Her mother was a sixties flower-child who had never really moved on, never fully got her life together. She was much closer to her sister, Lara, although she found her husband, a workaholic investment banker, tedious. And she adored their three young children, her nephew and nieces.
Maxine squatted cosily on the floor, leaning against a sofa, calmly looking up at her, waiting for her to continue.
‘
Brian!
’ Amanda said. ‘You know, I don’t even like the name! I can’t believe I ever even went out with someone called
Brian
!’
Maxine smiled. Her voice had a transatlantic tinge from ten years in San Francisco. ‘This is interesting, Amanda. Can you remember when you first started to dislike his name?’
‘I don’t like anything about him!’
‘I’m not buying into that. I don’t think you’re ready to dislike everything about him yet. I’m still not sure you’re ready to let go. I think you’ve got to the top of one hill, which is great, but there’s a higher one in front of you.’
‘I’m there!’ Amanda said, determinedly. ‘I really am.’
‘Why do you think that?’
Amanda stared at the lines of grey daylight she could see through the slats of the Venetian blinds. Down in the street below, a trendy terrace a few blocks from Portobello Road, some driver of a car or a van or a truck was thunking his horn; it was an ugly sound, jarring.
‘Because . . .’ Amanda said. She waited for another blast of the horn to stop, wriggled in her chair, crossed her legs, then uncrossed them again. It was a grey, muggy day. Even
in a T-shirt and lightweight jeans she was too warm in this normally cool, airy room. The horn stopped but immediately it started again. An alarm, she realised. Then, mercifully, it ceased. ‘I have a date!’
Perspiration was running down her.
Christ I hope I’m not going down with some lurgy! And, if I am, I hope to hell it’s better by tomorrow
!
Maxine looked pleased, not thrilled but pleased. ‘You have?’
‘I haven’t accepted an offer of a date since . . .’
Maxine gave her the space to think.
Finally Amanda smiled. ‘I guess for seven years.’
‘Since you first slept with Brian?’
‘Yes.’ Amanda blushed and grinned like a schoolkid. She always felt like a kid in here.
‘OK, Amanda, all this is good. What is not so good is the way you are handling Brian right now. What I want to see from you is
rejection
. What I’m actually seeing is
denial
. You hadn’t been taking his calls, you hadn’t been responding to his e-mails, you have been
denying
his existence, OK? You had dinner with him, but did you really tell him the truth?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Did you say, “
Listen
, Brian, you’ve let me down. When we got into this whole thing together it was because you had told me your marriage was over. A month after we had started sleeping together, you dropped the bombshell that your wife was pregnant with your second child. OK, she was four months pregnant and she’d kept it from you because she’d had so many miscarriages she was nervous to talk about it, but that was some bombshell!”’ She watched Amanda’s face. ‘Sure, you had to wait. He couldn’t leave his wife while she was pregnant, he had to wait until she was back home, the baby was fine, she was settled.’ Maxine shrugged. ‘Then his wife had post-natal depression, so again he couldn’t leave her. For seven years you had one excuse after the other. He was always going to leave her and he never did. And then, two months ago, after telling you he hasn’t made love to her for six years, he breaks the news that she is pregnant again. And suddenly he’s run out of
road, and you wake up and you realise where you have been for seven years. Did you just
think
that during your dinner or did you actually
tell
him?’
‘I – I told him.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Were you angry with him or calm?’
‘I was calm. I tried to help him understand how I felt.’
‘Because you still love him.’ Maxine said, bluntly.
‘I don’t.’ Amanda was emphatic. ‘No. Not any more. I – I sat there across the table and I felt nothing.’
‘You didn’t feel
nothing
, Amanda. You must have felt
something
. Tell me what you felt.’
Amanda was silent. Then she said, ‘I thought how
middle-aged
he looked. I felt sorry for him. I was pitying him. And I thought of some of the things I used to do to his body and I felt really, really – yuk!’
The therapist’s face was impassive. ‘This date you have accepted, is this man different?’
‘Very.’
‘Married?’
‘No, his wife is dead.’
