Lovers and Liars Trilogy (70 page)

He looked at Gini and at Mary. “You remember the night we came here for your party—it was Lise’s birthday?” Mary nodded. An expression of pained bewilderment now came into Hawthorne’s features. “Well, that was one of the occasions when I thought she seemed better. She was animated, almost the way she used to be. And then, when we were about to leave—you remember, Mary? She showed you her coat, and the necklace she was wearing and she said they were my birthday present to her that day?”

“I remember,” Mary replied.

“Well, that wasn’t true. I gave Lise the coat and the necklace last year, back in the fall. I took her away for the weekend then, just the two of us, to the country. It was our wedding anniversary. I wanted…I tried—” He broke off, then controlled the emotion in his voice. “I thought if we could just have two days, two quiet, normal days…And she seemed pleased with the coat and the necklace. Then she put them away. She never wore them, not once, until the night of your party. Then she lied about when I’d given them to her. Why? Why? I can’t tell whether she genuinely makes a mistake or whether it’s aimed at me, as if she wanted to forget that weekend, forget our anniversary, forget our marriage. I just don’t know anymore….” He turned away. Mary rose to her feet and crossed to him. She put her arm around his shoulders.

“John, don’t. Don’t,” she said quietly. “You’re crucifying yourself over this, and that doesn’t help anyone, you know. It’s better if you talk about it. You should learn to talk to your friends. Look. Have a drink. You’re exhausted, let me get you a whisky. Don’t argue. Just a small one. Come on.”

She crossed back to the drinks table, and poured the whisky. Gini looked at Hawthorne’s tense figure, and a terrible sick sense of doubt welled up inside her. She thought:
What have I done? I’ve been wrong, totally wrong….

There was a long, awkward silence then. Hawthorne accepted the drink from Mary, who returned to her chair. Gini saw her father look at Hawthorne with a kind of embarrassed concern.

“Shall I go on, John? Gini might as well know it all.”

“Why not?” Hawthorne gave a bitter dismissive gesture of the hand. “You explain. I can’t stand to talk about it anymore.”

Sam turned back to Gini. He took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “Read that later,” he said. “It’s a copy of an article I wrote twenty-five years ago. It describes a mission John’s platoon went on in Vietnam, in November 1968. I was attached to his platoon. We were cut off, upcountry, in the jungle south of Hue, south of the seventeenth parallel, not far from a village called My Nuc. John’s platoon was under Vietcong fire, pinned down, for over five days. More than half the platoon were killed.” He paused. “Has McMullen made allegations to your newspaper about what happened at My Nuc? Because believe me, Gini, if he hasn’t yet, he will.”

Gini hesitated. She looked down at the floor. All three were now watching her closely.

“Come on, Gini,” said her father impatiently. “We know pretty much what McMullen’s been saying about John and his marriage. Has he made allegations about Vietnam as well?”

“I told you,” Gini replied. “I’ve never spoken to McMullen. He’s disappeared. All I was doing was checking out rumors.”

“About my marriage?” Hawthorne said sharply.

“Yes.”

“And about the events at My Nuc?” This time it was her father who asked the question.

Gini shrugged. “I was told allegations had been made about what happened there. Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.” Her father shot Hawthorne an angry look. “Okay, Gini. My book on Vietnam is due out later this year—maybe that helped trigger McMullen—but let’s get this straight. McMullen’s raised questions about My Nuc before. He’s made allegations before. Twenty goddamn years ago. Did you know that?”

Gini hesitated. “No, I didn’t,” she said.

“Well, he did. Atrocities, rape, murder of noncombatants. He made them first to a U.S. senator who’s now dead. He took the story to two U.S. newspapers back in 1972, when he spent six months in the States. They’re a fabrication from beginning to end. None of it happened, Gini.
None
of it. When he tried to get newspapers interested back then, he was laughed out of town—and he didn’t like that, not one little bit. Gini, I was goddamn well
there.
I was with John the entire time. The village of My Nuc had been razed before we even got there. When we reached it, everyone in it was dead, including the girl McMullen claims was raped. Everything I wrote then is God’s own truth. I was a goddamn eyewitness, Gini, believe that.”

There was a silence. Out of that silence, John Hawthorne spoke.

