Sextet (4 page)

‘
Pace
?’ Markov gave a snort of derision. He looked at his watch and rose to his feet. ‘
Pace
? Lindy, we are talking sluggish here. We are talking snail; we are talking
limpet
. We are talking chronic inertia and galloping indecision. We are talking one millimetre every other century…’

‘Give it a
rest
, Markov.’

‘And why? Because of a man. Because of
that
man. Lindy, you have to cure yourself of that man, and do it fast. As far as that man is concerned, you, Lindy, are
invisible
. You are less than a speck on the very distant horizon. When are you going to accept that?’

‘I have accepted it. I’ve
nearly
accepted it.’

‘Lindy, I’m now going to be brutally honest.’ Markov drew himself up. ‘You, Lindy, are
not his type
. Now, God knows what his type
is
, but it isn’t you. I think he’s a fool, Jippy thinks he’s a fool, but there you are. Three years ago, I thought we could bring him around, make him see sense. I put a lot of time and energy into that project, Lindy, if you remember…’

‘I do remember. Much good it did.’

‘Precisely.
Nada
. Zilch. So the time has come, Lindy, my love, to cut your losses. You have to hitch a ride, darling, to a different city on the highway of life…’

‘Markov,
please
. Give me a
break
.’

‘And you have to leave that son of a bitch behind in the parking lot. Am I right or am I right?’

‘You’re right, and he isn’t a son of a bitch; he’s good, he’s kind, he’s clever, he’s handsome, he’s nice.’

‘He’s
blind
.’ Markov became stern. ‘What you need, Lindy, is some McGuire antibiotic…’

‘I
know
that. I’m administering it. I’m in mid-cure right now…’

‘You are? And when does this cure cease?’

‘The end of the month. This month. I’ve set myself a deadline, Markov. Truly…’

This reply, forced out of her, was another mistake—as Lindsay almost immediately realized. A crafty little smile curled about Markov’s lips. Next to him, the silent and gentle Jippy gave a sigh. His eyes fell on the pink mirror-writing invitation card, abandoned on a table. Markov at once picked it up.

‘This party’, he said, with emphasis, ‘takes place on the last day of this month. All the more reason to go. You can celebrate your new-won freedom, for a start. You can meet new people, make new friends and kick-start your new improved McGuireless life.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

Lindsay took the proffered card and tucked it back in the pocket of Markov’s chartreuse-coloured jacket. Then, since she knew that beneath Markov’s affectations of speech and dress, his intentions were kindly, she patted the pocket and gave him an affectionate kiss on the cheek.

‘Really, Markov, I know you meant well, but I wouldn’t enjoy it. I wouldn’t know anyone there…’

‘That’s the entire point.’

‘You go, then you and Jippy can tell me all about it. It’s the day before you go off to Greece, isn’t it? You can tell me all about it when you get back. That gives you plenty of time to work out a good story—who was there, what I missed…’

Markov, who rarely hesitated, hesitated then. He shifted from his right foot to his left.

‘Jippy thinks you ought to go,’ he announced. ‘In fact, this was all Jippy’s idea. You suggested it, didn’t you, Jippy?’

It was Jippy’s main characteristic to speak only when it was unavoidable. As usual, he had that day entered Lindsay’s apartment without speaking, had tucked into lunch without speaking, and had sat at Markov’s side, a small benign shadow, without uttering once. Now, directly appealed to for confirmation, he rose to his feet. Jippy had a very bad stammer.

‘I d-d-did,’ he said.

This unexpected endorsement made Lindsay pause. At the first meeting with Jippy, two years before, she had assumed that his reluctance to speak was caused by the stammer; further acquaintance with Jippy had taught her that the reason for those silences lay deeper.

Jippy was a rare being: he spoke only when he had something of import to say; when he did so, his remarks, although sometimes difficult to interpret, were usually unequivocal, generally wise, and invariably brief. Lindsay looked at him with affection and with sudden doubt. Jippy was a small, squarely built man, with neat dark hair, gentle eyes and a childlike demeanour. Lindsay herself was not tall, but Jippy was shorter still, and could have been, she calculated, little over five feet. He was of indeterminate age; he might have been thirty-five, or much younger, but in certain lights he could look older, considerably older—as if he had been around for centuries, Markov said.

