Sextet (18 page)

‘You mean you have to see me? So much for female intuition, Lindsay. I’m not impressed.’

‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You sound…dry. You’re smiling, Rowland, in that dry, infuriating way you do. You’re thinking—are you smiling like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see! I knew I was right. And I know what you’re thinking too. You’re thinking Lindsay talks nonsense; she’s a complete airhead.’

‘Wrong. A million miles out.’

‘You’re thinking about work.’

‘Wrong again.’

‘Damn, these fireworks must be putting me off. Colin; I think you’re thinking about Colin, about that very drunken lunch.’

‘Wrong yet again. You may be thinking about Colin; I’m not.’

‘There’s no need to sound so irritable, and I definitely know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking, why doesn’t this damn woman get off the phone? She’s a pest.’

‘Utterly wrong. I can give you my word—I’ve never thought that in my life, not once.’

Rowland spoke with great firmness. There was a silence, then, in answer, a sharp intake of breath; a strange moaning sound came down the line; this was followed by Lindsay, explaining she was moaning in despair. She still had so much packing to do; it was late; she had to be out at the airport at dawn. Rowland interrupted these excuses.

‘Where are you staying in New York?’ he said.

‘The Pierre. I’m staying at the Pierre.’

‘Maybe I should call you at the Pierre sometime. You could tell me what I was thinking. We could see if your intuition improves. Then—’

‘Then?’

‘Then you could call me—when you get back. You could call me when you get back from the airport, after you’ve closed the door, before you’ve removed your coat. Is that agreed?’

‘All right. Agreed.’

There was a silence; a long silence. Lindsay made a coughing sound, then cleared her throat.

‘Why?’ she croaked.

Rowland considered. He thought of a call made to Yorkshire, which he had missed. He thought of Colin’s remarks to him when describing that call. He hesitated. ‘I shall have missed you, Lindsay,’ he replied quietly, ‘and it’s always good to hear your voice.’

Had she said goodbye? Lindsay, replacing the receiver, was not at all sure. Possibly; she could not recall, because the room was suddenly bright and the whole conversation was whirling about in her head. Its words would not lie still, nor assemble themselves in the correct order. The room was fizzing with words, and the undersides of words, and the spaces between words. The words were protean—they might have meant
that
, and they might have meant
this
.

She began to roam about the room making odd, inarticulate sounds. She clasped and unclasped her hands and stared unseeingly at the chaos around her. Dresses and blouses, trousers, skirts and snaking tights; sentences that led in one direction and then doubled back. She prayed hard and silently not to hope, because hoping was the most painful emotion of all and the one she was most determined to cure. She pinched herself and read herself more of the usual silent lectures, because she knew she had been here before, in this stupid demented state, and she had learned, again and again, just how deluded it was.

Affection was not love, and she had to learn to distinguish the two in Rowland’s voice. It was pathetic, pathetic, that a man’s voice could produce this effect. Had she been twenty, there might have been some excuse, but she was not twenty, and something was badly wrong with her. Somewhere and somehow the past decades had never happened and she had failed to grow up.

No—she could not accept that. If to outgrow love was to grow up, then she would have none of it; she would be content to remain foolish and immature until the date of her death. So no, she would not denounce or renounce the need or the desire, but she would cure herself of imagining a response where it did not exist. She must stop her own emotions spilling over, so that the words she could not say overflowed into his, and her imagination rewrote Rowland’s scripts. On the other hand—and here she felt again an irrepressible delight—Rowland had liked her red dress; he had said, with great firmness, that he liked, no, that it was
good
to hear her voice. He did intend to call her in America; he wanted her to call him, the instant, the very instant, she got back. And this request, Lindsay found, had a soaring resonance; its wings beat about her heart and her head. Such a glorious night, this, she thought, dancing across to the window and gazing out. There was a moon, a full, high, powerful, pregnant moon, and instead of stars, which the lights of London blocked out, there was the lovely artifice of rocket star-trails, showering gold on wintry gardens, and exploding over the shine of slate roofs.

She had been talking to Gini in Washington, earlier, when Rowland had been trying to reach her. Now, watching these streaking stars and listening to these thunderclaps, it was clear to her that she must, at once, call her friend back.

