Fortnight of Fear Read online

  CHANGELING

  The elevator door opened and there she was, looking directly into his eyes as if she had known that he was standing on the other side. Tall, beautiful, dressed utterly in white. He hesitated for a moment and then stepped back one half-shuffle to allow her to pass.

  “Pardon mivrouw,” he acknowledged. She smiled briefly but didn’t reply. She passed him in a pungent swirl of Calvin Klein’s Obsession, and he turned around and watched her walk across the marble lobby and out through the revolving door. Her long brunette hair was lifted for a moment by the April wind out on the hotel steps. Then the doorman came forward to salute her and she was gone.

  “You’re going up?” asked an irritated American who was waiting for him in the elevator, his finger pressed on the Doors Open button.

  “I’m sorry? Oh, no. I’ve changed my mind.”

  He heard the man growl, “For Chrissakes, some people …” and then he found himself hurrying across the lobby and out through the door, just in time to see her climbing into the back of a taxi.

  The doorman approached him and touched his cap. “Taxi, sir?”

  “No, no thank you.” He stood holding his briefcase, the skirts of his raincoat flapping, watching the woman’s taxi turn into Sarphatistraat, feeling abandoned and grainy and weird, like a character in a black-and-white art movie. The doorman stood beside him, smiling uneasily.

  “Do you happen to know that lady’s name?” he asked. His voice sounded blurry in the wind. The doorman shook his head.

  “Is she a guest here?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. It is not permissible for me to say.”

  Gil reached into his inside pocket and for one moment considered bribery; but there was something in the doorman’s smile that warned him against it. He said, “Oh, okay, sure,” and retreated awkwardly back through the revolving door. The two elderly hall porters beamed and nodded at him as he returned to the elevator. Stan and Ollie, one thin and one fat. They were obviously quite accustomed to irrational behaviour.

  Gil stood in the oak-paneled elevator as it took him up to the third floor and scrutinized himself in the brass-framed mirror with as much intensity as if he were a business partner whom he suspected of cracking up. He had never done anything in years as spontaneous as chasing after that woman. What the hell had come over him? He was married, with two children, he was right on top of his job. He had a six-bedroom house in Working, a new Granada Scorpio, and he had been profiled in Business Week as one of the new breed of “totally committed” young entrepreneurs.

  And yet he had hurried after that unknown woman as gauche and panicky as an adolescent autograph-hunter.

  He closed the door of his suite behind him and stood for a long time in the middle of the room with his briefcase still in his hand, thinking. Then he set the briefcase down and slowly took off his coat. “Pity about Gil, he’s thrown a wobbly.” He could almost hear them talking about him in the office. “He was absolutely fine until that Amsterdam business. Probably suffering from overwork.”

  He went to the window and opened it. The hotel room overlooked the Amstel River, wide and gray, where it was crossed by the wide elevating bridge called the Hogesluis. Trams rumbled noisily over the sluis, their bells ringing, on their way to the suburbs. The wind blew so coldly through the window that the net curtains were lifted, shuddering, and Gil found that there were tears in his eyes.

  He checked his pulse. It was slightly too fast, but nothing to take to the doctor. He didn’t feel feverish, either. He had been working for four days, Tuesday to Friday, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but he had been careful not to drink too much and to rest whenever he could. Of course, it was impossible to judge what effect this round of negotiations might have had on his brain. But he felt normal.

  But he thought of her face and he thought of her hair and he thought of the way in which she had smiled at him; a smile that had dissolved as quickly as soluble aspirin; and then was gone. And against all the psychological and anthropological logic in the world, he knew that he had fallen in love with her. Well, maybe not in love, maybe not actually in love, not the way he loved Margaret. But she had looked into his eyes and smiled at him and wafted past in beguiling currents of Obsession, and in ten seconds he had experienced more excitement, more curiosity, more plain straightforward desire than he had in the last ten years of marriage.

