Just Last Night(62)

I laugh. “Seriously? You don’t have to turn white kni—”

“Yes, I’m serious!” Ed says, with vehemence. “You’re about to skip to another country with a dubious man you don’t know, on a wild goose chase where he’s running the show and picking up the tab. This has Very Creepy Interlude all over it.”

I agree I will send proofs of life and Ed calms down a notch. Yet when I end the call, my insouciance evaporates.

IT’S TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon by the time I’m waiting with my packed bag outside my house, ready to climb into Finlay Hart’s waiting car. It’s a dark Audi, you called it wrong there, Susie.

He gets out and opens the trunk, takes my bag from me. He’s wearing a fine-knit sweater under a navy trench coat, which he shucks off his shoulders and throws across the back seat. I notice his clothes have that quietly expensive quality where they’re unshowy, yet hang perfectly. If I bought a black sweater and a blue coat, they wouldn’t look like that.

There’s no opportunity to slyly paparazzi license plates. First fail.

“We should be there by dinner time,” he says, after hello. “Five hours, I reckon. Give or take.”

“Dinner is the best time to arrive anywhere,” I say, in a hopefully amicable tone, as I get into the passenger seat. “. . . How come you don’t sound more American? There’s only the smallest hint.”

I’m trying for friendly irreverence. It has belatedly dawned on me that never mind danger, I furthermore have hour after tedious hour in the company of someone with the conversational charm of a wooden actor playing a Nazi guard.

“I thought I did,” Finlay says, neither sounding offended or especially animated. “I moved to the States when I was twenty so your accent and vocabulary is pretty fixed by that point. Plus, a lot of friends are expats.”

A lot of friends. I struggle to picture them, but maybe he’s the life and soul, over there.

Once in the driver’s seat, he fiddles with the radio. “Do you want music on?”

“Sure,” I say.

“You choose,” he says.

I poke at it until 6 Music blares out.

“What’s playing? I’m so out of touch these days,” Fin says, checking the wing mirror as we pull into the flow of traffic.

“It’s ‘This Is What She’s Like’ by Dexys Midnight Runners,” I say, pleased that I happen to know by complete chance because I’m pretty out of touch myself these days. Justin loves Dexys. “You know, they did ‘Come On Eileen.’”

“Yeah, I know that much,” Fin says, with a smile.

He navigates out of the city and to the motorway with reasonable ease, punctuated by a stentorian male GPS voice, barking instructions.

“Only to get me to the motorway and I’ll turn it off,” Fin says, and I say “Sure” again, like a little robot. The car is comfortable and smells of valeted leather. I stretch my legs out in the footwell and feel grateful at least that I’m not writing about getting bendy with Wendy.

I’ve always liked this part of any trip, the sense you’re escaping. Whenever a plane lifts off, I think about what a tiny piece of the planet I inhabit, how limited my horizons are.

I can hear Mark in my head saying, “Yet I couldn’t get you to Stoke Newington.” And his line in our break-up fight: “You know what fucks me off the most? You’d move here for Susie and the gang.”

He was probably right.

“Don’t judge me for the automatic, it’s years since I’ve driven stick, as they say,” Fin says, as we zoom past the postwar houses that line the ring road.

I smile at the idea that of the things I might judge Finlay Hart for, it would be his not using manual gear change. A bonus—comfortable silences are easier when you don’t have to stare into each other’s faces.

I steal a sly look at Fin at the wheel, grudgingly admire the hard, leading-man jaw—clean-shaven once more—the arms with rolled-up shirt sleeves, and classy, rather than showy, leather-strap vintage watch.

No one said evil couldn’t be attractive. It’s how evil gets a lot of its workload done, in fact.

I amuse myself at the idea of him talking into a recorder, like Agent Cooper. It’s an imperfect comparison: Cooper looked like baby-faced FBI. Finlay Hart looks like the clean-cut assassin who nobody can remember clearly afterward.

“Whereabouts do you live in New York?” I ask.

“Park Slope. A gentrified but still almost affordable part of Brooklyn, if you don’t know it.”

“Do you like it there? New York as a whole, I mean?”

“Yeah . . . mostly. I’m not sure I want to stay for good. Put it this way, when I get together with friends all we do is moan about how awful it is, which is the point you know you’re a native. How about you? Do you like Nottingham?”

For once, Fin’s determinedly neutral tone sounds like something approximating grace.

“Hahaha. New York . . . to Nottingham. Big Apple to . . . tiny oranges. Big cats to bin raccoons.”

Fin smiles. “I like it.”

Of course he does, in that gently patronizing way that cool people, who have nothing to prove, feign approval of uncool things.

“You left it,” I say, also smiling.

He loosens his collar and peers up at a road sign. “Sometimes people leave places they like. Sometimes people leave people they like.”