The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  As a bachelor now, I had become an expert on all the restaurants in the neighbourhood. She was too, and ignoring my suggestions, she led me to one I had not found. Her cheerfulness evaporated as we walked. She seemed preoccupied and paid little attention to what I was saying. She stopped on a corner and turned to look back down the street we had just taken. I realised that there had been an echo, doubling our footsteps, and that this must have troubled her. Within two minutes the footsteps behind us reverberated again between the facades. Her pace picked up to reach the restaurant. I opened the door for her and when she had passed through, I dropped my hand onto her shoulder, feeling the bone through the fur coat, like an animal’s moving under its pelt.

  ‘Should you be wearing this?’ I asked as I helped her off with her coat. ‘It’s sable, isn’t it?’ The fur coat was as beautiful and sexy as she was, of a particularly glowing dark brown, and she wore it like a living fleece, a part of her.

  ‘You mean it’s too grand for where we are?’ The restaurant was small and crowded and had the atmosphere of a student haunt. The risk could not have been a new idea to her, but she looked at me as blankly as if it had never occurred to her that there might be those who disapproved of wearing fur, to the extent of using violence.

  ‘Well, perhaps it is, but what I meant was, don’t you risk a can of paint or abuse?’

  I had not meant that either. The link in my mind, an entirely illogical one, was that if she hadn’t worn the coat, she wouldn’t be hunted herself.

  ‘I don’t think so. Round here.’

  ‘This is exactly where you’d come, if you wanted to make a point.’

  Emily disapproved of fur coats. She thought they were grannyish in any case. She was sentimental about animals and did not eat veal. Julian shrugged. Her coat was by no means grannyish.

  ‘It’s a risk. But I’m a risk-taker.’

  ‘And does it worry you?’

  We had been pointed to a small table and sat down at such close quarters to our neighbours that our elbows almost touched. I had forgotten such places existed. They had passed out of my consciousness with age and marriage. To follow Julian through the door, to be enveloped by the atmosphere, smoky with candles, was to return to the dark clubs and restaurants, smoky with cigarettes and dope, that I had frequented twenty-five years earlier. The contrast and the similarity with my pre-marital life were rejuvenating.

  ‘You mean cruelty and all that?’ Julian was looking at the menu. ‘No, not at all. It’s no different from wearing leather shoes or eating meat. I’m a natural carnivore. I’m going to have the ris de veau tonight.’ Then she added inconsequentially, ‘In any case, in cold places like Russia, you need furs to keep you warm.’

  All the sensations of that evening come so vividly to my mind: Julian’s ris de veau, creamy and succulent, lying on her plate and opposite it, my daube, glistening, dark and aromatic; her narrow hands lifting her fork to her mouth, revealing the inside of a wrist so pale that I could trace a network of blue veins running up to her elbow.

  When we made our way home, tension re-emerged. I felt the nervousness that entered her as a van, parked outside the restaurant, started its engine before we had reached the end of the street. She lengthened her stride, taking a less direct route home. Behind us, footsteps rang hollow on the pavement. She quickened her pace and darted along a pedestrian passage, cutting between two roads. She had her key ready to unlock the door without delay. All this took place without comment from either of us.

  Once inside, she greeted Victor as if there had been nothing odd about our walk and made for the lift. I followed her closely.

  ‘Julian, what was all that about?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just being stupid. Sometimes I’m nervous at night. I imagine things. It must be the effect of the mugging. I thought I’d settled everything.’

  ‘Will you be all right? Let me come in and check the flat for you.’

  ‘No one could possibly get in,’ she said. ‘We’ve got Victor on the door. I’m fine.’

  We got out of the lift and the doors closed behind us, boxing us into the landing with out two front doors opposite one another.

  Then she relented, ‘But come in anyway.’

  And once inside I found it was easy, as easy as when I was young. I took the key from her and relocked the door and passed the chain across. The air was full of the scent of lilies. She was standing on the spot where she had fallen on the first night. I took her in my arms and the fur slid beneath my fingers. It had a tremulous, silky warmth, as if it were alive. I kissed her and, although she responded with conviction, she still stood apart from me, her arms by her side, making no attempt to embrace me in her turn.

