Lovers and Liars Trilogy (35 page)

“Is that Gini?” she said. “Oh, yes, it must be—how pretty she is, Mary. What a lovely dress. And who’s that man with her?”

Mary sighed. “He’s a photographer, I gather,” she said. “He’s French. His name’s Pascal Lamartine.”

“How nice. I love France. I must talk to him later.” Lise was now moving off in the direction of the editor of the scurrilous magazine. Mary took her firmly by the arm and redirected her toward the poet.

“You remember,” she said. “You’ve met before, Lise.
Stephen.
He has a new collection of poems just out….”

“He has? What’s it called?” Lise said, and Mary smiled. Lise was already recovering, her instincts reasserting themselves.

“Reflections.”

“Thanks.” Lise gave her a sudden amused glance, a sidelong smile. She approached the poet and held out her hand.

“Stephen,” Mary heard. “How lovely. I was hoping you’d be here.
Reflections
is wonderful. John and I both love it. No, really, we were reading it together, this evening. Yes, before we came here…”

“So, tell me, Monsieur Lamartine, are you staying in London long?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe a few more days only. Maybe a few weeks …”

Pascal looked down at Mary, this stepmother of Gini’s. She was not, somehow, what he had expected. For no very good reason, he had imagined that any woman previously married to Sam Hunter would be tall, elegant, and forceful. This woman was none of these things. She was short, no more than five feet four, and she was far from elegant. She was plump, and badly dressed in a very English way, in that she was wearing an unflattering dress of some pale material that needed ironing. She had white hair that stood up around her face in a fierce tufty halo. She had a superb English complexion, was wearing no makeup, and she was smiling at him. The smile, as yet, did not reach her eyes, which were a clear blue and had been fixed upon him since he’d entered the room not two minutes before. Pascal’s immediate impression had been of vagueness and slight eccentricity. That impression was now being revised. She had greeted Gini and himself with warm affection and a blizzard of words. There had been a flurry of hand gestures. Nevertheless, he noted, Gini had somehow been detached from him with speedy efficiency, and was now talking to John Hawthorne. He himself, he realized, had also been detached, and was now backed into a corner by the fireplace. To his right was the fire, to his left was a huge, ancient, sagging chintz-covered armchair, and in front of him, cutting off all possible means of escape, was this fierce, plump little woman. Pascal looked down at her, puzzled. Then he began to understand. She reminded him, suddenly, of his mother, and he had seen just that expression on his mother’s face in times past. It was how she had looked—
exactly
how she had looked—whenever as a young man he’d brought girls home. Pascal smiled.

Mary looked up at him. It was, she thought, a disarming smile, but she had no intention of being disarmed. True, this Frenchman was not what she had envisioned—not at all. For a start, he didn’t look right Mary had a vivid imagination, and she had had twelve years in which to summon up this man in her mind’s eye. She had not examined the material John Hawthorne had given her at all closely, and so the image of Lamartine conjured up at the time of Beirut was unimpaired. A French womanizer, Mary had decided twelve years before; she knew the type only too well. Good-looking, smarmy, with ghastly come-to-bed eyes. Mary had never actually met a Frenchman like that, but she was perfectly certain that’s how they were. Apart from the fact that he was good-looking, very good-looking—though he could have done with a haircut and a much closer shave—this Lamartine was none of these things. His manner was, if anything, slightly cool and distanced. His behavior to Gini as they entered had been charming and correct. He had entered at her side, one hand at her elbow, to help steer her past the crush of other guests. On being introduced to Mary he had shaken her hand, bent his head slightly in that rather delightful way some Frenchmen had, and said politely,
Madame.

Not smarmy, Mary decided. She blinked. And not in his forties either, which he would have been had Sam given her his correct age. He was considerably younger, in his mid-thirties, she judged. Damn Sam, she thought, and damn my wretched eyesight. She peered up at Lamartine. He did not look in the least like some cheap womanizer. He did not have ghastly come-to-bed eyes. In fact, now that she looked more closely, he had rather good eyes, of a smoky gray color. Their expression was ironic, quizzical, as if something were amusing him. …With a start, Mary realized that she was inspecting him in a quite unforgivable way. She took a step backward. Lamartine smiled. He had, she thought, a really rather wonderful smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said, speaking with great rapidity and waving her hands. “It’s just…you’re not what I expected at all….”

