‘Thanks.’
She carried on talking as he towelled off. ‘Travelling?’
‘Not too bad, for once. Brussels on Wednesday, but I’m hoping I can get in and out in a day. Manchester, and then a couple of question marks.’
She laughed. ‘It sounds so glamorous. But I’ve done it. I know it’s all cramped planes and wasting time in dirty airports.’
‘Wasting a lot less time since they invented laptops.’
‘Do you ever want to stop?’ she asked curiously.
Jay curbed a sigh. Here it comes, he thought. He could write the script.
Don’t you ever get tired of your frenetic lifestyle? Wouldn’t it be nice to stay in the same place for a while? We could put a home together. Share our lives.
He said quietly, ‘No, I don’t ever want to stop.’
He came out of the shower room in his underpants. Towelling the sleek dark hair, he looked at her.
He said gently, ‘I’m a migratory animal, Carla. You always knew that.’
She looked away. ‘Yes, but—’
He did not want her to hurt herself any more by making a case that he knew was hopeless. ‘I’ve done the country house bit,’ he said firmly, pulling on dark chinos. ‘Along with the neighbours in for drinks at Christmas and the ten- year plan for the garden. I was brought up with it. That’s how I know it isn’t me.’
The country cottage, with its fruit trees and summer-silent birds, was hers. She was a gardener by training, a journalist and broadcaster by profession. But he was beginning to see that she was a home-maker by instinct. Only it would never be his home. He saw the moment when she accepted it.
‘Yes, I see,’ she said after a long pause. She stood up.
Jay braced himself. But she was only getting the fine silk shirt from where he had hung it on the wardrobe handle.
‘Nice colour,’ she said.
He knew she didn’t mean it. Carla was a successful, professional woman. She liked her men in conservative suits. In Carla’s world, real men wore crisp white shirts in town, earth colours in the country. She had never come to terms with Jay’s taste for hot ochre and tangerine and emerald.
Today it was turquoise. His grandfather—his lost grandfather, soft-voiced and laughing in the endless dusty enchantment of Jay’s childhood—would have said that it was the colour of hopeful travel. Jay thought of it as that shade of the sea where it meets the sky: the horizon on a clear day with calm water. Carla would not have got on with his lost grandfather.
‘I like it,’ he said truthfully.
Carla shrugged, as she always did when they disagreed. For a moment he wondered if things would be better if they argued. But he knew, in his heart of hearts, that they wouldn’t. He was a man born to be alone. He could not change that, no matter what Carla did.
She made a brave effort at a smile. ‘Is the new girl nice? Or don’t you know yet?’
Jay grinned. ‘I know. She’s a slick chick with her life under control. Gives great parties. Also I insulted her, and she hates my guts.’
‘Good grief. Is that going to make for a good working relationship?’
He laughed aloud. ‘Well, at least she’s not going to fall in love with me,’ he said with feeling. ‘Couldn’t take that again.’
He regretted it at once. Only, of course, once you’ve said it, you can’t call it back. She looked stricken.
He had meant that he couldn’t take another puppyish filing clerk with her eyes following him all round the office and her passionate ill-spelled e-mails. But that was not what Carla had heard. And maybe that was not all he had meant, after all.
‘Hell, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
He slipped his arms into the shirtsleeves and shook out the silk. For a moment the turquoise stuff billowed around his golden chest like a parachute settling. He glimpsed it over her shoulder in the mirror. The silk shimmered, like the cloak of one of the Mogul emperor’s bodyguards that his grandfather had shown him in old paintings. Not his lost grandfather. The other one, the Brigadier, with his impeccable standards and his careful culture and the sherry on Boxing Day. Carla got on just fine with the Brigadier.