Lovers and Liars Trilogy (99 page)

“That was the original plan.” Max shrugged. “When he’s ready, I assume. Lamartine’s a law unto himself.”

Rowland made no comment. He returned to his chair and sat down.

“So. Shall we get on with it, Max?” He glanced at his watch. “You were going to fill me in on Genevieve Hunter.”

“Was I?” A slightly evasive look crossed Max’s face.

“Yes. You were. As you well know. Come on, Max. We’ve got ten minutes before your meeting. I want the details.
All
the details. A to Z.”

“Rowland, we’ve been over this. You know most of it already.”

Rowland’s expression became obstinate and concentrated. He leaned forward.

“Possibly. Tell me again,” he said.

I
N THE MORNINGS NOW
, Genevieve Hunter walked. Sometimes she walked for one hour, sometimes two, and always at random. Walking was beneficial: it occupied her body, lulled her mind, and made the day shrink. If she stayed in her apartment, she felt obliged to try to write, but the words that came up on her computer screen refused to cohere or make sense. If she stayed in her apartment, she felt the absence of Pascal too acutely. This was the first home they had ever shared: they had found it together, furnished it together; it was a place that proclaimed their love—and they had lived in it together for less than five months.

It was on the fringes of Notting Hill, on the top floor of a huge, extravagantly turreted house designed for his pre-Raphaelite artist friends by an architect whose work was regarded as radical in 1868. Though Rossetti had once had one of the studios in the building and Ruskin had been a frequent visitor there, Gini could not sense her building’s past life. For her, its existence only truly began the moment she and Pascal first saw it: after weeks of searching, of losing heart, of viewing one overpriced gimcrack conversion after another, suddenly, like a miracle, they had come upon this.

There was one vast studio room, as tall, as spacious, as the interior of a church. A spiral staircase led up to a gallery bedroom lined with shelves for books. One entire wall was window, a tall, arched north-facing window. Light flooded through its panes and moved upon the walls. It was a spring day, a glorious spring day, a day in which regeneration sang out in the air, and that window let spring into the room. From it, the city was invisible: still transfixed in the doorway, they looked out at a pale azure sky, at small high clouds that raced, at the branches of plane trees just green with new leaf; the brilliance of the sunlight dazzled their eyes. “It’s ours,” Pascal said after a long silence. “It was intended for us. It has to be ours—yes?”

After that they had both tried very hard to be pragmatic. Hand in hand, they explored. They searched for defects. Solemnly, Pascal tapped walls, inspected wiring and plumbing; equally solemnly, Gini examined a kitchen she knew she loved at first sight. They discovered there was a second bedroom, on the studio level, a small, romantic turret bedroom, a domain Rackham might have drawn for some fairy-tale princess. It was a room made for a child with imagination. Gini could see Pascal, thinking of his daughter.

She said, “Marianne could come to stay, Pascal.”

“She could,” he said. “She would
love
this room.”

For a while after that, neither of them quite dared to speak. They returned to the huge studio room, and stood holding hands in front of that tall, glorious window. Pascal jangled the keys the agent had given him. They looked at each other; Pascal’s gray eyes lit with amusement. He knew that she was about to voice the unspoken. Before she could do so, he lifted his hand and rested his fingers lightly against her lips.

“No. Wait,” he said. “You’re about to be sensible. Before you’re sensible, I have to do this.”

He lifted her long, pale hair away from her face. He looked into her eyes, then, drawing her toward him, bent and kissed her on the lips.

The embrace was long, and it left her shaken, her mind in disarray; he had, she thought, intended this. She drew away from him at last, with a smile and a shake of the head. She laced her fingers in his and examined his face from a safer distance, arm’s length. She watched the sunlight move across the darkness of his hair, across the planes of his face. She loved the line of his brows; she loved every aspect of his face, every inflection in his voice, every variation in his touch. Finely attuned to him, she knew precisely what he was thinking. It was there in every lineament, in the set of his mouth and in the glint of amusement that still lit his eyes. Nonetheless, the unspoken had to be voiced sooner or later.

“It’s too expensive,” she said, “we have to face facts.”

