Sextet (46 page)

‘I wish you well, Rowland. I wish you wisdom, my dear.’ She paused. ‘When will you be returning to England?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘I see.’ She released his hand. Somewhere in the building a door slammed. Emily shivered.

‘It’s darned cold tonight,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to take the stairs, Rowland, the elevator’s playing up again.’

‘I’ve already discovered that.’

‘I dislike those stairs myself.’ She huddled her shawl more tightly around her. ‘Well, well, you’re a good man, Rowland. I’m glad you came—’

Rowland hesitated. ‘Are you all right, Emily?’

‘Fine. I’m just fine. A little tired maybe.’ She picked up her tiny dog, and kissed his crinkled sagacious brow. Still Rowland hesitated, suddenly concerned for her; he looked about the shadowy room and felt unease furl its wings about him.

Emily waved him away, her diamond ring catching the light.

‘Goodbye, my dear,’ she called after him, as he stepped out into the hall. Rowland passed out onto the galleried landing, with its brandishing arms and inadequate light. He descended the stairs, looking neither to left or right, and left the building. Snow had been falling, he discovered, stepping out onto a thin crust of white. There was an unnatural hush about the city, and more snow would fall during the night.

‘W
HAT TIME IS IT
in England now, Colin?’

With a sigh, Lindsay disentangled herself from his arms; she extricated herself from the tumbled sheets and, sitting up naked and cross-legged, reached for the bedside telephone and began dialling.

‘Five hours ahead of us,’ Colin replied, yawning, stretching, then sitting up and kissing the back of her neck. ‘I’ve no idea what time it is here, though,’ he added, beginning to kiss each disc of her spine. ‘It could be yesterday, or next week.’

‘It’s six-fifteen. Six-fifteen! How can that be? What happened to the afternoon?’

‘Darling, what happened to the morning?’

‘They merged,’ Lindsay said, giving him a mischievous glance. She replaced the receiver, then redialled. ‘And now we have to reform. The others will be arriving soon. We have to shower and get dressed and go downstairs and be respectable. Gini’s always horribly punctual…Damn! Tom’s not answering…’

‘Tell me about Gini,’ Colin said, beginning to kiss the back of her ear. ‘Will I like her?’

‘Probably. She’s beautiful, so most men tend to like her—on sight.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘Bother. I can’t get Tom, and I wanted to speak to him. He flew back from Edinburgh this evening. I wanted to know he was safe. Now I’ll worry about his flight.’

‘No, you won’t.’ Colin put his arms around her waist. ‘Darling, he has this number. It’s past eleven in Oxford. If there were any problem, he or Katya would have called.’

‘That’s true.’ Lindsay’s face brightened. ‘I’ll try him in the morning, before we leave for the airport.’ Her face became thoughtful. ‘Colin, tomorrow we’ll be in England…’

‘I don’t care where we are,’ Colin said, ‘as long as I’m with you.’

‘You comfort me.’ In an impulsive way, she took his hand in hers. ‘You comfort me, Colin. I feel happy. I woke up this morning next to you—and I felt content. The day felt full of promise and prospects. I’d forgotten a day could feel like that.’

Dazzled by the expression in her eyes, and too joyful to speak, Colin drew her into his arms. Lindsay rested her head against his shoulder; he began to kiss her hair; her use of the word ‘comfort’, which had surprised him, stirred some memory. For a moment he could not place it, then it came to him. ‘Comfort me with apples,’ he murmured, beginning to stroke her breasts. ‘My beloved is mine…I forget the rest. Something about lilies…’ His body stirred, and Lindsay gave a sigh of pleasure; her mouth opened under his.

‘Darling, we mustn’t, we mustn’t—it’s so late…’

‘Let them wait.’

‘Colin—no. We shouldn’t. I—Oh God, that’s not fair. We can’t, not
again
. I can’t go down like this. I have to have a shower. I smell of sex. Darling, stop—they’ll know what we’ve been doing…’

‘They’ll know anyway.’ Colin smiled. ‘It shows in your eyes, and mine. I know that.’

‘In my
eyes
? It can’t do. Oh,
yes
…’

‘It does. It’s flagrant. I can see every possible declension of sex in your eyes. Past, present, future—passive and active form. Has fucked, will be fucked—it’s beautiful, and it’s the most erotic thing I’ve ever seen in my life…’

‘Well, perhaps if we’re very quick,’ Lindsay said.

