Lovers and Liars Trilogy (107 page)

“Really?”

Rowland saw Gini raise her cool gray eyes to Mrs. Landis’s face.

“Well, my boyfriend’s due here any moment. He’s black. So that should even things out a little. Excuse me, will you? There’s a telephone call I’m trying to make.”

It was perfectly done. For a second, even Rowland was convinced. Mrs. Landis blushed crimson. Gini left the room. Very shortly afterward, the Landises left.

“Don’t, Rowland.” Charlotte had materialized at his side. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“I imagine you would. Why on earth do you allow them in your house?”

“He’s a horror, I admit.” Charlotte shrugged. “She isn’t half as bad as she seems. She’s bullied and lonely and desperate to make friends. The bloody snobby English around here snicker about her clothes and her house.”

“How about her views on race?”

“Oh, come on, Rowland. They agree with
those.
One of the penalties of living in Gloucestershire. So stop standing there in the corner, making superficial judgments on my guests. Come and cheer Lindsay up. She’s been fielding Robert Landis for hours. First we had golf, then the virtues of Newt Gingrich, then he remembered who she was and wanted to know what the little ladies would be wearing this year.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Only a bit. Lindsay told him breasts were small last year, but this year they were going to be
big
.” Charlotte linked her arm through his. “Come on, Rowland, only ten more minutes, then it’s steak and kidney pie. I made it specially for you.”

Rowland hesitated. Lindsay, who had been strenuously avoiding him since he walked in, had just given him a cold glance and turned her back. She was looking very fetching in a short, tight black leather skirt and black flats. She wore a white shirt with a high collar. With her short, curly hair and her slim figure, she looked boyish, like a medieval page, Rowland thought.

He consented to be led across. Charlotte immediately left them. Lindsay said: “I had an excellent bath, thanks, Rowland. One and a half inches of lukewarm water. And all the towels were wet.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not very house-trained,” Rowland said.

“You don’t look sorry.” Lindsay raised her face and inspected his. “You look amused and unrepentant.”

“Not true,” Rowland replied lazily. “I do repent. I repent in my heart. It just doesn’t always show on my face. My standards have slipped. That happens to men who live alone.”

“Then it doesn’t apply in your case,” Lindsay said smartly. “If rumor can be believed, you don’t spend much time alone.”

“None of those rumors is true,” said Rowland with feeling. “People spread these wicked lies about me. I’m a man who’s much misunderstood.”

“Are you trying to be charming?”

“Certainly not. Have you had a chance to look at that file yet?”

The question, for some reason Rowland could not fathom, was a mistake.

“No, I damn well haven’t,” Lindsay replied, and stalked off without a backward look.

Women,
Rowland thought. He added a few adjectives to that noun, which cheered him up. Then, since Charlotte had left the room, and Max was deep in conversation, he seized his opportunity and escaped.

Passing Max’s study off the hall, he heard Gini, arguing with a telephone operator by the sound of it, and repeating a string of numbers in a
weary
voice. Charlotte bumped into him at the foot of the stairs; from the top came the sound of ray guns and whoops. She gave him an exhausted look.

“Would you, Rowland? Just for five minutes? It’s because they know you’re here. They want one of your gory stories. Could you frighten them to sleep?”

Rowland was a traditionalist when it came to stories. “Once upon a time,” he began.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the boys’ large attic bedroom. Teddy bears flanked his tall frame; above his head, model airplanes were strung from the rafters; a procession of plastic dinosaurs was arranged at his feet.

Max and Charlotte, orderly in unexpected ways, had named their children alphabetically. Alex, at eight the eldest, was in the top bunk to Rowland’s left, with Ben, the next son, beneath him. Colin, who was just six, and Danny, were on his right. All the boys had laid their ray guns reverently on the ends of their bunks, and Colin, who had the most nervous temperament of the four, was clutching a stuffed penguin very tight.

“Once upon a time,” Rowland continued, “on the far west coast of Ireland, where I grew up, lived a leprechaun called Leaf. He had bright green skin, orange eyes, and a tail—”

“Leprechauns don’t have tails,” Alex interrupted.

“This leprechaun did,” Rowland said. “He had a tail one millimeter long, and he lived with his mother in a mousehole in the wall of my grandfather’s farm. They were both as happy as the day is long, but
unfortunately
—” Here Rowland, who had lowered his voice to a chilly whisper, paused.

