Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (31 page)

“I discarded the possibility. Until you arrived. And Marla, you were a giveaway. Try as you might, you could not disguise your triumph. Success was oozing out of you. Pleasure at my failure. But there was still no proof. It might still have been just coincidence. Then, early next morning, I got a phone call. A little Santa Cruz bird had seen J.T. in the company of a certain large blond woman. He had left her for a couple of hours in a bar in the middle of the night. Don’t look so surprised, Marla. Watching is part of the game. All kinds of people are paid to do it. Now, what was I to make of that? On the one hand, your rounded English vowels told me that you and J.T. had spoken less than a dozen words to each other. On the other, I had this story of a night spent in each other’s company. You’ll forgive me if I assumed the affair was platonic. In which case, what else could you and J.T. possibly have in common—except perhaps Elly’s welfare?

“I could still have been wrong. There was one way to find out. Elly was so anxious about my father’s ‘illness’ that she even shed her own tears. Of course she’d go in my place. She knew enough about the business to know there are some arrangements that can’t be changed. I told her there was no danger, and she believed me. I even packed her suitcases for her. I told her nothing. I couldn’t. Anything I said would have led back to you, and I wanted to watch you for myself. Through Indigo’s eyes.

“Your visit to the pay phone told me everything I needed to know. I knew you very well by then. You may not have wanted us to be friends, Marla, but you couldn’t stop me worming my way inside your brain and bugging your thoughts. I knew you
would call J.T., and I knew what he would tell you. I also knew that you would save her. My only concern was that, in order to do so, you might be tempted to tell her the whole story, then and there. But I banked on the fact that you would want her out of America first, away from my clutches. You had proved good at keeping secrets. I was sure this one could be kept for one more day.

“The rest you know. Or rather you think you know. Because there is one thing left to say, although you are not going to want to hear it. Because in all of this rotten little tale there is only one thing you did wrong, one miscalculation that you made all the way through, right to the bitter end. What happened when you told her, Marla? How much did she hate me then? Oh yes, she was angry. I had lied to and deceived her—believe me, she made that plain when I saw her. But she did see me. It was important enough for her to come and meet me face-to-face. She owed me that much. Why? Didn’t you ask yourself that question? Well, the answer is, Marla, that she loved me. And that despite all the shit, there was still something left between us. Something that had to be sorted out. And that’s what you can’t stand, isn’t it? You never could. Right from the beginning you could not accept that there had been something between her and me which was as powerful as the relationship between the two of you. It hurt so much that you simply refused to acknowledge it. That refusal blinded your judgment all along. And that refusal meant that in the end she had to come to me to find out the whole truth.

“And I told her. That afternoon when I picked her up from the train. We drove back here and walked along the beach, walked and talked for hours. Just like you and I now. I told her everything, exactly as I have told you. But the difference was that she believed me. Believed me enough for her to spend the night with me and for us to go out together this morning. To walk together to the falls. What did you think, Marla? That I
dragged her screaming from the car and flung her over the edge to stop her from talking? What would be the point of that? And even you, I’m afraid, won’t be able to prove it. Alas, there are witnesses to our mutual goodwill. The waitress in the restaurant where we lunched in Ullapool, the girl at the reception desk, the couple we passed on our way across the bridge. All these people, if asked, would talk of a kind of togetherness between us, an ease. I don’t want to hurt you more than necessary, Marla. I am not saying that we were reconciled. We were not. There was no future for us. We were both aware of that. There had been too many lies and too much pain. She had been hurt almost beyond healing. Certainly it was over. But with sadness rather than violence.

“And so we return to your original question. What happened this afternoon at the Measach Falls? There is more if you want to hear it. I could tell you for instance that we were talking about you as we crossed the bridge. About why it was you hadn’t told her, why you had been so eager to see me damned; eager enough to accept J.T.’s story without thinking to question it. You see, I was not the only one to have hurt her, Marla. She had expected more from you. I was only a lover, but you were a friend. You were sacrosanct, and your lies had damaged her. When we reached the end of the bridge, she fell silent and would not accept my comfort. I thought she needed to be alone. I left her there and started to walk back toward the car. But I remembered she had the keys. I retraced my steps, and that was when I saw her, by the edge of the gorge. There was something in the way she was standing that chilled me. I called out her name. She turned, and it was then that her foot seemed to slip. She lost her balance and fell sideways. It happened so quickly.

