‘That was before you became involved in this …
scheme
.’
‘Reuben’s scheme makes money, vast quantities of it. Do not tell me—’ a pause, during which Aurora imagined JB gesturing round the boat ‘—that holds no interest to you?’
‘You would never have been without money.’
‘I never wanted their money. I wanted my own.’
Arnaud swore in French. ‘How many this year, Jean-Baptiste? Tell me.’
‘Three. Selected by me.’
A bitter laugh. ‘“Selected.” You make it sound like picking apples in the market.’
‘In some ways, that is all it is.’
‘What it is
is wrong
.’
‘In my view, we are helping. We are doing a brave thing. It’s only wrong in your view.’
What was wrong? What were they talking about? Aurora cursed the wind that kept snatching the words before they reached her.
‘In any acceptable view,’ countered Arnaud. ‘How do you sleep at night? Knowing those mothers are out there, bribed and seduced and …
exploited
?’
‘And rich beyond their wildest dreams.’
‘But not as rich as you and van der Meyde.’
‘It’s relative.’
‘Does it all come back to money? You can pay for life, trade it like a commodity?’
‘You can pay for everything else. Why not that? It’s the most valuable thing in the world. There is no reason it should not command a handsome fee.’
‘You would think van der Meyde would be more careful after the situation he got himself in with that woman. Imagine! Meant to give the boy away, then, at the last moment, unable to.’
‘Margaret Jensen has nothing to do with this.’
‘No? I think she captures eloquently my point.’
‘Jensen is lucky to be alive,’ said JB. ‘Reuben could have done with her as he wished.’
‘Van der Meyde can do with anyone, any time,
as he wishes
. That’s the problem. Did anyone stop to think about the boy? Believing his real mother to be dead?’
‘Reuben had no alternative. Jensen was a liability, safer under his roof—’
‘With the consolation prize of being able to raise her
own flesh and blood? Madness. What was van der Meyde thinking fathering the child himself? I thought you employed men to—’
‘It was a lapse in judgement.’ JB’s voice was measured. ‘It happened once and hasn’t again. Today it is a meticulous process, you know that.’
‘I’m sure. And you are meticulous in your “selection”, are you?’
‘Always. Hollywood is rife with possibilities but not all are appropriate. It must be the correct match.’
Aurora’s heart was beating wildly. She felt very sick though she couldn’t decide why.
‘As much of a risk for them as for you?’ Arnaud demanded.
‘Let’s call it collateral.’
Arnaud spoke so quietly she was hardly sure of the words. ‘The babies who are not … born right. I know how van der Meyde has.
disposed
of them.’
‘You know nothing.’
‘You cannot play God, Jean-Baptiste.’
‘God and the Devil, are they so very different? Look at the girl, Arnaud.
Look at her
. And tell me she would have been better off staying with her real mother.’
A shiver travelled down Aurora’s spine.
Her real mother
.
‘We will never know.’
‘Wake up. She has everything a girl could want.’
‘You may imagine so,’ Arnaud said softly. ‘I see sadness in her.’
‘You see sadness in everyone. It says more of you than it does of us.’
‘Do you think she never wonders about her mother and father? The ones she never knew?’
Aurora backed away from the hatch, spots of colour bursting behind her eyes.
‘Why should she?’
A sharp intake of breath as Arnaud took in smoke. ‘That is precisely why you are able to do this.’ There was a note of reluctant admiration in his words. ‘You simply
do not care.’
Alarm bells rang loud and long in Aurora’s head.
Do you think she never wonders about her mother and father? The ones she never knew?
Tell me she would have been better off staying with her real mother
.
Questions shot through her, their edges blunted by fear. She turned and stumbled, knocking a glass decanter from its position on the dresser. It smashed on the floor.
Immediately the conversation above her stopped. Aurora’s heart was thrumming in her ears. She was trapped. She would be found.
God and the Devil …
The words resonated, taunting. She heard footsteps approaching, the sliding doors above her being peeled apart.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
Quick, too quick, Arnaud was in the doorway. His eyes darted from wall to wall, absorbing the evidence, clocking the open hatch and returning accusingly to her face.
