Lovers and Liars Trilogy (139 page)

“How can you say that? How?” He was shaking with rage. “Don’t you believe anything I’ve ever told you? That’s all it takes, is it, to undo all your trust in me—one conversation with my ex-wife? That’s your justification, is it, for getting into bed with a man you’ve known three days, and fucking him all night? Christ…”

He thrust her away from him. “Don’t answer that. You don’t need to. Don’t speak to me about Marianne. I love my daughter. And just now I don’t want to hear her name on your lips.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know. We both know.” He stopped, then drew in a breath to steady himself. “I’m sorry I hit you. I don’t want it to end this way. However, it has. I’d better go. If I stay—I could hit you again. I—” He looked around the room blindly. “There was a moment—in Bosnia—when I thought… Never mind that. Just don’t talk about Marianne in that way. You have no children. You can’t understand. All that joy and guilt and remorse. Trying so hard, feeling you’ve never done enough. I did have to work, you know.” He gave her a pained glance. “No doubt Helen left out that part of the equation. But I did have to support a child and wife. I take photographs. Of wars. You can’t do that nine to five and come home for dinner every night. She did know that when she married me. When Marianne was born, we did make plans. Where I should go, when I would return. How I could ration out my life. Meet my responsibilities as a father. According to Helen, the result was failure, and the failure was entirely mine, of course. I might have hoped—” He hesitated. “I might have hoped that you would see it differently. It doesn’t matter. You listened to my ex-wife and you judged me. Now I understand what happened last night. I’ll go. There’s no point in protracting this. It’s painful for both of us.”

“I wanted your baby.” Gini gave a cry; she made a small rushing movement toward him, then stopped. “Oh, Pascal—couldn’t you see? Couldn’t you guess? It began in Bosnia, in Mostar maybe. Because I loved you so much, and we saw so much death.” Her voice wavered and her face contracted. “I knew it was impractical. I could see you didn’t want it. But it just took hold of me, and I couldn’t get free. I wanted your baby so much, I couldn’t think of anything else.”

There was a silence. He had listened to this stumbling confession intently, with a pale, set face. As she came to its end, he gave a small gesture of the hands, an eloquent gesture, as if he were about to relinquish something he valued very much.

“I see.” His face became closed. “That was what you felt. Why couldn’t you bring yourself to tell me?”

“Why? Because I was too proud. Because I didn’t want to have to persuade you. Because that kind of decision has to be made by two people, not one—and it ought to be made
joyfully.
All that—”

Her voice broke. She began to speak again, and then gradually she realized that although she was pouring out to him her strongest feelings, emotions that had been dammed up for months, and although her confession seemed to move him, there was no relenting on his part, and no response.

She came to a faltering halt. He continued to look at her for a moment afterward, then gave a sigh.

“I wonder if you really mean that.” He glanced away, then back. “Perhaps you do. I can’t tell anymore. I wish you’d told me at the time. My reaction might have been different from the one you expected—who knows? As it is, perhaps it’s just as well. Presumably you changed your mind, did you, when you had that conversation with Helen, and you suddenly realized what a very unsuitable father I’d make?” The words were coolly said; the blood rushed into Gini’s face.

“No—I did not,” she said. “That wasn’t what I thought, not exactly. I told you. I wasn’t well. I couldn’t think clearly. I was afraid, terribly afraid. You have a child already. You might not have wanted a child with me.”

“I would certainly have resisted making a decision in Bosnia.” His voice remained cool. “A decision like that—it determines the next eighteen, twenty years of your life. It wouldn’t have been wise to rush into it then, in a war zone, when we were both under stress. You always told me how important your work was to you—in fact, you’ve been reminding me of that just now. So I would have suggested we wait until we had returned to London, had time to think—” He bent and picked up his camera case. “As it is, of course, it’s irrelevant now. Out of the question. You have all these requirements for the father of your children, and I don’t measure up to them. You’ve made that clear.”

“Pascal—please. I know what you’re going to say next. Don’t. I know you so well—if you say it, there’ll be no going back.”

