Lovers and Liars Trilogy (158 page)

She gave a small distressed gesture of the hands, displacing air. He watched her face alter, soften, and then flood with regret.

“Don’t.” She moved across to him and took his hand in hers. “You were going to make a speech—weren’t you?”

“I was.”

“Please don’t. I can imagine it. I was going to make a speech too. A similar one, I think. None of it would have been true—it might have made things easier, but it wouldn’t have been true. I was going to be—oh, hard. Brittle. Dismissive. Light. Maybe a little cheap. I thought cheap might help…” She paused and gave a half-smile. “And you?”

“Brusque. Shabby. Stereotypically male. I’ve had some practice at that.”

She smiled again, then, her eyes filling with tears, shook her head.

“I’m glad you stopped. I’d have hated that. It would have meant I was wrong about you—that you were less than I thought.” She hesitated, then looked up at him with an expression half doubtful, half pleading.

“May I say something else instead? It’s brief, I promise you—and I probably shouldn’t say it, but…”

“Tell me.”

“I could love you, Rowland…” She gave a small gasp, or sigh, as she said this, as if the words shocked her as much as they did him. She jerked her face away as if ashamed, then turned back, clasping his hands. “Oh, God—I think that’s true. I think I knew that—but I don’t know why. When I walked into that room here with you, when you began talking—it was before you touched me, I’m sure of that. I think it’s why I went to bed with you—but that might just be an excuse. Except no. No…” She shook her head angrily. “It isn’t an excuse—that’s how it was. Something
came
at me, out of the air, I hadn’t foreseen it, I promise you that. It wasn’t a matter of strategy, decisions… I just… I could see all the possible consequences very clearly. I could
hear
them, Rowland, shouting away in my head—all the lies, the misery, the betrayal of trust, the hurt to someone I loved—someone I still love. Oh, God…” Her face contorted. “I could see—all those consequences, all those barriers—and I
still
did it. I’m not proud of that, but I can’t be ashamed of it either. I could—I could sense something, there in the room with us, and it felt
bright,
Rowland, good, like hope, like a promise—no, not like a promise, like a glimpse, just a glimpse of another future, and I… oh, God. I shouldn’t be saying this—”

She broke off, her eyes filling with tears, and bent her head. She had begun to tremble as she spoke. Rowland was deeply moved; everything she attempted to describe, in all its flimsiness and strength, he, too, had felt. He said her name and drew her into his arms. “Darling,” he began. “I understand. I know exactly what you mean. Listen to me, Gini.”

“No. No.” She drew back from him a little, then clung to him again. “No—you must listen, Rowland. Please listen. Don’t touch me—I have to finish this. I have to make a choice, I know that. I’ve known for days. I’ve been thinking and thinking—I’ve thought of nothing else. I
have
to decide. And I’ve chosen, Rowland—I’ve already chosen. I’m going to stay with Pascal. Rowland, he loves me—I have to do that.”

“No, you don’t.” He caught her to him again and forced her to meet his eyes. “You don’t have to decide—not yet. You shouldn’t even be trying to decide, not now. You should wait—think. Gini, listen—you think that was nothing to me, what happened here between us? You say you
could
love me? Why do you say that—why? You know it’s much closer, much stronger than that…”

“No. No—and I mean what I say. I don’t
trust
that kind of love, Rowland. I don’t trust being
in
love—it’s too—it feels like being drunk—or drugged. It makes me—I can’t
think
when I feel that way. I feel
blind
—I’m sure I must
look
blind. Rowland, look at me…”

Rowland looked. Her face was alight with contradictions, with pain, and with delight. Her eyes, bright with tears, dazzled him.

“You think I can look at you now…” he began in an unsteady voice. “Darling—I feel blind too—but I also feel—Gini, will you for God’s sake listen to me…”

“No. I know what you’re going to say. I can feel it
here.
Color flooded into her face. She pressed her hand against her heart. “You feel as if you can see better. As if you see
more.
I know. I feel that too. But, Rowland, you can’t
trust
that. It isn’t the first time I’ve felt it. And it doesn’t
last,
you know that as well as I do—we’re both old enough. It’s there—and then it dwindles away. So I have to
listen,
Rowland, to all those other voices. Trust. Honor—if I have any left. All the promises I made to Pascal. The things I said. The things I
swore.
I can’t go back on them. I do love him. I love him very much. I owe him—so many things, I can’t explain…”

“You don’t need to explain.” He jerked away from her, his face darkening. “I
know
why you’re saying this. He saved your life yesterday. That’s the reason for this. If that hadn’t happened, this might have been different.”

