Paul nodded, although he had failed to notice, on this occasion, whether the waitress was cute or not. His head was still full of Malvina— from whom he now received another text message, just as he was gearing himself up to start talking to Rolf about his reasons for wanting to meet again.
Hope not interrupting vital discussions. Just wanted to say am still thinking of u. Always always always. Call later 2nite if u can? xxx
Paul put the phone away in his pocket after reading this and hoped that his smile had not betrayed too much.
“Friske asparges means fresh asparagus, presumably,” said Rolf, looking down at the menu over the top of his glasses. “With rødtunge, which can only be some kind of red fish—I suppose a snapper?” He gave the menu another brief glance and then laid it down. “What proportion of text messages, I wonder, are on a sexual or romantic theme? Ninety or ninety-five per cent, would you think? I wonder if there’s been any research done into the subject yet.”
Paul laughed uneasily. “I hope you don’t think—”
“I imagine that Mr. Tony Blair himself is texting you on a matter of state. Either that or your wife still harbours enough romantic feelings to send you virtual billets doux during your business trips abroad. How long have you been married now?”
“Five years. Yourself?”
“Twelve.”
Rolf added nothing to this bald information, and began spreading butter thickly on to a chunk of rye bread.
Paul hovered for a moment on the edge of the precipice—no more than that; it was really an easy leap to make—and then blurted out:
“I’m in love with somebody else.”
Rolf bit into his bread, leaving a perfect semi-circle of teeth marks in the butter. “Ah, yes. Well, that happens. That certainly happens.”
“You don’t sound very surprised,” said Paul, rather offended to find this momentous confession being received with such insouciance.
“Who is she?” Rolf asked.
“Her name’s Malvina. She’s my media adviser.”
“Is that the same as a research assistant?”
“I suppose so, more or less.”
“Hm.” Rolf grunted. “No marks for originality, Paul. How old is she?”
“Twenty.”
He raised his eyebrows, tutted, and chewed on some more bread. “Dear me.”
“I know how that sounds,” said Paul. “But it’s the real thing. It really is . . . the real thing.”
“Oh, I can see that,” Rolf assured him.
“You can? How?”
“It’s in your eyes. They look desperate. The look of a man experiencing temporary euphoria, when underneath he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s going to do.” Paul was regarding him disbelievingly, so he added: “I know what I’m talking about, Paul. I’ve seen that look before.”
“Really? Where might that have been?”
“In the mirror. Twice.”
The waitress came to take their order, and Rolf got to work on the serious business of ordering food and the even more serious business of flirting with her. Within a few minutes he had established that she was a student at the university in Aalborg, reading biological sciences, that she had spent three months last summer in the United States, that she had two brothers and no boyfriend, that she kept in shape by doing yoga three times a week and she thought that Radiohead were overrated. She also persuaded them to try a house speciality called Hvidvin med brombœrlikøk, which she explained was a white wine supplemented with redcurrant liqueur. She brought them two tall glasses and after drinking his down within a few seconds, Rolf demanded that she bring them two more.
When they were both thoroughly drunk and thoroughly well fed, Rolf said to Paul: “A case can be made for saying that a male is simply a defective female. What do you make of that?”
“I’m not familiar with that theory,” said Paul, frowning.
“Well, you can look at it from a biological point of view,” said Rolf. “The presence of the Y-chromosome itself is a sign of deficiency. But you don’t even have to be so specific about it. It’s just common sense. Look at that waitress, for instance.”
“Lise.”
“Lise. Is her name Lise? Did she tell us that?”
“She did. A number of times.”
“Well. Look at her, anyway—trotting up and down that staircase, being so effortlessly charming to everybody. What is she, twenty-one, twenty-two? Look at the way our eyes follow her. What do we know about her? Only that she’s young, and she has a body that we both crave. Apart from that, nothing. She could be a serial murderer, for all that we know. And yet either one of us, after a couple more drinks, would put our family lives at risk if she asked us to come back to her room. Wouldn’t we? It’s a pathological disorder of the male sex. We have no loyalty—no nesting instinct— none of the healthy, natural things women are born with. We’re defective. A man is just a defective woman. It’s as simple as that.”
