Lovers and Liars Trilogy (181 page)

‘I wouldn’t say that. Who is this unsuitable man she’s interested in?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Someone she works with, I think. Pascal, I don’t have
time
for this. I have to check through this stupid Natasha Lawrence article I’ve written and fax it off to her and I just
know
she’s going to start raising objections. I wish I’d never said I’d do it. I hate showbiz profiles; this is the last one I’ll ever do…’

Her husband, watching her change the subject in this way, thought he knew the reason. He hesitated, wondering if he could bring himself to mention Rowland McGuire’s name, with all its attendant risks. He decided not to do so, although he now felt certain that McGuire was the unnamed man concerned, for he had heard jealousy in his wife’s voice—or possessiveness, perhaps.

Could you be possessive about a man you no longer cared for? A man you had not seen in three years? He doubted it; but then his wife did not relinquish her hold on others easily, even after they had ceased to be part of her life. But there were reasons for that—her relationship with her father above all. It had not been easy for her, he thought, as she bent her fair head over her papers, to come here to her father’s house and discover the degree to which he had eradicated her from his life. So far, they had not found the least hint of her existence—not one photograph, none of the letters she had written him, none of the newspaper articles she had written and religiously sent to him. The thanklessness and cruelty of this angered Pascal; with the death of her father, he had believed that Gini might at last break free of his influence. A sojourn here in this house had shown him that death made no difference; for many more years, he feared, his wife would be haunted by her father’s indifference and neglect.

Moving across to her now, he drew her against him and kissed her pale hair.

‘Send the article off, darling,’ he said, ‘then come out with Lucien and me. It would do you good to walk, to get some fresh air. You’ve been working so hard: clearing up this place, writing a thousand letters to lawyers and banks. Come out with us—the sun’s shining; it’s a beautiful day…’

‘No, I won’t—I’d like to, Pascal, you know I would, but I need to check this through before I send it. There are some letters I have to write. If Lindsay
isn’t
coming for Thanksgiving, I suppose we could leave here a little sooner…’

‘We could.’ He hesitated. ‘And that might be a much better plan anyway, darling. It was never going to be easy, having her here—the place is in chaos. I know you were very set on it, but we can’t delay for ever. You’ll feel better once you’re out of this house. We could go to friends for Thanksgiving, then we could start work on our book…’

‘I suppose so.’ She moved away from him. ‘You go, Pascal; I’ll come with you tomorrow. But I must get on with this.’

‘Do you want me to read your piece before I go?’

‘No, I hate it. It’s adequate at best. I got nothing out of her. You know the only interesting fact in here?’ She gestured at the printout of her article. ‘It took fifty-five takes to shoot that spider sequence in
Dead Heat
—and Natasha Lawrence is terrified of spiders, or so she said. I thought that was revealing. That sequence is one of the vilest things I’ve ever seen on film. Why would that ex-husband of hers put her through that fifty-five times? He’s a sadist, I think.’

‘I doubt that.’ Pascal smiled. ‘That sequence is very complex from a technical point of view, Gini. There’s those mirrors; there’s that three hundred and sixty degree pan. I’ve seen it three times; I work with cameras and I still don’t know how he did it…’ He paused. ‘You’re sure you won’t come with us? No? Then we’ll see you in about an hour…’

He went out. With a sigh, Gini sat down at the table; she moved papers and files in a desultory way, back and forth. She glanced over her shoulder, because when the house was quiet, she could never rid herself of the sensation that at any moment the door would open and her father would come in and ask her what right she had to be here, in his house.

She had no right—she felt that. In front of her now were all the files and papers which confirmed her daughterly role: the letters from lawyers and real-estate agents; the letters from the IRS, from brokers, from banks. To these correspondents, she possessed the authority of daughter, executor and sole heir, as certified by a brief cold will made some twelve years before and never revised: ‘I hereby give and bequeath to my only child, Genevieve Hunter.’ Only her father, she thought, could contrive to leave her everything, yet make her feel disinherited. And she saw him again, as he had been in the last week of his illness, when he realized he was dying, and that the years of alcoholism had finally caught up with him. It had been the day before they put him on a morphine pump and he lapsed into unconsciousness. She had been sitting there, holding his hand, until she had realized that, for some while, he had been struggling to free himself.