There was absolute silence. Gini stared at his face. It was taut with strain. Suddenly, with an oddly formal gesture, he released her hands and stepped back.

“I didn’t mean to do this. I didn’t mean—above all—to say that. I intended to leave here and keep my feelings to myself. That was what I planned.” He hesitated. “I can see how much Pascal Lamartine loves you. I don’t doubt you also love him. I feel I owe him a debt for what he did yesterday. But I find I can’t… Too much is at stake.” He gave a quick, angry shrug. “I want you to be very clear. I’m old-fashioned—Lindsay said that. And so—if you would have me, I’d marry you. And if you’re still going to dismiss me, you can do it knowing that.”

His manner had become more formal by the second; his final statements, made in a way that was almost harsh, were as devoid of emotion as he could make them—and the more effective for that. Gini’s eyes filled with tears.

“How
can you say that, how? Rowland—stop. You scarcely know me—”

“I know you enough.”

“That can’t be true. You shouldn’t say such things. It isn’t fair to me. It isn’t fair to yourself.”

“Isn’t it?” He gave her a hard look. “Why not? I can see the alternative only too clearly. I love you, Gini. I know what it would be like, walking out now, not seeing you, not hearing your voice. That half-life. Dear God—I can see that so
well
…”

“It needn’t
be
like that…” She covered her face with her hands. “Rowland, you know I’m right. Those feelings don’t
last.
You may feel like that now—I may… But if we’re determined, if we ignore them, avoid meeting—we’ll forget. All this,
all
this—it will become weaker and weaker, and finally absurd, and then one day we’ll both look back, and we’ll think—Thank heaven I was sensible. What a fool I was—how could I ever have imagined—”

She stopped. She watched his face, lit by concern, become still and set. He took her hand in his.

“You think we’re imagining this?” he said quietly. “If so, thank God for imagination. I trust it beyond reason. Are you telling me you don’t?”

There was a silence then while he waited for her reply. Outside the room, a church bell tolled the hour, traffic passed, voices from other lives floated upward from the street. Gini looked at her imaginings, and his. She could see a possible future, just as he did. It was hazy, a little misted, like the light of a spring morning in which the loveliness of the day to come is glimpsed. She watched her life fork, north, south, right, left. The vision she now saw was very like the bright panorama Pascal had first opened up to her eyes. Both men seemed able to dismantle some defense in her mind, flooding it with illumination and promise. She was unsure if their ability to do this was innate, or if she herself gifted it to them. To discover that another man besides Pascal, and so soon after Pascal, could achieve this, confused her. It made her distrust joy, and it also made her distrust herself.

Besides such insubstantiality, duty and loyalty and the settled dailiness of established love seemed so sure, and so commendable. It was a question of
discipline,
she told herself, of honoring vows made, and remaining true, therefore, to Pascal and to herself. She looked one last time at the other Gini, the mirror woman who was so much more prepared to flout rules and take risks, and she rejected her, canceled her out.

She felt an immediate diminution, an intense stab of loss. This she ignored; if she felt unaccountably less now, she told herself, she would feel more, she would feel enfranchised, in due course.

“You have to catch a plane. I have to go to the hospital,” she said.

“I see.” Rowland at once released her and stepped back. “That’s your final decision?”

“Yes, Rowland. It is.”

She saw the reply glance like a blow across his face. He half turned in a blinded way, then turned back. He glanced down at his watch, checked the airline ticket in the pocket of his coat, braced himself, and then said in a stiff, abrupt way the one thing she feared most.

“We had unprotected sex,” he began awkwardly. “I’m sorry, but I have to say this. I broke one of my own inviolable rules in that respect. If there were any possibility that you could become pregnant—I couldn’t walk away from that. You do understand?”

