Lovers and Liars Trilogy (161 page)

Markov stopped. That surely had to be enough. McGuire was now looking concerned. He felt pleased with himself. The lie indirect. Perhaps it needed one final tiny gloss.

“And of course,” he went on, “when the woman
still
loves the man concerned—then it’s worse. It makes me really angry, as a matter of fact.” He shot Rowland a quick glance. “I don’t like to see a good woman wasted. I mean, the way I look at it—from the sidelines, all right—Lindsay’s got everything going for her. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She’s kind. She’s generous. She’s good. She’s a great mother—and she ought to make some man a great wife.”

“I’m sure she will. In due course.”

“Maybe. I have my doubts. Because there’s a few problems. One of them being—as far as Lindsay’s concerned—other men don’t exist.”

Rowland, as Markov had hoped, looked faintly encouraged by this. “That’s why,” Markov went on, pressing home this advantage, “I approached you. I mean, I had reservations at first. Mr. Lothario, right? The last thing Lindsay needs right now is some other guy taking advantage of the state she’s in, making some cheap pass—”

“If that’s a warning,” Rowland said with edge, “I can assure you it’s unnecessary. It’s not my practice to take advantage of women. Particularly unhappy women. Despite what you may have heard.”

“My opinion too. Now that I’ve met you, that is.” Markov flashed a smile. “Besides, it’s just for a few weeks. Escort duties. At most a shoulder to cry on. Someone to give her reassurance and advice.”

This was met with further silence. They walked on, descending the final slope and approaching the entrance to Max’s orchard. McGuire paused at the gate, frowning again. Apple blossoms drifted from the trees, and lay like confetti at their feet.

“Look,” he said in an abrupt way. “If Lindsay truly needs that kind of help, then I’d be glad to provide it. Of course I’d be delighted to take her out for a meal, take her to the theater. I told you—I like Lindsay. But advice? Reassurance? A shoulder to cry on? I’m not sure I’m the best candidate. I always try to avoid getting involved in other people’s personal problems. Particularly those of women. I’ve found—”

“Yes?”

“—I’ve found I just end up making them worse. I’m not sure why that is.”

“I can’t imagine,” Markov said with the smallest of glances at Rowland’s magnificent physique.

“But if Lindsay just needs an escort occasionally, someone to listen, of course I’d do that…”

“And it is only for a few weeks,” Markov put in. “You’ll be my understudy. Then, when I get back from Tangier…” There was a slight pause.

“Or,” Rowland said evenly, “the remote part of the African bush…”

“Right. Right. Up the Zambezi someplace…”

Markov, feeling triumphant—this was not so very difficult after all—threw open the orchard gate.

“It just seems slightly
odd
that no one mentioned this to me before,” Rowland said in a thoughtful way. “And no one did. Not Max. Not Charlotte.”

“Did Max even know?” Markov cried on a rhetorical note. “Did Charlotte know? My impression is
not.
Lindsay’s secretive. She doesn’t open her heart to many people. Virtually no one in fact.”

“—And then, Lindsay herself gave me a rather different impression. This would have been back in January. She very kindly cooked dinner for me then, at my house. And I could have
sworn
she mentioned—”

“Other men?” Markov cut in fast. “A succession of other men? Oh, she does that. It’s a cover-up, of course. I can’t believe that took
you
in. You can’t be that slow, surely?”

“Maybe it’s that insensitivity of mine,” McGuire said politely with a half-smile. “It blinded me, I suppose. How stupid of me. Well, well, well.”

He followed Markov into the garden. Markov decided silence was now the best response. He was sweating with the effort of those fast final lies, and something in McGuire’s tone confused him. The man’s self-possession faintly irritated him, and also faintly alarmed him.

“Look,” he said as they approached the house. “Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut? Maybe this is a bad idea of mine. But I mean, how many single men are there to ask…”

“Very few. We’re a vanishing breed.”

“I can’t ask Max. He hasn’t the time. He’s got a wife. Kids. It had to be someone Lindsay knows, and trusts.”

