by Allan Massie
Belinda greeted him with a light kiss on the cheek. She said she would make tea, suggested he join Erik on the terrace. “Then we can talk.”
Erik was stretched out on a canvas chair, he wore T-shirt and shorts. In the sunlight the down on his legs, arms and face was the colour of pale honey. He was reading The Charterhouse of Parma. Tom liked him better for that, but he still looked a soft boy. He smiled at Tom and set his book aside.
Belinda came out with the tea. She had made a pot and carried it on a tray with bone-china cups and slices of lemon and a little bowl with sugar lumps. She was wearing a cream-coloured dress that stopped just short of her knees. Her feet were bare.
“We’ve been so lazy today, the pair of us.”
“It’s been lovely,” Erik said, “so peaceful.”
“And you’ve had this horror,” she said. “So how is he? We’re really grateful to you.”
The tea was good, Lapsang. Tom drank some and told them about finding Stephen, the state he was in, how he refused to go to hospital, how Meg said she would care for him, how she had called Sol.
“He was pathetic, all but done in, and afraid, of course.”
“But he must go to hospital,” Belinda said. “It’s not fair on Meg, and I’m sure she doesn’t even like him. We should get him into Salvator Mundi – that’s the American hospital on Monteverde – they understand alcoholics there. I’ll go and call Meg.”
Tom leaned over the terrace wall. It looked away from the street, and the sound of the traffic from the Lungotevere was muffled.
Erik said, “Belinda’s so good. I don’t know where I’d be without her just now. You know I was Stephen’s boyfriend, don’t you?”
When Tom didn’t reply, Erik said, “Do you think I should blame myself for him going on the booze again?”
“It’s no business of mine,” Tom said, “but the answer is probably no.”
“That’s what Belinda says but I don’t know if she’s just trying to make me feel better, so it’s good to hear you say so too. You know I was in Al-Anon for years – junior Al-Anon – before I was in AA myself on account of my mother being alcoholic, so I know all the language, all the arguments one way and the other. I mean I’ve heard them all my life it seems.”
He slid the palms of his hands along his thighs.
“Belinda’s wonderful, you know, I really think she’s my salvation.”
Tom thought: you are a self-centred little prick.
He said, “Did Stephen ever talk about a boy called Jamie?”
The boy who had been as relaxed as a cat in the sunshine hesitated. His tongue flickered across his lower lip.
“Hey,” he said, “how d’you know that? It scared me, that he called me Jamie when we were …” he glanced away … “having sex. He had this photograph and I asked him about it and he told me it was this Jamie and he was dead. Murdered he said, and then he called me by this murdered boy’s name. It was creepy, made me feel like I wasn’t there, not me myself.”
“Jamie wasn’t murdered. Stephen was dramatising that. He killed himself. It was a long time ago, in England, when they were both boys, fourteen, fifteen. You don’t look much like him. He was blond too but the colouring’s different and the build. He shouldn’t have called you Jamie though.”
“You knew him then?”
“Oh yes, I knew him.”
“He wasn’t … your son?”
“Not quite. My nephew, my ward.”
“You don’t mind me asking? He must have meant a lot to Stephen.”
When Tom didn’t answer, Erik said, “You don’t like any of this, I guess. He must have meant a lot to you too. I’m sorry. I owe something to Stephen, I’m aware of that. I wouldn’t have gone with him if I hadn’t been drinking, though it was me picked him up, I have to confess. But he got me back into AA and I do hope” – he flashed the smile that had made him a schoolgirls’ pin-up a couple of years past when he was a star in a teen soap – “you don’t think I’m too young to be a real alky. Mike does. He says I’m to real alkies like him what alcopops are to Scotch. But I know what it’s all about – you should have seen my ma and when I felt myself going that way too, saying the same things even, the same crappy awful things – I just knew where I was heading, and no thank you.”
“There’s no merit in going the length,” Tom said. “It’s a long, dark, stupid tunnel and you’re wise to call a halt.”
