The Four of Us (31 page)

As there came the sound of loud voices and laughter, she looked towards the door Kit had left open with interest. With luck, one of the musicians would be a hunk. Life couldn't be all problems and disappointments. She was a rock star, about to appear at one of the most prestigious venues in Europe alongside the biggest names in the business. Casual sex went with her territory – and she had no quibble about casual sex. Absolutely none at all.

Four days later, she was in seventh heaven. The rehearsals at the Albert Hall had been going on for most of the day and the fevered activity – the rubbing shoulders with fellow rock stars, the sense of being a player, of being where the action was, of being wonderfully special – was meat and drink to her. Or it was until her old buddy Davy Jones wandered over to have a chat whilst she was watching Boney M go through their paces.

‘Hiya,' he said, nursing steaming coffee in a paper cup. ‘I'm disappointed in you, Kiki. You know that, don't you?'

‘What for?' Davy was one of the few guys who had never made a pass at her and so she knew he wasn't referring to an occasion when she hadn't come across.

‘The Cocoanut Grove date in Los Angeles. When our manager asked Francis if you'd like to second bill on it for us we thought you'd jump at the chance. As it is we had to make do with a singer so bad, if his performance had been a fight it would have been stopped.'

She didn't laugh. She couldn't. She felt frozen inside. ‘Are you telling me that Francis was approached with an offer for me to perform at the Cocoanut Grove with The Monkees?'

His eyebrows rose as he cottoned on to the fact that she hadn't known about it. ‘For four weeks, two shows a night.'

‘When was this?' She could hardly get the words past her lips, her jaw was clamped so tight. The Cocoanut Grove, Los Angeles. It would have meant the chance of being reviewed in the
Hollywood Reporter
, even, perhaps, the
Los Angeles Times
. There would have been celebrities in the audience. Movers and shakers. Hell, it might even have led to a stint in Las Vegas!

‘Six months ago. Are you telling me Francis never told you the offer was on the table?'

Twenty yards or so away from them, on stage, Boney M were going through ‘Rivers of Babylon'for the third time as the lighting for it was adjusted and re-adjusted.

‘No,' she said, white to the lips. ‘It obviously slipped his mind.'

Because he was only her height, Davy's eyes met hers straight on. ‘Then get yourself another manager,' he said sagely. ‘Slips of memory like that are no help to anyone's career. Is he with you now? Here at the Hall?'

Somehow, she managed to unclamp her jaw. ‘He should be. He should have arrived today, but he hasn't shown yet. But when he does …'

She didn't finish her sentence. She didn't need to. When Francis finally showed he would be doing so for the last time.

‘The Cocoanut Grove!' she screamed at him as he lounged against

the door of her otherwise empty communal dressing room, looking

jet-lagged and the worse for wear. ‘The Cocoanut Grove, and you didn't even
tell
me about it! Why? Were you off your head on charlie, or was it simply that you couldn't be bothered?'

It was the next day and the concert was already under way. In five minutes, perhaps less, it would be time for her to strut on to the stage and to give it all she'd got. At the moment, though, she could think of nothing but unleashing her pent-up fury.

‘You
know
how important America is to me! You
know
how prestigious the Cocoanut Grove venue is. If I'd once successfully fronted for The Monkees, then I'd probably have been able to do more and more with them – perhaps even record with them and appear on their TV show! You're my manager and yet you blew it for me! Well, you sure as hell aren't going to blow anything else! I've had it with you, Francis. I want you out of my life every which way there is!'

‘So I forgot,' he said wearily. ‘It isn't the end of the world, Kiki. And don't let's row when we're within hearing of nearly every group that's appearing. Go on stage, do your stuff, and then we'll talk.'

‘Like hell we will!' She was wearing a boldly coloured neo-psychedelic jacket with nothing beneath it but a black bra, skin-tight black trousers and four-inch-high silver-heeled stilettos. ‘I want you to get the fuck out now, Francis! As far as you're concerned, I'm a memory, got it? If we're ever in the same room again, you don't see me. Got it?'