‘I … I got lost,’ she managed. She felt ill. The motion of the sea was too much.
‘You got lost,’ Arnaud repeated. His eyes were coffee-brown, his large nose and winking gold chain lending him an air of classic authority, like an emperor in the ring.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise this was private, and I came in
and I started looking around, and then I accidentally …’ She gazed mournfully at the glass at her feet. ‘My parents will pay for it …’ The word ‘parents’ sounded vacant, absurd.
He considered her for a moment. ‘Get out,’ he said, not unkindly.
Gratefully, she headed for the open door. On the way past, he stopped her.
‘Anything you might have heard,’ he warned, his breath warm and smelling of cigarettes, ‘forget. It is for your own protection. Do we understand each other?’
She nodded.
Abruptly, Arnaud grabbed her arm. ‘Remember, you are on my boat.’ He squeezed her so hard it hurt. ‘And everything on this boat belongs to me. Every conversation, every word, every whisper.’ She tried to pull away but his hold was too firm. ‘I will not forget we had this talk. Will you?’
Eyes filled with tears, Aurora shook her head. ‘N-no,’ she stammered.
‘Good.’ She was on the cusp of crying out when he released her. ‘Now go, get upstairs.’
Aurora’s arm ached. It was red where he had gripped it. She locked herself in the bathroom a long time before she emerged.
34
Stevie
Xander’s friend, a London financier named Paul Priestly, loaned them the boat. It was modest, a Sigma 35, with a dark blue mainsail and sleek wooden hull. Paul kept it moored in the South of France for most of the year, except during the summer months when he and his family would head down towards Greece and Italy. They had arranged to coincide with the midway point of the Priestlys’ trip, when Paul would take to shore and travel back through mainland Europe.
‘This is bliss,’ Stevie said, arranging her towel across the bow and rubbing on sun cream. She decided there was no better scent in the world: it reminded her of caravan holidays with her brothers and sisters when she was young, getting burned under a Cornish sun and playing cards on a foldaway table. Warm wind filled the sails, inflating them like cheekfuls of air, sending the boat slicing through the water in purposeful strokes. On the horizon, the sharp contours
of the isle of Capri could just be made out, the broad back of her sister Ischia sleeping next door.
‘We could stay, you know.’ Xander was at the stern, hands on the ship’s wheel, richly tanned from a fortnight in the sun. ‘Hire another boat. Sail around the world.’
There was nothing she’d like more. But there were responsibilities waiting for them back in America. Lives, jobs … friends.
Stevie turned over, resting on her elbows. The hot sun pooled in the small of her back. ‘Ask me again in an hour,’ she called.
Xander grinned and gave a mock captain’s salute. He played it down but she was impressed by the way he handled the vessel, every so often jumping to operate the boom or the jib—’Let’s see what she can really do’—and then Stevie would help and at first get it wrong, laughing as she clambered about the deck getting port side and starboard confused, before gradually and determinedly getting the hang of it. He said he’d learned after school, which seemed to Stevie an unusual time to do it, but then she was remembering her own post-school days, characterised by hours alone in her bedroom circling job applications in red pen and drinking horrible whisky miniatures because it made her feel gritty.
Xander brought the boat to rest and dropped the anchor. They were in shallower depths, so it was possible to see the sunlight reflecting off the seabed, making the water green.
‘Swim?’ Xander climbed over the thin ropes cordoning the boat’s flanks. He raised his arms above his head and dived cleanly into the water. Moments later, he reappeared. Droplets twinkled off his mouth and nose and Stevie put her chin in her hands, watching her husband.
‘Fish,’ he informed her. ‘Silver ones.’
‘What are they?’
‘No idea.’
‘Maybe they’re sharks.’
‘Bit small for sharks.’ He dived again. Re-emerging, he asked, ‘You don’t get sharks in the Bay of Naples … do you?’
Stevie laughed. ‘I think you’ll be all right.’
