She pulled the seat-belt over her chest and found the buckle. He climbed in and sat slightly hunched, his head touching the roof lining, as if the car were a suit that was a size too small. He twisted the ignition key and the engine clattered into life, then he turned towards her. ‘I apologize if I’m not quite with it at the moment. I had a bit of grim news just before I came to pick you up.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘No – it’s –’ he shrugged. ‘My son’s on holiday in the South of France, staying with some friends who’ve a boy his age – they have a villa down there.’ His voice tailed and he pulled the car out, accelerating harshly. ‘I just had a phone call this evening – they had a ghastly accident on a speedboat yesterday.’ He braked at the junction and peered sternly out into the main road, as if he expected the traffic to stop under his
withering gaze. ‘Apparently they all went out in the boat to find a bay for a picnic and water-skiing. On the way back they ran over a swimmer – a girl.’
‘God!’ Frannie said. ‘Awful. Is she –’ she hesitated. ‘Badly hurt?’
‘She was killed.’
‘That’s terrible.’
He accelerated decisively out into a gap, alarmingly close to an oncoming car.
‘Is your son all right?’
He drove on without replying for some moments. ‘Fine. Edward’s fine.’ He said it rather oddly, she thought; quite defensively.
‘Shock sometimes hits people later,’ she said, remembering the time she had been a passenger in a motorway pile-up four years ago, and one of the cars behind had caught fire. Just a few flames under the bonnet at first. Everyone had tried to get the trapped driver out, but the flames had soon engulfed the car and beaten them back. She’d watched him banging the windscreen and yelling until she could bear it no longer and had had to turn away. It had been a week later that she’d had the first nightmare about it. She still dreamed of it now, occasionally.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Who was driving the boat?’
‘I’m not sure. It wasn’t Edward.’ He was about to say something else, then was silent.
‘What a horrible thing for a child to see,’ Frannie said.
‘I had a word with him over the phone. He seemed fine – far more concerned about whether I’d got his Scalextric working again – there was a problem with the transformer.’
She smiled. But there was no humour in Oliver’s
expression and he lapsed into silence. She watched him, the glare of each passing street light flaring on his face then fading. Something about his taut profile reminded her of a rabbit when it is caught in the glare of the headlights and doesn’t know which way to turn. Just for a moment. Then the impression was gone.
The restaurant was a cheap and cheery trattoria, with red-and-white tablecloths, strips of fish netting and wickered Chianti bottles strung from the walls. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, and stronger, sumptuous smells of hot olive oil and garlic, of searing meats and grilling fish. All the tables were occupied and the place had a crammed, lively atmosphere which made Frannie immediately feel comfortable.
A waiter with an accent Frannie recognized as Neapolitan led them down a staircase into an equally packed basement. There was a burst of raucous laughter from a large party of people in their twenties at the far end. Only two tables were unoccupied and he led them to one tucked in a corner alcove near the party. ‘You like an aperitif, perhaps?’ he said as he pushed Frannie’s chair in.
‘Yes, I – er –’ Oliver raised his eyes quizzically at Frannie.
‘Love one.’ She felt in need of a drink.
‘A couple of your cocktails.’
‘
Due Vito Fizzo
,’ he proclaimed, presented each of them with a large, handwritten menu and wheeled away. A packet of
pannini
lay beside each of their places. Oliver picked his up and tore open the top.
There was a deafening eruption of laughter from the party behind them, and Frannie instinctively turned her head. As she did so, a chuckling face looked familiar. The luxuriant hair was shorter than when she
had last seen it, but there was no mistaking the thick lips, the burly frame, the booming voice. She watched as Seb Holland banged the table and called out: ‘Hey, Luigi, bring me an alligator sandwich and make it snappy!’ He turned, roaring with laughter at his joke, to his companions.
She hadn’t seen Seb since university, over three years ago. He was going into his family business, she remembered. They were in insurance, something large in the City, and he looked like a prosperous City businessman now, in his chalk-striped suit and loud tie. Their eyes met and he beamed in recognition, stood up, stumbled slightly drunkenly out of his chair, came over, and leaned across the table. ‘Frannie! Hi! How are you? You look gorgeous.’ He gave Oliver Halkin a cursory glance. ‘Sorry, ’scuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been in love with this girl – might try and pinch her from you later on if I get pissed enough.’ Seb Holland’s voice was slurred with booze and he spoke too loudly.
