He thought about this, as though doing the sums on the eleven-year gap between them. He said, ‘Hitting the bottle with a vengeance.’ He raised himself up on an elbow. ‘And what about your own talent in the bedroom? The King of Comedy can only do his best when he’s working with the classiest material.’
Without answering, she plucked at a long piece of grass and used it to trace the outline of his jaw and mouth. His lips twitched and he took the grass from her hand and did the same to her. It tickled and she started to laugh. ‘No,’ he said, when she pushed him away, ‘what’s sauce for the goose is good for the gander.’ But she ignored him, rolled on to his chest, and snatched the piece of grass out of his grasp. ‘You’re playing with fire, Miss Jordan,’ he warned, and suddenly she was on her back and he was lying on top of her and one of his hands was undoing the button on her shorts.
‘Mark, no!’
‘This one’s on me, Izzy, treat yourself. Go with it.’ His fingers began to move, slowly, expertly.
‘But someone might see,’ she whimpered, trying desperately to hang on to reason, but already her body was betraying her and responding swiftly to his touch.
‘Who cares? Live a little. Have some fun.’
And she did.
Again and again.
Wave after wave of exquisite pleasure.
She lay in stunned silence afterwards, languid and limp, staring up at the silver leaves dancing in the breeze above them, shocked that he could arouse her so effortlessly. ‘That must be an all-time record,’ he said, brushing his lips over hers. ‘You were over the finishing line before I’d fired the starting gun.’
‘It’s you. You have this terrible effect on me.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, but face facts, my darling, you’re a hussy.’
‘Oh, Lord, am I?’
‘Yes, shamelessly so. But don’t ever change, that’s just how I like you.’
She closed her eyes. Hussy. It was official; she was a hussy. That’s what this gorgeous man with his husky voice and extraordinary life had turned her into. She was a woman who now lay on the sun-baked earth in the scorching heat, experiencing the fastest orgasm known to mankind. She smiled to herself, feeling like the cat who had got more than the cream. How’s that for living dangerously? she thought. How’s that for dancing naked in the street and kicking over the milk bottles and rattling the dustbin lids? Opening her eyes, she said, ‘With Alan I used to fake it, just to hurry things along.’
He lay on his back and laughed loudly. ‘Oh, please, keep those confessions coming. I just love to hear them.’
‘And what about your previous lovers? Did you have the same effect on them?’ She could tell from his silence that she had surprised him.
‘Bones asked me much the same question in the clinic,’ he said eventually.
‘And your answer?’
He shifted his position so that he was sitting with his shoulders resting against the wall. ‘As humiliating as it was I had to admit that I made a lousy lover. Probably on a par with your Alan.’
She sat up next to him, her legs stretched out alongside his. Touching the inner side of his thin wrist, she lightly trailed a finger the length of a vein. ‘So it was more than just a guy thing, the interest in Alan?’
‘Shucks, Izzy, you’ve caught me out again.’
‘So what was the problem?’
‘I hadn’t met you.’
‘No, seriously.’
‘I was being serious.’ He stroked her hand. ‘Low self-esteem also played its part, of course. That and the drugs.’
‘I thought they kind of buoyed you up, you know, made you want to do it all the more.’
‘For some people they do. Maybe in the early stages. But mix it with a barrel-sized cocktail of whisky and vodka and you’re lucky if you can walk straight, never mind impress the girls. Cocaine made me feel invincible, as if I was running like the wind, but all I was doing was running on the spot. I was going nowhere.’
‘Did no one try to stop you?’
‘In the beginning, yes. But you have to remember, I didn’t have many friends. Relationships don’t last when you’re abusing yourself, not when you’re self-absorbed and insensitive to anybody else’s problems. And, anyway, the few people I knew put my behaviour down to the fact that I’d always been a difficult bastard. Though once I suspected people were looking out for me, I became cunning. I drank on my own, kept things hidden.’
‘Even from Theo?’
‘Especially from Theo. I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment in his face whenever he saw me drunk. He didn’t bother with censure, he just tolerated me as though I was a badly behaved child who was letting him down. I’m relieved in a way that he never saw me at my worst, when I thought I could drink myself sober.’
