The High Flyer (6 page)

VIII

I sat there, examining the fingernail I had broken by clenching my fists too hard, and thought idly how wonderful it would be to have Tucker as a permanent personal assistant, almost a pseudo-spouse, a male equivalent of Kim’s doting long-time PA Mary Waters who had followed him to Graf-Rosen just as Jacqui had followed me to Curtis, Towers. But could I really trust a heterosexual male not to make a sex-mess if he were put in the position of being my chief pamperer, crisis-fixer, gofer and hitman? Probably not. Yet it was becoming increasingly tempting to massage Jacqui out of my life and try.

I hit the intercom. “Hey, Tucker! Get in here.”

He was planted on the carpet in front of me in less than ten seconds, white shirt glistening, black shoes gleaming, terminally dull tie toning with his irreproachable charcoal-grey suit. The office serf as male slave, obedient to his lady’s every whim—this glorious pipe-dream of every stressed-out female high flyer was now miraculously incarnate in my office. At least something in my life was currently going right.

In a voice mild enough to signal my appreciation I said: “Thank you for handling that call. Mrs. Sophie Betz is my husband’s ex-wife and she’s been harassing me for some time. If she calls again you can say straight away that I’m not available.”

“Right.” He thought for a moment. “Is she likely to try to storm your office?”

I respected him for having the intelligence to ask this horrible but necessary question. “Probably not,” I said. “I suspect she’d be reluctant to make such a public exhibition of herself, but on the other hand if she’s nuts anything’s possible.”

“Maybe I should know what she looks like so that I can repel any invasion.”

“Well, I’ve never met the woman, but I understand she’s fat, fiftyish and frumpish with tightly waved grey hair.”

“In that case she’ll be easy to spot once she crosses the threshold of Curtis, Towers.”

We exchanged poker-faced looks but I knew at once that we were both silently making the same observation. The dinosaurs at Curtis, Towers, unfettered by laws forbidding age discrimination, tended to pressure any female into resigning at the first sign of a varicose vein. No wonder pantsuits were becoming so fashionable.

“Anything else, ma’am?”

“No. Wait a moment—yes. Could you get Mrs. Lake of Blue Lake Catering on the phone? She’s booked to do a dinner-party for me on Friday night and as it’s now Wednesday afternoon I think it’s time I made sure she’s not planning to serve mad cow.”

He vanished.

By this time Tucker had woven himself seamlessly into his new environment and was proving to be an object of considerable interest to the fluffettes. Later I was to overhear him being discussed passionately in the ladies’ loo when an argument broke out about whether his hair should be classified as chestnut brown or darkest red. The freckles visible across the bridge of his nose favoured the darkest-red party, but this faint spattering of pigment was reckoned by the chestnut-brown crowd not to indicate the presence of the red-hair gene unless his forearms were similarly mottled. Speculation then took place about how Tucker could be persuaded to expose his forearms, and Shana, the office shag-queen, was driven to declare rashly that she would discover the colour of his pubic hair, but pride went before a fall and Tucker remained chastely veiled in his white shirts and dark suits. I heard Shana’s excuse for her uncharacteristic failure was that “Slaughter” Graham kept her lad on a tight leash, no doubt to satisfy a craving for sado-masochistic sex-games.

However, these ladies’-loo vignettes took place during the second week of his assignment, and on the day that Sophie called me at work I was still savouring his first week as my pipe-dream incarnate.

I had just finished attending to my broken nail when Tucker slipped back into my room.

“Bad news, Ms. Graham.”

“It’s the Lake Lady.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“She’s dead?”

“No, departed.”

I was outraged. “But that’s impossible! She was recommended by two clothes-horses in my building who do nothing but give dinner-parties!”

“I gather the bank manager switched off the business’s life-support machine. I just spoke to the bailiff.”

“Bloody hell, I don’t need this crisis!” I yelled, deciding it was time to do some therapeutic emoting. “For Christ’s sake, why didn’t the woman let me know she’d be off the map by Friday? This disaster can’t have happened overnight!”

“It could be you were low on her list of priorities. She’s currently being reassembled in a South London clinic after overgrazing on Valium.”

“Okay, that’s sad, I’ll stop wanting to kill her, but
what am I going to do
about my dinner-party
?”

“May I make a suggestion?”

“Yes, but make damn sure it’s brilliant.”

