Sextet (35 page)

‘H-h-hell,’ he said finally. Lindsay waited for the last ‘o’ of the greeting; it never came.

‘Sorry about that.’ After a pause, Markov came back on line. ‘I told you, Jippy’s upset. He’s picking up some
baad
vibrations here…’

‘Where?’ Lindsay asked, jolted by Jippy’s truncated greeting and giving a small shiver. ‘Where? In Knossos? In Crete, you mean?’

‘Kind of.’ There was a pause; some whispering. ‘Anyway, he sends love. He says, take care.’

‘Listen Markov, I send you both my love too, but I’m hanging up, I have to—’

‘No problems. We’ll see you soon anyway. Back for Thanksgiving in Gotham City, that’s the plan. I might go for a swim now. The wine-dark sea beckons…Give my
fondest
love to Rowland, darling. Oh, and here’s
un petit message
for him. Tell him, he who hesitated has lost. Tell him, serves him
right
, because if he’d listened to me
years
ago, he wouldn’t be up shit creek without a compass now. And tell him Jippy says—’

‘What? What?’

‘Jippy says, Frailty thy name is woman.’ Markov laughed. ‘Bye,
mia cara
,’ he added, and with his usual annoying timing, rang off.

Lindsay glared at the telephone. The trouble with gay men, she told herself, was that they did not understand women at all. They might like to think they did, but they were invariably wrong.

Minutes ticked. Mr Blind, Mr Unobtainable did not call. She would give him another five minutes, Lindsay decided, at 9.40, and then she would leave.

It had taken Colin and Thalia a long time to load all the bags and boxes of toxic waste into her station-wagon. Thalia announced that when she had disposed of them she would be going out to the clinic to see Tomas Court; she would call Colin at the Conrad later that day.

‘You know that ex-wife of his is trying to buy an apartment there?’ she said, standing arms akimbo, out of breath, next to the open door of her car.

Colin felt as if he were drowning, possibly in un-happiness, or confusion, or slime; he focused on her question with difficulty.

‘I know. It seemed better not to mention it—’

‘Wise,’ said Thalia. ‘With Tomas, the art is knowing when to speak and when to keep your mouth shut. He respects silence.’ She frowned. ‘Have you met Natasha?’

‘No.’

‘Well, when you do, you’ll see. She perfected the art of silence a long time ago.’

Her tone was pejorative. ‘Perfected?’ Colin said.

‘Sure. In her case, silence can be a weapon, you know.’ She made no further comment. Colin watched her car disappear. He stood in the deserted street, looking at darkened buildings; a steady rain had begun to fall. It was still early, not seven yet; the day seemed reluctant to begin, and the city was unusually silent. Distant, and filtered by buildings, he could just hear the growl of traffic, as if some somnolent leviathan sensed dawn and stirred.

He felt light-headed and disoriented from lack of sleep. He knew there was a cross-street less than two blocks away where he could pick up a cab, yet felt he had no idea which way to turn. He was tired, yet hyper-alert; he felt dirty and anxious to wash off all trace of King’s communications from his hands; he felt afraid, and had done ever since he heard that low, oddly mocking voice come through on the answering machine.

‘Testing, testing,
testing
.’ He glanced over his shoulder, swung around, suddenly sensing someone behind him, as close as a shadow. There was no-one there; the street was empty. From some domain beyond the stacks of trash cans, a cat yowled.

He had to walk, he discovered, when he had already covered two blocks. He had to walk, move his body, breathe air; he had no wish to wait for a cab, or to be in a cab, or to have to speak to anyone, even to give directions. He had to walk and force the night’s events out of his mind. He paused, looking back at the towers of the financial district to his south, where the light was beginning to crest the money citadels with gold. Then he set off north, swinging his arms, breathing in carbon monoxide as if it were the freshest mountain air. He skirted Little Italy, plunged on north through the charms of the West Village, and found himself in the Garment District, where the trucks were already drawn up, disgorging rails of clothes. It was winter and it was cold, yet he was pushing past diaphanous summer dresses. He brushed against something gauzy, thought of Lindsay whose professional territory this was, and felt a longing to be with her so fierce and so sudden it was like being punched in the heart.