“I know it’s hurtful. It still has to be said.” He gave her a long, steady, and regretful look, then moved toward the door. “I
have
a child, Gini. I know what that involves. If you have requirements for any future father of your children, doesn’t it occur to you that
I
have requirements also? I know what I would want in any future wife, in the mother of any children I might have. This time—” He hesitated. “This time I’d want to be sure that there was love on both sides. The kind of love that didn’t waver, that would endure. Responsibility, fidelity—all those things.” His voice became bitter. “Above all, like most men, I would want to be totally sure that any child my wife gave birth to was actually mine.” He paused. “You can be very self-absorbed, Gini. Even so, I imagine you can understand that.”

The final reproach was gently made; Gini had never felt such shame. With a low cry she held out her hand to him.

“Pascal, wait Whatever I did—I do love you. I still love you. I can’t bear to hear you say these terrible things. I wish none of this had happened. I’d give anything to put the clock back. But you
could
trust me. I’d never—you could come to trust me again. Please—we could move beyond this eventually, you said we could.”

“That was an hour ago. How strange.” He looked at her blindly, then glanced down at his watch. “Yes, an hour. It feels like a lifetime. In that hour you’ve told me how passionately you wanted my child, and I’ll never forget your face when you said that.” He paused. “But it didn’t prevent your going to bed with a virtual stranger, did it? You still let him cover up for you, and lie to my face—” His voice broke. “Is that love, Gini? It isn’t any love I recognize. I would have died rather than do that to you. I—look, it’s better if I just go. I can’t bear any more of this. You’ve changed, Gini.” He lifted her face up to his. “You used to be so—open. So direct. And now—you equivocate. You shift ground. You claim one truth, then deny it with your next breath. What did that to you? The war? My absence? A man you scarcely know? Tell me the truth.”

Gini looked for a long time at his face.

“All three,” she answered at last in a low voice.

She could see that the admission hurt him as much as it hurt her to make. His face contracted; then he turned away.

“That’s honest, at least. Thank you for that.” He moved to the door again, half opened it, then looked back.

“I could have kissed you then. I wanted to very much. Did you know that?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Better not to weaken in that particular way.” He shrugged. “If one’s going to do this, better to do it cleanly, don’t you think? I have to catch that plane. I’ll have moved my things out of the apartment by the time you get back. Gini, good-bye.”

And with that, just as she had expected, he left. The door closed quietly behind him. She heard his feet descend the staircase. Running first to the door, and then to the window, she saw him emerge from the entrance below. He crossed the narrow street, crossed the small park beyond at a fast pace. She watched his tall, determined figure as he receded into the distance. On the quay beyond the park he hailed a taxi and climbed into it. Indeed absolute; he never once looked back.

With tears blurring her vision, Gini ran to the bed. She picked up the letters she had written to him and pressed them tight against her chest. She felt cut to the heart by his words; it pained her deeply that he should have left these letters, these talismans. She stared at the walls of the room, with their remorseless patternings of ruins, of shepherds and nymphs. Shame and self-reproach and uncertainty washed through her mind. She thought: I could go after him—and then she felt it, welling inside her, a resistance, even a rebellion, that lay deep inside herself.

She was almost thirty years old. Her years of fertility were shortening month by month. That desire for a child—had Pascal understood, truly understood, when she spoke to him of that? He might; he might not. Oh,
decide,
she said to herself, beginning to pace the room, trying to force herself to think. And then it occurred to her as it had—if she were truthful—once during the previous night, that she might have conceived now, that even now, within her, infinitely small, were the beginnings of new life.

That possibility terrified her. Standing suddenly still, she realized that whatever decisions her mind came to, her body might already have made for her an irrevocable choice. Her fear deepened, and then, stealing along her veins, came a furtive exultation, an ill-advised joy; she tried to examine the idea of maternity—and maternity under these circumstances—she tried to see its implications, but they were too huge and her mind could not grapple with them. She watched herself take refuge in a certain fatalism, that woman’s defense.