Lying back, she shut her eyes. It had been a month since the wedding and she hoped things were moving forward in LA. Back in the Bahamas, Bibi had confided her plans to divorce Linus Posen—and as far as Stevie was concerned it wasn’t a moment too soon. Hearing about Linus’s increasing demands on Bibi’s body was dreadful, and now, at last, her friend was seeing sense: Linus had no intention of securing his wife above-board work in Hollywood, wanted her only for his sick perversions. She’d given Bibi a key to Xander’s place in case she needed somewhere to stay, and would be back in time to support her friend if Linus decided to make things ugly. Whatever happened, they weren’t backing down.
Stevie raised herself on one elbow and squinted behind her sunglasses. A massive white yacht was bobbing on the water several hundred metres away. It was giant, opulent, with an elevated sun deck. She could decipher two dark-haired women reclining on the bow, a taller blonde one standing. She wondered who they were. A French flag flapped in the breeze.
Xander came aboard, the drips from his body as he hauled himself on to the boat snapping her from her reverie. He knelt and grabbed her from behind, kissing her neck.
‘Get off! You’re sopping.’
‘Sopping … now that’s sexy.’
‘You’re wet, get off.’
He scooped her into his arms and for a moment she thought he was going to throw her in. ‘Don’t you dare!’ she warned. ‘If I go anywhere near that water, this marriage is annulled.’
‘That’s a bit soon, isn’t it?’
‘Seriously, put me down.’
He did as he was told then he kissed her, softly. His lips tasted briny. She felt his erection on her stomach and his tongue slip into her mouth.
Down in the cabin, they made love. The salt residue stung a bit, as it had when they’d had sex in the water late at night, she gripping on to the silver ladder that led from the boat while Xander entered her from behind. She thought about how phenomenal sex with her husband was, how she would never, not in a million years, get tired of sex with him. And then she thought about how she had stopped taking the Pill, and he had stopped using protection, and how they both knew that was what they were doing. And didn’t stop.
Across the Atlantic, Bibi Reiner applied the final touches to her outfit. One of Linus’s favourites: crotchless panties, leather bra with the nipples cut out, slovenly school uniform thrown over the top, cropped blonde wig. She stripped her face of the day’s make-up. Dabbed fragrance behind her ears and on her wrists—not too much; he didn’t like it if he could taste it.
She consulted the time. He would be home any minute, back from an important studio meeting with Dirk Michaels. Perhaps they were in talks about their new action blockbuster.
Or perhaps they were in talks about another hopeful starlet desperate enough to appear in one of their clandestine ventures.
Never again could she look Dirk Michaels in the eye. Last week Linus had rolled in blind drunk and ordered her to strip. He hadn’t been alone. Dirk was there, and another of their producer cronies, all puffing on cigars, drinking shorts of brandy as their eyes raked across her exposed body. She’d been forced to dance for them, then to get to her knees: first for Dirk, then for his friend, then to let them take her, one after the other, their sagging, aged bodies ramming into every orifice they could find. Meanwhile her husband surveyed all, waiting for his turn, licking his fleshy lips and loving what a swell party he could lay on for his friends. And then that final …
thing
he and Dirk had forced on her—
in
her. She gagged. It was something she could not come back from.
That was the night he had sealed his fate. Divorce was no longer an option.
Cutting Linus loose was too easy, too kind. Why should he be able to walk away when she could not? Was it fair that he could begin a new life when, after the shame she had known, she considered her own to be over? Divorce would be a bruise to his public ego but it wouldn’t change him, it wouldn’t make him understand the repercussions of what he’d put her through. The hours of torment, the degradation and despair … and now he saw fit to share her with others. Linus, Dirk and their friends had gone through life devouring women, never once stopping to recognise they were dealing with human beings, people with feelings who could bruise and tear and hurt. She hated them all with a passion she’d never imagined was in her to possess. The
way they cajoled each other into it, rallying each other on as if she were a toy they could play with and discard, whose sole purpose was to provide a forum for their bragging display, attempting to outstrip the others by making her cry out the loudest.
Linus had robbed her of all respect and dignity. Now, it was payback time.
It was a fantasy she’d cherished for so long, a pipedream that had comforted her in her darkest hours and was now suddenly, beautifully, achievable. Bibi was certain that as long as the director walked this earth, she would never live again. She would never again smile and really mean it, laugh with her friends till her cheeks ached, gaze at the ocean and feel lucky to be alive, right here, today. None of it, ever again.