Lovers and Liars Trilogy (106 page)

“I thought it would be a question of money, and autonomy, allowing him a major say in what he covered, when, and where. I was wrong. He had a third demand; non-negotiable. Genevieve Hunter went with him. They had to go as a team. And if I wouldn’t agree to that, then another paper would. That was the deal.”

This admission was met with a lengthy silence. Rowland’s frown had deepened.

“Now, listen, Rowland, I want you to be clear about this. She didn’t put him up to it. Well, I suppose I can’t say that with absolute certainty—I have only Lamartine’s word for it. But he isn’t a liar, and he wouldn’t let himself be used. Nor would she use him, Rowland. She has her faults, as you’ll discover if you work with her, but lack of scruples isn’t one of them. Quite the reverse.”

He paused. Rowland still remained silent. Max gave a shrug.

“So, now you know the truth. If I’m perfectly honest, if Lamartine hadn’t held a gun to my head like that, I’d have refused. But, as it was, he gave me very little option. And he was very persuasive on her behalf.”

Rowland gave him a sharp glance. “He’s a persuasive man?”

“Very. I like him, and I admire him, and I respect his judgment. If you met him, I’m sure you’d agree. All right, he was speaking as a man who was in love. He was partisan, and he admitted that. But he was fighting to get her a chance, a chance he felt she had earned.”

“And his confidence in her wasn’t misplaced,” Rowland interjected. “As subsequent events proved.”

“Well, yes.” Max hesitated again. “She was impressive. The work she did was very fine. So the ends justified the means. It’s just—”

He broke off; Rowland did not prompt him, and his silence gave Max a twinge of uncertainty. In the same situation, would Rowland have acted as he had?

He thought he knew the answer to that question. Rowland, who, in the workplace, was curiously indifferent to gender, was more likely than Max to send a woman to a battle zone; but Rowland confronted with Lamartine’s demands was another matter. He would not have liked pressure of that kind, and—had he suspected collusion—neither Lamartine nor Gini would ever have worked for him again.

In which case, Max thought with a return of self-confidence, Rowland’s scruples would have lost him first-class photographs and first-class reporting. One of Rowland’s little problems, he told himself, was a certain moral inflexibility, a refusal to compromise. To recall that his gifted friend had an Achilles’ heel restored Max’s humor at once. He rose.

“Anyway,” he said, “for good or ill, that’s what happened. I thought you should know, but all this is in confidence, needless to say. Gini thinks she won that assignment on her own merits alone, and if she discovered what Lamartine had done, if she even knew I had a private meeting with him—all hell would break loose. So not one word to her.”

“Of course.” Rowland also rose. “Trappist silence. You can rely on me. You probably made the right decision, from a professional point of view. Except—” He paused in the doorway. “Were there repercussions of a more personal kind? Why didn’t Lamartine come back from Bosnia with her? Wasn’t that the deal?”

“Yes. It was.” Max, who had expected Rowland to pick up on this, gave him an anxious look. “Then Lamartine suggested he stay on, and I agreed. I assumed that was purely a work decision. Now I’m not so sure. I get the feeling they may have quarreled, even split up—though I gather Gini’s admitted nothing to Lindsay. And I was shocked when I saw her tonight. She looks ill. Even shell-shocked, wouldn’t you say?”

“Her manner’s odd, certainly. I’m reserving judgment.”

“That’s unusual, for you.”

Rowland made no reply to this comment. He opened the door to the landing.

“I just hope I’m wrong, that’s all,” Max continued, glancing in the direction of Gini’s room. He lowered his voice. “I like Lamartine. I like her. If anything has gone wrong between them, I’d feel partly to blame.”

“Not your responsibility, Max,” Rowland said, his manner suddenly brisk. He gave Max a smile of sudden warmth, then headed off to his room down the corridor, leaving Max to wonder: how exactly
would
Rowland have dealt with Lamartine? He would ask him over the course of the weekend, Max resolved, but as it happened, the weekend took an unexpected turn, so the question was neither answered nor asked.

Downstairs, Lindsay was sitting alone, staring thoughtfully into the fire, when Danny toddled into the room, looking anxious, and clutching a painting of a blue bristly animal.

“Where’s Rowland?” he said.

“Upstairs, I think, Danny. He and your daddy went up to wash and change.”

“Look.” He flourished the picture. “Dog. I made it for Rowland.”

