Lovers and Liars Trilogy (140 page)

“They were? For how long?”

“Look, Pixie, I was up in the room with them a good two hours, maybe more. We were all three of us working. And you might think about doing some work right now.”

She moved to the door, hoping this lie would quell the gossip, then hesitated. “What made you think Rowland fired Gini?”

“I don’t think. I know. Tony called me from London late last night. McGuire was on the telephone, in his office, with the door closed, but Tony overheard. He said you couldn’t
help
overhearing, McGuire was so mad, you could have heard him in Piccadilly Circus.”

Lindsay sighed: Tony was Pixie’s latest boyfriend, and devoted. He worked in a very junior capacity in the features department, in an office across the corridor from Rowland McGuire’s.

“Well, I’m sorry, Pixie,” she said, “but for once Tony has it wrong. I told you—I was
with
them. Gini certainly has not been fired.”

“Oh, she got reinstated.” Pixie gave her a sidelong glance. “I mean, that was obvious to everyone in the lobby last night. But he did fire her. And he didn’t mince his words. She’d screwed up in Amsterdam, Tony says, and McGuire was going wild. Then he started in on Pascal Lamartine. Tony said he’d have died if he’d been on the receiving end. Tony said that was the
worst
he’d ever heard him. Then he slammed down the phone, he’d fired her by then, several times, and then he came storming out of his office with his green eyes flashing fire. Then he left, and before he left he went suddenly quiet and—” Pixie gave a sigh. “I just wish I’d
been
there, that’s all. I told you he was gorgeous. Can you imagine how
totally
gorgeous he’d be in a rage? I love tempestuous men…”

“Pixie, for God’s sake!”

“Well, I do. Show me the woman who doesn’t. I’m just honest, that’s all. Just the
thought
of McGuire in a rage makes my nipples go hard.”

“That’s enough, Pixie.”

“It’s his eyes, mainly…” Pixie, always irrepressible, gave a small shiver of delight. “And that black hair. And the voice. And the muscles. And the fact that he’s so tall. Also I hear he’s incredible in bed. I mean like
seriously
incredible, so you can hardly
walk
the next day. Walk? I can tell you, I wouldn’t be walking anywhere, I’d just be lying there, waiting for more…”

“Pixie, stop this right now. I’m not interested in these fantasies.”

“They’re not fantasies. All this is well documented. There’s this girl I know…”

“Pixie!”

“She scores them, all right? And her top mark is twenty-five. She gives them marks for invention, stamina, intuition, size, tendresse, output, concern—”

“Intuition? Who is this girl?”

“And you know what McGuire scored? One hundred. He went right off the charts. She was
floored.
Also, and this is
corroborated,
because she checked, and it wasn’t just her—also, he has these rules…”

“Rules?” Lindsay said faintly.

“Yes.” Pixie lowered her voice to a more confidential tone. “Like—
before,
right—he always makes the situation crystal clear. It’s sex, maybe friendship—and that’s all. The relationship isn’t going to have any future, there’s going to be no commitments on either side. Those are his terms. And he sticks to them too. I mean, not even any endearments, no ‘darlings,’ no personal revelations of any kind. This girl said she didn’t know one thing more about him when he ended it than she did the day it began. It drove her totally wild.”

Pixie gave Lindsay a long, significant look. Lindsay had a brief battle with her own most vulgar instincts; the instincts won.

“How long did she—”

“Two months. I gather the all-time record is two and a half. This was some years back, just after he returned from Washington. She said he went through women like a
machine.
She said that when it began, when he spelled out his statute of limitations, as it were—well it was fatal. She fell in love with him before he’d finished the first sentence. And then, the next morning, when she got out of bed and, like I say, she could hardly
stand,
she made herself this promise. She was determined, but determined, to be the one who changed his mind.”

“Well, she clearly didn’t succeed—” Lindsay said.

“She tried really hard,” Pixie continued, launched now, and speaking fast. “She thought that if she managed to hide the fact that she was totally crazy about him, she had a chance. I mean, she’s having the most incredible sex of her life, she figures there
must
be progress of some kind. Only there wasn’t.” Pixie sighed. “And the instant he realized how she felt—well, one night she was so overcome she just told him—that was it. Curtains. Kind but immovable. The end.”