“I think you’re talking rubbish,” said Paul, “with the greatest respect. For one thing, why would she ask one of us back to her room? We’re old men, as far as she’s concerned.”
“You say that, Paul. But you have won the heart—apparently—of a beautiful twenty-year-old woman. So it can happen.”
“That’s different. What’s happening between me and Malvina has been building up for a long time. Last night it just came to a kind of crisis.”
Rolf laughed quietly. “The crisis has not yet begun, Paul. It hasn’t even begun.”
“I know, it’ll probably get into the papers. Nearly has already, in fact. But I can handle—”
“That’s not what I mean,” said Rolf. “That’s nothing. Nothing at all.” They had moved on to brandy by now: he swirled the ochre liquid around in its bell-like glass, his face souring into depression as he did so. “Anyway,” he said, snapping out of it with a willed effort, “talking of crises, isn’t it about time we got down to business? Or am I expected to sit here all night waiting for you to tell me what it is you want from me?”
“What makes you think I want anything from you?”
“You didn’t contact me this week in order to reminisce, Paul. Credit me with a little knowledge of human nature. Almost the last thing I said to you when we saw each other all those years ago—I don’t remember the exact words, perhaps you do—was to thank you for saving my life and to assure you that I would always be in your debt. It’s not the kind of thing you forget easily, is it? And now suddenly, out of the blue, you call me, after more than twenty years. This week, Paul. Now why would a British Member of Parliament, with a constituency in the West Midlands, contact a member of the board of management of BMW this week, of all weeks? Hm? It’s a real puzzle, isn’t it?”
Paul looked away, unable to meet his eye. But Rolf insisted: “I don’t mind, you know. I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t wanted to help you. But I’m not sure there’s much I can do.”
“If I . . .” Paul began, with some difficulty; then floundered and tried again. “If you and I can just . . . discuss some options. It’s just that—the thing is, I may have got myself into a bit of a spot with the party, and I’ve been a bit inactive on the Longbridge front over the last few weeks, a bit preoccupied. If I could just show them, somehow, that I was . . . on the ball.”
“And this ‘spot’ you’re in—it has something to do with your media adviser?”
“Possibly.”
“Well then. It’s always best to be direct, Paul. We save so much time that way. Just tell me what it is you want. No embarrassment. Straight to the point.”
“All right then.” Paul laid down his brandy glass, and clasped his hands together, almost in an attitude of prayer. Waves of throaty laughter reached them from the party downstairs. He waited for the noise to subside. “You shouldn’t be selling Rover. BMW shouldn’t be selling Rover. You should commit yourself to the Longbridge plant, and make a go of it.”
Rolf seemed genuinely taken aback, for the fir
st time that evening. “But what you are proposing, Paul—or suggesting, rather—flies in the face of your own government’s policy. Correct me if I’m wrong about that. But since the Alchemy bid failed, we are in talks with another buyer: the Phoenix Consortium. The talks are going well. And your Mr. Byers supports the Phoenix bid. In fact I was talking to him about it only this afternoon.”
“That’s true. But my information is that the Phoenix bid is not realistic.”
“And where does this information come from? The newspapers, I suppose.”
“Mainly,” Paul was forced to admit.
“Well, as we know, you shouldn’t believe everything that you read in the newspapers.”
“You mean, you’re considering it?”
“What’s the alternative? That we make thousands of workers redundant, and create a public relations disaster for ourselves?”
“There’s a much simpler solution. Keep Longbridge going.”
Rolf gave a short, dismissive laugh. “And lose millions of pounds every week?”
“The losses aren’t nearly as high as you’ve been making out. A lot of those figures are down to your own accounting methods.”
Whether because this was true, or whether because he was impressed by the sudden passion and sincerity with which Paul seemed to be arguing his point, Rolf fell silent for a while. He appeared to be considering the matter seriously.