‘And are you excited about seeing him or are you just using this date as some kind of a test to see what it would feel like to be out with another man? You need to be honest with this answer, Amanda.’
‘A test, I guess, in part. He’s taking me to the Globe Theatre tomorrow, and I haven’t been there. And it’s a play I want to see.’
‘People go on dates because they want to be with each other, Amanda. This doesn’t sound like a
date
, it sounds like an
evening out
. You haven’t mentioned one thing about this man you are going with. Don’t you think that’s a little strange?’
‘He’s a very interesting guy.’
‘Does he turn you on? Do you want to sleep with him? Do you want to have his children?’
Amanda grinned and reddened again. ‘Hey, slow down! I –’
‘You what?’
‘I haven’t thought about those things.’
‘You did with Brian. You told me you went to bed with him on your first date.’
‘Yes. I couldn’t keep my hands off him. I just fancied him to death the moment I saw him.’
‘And this new man? You don’t fancy him to death?’
Amanda shook her head. ‘No, I just like him. I hardly know him. Anyhow, I have a hidden agenda with him. I need him to be in my programme. It’s not a romance thing.’
‘What did you say his name was? Michael? So poor Michael is just an unwitting volunteer in your experiment, he’s your control sample, right? To see what it feels like being out with another man?’
‘No! It’s not as simple as that!’
‘Explain what you mean.’
‘Where’s this going, Maxine?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I don’t know. I have no idea. Probably nowhere.’
‘Are you sure you’re not attracted to him?’
‘You’re putting me under pressure!’
‘Uh-huh!’ Maxine nodded vigorously and good-humouredly. ‘I want an answer. Are you sure you’re not attracted to him?’
‘I’ll tell you next week.’
At a quarter to six Justin Flowering left his desk at the
Mill Hill Messenger
, saying nothing to his news editor, hoping that he would be able to surprise him with a scandalous story about the actress Gloria Lamark in his overnight basket.
He popped a piece of gum in his mouth and headed in the direction in which the stranger on the phone had instructed him earlier. His route took him along a street filled with dilapidated light-industrial units, the largest of which was a repair depot for London taxis, and then straight through into the long, dark archway beneath the railway line.
Half-way along, as instructed, he waited, lolling against the wall, chewing his gum, thinking about his job. He was nineteen and on a one-year work experience with the paper. His dream was to become a sports writer, and maybe one day a commentator, like his hero Des Lynam. He was tall, wiry and athletic, and hoped he’d get through this interview with the mysterious caller, get back to the office, finish his article and still have time to catch the last half-hour or so of his club’s football practice tonight.
A car was approaching, followed by a van. He looked at the van, but it was red, and it drove on past. More vehicles followed, but no white van.
He thought again about the strange, very tall man, Gloria Lamark’s son, who had been so angry with him at the funeral this afternoon; the way the man had screamed at him when he’d tried to ask him a few questions about his mother, as if he should have had her entire biography printed in his brain.
Maybe he should have. He had tried his best to find out a bit about the actress before going to the funeral and had even checked out her website.
Another van was approaching now. This was white. He stiffened and moved to the kerb. The van indicated and pulled over. The driver was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. In the darkness of his cab, it was impossible to make out his face.
Justin climbed in and pulled the door shut. The driver held out his hand. ‘Hallo,’ he said, in a voice that sounded familiar.
As their hands met, Justin felt a slight prick, like an insect bite, in his palm. The driver held his hand, clamped tight. As Justin tried to free it, the driver’s face blurred.
The driver’s face was still a blur, but now Justin Flowering was watching him through a steamed-up window, the smell of pine in his nostrils.
Drenched in sweat, he was spreadeagled in a sauna cabin, with his back propped up, his legs splayed out in front of him and strapped firmly to the slats, his arms pulled out either side of him and also strapped to slats. The heat was agonising. He was still in his suit and he was desperately thirsty.
The driver was looking at him through the glass window in the door, through the cloud of searing steam, and Justin knew his face now. It was Gloria Lamark’s son, Thomas.