Lindsay had begun to move toward the door.

“She tried everything,” Pixie went on, and Lindsay stopped. “She was getting so desperate, she was so madly in love, she hit on this really crazy plan. She’d get pregnant. She was sure, if she could just do that, she’d change his mind. So she stopped taking the pill and she never said a word. Only, of course, that didn’t work either. Condoms.” Pixie gave Lindsay a significant look. “Always. Because he’s careful as well as wild. And no way could she get around that—believe me, she’s inventive, and she tried.”

Lindsay had blushed crimson. She turned back from the door. “Pixie, stop this at once. We shouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Why not?”

“Because we just shouldn’t. I don’t expect you to understand. Let’s put it down to the generation gap. This is someone’s private life, someone we both know and like.”

“I thought you
didn’t
like McGuire? You said he was arrogant.”

“Never mind. Like him or dislike him, it makes no difference. That kind of gossip always ends up causing trouble, and pain. I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want you passing this kind of rumor around. If there are rumors, those rumors are untrue…”

“If you say so.” Pixie shrugged.

“I mean it, Pixie. Just keep your speculations to yourself, and don’t damned well encourage them in other people. I assume you have work to get on with—because if you haven’t, there’s something badly wrong.”

Pixie gave her a look of astonishment.

“Everything’s under control, Lindsay.”

“Just make sure I get the transparencies from the Chanel and Gaultier shows by nine tonight. Make sure Markov’s there, at his hotel, before you bike his invitations around to him, and remember, Pixie, any hitches, one fuckup, and you’re unemployed.”

Pixie had colored. “I’m good at my job,” she protested. “This is going to run like clockwork.”

“It had better,” Lindsay said, walking out, and just managing to prevent herself from slamming the door. She knew Pixie would probably be making some face at it once it was closed—and she was, of course, fully justified. Lindsay’s cheeks were still bright scarlet. She quickly left the hotel, went out into mists and soft rain, and took in deep breaths of damp air.

She was furious with herself. How could she reprimand Pixie for gossiping, when she had just been listening avidly to gossip herself? How could she then compound her own felony by picking on Pixie’s work, when that work was always excellent? She had just set Pixie an appalling example, and if she had succeeded in stemming the tide of gossip about Rowland and Gini, she would not have done so for long. She glanced back at the hotel. The lobby had been seething with journalists, with TV crews. In that kind of hothouse atmosphere, gossip bred faster than germs.

She felt dirtied by her own curiosity, sickened by the kind of details people bandied around. Beyond and behind such feelings were others.

Deeply troubled, Lindsay crossed the quay and leaned over the balustrade, looking down at the Seine. Prior to the conversation with Pixie, she had been trying to convince herself that her own instincts the previous night had been wrong. Now she felt doubly unsure. One aspect of Pixie’s report worried her, and that was the description of Rowland’s firing Gini, and the manner in which that action was performed.

Lindsay knew just how vulnerable Gini was to criticism from those she liked or admired. It was a legacy, of course, from her father, from all those years when she had tried to prove her worth, and win his affection, and failed.

Lindsay had never dared to say this to Gini, but she had always believed that this inheritance had been a strong contributing factor in her attraction to Pascal Lamartine. Lindsay might not have heard all the details of Gini’s original involvement with Pascal, for Gini was reticent, but she had heard the story of how Gini had first met him, in that press bar in Beirut, and it seemed to her there was an obvious aspect to that story to which Gini, and presumably Pascal, were totally blind.

What had ignited their affair? It was Pascal’s hostility to Gini’s father that had ignited it, and Gini’s intuition, subsequently confirmed, that Pascal Lamartine was contemptuous of Gini’s father, at whose shrine Gini had painfully worshiped for so long. At the very moment when Gini’s own doubts about her father were beginning, along came a handsome, impassioned, and very romantic man who loathed and despised Sam Hunter on sight—and said so to Gini in no uncertain terms.

As one figure of authority began to crumble before her eyes, Gini replaced him with another—what if, now, Gini was about to, or was in the process of, replacing that second mentor with a third?

Lindsay began to pace back and forth, feeling more agitated now. In order to love, she thought, Gini—like many women—had not only to admire, but also to feel she could learn. She had to look up to the man she loved, admiring his gifts, his character, his intelligence, his moral worth—and believing always that he was better endowed in these respects than she was herself.