This was where his footsteps had been leading him, he realized. Lindsay could heal him; she could rid him of this sensation—which he still had, long after leaving the chaos of Court’s loft—that he was treading on broken glass.

But he could not see Lindsay as he was now. He felt dirty, coated with grime, besmirched; he could not rid himself of the sensation that Joseph King’s words had got under his fingernails and were adhering to his hair. Two men, he felt, had stood in Tomas Court’s bedroom a few hours before, and two men had confronted that tape recorder. One, the Colin he recognized and thought he knew, had wanted to silence that voice; the other, some
dopplegänger
, some other Colin whom he loathed and feared, liked the voice and its story. It was familiar to him, as if he and not King had determined it; he knew every twist of its plot, longed to hear its climaxes and saw, with a dark and resonant pleasure, how it must inevitably end. Which man had failed to find the switch-off mechanism? Colin thought now, quickening his pace—and was he entirely sure which of these two selves was drawing him northwards to Lindsay now?

He crossed 42nd Street, that Manhattan divide, and pressed on, the rain falling more heavily now. He was on Fifth, and approaching a gilded area of the city, although he scarcely saw the lighted windows and was blind to their promise of luxury. He did not see the furs, the exquisite shoes, or the jewels; he did not see the temptations arrayed for Thanksgiving, or sense the allure of commerce’s pre-Christmas display. Blind to Saks, to Tiffany’s and to Bergdorf s, he fixed his eyes on the bare trees of Central Park up ahead, crossed by the Plaza, caught the smell of the poor blinkered horses who waited there to ferry tourists, even in winter, even in rain, and finally glimpsed, up ahead of him, the dark, squat bulk of the Conrad, the bellying of its rounded turrets and the expectancy of its many dormer eyes.

How many blocks had he walked? Fifty? Sixty? More? He had lost count long ago. He stumbled into Emily’s apartment, drenched to the skin. There Frobisher, who had known him all his life, fussed over him and exclaimed, but he brushed aside these ministrations; all he could think about was a bath, a shower, the cleansing effect of water and the urgency of seeing Lindsay. Pushing past Frobisher, he was waylaid by Emily, who seemed to be in a great state of excitement about something. She bombarded him with sentences; she was getting ready for the crucial board meeting; she couldn’t find her pearls; she had discovered she was
wearing
her pearls; she had already spoken to Biff and Henry Foxe on the telephone, and
something was going on
…

‘Going on? Going on?’ Colin did not know what his aunt was talking about; nor, at that moment, did he care.

‘What time is it? What time is it?’ he said over his shoulder, hurrying on down the corridor.

‘Wheels within wheels,’ he heard her call after him. ‘
Wheels
; and I can darned well hear them turning. Frobisher, Frobisher, which purse shall I take? The lizard, or the crocodile?’

Colin slammed his door on her agitations. He went to look at his watch, a twenty-first birthday present from his father, and found he was not wearing it. He began on a frantic search, on his chest of drawers, bedside table, on the floor. Then he remembered, felt in the pocket of his coat, felt in the pocket of his masterly suit and discovered it. He peered at its dial in disbelief. Past nine? How could it be past nine? What had happened to the hours?

He plunged across to the telephone and dialled the Pierre.

‘I have to see you,’ he said. ‘Lindsay—I have to see you this morning,
now
. Can you wait for me? I’ll—I have to—I’ll be with you within the hour

He thought she said yes, she would wait. He put down the phone, turned on the shower and started pulling off his clothes. Then he realized he was uncertain what she had said. Was it yes? Was it no? Had a time been mentioned? He dived back to the phone. He punched in the numbers. It rang through to Lindsay’s room, his watch told him, at precisely 9.45. Lindsay answered on the first ring.

‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,’ she said. ‘I told you. I’ll be here.’

She replaced the receiver at once. Colin felt a soaring of the spirits. He pulled off his clothes, kicked the masterly dirty suit into a corner, kicked the shirt and the silk foulard tie and the handmade shoes and the socks and the boxer shorts after it. He turned the water full on. He glimpsed his own nakedness in the mirrors and stepped into the hail of the shower.