“I know a cook, cordon bleu, freelance, clean, sober, respectable and reliable. She lives in Clerkenwell, she’s worked for the aristocracy in Belgravia, and she often does Barbican dinner-parties. Shall I call her?”

“Okay, that
is
brilliant—but no, hold it, that type of wonder woman’s bound to be booked up for at least six months—”

“Not on Friday nights, not for formal dinner-parties. That’s when she cooks dinner for her
cher ami
.”

“You?”

“I’m not that lucky. Shall I—”

“Yes, for God’s sake eliminate the boyfriend and kidnap her.”

An interval followed during which I drew pictures of vodka martinis on my scratchpad, overcame the urge to gnaw my mutilated fingernail and silently reviewed in my mind’s eye all the major chill-food lines in Marks and Spencer’s food department.

The intercom buzzed.

“Good news?”

“The best. I’ve fixed it. She’s happy to help you out.”

I sagged in my chair, wiped my memory of the chill-food cabinets and said: “Tucker, you should be garlanded with flowers and led through the cheering crowds of the City of London on an elephant. What’s this heroine’s name and where can I reach her?”

“She’s on the line right now and her name’s Alice Fletcher. I’ll put her through.”

I instantly resolved to offer him a permanent job at a salary he would be unable to refuse.

IX

Ms. Fletcher spoke courteously, displaying an effortless mastery of the accent which I called Home Counties and which she probably still called BBC, even though nowadays the BBC prided itself on flaunting regional dialects. She suggested that she call at my flat after work on the following day, Thursday, to inspect the kitchen and discuss the menu. She then said she would do all the shopping afterwards, but when I proved to be too much of a control-freak to let her shop alone she seemed delighted that I was willing to take an interest in the preparations.

At five-thirty on the following evening after a diabolical day which included a fraught partners’ meeting, a furious clash with a snooty barrister over his “counsel’s opinion,” and a ferocious conference with a snotty client who refused to see the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, I arrived home to find Alice Fletcher waiting for me in the lobby of Harvey Tower. I eyed her warily but found nothing which set my teeth on edge. She was about my age, dark-eyed with a square, friendly face and brown hair tucked up in a French pleat. She was about twenty pounds overweight but I knew no man would dream of calling her fat; he would be too busy noting that the surplus flesh was distributed in all the right places. As if to play down the voluptuousness and enhance her respectability, she was wearing a decorous black blouse and black skirt beneath her unbuttoned, drab raincoat.

Upstairs in my flat she was polite about my kitchen, which I had not bothered to modernise, and her rigorously neutral expression never changed as she inspected the sparse contents of my storecupboard and refrigerator. Taking a notepad and pen from her bag she asked what food I wanted to serve to my guests.

“That’s for you to decide,” I said cautiously, “but there must be no beef of any kind.”

“I believe Scottish beef is still safe,” said Ms. Fletcher, “but of course it would be such a bore for you to have to explain that. Is there any guest who’s vegetarian? Or who requires kosher?”

“Not this time.”

“All right, but who exactly will be eating this meal? I like to try to anticipate what will appeal to them.”

I listed the middle-aged American investment banker, his trophy wife of twenty-eight, the elderly English judge and his worthy spouse who was a prison visitor.

“A bold mix!” said Ms. Fletcher admiringly. “What fun! Anyone else?”

“Just me and my husband. He’s a lawyer who’s lived all over the world.”

“Cosmopolitan,” said Ms. Fletcher, classifying him. “He’ll adapt to whatever food is set before him. The Americans will want a salad at some stage, and a lo-cal dessert, the judge will be suspicious of any foreign food except French, and Mrs. Judge will be into Tuscan cuisine while secretly hankering for shepherd’s pie.”

I laughed. “What about me?”

“Ah, I suspect you’re not basically a foodie! You’re so beautifully slim.”

“I might still be obsessed with food. How do you know I’m not bulimic or anorexic?”

“If you were, you’d be too hung up to suggest the possibility to a stranger—in fact you’d probably be in denial and unable to accept you were slim at all.”

I was impressed by these deductions, so impressed that I finally dared to believe I was dealing with an intelligent professional. With relief I decided that Ms. Fletcher and I were going to get along.

