He had met her six years ago. She’d been a secretary then, working with the UK Branch of a German chemical corporation. A sprightly, good-looking woman in her middle thirties, whose formality, he’d guessed, disguised humor and warmth in abundance. He’d been attracted to her from the beginning, but his natural hesitancy in such matters, and the considerable difference in their ages, kept him from making any overtures. Eventually it was Yvonne who broke the ice between them, commenting on small things about his appearance-a recent haircut, a new tie-and so making her interest in him perfectly plain. Once the signal had been given, Toy had proposed dinner, and she’d accepted. It had been the beginning of the most rewarding months of Toy’s life.
He was not an overly emotional man. The very lack of extremes in his nature had made him a useful part of Whitehead’s entourage, and he had nurtured his reserve as the salable commodity it was until, by the time he met Yvonne, he’d almost come to believe his own publicity. She it was who first called him a cold fish; she who taught him (difficult lesson that it was) the importance of showing weakness, if not to the world at large at least to intimates. It had taken him time. He was fifty-three when they met, and this new way of thinking went against the grain. But she persisted, and slowly, the melt began. Once it did, he wondered how he had ever lived the life he had for the previous twenty years; a life of servitude to a man whose compassion was negligible, and ego, monstrous. He saw, through Yvonne’s eyes, the cruelty in Whitehead, the arrogance, the mythmaking; and though he showed, he hoped, no change in his superficial attitudes to his employer, beneath the conciliation and the humility there increasingly simmered a resentment that approached hatred. Only now, after six years, could Toy contemplate his own contradictory feelings about the old man, and even now he found himself forgetting the worst; at least when he was out of Yvonne’s sphere of influence. It was so difficult when he was in the house, subject to Whitehead’s whim, to keep the perspective she’d given him, to see the sacred monster for what he was: monstrous, but far from sacred.
After twelve months Toy had moved Yvonne into the house Whitehead had purchased for him in Pimlico; a retreat from the world of the Whitehead Corporation that the old man never inquired about, a place where he and Yvonne could talk-or be silent-together; where he could indulge his passion for Schubert, and she could write letters to her family, which was spread across half the globe.
That night, when he got back, he told her about the man on the train, the constellation namer. She found the whole story pointless; couldn’t see the romance of it at all.
“I just thought it was strange,” he said.
“I suppose it is,” she replied, unimpressed, and went back to her dinner preparations. A few words on, she stopped.
“What’s wrong, Billy?”
“Why should something be wrong?”
“Everything’s fine?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
She was always quick to ferret out his secrets. He gave up before she really began on him; it wasn’t worth the effort of deception. He stroked the ridge of his broken nose, a familiar trick when he was nervous. Then he said, “It’s all going to come down. Everything.” His voice trembled and fell away. When it was clear he wasn’t going to elaborate she put down the dinner plates and crossed to his chair. He looked up, almost startled, when she touched his ear.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, more gently than before.
He took hold of her hand.
“There might come a time . . . not so far away . . . when I’d ask you to leave with me,” he said.
“Leave?”
“Just up and go.”
“Where?”
“I haven’t thought that through yet. We’d just go.” He halted, and looked at her fingers, which were now dovetailed with his. “Would you come with me?” he asked at last.
“Of course.”
“Ask no questions?”
“What is this, Billy?”
“I said: ask no questions.