“Well, let me get this clear,” he said at last. “You want me to persuade the board to change their minds about this—to perform a complete U-turn, in effect—so that you can go home and tell the news to your Mr. Blair and present yourself as a hero. The man who saved Longbridge.”
“Put like that—”
“Be honest with me, Paul. However much that goes against your training. Is that what you want me to do?”
Paul could see no point in dissembling. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
Rolf looked at him, now, as if it had finally occurred to him that he might be someone to reckon with. Otherwise, his expression gave nothing away—any more than his words. “Very well,” he said, scraping back his chair. “I’ll sleep on it.” And signalled across the room to Lise for the bill.
Paul awoke the next morning with a severe hangover and didn’t make it down to breakfast. Rolf, however, must have arisen early, for it was only just after nine o’clock when he knocked firmly on Paul’s door and said: “Are you awake? Hurry up! I have to leave in an hour and a half—and we have a journey to make before then.”
Paul ran his head under the cold tap, swallowed two paracetamol and shuffled downstairs. Rolf was waiting for him in the street, wearing a pleased expression and standing beside a shiny, lightweight bicycle: a tandem, to be precise.
“What do you think?” he said. “It’s a nice one, isn’t it?”
Paul walked around the bicycle, inspecting it from every angle with the air (not entirely affected) of an expert.
“Not bad,” he said. “Not bad at all. Where did you get this from?”
“There’s a hire shop in the town. I thought it would be the simplest way to get there.”
“Where are we going?” asked Paul.
“To where the seas meet, of course. Climb on—you’re going to be steering. I’ve got to take my luggage with me.”
And so they set off, turning right along Oddevej and then continuing past the Grenen Kunstmuseum on to Fyrvej and up towards the tip of the peninsula. There were few people around to take notice of them at this hour, but they must have made an incongruous couple, all the same. Paul, at least, was dressed for the part, in the standard New-Labour-MP-off-duty uniform of open-necked shirt and crisply ironed pale blue jeans. Rolf was not only still wearing his dark business suit, but he also had his attaché case carefully balanced on the handlebars in front of him as he rode. Neither of them cared what they looked like, anyway. They were enjoying the sensation—which came back to them as soon as they left the town behind and set out on the long, unswerving road to Grenen itself—of being twelve- and fourteen-year-old boys again.
“This takes you back, doesn’t it?” Rolf shouted; and when Paul turned to look at him he saw that Rolf’s face, besides turning slightly red even after these moderate exertions, was none the less suffused by a kind of boyish exhilaration which seemed to have wiped it clean of frown-lines and all the other signs of incipient middle age.
After that they said nothing, and Paul savoured once again the absolute silence: a silence which seemed to mark the suspension of time; so that it seemed not only possible, while he was here, to live in the moment (which he could never do in London, so temporal was his existence there, so thoroughly comprising plans, forethoughts, survival strategies), but possible, too, to conceive of that moment as being stretched, eternal. This realization, fleeting as it was, gave him a feeling of delicious luxury; and as he pedalled through the featureless landscape, the kilometres falling away behind him, he saw a vision. A memory rose up before him: Marie, the Danish boys’ grandmother, reaching for the cord of the Venetian blind at the end of her long story, raising the blind to the very top of her high sitting-room window so that the room was suddenly flooded with the afternoon sunlight, grey-blue like her eyes . . . The vision was fugitive, evanescent, but while it hovered before him it seemed so vivid, so real that it took his breath away and he forgot everything else: where he was, who he was with, what he was still hoping to gain from this strange and wonderful reunion.
“Hey, Englishman!” Rolf called suddenly. “No slacking at the front there! This is a two-man job, remember.”
Paul realized that he had stopped pedalling.
“Sorry!” he called, and went back to work with redoubled energy.
The road hugged the shoreline for a while and then curved away, in a slow, graceful arc, past a festively painted lighthouse, until it dropped them gently into the car park at the northernmost point of the peninsula. They left the tandem, unlocked, in one of the many bicycle racks (nobody seemed to give very much thought to crime in this part of the world) and completed the journey to the beach on foot, taking off their shoes and socks as they made their way through the soft rise and fall of the dunes.
