The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [72]
Which meant Ranjit had only the day to get through before he could have the pleasure of being the one who provided something for her.
Ada wasn’t there, so they actually swam together, farther out than usual, and when they came back, they dressed and sat with drinks on the lanai, idly talking. Well, Myra was doing most of the talking. “It used to be a lot livelier here,” she said, gazing out over the nearly empty sand. “When I was tiny, there were two deluxe hotels right down the beach, and a lot more restaurants.”
Ranjit looked at her curiously. “You miss the lively times?”
“Oh, not really. I like it peaceful, the way it is. But my parents used to go dancing there, and now there’s nothing.”
Ranjit nodded. “The Boxing Day tsunami,” he said wisely.
But she was shaking her head. “Long before that,” she said. “It was 1984. The beginning of the civil war. Some of the first battles were fought right here, Sea Tigers making a landing so they could launch an attack on the airport. The army took the hotels over as firing positions, so the Tigers took care of the hotels. My parents were right here, couldn’t get away until things calmed down a little and the roads reopened. My mom said the tracers were like a fireworks display, screaming in from the assault boats and back out from the hotels. They called it ‘the entertainment.’”
Ranjit wanted to make a response but didn’t know how to do it. Not in words, maybe. What he really wanted to do was put an arm around her. He settled for a sort of first step, putting his hand over hers as it rested on the arm of her chair.
She didn’t seem to mind. “The ruined old buildings were still there while I was growing up,” she said. “You know what finally took care of them? That was the tsunami. Otherwise I think they’d still be right there.”
She turned toward him, smiling…and looking quite a lot as though she wanted to be kissed.
He put it to the test.
It turned out that his estimate had been correct. She had. And she was the one who took his hand and led him back into the beach house, with that welcoming couch, just right for two, and Ranjit discovered that sexual intercourse with a woman was not only a good thing in itself, but was several times better when the woman was someone you liked, and respected, and really wanted to spend a lot of time in the company of.
And then there was the dinner that he hosted, and that was great, too. So all in all that day on the beach was a great success, and Myra and Ranjit at once made plans to do it again. Often.
It didn’t quite work out that way, though, because the very next day something happened to change their plans.
Ada Labrooy was with them that day, and so was her nanny, who kept giving sidelong glances at Myra and Ranjit, convincing Ranjit that what the two of them had done was written all over their faces. It was a perfectly normal day, though—if you didn’t count that when he arrived, Myra kissed him on the lips instead of the usual cheek—until they were back from their outing in the water, and wearing their robes and helping themselves to their drinks.
And then Ada saw something. Hand shading her eyes from the sun, she asked, “Is that that man who works for the Vorhulsts again?”
And when Ranjit stood up to get a better look, yes, it was the Vorhulst butler, moving a great deal faster than Ranjit had ever seen him move before, and holding a sheaf of papers clenched tightly in one hand. He seemed excited. Not just excited, impatient to get the pages to Ranjit, so that he was still five or six meters away when he called, “Sir! I think this may be what you’ve been waiting for!”
And it was.
Well, it sort of was. Well, what it was was a lengthy analysis of Ranjit’s paper, or actually five different analyses of the paper, each apparently written by a different (but unnamed) person, and what they’d done—in exacting and almost unreadable detail—was go over every last passage that Ranjit himself had already found to contain a mistake