“It’s a magnificent dog, Danny. I like it very much.”

“Short legs,” Danny said in a critical tone, surveying his handiwork.

“Some dogs do have short legs. That’s fine.”

“Could be a hedgehog,” Danny said craftily, turning it upside down. “I like hedgehogs. I like them
best.
”

“
That’s
what’s so clever, Danny. It could be a hedgehog
or
a dog. In fact, it could be a hedge
dog
.”

Danny thought this was hilarious. He fell over laughing and kicked his legs in the air. Lindsay was just remembering how wonderfully reassuring small children were, because they liked the feeblest jokes, when something else occurred to her. She remembered the cake. She frowned.

“Did you know Rowland was coming, Danny?” she asked, feeling instantly guilty and mean.

“Yes. Mummy said at breakfast. She said it was a secret, a nice secret. But if I ate up all my egg, she’d tell me. So I did. I ate it
all
up, even the yucky white bits.”

Danny’s eyes rounded. He became bright red. He looked at Lindsay anxiously.

“It’s not a secret now, is it?” he whispered. “He’s here now. He brought me a ray gun. He ate his cake.”

“No, it’s not a secret now, Danny.” Lindsay gave him a kiss. “Besides, I won’t breathe a word.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. Zip the lips. Sure.”

Danny loved zip the lips. He zipped his own, several times, then toddled off upstairs. Lindsay remained. She glared at the fire. Skunk, she thought: laughing up his sleeve at her throughout their meeting that morning. Lying, devious, manipulative, two-faced skunk! How long had he been planning this? What was he up to?

Charlotte stuck her head around the door, looking pink and flustered.

“Oh, there you are, Lindsay. I’m—I thought I’d just go and have a chat with Max. And change. Gini’s gone to read. We’re having guests for drinks at seven-thirty. They’ll stay only an hour. Then we’ll eat. I’ve made a huge steak and kidney pie. I hope it’s all right. I’m afraid you and Gini are sharing the end bathroom with Rowland, so if you want a bath…”

“I’d love a bath.”

“Well, turf Rowland out. Don’t let him hog all the hot water. And ignore the boys. Rowland brought them all ray guns. It sounds like World War Three up there.”

She disappeared, and Lindsay went upstairs. Martian noises emanated from the boys’ attic bedroom. Gini’s door was shut. The bathroom door was shut: the gushings and rumblings of ancient plumbing proclaimed Rowland’s occupancy. What in hell was the man doing—running a bath, or filling a swimming pool? Did he have to whistle while he did it? Lindsay glowered at the door, then retreated to her own room.

She looked at the clothes she had packed. She had planned to wear a rather dull dress, which she had brought mainly because it happened to be pressed and clean. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like it. She felt like wearing that very short Donna Karan skirt, that very short,
tight
skirt, made of the softest leather, a skirt that proclaimed to the world that Lindsay had excellent legs.

Cursing the low priority the English gave to bathrooms in old country houses, she lurked by her door, waiting. Surely even Rowland McGuire must have finished bathing by now?

The whistling had given way to operatic snatches. Rowland sang “La donna è mobile” with gusto, out of tune. Lindsay waited until the various arias had ended; she heard the bathroom door open at last. She counted to ten, then darted out.

She collided with a half-naked Rowland, and reeled back. Six feet five inches of tanned muscle blocked her path. Rowland’s wild hair was wet and black and tamed and sleek. It dripped water onto his powerful shoulders; water ran down his muscled chest. He was wearing a white towel around his waist, and nothing else.

“Do you have to parade around like Tarzan?” Lindsay snapped, trying to avert her eyes from biceps, pectorals, and narrow waist and hips. “You’re half naked.”

“Ah, you object to the towel? I’ll remove it, if you prefer.”

His hands dropped to his waist. From the attic came the stuttering burst of ray-gun fire. Lindsay fled. She dived into the bathroom, slammed the door, and bolted it. She was standing in thick fog; she swore at the steaming billowy air, paddled her way forward blindly, then stopped. He’d had the grace, she noted, to clean the tub, but like all men when bathing, had left the room half flooded and the towels in a sodden heap.

She sat down by the vast iron monster of a bathtub, and stared at its clawed feet. The room smelled deliciously of Rowland’s aftershave. Its scent made Lindsay feel angry, nostalgic—and weak.