  It’s ridiculous, he said to himself. It’s just a moment of weakness. I’m tired, I’m suffering from stress. I’m lonely, too. Nobody ever understands how lonely it can be, traveling abroad on business. No wonder so many businessmen stay in their hotel rooms, drinking too much whiskey and watching television programmes they can’t understand. There is no experience so friendless as walking the streets of a strange city, with nobody to talk to.

  He closed the window and went to the mini-bar to find himself a beer. He switched on the television and watched the news in Dutch. Tomorrow morning, after he had collected the signed papers from the Gemeentevervoerbedrijf, he would take a taxi straight to Schiphol and fly back to London. Against ferocious competition from Volvo and M.A.N. Diesel, he had won an order for twenty-eight new buses for Amsterdam’s municipal transport system, all to be built in Oxford.

  On the phone, Brian Taylor had called him “a bloody marvel.” Margaret had squealed in delight, like she always did.

  But the way the wind had lifted up that woman’s hair kept running and re-running in his mind like a tiny scrap of film that had been looped to play over and over. The revolving door had turned, her hair had lifted. Shining and dark, the kind of hair that should be spread out over silk pillows.

  It began to grow dark and the lights began to dip and sparkle in the river and the trams began to grind their way out to Oosterpark and the farther suburbs. Gil consulted the room-service menu to see what he could have for supper, but after he had called up to order the smoked eel and the veal schnitzel, with a half-bottle of white wine, he was taken with a sudden surge of panic about eating alone, and he called back and canceled his order.

  “You don’t want the dinner, sir?” The voice was flat, Dutch-accented, polite but curiously hostile.

  “No thank you. I’ve … changed my mind.”

  He went to the bathroom and washed his face and hands. Then he straightened his necktie, shrugged on his coat, picked up his key, and went down to the hotel’s riverside bar for a drink. The bar was crowded with Japanese and American businessmen. Only two women, and both of them were quite obviously senior executives, one lopsidedly beautiful, the other as hard-faced as a man. He sat up on a bar-stool and ordered a whiskey-and-soda.

  “Cold wind today, hmh?” the barman asked him.

  He drank his whiskey too quickly, and he was about to order another one when the woman came and sat just one stool away from him, still dressed in white, still fragrant with Obsession. She smiled to the barman and asked for a Bacardi, in English.

  Gil felt as if he were unable to breathe. He had never experienced anything like it. It was a kind of panic, like claustrophobia, and yet it had an extraordinary quality of erotic compulsion, too. He could understand why people half-strangled themselves to intensify their sexual arousal. He stared at himself glassy-eyed in the mirror behind the Genever gin-bottles, trying to detect any signs of emotional breakdown. But did it show, when you finally cracked? Did your face fall apart like a broken jug? Or was it all kept tightly inside of you? Did it snap in the back of your brain where nobody could see?

  He glanced covertly sideways, first at the woman’s thigh, then more boldly at her face. She was looking straight ahead, at the mirror. Her nose was classically straight, her eyes were cobalt-blue, slightly slanted, very European. Her lips were glossed with crimson. He noticed a bracelet of yellow-and-white gold, intertwined, that must have cost the equivalent of three months of his salary, including expenses, and a gold Ebel wristwatch. Her nails were long and crimson and perfect. She moved slightly sideways on her stool and he noticed the narrowness of her w
aist, and the full sway of her breasts. She’s naked underneath that dress, he thought to himself, or practically naked. She’s just too incredibly sexy to be true.

  What could he say to her? Should he say anything? Could he say anything? He thought dutifully for a moment about Margaret, but he knew that he was only being dutiful. This woman existed on a different planet from Margaret, she was one of a different species. She was feminine, sexual, undomesticated, elegant, and probably dangerous, too.

  The barman approached him. “Can I fix you another drink, sir?”

  “I – unh –”

  “Oh, go ahead,” the woman smiled. “I can’t bear to drink alone.”

  Gil flushed, and grinned, and shrugged, and said, “All right, then. Yes.” He turned to the woman and asked, “How about you?”