We were just moseying around the meat cabinets of the nearby supermarket some time later when I became vaguely aware of a woman watching us from the far end of the aisle. I might not have noticed her if she had been less well-dressed, but in her royal-blue coat and matching dress she stood out among the other shoppers, most of whom would have come from the nearby council estates. Her greying dark hair was expensively styled in swirling curves, and as she impulsively darted towards me I saw she had beautiful skin, lined lightly around the mouth and eyes but still very smooth. Her blue eyes were bright with an emotion which might have been anxiety or fear or anger or a potent combination of all three.

“You’re Carter, aren’t you,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

“That’s me.” I was trying to think who she was, but such a distinguished-looking woman could have been anyone in the City from a top-grade PA to a key player in a multinational, and it was no easy task to locate her name immediately in my memory.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t quite recall—” Then I broke off as the horrific truth suddenly hit me, and at once the woman said: “I’m Sophie Betz.”

I

I took a step backwards. I opened my mouth but no words came out. Horror, rage, panic and downright incredulity surged through my brain in an emotional tidal wave.

“I had to see you,” she said in a rush. “We have to talk.”

“You’re Sophie Betz,” was all I could say. Then, more stunned than ever, I heard myself repeat with a wholly different emphasis: “
You’re
Sophie Betz?”

“Look, I know you don’t want to talk to me, but—”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

I was now floundering around trying to make sense of this bizarre appearance, but Sophie was so agitated that I believe she barely heard my question. We were talking across each other, our dialogue out of joint, while around us the shoppers’ eyes were glazed and the white lights were glaring and the meat lay in glistening packages on the glacial shelves nearby.

“I tried to spin out the divorce because I thought you might get tired of him, but it all became such a nightmare, so expensive, and then—”

“
How did you know who I was and how did you know I’d be here tonight?
”

“I felt I simply had to make one last effort to save you, so I reengaged the private detective I used last year. I told him I wanted to know your daily routine and what you looked like, and he took photos and—”

“What a bloody nerve!”

“—and he found out you usually came here at least once during the week after work to pick up things which couldn’t wait till the weekly shopping expedition on Saturdays. So when you refused to take my call yesterday I knew I had no choice but to—”

“—haunt Safeway’s till I showed up! Wonderful! Okay, now listen to me, Sophie. Don’t think I’m entirely without sympathy for you, but the marriage was all over, wasn’t it, before I arrived on the scene, so I really don’t see why you—”

“I felt called to save you, absolutely
called
, although John—that’s my local clergyman—did say after the divorce that maybe it wasn’t for me to do that, he said maybe I should now put my trust in God to save you in his own way and in his own time—”

“Sorry, I’m not following you at all, can we keep God out of this?”

“But how can we? We’re all utterly dependent on God’s grace!”

I finally lost patience with her. “I’m not dependent on anyone!” I shouted. “I don’t believe in God, and even if I did, I wouldn’t need him! I’m a big success entirely due to my own efforts and I’ve got this life-plan which is panning out beautifully and the last thing I need is a Christian spouting nutterguff in a supermarket when I’m trying to do my shopping!”

“But you’re a lawyer—surely you’re interested in truth! Listen, Kim’s gone down the wrong road. I thought that by staying with him I could save him, but—”

“Christ, you’re worse than any American televangelist—”

“Has he told you about Mrs. Mayfield?”

In the profound silence which followed it felt as if the supermarket had been drained of air.

“He’s mixed up with the occult,” said the woman. “It’s dragged him deep into the moral quicksands, so save yourself while you can, move out of his life as quickly as possible—”

“Fuck off,” I said, and turned my back on her. I had sucked in some air from somewhere but my heart felt as if it were revving up for a killer thump. My body was clammy with sweat.

“Ask him about Mrs. Mayfield!” she shouted after me. “Ask him about Mrs. Mayfield!”

I blundered away without looking back.

II

I was standing in front of the dairy products cases and staring at the cheeses. I felt as if an hour had passed but the time-lapse was probably no more than two minutes. I was dry-mouthed and feeling nauseous. Some of the cheeses were a suggestive shade of yellow.

Turning away with a shudder I found myself face to face with Alice Fletcher who had followed me silently to the dairy section and was now waiting for me to show signs of recovery.

“Are you okay?” she said, concerned as I registered her presence.

“No, I feel as if I’d had a lobotomy without an anaesthetic. Has that ghastly woman gone?”

“Yes, she walked out.”

“Thank God. I’m afraid she’s a total nutcase and I’m very sorry indeed that you had to witness such a scene.” I started to massage my neck, which was aching with tension. “She’s been stalking me at a distance for some time.”