Wait,
she said to herself, wait—because no decision could be made until she was certain, and meanwhile neither Pascal nor Rowland need be involved; she felt, obscurely, that she had forfeited that right.

With that realization, that here essentially she was alone, some equilibrium returned. Clutching Pascal’s letters, she moved to the window and looked out at the Seine, at that slanting view of Notre Dame; from this partial viewpoint it resembled the bow of a great ship.

She thought of Anneke’s mother, and a promise made to herself. She ran out of the room, down the stairs, and into the street.
Work,
she thought, hastening back to the St. Vincent.

Room 810 was empty. Rowland McGuire, adhering to his schedule, had already left.

M
ORTE D’UNE LEGENDE
READ
the headline on the newspaper delivered to Lindsay’s room that morning. Beneath it was the famous Beaton photograph of a laughing, short-haired young woman, her hands half obscuring her face. Lindsay began to translate the long article.

Her French was serviceable, but not extensive: she could not cope with the lyricism, the orotundity here. She could gather that the facts repeated the authorized version of Cazarès’s life. Beyond that, she could see that Maria Cazarès was already being turned into a symbol, before she was twenty-four hours dead.

But a symbol of what? She struggled with the vocabulary, the syntax. Several things, it seemed: of modern womanhood, of modern women, whom she had freed, the writer claimed, redefining their images of themselves. Of France, in that she embodied the French virtues of elegance, discernment, and chic. By the final paragraph, the claims seemed to have swelled, as if the male writer were drunk on his own prose.
L’éternelle feminine,
Lindsay read, trying to construe a clutch of dense phrases. She had the gist, she thought. Maria Cazarès,
une femme solitaire, unique, et mystérieuse…
yes, yes, she understood that… was the something something and the very embodiment of the eternal feminine—whatever
that
was, Lindsay thought with sudden impatience. Giving up, she tossed the paper aside.

How typical, how predictable, she thought, that having decided Cazarès was an enigma, a female enigma, they should give the task of decoding her to a man. Lindsay, who had slept badly and still felt restless, moved to the window and looked out. It was still early; she could see the day would not be clear. The sky was low, the clouds scudding fast. Wind whipped the branches of the trees and rippled the Seine. The air was watery, gray, promising rain and then more rain: a day of half-light and mist.

This hotel room was beginning to feel confining. She made some time pass, first by telephoning home and speaking to Tom, and then by sending a second fax to her contact at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who had not yet replied to her query of the previous day. Then, having hesitated some time, and finally having decided to risk it, she called Rowland’s room, since it was now nine in the morning and need not, therefore, be too embarrassing if it was Gini who picked up the phone.

She let the number ring, but there was no answer. Then, still feeling on edge, she went down to the room the
Correspondent
was using as their headquarters. Pixie, dressed in a garment that appeared to be made of knitted string, was already there. Lindsay picked up her pass for the Cazarès press conference that morning, checked on a few other details, was about to leave, then paused.

“You made sure there were passes for Rowland and Gini?”

Pixie gave a small smile.

“Oh, sure. I had them sent up to their room last night.” Then, after a delicate pause: “Clever of McGuire to get that room. I wept, pleaded, offered to sell the management my body—and I had no luck at all.”

“So? Rowland has more heft than you do,” Lindsay said.

Pixie’s smile broadened. Lindsay knew what that smile meant: it meant gossip, speculation, the spirals of office intrigue.

“Well,” Pixie said, “he’s that kind of man. Not easy to refuse.”

“What’s that supposed to imply?”

“—Though I thought it was pretty odd. Him sharing that room with her. I mean, he’d fired her only a few hours before.”

“What? Rowland fired Gini?” Lindsay shook her head. “No, Pixie. I saw them both last night. You’re wrong.”

“Oh,
everyone
saw them last night,” Pixie said in a negligent tone. “After all, this place is stuffed to the gills with reporters, what can you expect? They were seen going out late last night. They were seen when they returned. One look at her face, apparently—there was what you might call ribaldry in the bar.”

“What absolute rubbish,” Lindsay said sharply. “I was with them both later. They were working, that’s all.”