‘And what were you like at your worst?’
He let go of her hand and plucked at the parched grass between them. ‘Oh, mood swings that covered everything from violent rage to weeping self-pity. A restless and paranoid concern only for myself. A need to put others down before they did it to me. And, most importantly, a hard-nosed determination never to admit I was out of control. I was like the Grand Old Duke of York: when I was up, I was very up and when I was down, I was down on my knees, head in the gutter. I did some pretty awful things and I can’t dignify any of them. There are no excuses I can offer.’
Sliding her palm under his hand, she slipped her fingers between his and squeezed them gently. And thinking of the night she had found him all alone in the darkness at Villa Anna, she said, ‘Mark, what would happen if you did have a drink?’
‘It would probably kill me.’ He spoke the words quite calmly, as if he had told her nothing more significant than what time it was. ‘I have to accept that I have an addictive personality, and that the programme of recovery I embarked upon all those years ago is with me for life. I’m still in touch with Bones by phone and letter, and once a year I pay him a visit so that he can ask me a lot of absurd questions. He calls it my MOT — Mark’s Ongoing Therapy.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘Of course, I only go to humour him.’
She smiled too. ‘Of course.’
A tiny sparrow flew down from the olive tree above them and landed a few yards from their feet. Keeping very still, they watched it hop towards them as it pecked hopefully, but in vain, at the dusty ground. It soon gave up and flew off in search of more promising pastures.
‘So tell me, Izzy. Have I put you off?’
‘Put me off what?’
‘Getting involved with me.’
‘I think I’m already involved with you,’ she said softly, and even more faintly, ‘heart, body and soul involved.’
‘Heart, body and soul,’ he echoed, staring straight ahead of him. ‘Would that be the same as love?’
Caught between wanting to tear out her heart with her bare hands to give him, and protecting herself from being hurt again, she said, ‘I’m not sure. You tell me.’
He turned his head, held her face in his hands, and kissed her lightly. ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?
That evening back in Áyios Nikólaos, where the bay was now empty of journalists and photographers, Izzy phoned Laura. She was mortified to learn that Max and Laura had already had several newspapers contact them about Sally nearly drowning.
‘All we can do is wait and see what they come up with,’ Laura said. ‘If there’s anything to report, we’ll fax you a copy first thing in the morning.’
They spent the night at Villa Petros and early the next morning, when they opened the door of Max’s den, Izzy and Mark were horrified at what they found: a long roll of printed fax paper stretched right across Max’s desk and cascaded down on to the white-tiled floor.
Chapter Forty-Two
It was all there in hideous black and white.
The exposure of Christine and Mikey’s whereabouts in Corfu had been thoroughly detailed, including their subsequent return to England, where, and in the words and pictures of the
Sun,
the
Mirror
and the
News of the World,
Mikey had been reunited with his open-armed parents. Most photographs showed a smiling, cocky lad who looked about twenty and who had clearly had the time of his life. In contrast, the
Mail
showed a picture of Christine, her head bent, her shoulders sagging, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. For her, the fun was over. Not only was she going to have to face her husband and children but, at the insistence of Mikey’s parents, the police had every intention of pressing charges. Izzy felt sorry for her: whatever dream she had been chasing, it had now become a fully fledged nightmare.
With the tawdry details of the runaway lovers exhaustively dealt with — and Mikey had not been shy in giving the tabloid boys what they wanted, though one suspected that any moment his canny parents might get Max Clifford involved — the journalists had gone on to fill up the pages with an expose of what they called, the Jag-and-gin crowd who holidayed in this idyllic part of Corfu and who were apparently abusing local kindness and hospitality with their careless middle-class arrogance.
Not even the fuzzy reproduction quality of the fax machine could take the edge off the disreputable savagery of the journalists’ self-righteous knives. Headline after headline, paragraph after paragraph gave a wildly distorted version of who they all were and what they had been up to. Max and Laura were shown to be wealthy, uncaring parents who had slept on while their drunken daughter’s drug-taking friend had nearly drowned. Mr and Mrs Patterson were portrayed as parents who had a lax attitude towards the taking of recreational drugs by their out-of-control junkie sons, with Mr Patterson caricatured as a sixties throw-back hippie who made sleazy low-budget documentaries. And the Fitzgeralds — the ex-croupier and the self-made man — were held up as paragons of moral decency for blowing the cover of an evil woman leading an impressionable young boy astray.