“In that case maybe she’ll leave you alone now that she’s finally managed to speak to you.”

“How I wish I could believe that! She’s my husband’s ex-wife, as you must have realised from the dialogue, and . . . no, never mind, let’s forget her. Can we make a decision now about the meat?”

Alice, brimming over with tact, at once began to talk about the different cuts of lamb.

III

After we had completed the shopping I drove Alice home to her flat in one of the Georgian terrace houses north of Clerkenwell Green and then returned to Harvey Tower. Kim was working late and I did not expect him back until nine. Having put away the shopping I fixed myself a double vodka martini on the rocks and finally acknowledged the magnitude of the shock I had received.

At once I tried to master it by analysing it. I was shocked, I told myself, because Sophie had said hard-headed, well-balanced Kim was mixed up in a nutty activity; I was shocked because my husband had not confided in me about a woman whom Sophie had implied was important to him; but most of all, I knew, I was shocked because there was no way Sophie could be described as fat and frumpish with hair styled to resemble corrugated iron. As I wrestled with this truth I began to see why I was so appalled by it. The talk of Kim being mixed up with the occult was almost certainly the fantasy of a disturbed religious zealot, and Mrs. Mayfield was probably just a past mistress who would prove to be unimportant, but why should Kim have lied to me about Sophie’s appearance? I could only suppose that he had described his wife in such unappealing terms in order to reassure me, but I did not need that kind of reassurance—and I did not like him telling me lies.

Having analysed my shock I tried to work out what I should do when he arrived home. Did I or did I not immediately spew out all the vile details of the scene in the supermarket? I reminded myself that he was going to be tired after a long, arduous day; this would not be the best moment to inform him that I had been jousting with his ex-wife in Safeway’s. On the other hand (and as a lawyer I knew there was always another hand) what better moment could there be to extract the truth from him than the moment when he was too exhausted to do anything but confess?

Yet this cool insight, which proved that my brain was finally up and running again, failed to calm me. I began to pace around the living-room. I was too tense to eat but I finally managed to sit on the stool by my telescope and gaze out over the blazing lights below. Tuning in to the City in this way always steadied me, made me feel less isolated and more connected with the City’s pulse, that driving, thrusting life-force which for me represented the heart of reality. I gazed at the skyscrapers, those temples dedicated to wealth and power, for some time.

Long before Kim’s key turned in the lock I had got my act together and resolved not to talk of Sophie when he was exhausted. I did not want to alienate him; the necessary interrogation would have to wait.

I went into the hall.

“Welcome back!” I said brightly, moving into his arms, but no sooner had we kissed than I found myself blurting out: “Who’s Mrs. Mayfield?”

IV

All expression vanished from Kim’s face. Then he said with superb nonchalance: “She’s just someone I don’t see any more. Fix me a drink, would you, sweetheart? It’s been one hell of a day.” And moving past me into the living-room he stretched himself with a yawn before reaching for my unread copy of the
Evening Standard
. I was reminded of a big cat relaxing at last after a busy killing spree in the safari park.

My first reaction was admiration. This was a very cool, tough customer who had taken a blow below the belt almost without flinching. My second reaction was lust. Most women like their men to be cool and tough in a crisis, and I was no exception. My third reaction was relief. Mrs. Mayfield, just as I had suspected, was a past mistress whom Sophie had cited in an attempt to shock me—as if she thought I would have had no idea that Kim had been unfaithful to her before.

But my fourth reaction was dismay. Why wasn’t he asking me where I had heard Mrs. Mayfield’s name? Because he was still too shattered to do more than assume a façade of nonchalance was the answer, and it was not an answer I cared for at all. Then I realised there was an answer which was still more unsavoury: perhaps Kim was not shattered but instead operating with maximum skill, putting me on hold with a couple of casual sentences while he quickly designed a satisfactory explanation.

I fixed him a dark Scotch-and-soda, and as I handed it to him he finally asked the question he should have asked in the beginning. “Who told you about Mrs. Mayfield?” he said idly, but before I could reply he was sloughing off the mystery by adding: “I suppose it was either Steve or Mandy Simmons. Where did you bump into them again?”