Unlike Markov, who was flamboyant, Jippy cultivated anonymity of dress. Today, as usual, he was wearing clean, pressed blue jeans, a navy-blue sweater which a schoolboy might have worn, and a white shirt. His old-fashioned lace-up shoes were smartly polished, and, in a way Lindsay found heart-breakingly sad, he always looked spruced up, as if for a job interview—his expression, shy and somewhat hopeful, dogged but melancholy, suggesting it was a job Jippy was never going to get. He would have passed in a crowd without anyone’s giving him a second glance—indeed, Lindsay suspected that he preferred and intended this—but on closer inspection, he conveyed a powerful and disconcerting benevolence. Quite how he did this, Lindsay could not have said, since the benevolence seemed to radiate from him, without visible source, unless it be his eyes, the gaze of which was steady, as if expecting the best in others, and yet sorrowful—or so Lindsay thought.

Jippy’s origins were in many ways obscure: Lindsay had never discovered his true name, where he lived or what he did before meeting Markov, or indeed how they had met. His ancestry, however, was for some reason elaborately exact. He was one half Belorussian, one quarter Armenian, one eighth British and one eighth Greek—on this issue, Jippy was emphatic, even pedantic. He was Markov’s photographic assistant as well as his lover, and according to Markov, he was a genius of the darkroom, indispensable to Markov’s latest experiments with silver and platinum prints. Lindsay knew virtually nothing else about him, except for one key piece of information, which, true, or untrue, Markov always stressed. He claimed that, from the Armenian grandmother, Jippy had inherited second sight.

He was a gifted astrological interpreter, Markov said; he could read palms and sense auras, and was, at unexpected moments, afforded views of the future. This clairvoyance, whether a blessing or a curse, Jippy was said to treat with fortitude and circumspection, never discussing the ability himself. ‘Pay attention to Jippy,’ Markov liked to say. ‘He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, and believe me, you don’t argue with that.’

Lindsay, who was more credulous and superstitious than she might have liked, was not disposed to argue in any case. From first meeting and first handshake, Jippy had impressed her. She liked his appearance, his reticence and his stammer; she liked
him
. Markov loved him, of course.

When, therefore, she learned that it was Jippy who had suggested procuring the invitation to this ludicrous party, and that it was not one of Markov’s devious, hare-brained schemes, she began to see that mirror-writing invitation in a new light. Was it possible, could it be that…did Jippy see something fateful here, to which she was blind? She looked closely at Jippy, whose steady, liquid, brown-eyed gaze held hers. Perhaps she had been hasty; what harm could it do to go, after all? Was it not tempting to believe that, at last, she might be finding new purpose and direction to her life?

At worst she risked being bored; escape would be easy; she would be free that night. Had she not, as Markov had just annoyingly reminded her, resolved to break out of the indecision and inertia that had comprised the last three years of her life? On the other hand, of course, Jippy was a social innocent; it was bound to be an appalling party, filled with people she neither knew, nor wished to know. Yes, it might have been intriguing to meet Tomas Court, whose movies she greatly admired, but a glimpse of the man, or one brief handshake, was the best she could expect, and that, she thought, she could well live without.

And then there was the location: the party was to be held in some Dockland’s loft, in a part of London she knew well, having once worked for a newspaper whose grim and fortified offices lay very close to this venue in Wapping. It was miles from where she lived, in Notting Hill Gate; she was sure to get lost in those eerie ill-lit riverside streets. It would be dark; it would be Hallowe’en; she would almost certainly have to park miles away and then venture past gloomy wharves, threatening alleyways, at the end of which, by mud and slippery, weedy steps, the Thames sucked and washed…She gave a small involuntary shiver. ‘I know you both mean well,’ she began, ‘but I
really
don’t want to go. It’s a Friday; I have to go to Oxford to see Tom that weekend. It’s just before the New York collections, so I’ll be getting ready for New York and I’ll have a mountain of work…’

Jippy made a gesture, a tiny, quick motion of the hand. He patted her arm and smiled, and began to lead Markov towards the door.

‘S-see how you feel,’ he said, ‘on the n-night.’

‘Oh, all right, I’ll think about it,’ Lindsay conceded, ‘if you both promise to go to it too. Markov, you might as well leave the invitation…’

Jippy smiled broadly. Markov smiled broadly.

‘In your left pocket, I think you’ll find, Lindy,’ Markov said, opening her front door, exiting fast and shutting it with a smart click.

