Sextet (51 page)

‘Jonathan, try to eat your dinner,’ Natasha Lawrence said. ‘Please try, darling. Angelica went to a lot of trouble…’

Her son speared a tiny fragment of turkey on his fork, put it in his mouth and chewed. Eventually, he swallowed; he bent his head over his plate.

‘Natasha, there’s no point in forcing him,’ Tomas Court said, in a quiet voice. ‘Angelica’s out. She’s not going to see whether he eats it or not.’

‘That’s not the point.’ His wife gave a small nervous gesture. ‘This is our first Thanksgiving here. I planned it all so carefully. I wanted…’

‘The sweet potatoes are certainly very good,’ Court interrupted, in a pacifying voice. ‘Are there any more?’

‘There’s heaps.’ His wife rose in an eager way. ‘They’re in the kitchen, keeping warm. I’ll get them…’

As soon as she left the room, the eyes of Court and his son intersected. Court laid his finger against his lips, picked up Jonathan’s plate and scooped most of its contents onto his own. By the time Natasha returned, both were eating, at a steady pace.

Court, who had no appetite whatsoever, forced himself to eat everything put in front of him. He tried to fix his mind on the scene with Natasha that had to take place after dinner, when his son was safely in bed. All the while, Natasha kept up a steady flow of conversation, to which he responded with a polite murmur whenever appropriate. Both of them, he thought, could sense Jonathan’s mute distress; both of them, helpless in the face of it, tried to conceal their knowledge. Court began to wish they were not alone, and that Natasha, accepting that his presence was unavoidable, had not cancelled the invitations to her other guests.

He looked around the dining-room from time to time with a sense of dazed incomprehension. No invitation to see the apartment had been extended by his wife on either of his visits since his return from Montana; he had, as yet, seen only a few of its many rooms. He had seen a whitish hall and a white on white drawing-room where he and Natasha had quarrelled, the previous night. Now he saw this appalling dining-room, where, as Natasha had informed him, the decorator recommended by Jules McKechnie had been given his head.

The dining-room walls, at this man’s behest, had been lacquered a deep and not unsubtle red. The furniture, old, heavy, and acquired from God knew where, was black. Court faced his wife across a blackened expanse of oak; his view of his son was half obscured by the ranks of ecclesiastic candlesticks. At intervals around the room were modish arrangements of plants: a white orchid reared up at him from a side-table; one of Natasha’s mother’s orchid paintings cried out at him, open-throated, from above the chimney-piece; in the grate burned a recalcitrant, smokey, obstinate fire, which gave, and needed to give, no heat.

The temperature in the apartment was in the high seventies, he would have guessed. The air, dry and scented by candles, smelled of pine needles; it had an acrid quality that caught at his throat. He was breathing with caution and with irritation, and trying to disguise this.

He found the apartment uneasy, a little schizoid and desperate. He pitied Natasha for the desperation he could read here, and he pitied his son, who had to make a home in this vast mausoleum of a place. He thought of the small, ugly frame-house where he himself had grown up, a place he had not loved at the time, and from which a drive-in movie theatre two miles away had provided, in his youth, the only means of escape. Poor and cramped his childhood home might have been, but it seemed to him a thousand times preferable to this. He half listened to Natasha, as she coaxed replies from their son, and the air began to whisper to him, and he allowed his mind to start travelling, to drift back.

That drive-in, that drive-in, with its lousy sound system, old scratched prints, and an audience who rarely bothered to watch the movie because they were too busy making out. That drive-in, with its output of old B-features and violent cartoons; with its terse private eyes and taciturn cowboys; with its vampires, zombies and supermen. That drive-in, where all the slurry of the movie industry was dredged up night after night. A sudden longing rose up in his heart for those gangsters and their molls, for those Apaches gathering on the horizon, for the trenchcoats, tough dialogue and slouch hats. He saw himself as a boy, not much older than his son was now, sitting there entranced, eyes fixed on the screen, lips moving to dialogue he knew by heart, watching the camera angles, watching the lighting, learning the grammar of this rough magic, the grammar of kisses, weapons, buddies and baddies; of cross-fades, close-ups, reverse shots, two shots and cuts.