“Not at all.” McGuire laid one large strong hand briefly on Markov’s shoulder. He gave him a warm smile. “It will be an honor to be your understudy.”

“You won’t say anything to Lindsay? I mean, if she knew I’d spoken to you, she’d have cardiac arrest…”

“You can rely on me,” Rowland replied. “I shall perform my role to the very best of my abilities. Until you come back, that is.”

Markov sighed. This, of course, was not the scenario he intended. But there was nothing more he could do. From now on it was up to Lindsay. Allowing Rowland to precede him into the house, Markov looked up at the brilliant sky and the whirling blossoms. His lips moved. He could on occasion be superstitious, even pagan: since it was now in their laps, he was offering up a little prayer to the gods.

Pascal had been dreaming about loss. These dreams had first begun in the early years, when he first covered wars. They had recurred, in various forms, ever since. Sometimes the dreams were replays of actual events he had witnessed but thought forgotten. He would see a tiny child crouched over the dead body of a parent, or a mother prostrate over the grave of her soldier son, and waking, he would recall the exact place where he had witnessed that incident—in Mozambique, or Bosnia, or Afghanistan. His unconscious mind had selected one random image out of millions, and he would think, on waking—
why that particular grief?

At other times, and this made him more uneasy, the dream of searching and losing was a vague, shadowy thing. It would lead him through some remembered war zone, into the streets near his home; frantic, he would be searching for his daughter one moment, for Gini the next, and sometimes for a phantom presence that he would suspect, on waking, was himself. The search was always accompanied by acute anxiety and mounting fear. He woke, always, startled, dry-mouthed, and drenched in sweat.

Nearly twenty years of wars: he had learned how to deal with such nightmares. So, this morning, he applied the learned techniques. He waited quietly, until the pounding of his heart slowed. He concentrated on the details of his immediate environment, this bed, this room. Sometimes he might begin on a silent recital, a multiplication table, the list of his appointments for that day.

This morning the dream lingered longer than was usual. It clung with a cobwebby tenacity to the corners of his mind. He began to recite silently some lines of poetry taught to him by his father. Still the dream clung, leaving him with a paralyzing sense of misery. He persevered, and slowly the room began to reassert itself. The details of the dream shimmered, surged back, and then were gone. He had remembered that he was back in London again, that he was with Gini, that his arm was mended now and his fingers once again deft and strong. He sat up, listening, touching the sheets beside him, which felt cool. He could hear the sound of Gini’s movements below, the quietness of footsteps, the opening and closing of a door.

He felt an immediate, bounteous, and immeasurable relief: his first instinct was to call out to her, but he waited, then lay back and closed his eyes. For a few moments he wanted to listen to this relief, to the sound of hope, because it had not been easy to achieve, and there had been moments, those past weeks in Paris, when he had feared it would never return.

While he remained in the hospital, spending night after long night alone, he had believed that they could remake their life together, and reaffirm their love, because this was what they both passionately desired. Their difficulties could be surmounted. It was, he had told himself then, a question of determination, of
will.

Released from the hospital finally, and reunited with Gini in that borrowed apartment belonging to friends, he had embarked—in a way he knew was very characteristic of him—on a
program
of reconciliation. At first he trusted in words. They would
talk
their way around every obstacle and past every evasion. Every one of those difficult topics: his work, her work, the nature of fidelity, the possibility of a child. He would resist the jealousy he still felt; they would both resist indulging in accusation; they would
talk
themselves back to truth, and they would become not less, but more than before.

Almost at once, however, they both sensed these conversations were leading them astray. However much they fought it, their words took on a dry, therapeutic tone, as if they were discussing the marital problems of two strangers. The more clinically truthful their language, the more strained these conversations became: Pascal felt they spoke across a chasm—and it was a chasm good intentions could not bridge.

What they needed, Pascal felt, was some fiercer link. They did not need some careful, engineered construct, but some invisible power that could arc between them. But to search for this power, to coax it back to flickering life, made them both fearful. Once upon a time, as they were both bitterly aware, this electricity had simply
been
there. Words had not been needed then to galvanize them; the current of communication had flowed from the simplest glance, or touch.