No sooner thought than done. She dialled Gini’s number and spoke with a sparkling precision; she rearranged all the plans they had made less than an hour earlier, and, having done so, hung up and began to repack. Such a transformation: now, she found, the clothes folded themselves into suitcases and lay obligingly flat, shoes tucked themselves cunningly in corners; instead of bulging and protesting and refusing to shut, as the cases usually did, they closed with ease—one touch of the fingers and the locks snapped shut. One last case remained. Inside it, Lindsay prepared a nest of tissue-paper; she danced across to the closet, and on this nest, interleaved with more tissue, she folded her newly beloved red dress.

In Washington, meanwhile, in her dead father’s house, Gini had replaced the telephone receiver, and—looking at her husband and half-sleeping baby son—was shaking her head.

‘That was Lindsay again, and she sounded completely
mad
,’ she said.

‘Lindsay? But you’d only just spoken to her.’

‘I know, and she sounded fine then. Now, I couldn’t make out half of what she was saying. It’s Bonfire Night in England; I could hear fireworks in the background. She was scrambling up all her sentences and she was out of breath; she sounded as if she’d just run a marathon…no, panic-stricken. She sounded panic-stricken, as if she’d just been attacked.’

Her husband smiled. He moved across to the windows and looked out at the quiet, charming, brick-paved Georgetown street. He adjusted Lucien’s weight in his arms so he was more secure and kissed his brow.

‘Oh, you know Lindsay,’ he said carelessly, ‘she often sounds as if she’s run halfway up the Empire State building. Lucien’s sleepy—I’m going to take him out in a minute. What did she want anyway?’

‘She wanted to cancel her Thanksgiving visit here, I think. Half an hour earlier, we had everything planned. Now she says she may have to rush straight back to London…’

‘How odd. Did she say why?’

‘No, not really. Some garbled excuse.’ She gave a small frown and glanced at Pascal. ‘I think there’s some man at the back of it. She’s been quite strange for months…’

‘Well, I hope there is,’ Pascal replied. ‘I like Lindsay; she deserves to be happy…’

‘A man doesn’t necessarily provide happiness, you know,’ Gini said, a little sharply, turning away. ‘Lindsay’s lived alone for years. She’s perfectly happy as she is.’

There was a small silence. Pascal looked at his wife thoughtfully; she had moved away to the dining-table which she had been using as a desk. It was piled with folders and files, most of them containing the paperwork attendant on her father’s death. This room, like most of the house, was in the process of being dismantled prior to its sale. There were faded patches of wall-paper where pictures had once hung and one wall was lined with packing-cases. He had never liked Gini’s father and he had found these necessary weeks in his former home difficult. This, he knew, was even more true for Gini, and he was prepared to make allowances because of that.

‘She might not wish to continue living alone,’ he said, in a mild way. ‘She might even wish to marry again, and marriage can bring happiness, don’t you think?’

His wife coloured. ‘Of course. I didn’t mean that. It’s just—Lindsay has no judgement whatsoever where men are concerned…’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Who is this unsuitable man she’s interested in?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Someone she works with, I think. Pascal, I don’t have
time
for this. I have to check through this stupid Natasha Lawrence article I’ve written and fax it off to her and I just
know
she’s going to start raising objections. I wish I’d never said I’d do it. I hate showbiz profiles; this is the last one I’ll ever do…’

Her husband, watching her change the subject in this way, thought he knew the reason. He hesitated, wondering if he could bring himself to mention Rowland McGuire’s name, with all its attendant risks. He decided not to do so, although he now felt certain that McGuire was the unnamed man concerned, for he had heard jealousy in his wife’s voice—or possessiveness, perhaps.

Could you be possessive about a man you no longer cared for? A man you had not seen in three years? He doubted it; but then his wife did not relinquish her hold on others easily, even after they had ceased to be part of her life. But there were reasons for that—her relationship with her father above all. It had not been easy for her, he thought, as she bent her fair head over her papers, to come here to her father’s house and discover the degree to which he had eradicated her from his life. So far, they had not found the least hint of her existence—not one photograph, none of the letters she had written him, none of the newspaper articles she had written and religiously sent to him. The thanklessness and cruelty of this angered Pascal; with the death of her father, he had believed that Gini might at last break free of his influence. A sojourn here in this house had shown him that death made no difference; for many more years, he feared, his wife would be haunted by her father’s indifference and neglect.