Ah, the terrible beauty of film, he thought—and he had been so confident of mastering it once. It was only now, when he was practised in his art, when his health was poor and his life disrupted, that he was beginning to learn just how ravenous the appetite of this art was. It ate him alive—and what was the result? Approximations merely, he thought, as the ghosts of his past and future work moved in his mind; into this maw he poured all his energy, all his acquired skill—and it was never enough.

One of his sins—and he now thought of it as a sin, as well as a gift—was that these ghosts of his work were more real to him than anything else; they drained the blood from all his other concerns, including his concern for his son and his wife. Much of the time, as his wife had often accused him, he lived in that other parallel world; even now, the air teemed with its spirits; their hands plucked at his sleeve, begging him to give them expression and thus release. He could hear two men’s voices now, arguing some issue back and forth; he could hear a woman’s footsteps, pattering between them. It was in this spectral way that his movies always first came to him: the next movie but one, he thought. He looked up and returned to the red room. His wife had just risen to her feet.

‘It’s time for Jonathan to go to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ll just see him up. You go through to the living-room, Tomas. I won’t be long. Darling, kiss your father goodnight.’

Court hesitated, wondering whether he should suggest accompanying them. Sensing the suggestion would be refused, he rose and held out his arms to his son. Jonathan held back, his face tense and pale. He glanced towards his mother, then cannoned into his father’s arms, clinging to him as he was hoisted aloft.

‘Will you be here in the morning, Daddy? Will you be here when I wake up?’

‘Darling, no.’ Court concealed his reaction. ‘I start work again tomorrow. I’ll be leaving for work long before you wake up. We’ll all be off to England soon, remember. Now—off to bed.’ He embraced his son tightly, then passed him across to his mother, and listened to their footsteps retreat. He returned to the white living-room, where another stubborn fire smouldered; he kicked at its greying embers and it flared briefly into life.

He picked up the briefcase he had brought with him, with its faxes and photographs, with the documentation that had been pouring in now for a day and a half, and which had to be shown, and explained, to Natasha that night. Where should they sit when he embarked on this explanation? This question, a trivial one, refused to be dislodged. He looked at the room as if it were a set; he adjusted the lighting; he moved an irritating feminine cushion; he rehearsed evasive sentences, and calming ones—after all, the important thing was that the mystery attached to Joseph King was now solved; it was out of his hands and in those of the proper authorities. An arrest must now be imminent. What he must stress, he told himself, was that the stalking was now over; he must emphasize that he and Natasha and Jonathan were now safe.

He did not feel safe, however, but he blamed that reaction on the long years of unease and the atmosphere in this apartment. He blamed too the devices of the movies with which his mind was saturated: at that drive-in in his mind, evil was always reluctant to die; up from the floor rose the dead body of the enemy; from out of the grave came the snatching hand; just as hero embraced heroine, the lights flickered and a door creaked.

A door
had
creaked. He turned and crossed to the hall, frowning. He looked along the pale corridor which led, as those plans of the Conrad had informed him, to that inner and elusive staircase, and those rooms on the upper level where he supposed his wife, and perhaps his son, now slept.

Those plans had disappeared with the rest of the detritus that had been littering the floor of his TriBeCa loft on the night he had entered it and someone unseen had attacked. His memory of that night was fragmentary; he supposed that Thalia had destroyed the architectural plans with the rest of the papers and tapes. It was of little moment, since he could remember their details with precision—and he could also see that these spaces here, and those plans, did not fit.

The apartment might appear unaltered and in its original state—indeed Natasha had claimed, with pride, that that was the case. Yet that could not be so, he realized, looking along the corridor, looking from the doorway on his right to that on his left. They did not
match
, and this perhaps accounted for his feeling, intense since he first entered this place the previous day, that his perceptions were skewed. It was not his perceptions that were to blame, he told himself, what was wrong here was the
space
.

On Hillyard White’s drawings, this corridor had run through the centre of the apartment like an artery; now he could see that the corridor, although arterial, was neither centred, nor straight. It angled around a corner that should not have been there; to his immediate right was a wall where there should have been a room—could that room have been bricked up?

