Spring by David Szalay Page A

These ones too were snapping as soon as they arrived. Voices were shouting Jane Green’s real name. Shouting, ‘Over here! Here!’ Katherine heard one man shout, ‘Oi! You fucking whore!’ (Fraser would later explain, when she mentioned it, that this man had not meant anything nasty—­he had simply been trying to get her attention and perhaps provoke some sort of interesting facial expression.) It had turned into a scrum in the vicinity of the doors. As they poured into the lobby, the influx of sweating, panting paps from Park Street was pushing against the security guards and Jane Green’s now furious entourage. There was even a policeman involved. Some hapless members of the public were knocked over as the scrum wheeled to one side. More security guards arrived at speed, sprinting through the lobby in their blue blazers. A pap was knocked over too—­his camera, which may have taken a kick, went skittering over the marble. Immediately he was on his feet shouting threats to sue, but by then the entourage had forced its way out, and moments later the two Mercedes were pulling away, even then being pestered by paps on foot, stumbling through the flower beds in front of the hotel, holding their cameras over their heads to fire off a last flickering fusillade as the mopeds appeared from nowhere and tore off into the traffic in loudly nasal pursuit.
    Fraser was triumphant. His face was shining with joy. She loved that. She loved the way his face was shining with joy. It made her feel joy herself. Needless to say, her heart was pumping frenziedly. Flushed with victory, having spontaneously picked her up and spun her around—­she shrieked, then laughed—­he was showing her the shots he had taken. Throughout the whole mad half-­minute—­or maybe it was even less—­she herself had not seen ‘Jane Green’.
    And now, excitably, Fraser was saying something else.
    ‘What?’ she said. She had not heard. There had been some furious shouting—­a pap and a security guard were still having a private feud.
    ‘I want to buy you a drink,’ he said. ‘What time do you finish work?’ His face was still shining with joy.
    ‘Eight,’ she said.
    ‘I’ll meet you here at eight. Okay?’
    ‘Okay,’ she said, and he jogged off, whooping and waving to some of the others.
    He was early. At ten to eight she saw him waiting in the lobby. No longer in his photographer’s fatigues, he was wearing a suit with an open-­necked shirt and two-­tone shoes. (Those shoes made her smile.) And he looked touchingly nervous. He was nervously pacing.
    As soon as they were out of the hotel he surprised her by lighting a cigarette. A Silk Cut. It seemed an effeminate choice of smoke for him. He offered her one and she shook her head. Then she said, ‘Yes, okay.’ He lit it for her—­together they made a tulip of their hands in the fresh night wind. She was so intensely aware of the points at which their fingers were touching that for a second she felt slightly faint. The frail flame steadied. They started to walk towards Hyde Park Corner. ‘I don’t really smoke,’ she said.
    ‘No, me neither.’
    He told her that a London tabloid had snapped up his pictures of ‘Jane Green’, and they were selling well in other territories too.
    ‘How much for?’ she asked.
    ‘Quite a lot.’
    ‘How much?’ she insisted.
    ‘No,’ he said, ‘not that much.’ He was smiling, very pleased with himself. ‘Enough for a drink in one of these places.’
    They went to one of the other handsome Park Lane hotels for their drink, and there, in the very first lull, with her poor heart moving into overdrive, she lifted her eyes to his and said—­‘I find you very attractive.’ It was not the sort of thing she was in the habit of saying to men she had only just met. It was not the sort of thing she was in the habit of saying at all. That she said it was part of the intense strangeness, the strange intensity of those days. It was what she was