“I’m on the pill, Rowland,” she replied, and looked down. She stared at the carpet, at the patterns that separated them. She watched him approach. He stood for a while, looking down at her without speaking. Then, very gently, he lifted her face and inspected it.

“You’re not telling me the truth,” he said in a quiet voice. “I understand why—but don’t lie to me, Gini, not about something as important as this. Look at me. I want you to make me a promise. All right, I’ll go now. But when you know for certain, either way, then you send me a telegram, or you make one telephone call. Just tell me, Yes, I am—or no, I’m not. You promise me you’ll do that?”

“Yes. I do.”

He took her hands in his. “If the answer is no, very well, I’ll obey your wishes. I’ll stay away. I’ll get on with the rest of my life. But if the answer is yes, I don’t care where you are in the world, or whom you’re with, I’m on the next plane. And you won’t find it so easy to persuade me to leave then. Are you clear about that?”

He watched her face change, and her eyes flood with assent. At that point, curiously certain that he would eventually be recalled, he had intended to leave, and even turned to go. But she made some inarticulate sound, or gave some inarticulate gesture, and then—being human, being male, and far less resolved than he wished to appear—he gave way and kissed her on the mouth. Sensing her response, he might have stayed even then, especially then, but she took him by the hand, led him firmly to the door, and closed it quietly but firmly on him before either of them could risk further speech.

L
EAVING THAT PARIS HOTEL
, Rowland had felt blind. He felt blind in the elevator, blind to the airplane, blind to the customs formalities in London. It was with a sense of surprise that he found himself, sometime later, in his own house. Disconcerted, he looked around his living room, a room that had always given him pleasure: for the first time it seemed to him cold, alien, and bare.

For two weeks after that he functioned on automatic, certain a summons from Gini must come. He anticipated, and feared, the mail each morning; he tensed at each telephone call. In February, late one Friday afternoon, the telegram finally arrived. It consisted of a one-word negative, followed by her name. He knew why she had been so terse—had he himself not even suggested it?—but the brevity of the message and its finality caused him great pain.

He sat for a long while, holding the scrap of paper, watching the future he had unconsciously been planning for those past two weeks shrivel before his gaze. Then, angry at himself, he called an airline and made a reservation on that evening’s last flight to Scotland. Packing his climbing equipment later, catching a cab out to the airport, he felt almost calm. He knew the cure for this, he told himself; he had taught himself how to live without love before.

He climbed in the Cairngorms that weekend, in ideal weather and dangerous snow conditions, and he climbed alone. Once or twice, tempted, he took unjustifiable risks; he felt a defiant and bitter amusement when nothing untoward occurred.

He returned to London, to his house with its view of Hawksmoor’s spire. He worked—this, too, had proved effective in the past—twice as hard. With the assistance of his DEA contact, Sandra Lucas, he knew that he would be able to tie up the last loose ends of his Amsterdam drug story: the Dutch chemist and his American partner were about to be raided; they would not be making the fortune they had so blithely anticipated; they would not be pushing White Doves much longer.

“It’s tonight,” Sandra Lucas said one morning in March, calling from a safe phone in Amsterdam.

“And then?” Rowland replied.

“And then they both go down, Rowland. We have Mina Landis’s evidence. We have the toxicology reports on Cassandra Morley. Manslaughter is the best they can hope for, even in Holland. They’ll both go down—and for a very long time.” There was a silence. She gave a sigh. “I know it’s not enough, Rowland. It’s never enough. But the American has shifted quite a lot of heroin in his time. He’ll certainly talk. He may give us some links in that chain…” An awkwardness came into her voice. “I wanted to ask you something—this crusade of yours…”

“It isn’t a crusade. It’s news.”

“—Are you still doing it for Esther?”

Rowland did not reply.

“Okay. If you won’t answer that, then just tell me this—you still think of her?”

“Sometimes. Not so much recently.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Her voice became brisker. “She’d never have wanted this, you know. She was a realist. She’d have wanted you to let her go.”

Was that what the dead required of the living—to be forgotten, to be relegated? Rowland doubted it. Nevertheless, the comment affected him, and perhaps chimed with feelings of his own. At the end of March he finally decided, late at night, and alone in his house, that it was now time to acknowledge that he had changed, that he had already begun the process of letting the past go.