He looked at the wall in question, and at the odd sweaty sheen achieved by some specialist paint effect; hung upon it was a picture by Natasha’s mother he had always greatly disliked, in which a man’s hand grasped the stem of some white and repugnant flower. The picture was askew; irritably, he moved to straighten it, then drew back, with a low exclamation and a sense of dread. A sound was coming from behind the wall, a dry, persistent scratching sound, as if something were clawing at the plaster, desperate to get through, desperate to get out. Court, who had grown up in a farming community, recognized the sound instantly as that of rats.

As a boy, he had shot rats for his uncle in one of his barns; he was paid a nickel a dozen, and the task was one he disliked. It was not easy to shoot the rats, for they were fast and agile; their death throes, prolonged, acrobatic and squirming, were vile yet fascinating to watch. It was difficult too, to collect up the bodies: he had a superstitious fear that one rat might be shamming, that it would rise up and bite him as he stooped. Also, he discovered, the live rats retrieved the dead bodies of their fellows, and did so in a bold, knowing way, even as he approached. He had never been able to decide, nor could his uncle inform him, why they did this: did they give their rat brothers honourable burials—or did they eat them? He stared at the wall, sweat breaking out on his brow, and all the fears of his childhood rising up; the scratching continued for some while; then, abruptly, it stopped.

‘Would you like me to read to you, Jonathan, or shall I tell you a story?’ Maria said, as Natasha’s footsteps retreated into the distance. A door closed. Maria, plump, bespectacled and familiar, switched on the night-light. Jonathan found her comforting—not as comforting as his parents or Angelica, but comforting nonetheless.

Maria’s speciality was fairy stories, of which she had a vast repertoire. In the past, she had told him the story of Hansel and Gretel, and the Babes in the Wood; of Red Riding Hood, of Rapunzel, Cinderella, and a Sleeping Beauty cursed in her cradle by a wicked godmother who was also, Maria said, a witch.

Maria’s witch performances were convincing, and Jonathan had enjoyed them at the Carlyle, in company with Angelica. He felt less sure he would enjoy them here. He was discovering that the Conrad was never quiet; there was always some alarming sound, some creaking or inexplicable slithering, just as he was about to fall asleep.

‘We could look at my new animal book,’ he said, a little uncertainly. ‘Daddy gave it to me for Thanksgiving.’ He paused. ‘Daddy’s downstairs now, with Mommy. He may come here to live with us, I think.’

‘Well now, wouldn’t that be cosy,’ Maria said.

She plumped up his pillows, smoothed back his hair, picked up the book and made herself comfortable on the duvet next to him. ‘My oh my,’ she said, flicking the pages with great rapidity, ‘will you look at that.’

Jonathan looked at her curiously. Maria did not seem very interested in the pictures, although she had removed her glasses—the better to see them, she said. Jonathan had never seen her without thick and unflattering lenses and now he did, he found her eyes odd. They were set too close together and they had a yellowish glint. He thought Maria’s eyes had always been brown—dark brown; he said this.

‘Brown, blue, green…’ Maria shut the book. ‘Contact lenses. All the colours of the rainbow. You can buy eyes in a store, these days. Any colour you like. Didn’t you know that?’

‘I guess so…’

‘Fat, thin, dark, fair, pale, tanned…’ Maria laughed. ‘These days it’s easy. A woman can be anyone she wants. Magic, Mr Sharp Eyes.’ She gave Jonathan’s arm a sharp pinch.

Jonathan did not like the way she said that, and the pinch hurt. He gave her a doubtful look. It would not have surprised him if Maria were capable of magic; he thought of her turning up at the Carlyle to give his mother her pre-theatre massage, with all her little bottles of special oils. These oils were magic, she had told him once, and when he had told his mother, she had smiled. ‘Well, magic in a way, maybe,’ she had said. ‘They smell nice, and they make me relax.’

He sniffed. Maria smelled faintly of her own oils now, he thought, and he could recognize some of them, all the herby scents, lavender and rosemary; beneath them, though, and not quite masked by them, was another, less pleasant odour, that might have been blood or sweat. Maria smelt nervy, twitchy; he laid his hand on her dark sleeve.

‘Are your special oils magic, Maria? Do you make them up yourself?’