans were clinking ice cubes in tall glasses. So much ice, every day and everywhere in that vast country, all that fossil energy being used up to freeze water to make drinks seem more cooling and refreshing. In the three days Teresa had been staying at the White Dragon they had got through twice as much ice as normal. Every day they put two extra ice-moulds in the freezer in case the American guest wanted ice. And here she was, clinking it around in her highball.

  ‘Well?’ she said, putting down the glass. After just a couple of drinks she had acquired that directness, almost aggression, that some people take on when drinking. ‘What’s your own interest in it?’

  ‘Intense too, I suppose. I haven’t really thought about it like that.’

  ‘Getting over it?’

  ‘Starting to, I think.’

  ‘Look, if people ask what I’m doing here, tell them I’m a kind of historian.’

  ‘Is that what you really are?’

  ‘Kind of,’ she said, but she looked introspective for a moment, turning away from him to glance at the men from Bexhill as they laughed loudly at some joke. ‘I keep forgetting what you people went through. Did you ever hear of a place called Kingwood City, Texas?’

  ‘No, I didn’t, haven’t.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard of Bulverton. I guess that’s a kind of connection between us, if nothing else.’

  ‘What happened in Kingwood, was that similar to this?’

  ‘Kingwood City. The same.’

  ‘A shooting? And you lost someone?’

  ‘My husband. Andy. His name was Andy Simons, and he worked for the federal government, and he was shot in Kingwood City, Texas. That’s why I’m here, in Bulverton, East Sussex, because some goddamned bastard killed the man I loved.’

  She lowered her face, but her arm was stretched across the bar towards him, holding the glass. It was empty, apart from the barely melted ice cubes. She said nothing, but the drinker’s body-language said it all; he poured her another double whiskey.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  She looked up at him again, but now her gaze was not so steady. Her eyes had the glazed look familiar to everyone who has ever worked behind a bar and waited for the release of closing time. She was getting drunk more quickly than Nick had expected. While she used the soda syphon with concentrated accuracy, he quietly added the price of the new drink to her slate beneath the counter.

  ‘Do you want to talk about what happened?’ he said. He was the sympathetic barman, member of the caring profession for the drunk and the disconsolate.

  ‘No more than you did.’

  The of-age kids rose from their table with much scraping of chairs, and headed in an unruly bunch for the door. They left their table littered with empty glasses and snack bags. An insistent column of smoke was rising from the ashtray. Nick went round, cleared up the table, then doused the smouldering paper and cigarette ends in the ashtray and started to wash everything in the sink underneath the bar. As he did so the door behind him opened and Amy appeared.

  ‘Want me to take over for a while?’ she said, with what he took to be a suspicious glance in the direction of Teresa Simons.

  ‘No, it’s OK. I’ll be closing soon.’ He straightened, and turned to face her. She beckoned him down to the far end of the bar.

  ‘Is Mrs Simons all right?’ Amy said, over the music that was still coming from the jukebox, something else the kids had left behind.

  ‘She’s drinking a lot of bourbon, but she doesn’t have a long way to go home.’

  ‘Are you going to carry her upstairs after she’s passed out?’

  ‘Come off it, Amy!’ He gestured in irritation. ‘I thought you had gone to bed.’

  ‘I wasn’t tired. I could hear you talking down here.’

  ‘Look, I’m just the barkeep people tell their troubles to.’

  ‘She has troubles, has she?’

  ‘Don’t we all?’

  ‘She never seems to use the bar when I’m working in it.’

  ‘Maybe she feels she can open up to men.’

  ‘So what’s she been opening up to you about?’

  ‘Let’s do this later, Amy. OK?’

  ‘She can’t hear us.’

  ‘Even so. You’re being a bit bloody obvious.’

  ‘I don’t get any choice.’

  Her voice was rising, so Nick pushed past her and went out from behind the bar. He flicked the hidden switch at the
back of the jukebox, ensuring the music would fall silent after the current record.

  ‘If you’re closing, the barrel for the draught Guinness needs changing,’ Amy said.

  ‘I’ll do the cellar work in the morning.’

  ‘I thought you always said Guinness was best left to sit overnight.’

  ‘I’ll do it in the morning, Amy.’

  She shrugged, pushed past him and went through the door into the main part of the hotel. He dreaded what would be said, what might happen, when he eventually went upstairs to bed. He was still learning Amy, after all these years.

  Teresa Simons had finished her drink again, but now she was sitting erect on her stool, her hands resting lightly on the counter.

  ‘Did I hear you say you’re about to close?’ she said.

  ‘Not to you. You’re a resident. You can drink all night if you want.’

  ‘No thanks, Mr Surtees. That’s not my style.’

  ‘Nick,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, we agreed on that. Not my style, Nick. Hell, I don’t even like bourbon much. That was Andy’s drink, you know? I only started to drink it because of him, never had the guts to say I didn’t much care for it. Before that I used to drink beer. You know all about American beer, right? Doesn’t taste good, so you chill it right down so you can’t taste anything at all. That’s why people like Andy drink bourbon. Even he didn’t drink too much of it. Said he had to keep a clear head, or he’d lose his badge.’

  ‘His badge? Was he a cop?’ Nick said.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of a cop like you’re sort of a historian?’

  She was standing now, and looked remarkably steady on her feet for someone who had drunk so much bourbon in so short a time.

  ‘Hell, I guess it doesn’t matter any more. Andy was a special agent, with the Bureau.’