“The next thing I remember is her hitting the railing, the post ripping out of the ground and her body going with it.
That’s when she screamed. I ran to the edge. I even tried to climb down, but the ground was covered in thorns and thistles, and below was a sheer drop—I couldn’t even see the bottom. I lay there, hollering her name into the canyon, screeching till the echo hurt my ears. The two people we’d passed on the bridge must have heard my screams. They came running back. It was they who pulled me back from the edge and ran for help. I knew it was too late. We all did. No one could have survived that fall. No one. Not even Elly. Elly … the rest you know. That’s it. There’s nothing left to tell. You have it all, Marla. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth …”

So help you God. The dining room of the Inverlochy Metropole had frozen in time. The tables were empty, and the candle had long since burned out. The silence after his words stretched back and forward into infinity. I could feel his eyes boring into my brain.

“It’s your choice, Marla,” he said softly. “Am I really the villain of this piece, paranoid enough to kill twice to ensure silence? Or am I too one of the victims, despised, mistrusted, and framed by those who envied my success … envied me Elly. All I—”

But I was not listening. I was looking at his arms resting on the tablecloth and noticing for the first time a crisscross of cuts and scratches which, like stigmata, seemed to have miraculously appeared during the telling of the story. There they were—Exhibit Number 3. Lenny’s arms as proof that he had tried to save her. Another vision appeared to me. Of her nails clutching at his flesh as they clung together on the edge before the final swift push sent her spinning down through the crack in the earth’s crust. The two images, angel and devil, blurred into one. I returned to the marks on his arms, which had begun to pulsate in front of my eyes. I saw maggots and squirming yellow grubs
nosing their way out from the wounds, watched bulges of skin erupting into small volcanoes of pus. I dragged my eyes from the sight. The room rotated on its axis. Welcome to the void.

“Marla.” His voice licked its way over my neck, making me shiver with its tenderness. “I know how hard this is for you. But we can’t bring her back. All we can do is to let her death make peace between us. I think she would have wanted that.”

It was so overwhelmingly tempting, this prospect of forgiving and forgetting. The future ahead of me stretched bleak and empty, so utterly lonely that it seemed unbearable not to be able to share it.

For what it is worth, I had believed Lenny. Just as I had believed J.T. All good stories deserve to be believed, and his had been a cracker, complex, compulsive, consistent, cajoling, filling in the silences that other versions could not reach. So it must have sounded to Elly, and so she must have been charmed again. And yet. And yet … what is any good story but a kind of fiction? The spinnings of a fertile brain. How credible it sounds is not the point. The point is that in order to write history you have to choose. When all the source material has been uncovered, that is the historian’s job. And I had already made my choice. Although each of the stories may have fitted the facts, only one fitted my feelings. Lenny and I would always be separated by a gorge filled with the sound of rushing water and the corpse of a woman on the rocks. One woman or two, it hardly mattered, so long as one of them was Elly. After all the lies—whoever they belonged to—only the facts remained. Fallen or pushed—and there was, despite his innuendo, no other possible alternative—it made no difference. The line of her life had led through Lenny to death. There could be no forgetting or forgiving that.

Now, at last, I could look at him. The face had recovered some of its former sleekness. The eyes were sharp again, and the
skin had regained its color. This was a man flushed with the pleasure of performance.

“You look sick with tiredness, Marla. Why don’t you go to bed? There’s no need to say anything. I just wanted you to listen, and for that I’m grateful. Everything else can wait till morning.”

I opened my eyes into the sunshine of his smile. Brotherly love. He was, once again, invincible. Everything else could wait till morning. What else was there?

“You’re right,” I said thickly. “I do need sleep. Good night, Lenny. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I began the Long March. From the table across the room, through the heavy swing door out to the reception desk, and up interminable stairs to a dimly lit corridor to Room 22.

I locked the door behind me and lay down on the bed without bothering to remove my clothes. Sleep, near to instant unconsciousness, rushed up to greet me. As I gave myself up to it I heard Lenny’s words—“Everything else can wait till morning.” And in a corner of my mind I saw a dark cubbyhole at the top of a Paris cupboard. Five kilos of high-grade cocaine. Of course. Out of Lenny’s two lovers, only one was dead. There was, for him, comfort in sorrow. Tomorrow. It could wait until tomorrow.