He blanched, suddenly aware that this was no ordinary row – that she was deathly serious.

‘What's the matter, Kiki?' he asked tightly.

‘Have I outgrown my usefulness? Are you going to move on to someone with more to offer you? Are you hungry for another victim?'

‘Yes,' she said brutally, noting dispassionately how his looks were beginning to go. His fair-haired, Prince Charming handsomeness had once been his redeeming grace. Now, though he was only thirty, the waving hair he still wore shoulder-length was beginning to thin and looked dull – and he was too thin. There was now no longer anything sexy about his narrow hips. They merely looked bony. They'd been together for six years when they should have been together for a year – if that.

‘Yes,' she said again, no longer shouting, but tightly in control. ‘Yes, I have outgrown you and yes, I am going on to the next person who will be useful to me. As for your being a victim, if that's how you see yourself, then that's what you are. But I didn't make you one. That's been down to you, Francis. No one else.'

There came a hammering on the door and Leon's voice shouted: ‘Get the hell outta there, Kiki! We're on next!'

She strode towards the door and Francis moved out of her way. ‘I don't want to find you here when I come back,' she said tersely as she opened the door. ‘You're not my manager any more. Got it?'

‘Oh yes,' he said bitterly. ‘Where you are concerned, Kiki, I got things a long time ago.'

She hesitated, about to at least throw him a final goodbye.

Leon seized hold of her arm. ‘What the fuck d'you think you're playing at, babe?' he demanded, beginning to propel her down the stone-floored corridor at top speed. ‘It's a five-minute hike from here to the stage. Get your ass moving
now
.'

Without looking back at Francis, she broke into a run.

Six minutes later, she was prancing on stage for her ‘Twilight Love'opening number. The vast audience, already well warmed up by previous acts, roared approval for a song that had first been a hit for her six years ago. Her surge of adrenalin was cataclysmic. This was all that mattered. This was where she wanted to be. And with Francis now part of her history and a new hotshot American manager all set to re-package her image and take her to new heights, she'd soon be headlining concerts as a bona fide rock phenomenon.

Behind her, she could hear Leon really taking off on the drums. The rest of the six-member band were top-notch, too. As she went into her next number, she maintained the heart-pounding pace; the applause was thunderous. Sweat was pouring off her, but she didn't care. This sensation of being the centre of the universe was all she wanted. It was all she'd ever wanted. And as she gloried in the spotlight, no one was further from her thoughts than Francis Sheringham.

Geraldine let herself into her ground-floor Parisian apartment. The house, with Palladian columns decorating its main façade, was set on a bend in the road, near to the Madeleine. In a previous age it had been one of many prestigious mansions, now it stood a little isolated, uncomfortably at odds with the busy, twentieth-century traffic hurtling past its paved courtyard frontage.

Nothing hurtled past at the mansion's rear, though. As Geraldine closed the door to her apartment behind her and looked ahead through the hall and into the salon she could see, through the arched French windows, the small garden that had motivated her into signing the lease and agreeing to an astronomical rent.

There was none of the vibrant colour of Cedar Court's magnificent herbaceous borders, no spectacular vista of lawns and rolling parkland. What there was, though, was an intricate, classical box-hedged parterre, so dramatic that it looked as if it were a stage set.

Dropping her lizard-skin shoulder bag on to a gilded reproduction Louis XVI salon chair, she walked over to the windows, opened them and stepped outside.

When she had moved into the apartment, five years ago, the spaces enclosed by the box hedges had been rank with weeds. Now they were planted with white flowers from spring to autumn. In April the delicate lockets of white dicentra swayed in gentle movement. In summer Iceberg roses were a sea of foaming blossom, and now, in September, wax-white Japanese anemones fluttered and stirred above the dense green of the box.

She leaned against the jamb of the French windows, wishing she had a drink in her hand. The rosewood credenza that served her as a drinks cabinet was only a dozen steps away but she didn't have the energy to turn round and walk back into the room. She felt too melancholy; too deep in thoughts of her recent, unsettling trip to London.