‘Are you still anxious, Jippy?’ Markov asked, catching a glimpse of Jippy’s pale face over his shoulder, in his hallway mirror. They were preparing to leave for the Plaza, and Markov was in the process of selecting a hat.

‘Don’t be, darling.’ He turned. Jippy was wearing a neat suit that made him look like a minor accountant; Markov, moved by this, took his hands fondly in his. He hesitated. ‘It will all be all right—won’t it?’

Jippy did not reply. He could not explain, even to Markov, how it felt to see the aura of future events. For days, ever since they had returned from Crete, he had been afflicted by the buzzings and whisperings and seethings that signified unrest. That morning, he had woken from disturbed sleep to a sense of paralysing fear. He had watched some dark shape lumber across the room, and he had smelled evil. Evil had a precise smell, a distillation of iron, burning and salt. It was not a noxious odour, and Jippy suspected others might find it bracing, like sea air, but it left him feeling sick and lethargic, aching at his own impotence, knowing he could glimpse troubles, but that his powers were limited. The troubles, he could foresee, but could not prevent.

As yet, and as usual, the shape of those troubles were still vague; their proximity was now giving him an acute headache, for which he had already taken several doses of codeine, without effect. Standing next to Markov now, he was seeing fizzes and flashes of blinding light; he wished they would go away; he blinked.

Markov, having decided on a black fedora, turned to look at him again. When they were alone together, and only when they were alone, Markov abandoned his affectations of speech.

‘I love you, Jippy,’ he said.

‘I l-love you back,’ Jippy replied in a stout way; his stammer improved when they were alone also; Markov’s term for this shared phenomenon was the ‘Certainty Effect’.

‘Does your head still hurt, darling?’

Jippy nodded; Markov put his arms around him. ‘I’ll make the pain go away,’ he said, kissing Jippy’s neat dark hair, then stroking it. ‘There—is that better?’

Jippy nodded; the pain, indeed, diminished when Markov held him.

‘Well, I won’t do anything to make things worse, I promise you that.’ Markov looked at Jippy in a penitent way. ‘I won’t say a word out of place—for once. Not even to Rowland, if he turns up. Is he going to turn up, Jippy?’

Jippy did not know the answer to that question, and the minute Markov released him, the sharp stabbing pain had returned to his head.

Markov opened the front door of his small, smart East Side town house.

He grimaced at the sidewalk, and then at the sky.

‘Can you believe it? It’s snowing again,’ he said.

Further south, Rowland stood at the window of his cell at the Pierre, and looked out at the dark sky. He had showered, shaved, exchanged one dark suit for a different one, and was still irresolute. Stay or go? Risk or retreat? It was approaching seven, and he remained undecided. The scales were almost exactly balanced. On the one side was the loyalty he felt towards Colin, given added weight by the reason and dispassion of Emily’s arguments; on the other were his own hopes and desires—and instincts, of course.

A decisive man, Rowland hated indecision; he despised it in others and he despised it even more in himself. He took out Lindsay’s letter to him, hoping it might resolve the issue. When first read, in London, it had seemed capable of only one interpretation; now, interpretations swarmed. With a dull misery, he saw that it could mean the very opposite of what he had thought it meant. It could even be read, he realized for the first time, as a farewell letter, in which Lindsay looked at something for the last time, and then sadly but decisively turned her back.

To go or not to go. He stared out at the streets, at the groups of people making their way to Thanksgiving gatherings.
Why
had he not acted before? Why, when he was rarely tentative, had be been tentative in this? He lifted Lindsay’s letter to the light again, groping at the sense of her sentences. ‘Colin came here after you telephoned…Are those shutters I admire so much open or closed? The smudges everywhere are from the biro. You’ll find I’m a reformed character…’

He refolded the letter, some confused and incoherent plea rising up in his heart; he rested his forehead against the glass and watched the snow fall. He began to feel that time had stopped and that the hands of his watch were fixed; he lifted it to his ear and listened to the seconds tick.

‘Do we have to go?’ Pascal said to his wife, putting on a tie in honour of the Plaza—and he hated to wear ties. ‘It’s snowing. It’s thirty blocks from here. Couldn’t we just call Lindsay and say we can’t make it?’