“Did he have an enemy, Rowland?” Ben asked with a shiver of delight. “Was he horrible?”

“He most certainly was,” Rowland confirmed. “His name was Groilach. He was a black-hearted hobgoblin, and he lived in the peat bogs by the loch. He drank frogs’ blood for breakfast, he had scaly skin, and he was covered in slime.”

“Yuck.” Ben screwed up his nose. “I bet he smelled really foul. I fell in a peat bog once, in Scotland—d’you remember, Alex? I stank. I stank for
days
.”

“He smelled appalling,” Rowland agreed, improvising obligingly. “Think of all the nastiest smells in the world. Boiled cabbage, for instance, and—”

“Danny’s farts!” Alex shouted, and all four convulsed.

“Groilach smelled even worse. As well as an evil heart, he had a huge appetite, and he’d been after Leaf the leprechaun for years. Leprechauns, you see, were his favorite food of all…”

Rowland talked on quietly, until he could see the boys were lulled. First Danny fell asleep, then Alex, then Ben. Only Colin remained awake, hanging on every word.

“He didn’t eat Leaf, did he, Rowland?” Colin whispered, stealing out a hand from under the bedclothes, and holding Rowland fast.

“Well, and of course he didn’t,” Rowland replied, knowing it was now time for his story to take a different course. “Not a chance. Leaf was good-hearted and brave, so he was bound to triumph in the end. Besides, he had a sword. And to tell you the truth, he wasn’t that worried about Groilach.”

“Why not, Rowland?”

“Because he had other things on his mind. He’d heard of this princess, you see. A very beautiful and very sad princess, a leprechaun princess who had eyes like sapphires and pale golden hair. She’d been imprisoned by a spell a long time ago. The spell kept her in this tower, which was a hundred feet high, and made of glass. She wept tears like crystals every day, because she longed to be rescued…”

Colin was sleeping now. Gently, Rowland released his hand. He rose and stretched his legs. The room was peaceful and still, the only sound the quiet breathing of the boys. For some reason, a residue of sadness from his story remained with Rowland, and he felt reluctant to leave.

His story had brought his childhood back; he could see in his mind’s eye the farm buildings he had described, where he himself had lived until he was around eight, Alex’s age.

He moved across to the window and eased the curtains aside. The moon was high; the trees and hedges were already white with hoarfrost; he looked out at a silver world. On the far side of the orchard he watched a shape detach itself from the shadows of a hedgerow; he watched the dog-fox move delicately across the grass. It circled the henhouse, lifted its snout, sniffed the air, then stiffened as, from the front of the house, came the noise of people, and cars.

The last of the local guests must be leaving. Soon one of Charlotte’s wonderful dinners would be served. Rowland listened to the cars crunch their way down the drive. He watched the dog-fox trot back to the hedgerow, then move off across the fields toward the hills. For a moment, straining his eyes to follow the fox’s movements, Rowland thought he saw lights move, high up behind the house. This puzzled him slightly, for he had walked that way many times, and he knew there were no villages up there, and no roads, just open wolds.

Voices drifted up from the kitchen below. Rowland let the curtains fall and left the room quietly. Ducking his head beneath the beams, he made his way down the narrow, twisting stairs.

It was some while, during dinner, before his feelings of nostalgia, of separation, finally passed. Gradually though, he was drawn back into the present, warmed by wine, by conversation, by good food. It was then he noticed that he was not the only person at this convivial table to be abstracted. Genevieve Hunter’s attention, he observed, was also elsewhere. She took little part in the conversation, and spoke seldom. When she did participate, the effort involved was palpable.

She was seated opposite him. Covertly, Rowland examined her. She had very short, pale, silvery hair, a pale complexion, and the expression in her gray eyes remained unreadable. She reminded him of someone, and at first he could not place the resemblance. Then it came to him. It was no one he knew: she resembled the princess of his own fairy tale that evening. Like that creature, she looked spellbound, as if someone or something had imprisoned her, as if she were looking out at the world through glass walls.

By the time Mina and Cassandra finally reached the barn, it was bitterly cold. The huge barn doors were open, and its interior was lit with strobes. People were already dancing inside, and the field around was rutted with the wheel tracks of the travelers’ trailers, ancient buses, and vans. Campfires illumined little patches of ground and intensified the blackness beyond.