  I put my hands inside the coat and pushed it off her shoulders onto the floor at her feet. As if she had been released, she stepped out of it and, taking my hand, led the way upstairs, along the corridor. She undressed at once, her clothes falling off her like leaves, much quicker than I could manage. She was naked and I could see how thin she was. Her shoulders, neck and wrists were attenuated, fragile, her breasts disproportionately large, with long dark-red nipples, the shape and colour of mulberries.

  She was moving about, turning off a lamp, putting on the music by which she lived. She had taken control, which she was willing to hand back and share. This time she held me, putting her hands on my back, running them down my sides, drawing me into her. She was not soft, pliable, passive, someone whom you could sink into, to be enfolded and enveloped. Her skin was smooth and her body hard, with all the muscles, tendons, bones, making themselves felt below the surface. I groaned, my face in the hollow of her neck, as she fell forward onto me, and I heard for the first time her strange animal cry, like the mewing of a buzzard, or the yelp of a fox.

  Sex is sex and its variety is not infinite and its detail is boring. What is strange, though, is why it works so extraordinarily well with one person and so dully with another. Thought of her filled my day, at my desk, in meetings and seminars, I would find myself recalling the side of her face, her mouth, the nape of her neck when her hair fell forward, exposing the vertebra like a victim on the scaffold. My fascination with Julian now came to comprehend a form of sexual obsession, a never-sated desire.

  7

  I learned no more about Julian once we had become lovers than I knew before. I never entered her flat except by invitation, nor she mine. However, now I had penetrated to the upper regions of her apartment, which I had secretly explored, and had certain rights there, if temporary ones, I could look for signs of that other man. But I found nothing. No shaving foam stood among her hairsprays and deodorants. No electric razor was tucked into any drawer that I opened, stealthily, when I went into the bathroom to pee or to shower.

  One evening I was sitting beside the fire in her apartment waiting for her, when I saw on the table beside her chair an open box file crammed with papers. I sat down cautiously and crooked my head so that its contents came into view. Below the top two sheets of paper, bank statements, the address Geneva, lay a sheaf of photographs. They were of different sizes and looked as if they had been gathered up, unsorted, and pushed into the box to tidy them out of the way.

  Brazenly, I lifted the pile from the box and shuffled through the photographs. They were all of one man, but not, curiously enough, the man I had already seen. This one was of different build, solider, older, about my own age, with a well cared for complacency radiating from his smile.

  Julian descended, unheard, as I reached this point of analysis, or fabrication. Guilty, I made no attempt to hide the incriminating documents.

  ‘So you’re spying on me, too,’ she said. I laid them down on the table; the face with its even teeth and moustachioed upper lip, unmoved at being caught in flagrante, smiled up at us.

  ‘It’s my job,’ I said, ‘I’m a psychologist and a historian. I’m researching you.’

  ‘That’s my past. He’s an old boyfriend.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  I
thought she might refuse to answer. Then, pulling on her fur coat, she replied, ‘Anatoli. Let’s go, Nick.’

  So I learned his name and nothing more. I had to make what I could of it, just as I had to deduce what I could from her name. She was standing by the door with her keys ready. I replaced the photographs, slipping the last one into my pocket. She had started using her alarm and she was punching the code into the keyboard. With a Matisse on the wall and a Swiss bank account, she had a lot to lose.

  We went to see a concert performance of Otello that night. The torrent of love and jealousy on stage must have reminded her about Victor’s tempestuous home life, for she had another episode to tell me on our way back.

  ‘Victor had a terrible weekend,’ she said in the taxi. ‘His daughter and his woman had a frightful row. They argued and shouted at one another all afternoon and, Josie, the daughter, deliberately smashed a set of plates that Victor and Mary bought when they went to Majorca.’

  I tried to imagine a life in which disagreement resolved itself in the breaking of china, and failed.

