Kit has spent the last two weeks trawling the Internet for information on Navy SEAL training. Every day she collates the most relevant facts, cuts and pastes them, and gives them to Robert. She doesn’t read the books as he writes them, but reads the outlines, the synopses and the research. She never thought this kind of book would interest her—she is much more likely to pick up a book with a pink cover featuring a pair of glossy high-heeled shoes—but since working here she has read most of Robert’s work, and is surprised by how much she likes it.
This latest features a martial arts expert brought in to train the Navy SEALs. Only he’s not quite what he appears, and mayhem ensues when his terrorist links are discovered.
“It’s fascinating,” Kit says, for it is, and that is the true beauty of the job. Not that she is gainfully employed and earning her own money for the first time in years, but that she is learning something new every day. Frequently, she leaves feeling that her brain has physically expanded in the few short hours she has spent there. “I love learning about all these new things,” she says with a smile. “I never expected I’d be finding out so much when I took the job.”
“That doesn’t mean you regret it, then? ” Robert says, sipping his coffee.
“God! No!” She is forceful, and slightly embarrassed. She looks away, then turns to him again, wondering how it is that such a kind, successful and—yes, okay, she has to admit this, even though he is many years older than her—very handsome man, is on his own so much of the time.
There are times, particularly like now, when there feels such intimacy between them that she wants to blurt out the question: why are you on your own? But she would never cross that line, would never dare be so presumptuous.
But she doesn’t understand it. She knows about the terrible tragedy with his wife, yet it seems there has been no one serious since then. Rumors abound about covert affairs with wives of wealthy men, but in eight months here she has never seen evidence of anything.
There is talk in the town that he might be gay, but she thinks that unlikely. Just as there have been no women, there have been no men either, and she just doesn’t believe it, realizing that he is a target for gossip, false rumors, simply because of his fame.
She studies him as he leafs through the papers she has collated for him. He has a craggy, handsome face, tanned from the hours he spends in the garden. She watches him through the windows sometimes, knows he is taking a break from writing, but that this is part of the process, that gardening is a meditation for him, and he would not relish being disturbed.
His hair is more salt than pepper these days, but the silver-framed photos scattered around the house show Robert and Penelope decades ago, Robert squeezed next to Warren Beatty and Meryl Streep at the Academy Awards, and when he was younger his looks weren’t just handsome, they were breathtak ing.
“I wonder whether you would come to the reading tonight.” Robert suddenly lays the papers on his lap and studies Kit over the top of his glasses. “You haven’t been to one of my readings and I think you would enjoy it.”
“I thought you didn’t like turning up with ‘people,’ ” Kit says and grins, thinking of the stories Robert has told her, how he turns up for book signings, lectures, television shows, with no one, and is usually ignored because people don’t believe it’s him, don’t believe a writer of his caliber could possibly have no ego, ergo no entourage.
Her favorite story, one that he told her just recently, laughing all the while, was when he turned up to a talk show that featured another author, this one female, young, who had enjoyed great success with her very commercial first novel and was suffering from an advanced case, Robert said, of “first novel syndrome,” which meant all the attention had quite clearly gone to her head.
Young, beautiful and charming on the surface, she had arrived with her assistant, her publicist, her editor, her manager, her hair and makeup artist, her sister and her sister’s friend. The production team, panicking, put her in the best dressing room, the one that had homemade pastries and fresh coffee, baskets of fresh fruit on every surface.