The field nearest the barn was a seething mass of moving shapes. Ragged children ran back and forth in packs; dogs barked; some of the travelers were dancing outside, pumping their arms and stamping to the strange loops and electronic chatter of the music; others cooked food, or just sat in huddles near their fires, on bright blankets and quilts they had laid out on the ground.

Mina shrank back, but Cassandra caught hold of her and pulled her into the throng. The music grew louder, beating in on Mina’s ears; she felt assaulted by smells and sound. There was a rich drift of marijuana, of sweat and unwashed clothes; cooking fumes, car exhausts, burning wood, mud, and icy air. Outside the barn doors, a man dressed in a scarlet embroidered Afghan coat was juggling with colored balls. Beyond him, inside the barn itself, lights danced and bounced on the walls. The strobe flashes dazzled Mina’s eyes. She clutched Cassandra’s arm and watched her face speed up, like jerky frames of old film, so her expressions were fragmented, and the scorpion on her forehead appeared to move.

Cassandra’s eyes, black, then bright, were searching the crowd. Somewhere here, Cassandra said, somewhere in the midst of the tossing hair and jerking arms they would find Star.

“He’s tall,” Cassandra shouted through the din of the music. “He looks like an angel. He has long black hair. He’ll be wearing a red scarf.”

She began to push her way through the dancers, holding Mina tight by the arm. And as they fought their way through, Mina began to feel it, the pulse of the music, and the electricity of the crowd. It was benign, not threatening, and heady too. She could feel the rhythm of synthesizer guitars start to beat in her veins; the random snatches of words incorporated into the music opened up the corners of her mind. She liked the weird, high-pitched helium voices. She chanted the words; she wanted to dance too; she wanted to get inside the sound.

She moved her feet, then her arms; she sucked in deep breaths of the smoky, acrid air. She was parted from Cassandra, then tossed out to her again into a little space on the edge of the crowd.

“You see? Isn’t it great?” Cassandra’s face came and went. The scorpion on her forehead came and went. She had lit a joint; its end glowed then was dark. “Here.”

She passed it across; Mina sucked in the wonderful sweetness. It was instant lift: she could move on the music; the lights buoyed her; she felt she could touch the rafters fifty feet above her head—one more little suck and she might reach out her hand and touch the sky.

Cassandra was smiling; her face was making flashes of encouragement and understanding.

“You see—just wait. Come and find Star.”

She turned her head the wrong way, into the music, into the strobe, and Mina, for whom time was braking, realized that Cassandra couldn’t sense him the way she herself could. She tried to shape the words and tell Cassandra: she knew even without looking that Star was already beside them. He had come out of nowhere; without even turning her head she knew he was there.

She turned around to look at him and knew at once that she trusted him. At first, because he was so startlingly beautiful, he was like an apparition. She stared at the flash of his eyes; the strobe made his smile like lightning. Then he took her hand, and Cassandra’s hand, and she felt it immediately, just as Cass had described it—the jolt of his power.

He greeted Cassandra, then turned to Mina and gave her a long, unwavering stare.

“And this is Mina,” he said. “Your American friend. Welcome, Mina. I’ve been told all about you. Are you happy tonight, Mina? Are you flying yet?”

“A little,” Mina said. “Yes, I am.”

“Good.” He pressed her hand, then released it.

“I can help. I’ve brought you both wings.”

It was like watching a conjuror magicking cards out of air. A moment before, his hand had been empty. Now he extended it slowly, uncurling his fingers, and there, flashing in the strobe light, were two little pills. One was pink, bright pink, the color of cotton candy; the other was smooth and white as a pearl.

“A White Dove and a pink jewel,” he said slowly. “Star’s special gifts to two very special girls. Now, which shall it be? Is Mina a dove girl or a jewel girl?”

“Which is stronger?” Cassandra asked.

“Oh, they’re both powerful. I brought them back myself, from across the sea.”

“From Amsterdam?”

“Maybe. Who knows?” The music gave a twist, and Star gave a smile. “Pink for Cassandra, I think,” he said, “and white for Mina. Pink like a fine Burmese ruby, and white like a nun’s veil.”