Your Perfect Year(61)
“Oh?” Jonathan replied cynically. “And since you saw the light six weeks ago, you’re now evangelizing?”
Leopold shook his head. “No, not at all. But I look at you and think I’d give anything to be fifteen years younger and able to do it all differently.”
“With respect”—Jonathan coughed for emphasis—“I’m neither on the bottle nor on the streets.”
“But your marriage is down the drain, and you told me yourself that your finances probably don’t look too rosy. And a pad like this doesn’t run itself on fresh air.”
“Yes, but—”
“At your age, I, too, only enjoyed a glass or two here and there,” Leopold continued without taking any notice of him, “and I was way up the career ladder.”
“As a chef,” Jonathan replied drily.
“No, you dunce!” His voice was raised now. “I wished I’d stayed a chef! I enjoyed it; it was my passion. But I always hankered after more—nothing was ever enough. So I went to night school and got a degree in business administration, and over the years I worked my way up from managing director of a chain of restaurants to the board of a major group of food companies.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad.”
“No, of course not. It was all wonderful! A massive salary, fancy company car with chauffeur, fancy house, fancy yacht, very fancy friends in the very best society. Massive ego. And massive depression, because endless work I didn’t actually enjoy meant that I no longer knew who I really was. When things began to go downhill, my wife and kids did a disappearing act along with all my fancy friends, leaving me alone with my schnapps and a huge mountain of debt. Or that’s how it seemed. Anyway, I advise you to stop and take a good look inside yourself. If the publishing house isn’t your thing, then sell it.”
“Sell it?” Jonathan laughed indignantly. “That’s impossible—it’s a family firm with a long tradition behind it.”
“If family tradition is the only reason, you really should sell it.”
Jonathan opened his mouth to object. And closed it. He was speechless. Who was this man? How had he come to be sitting at Jonathan’s table?
A thought occurred to him: it was no mere coincidence! So many strange things had happened over the last two days—something fishy was going on!
No, that was crazy: of course it was coincidence. No one could have imagined that Henriette Jansen would throw the papers into the recycling and so lead Jonathan to Leopold.
But it was uncanny. The kind of thing that happened in fairy tales. There was always a wizened little old man turning up in storybooks who set the hero back on the right track.
Or the wrong one, depending on the story.
“I’m sorry.” Leopold jolted him from his thoughts. “It really wasn’t my place.”
“No problem,” Jonathan said. “It was . . . interesting, anyway.”
“No, really, it was excessive. I don’t know you at all, and I haven’t the slightest clue about your life. Things seem to be going just fine for you; I really shouldn’t have assumed otherwise.”
“No. No one ever should.” All the while, he was thinking, Leopold’s right. Things are going fine. It’s just that there’s nothing more to it than that. “You know,” he said, “something strange happened to me the day before yesterday.”
He went on to tell Leopold about the diary. His new friend listened attentively.
A quarter past three. A quarter past three in the morning! Jonathan couldn’t remember the last time he had sat over a glass of good wine until the small hours, chatting with someone. If ever in his life. He was no night owl; sleep was just as important to a man as having enough to eat and drink.
But after he’d told Leopold about the Filofax and then shown it to him, they had begun to speculate: where it could have come from, and for whom it was intended (Leopold considered the theory about Jonathan’s mother to be absurd). What he should make of his visit to Sarasvati and what the relevance of the money could be. And, of course, they discussed what was now the best thing to do. Leopold was strongly against Jonathan taking the diary to the lost-and-found, because he thought it highly unlikely it would find its owner that way. He also regarded the whole situation as far too exciting to end it just like that.
“If fate deals you a hand like this, you can’t just ignore it,” he had said.
“Why’s everyone suddenly so concerned with fate?”
“It’s a question that merits consideration,” Leopold had said, grinning enigmatically. At least that was how it had seemed to Jonathan, though it could have been a result of the wine—since, contrary to his usual habit of enjoying no more than an occasional glass or two, he had single-handedly downed almost the entire bottle over the course of the evening.
He was now lying in bed at a quarter past three in the morning. His head was spinning, which definitely had less to do with the wine than with the many thoughts casually playing ping-pong in his mind. They weren’t bad thoughts, just unusual ones. He closed his eyes and sighed. The last few days had certainly been eventful.
He was on the brink of falling asleep when something occurred to him.
He sat up with a start, switched on his bedside light, and reached toward his night table for the Filofax. He opened it and picked up the pencil he kept tucked between the pages. He began to write.