‘Just for Christ’s sake let
go
of me,’ he had said. ‘And for the love of God, go somewhere
else
.’

She knew, with a dull and painful certainty, that those words, spoken with a bitter amusement very characteristic of him, would remain with her for the rest of her life.

Pascal was right, she thought; she had to escape from this house—and the sooner she did it, the better.

She picked up the
New York Times
interview she had written, together with its covering letter, and fed it into her fax machine; she had asked Natasha Lawrence to reply by the end of the following day and to restrict any queries she might have to facts, but she felt no great optimism that the actress would listen to either request.

She glanced towards the windows and the quiet, empty street beyond, hesitated, and then drew towards her the file of condolence letters. Only half of these had been answered, although she had set aside an hour each morning for the task. Here were all the gentle fictions from her father’s past friends, erstwhile editors and colleagues. They wrote kindly and with ingenuity, avoiding the issue of his drunken, wilderness years; she answered with similar evasions and reticence.

Pushing aside the top-most letters in the file, all of which Pascal had seen, she drew out the one letter she had
not
shown him, the letter received almost a month before, from Rowland McGuire.

The letter was brief, handwritten, and formal in tone. ‘I was sorry to hear the news of…’ Rowland wrote in black ink, on white paper, his handwriting firm and clear. The phrases he used were those of a polite acquaintance, observing the formalities, yet she could not hold the letter in her hand without remembering their brief affair. His letter brought him back—the strokes of his pen made her see his face and hear his voice; worse still, they made her remember a particular expression in his eyes, at a particular time. Closing her eyes now, she let herself watch an act impetuously and urgently begun, then repeated throughout a long night. She allowed herself to remember and, to her shame, she felt a brief pulse of physical longing for him, a faint echoing in her body of past sexual excitement and desire.

This had never happened to her before. With a low exclamation of anger and distress, she rose from her chair and began to pace the room. A car passed in the street beyond; the air in the room suddenly felt thick with a choking despondency. Too many ghosts, she thought, and this house was to blame. She met her childhood self in the dark at the turn of the stairs; the past spilled out of these packing-cases; uncertainty was disgorged from these files.

She moved towards the door, then stopped, catching sight of herself in a dusty mirror which had not yet been packed away. There, behind the veiling of dust and mercury scars on the glass, she saw herself: a pale woman, with pale hair and a striving expression. Examining her, she realized that this woman, with her vacillating gaze, had lost the first bloom of youth, was visibly in her thirties, and would soon look middle-aged.

Wife. Mother. She mouthed these words at her own reflection. She thought of her son, whom she loved with the greatest intensity, and of Pascal, a gentler, quieter man now than he had once been. Fatherhood became him—but she was afraid sometimes, although he never spoke of it, that he regretted the decision to give up photographing wars.

It was the right decision, she told her own reflection: his work had contributed to the break-up of his first marriage, and photographing wars as Pascal did was dangerous; it was not a suitable occupation now that he was the father of her child. She looked in the mirror uncertainly, but her face did not reproach her for a decision she knew was influenced by her. ‘The
right
thing to do,’ she said, turning away from the mirror. She sat down again at the table, and quickly, before she could change her mind, wrote a brief answer to Rowland McGuire.

Rowland wrote formally: she found she could master this language equally well. A sentence of thanks for his letter; a sentence for her father and the funeral; a brief mention of the planned book; a final sentence for herself, Lucien and Pascal. She ended the letter ‘Yours sincerely’, as he had done. She was about to fold it into its envelope when the fax machine rang, then whirred. She had been concentrating on her task so deeply that the sound made her jump; she swung around, as if someone unseen had just crept up behind her and touched her arm.