“Mike says different, he says my pretty ass hasn’t come within sight of the gutter and so I’m a phoney. If I’m talking too much it’s because I’m nervous. You see I’ve been stupid. I didn’t connect with who you are, didn’t cotton on. It was real stupid not to realise it was you wrote the script for Gehenna. I just adored that movie – it really hit me. So you see …”
XXVII
“So she’s stripping you down, tearing the skin off.”
Reynard Yallett kept his tone light, his mockery as friendly as could be. Not truly friendly of course; there was always that undercurrent.
Gary made no reply. They were sitting outside the café in the piazza at the foot of the tree-lined avenue in which Kate had her apartment. She had retired there, on the plea of a headache. Reynard had said that there were matters he must discuss with the Chicken, now as good a time as any.
He summoned the waiter, ordered a whisky for himself, a Diet Coke for Gary.
“Still not drinking? That’s sensible. People like you talk when they drink. You don’t want to talk, Gary, not you. You might say things you come to regret. So how far has she got?”
Gary picked at skin, right thumb scraping left. He didn’t speak till the waiter brought their drinks, but looked away, his eyes on the leather-suited boys who were revving their bikes on the other side of the street.
“Why the fuck are you here?” he said. “We got nothing to discuss.”
“Curiosity, chicken, curiosity. I suffer from insatiable curiosity. And this experiment the good Dr Sturzo is conducting – how could I resist monitoring it?”
“You was my brief,” Gary said. “That’s all. It’s over. I got off, didn’t I?”
“Thanks to me,” Yallett said.
“That’s as may be. I don’t know myself. Nobody knows. There wasn’t the evidence. Need evidence for a conviction, don’t you. You pointed that out. I said thank you. I don’t owe you nothing now.”
“Calm down, chicken, calm down.”
“Don’t call me chicken. I don’t like it. And I’m calm enough. What do you want here? Why’re you getting at me?”
“Getting at you, chicken? Getting at my favourite kid killer? What makes you think that?” Reynard Yallett held up his glass to the light, swirling the ice round, and drank half of the large measure. “Are you fucking the good Dr Sturzo?”
“That’s disgusting, she’s old enough to be my mum. You think I did it then, knifed that nigger.”
“I know you did, darling. So what? I just wouldn’t be too forthcoming with the good Dr Sturzo, that’s all.”
“Don’t know what you mean. I got off, didn’t I? That means I’m innocent, not guilty. It’s finished.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Yallett smiled, revealing his canines. “There’s talk of abolishing double jeopardy. You know what that is, don’t you? There’s a proposal to allow the Crown a retrial if new evidence appears. How do you like that?”
“There’s no fucking evidence old or new.”
“Oh good then, so we’ve nothing to worry about,” Yallett said. “That journalist, Trensshe you know, thinks differently. But he’s wrong then, is he?”
“You’re dead right, he’s wrong. Wanker.”
Two of the motor cyclists, with a revving of Formula One proportions, roared round the piazza. Gary followed them with hungry eyes as they disappeared up the tree-lined avenue.
“Come off it, me old china.” Reynard raised his left eyebrow and curled his upper lip – a mannerism that delighted or infuriated his TV following. “Pull the other one. I know you
did for him. Doesn’t worry me. One fewer of these buggers isn’t going to spoil my day.”
Gary pushed his chair back. He stood very stiff in his dark suit and white shirt, and he looked Reynard in the face. A nerve jumped in his right cheek and he lifted his hand and touched the bone to hide it or still it. He looked as if he was about to make a speech, but there was nothing to say. Perhaps that was it. The waiter, leaning against the wall by the open doorway into the bar, drew on his cigarette. The tall Englishman in the suede jacket had just made an indecent suggestion. He watched the boy turn away. He recognised him as the dottoressa’s young friend. He admired the dottoressa and could have told the Englishman there was nothing doing; and quite right too. He approached the table, collected the glasses. Another whisky, dottore?