The temptation to get in touch with both Primmie and Artemis had, when she had been there, nearly overwhelmed her. Only the thought of the lies she would have ended up telling them had deterred her. After six years of no real contact – apart from the birthday and Christmas cards she had sent them – they would have wanted to know why she preferred Paris to London, what it was that was keeping her there; what it was she did for a living.

Lies, of course, would have been easy. When she'd first arrived in Paris she'd built on the antiques course she'd taken at Sotheby's by taking a fine art and antiques course at the Louvre, and she could have said that on finishing it she'd begun working at a gallery, or that she was a PA to an art dealer. She could, in fact, have told them anything – that she was a secretary, a receptionist, or a stylist again – and they would have been none the wiser. It wouldn't, though, have explained why she'd made no direct contact with them and why, on the cards she had sent, she had never given an address to which they could have written back.

It was late afternoon and the sky was smoking to dusk. The immaculately clipped box parterre was surrounded by pale gravel and beyond the gravel was a profusion of less geometric planting. Cistus, white hydrangeas, choisya, the pale grey leaves of Jerusalem sage. She watched the late summer light play on the restricted green, white and grey colours of her carefully thought out, restrained planting scheme and tried to imagine what Artemis's and Primmie's reactions would have been if she had told them that she was a high-class call girl.

She couldn't do it. Her imagination simply wouldn't take her that far. She could, of course, have dressed up the description of what she did by saying that she worked for an escort agency, but what would have been the point? Even Artemis would have known what was meant by that.

‘You are a sex worker,' her friend Dominique would say with a Gallic shrug, her English heavily accented. ‘So what ees ze problem?'

The answer was that there wasn't one – apart from the fact that she didn't want Artemis and Primmie to know that she was a sex worker.

The longing for a drink overcame her disinclination to move and she turned and walked back into the salon. The temptation to meet up again with Artemis and Primmie hadn't been the only reason her trip to London, with André Barre, had so unsettled her. There had also been another temptation. The temptation to drive down to Cedar Court and to never, ever leave it.

Her hand trembled slightly as she poured Rémy into a cut-glass tumbler and added a cube of ice.

‘Cedar Court is always here for you, my dear,' her Uncle Piers had said to her in the indescribably hellish hours after Kiki's telephone call from Rome. ‘You needn't fear finding Francis here. This is an outrage too far and I shall be telling him so. From now on, I don't want to see him. He's never had a sense of responsibility towards his heritage. You're the only one who's ever valued the house and our family history. It's your family home and, as always, you are welcome to live here whenever you want and for however long you want.'

She'd been so slaughtered with grief at all she had lost that she'd barely been able to thank him for his kindness. And he had been kind. Everyone had been kind. But she hadn't wanted kindness. She'd wanted Francis and she'd wanted Cedar Court. She'd wanted it not just as her family home, but as her marital home – the home where her children would have been born. The home her eldest son would have inherited.

At the thought of Francis marrying Kiki and having children, and of Kiki's son inheriting after Francis, she had vomited until all she had been able to bring up was bile.

She hadn't taken up her uncle's offer. To be at Cedar Court, without Francis would have been a pain beyond enduring.

Instead, she had fled to Paris, returning to England only twice. The first time for her mother's funeral, the second time because André Barre had wanted her on his arm when he attended the reception at the French Embassy in London – and because she had thought that she could at last make a visit to London without subjecting herself to memories she preferred to suppress.

She'd been wrong in thinking she could do so.

The very first thing that had met her eyes as André Barre's chauffeured car paused at traffic lights en route to London from the airport had been a giant poster advertising a rock concert to be held at the Albert Hall. Kiki's name hadn't been headlining the bill and hadn't been printed in very large letters, but she had seen it all the same.

It was then that her stomach had begun churning, for she'd known that if Kiki was in London, or about to come to London, then so was Francis. What if she ran into the two of them? What if she saw him, his arm around Kiki, happy with her? London wasn't a village, and such a meeting wasn't likely, but stranger things had happened.