‘I don’t know where she is.’ Gini was sitting at the dressing-table of the guest bedroom, in their friends’ apartment on the upper West Side. She was concentrating, pinning back her pale hair in a pleat. She had hoped to look beautiful tonight, and felt, in a dispassionate way, that she did. She examined the serene oval of her face and the lustre of her skin; no lines were visible; her father’s house was sold; she was free and beginning her new life. She picked up a string of pearls and held them against her dress. ‘We can’t let her down,’ she said, abandoning the necklace. ‘We needn’t stay long…’

‘We
can’t
stay long. We have to be back here for dinner. This is a crazy arrangement—what if Lucien wakes up?’

‘Darling, he won’t. And if he does, the others will look after him. He’ll be thoroughly spoiled. Don’t you want to meet Lindsay’s new man? I do. I’m intrigued.’

‘Women usually are by that kind of thing. It bores me to distraction. I wish them well—beyond that, I couldn’t care less.’

‘Well, I could. I’m interested. It’s all so sudden. And I’d begun to suspect she was interested in someone else.’ She paused, looking at her own reflection. ‘Someone very unsuitable—he wouldn’t have suited her
at all
. So I’m glad she’s seen sense.’

Pascal did not reply. He moved across to the window, drew back the curtains and looked out. This apartment, on the fourth floor of a brownstone on Riverside Drive, overlooked the Hudson. River and sky now blurred together; the air was thick with snow. Turning away, his manner edgy and irritable, he began to pace.

His wife watched him do so in the mirror. Carefully, she screwed two pearl ear-rings into place. She knew what was wrong with her husband, and it had very little to do with the meeting with Lindsay: Pascal was beginning to feel caged by domesticity. Once they began work on their book, this feeling would lessen, but it would not disappear altogether, and she was beginning to realize that.

‘You’re missing your wars, Pascal,’ she said, hearing her own voice strike exactly the wrong note.

‘My wars?’ He gave her a sharp look. ‘The wars aren’t of my making; I merely photograph them.’

‘You’re missing them, nonetheless. Pascal—’

‘I miss doing what I do best, possibly.’ His tone was cold. ‘Gini, we really should go. Surely you’re ready by now?’

Gini experienced a tiny moment of fear. She looked at her own face in the mirror; she felt she was stepping through the glass and watching history repeat. This was the pattern of his first broken marriage; his first wife, Helen, being informed by Gini that Pascal had decided to end his coverage of wars, had smiled a small tight smile.

‘Gini, dear,’ she said. ‘What a victory for you! I hate to say it, but I give it six months before he reverts.’

It was more than six months; it was nearly two years.

‘Pascal—you promised me…’ she said.

‘I know, I know, I know.’ He gave her a long, still, penetrating look. ‘You extracted that promise from me after Lucien’s birth. You always have good timing.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing, my darling. Just that, with marriage to you, I’ve realized how tenacious you are. You usually end up getting what you want, don’t you, Gini?’ He gave her a regretful, measuring look, then gave a shrug. Dropping a kiss on her brow, he moved to the door.

‘We really must leave. Who else did you say was going to be there?’

‘Just Lindsay and this Colin man. And Markov and Jippy.’

‘Thank God for that. I like Jippy.’

‘Do you still love me, Pascal?’ She rose.

‘Still? That sounds defeatist. Of course I do. You know that.’ He took her hand as she reached his side and looked at her closely. ‘And now you’ve finally made me into what you wanted, do you still love me? No regrets?’

‘Of course I do.’ She hesitated. ‘And everyone has regrets occasionally, Pascal. They mean nothing at all.’

‘Don’t they? Tell me, do your regrets take a specific shape?’

‘No. Certainly not.’

‘Good.’ Her husband’s cool grey eyes rested on her face. His wife did not intentionally deceive others, he thought, but he was learning how good she was at deceiving herself. ‘Then we have nothing to worry about. An ideal couple. Destined for each other from the first.’ He spoke in a light tone, feeling suddenly tired. ‘We must leave, Gini. Come on—we’ll be late.’

‘Good evening,’ Emily said, in crisp tones, to the tall man standing outside the elevator. Behind her, a maid closed the door to Henry Foxe’s elegant apartment, on the tenth and top-most floor of the Conrad building. The sounds of merriment from the cocktail party beyond were cut off. Emily eyed the man and felt a spurt of gossipy interest. This was her first proper sighting of Tomas Court, the ex-husband. He too had been present at the Foxe Thanksgiving party, but since he had not spoken once, and had lingered at its edges throughout, that sighting did not count.

‘Going down?’ he said.

Emily looked at the ceiling.