Lindsay had forgotten Jippy’s other skills: his sleight of hand, his conjuring tricks, his ability to convey solid matter from that place of concealment to this. She put her hand disbelievingly into the pocket of her jacket. It closed over the pink, mirror-writing invitation to a party. She still had no intention of going, she told herself, and over the next two intervening weeks she constantly reminded herself of this.

The two weeks were active ones. During them, she discovered something unpleasant: she began to realize just how much she missed her son, and how much she missed the daily tussle of wills provided in the past by the presence of her difficult mother. She missed Gini and her husband Pascal; other friends, and one in particular, were also away from London during this period, and Lindsay, returning to her familiar apartment after work, realized with a sense of panic that these much-loved rooms could feel lonely, not only on Sundays, but on weekday evenings as well.

So, when it finally came to Hallowe’en, and the last day of her spiritual antibiotic course, Lindsay weakened. Invitations to Lulu’s parties, she had heard, were much in demand. Lulu was
famous
for her parties. Lindsay, a social cynic, placed little faith in such claims, or in parties. On the evening in question, however, she discovered she had decided to go after all; a mysterious process. In the shower, she was still undecided; wrapped in a towel five minutes later, her mind was made up.

She threw on a red partyish dress, hated it, pulled it off, kicked it across the room and donned a black one. She screwed into place the prettiest ear-rings she possessed, which had been given to her by Gini as a parting gift: two teardrops of pale jade which seemed to have been imbued with an animation of their own, so that they shimmered or trembled before she made the least gesture or the slightest turn of her head.

She ran up and down stairs in stockinged feet as darkness fell and her front doorbell kept ringing. She gave a bar of chocolate to a diminutive witch and her brother the hangman. She gave a tube of sweets to a werewolf, and some Turkish delight to a covey of skeletons from next door, escorted by a lugubrious father with an axe through his head. She was forestalled by a gorilla and a ghoul when finally leaving, and lacking sweets or small change, thrust a five pound note into the startled gorilla’s fur-paw. The gorilla and the ghoul she noted, fought a brief battle for possession of this prize in the middle of the street.

Then, over an hour and a half late, and thoroughly rattled, she set off in her small car eastwards. Lindsay was a bad driver, and her sense of direction was dysfunctional. This fact had often been remarked upon, amiably and laconically, by Rowland McGuire. Even in his absence, Lindsay was determined to prove him wrong. She failed; as she had predicted, she lost herself in the dark streets of Docklands almost at once.

‘…T
HE THAMES,’ LINDSAY SAID
, raising her voice and peering upwards at the white, bloodless face of a complete stranger, an exceedingly tall, vampiric and emaciated man, whose features she could only just see through candle smoke, cigarette smoke, and some peculiar foggy density to the air, apparent throughout this vast and crowded room, but especially dense in this area, to which she had been bobbed, tossed and cast like so much flotsam and jetsam.

‘What? What did you say?’

The pale man had backed against a pillar, towards which he too had been tossed some moments before. Jammed against his right elbow, was a shorter, fatter man with a ponytail, who was waving a glass in one hand, and a large prawn in the other. This man was haranguing a satellite group on the subject of Scorsese’s movies.

‘Mayhem,’ he yelled. ‘Steadicam.
Mean Streets
, my friends. Note the tracking shots, yes?’

Another piece of human driftwood hit Lindsay hard from behind. She stumbled, then righted herself. She had arrived late; most of the other party guests appeared to have arrived early and were already wrecked. She gazed helplessly around her. If this room was like an aircraft carrier—and it was; several planes could have been parked in this space—its decks were awash. Waves of random conversations kept breaking over her; people surged on all sides; she could not even see properly, since it seemed Lulu Sabatier eschewed electric light. This entire, huge, confusing loft space, with a bewilderment of metal stairways; jutting, galleried upper decks; dark archways which might lead somewhere or nowhere, was lit by candles. In the centre of the deck, or floor, was a lipstick-coloured couch, to which party-goers clung like a life-raft, and thrumming up through her feet, she could sense some mysterious energy, like the power of a whirring turbine, buried deep in the bowels of a ship. The throb and pulse of this power source had a propulsive effect. Lindsay felt it was propelling her through the dark and the smoke to some vital but as yet undisclosed destination. She felt she would surely arrive somewhere eventually, but meanwhile she felt unstable, not too sure of her balance, and faintly sea-sick.