  ‘What did Victor do?’

  ‘He watched the football. It was Arsenal versus Liverpool.’

  ‘Did he mind?’

  ‘Of course he minded. Not the plates and the noise, but the situation itself. You see, he adores his granddaughter. She’s the love of his life. He’s afraid that Josie will move out and take Rose with her.’ We were drawing up outside our house. ‘It’s all right. I’ve got cash.’ She was already flourishing a twenty-pound note.

  Victor said goodnight to us with his usual impassivity. None of his intimate conversations with Julian took place in my presence. I looked at him furtively. He must know about Julian and me; I now knew about him. We hid our secret knowledge of one another.

  On our common landing Julian turned automatically to her own door, saying, ‘Goodnight, Nick.’ She was turning her key in the lock. I put my arms around her. I heard a small intake of breath, but I had not caused it.

  ‘The lights must have fused,’ she was saying. ‘Damn.’

  I realised that there was no sound from the alarm.

  ‘Let me find a torch.’

  I had entered my own flat by now and was rummaging in the drawer of my mother’s hall table for the torch that, with a timid precaution, she had always kept there for going out at night and other emergencies. Even before I had reached her with a light, Julian had realised that something was seriously wrong.

  ‘I think there’s been a break-in.’

  The thread of light from the torch could not comprehend the destruction, the overturned furniture, the heaps of books that had been swept onto the floor.

  ‘Wait.’ Her voice sounded perfectly natural, detached. ‘If our eyes can just get used to the dark, we’ll manage better.’

  ‘Where’s the fuse box?’

  ‘In the corridor outside the kitchen.’

  ‘We need some light on this.’

  To reach the kitchen corridor was impossible. The doors of the china cupboard had been opened and the contents poured on to the floor where they lay in a mountain of shards, wedging the door and preventing our passing. The frail beam revealed the door blocking our way. When I pushed it, the broken glass and porcelain grated in resistance.

  I found an extension cord, which I ran from my flat to hers and Julian plugged in a lamp from which she had removed the shade. The undirected light radiated blindingly. She held it aloft to reveal an unimaginable chaos.

  It was evident at once that this was no casual burglary. The arch between the hall and the drawing room was filled with upturned chairs. The sofas had been tipped forward, but not before all the cushions had been razored, so that there was a fall of feathers like snow on all the surfaces. Over and around these basic blocks of disorder, books, lamps, shades, ornaments lay jumbled. On top of them were papers, slithering down the slopes, fanning out from the crevices, one piece of computer paper balanced like a hanging rock on one of the summits. Oddly, in all this destruction, the works of art remained untouched. The Matisse still hung on the wall above the slaughtered sofa. The Hepworth I found, undamaged, beneath a heap cushions and papers. Julian’s response was of preternatural calm. ‘My God, what a mess,’ she said.

  ‘It is rather.’ My reply sounded inadequate because my mind was already engaged in finding hypotheses to explain the attack. It was the counterpart of the mugging. The direction of the violence had been transferred from Julian herself to her creation, but the meaning of both was the same. It was a threat, perhaps, a punishment, or revenge. Only Julian herself could interpret what had happened. I bent down and lifted some of the papers.

  “Why?’ she said. “Why would anyone want to do this? Why didn’t they just take the video and run.’

  ‘I don’t think this was a burglary.’

  ‘The first thing is to put the electricity on.’

  ‘The first thing is to phone the police.’

  ‘I suppose we have to. They’ll take all night.’

  ‘Certainly we must.’

  ‘I just want to see what else they’ve done.’

  She climbed through the rubble towards the stairs, which were deep with fabric, a waterfall of material, which I recognised as curtains, their tracks still attached, chunks of plaster hanging from them, showing they had been hauled from the walls. The corridor was strewn with clothes. She picked up a dress in passing, and let it drop again at the sight of the slash cutting through it from neck to hem. The bed had been pulled away from the wall and its pillows, sheets and covers dragged to the bathroom, piled into the bath and the water turned on. The taps were now nose-deep below the surface, still running, the water overflowing onto the floor in a steady stream. I turned them off and went back with the idea of checking the other bathrooms.