To her surprise, she saw that Natasha Lawrence was already replying. A brief handwritten note from the actress was scrolling out from the machine. She thanked Gini for an interesting interview, complimented her on her understanding of the acting process, and assured her that she had no objections to raise.

This letter made Gini unaccountably uneasy. It was too complimentary; it was oversweet and artificial in tone. The lady doth protest too much, she thought, and wondered why.

Tossing it to one side, she picked up her own letter to Rowland McGuire. On second reading, its tone seemed less unequivocal than she had intended. She would rewrite it tomorrow, she decided, and glancing up, she saw that Pascal and Lucien were returning from their walk. Pascal was laughing and lifting Lucien up; his son, who resembled him so strongly, with the same dark hair and the same grey eyes, was also laughing and chattering away in his touching approximation to language, a tongue composed of recognizable words and invented ones of his own.

She saw them as if in a photograph, a shutter clicking and freezing this moment in time. As they were then, she would always remember them, she thought; in this she was correct. She would also remember her own immediate response, which was to hide Rowland McGuire’s letter, and her reply to it, at the bottom of that condolence file.

In New York, at the Carlyle, Tomas Court watched his wife return to the sitting-room with the faxed
New York Times
interview in her hand. He had arrived here only a short while before, and the atmosphere in the room felt edgy and duplicitous, although he could not have said why.

He was sitting in front of the television set and talking on the telephone to Colin Lascelles in London; as he spoke and listened, he flipped the video controls, and on the TV screen a perfect Wildfell Hall fast-forwarded, rewound, paused. He examined a louring doorway, dark ranked windows, a crumbling façade; he surveyed moorland, then tracked down to a deserted horseshoe-shaped beach, while in his ear, Lascelles’s very English voice continued to explain the security arrangements his assistants were making at various English location hotels. Behind and through his words came the pop, thunder and fizz of mysterious explosions. Court covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

‘You’ve passed that article?’

He glanced across at his wife. She nodded, then, as he snapped his fingers at her, handed the pages across.

‘You can’t watch, listen
and
read, Tomas,’ she said, in a mild tone.

‘You’re wrong, I can.’

She gave a small shrug, then crossed to her son, who was waiting in the doorway with a stout, well wrapped-up Angelica. Natasha adjusted his scarf and zipped up his scarlet anorak. Jonathan and Angelica, together with some new, recently hired bodyguard nicknamed Tex, were about to make an expedition to feed the zoo animals in Central Park.

Apparently, they did this every Wednesday;
apparently
, the new bodyguard was a great favourite with everyone, especially Jonathan;
apparently
, no-one had expected Tomas Court until later, and Jonathan would be disappointed if this expedition were postponed.
Apparently
, in the month since his father had last seen him, Jonathan had become obsessed with animals, birds, bats, reptiles and insects, books on which now surrounded Court on all sides. Court looked at the
Times
article and the books somewhat sourly. It seemed to him that
apparently
Jonathan had grown used to being mollycoddled by his mother and all the other attendant women who came and went here; Jonathan was
apparently
in danger of being spoiled.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘leave the boy alone, Natasha. He’s going to Central Park, not the North Pole.’

The response, as he could have predicted, was a female closing of ranks, a shushing and scurrying, a furtive maternal embrace. Angelica turned her back on Court; Jonathan was hustled out; the door closed.

Colin Lascelles, Court thought, with a certain dour amusement, returning his attention to the telephone, was now sounding more confident than he had in weeks. The particular game Court had played with him, a game often employed before, had proved effective. Court had wanted to see if Lascelles buckled under pressure, and had he done so, would have discarded him. Lascelles had
not
buckled, and he had finally found a house that was everything Court desired, the Wildfell Hall of his imagination, that place of exile and retreat which, for nearly two years now, had occupied his thoughts and appeared to him in dreams.

One day, he thought, he would perhaps tell Colin Lascelles why he had hired him—a decision he had reached during their first meeting in that Prague hotel room when Lascelles, vulnerable, voluble and ill at ease, had told him that story about a woman once encountered on a Qantas flight, a story Court had found touching and absurd.