Frannie blushed and introduced the two men.
‘Hello,’ Oliver said. There was a brief silence as Oliver and Seb frowned at each other in vague recognition.
‘Met you before,’ Seb said. He was having difficulty in standing upright without swaying, and held on to Frannie’s chair-back.
‘Yes,’ Oliver said good-humouredly, ‘I – seem to think we – have –’ He frowned which made him look rather fierce, Frannie thought.
‘Halkin? Halkin-Northrop bank?’
‘Yes,’ Oliver said. ‘Seb Holland? Any connection with Holland Delarue?’
‘Yah.’
‘Ah!’ Oliver’s face relaxed into a beam as recognition dawned. ‘I know Victor Holland.’
‘’S’ my brother.’
‘Good Lord! Your brother! I play tennis with him occasionally at Queen’s.’
‘Didn’t you come to our Christmas party last year? That’s where we met.’
‘At your rather super building?’ Oliver’s eyes narrowed as if he was trying to remember its name. ‘That’s right. We talked about cricket! How is Vic? Haven’t seen him for a while.’
‘He’s fine.’
‘Good – well –’ Oliver looked awkward suddenly, as if unsure how to end the conversation. ‘Give him my regards.’
‘Yes, I will.’ Seb turned to Frannie. ‘So, how are you? What are you up to?’
‘Fine. Working at the British Museum. How about you?’
‘Great.’ He sniffed. ‘Getting married next month. That’s my fiancée.’ He pointed at the table, but Frannie could not work out which of the girls he meant. ‘Lucy – d’yever meet her?’ He screwed up his eyes as if finding it hard to focus. ‘No – that was after university. Getting married next month,’ he repeated. ‘Hey, you must come! Send you an invite. I’ve still got your family address. We must have a drink sometime before that, anyway.’
‘Love to. Congratulations.’
‘Yah, thanks.’
Frannie was secretly pleased at being recognized; it helped her stand on her own two feet with Oliver. Seb showed no signs of moving away and she felt a bit embarrassed about prolonging the conversation. ‘Still in your family business?’
‘Yah, it’s OK. Spend half the time in the States.’ He sniffed. ‘Still see any of the people I’d remember?’
‘Meredith. I stayed with her a couple of weekends ago up in York.’
‘Meredith! Great girl! Really liked her. How is she?’
‘Fine. Very married.’
He grinned, then looked solemn. ‘Hey – remember Jonathan Mountjoy?’
‘Yes.’ She remembered him clearly, a tall, quiet boy, always intensely serious, who never said very much.
‘Poor bugger got shot dead in Washington a few weeks ago.’
Frannie stared at him in shocked silence. Her stomach felt as if a drum of cold water had been emptied into it. ‘What – what happened?’
‘Mugger. Gave him his wallet apparently and the bastard still shot him.’
‘God, poor Jonathan!’ she said. ‘That’s awful. Horrible.’ She shivered, feeling oddly disoriented suddenly.
Seb dug his finger into his breast pocket and pulled out a card. ‘Give me a buzz – come and have lunch or something sometime.’ He gave Oliver a smile. ‘I’ll tell Vic I met you,’ he said, then moved away from the table, hesitated for a moment and turned towards Frannie. ‘Great seeing you.’
‘You too.’
Jonathan Mountjoy. Shot. Dead. Gone.
‘Were you at school together?’
Oliver’s voice startled her. She collected her thoughts and smiled at him apologetically. ‘University.’
A waiter presented them with their cocktails.
Oliver raised his glass. ‘Cheers,’ he said, quietly. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
‘You too,’ Frannie said and sipped the pink-tinged fizzing concoction. It had a pleasant taste of apricots but she barely registered it.
‘I’m sorry about the news – about your friend being killed.’
‘Thanks,’ she said heavily. ‘I didn’t really know him that well – hadn’t seen him since university. But he was nice.’ She hunched her shoulders and smiled more brightly. ‘Doesn’t seem as if either of us are having much good news tonight.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Well – except that you’re here, and that’s pretty good news.’