  “Thank you,” she acknowledged, passing her glass to the barman, although there was a curious intonation in her voice which made it sound as if she were saying thank you for something else altogether.

  The barman set up the drinks. They raised their glasses to each other and said, “Prost!”

  “Are you staying here?” Gil asked the woman. He wished his words didn’t sound so tight and high-pitched.

  “In Amsterdam?”

  “I mean here, at the Amstel Hotel.”

  “No, no,” she said. “I live by the sea, in Zandvoort. I only came here to meet a friend of mine.”

  “You speak perfect English,” he told her.

  “Yes,” she replied. Gil waited, expecting her to tell him what she did for a living, but she remained silent.

  “I’m in transportation,” he volunteered. “Well, buses, actually.”

  She focused her eyes on him narrowly but still she said nothing. Gil said, “I go back to London tomorrow. Job’s over.”

  “Why did you come running after me?” she asked. “You know when – this afternoon, when I was leaving the hotel. You came running after me and you stood outside the hotel and watched me go.”

  Gil opened and closed his mouth. Then he lifted both hands helplessly, and said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know. It was – I don’t know. I just did it.”

  She kept her eyes focused on him as sharply as a camera. “You desire me,” she said.

  Gil didn’t reply, but uncomfortably sat back on his barstool.

  Without hesitation, the woman leaned forward and laid her open hand on his thigh. She was very close now. Her lips were parted and he could see the tips of her front teeth. He could smell the Bacardi on her breath. Warm, soft, even breath.

  “You desire me,” she repeated.

  She gave him one quick, hard squeeze, and then sat back. Her face was filled with silent triumph. Gil looked at her with a mixture of excitement and embarrassment and disbelief. She had actually reached over and touched him – not touched him, caressed him, this beautiful woman in the white dress, this beautiful woman whom every businessman in the bar would have given his Christmas bonus just to sit with.

  “I don’t even know your name,” said Gil, growing bolder.

  “Is that necessary?”

  “I don’t really suppose it is. But I’d like to. My name’s Gil Batchelor.”

  “Anna.”

  “Is that all, just Anna?”

  “It’s a palindrome,” she smiled. “That means that it’s the same backwards as it is forwards. I try to live up to it.”

  “Could I buy you some dinner?”

  “Is that necessary?”

  Gil took three long heartbeats to reply. “Necessary in what sense?” he asked her.

  “In the sense that you feel it necessary to court me somehow. To buy me dinner; to impress me with your taste in wine; to make witty small-talk. To tell me all those humorous anecdotes which I am sure your colleagues have heard one hundred times at least. Is all that necessary?”

  Gil licked his lips. Then he said, “Maybe we should take a bottle of champagne upstairs.”

  Anna smiled. “I’m not a prostitute, you know. The barman thinks I’m a prostitute, but of course prostitutes are good for business, provided they are suitably dressed and behave according to the standards expected by the hotel. If you take me up to your room now, let me tell you truthfully that you will be only the second man I have ever slept with.”

  Gil gave Anna a complicated shrug with which he intended to convey the feeling that he was flattered by what she had said, but couldn’t take her seriously. A woman with Anna’s style and Anna’s body and Anna’s sexual directness had slept in the whole of her life with only one man?

  Anna said, “You don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t have to believe you, do I? That’s part of the game.” Gil thought that response was quite clever and sophisticated.

  But Anna reached out toward him and gently picked a single hair from the shoulder of his coat and said very quietly, “It’s not a game, my love.”

  She undressed in silence, close to the window, so that her body was outlined by the cold glow of the streetlights outside, but her face remained in shadow. Her dress slipped to the floor with a sigh. Underneath, she was naked except for a tiny cache-sexe of white embroidered cotton. Her breasts were large, almost too large for a woman with such a narrow back, and her nipples were wide and pale as sugar-frosting.

  Gil watched her, unbuttoning his shirt. He could sense her smiling. She came over and buried the fingers of one hand into the curly brown hair on his chest, and tugged at it. She kissed his cheeks, then his lips. Then she reached down and started to unfasten his belt.