R
OWLAND WAS NOT GOOD
at cocktail parties, which he disliked. He was not gifted at small talk, and he did not suffer fools gladly. Deficient in these necessary requirements, he avoided such occasions whenever possible, and when trapped, as now, preferred to retreat to the edge.

He talked briefly to an Oxford don, and to a painter who lived in the next village, both of whom he had met before and liked. The don, a close friend of Rowland’s former Oxford tutor, sought to persuade him, as he had done before, that he was wasting his abilities and his honors degree, and should return to academic life.

“Too cloistered,” Rowland said.

“Scholarship can be narrow, I grant you,” replied the don, who was elderly, and an authority on Wittgenstein. “The corollary is that it’s deep.”

“Even so. I like journalism. It suits me. Wrongs can be righted.”

“Often?”

“Sometimes. Besides, I like a patchwork life.”

“Do you still climb?” the don asked, and when Rowland said that yes, he still did, the old man’s face lit up. They talked mountains for a while, most enjoyably, and rock types, and the Cairngorms and the Skye Ridge. Then Charlotte came up, and led the old man away, and Rowland was able to shift a few paces backward toward the bookshelves. There, for a while, he was left in blessed peace.

Rowland thought how much he liked this house, which was very old and rambling, which smelled of woodsmoke and cooking, and which seemed to him to enshrine the settled pleasures of family life. He watched Charlotte, who was wearing an old fisherman’s sweater and a long, embroidered Rajasthani skirt as she moved among her guests. She was the calmest and most maternal woman he knew, and sometimes Rowland envied Max for marrying her. Very occasionally, it would occur to Rowland, who lived alone and liked to live alone, that Max had outstripped him in the years since Oxford. Rowland’s own circumstances were little changed since leaving Balliol: Max had four sons, a happy marriage. Max was anchored; above and beyond his work he had meaning and purpose in his life. He himself was without religion, family, or strong political creed; he was neither Irish nor truly English; he was an outsider, a spectator, and likely to remain so for the rest of his life.

The thought drew his eyes to Genevieve Hunter, also an outsider, he suspected, neither quite American nor quite English: his first impression of her, which remained, was of a woman adrift.

She seemed intent, he thought, on camouflaging herself. She had been wearing gray, indeterminate clothes when he arrived. She was wearing something different, but also gray and indeterminate, now. Twice she had left the room to make a telephone call, and twice returned, almost immediately, with a tense white face. He considered the information about her that Max had given him earlier, and it seemed to him that it raised more questions than it answered. He moved forward a few paces. She had a low voice, and he found himself curious to overhear the little she said.

She had been trapped now, for some time, by one of the other local guests, an American woman in her early forties to whom Rowland had been introduced earlier, and from whom he had immediately, and not very courteously, escaped. The woman’s name was Susan something—Susan Landis, that was it. Her husband, an officer at some nearby U.S. air base, a tall loud-voiced man, was now boasting about his golf handicap to Lindsay.

Mrs. Landis was overdressed in English terms for an occasion such as this. She was the only woman present wearing heavy makeup, high-heeled shoes, and a tailored suit. She was nervous, socially ill at ease, and she had latched on to Gini as the only other American present. Gini, Rowland noted, had been making a stiff but polite attempt to draw her out.

Scraps of their conversation drifted across to Rowland. Susan Landis was extolling the delights of the Cotswolds; she found old Elizabethan houses quaint. She and her husband lived only a few miles away, and were settling into the area very well. Everyone was just so friendly and hospitable, why, if she and her husband accepted all the invitations they received, they’d be out every night. And her daughter—she had a daughter called Wilhelmina, or Mina for short—she just adored it here, had made so many friends—was at the Cheltenham Academy, such a fine, exclusive school, and—imagine—was staying overnight in this very village with a school friend, in the manor, had Gini seen the manor? Well, it was historic; it had cost the school friend’s mother—a
very
well-known interior designer—the better part of a million, or so people said.

“What is just so wonderful about being here,” she was now saying, “is that it’s so
safe.
I mean, can you imagine, Gini, bringing up a teenage girl in New York City these days—any big American city, come to that? Whereas here, all these darling little villages—I always know where Mina is. No hooliganism, no drugs, no muggers—” She hesitated. “I guess I shouldn’t say this, but you know I haven’t seen a black face since we moved here? Except around the base, that is…”