Now, even the touching was tentative. It could be unsure, or ill timed, or fumbled, or overassertive; all its former immediacies seemed to have been lost. For weeks Pascal felt watched. True intimacy was impossible, for he felt that a third person shared these rooms with them; his presence intruded into their conversations and interrupted their attempts at making love. Pascal tried to exorcise this man, then, realizing Gini was also attempting to do the same, felt the jealousy come surging back. Did she compare kisses? Had he touched her there, and in this way—and when he did so,
if
he did so, what had been her response?

He longed to know, and loathed himself for this. He would permit himself to ask no such vulgar questions, and he would not allude to his feelings, he was too proud to do that. He knew they affected what he came to think of as his performance—and how he loathed
that
term, though it was apt—and he could see the pained efforts Gini made to reassure him. The loving embraces, the strokings, the soothing words, her apparent fear that he no longer desired her—how he hated all that. She kissed him now as if she doubted her right to do so. Pascal, wanting her desperately but fearful of failure and comparison, would jerk away from her touch. This was torture to him. Pascal, an absolutist, hated all lies; until then he had never understood just how much the body could lie. He had assumed, naively, that untruth and evasion required speech.

It was six weeks before he could bring himself to make love to her. When he finally did, it was after a violent argument, during the course of which they had both drunk too much wine, perhaps because they had both begun to believe that antagonism might succeed where care and patience had failed. A short-circuit device; fucking her, Pascal thought—we both intended to incite precisely this.

The act had not been the reunion he had planned; it had been angry, unsatisfactory, and brief. Afterward, Gini wept—and for the first time in his life he turned away from those tears with a cold repugnance he had never expected to possess.

“You
did this,” he said to her. “It was you who brought us to this.” He slammed out, and walked furiously and mindlessly through the dark Paris streets.

The next day, a reconciliation; both were contrite. Then more arguments, and reconciliations again. Pascal began to grow desperate: this cycle was only too familiar to him. He could not believe that with a woman he so loved, he was experiencing again the remorseless downward spiral of disaffection he had been through with his ex-wife.

Perhaps, he thought, as the ugly month of February became March, perhaps if he could only
act
love better, he would be released, and would be able to express the love he knew was there, locked somewhere inside himself. It had sprung to his lips unaided facing Star in Madame Duval’s apartment; looking at death fifteen feet away, it had been impossible to disguise: it had simply
been
there, and he had sensed in Gini its unhesitating and immediate response.

If the love could well up then, why not now? What was wrong? And he then began to believe that conscious action and careful speech would achieve nothing. They needed some near divine intervention for which he had no apposite term. Willpower was no use to them; love could not be willed. With fear, he began to believe that love was as mysterious as the welling-up of water in the desert: in essence, it was a
gift.

If so, the gift proved elusive. He redoubled his efforts, as she did. Their mutual politeness pained them both. In long discussions late into the night, they planned new kinds of futures together: these visions—civilized, caring, egalitarian—convinced neither of them very much, he felt. He promised that he would either abandon war coverage altogether or restrict such work to a few months every year. She countered that this was unacceptable; she would not allow him to give up this work, this vocation, for her sake. Pascal listened to her arguments, remembered the comments of his ex-wife, and made his own private resolves: this mistake he could at least avoid again. Others also: one day he found the contraceptive pills she had begun taking again the previous month, and threw them away. They quarreled violently over this—and yet that action, that quarrel, proved a turning point. Pascal made love to her that night, and for weeks afterward, with a new and fixed determination: this act he intended to have consequences:
Conception.
Then, and only then, would she be repossessed.

This determination, they both found, altered the tenor of a familiar act. Pascal abandoned endearments and gentleness. He could sense some resistance in her, and so he set about fucking her into submission, then out the other side of submission. When this had finally been achieved, he knew that they were alone at last, and that he had found a route back.