Mark had been similarly misrepresented. ‘Bestselling Novelist and One-time Addict Mark St James in Drugs Drowning Drama’ was one headline.
Izzy could feel Mark’s growing annoyance as together they scanned the long roll of paper. There were several photographs of him; one she recognised from the covers of his books, and another of the pair of them standing wide-eyed and startled in the doorway of Theo’s villa — she in just a T-shirt, which mercifully covered everything, and him bare-chested and in his shorts. There was a caption describing her as ‘Mr St James’s Holiday Companion’. It made her sound as though he had found her through an escort agency. But the paragraph that incensed her most was the one that had been put together as a result of Carrot Top eavesdropping on a private conversation. Mark was portrayed as having a cavalier attitude towards his previous problems, that smashing a car into a tree when off his head was an everyday occurrence for him. Furious, Izzy wondered at Carrot Top’s nerve. ‘It’s so wrong,’ was all she could say. ‘How dare they do this to you?’
‘It’s how it works.’ He threw the paper on to Max’s desk and walked away. She didn’t go after him, sensing that perhaps he wanted to be alone. Carefully folding the long piece of paper, she placed it neatly on the desk and phoned Max and Laura.
Within seconds Laura had answered. She sounded upset and told Izzy Max was so angry that he had already been in touch with the company lawyer to see if anything could be done. ‘I’ve never seen him so cross,’ she said. Izzy could hear that she was close to tears. ‘And we’ve had Sally’s parents on the phone. They’re livid and blaming us for what happened. They’ve called us irresponsible.’
‘But that’s ridiculous. Sally’s an adult. It was down to her what she drank or smoked. You mustn’t blame yourself, Laura. Promise me that. Do you want me to come back?’
‘No, there’s no need. Stay there. We’ll be joining you as soon as we can next week. We’d come sooner only I’ve got a doctor’s appointment arranged.’
‘Nothing wrong, is there?’
‘I doubt it, but Max is insisting I get checked out. You know what a worrier he can be. I keep telling him it’s my age, but he won’t listen. I think he’s anxious that it could be something serious. And wouldn’t that be the last thing we need on top of all this? How’s Mark?’
‘Angry.’
‘He needn’t be. I thought he came out of it a lot better than the rest of us.’
‘Yes, but I get the feeling he doesn’t like his past being dredged up in such lurid detail.’
‘Well, if you get the opportunity go and see that ghastly Dolly-Babe and tell her she ought to be ashamed of herself for what she’s done. And to think I almost felt sorry for her at the party. Now all I feel like doing is wringing her scrawny old neck! My only consolation is that she looks such a tart in the photographs of her sprawled on a sun-lounger with all that cellulite on show!’
‘You haven’t sent any of those pictures. Why not?’
‘Oh, didn’t I? Well, I certainly meant to. I’ll do it when we’ve finished talking.’
A short while later, the fax machine sprang into life again and Izzy ripped off the length of paper. Laura was right. Dolly-Babe hadn’t fared at all well — not so much
Hello!
as
Oh, My Gawd!
The following morning, because his father couldn’t resist reading about himself, Harry was dispatched to the supermarket to buy a copy of every English paper that had arrived in Kassiópi bearing yesterday’s news. When he got back to the villa the rest of his family were waiting for him. They each grabbed a paper from him and soon found what they were looking for. Even his mother was eagerly flicking through the pages, despite her earlier protestations that she wouldn’t be reduced to such vulgarity.
‘I don’t believe it,’ his father cried. ‘They’ve got my age wrong! How could they think I was sixty?’
‘Because you look sixty,’ said Virginia. Her tone was cruel and bitter. ‘That dreadful Fitzgerald woman has implied that since we’re neighbours here, it makes us friends.’ Shuddering at the thought, she returned her attention to the paper.