Such a female weakness, Lindsay thought, aware that it was also her own. Gini might preach equality, and imagine she practiced it, but Lindsay believed that too much equality in love would be something Gini would loathe. Nothing appealed to Gini so much as a teacher, and nothing was so likely to attract her to a man as some reprimand from him she knew was deserved.

Would a bitter dressing-down from Rowland McGuire have a deep effect on Gini? Lindsay frowned down at the gray water, knowing that—if she herself were truthful—it would certainly have influenced her. Then she realized: in Gini’s case, that particular question had already been answered, and in front of her eyes.

It was Rowland McGuire’s sharp and angry condemnation at Max’s house, that moment when he accused Gini of behaving selfishly, that had snapped Gini out of months of illness, misery, and self-reproach. With a few sentences Rowland McGuire had been able to effect a change that in months of sympathy and argument, Lindsay had failed to achieve. Lindsay thought she could see a pattern now. She could see how, if her relationship with Pascal had been impaired, or if Pascal had, in Bosnia, failed Gini in some way, Gini might possibly end up in Rowland McGuire’s arms.

And as for Rowland’s motivation—well, that was obvious enough, Lindsay thought, turning angrily away. Gini was beautiful; for men, as Lindsay had watched over the years, she carried a powerful sexual allure. She could see Rowland McGuire’s responding to that, McGuire, who went through women “like a machine.” To him it was a matter of two months, three months, a scrupulous exercise in which his heart was not involved.

Lindsay felt indignant, then angry. In such a situation, her sympathies were always with the woman, and Gini was her closest woman friend. This anger at McGuire took root and grew as she made her way to the Cazarès headquarters for Lazare’s press conference.

By the time she reached there, Lindsay had argued herself into a position where, she told herself, she felt no attraction for McGuire anymore, not even liking. Pixie’s words ringing in her ears, she told herself that Rowland McGuire was an irresponsible, cold manipulator of women, a Casanova, a Valmont, the kind of man she most despised. Then, through the press of people, she saw him. One look at his face and she at once changed her mind.

It was a while before she saw him. When she reached the Cazarès building it was still half an hour before the start of the press conference, but the rabble had already arrived. The street outside and the courtyard within were crammed with vans, with the white sprouting mushrooms of satellite dishes, with the cables and impedimenta of TV crews. CNN was there, and the other major American network crews; she could see familiar faces from the BBC and ITN. The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish, the Japanese—they were all out in force. Lindsay pushed through a wall of people, a babel of tongues. Inside the front lobby the crush was even worse: like the melees that attended the collections, but worse. Lindsay could feel that peculiar intensity of hysteria generated by a crowd, but here, in addition to the mad desire simply to get in, there were other, stronger emotions. There was a vicarious thrill to the drama of sudden death.

Lindsay was pushed, shoved, trodden on, nearly thrown to the floor as she approached the doors to the hall where the conference would be held. Black-suited Cazarès courtiers were trying to control the crowd, but there were too few of them; they could not hold back this surge. Jostled, Lindsay let the crowd pick her up and propel her forward. She could now see into the hall beyond, which was blindingly bright from TV lights; she could glimpse, at its far end, a black dais, a table, a lectern, microphones, cameras, and—surmounting it all—a huge blow-up of that Beaton photograph of Maria Cazarès. Lindsay was caught up, thrust into the room, carried forward by a wave of people—and then she saw Rowland McGuire.

He was standing just a few feet from her, on the eddying edge of the crowd. He was using the advantage of his height to scan over the heads of those entering to watch who came through the door. He was wearing, Lindsay saw, a black overcoat, a black suit, and a black tie, a formality of dress that made him stand out from the crowd. His face was pale and set; he never once moved his eyes from the doorway, and Lindsay knew, without a second’s doubt, for whom he was searching that crowd.

He must have seen Lindsay enter, though he gave no indication of doing so, because he made one quick move, still keeping his eyes on the door. A heavy American who had pushed past Lindsay earlier now found himself thrust aside so hard, he nearly fell; Lindsay found that her arm had been gripped, and she had been drawn through the press of people to his side.