Oscar
Thornton did not make a habit of listening to other people's
conversations. He also did not make a habit of answering the phone
whilst at dinner, and he did make a habit (although not a conscious
one) of being offended when other people were rude. Therefore, he had
fewer qualms than normal about overhearing Delta's telephone
conversation. It would have been a lot more effort to not listen,
actually, because she was speaking as though the person on the other
end were right in front of her, as though Oscar were not there at
all.
“Hello?”
she said first of all. Then, after a pause, she added excitedly, “Oh,
it's you!” Then there were a few exchanges of seemingly nonsense
words – perhaps this was come kind of code or inside joke. Next she
filled the caller in on her present situation. “You should have
called earlier, I'm in Germany now.” A pause. “No, they didn't
send me here, the airline did. Apparently the plane was here so they
put us all on a coach here.” Another pause. “No, don't worry,
that's fine, I understand.” A few giggles. “Frog!” Did she just
call the person on the other end Frog?
Was she speaking to a Frenchman (Oscar wouldn't put it past her to be
rude to foreigners) or was it a nickname? “I have to go now,” she
announced suddenly. “Bye, see you soon.” She put the phone back
in her bag.
“Sorry
about that,” she said to Oscar. “A family friend who's a pilot.
He's just landed in Austria and wondered if I wanted a lift. I told
him it's too late because we're not there any more. It is Germany
we're in, right?”
“That's
right,” Oscar nodded. He didn't feel he could ask whether the
caller's name really was Frog or if it had meant something else, or
what they'd been talking about at the beginning of their
conversation, because he wasn't really supposed to have been
listening to any of it.
The
next hour passed fairly uneventfully, for which Oscar would have been
grateful, except that he just could not concentrate on reading his
newspaper. He even tried doing the crossword, but he couldn't help
worrying about what Delta had been telling him about over lunch,
about this order she was a member of and the martial arts they did,
the schools, the goddess and the wild geese. She was now sitting a
few feet from him, by the window, with her earphones in, nodding
along to the music whilst she looked in the direction of the window.
He was perplexed by her. On the one hand she was so vulnerable and
naïve – not knowing where Munich was, being concerned about her
hair style – but on the other hand so dangerous – she had floored
two policemen! He was no more calm about getting on a plane with her.
But he was getting more curious.
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