I
t was early that morning they found her.

I woke at 5:00
A.M.
, as if by alarm, to find the pain lying in wait for me, an ambush on the edge of sleep. It descended like a physical attack, a poisonous cloud of despair, the weight of it pinning me to the bed, making it hard for me to breathe. I struggled against it, driven by an even greater fear of paralysis, of being discovered hours later by some scuttling maid or, even worse, by the dapper figure of a morning Lenny.

I heaved myself off the bed and into the bathroom, where I put my head under the cold tap. The shock stunned me into a few precious moments of alertness. I used them to change my
clothes and get myself out of the room before the walls began closing in.

Downstairs, the dawn had made little impression on the nooks and crannies of the mahogany reception room. The front doors were locked. I pushed my way through the heavy fire doors into the bar, where stale beer and cigar smoke lingered in the air. The French windows had a key in them. I turned it and was released into a gray morning and a long slope of lawn down to steps onto the beach.

My feet crunched shingle. Out at sea a wind was driving long white furrows into the shore. The air was sharp with the taste of salt. I walked down toward the water, feet slipping on wet pebbles, dragging my sorrow with me. At the edge, where the waves sighed over the stones, I stopped, then walked a little more. I felt the cold of the sea on the soles of my feet. Then the water crept up over my ankles, curious and playful. In my head, a percussion of blood beating in tune with the waves. I took a few more steps. To the right a piece of driftwood pounded onto the beach, dumped by a rush of surf. I thought of a body, pulling sluggishly in shallow water, facedown, the fabric of a skirt billowing free. On the feet a flash of white plastic. Then I saw a second corpse, larger than the first, fair hair matted and dark with water, limbs bloated, while small fishes darted in and out from under the face, a meal already in progress. Together we gorged, they and I, on images of death and oblivion. The water sucked at my trouser legs, reaching greedily for my knees.

I had begun to cry, although I do not remember when. The horizon blurred with the rain of my tears, and the images washed away. The blur turned to blindness, closing up my eyes and clogging my nostrils. Elly. The loss of her blotted out the whole world, an abstract force, so much itself, so selfish that it brooked no competition. I became aware of a sudden relief, as if
the real pain had come from resistance. She had been part of me: part of me was dead. I heard round me a kind of wailing, my own voice like the roar of the sea. The water clutched at my thighs. It seemed it would go on forever, this drowning. How long had it taken her? Would I feel the same instant of extinction now, if I opened my arms and lungs to the sea? It seemed so close, so easy. But something inside me held on and would not be released. A symbolic death mine, nothing more. And so, eventually, like water after high tide, the sorrow and the tears began to recede and I pulled myself back from the ocean.

When it was past, I examined myself for damage. I found I was squatting in the surf, my chest pressing close to my knees, arms locked around my body. A vise grip. So tight I could feel a pain in my ribs, cutting out the chill of the water. I uncurled a little and felt the wind tugging at my skin, drying salt on salt, spray upon tears. I was quieter, more real. After a while I looked down at my watch. Seven-twenty
A.M
. I had been at sea for hours.

I stood up slowly, unlocking my arms and lifting them above my head. My body felt light, like in that children’s game where someone pushes down on your head, then suddenly releases you. I stood on tiptoe and stretched and stretched until my muscles sang. I pushed my head down onto my chest and felt rivulets of strain running down through my shoulders. Then I lifted my head and let it fall backward until all I could see was the sky, the world upside down. My body had been clamped shut for so long holding in the pain. Even in sleep I had been rigid. Now at last, in this early morning with the world deserted, now I could let go. I began to do a few simple exercises, stretching, flexing, pushing into the wind, taking long deep breaths until my heart was beating hollow in my chest and the blood pumped at the sides of my temples. I became almost lightheaded. I, me, Marla, was feeling these things. My muscles, my limbs, my rib cage expanding and contracting, breathing in my
life. I could mourn Elly forever. I could love her as hopelessly as you can love only the dead. But I was still me, still here now, alive—and she was not. I could not share her death, not even by experiencing my own. I could not black myself out for her. The realization of that swept over me like a last unbearable wave of pain, but I held my ground, and in its wake it brought unexpected comfort.