“And you are not what I expected,” he replied.

“You see,” Mary continued, rushing on, and trying to avoid the conversational pits and traps that suddenly seemed to surround her on all sides. “You see, that is, Gini told me you were a paparazzo—” This did not please him. The smile disappeared. “Oh? That was what she said?”

He glanced across the room to where Gini was now deep in conversation with John Hawthorne. Mary swallowed and thought fast.

“Maybe I’ve got that wrong. I expect so. I’m such a scatter-brain. I muddle up things all the time, and—”

“No. She was perfectly correct. That’s exactly what I am.”

This was said seriously, but with a detectable edge. Mary took a large swallow of her wine.

“Well, there you are,” she went on idiotically. “I’m sure it’s
most
exciting. Rushing around the world, that kind of thing …” She pulled herself together. “So tell me, have you known Gini long?”

Pascal hesitated. “No,” he said carefully. “We’ve met a few times.”

Mary paused. Here was her perfect opportunity. Now was the moment to draw herself up, give him a withering stare and say, Come, come, Monsieur Lamartine. You once knew Gini very well, I think. In Beirut. Twelve years ago. Mary looked up at this man and found the words would not come. She could not possibly say them. In the first place, he was quite formidable, and she simply didn’t dare; in the second, she could see they would be an unpardonable intrusion, rude, wrong, and possibly unfair. I know
nothing
about what happened, she realized, nothing at all. All I know is what Sam told me.

She met Lamartine’s eyes again. Every instinct she possessed told her that some aspects of Sam’s story must be wrong. On the other hand, she was not always a good judge of character; people could take her in. …John was right, totally right, she thought. I shouldn’t trespass. I should say and do nothing at all. This decision brought with it an enormous relief. Suddenly she relaxed.

“And meanwhile, you’re working for the
News
too, I think Gini said?”

“Just briefly. Yes, I am.”

“Well, you’d be doing me a great favor,” she continued more warmly, “if you could make Gini see she should leave. It’s a perfectly horrible newspaper now, an absolute rag—well, I suppose not entirely, but I don’t like its tone. And that ghastly new editor gives Gini the most pathetic stories. Before he came, she was doing so well. Did she tell you, a couple of years ago, she won two awards….”

“No. She didn’t mention that.”

“How typical! Well, she did. She did a very fine series on police corruption in the north. The previous editor admired her work enormously. He’d agreed to send her abroad—to Bosnia, which was the kind of story she’d always wanted to cover, of course. And she’d done a great deal of work in preparation, then—”

“Bosnia?” He was frowning. “You mean she wanted to cover the war?”

“Yes. She did. That’s the kind of work she’s always wanted to do. And she would have pulled it off. Gini is absolutely determined, and she’s very brave too.”

“I don’t doubt that.” He glanced across the room once more. Gini was still in conversation with John Hawthorne; she said something inaudible, and Hawthorne laughed.

“The thing is,” Mary rushed on. She was now on her favorite subject. “Gini would never admit this, but she’s very influenced by her father. Where he went, she’s always been determined to follow. Her mother died, you see, when Gini was terribly young—two years old. She doesn’t remember her at all. When I first knew Gini, she was only five, but she was very advanced for her age. She could read and write very well. She used to write these stories—well, all children do that, I suppose—but Gini used to lay them out in little books, like a newspaper. Then she’d show them to her father, only…well, unfortunately, he never took very much interest. But that only made her more determined. She’s very single-minded. You can’t rein her in. Do you know, when she was fifteen years old, she just walked out of school one day and went rushing off to—”

Mary stopped. She flushed crimson. She knew that when launched on the subject of Gini, she found it difficult to stop; but to have walked into that, to have been so incredibly stupid. She would never have done it, she realized, had Lamartine not been listening with such close attention to her proud boast. She would never have done it had he not seemed so very different from that imagined man in Beirut. However, she
had
done it. Now she had to extricate herself.

“Went rushing off to where?” Lamartine said in polite tones.

“Oh, heavens.” Mary looked around her distractedly. “Could you excuse me just one second? That wretched poet friend of mine is monopolizing Lise. I must intervene….”