“McMullen has always claimed to know of witnesses also, Sam. I imagine Gini’s heard that. There’s no point in this claim and counterclaim, not twenty-five years after an event. What Gini should do is take a very close look at
when
McMullen made those accusations, and what he has done since.” He turned his eyes coldly in her direction. “Since last July, when McMullen began on a campaign to influence my wife—knowing full well, I believe, how ill she was—I’ve made it my business to have McMullen and his allegations checked out. The woman he claims was raped was not some peasant living in a tiny remote village. For a start, she was from North Vietnam, not the south. Her father and her brother were both prominent Hanoi activists. In fact, her father was on the standing committee of the North Vietnamese national assembly. She was twenty-five years old when she died and she’d been a political activist since the age of sixteen. She was half French and she was extremely well educated. She had not only studied in Hanoi, but also Paris, Prague, and Moscow. So I think there are some questions to be asked about what this woman was doing in My Nuc, in the south.”

“She was a fucking NLF agent, that’s what she was,” Sam burst out. “She was working with the Vietcong, Gini—have you got that?” He threw up his hands. “Jesus, John, this is a waste of time. Gini knows nothing about that war.”

“All right.” Hawthorne showed no sign of emotion. “Then perhaps she will understand better if I explain McMullen’s situation. At the time of this woman’s death, he had known her, in Paris, for precisely two months. When news of her death finally reached him, he had a mental collapse—a complete breakdown. His parents tried to hush it up, but medical records exist. When British security started checking him out last summer, at my behest, they discovered McMullen left Oxford and spent six months in a private nursing home. It was after he left there that this obsession about My Nuc began. When my people started checking back, they found he’d even written three times to my office for information about my military record. I had never even seen those letters until now. They were filed as routine request, dealt with by a junior secretary, and forgotten.”

“He wrote to me too,” Sam burst out “Twenty goddamn years ago he wrote. I put my lawyers on to him, and never heard another word. I just wrote it off, forgot it. Gini, you should know, all journalists get those kind of letters, alleging this, alleging that. For a man like John, it’s even worse. Every time he makes a speech, every time he’s on TV, there’s some asshole writing in, claiming to be his long-lost son, claiming John’s sending the guy personal messages over the airwaves in code—there’s a lot of nuts out there. If you want to stay sane, you ignore them. Usually, they go away.”

He glanced at Hawthorne, then turned back to Gini. “Just remember, Gini, sometimes they
don’t
go away. Any American knows that. Sometimes they hole up, and they let their fantasies fester away and then eventually, they surface. They go out one day and kill a president or slash a movie star, or go into a playground and shoot up all the little kids.” He paused. “Now, I’m not saying McMullen is that kind of psychopath, but I am saying he’s badly disturbed. And I am saying he’s been trailing John for twenty-five years with this goddamn crazy fantasy of his.”

There was a silence.

“Trailing?” Gini said.

Hawthorne gave a sigh. “Take a look at the pattern,” he said in a cool voice. “McMullen pursued an active campaign on the question of My Nuc for three years. He wrote to me and to Sam. We now know that he made more direct allegations in the same period, immediately after his breakdown, first to Senator Melville, then to two American newspapers. But he did more than that. As Sam said, toward the end of this period he spent six months in the States.”

He stopped, and looked at Gini coldly. “Do you know who he spent those six months with? With some very distant friends of his mother’s. The Grenville family. Lise is distantly related to them. I am more closely related. They are my first cousins. I visit them often. That was when I first encountered James McMullen, their pleasant young English friend who was staying with them while he recovered from a somewhat vague illness. I met him first in 1972, Gini, at their house. It was the same occasion on which Lise first met him. She and McMullen became close friends, and remained friends afterward. They shared an interest in art, a passion for Italy. I always suspected McMullen was a little in love with her—his devotion to her always amused Lise. She and I used to tease each other about it. He’d actually proposed to her at some point, or so she told me.”

His gaze became intent. “I now believe there was much more to that meeting, and to McMullen’s continuing contact with Lise, than I understood at the time. McMullen may well love Lise in some strange way of his own, but he is also prepared to use her. Through Lise he remains in close contact with me. And through Lise, and her illness, he thinks he has finally found the means of destroying me. It’s taken him twenty-five years. No doubt the revenge tastes all the more sweet for the delay.”