  In the middle of her mattress, which had been slashed to ribbons with a manic, industrial thoroughness, was a small hill of dollar bills. Julian had seen them at once and she was already kneeling on the bed, gathering them up. She looked up at me, saying nothing, and continued with her task. I went out, and when I returned, having found the other bathrooms dry, she had regularised the cash into a brick-like block, which she was inserting into her handbag. They were, I noticed, notes of a hundred dollars. Whatever the purpose of this break-in, it wasn’t theft.

  ‘We’d better get out quickly. The floor could come down any minute. God knows how long the water’s been running.’

  We went to my flat to phone the police. I was beginning to engage with the details. ‘I wonder if anyone heard anything. It must have sounded like a gang of navvies at work.’

  I poured her a generous glass of brandy. She was sitting on my mother’s chintz-covered sofa, her legs crossed, one flat shoe half-off her foot, swinging with deceptive casualness, swinging, swinging.

  ‘Unlikely,’ she said. ‘The flat is double height, after all. I’ve never heard noises from above or below, so the sound-proofing I put in must be reasonably effective.’

  ‘How could they have got in? Why did the alarm not work?’ Julian did not answer these questions. She refused speculation.

  Although dealing with the police did not take all night, it did occupy a very long time. The report of a break-in at a flat did not sound like a matter of the greatest urgency and we waited for an hour or so before a pair of officers turned up.

  The one who took the lead, introducing himself and his companion, was tall and heavy, with a double chin that haloed his jaw line. Inside his gross face was a prim mouth. The other, who only reached his shoulder, was compact and wore his hands gathered into permanent fists. They asked at once to see the damage, polite boredom written on their obedient, doggy faces, bulldog and terrier. When they opened the door and saw the state of the apartment, they registered at once that they were looking at something out of scale. The first, the bulldog, whistled through his teeth when I turned on the lamp and shone its beams over the heaps of furniture.

  The other made a kind of hooting sound in his surpr
ise. ‘Oh-wo- wo, did they find what they were looking for?’ he asked.

  The terrier was already muttering into his radio, his eyes flicking round as he described the devastation.

  I did not reply to the bulldog’s question. This was Julian’s business. She was standing on the landing, as if she could not bear to re-enter her home.

  ‘There was nothing to find,’ she said. ‘Nothing special. It was just an ordinary flat.’

  Both of them directed sceptical expressions at her. ‘They must’ve been looking for something,’ he insisted obstinately.

  The terrier shook his head in disbelief. ‘I’ve got a scene-of-crime officer coming round straight away. He’ll make a start on fingerprinting. You haven’t seen how they got in, sir?’

  I remained silent. Julian said, ‘No, I’ve no idea. I haven’t been able to look everywhere in any case.’

  ‘He’ll find whatever there is.’

  We went back to my mother’s drawing room to give them the details they required, while the scene-of-crime officer examined the debris next door. The questions were initially addressed to me, with instinctive chauvinism. I disclaimed the role of principal and listened to Julian’s replies. She spoke precisely, answering their queries, giving no background information or gloss to set what had happened into any kind of context. However, towards the end of the interview one of the police officers, the terrier, looking over his notes, said, ‘Julian Bennet, odd name for a woman. Didn’t you have an accident or something recently?’

  ‘Not an accident exactly. I was mugged just outside here in the square.’

  ‘I remember the name. I was on duty that night at the station and I noticed the name. I collect them,’ he added.

  ‘Collect names?’ The full force of Julian’s smile was directed at him for this diversion.

  ‘Yes, odd ones, you know. Only this month I’ve had Blanche Black and Joy Comfort and Laurie Carr. I mean you can’t forget names like that, can you?’ His face was illuminated with interest. I thought he was going to flip over the page in his pad and read us a list of idiosyncratic nomenclature that he had come across recently. Then the light died and his professionalism took over.