The man was playing some kind of ridiculous practical joke on him, keeping him here in the sauna, accompanied by a television set and a video-recorder placed on a chair in front of him, both wrapped in plastic to protect them from the steam, playing one of his mother’s old films for him. On the screen a biplane was being flown by a woman, while a man, an actor Justin did not recognise, was clinging desperately to a wing strut.
Justin was angry, but at the same time he was wary of the man. There was an air of darkness about him, as if he could kill someone without any trouble at all. He needed to
handle this carefully. Then the door opened and Justin was grateful for the blast of cool air that accompanied it.
Thomas Lamark came in and nodded at the television set. ‘
Wings of the Wild
, Justin F. Flowering. Her best film. Are you enjoying it?’
To appease the man, Justin nodded.
‘I really don’t like your tie, Justin F. Flowering. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you should wear a
black
tie to a funeral? A plain black tie?’
‘No, no one told me.’ Something Justin saw in the man’s eyes frightened him even more.
‘You don’t look comfortable, Justin F. Flowering. I thought you were a hard-boiled newspaperman, I thought you could take heat. So, now, tell me the names of the actor and the actress on the screen?’
‘Gloria Lamark,’ the young reporter said.
‘Very good. And now the man?’
The reporter stared at him blankly.
‘I did tell you,’ Thomas said. ‘I told you the names of all her films, and all the stars. You probably have your head filled with art-house junk, don’t you? You like Fellini? Jean-Luc Godard?
Robbe-Grillet
?’
‘I don’t go to the films much.’
‘You have to understand, Justin F. Flowering, that the plots of my mother’s films weren’t complex. That’s not to say they weren’t clever, but they were straightforward. No art-house crap. None of that boring
nouvelle vague
crap. But I tell you something, Justin, she made
great
movies. And that’s why her career was destroyed. By jealous people. I want you to remember this for your article, OK?’
Justin nodded.
‘They don’t make those kinds of films any more. They’ll never make them like that any more. They can’t because she is dead. And they killed her.
They
!’
In a sudden squall of rage, Thomas stepped forward, emptied the bucket of water over the coals, stepped back as the steam exploded, refilled the bucket, and emptied that over them, too. The heat was incredible. Justin screamed.
Thomas Lamark stepped out of the cabin and closed the door.
Justin lay there, twisting his head to the right, then to the left, trying to find some pocket of cool air in the searing, claustrophobic steam. It burned his lungs as he breathed it in. Burned his nostrils, his eyes, crackled his hair. It was so hot that his brain tricked him into thinking he’d been plunged into ice. Then it returned him again to the heat.
A short while later, the door opened. Thomas Lamark stood in the entrance, holding an unlit blowtorch in one hand and a rotary band-saw, attached to a flex, in the other.
‘Justin F. Flowering, we’re going to play a little game to help you remember my mother’s films. I’m going to tell you them all once again. When I’ve finished, you are going to repeat them back to me. Just the titles, OK?’
‘Yes.’ The reporter’s voice sounded unstable.
‘Good, this is going to be fun, Justin. Just one thing I want you to remember. Each time you make a mistake, I’m going to cut off one of your limbs. OK?’
The reporter stared back at him in bald terror.
Thomas recited the list, all twenty-five films. Then he said, ‘Your turn now, Justin.’
‘Could you repeat the list?’
‘I’ll repeat it if you make a mistake, but not until then, Justin. In your own time, just go ahead.’
‘
W-Wings of the Wild
.’ Justin Flowering said.
Thomas nodded, approvingly.
‘
The – The – The Argossy File
.’
Thomas smiled. ‘Close, Justin, but not quite right. It’s
The
Arbuthnot
File
! But you were close enough, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.’ He smiled back so warmly that now Justin knew he was only joking about cutting off his limbs.
He smiled back. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re very welcome,’ Thomas said. ‘Now, in your own time again.’
‘
Race of The Devils
.’
‘Yes. Only twenty-two to go now, Justin!’
‘
Storm Warning
.’
‘Twenty-one!’
‘Um – um – something
Monaco?
’
‘I can’t help you, Justin. You have to do this by yourself.’ He stared with hatred at the youth, stared at the fair hair matted on his head, the sweat guttering down his face.