She darted away. Pascal watched her thoughtfully. He liked her, he thought, and he had learned a great deal from her, things Gini would never have told him herself. He had also learned, of course, that Gini had been wrong. Her stepmother knew very well what had happened in Beirut, and that meant Sam Hunter had not kept his word. He had told Mary about those events. Who, in her turn, might Mary have told?

He would have preferred Mary not to have heard that story from Hunter, and not to have been prejudiced against him, but there was nothing he could do about that now. It explained the way in which she had greeted him, that fierce protective inspection she had given him. Now she had obviously decided to risk no more faux pas, for she was returning, together with Lise Hawthorne.

She made the necessary introductions, then hastened away. Pascal looked down at the ambassador’s wife. Her lovely face was tilted up to his; she radiated a tense, almost febrile animation.

“I’m so pleased to meet you,” she was saying in a low, breathy voice, so he had to bend slightly to catch her words. She gave him an amused glance, which was more than a little flirtatious. “I’ve seen your photographs,” she was saying. “Those ones of Stephanie of Monaco. Monsieur Lamartine…” She wagged one long beautifully manicured finger at him with a kind of arch reproof. “Monsieur Lamartine, I was shocked. You have a very bad reputation, you know….”

“So tell me about your father,” John Hawthorne was saying to Gini. “Give me an update. It’s too long since we’ve seen him. It must be five or six years.”

“He’s in Washington now,” Gini began.

“Washington. Of course. But didn’t I hear some rumor—wasn’t he planning a new book? Afghanistan? No, the Middle East?”

“Vietnam,” Gini replied.

She was almost certain Hawthorne knew this as well as she did, but for reasons of his own—perhaps to draw her out—kept that knowledge concealed. “Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia,” she went on. “It’s almost twenty-five years since he was there. He wants to go back and write about the changes since the war. I think he feels he did his finest work there.”

“He’s wrong.” Hawthorne spoke abruptly. “Obviously, the pieces he filed from Vietnam were outstanding—that Pulitzer was well deserved. But he’s still in a class of his own. I followed everything he wrote during the Gulf War. I’m afraid I even poached some of his material for speeches.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded. Flattered, I’d say.”

“Maybe. Maybe. Sam never had much time for politicians.” He smiled. “The point was, he could always uncover something new, something the military might have liked to conceal. They couldn’t buy him, and they couldn’t gag him. He should do his book on Vietnam. It needs writing. And if Sam did it, it’d sell—” He paused. “Here, your glass is empty. Let me get you a drink. White wine?”

He crossed to the drinks table, paused to speak to a group there. New guests were still arriving. The room was becoming crowded now. Gini, glancing around her, saw her stepmother leading Pascal across to Lise Hawthorne. They were introduced: Lise Hawthorne held out her hand.

Gini turned back to look at Hawthorne. The remarks about her father had pleased her, particularly the fact that in Hawthorne’s opinion her father was still writing well. Had the comments been made for that reason, to please, to ingratiate?

Gini felt unsure. Hawthorne had no need, surely, to ingratiate himself with her. Why bother? His manner, certainly, had suggested nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it had been easy and direct; when he first mentioned her father—and he had done so almost immediately—he had spoken with an amused affection. “Didn’t you know?” he’d said. “Your father kept me sane in Vietnam. He was an observer on two missions with my platoon. Sam and I once spent three days and nights in a foxhole together, under fire. He ate my rations, and I drank the contents of his brandy flask. I was twenty-one years old and scared shitless. Your father never turned a hair. He taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. I’m not sure if it’s called courage or blind stupidity. Either way, Sam and I go back a long way.”

A disarming story, Gini thought. Flattering to her father, self-deprecatory, even the mild obscenity introduced as if to signal that Hawthorne was no prude, no stuffed shirt. …Yes, it might have been calculated to win her over. Still, it had been recounted naturally, and with warmth.

Gini frowned: She was not a novice when it came to interviewing celebrated, powerful men; she had interviewed numerous politicians. Hawthorne resembled none of them. He did not monopolize the conversation, but turned it away from himself. He did not patronize. He did not glance away to check whether someone more important than Gini had just entered the room.