“Ha! Remember that?” said Rolf, pointing behind them. And there in the distance was an odd sight, a single railway coach being towed by a tractor, taking the first handful of early-morning tourists to the furthest part of the beach, the very tip of Denmark where the Kattegat and the Skagerrak seas ran into each other.
“Yes, I remember,” said Paul; and stopped, after a few more steps, to read the prominently displayed notices, in English, Danish and German, which warned visitors that the welcoming, unpretentious nature of this landscape concealed hidden dangers.
“Livsfare,” he read, aloud. “Were these here before?”
“Oh yes,” said Rolf. “I believe so.”
“Didn’t your mother manage to drive her car on to this beach somehow? And didn’t the fire brigade or someone have to come and dig her out?”
“That’s right. Poor Mutti—she died two years ago, and she was the world’s worst driver right up until the end. That was the day . . . that was the thing that made Jorgen, or whatever his name was, tease me so badly. What I said to him in response was very insulting, I think. I still blush when I think of it.”
“It was a long time ago,” said Paul, as they started to walk on. “We were all very young.”
Rolf shook his head. “I should not have said it.”
They walked close to the water’s edge, where the sand was dark and firm. It was getting on for ten o’clock, now, and the tourists were swelling in number, larking about in groups of three and four, endlessly taking photographs of the beach from every conceivable angle. The barefoot businessman and his politician friend seemed more conspicuous than ever.
At last they reached the end of the peninsula and, shielding their eyes against the morning sunlight which the water was now throwing back at them with dazzling intensity, they stared in renewed wonderment at the
two sets of waves which ran together, forming strange triangular patterns as they did so, mingling and coalescing in what the teenage Benjamin had once described as “foamy, promiscuous couplings.” They smiled at each other, wanting to share the moment, but neither of them said anything at all for many minutes. The beeping of Paul’s mobile told him that another text message had arrived, but he didn’t look at it yet. He would save that for later.
When Rolf spoke, at last, it was very slowly, as if dredging up the words from some deep ocean of thought. “Strangely . . .” he began, “strangely, I have no memory of what it felt like, to be lost out there in the water, dragged down towards the sea-bed by some elemental force. I must have believed that I was dying. I don’t even remember you saving me. I mean, I know that it happened, but I cannot picture it: I can’t . . . bring the sensation to mind.” He looked towards the horizon and his eyes narrowed further against the blinding sun. “The mind has fuses, I suppose. Yes, I know that to be the case.”
“I don’t remember it too well, either,” said Paul. And he added, sensing the banality of his own words: “We’ve both come a long way since then.”
“I wonder if you were right to save me,” said Rolf, unexpectedly.
“What do you mean?” asked Paul, genuinely shocked.
“The absolute sanctity of human life,” Rolf mused, half to himself. “I’ve never really understood that concept. Or subscribed to it, I should say. I suppose that, in my moral philosophy, I’ve always inclined towards the utilitarian. When you ran out into that water and saved me it was an unthinking act, an animal impulse. I wonder whether I would have done the same thing.”
“When you see somebody drowning,” said Paul, “you don’t think about whether their life is worth saving. You don’t stand there for ten minutes weighing up their contribution to humanity. There isn’t time, for one thing. You just dive in and do it.”
“Of course,” Rolf answered. “I understand that. I simply mean that, from a rational point of view, I believe you may have done the wrong thing.”
“The wrong thing?”
“If I had drowned that day . . . Well, my parents would have grieved, that goes without saying. But after that—” he shook his head “—my wife would have met somebody else, who would not have made her as unhappy as I have. That’s for certain. My love affairs, which caused nothing but pain to everyone concerned, would not have occurred. My employers could easily have appointed someone else to their board, someone just as capable.” He turned to Paul and there was an edge of anger to his voice now, almost violence. “You see, I am under no illusions about myself. I’ve realized that I am a selfish man. I care very little about the happiness of others.”