  Gil thought: this is morally wrong, damn it. I’m cheating the woman who gave me my children; the woman who’s waiting for me to come home tomorrow. But how often does a man run into a sexual dream like this? Supposing I tell her to get dressed and leave. I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering what it could have been like.

  Anna slid her hands into the back of his trousers. Her sharp fingernails traced the line of his buttocks, and he couldn’t help shivering. “Lie down on the bed,” she whispered. “Let me make love to you.”

  Gil sat on the edge of the bed, and struggled out of his trousers. Then Anna pushed him gently backwards. He heard the softest plucking of elastic as she took off her cache-sexe. She climbed astride his chest, and sat in the semi-darkness smiling at him, her hair like a soft and mysterious veil. “Do you like to be kissed?” she asked him. “There are so many ways to be kissed.”

  She lifted herself up, and teasingly lowered her vulva so that it kissed his lips. Her pubic hair was silky and long, and rose up in a plume. Gil kissed her, hesitantly at first, then deeper, holding her open with his fingers.

  She gave a deep, soft murmur of pleasure, and ran her fingers through his hair.

  They made love four times that night. Anna seemed to be insatiable. When the first slate-gray light of morning began to strain into the room, and the trams began to boom over Hogesluis again, Gil lay back in bed watching her sleep, her hair tangled on the pillow. He cupped her breast in his hand, and then ran his fingers gently all the way down the flatness of her stomach to her dark-haired sex. She was more than a dream, she was irresistible. She was everything that anybody could desire. Gil kissed her lightly on the forehead, and when she opened her eyes and looked up at him and smiled, he knew that he was already falling in love with her.

  “You have to go back to England today,” she said, softly.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You mean you could stay a little longer?”

  Gil looked at her, but at the same time he made a conscious effort to picture Margaret, as if he were watching a movie with a split screen. He could imagine Margaret sitting on the sofa sewing and glancing at the clock every few minutes to see if it was time for him to be landing at Gatwick Airport. He could see her opening the front door and smiling and kissing him and telling him what Alan had been doing at playschool.

  “Maybe another day,” Gil heard himself saying, as if there were somebody else in the room who spoke just like
him.

  Anna drew his head down and kissed him. Her tongue slipped in between his teeth. Then she lay back and whispered, “What about two days? I could take you to Zandvoort. We could go to my house, and then we could spend all day and all night and all the next day, making love.”

  “I’m not sure that I can manage two days.”

  “Call your office. Tell them you may be able to sell the good burghers of Amsterdam a few more of your buses. A day and a night and a day. You can go home on Sunday night. The plane won’t be so crowded then.”

  Gil hesitated, and then kissed her. “All right then. What the hell. I’ll call the airline after breakfast.”

  “And your wife? You have to call your wife.”

  “I’ll call her.”

  Anna stretched out like a a beautiful sleek animal. “You are a very special gentle man, Mr Gil Batchelor,” she told him.

  “Well, you’re a very special lady.”

  Margaret had sniffled: that had made him feel so guilty that he had nearly agreed to come back to England straight away. She missed him, everything was ready for him at home, Alan kept saying, “Where’s daddy?” And why did he have to stay in Holland for another two days? Surely the Dutch people could telephone him, or send him a telex? And why him? George Kendall should have been selling those extra buses, not him.

  In the end, it was her whining that gave him the strength to say, “I have to, that’s all. I don’t like it any more than you do, darling, believe me. I miss you too, and Alan. But it’s only two more days. And then we’ll all go to Brighton for the day, what about that? We’ll have lunch at Wheeler’s.”

  He put down the phone. Anna was watching him across the room. She was sitting on a large white leather sofa, wearing only thin pajama trousers of crêpe silk. Between her bare breasts she held a heavy crystal glass of Bacardi. The coldness of the glass had made her nipples tighten. She was smiling at him in a way that he found oddly disturbing. She looked almost triumphant, as if by persuading him to lie to Margaret, she had somehow captured a little part of his soul.