Pascal, the most determined man she had ever known, a man who could always contrive to get himself to the back of beyond, by yesterday, when there were no flights, gave a shrug. He began to pace the room. Gini, familiar with his refusal ever to accept defeat, watched him with quiet affection. She had seen him like this before, when he worked. Pascal, who could argue or charm his way past any barricade or impediment, Pascal, who, failing to get in some front entrance, would always contrive a way in through the side or the back, Pascal, who went into war zones and brought back the pictures no one else could get.

Gini tried to concentrate. She added up, again, the money she could expect from the sale of her own London apartment; the money Pascal thought could be raised from the sale of his Paris atelier; the figures the mortgage companies had mentioned. No matter how she added up those figures, the discrepancy was huge. She gave a sigh; Pascal, undaunted as always, returned to her at once. He put his arm around her waist.

“My car,” said Pascal, who drove fast in a classic, old, and much-loved Porsche. “I’ll sell my car. I’ll get a dull car. That would help.”

“I’ll sell mine too.” She smiled. Gini drove an ancient Volkswagen Beetle. Pascal, who did not admire this vehicle, gave her a serious look.

“A sacrifice I couldn’t permit. Besides, we’d have to pay someone to take it off our hands.”

“We could live on vegetables.”

“We could.” He drew her closer to him. “Turnips. Parsnips.”

“No new clothes for the next ten years.”

“A better idea. I prefer you without clothes, in any case.”

“I could change careers. Stop being a journalist. Become a merchant banker. A corporate lawyer. An advertising whiz kid…”

“I think not. That would be a waste. Look at me, Gini.”

She turned to face him; his arms encircled her waist.

“Do we want this, Gini?”

“Yes. We do.”

“Then let’s get it,” said Pascal.

From that moment onward he was as she most loved him—very energetic, very charming, very steely, and very French. First the owners of the apartment, then their agents, then the bank, began to give way under his onslaught: the price, it seemed, might after all be a little negotiable; the mortgage might be, after all, increased. Returning to Gini’s apartment, with its forlorn For Sale sign, he found her a buyer within a week. At night, when to his annoyance and chagrin—for Pascal himself did not observe office hours and despised those who did—the bank or real estate agents could not be reached, he covered hundreds of sheets of paper with calculations. Sum after sum, all the sevens neatly crossed. He added up their expenses, his child support payments to his ex-wife for Marianne, the mortgage payments, the cost of heating and travel and—Gini saw to her amused delight—wine and bread.

“Wine?” she said, leaning over his shoulder. “That’s a luxury. Cross that off.”

“To you, my darling American, it may be a luxury. To me it is a necessity.”

“You’ve left out electricity.”

“Candles?” He looked at her with a smile.

“Insurance?”

“Damn. I’ll have to call Max.”

He called Max there and then, as—Gini suspected—he had intended to do from the first. He told Max that he was enjoying being wooed by the
Correspondent
very much, but if Max wished courtship to lead to marriage, the dowry would have to be increased.

“I have been doing sums,” Pascal said. “I had allowed for wine but not electricity. A foolish oversight…When you come to dinner with us, you see, Max, in this wonderful place we mean to have, it would be useful to be able to cook for you—Oh, really? A ballpark figure? What is that?”

There was a pause while Pascal, who understood the term very well, listened intently. He then named a sum of money. Gini paled; Max said yes.

And so it had become theirs, all this wonderful space. Pascal went to see an antiques-dealer friend with a warehouse on King’s Road. After an excellent lunch, and several hours of fierce Gallic bargaining, he acquired a bed. It was a high, wide, glorious four-poster, once the property of a king’s mistress—or so the dealer claimed. It had pillars carved with vines, and its original hangings of worn scarlet silk. He kept the purchase secret, and had the bed installed on a day when Gini was out interviewing a very dull and self-satisfied Cabinet minister. When she came home that spring evening, there it was.

They climbed into it together at once. It was like being aboard a sailing ship. From its pillows, they looked out across the gallery balustrade to the magnificent window, to the tops of trees, to a scudding sky, to the lights and sounds of the invisible city that thrummed five floors below. They drank wine there, then ate supper there, then made love there, then slept.