Their eyes met. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
Someone at Seb’s table was telling a story and a girl was squealing in protest. Frannie felt a chilly draught from the air-conditioning against her neck, then a sudden rash of goose-pimples down between her shoulder-blades. She drank some more of the cocktail, but could not feel any effects from it yet. Oliver Halkin and Jonathan Mountjoy’s death were now intertwined in her mind, as if somehow connected. She tried to control the crazy notion that the news was an omen about her and Oliver. That she should pull out now, while she still could.
A waiter hovered; they looked at their menus and ordered, then there was an awkward silence. Oliver shook a stick out of his packet of
pannini
, then laid both the stick and the packet down, aligning them carefully so they lay parallel to his cutlery. ‘Penny for your thoughts,’ he said.
‘I was thinking about the coincidence – of bumping into Seb – and that we should both know him.’
Oliver broke a piece off the end of his
pannini
stick and ate it in silence. ‘Coincidences make me uneasy,’ he said.
‘Why’s that?’
He shrugged, then lowered his eyes to the tablecloth, as if embarrassed by what he was about to say. ‘I’ve
had rather too many in the past few years; not very happy ones. I find them bad news. They bother me. Probably sounds daft.’
Frannie smiled back at him, surprised that he was superstitious. ‘They happen to everybody, surely? Don’t you ever have harmless coincidences – like when you’re thinking about someone and they phone you?’
‘I’m not sure there is such a thing as a meaningless coincidence.’
As she watched his serious face, she began to feel excluded, and her sceptical grin faded. ‘What’s happened to make you feel that way?’
He fiddled around for some moments with the
pannini
packet, then responded in a way that did nothing to make her feel better. ‘I suppose the worst was my wife’s death.’ He moved his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
‘I’m sorry,’ Frannie said. ‘What happened?’ She felt that she needed to know.
He leaned forward, pressed his fingernail hard into the tablecloth, and with intense concentration began to make a straight line across. ‘Almost any sort of coincidence,’ he said distantly, as if he had not heard her question. ‘Bumping into someone like Seb Holland. The same number coming up a couple of times. Anything.’
His expression suddenly changed into a distant smile that seemed to be directed at the universe in general rather than at her. ‘The French mathematician Laplace said that chance is the expression of man’s ignorance.’
‘Is that what you believe?’
He picked his glass up by the stem, cupped the base in the palm of his hand and twisted it round slowly, studying the contents with an air of suspicion. ‘Chaos. All these bubbles firing off in here at random. But the
effect works; it tastes good and it’s intoxicating. Order from chaos! See?’ He continued to hold the glass in the air as if in a mood of childish contentment.
‘Perhaps the next coincidence is going to change your luck,’ she said and drank some more.
‘Maybe,’ he said, unconvinced.
An image slipped silently through her mind. Jonathan Mountjoy wearing a battered old greatcoat, standing with his hands in his pockets, staring into space. That was how she remembered him, always slightly out of it, in his own world. Dozy, silent Jonathan, handing over his wallet, then the gun coming up, firing.
Over.
She swallowed, placed her hands on the tablecloth, reached out awkwardly for her glass, then stopped as she realized there was nothing left in it.
I’m not sure there is such a thing as a meaningless coincidence
.
‘Mozzarella for the signorina!’ A waiter placed their plates in front of them, then brandished a pepper grinder above Oliver’s minestrone. He gave the handle several sharp, crunching twists.
Another waiter appeared with a bottle of wine, which he ceremoniously opened. Frannie looked at her plate, but her appetite had gone. She wanted someone to tell her that it was quite safe to fall in love with Oliver Halkin. She looked across the table at him. He was tasting the wine, holding the glass with one hand, the other lying on the table, large and solid, the winder of his watch nestling in the hairs of his wrist. The sadness had returned to his eyes and she felt an urge to put her own hand out and touch his, to reassure him, to reassure herself.
Her attraction towards him was growing, but her
unease grew with it. Almost as if he were reading her thoughts, he smiled at her.
They talked deeply throughout the meal, which Frannie managed to pick at, mostly discussing their views on the meaning of life, and carrying on their arguments from where they had left off at lunch on Tuesday. She found him challenging to talk to, and he opened her mind further to the world of mathematics and physics. Starting to relax, she told him she had tried to read
A Brief History of Time
but had abandoned it halfway through, and he laughed and told her he’d abandoned it a quarter of the way through, and talked her through the theories in a way that made more, if not total, sense to her.