XXVIII
Seeing Erik deep again in The Charterhouse, Tom once more warmed to him, a bit anyway. A boy who read Stendhal … that was OK. For years Tom kept La Vie de Henry Brulard as a bedside book, and for him The Charterhouse was the greatest novel ever written. In his drinking days he used to say, “Beats War and Peace the way a dry Martini beats a Daiquiri.”
There was a triangle in it, formed of people whose desires could none of them be satisfied. What could be truer than that? There was the powerful Count Mosca, unhappy because he had fixed his adoration on the certainly adorable Gina Sanseverina, who herself had eyes only for her nephew, the beautiful, intemperate and unreliable Fabrizio. As for Fabrizio himself, he indulged an agreeably hopeless passion for an angelic and unobtainable girl, but really, Tom thought, was in love first with himself, which in the Stendhalian world was as much as to say, in love with his own vitality, life indeed.
Erik laid down the book.
Tom said, “All right, isn’t it?”
“All right? It’s wonderful … the whole atmosphere, it’s like music.”
“Well that was what Stendhal loved here in Italy, not only the music itself but that life here aspired to the condition of opera, people killing for love, that sort of thing.”
Belinda rejoined them.
“Really,” she said, “people are tiresome. It’s all this sensitivity. I’ve been speaking to Meg, and then Sol, and Bridget – or rather I got Tomaso who is tiresome but practical in his way. Anyway he’s against hospital and sides with Stephen and Meg on that. Sol agrees that hospital is essential, and that annoys Meg because she thinks it’s a slight on her. Stephen won’t budge and has passed out again, and Meg’s in a temper, I think, because she’s not trusted. Tomaso called her, you see, and said he would take over because he fancies himself as an amateur doctor, and then Bridget came on the phone and spoke in that soft sibilant way she has when she’s angry, because she said Meg has been rude to Tomaso. I bet he put her up to it, told her to phone. And Kate’s not answering, though she’s the one with more sense than the rest rolled up together except Sol. It really is hopeless, I don’t know why one bothers.”
She flopped into a deckchair. Erik came and stood behind her and stroked her hair and then began to massage her neck.
“Relax,” he said, “it’s not like you, this isn’t …” Who’s to say what’s like anyone, Tom thought. We make for ourselves impressions of people and if they act in a way that doesn’t fit that impression, we say they are acting out of character, as if they were actors condemned to be typecast,
“You’ve done all you can,” Erik said. “Really.”
“I’ve done nothing,” Belinda said, “except yatter on the phone and make a nuisance of myself.”
XXIX
They talked of going out to a restaurant. “Later,” Belinda said, “Meg may call again and I don’t want to speak on the mobile, not in a restaurant, not about this.”
It got dark, but was still warm and they didn’t move from the terrace. Erik set himself, evidently, to please, amuse and interest Tom. If it lasts, Belinda thought, it will always be like this; only it can’t last, won’t. She fetched another bottle of mineral water from the fridge and filled their glasses. Erik reached up with his and she ran the back of her index finger along the line of his jaw. He was telling Tom about a star of the early sixties, one of the several billed as the new James Dean, who had been reduced to work on Erik’s teen soap.
“He was sad and sour. I guess we were all afraid of him. And then I saw Barbary Shore, the movie he made from that Mailer novel, and he was electric, just electric. And I thought, he really had it once and then it was for myself I got scared. The way he was all burned up, exhausted, dried out.”
Tom took a half-toscano from his breast pocket and lit it.
“Talent dies. ‘Some seed fell upon stony ground and sprang up quickly and withered because it had no roots.’ Maybe he was lucky to be able to work at all.”
The telephone rang. Belinda sighed and went to answer.
Erik said, “He didn’t for that long. On account of the chick who played my girlfriend. She was just thirteen, but a real little Lolita, I mean, she just set out to … you know … she was surely no innocent, but she was great at playing the innocent … little bitch. There was even talk of prosecution, but her Mom wouldn’t have that, thought it would do her little darling – and wage-earner – no good careerwise. Some career; she had talent enough to fry a Big Mac … maybe. But you know, he just shrugged his shoulders and walked away from it all with a sad sort of hopeless dignity. It could be that was a performance too, but it was a hell of a lot better one than he gave on the set.”