“I am content,” Pascal said, gathering her into his arms the next morning, “I have never been so content.”

Gini was also content. She liked the word, which seemed to link them in its embrace. She thought of all the years since she had first met Pascal, and realized with a shock that they comprised almost half her life. She thought of the weeks when she had first known him, and first loved him, in Beirut. She thought of their years apart, and their reunion. She thought: I want for nothing. Everything I love and value and esteem is here. Oh, yes, I am content.

She felt no unease, not the least premonition, not even a prick of superstition that the beneficent gods who dispense bounty to humans have a grim habit of giving with the right hand, then immediately taking back with the left. Five months after moving into that apartment, she was granted what had always been her other wish: she was sent to Sarajevo, to cover the war in Bosnia. She went with Pascal, and worked there with Pascal. He had operated from war zones before, many times; she had not.

Six months later, she returned alone. Pascal, unaware of the extent of the change in her, agreed that her return to London was the best course. He would remain in Bosnia for a brief period—at most three weeks, a month. He had now been there, alone, for nine weeks, and the date of his return was still not fixed. At first, although Gini was careful not to tell Pascal this, she was glad of the delay. She thought it would give her time—time to cure herself of the aftermath of Bosnia and what she saw there, time to cure the nightmares, the sleeplessness, time to cure herself.

Wars could be exorcised, she told herself as the weeks went by. It must, somehow, be possible—not to forget, she would have despised herself had she ever forgotten—to distance herself. But death—the sound, taste, sight, and smell of death—pursued her. It prevented rest, jerked her awake with a cry of fear in the lonely morning hours; it seeped into this lovely apartment and soiled its contentment; it pursued her out into the ordinary streets.

She had, as had many of the reporters out there, been physically wounded while in Bosnia. One evening, in a small village set high in a mountain pass, on her way with Pascal to Mostar (and above all she feared to think of Mostar) they had been caught in a mortar attack. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in her upper arm. It was a minor injury of which she was almost ashamed, given the maimings she had witnessed; it was quickly, and with reasonable efficiency, patched up.

Now, nine weeks after leaving that country, the wound had almost healed: her mind had not. Pascal, long acquainted with modern warfare and its hideous results, had tried to warn her. And she, not being a fool, had listened to those warnings, of course. Quietly, with reluctance, he had shown her, before they left for Bosnia, some of the pictures he had taken in the past, pictures taken as documentation only, never intended for publication, pictures no magazine or newspaper could ever reproduce.

“You have to be prepared.” He laid out the black and white rectangles in front of her. “You will see this, Gini. And worse.”

He waited, in silence, as she looked down at the photographs.

“That’s the threshold,” he said eventually. “Are you sure, Gini—absolutely sure—that it’s one you want to cross?”

Shaken, nauseated, fighting the physical symptoms of her distress, she had turned away, unable to face him. Their journey to Bosnia was still one week away; he had timed this, she thought, so that it was possible for her, even then, to back out.

“It wouldn’t be cowardice,” he went on gently. “You mustn’t think that. It would simply be a choice. There
is
a difference, Gini, between the sexes. It is harder for a woman to look at this, to live with this—”

“Why?”
She swung around to face him again, sensing he might be right. “
Why,
Pascal? These things happen. These atrocities
exist.
Why should women be shielded from them? That can’t be right. I think that’s weak—and I don’t want to be weak.”

“It isn’t necessarily weakness. I don’t think of it that way. These incidents you see here”—he gestured at the photographs—“they are perpetrated by men. So they are something all men have to confront. But if a woman turns away from them, if you turn away, Gini, might that not be a sign of strength?”

She had been moved then by the concern and the gentleness in his face. It was very characteristic of Pascal, she thought, not only to offer her an escape route, but to do so with grace.

The offer had been quietly made, and quietly she refused it. But once they reached Bosnia, Pascal did attempt to shield her at first. There were dangers he, if alone, might have risked, to which he would not expose her. He was careful what she saw, and tried to ensure that, like a plant susceptible to frost damage, she was gradually hardened off.