Moving across to her now, he drew her against him and kissed her pale hair.

‘Send the article off, darling,’ he said, ‘then come out with Lucien and me. It would do you good to walk, to get some fresh air. You’ve been working so hard: clearing up this place, writing a thousand letters to lawyers and banks. Come out with us—the sun’s shining; it’s a beautiful day…’

‘No, I won’t—I’d like to, Pascal, you know I would, but I need to check this through before I send it. There are some letters I have to write. If Lindsay
isn’t
coming for Thanksgiving, I suppose we could leave here a little sooner…’

‘We could.’ He hesitated. ‘And that might be a much better plan anyway, darling. It was never going to be easy, having her here—the place is in chaos. I know you were very set on it, but we can’t delay for ever. You’ll feel better once you’re out of this house. We could go to friends for Thanksgiving, then we could start work on our book…’

‘I suppose so.’ She moved away from him. ‘You go, Pascal; I’ll come with you tomorrow. But I must get on with this.’

‘Do you want me to read your piece before I go?’

‘No, I hate it. It’s adequate at best. I got nothing out of her. You know the only interesting fact in here?’ She gestured at the printout of her article. ‘It took fifty-five takes to shoot that spider sequence in
Dead Heat
—and Natasha Lawrence is terrified of spiders, or so she said. I thought that was revealing. That sequence is one of the vilest things I’ve ever seen on film. Why would that ex-husband of hers put her through that fifty-five times? He’s a sadist, I think.’

‘I doubt that.’ Pascal smiled. ‘That sequence is very complex from a technical point of view, Gini. There’s those mirrors; there’s that three hundred and sixty degree pan. I’ve seen it three times; I work with cameras and I still don’t know how he did it…’ He paused. ‘You’re sure you won’t come with us? No? Then we’ll see you in about an hour…’

He went out. With a sigh, Gini sat down at the table; she moved papers and files in a desultory way, back and forth. She glanced over her shoulder, because when the house was quiet, she could never rid herself of the sensation that at any moment the door would open and her father would come in and ask her what right she had to be here, in his house.

She had no right—she felt that. In front of her now were all the files and papers which confirmed her daughterly role: the letters from lawyers and real-estate agents; the letters from the IRS, from brokers, from banks. To these correspondents, she possessed the authority of daughter, executor and sole heir, as certified by a brief cold will made some twelve years before and never revised: ‘I hereby give and bequeath to my only child, Genevieve Hunter.’ Only her father, she thought, could contrive to leave her everything, yet make her feel disinherited. And she saw him again, as he had been in the last week of his illness, when he realized he was dying, and that the years of alcoholism had finally caught up with him. It had been the day before they put him on a morphine pump and he lapsed into unconsciousness. She had been sitting there, holding his hand, until she had realized that, for some while, he had been struggling to free himself.

‘Just for Christ’s sake let
go
of me,’ he had said. ‘And for the love of God, go somewhere
else
.’

She knew, with a dull and painful certainty, that those words, spoken with a bitter amusement very characteristic of him, would remain with her for the rest of her life.

Pascal was right, she thought; she had to escape from this house—and the sooner she did it, the better.

She picked up the
New York Times
interview she had written, together with its covering letter, and fed it into her fax machine; she had asked Natasha Lawrence to reply by the end of the following day and to restrict any queries she might have to facts, but she felt no great optimism that the actress would listen to either request.

She glanced towards the windows and the quiet, empty street beyond, hesitated, and then drew towards her the file of condolence letters. Only half of these had been answered, although she had set aside an hour each morning for the task. Here were all the gentle fictions from her father’s past friends, erstwhile editors and colleagues. They wrote kindly and with ingenuity, avoiding the issue of his drunken, wilderness years; she answered with similar evasions and reticence.