Belinda came back on to the terrace.
“That was Kate. We’ve got to go over there. Or at least I have to. There’s trouble. She wouldn’t say what, but she was agitated, I’ve never heard her like that, she’s usually so in control.” She turned to Tom, “You’ll come too, won’t you. Please.”
“I scarcely know her, but if you think I can be of some help, of course.”
“Is it Gary?” Erik said.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know anything. Just, Kate said come. She sounded desperate.”
“Where does she live?”
“Parioli. We’ll have to take a taxi. But she said, stop it in the piazza and walk from there. That’s odd, isn’t it?”
“It’s weird,” Erik said. “I guess it’s to do with Gary.”
Belinda spoke into the intercom. “Kate, it’s me.”
The buzzer sounded. They entered the silent hall and rang the lift. Kate was waiting for them on the landing outside her apartment. She took Belinda in her arms. Belinda hugged her hard.
“You know Tom,” she said. “I thought he might be some help.”
“I don’t know that anyone can. But thank you.”
Belinda held her a moment. There was a swelling under her left eye and her upper lip had been cut, was still smeared with dried blood.
“Is it Gary?”
Kate pulled away, led them into the apartment, through the dark entrance hall and into a long-ceilinged drawing-room lit by two standard lamps and an art nouveau electrolier. Immediately under this lay the body of a man. He was face down and wore only a shirt and socks. There was a big red stain on the cream shirt and a small puddle of blood on the parquet floor. It was a moment before Belinda recognised him as Reynard Yallett. She knelt beside him a moment to make sure. Then she got up and looked across the room. Gary was sitting on the window seat. He was in the shadows and there was no expression she could put a name to on his face.
“Tell,” she said. “You’d better tell if you’re up to it.”
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” Kate said. “I must be mad. But I couldn’t think what else to do.”
“He is dead, isn’t he,” Erik said.
“There’s no doubt about that,” Tom said. “Do we know who he is? I take it we do.”
“Oh yes,” Belinda said, “we know. It’s Reynard Yallett – the QC. You must have heard of him.”
And I came close once to marrying him, she thought. She looked again towards Gary who gave no sign that he had noticed their arrival.
“It’s banal,” she said, “but I think since we can none of us have brandy we could do with a cup of tea. And then tell. I’ll make it.”
Erik followed her through to the kitchen.
“You’re so cool,” he said, “and I’m shaking.”
“Getting in a state won’t help us.”
She plugged the kettle in and turned and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“But I’m glad you’re here. Bless you.”
Back in the drawing-room Tom Durward said, “I take it you haven’t called the police.”
Kate stayed silent, looked a negative.
“And don’t intend to?”
Again she made no reply, sat down in a wickerwork chair, keeping her eyes fixed on the body as if praying for it to move.
“Reynard Yallett,” Tom said. “The mills of God … do you mind if I smoke?”
Belinda, returning, poured tea. Erik took a mug over to Gary and set it beside him, getting no acknowledgement.
“Tell then,” Belinda said. “I know it’s going to be difficult, but tell.”
Erik, turning away from Gary, knocked his foot against an object which skittered across the parquet. He bent down, drew back from the knife which now lay in the open. When he sat himself on the arm of Belinda’s chair, he couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“Reynard came back,” Kate said, “came over, I mean, I don’t know exactly when. He’d been drinking. He was in a foul mood. Gary had walked out on him when they’d gone to discuss what Reynard said was some business they had to settle. I don’t know what it was. It puzzled me, I couldn’t see what they might have to discuss. I wasn’t expecting him and wasn’t pleased to see him. I showed that and he became offensive, aggressive. I won’t repeat what he said, but I slapped his face. It was then he hit me, knocked me down. I may have been knocked out, I don’t really know. But the next thing I knew he was on top of me, tearing at my clothes, trying to rape me. I may have screamed, must have. Then he went all limp, just a weight on top of me. I struggled out from under, and he was like he is now. He didn’t even know Gary was in the apartment, you see.”