He turned away with a curt gesture as he said this, and stared down into the fire. Gini looked at the pale, tight line of his profile, and she thought:
I was right.
Hawthorne might now have given her further substantiating detail, detail McMullen had been careful to leave out, but in essence the suggestion he was now making was the one she had made to McMullen himself. It was left to her father to drive the nail home, and he did so at once.

“Come on, Gini”—he took a long swallow of bourbon then slammed the glass down on the table beside him—“you’re not that naive. You can see the pattern here. This guy’s been nursing this grievance a long time. Now my book’s due out and Lise’s illness, her fantasies about John—they give him the chance he’s been waiting for. So he moves in for the kill. This time, when he goes to a newspaper, he makes sure he’s got a very different story to peddle. A sex scandal about an eminent man—about the one American politician I know who has a clean pair of hands in that respect. And who buys it? You do, Gini. You and that bastard Lamartine.”

He turned away with a shudder of disgust. He refilled his bourbon glass, ignoring Mary’s protests. When Gini still said nothing, he threw up his hands angrily.

“You talk to her, John,” he said. “I give up on this. Make her see sense. I can tell when she gets that goddamn mulish look on her face she’s not listening to me. You try.”

“Very well.” Hawthorne put down his whisky and turned back to look at Gini. “I’ll say this. I don’t know what exact lies McMullen has been peddling this time. But I have a pretty fair idea. And he won’t have invented those stories either, though he may have embellished them. He’ll have gotten them from Lise. Because—and Mary’s seen this—Lise is tormented with jealousy. It’s tearing her apart. She imagines I have liaisons, affairs. She suspects any woman I have any dealings with in the course of my work. Nothing I say or do can reassure her—and McMullen has been working on that, to my certain knowledge, since the summer of last year.”

He gave a sudden furious gesture. “That’s the kind of man he is. He’s prepared to exploit my wife’s illness and I’m not going to stand for that anymore. It’s all lies, from beginning to end—all of it. I love my wife—and as far as McMullen’s concerned, that’s my one unforgivable sin. That and the fact that I married Lise, of course. Ten years after she refused—very wisely—to marry him.” He stopped in an abrupt way and looked Gini directly in the eye. “That’s it,” he said. “I won’t discuss this any further. It sickens me to have to discuss Lise and our marriage in this way. Judge for yourself, Gini, but if you still intend pursuing this, despite what I’ve told you and what Sam’s told you, just remember this: It wouldn’t take a great deal to push Lise over the edge. If any of this did become public, you realize she could try to kill herself again? You do understand that, don’t you? Because let’s be quite clear—that’s what’s at stake here. Not my reputation, not my future. I’ve reached the point now where I don’t give a damn about that anymore. But I do care about my sons. And I do care about Lise.” His eyes held hers. “So, are you going to give me an answer? I think you owe me one, don’t you? Do you intend pursuing this? Yes or no?”

The question was put in a peremptory way, but behind the curtness of tone, Gini could hear a plea. She looked up at Hawthorne uncertainly. There was now no doubting the strength of his emotion. She had heard his voice catch when he mentioned his children, and she could still see pain and exhaustion in his eyes. Just for a moment, one tiny instant, his expression reminded her of Pascal; he too looked this way sometimes, when he spoke of his divorce, or looked back to his years in war zones. She felt a sudden rush of sympathy for Hawthorne then, and she could tell that he sensed it. His face altered. She saw he was about to speak, or perhaps reach out for her hand.

Before he could do so, however, there was a sudden and violent reaction from her father. For him, obviously, her silence had continued too long.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell is this?” he erupted. “You’re asked a straight question, Gini, give it a straight fucking answer. Yes or no? Are you going to drop this? Because if you’re not, then just take on board the consequences here. There are libel laws in this country, and they’re a whole lot tougher than the libel laws back home. So check your contract with the
News
or any other paper you go to very carefully. Make sure you’re indemnified, sweetheart, and have your lawyer explain the fine print. No paper can cover you on a criminal libel charge anyway. You get hauled up on that one, Gini, and there’s a double payoff. In the first place, you’re bankrupt and in the second, you’re in jail—”