Rowland McGuire’s call finally came through at 9.52. By then, those demons she fought so unsuccessfully had tormented Lindsay into a great state of nerves. Despite the fact that, of all the female characteristics with which she was richly endowed, a propensity to sit by a telephone and hope was the one she most loathed and despised, she had found herself trapped in that room at the Pierre. She was well acquainted with every inch of its carpet as she paced round and round. It was disconcerting, at exactly 9.45—the time she had convinced herself Rowland would call—to pick up the receiver and hear a man tell her he had to see her, when the voice telling her this was the wrong voice, and the man, much as she liked him, was the wrong man.

At 9.46, having hung up on Colin, she had got herself as far as the door. By 9.47 she was back again at the bed, staring at the telephone with joy in her heart. She had just realized that if Rowland’s call the night before came through at eleven New York time, it must have been placed in London at four in the morning. For a brief instant, this fact filled her with hope. She imagined Rowland, in the dead of night, afflicted with torments similar to her own. Then she saw the obvious explanation: Rowland, who did not suffer torments, had called at 4 a.m. because he happened to have returned home then—and her swift and deadly imagination had no difficulty in seeing just why he might have returned so late, and why he had been detained.

A brief sojourn in heaven; a swift and predictable descent to hell. Will I never be free of this bondage? Lindsay thought, feeling the familiar shackles lock into place. She turned back to the door, resolving on liberty; the telephone rang, and she found all desire for liberty had gone.

She let it ring three times, out of pride, and in an attempt to calm herself. Sweet, womanly,
dulcet
, she reminded herself. She snatched up the receiver, heard Rowland’s voice, and experienced, as she always did, the same fatal joy. It was short-lived. Within sentences, she saw that this conversation was stilted and unusually awkward; this panicked her; she sensed an alteration in Rowland’s manner, and this panicked her more.

He was not addressing her with his usual friendly warmth; if anything, his manner was cautious and guarded, even cold. He sounded as if he were feeling his way into this conversation with care, trusting neither himself nor her. He sounded, in short, like a stranger, and not like the man she had known for three years.

Where was that usual fraternal ease, that relaxed willingness to discuss what each of them had been doing and where each had been? It was gone, utterly gone—the rules of their dialogue had changed. What could have happened in the space of just a week to effect such a change? Lindsay’s mind froze over. She felt like an actor whose script had just been torn from his hand; she was left with scraps and tatters of memorized speeches and an urgent need to improvise her way back into the scene.

It might have been easier to do that, had Rowland been giving her clear and simple cues, but she found he was not doing that. She was stranded mid-stage, unable to hear the prompter, desperate to communicate with a fellow actor who sounded as stranded and uneasy as she. She stared at the wall. What was
wrong
? Had Rowland changed or had she?

Concentrate, concentrate, she said to herself. How did this halting dialogue begin? Rowland had presaged his remarks by explaining, somewhat irritably, that he had been trying to get through since 8.55. Sounding agitated—and Rowland never sounded agitated—he had added that he had a meeting shortly and so could not talk for long.

‘I’d hoped,’ he had said, ‘to reach you last night. It would have been almost exactly a week since I last spoke to you—and we wouldn’t have been worrying about time…’

Time! As soon as he used the word, Lindsay started gabbling inanities. She realized that Colin Lascelles would be arriving here soon. She could hear some inexorable clock ticking; she could see its pendulum swing. It was important, it was vital, to strike the right tone, to say the right thing.

Then—what had happened then? Rowland had cut her inanities short. Had he done so in an irritable way? No. He had interrupted in a dry, even patient way, so for a second Lindsay glimpsed the man she knew.

‘I received that burst of Morse,’ he said, hesitating. ‘At least, I think I did. Lindsay—’

Then he had stopped short. Whatever he had been about to say, he seemed to find it impossible to pronounce. He was as silent as Jippy, and Lindsay panicked again. Some idiot, she thought, some
dolt
has cut us off.

‘Rowland, are you there?’ she said, now very agitated.

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘Oh, thank goodness. I thought…’

‘Can you hear me all right? You sound odd, Lindsay. You sound different. I—’

‘Yes, yes. I can hear you perfectly…’

‘You’re sure?’

Why ever was he insisting on this point, Lindsay thought. It was wasting time; it was using up precious seconds.

‘Yes, I hear you as clear as a bell, as if you were in the same room and standing next to me. It’s just…’

‘What?’