He was referring to a couple whom we had encountered by chance at a drinks party a month ago. Steve Simmons was a lawyer who worked at Kim’s old firm, his wife Mandy had an advertising job in the West End, and they lived in Wapping, east of the City, in a flat which formed part of a converted warehouse overlooking the river. I had never seen this flat because although the Simmonses had been keen to invite us to dinner Kim had told me he had no wish to renew his acquaintance with them. He said that in the past he had become tired of fending off Mandy’s advances.

Having no desire to become friendly with a husband-snatcher I had accepted this decision willingly enough, but now it seemed the Simmonses were drifting back into our lives. I stared at Kim. “Mandy and Steve know Mrs. Mayfield?”

“That’s another reason why I didn’t want to see them again.”

Sinking down beside him on the couch I managed to say very mildly: “Do you think you could explain, please, who Mrs. Mayfield is?”

“Sure,” said Kim as if surprised that I should think he might want to withhold the information. “But first of all explain how you heard about her. If Mandy and Steve didn’t tell you, who did?”

“Take a deep breath,” I said, “and prepare to be appalled. It was Sophie.”

Kim moved so suddenly that I jumped. One moment he was sprawled on the cushions, the picture of ease, and the next moment he was sitting bolt upright on the sofa’s edge. “She called you again?”

“She’s called several times.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“But if I’d known she’d started phoning again—”

“She never achieved a conversation with me! I always hung up before she could get going!”

“But if she told you about Mrs. Mayfield—”

“That wasn’t over the phone. She confronted me this evening in the supermarket.”

He leaped to his feet. “But what did she—”

“Relax! She was obviously fruity-loops, rambling on about God—it was quite impossible for me to take her seriously!”

He downed the Scotch and moved to the sideboard to fix himself another. All he said was: “I want to know exactly what happened.”

I tried to summarise the scene as crisply as possible. “I was shopping with Alice Fletcher for the dinner-party. Eventually a woman approached me. She was British size fourteen, American size twelve, Euro size—but you get the picture. Her hair was styled in a smooth wave. She was wearing a royal-blue coat with a matching dress and looked very smart, very elegant and very stylish. Naturally I failed to recognise her from your description so when she introduced herself I was gobsmacked. I was even more gobsmacked when she said you were mixed up with the occult. She then urged me to ask you about Mrs. Mayfield but at that point I told her to fuck off and went to look at the cheeses . . . Darling, why on earth did you describe Sophie to me as a size-twenty frump with a corrugated-iron hairstyle?”

“Because it was the truth! She must have lost weight as the result of all the stress and then taken care to smarten herself up before confronting her rival!”

“Well yes, I suppose that
is
just possible, but—”

“How did she know who you were?”

“She admitted rehiring the PI and telling him to take pix. She also said nuttily that she was being called by God to make a new effort to save me, and then she started burbling about moral quicksands and the occult and—”

“Quite. Well, it’s plain to see what’s happened. Sophie’s overreacted, converting a quirky episode in my past—repeat,
past
—into a gothic melodrama which she thinks is still going on.”

“She must be totally unhinged!”

Kim shrugged, drank some more Scotch. I noticed that this time he was drinking it neat. “Christians are opposed to the occult,” he said flatly, “and nowadays they often confuse it with perfectly reputable New Age practices. Mrs. Mayfield used to get very annoyed with this irrationally hostile stance, so annoyed that she would always refer to Christians as ‘the enemy.’ She probably still refers to them in that way, but I wouldn’t know. I gave up seeing her soon after I met you.”

“So Mrs. Mayfield,” I said slowly, “is—”

“Mrs. Mayfield’s a New Age practitioner.”

After a moment I said: “What does she practise?”

“Psychic healing.”

There was another pause before I managed to say: “What on earth was a sane, rational man like you doing with an old bag who touted New Age nutterguff ?”

“Carter, do you still have no idea how pathetic you sound when you wheel out this dated logical positivism of yours? You sound just as absurd as any religious fanatic who’s unable to comprehend anything which falls outside a painfully narrow world-view! How can an intelligent person stand to remain so ignorant of reality?”

“Okay, I’m ignorant. So enlighten me. I still can’t understand how you could have got mixed up with this female—unless, of course, you were in the hell of a jam and driven to act out of character.”

He finished his neat Scotch and stood looking at his empty glass. “Well,” he said when he could play for time no more, “I was certainly in a jam, I concede that.”

Then he sank down beside me again on the couch and a very peculiar story began to unfold.