“Christ, Lindsay,” she said, still pacing. “I can’t stand it much longer. This place, the men who work in this place…”
Lindsay said nothing. Gini appeared oblivious of her in any case, and she had never, on any occasion in the past, seen Gini behave like this. Normally, Gini kept herself on the tightest of reins. Lindsay had often wondered how much that cost her. Well, now she saw, she thought.
“How can you bear it, Lindsay?” Gini swung around to look at her, then began pacing again. “The endless looks, the sniggers, the language, the innuendo, the little pats when you’re at the Xerox machine, the taking orders from men like Nicholas Jenkins, and all the time you can never ever say what you truly think, because you’re a woman, and so you have to tread so damn carefully, can’t lose your temper, can’t speak your mind, because if you did, if you did—then that would just prove all their points?”
She swung around again. “Don’t you think you’d like to speak the truth, just occasionally, tell them what you really think of them, and not care that then they’ll put you down as hysterical, or having your period—or being a ball breaker. Oh, Lindsay, don’t you ever wish you could stop acting, just for once?”
There was a silence. Lindsay made the coffee. She put it on her desk. Gini continued pacing. With a sudden angry gesture she undid the band tying back her hair so it fell over her shoulders and across her face. Lindsay watched her toss that hair back, and continue to pace, as if this office were a cage. She looked a little crazy and a little magnificent, Lindsay thought, like a maenad, like some wonderful and anarchic embodiment of female force.
“I have my own domain, Gini,” she said eventually. “It’s a female domain, so I’m safe. They don’t trespass in here, and if they do, I can tell them to fuck off. They don’t mind. Fashion doesn’t threaten them.”
“Oh, God, oh, God.” Gini suddenly banged her hands down hard on the desk. “Sometimes I’d like to blow it all up, this entire place.”
“What brought this on? Come on, Gini, if you’re so keen to speak your mind, do it for once.”
“What brought it on? Jenkins brought it on. I loathe and detest and despise him. And I loathe and detest and despise myself for working for him. I should have walked out, months ago, and I didn’t. I should never have listened to all those lies and promises of his. Next month, Gini, maybe then we’ll send you overseas…” She did a vicious and accurate impression of Jenkins. “Meantime, Gini, if you’d just get on with this really key story. It’s about telephone sex lines, for God’s sake. …”
“Okay.” Lindsay lit a cigarette. She could not quite believe this was happening, that Gini—quiet, cool, controlled Gini, who rarely so much as lost her temper—was acting like this. “Okay,” she said. “What else?”
“What else? What else? Those damn voyeurs for a start, passing those Sonia Swan pictures around. ‘Hey, Gini, hot or not?’ They make me sick. Sick. Not one of them has the nerve to stand up to Jenkins and say why the hell are we running this stuff? Who cares if Sonia Swan screws the entire French Cabinet, so what?” She drew in a deep breath and swung around to look at Lindsay once more. “They don’t have the courage—and neither do I, do you see? I could have said that to Jenkins. I had the perfect chance up there in his office, and did I? No. I kept my mouth shut. Why? Because I’m frightened of him?” She paused, and then shook her head. “No. It isn’t even that. Because I’m working on something right now that I actually want to work on. And I didn’t want to risk losing it. So I toed the line yet again. Yes, Nicholas. No, Nicholas. I hate myself.”
“And?” Lindsay said.
Gini met her eyes. She hesitated. Lindsay watched her fight herself, watched some angry internal struggle take place.
“All right,” she said finally. “All right. It’s Pascal Lamartine. Him above all. He took those Sonia Swan photographs and I mind. I mind passionately about that.”
“Why?” Lindsay said, although she already knew the answer. It flared in Gini’s eyes, it sprang from every feature of her face.
“Why? Because he’s better than that. Much better. You know the kind of work he used to do. You know the kind of pictures he used to take. And now he does this. And he hates himself for doing it—I can see that he does, Lindsay. It’s destroying him. It’s his own very special way of committing suicide, and I can’t bear to watch it.”
She pressed her hands to her heart as she said this. Then she made a wild and angry gesture, as if she were relinquishing something, or giving up. She moved her head, and that astonishing hair flared with a bluish-white fluorescence. Lindsay waited, one beat, then two. Gini’s gaze met hers, then faltered. She looked away.
Lindsay gave a sigh. She hesitated, then said: “Okay, Gini. Tell me. When?”
She was expecting Gini to say nothing at all. Or, if she admitted it, something like, last year, or six months ago. She did not.
“Twelve years ago,” she said, and began pacing again.
“Twelve years?” Lindsay stared at her. She could not remember Gini’s having mentioned Pascal Lamartine’s name, ever.
“Twelve years? You mean you were fifteen?”
“Yes. But he didn’t know that. I lied about my age to him.”
“Where was this?”
“In Beirut.”
“How long, Gini?”
“Three weeks.”
“That’s all?”
Gini swung around angrily. “It was enough. Believe me, it makes no difference. He’s still here.” She pressed her hands against her chest. “He’s in my heart and in my head. I can’t get him out. I never could.”
Lindsay hesitated. She was ten years older than Gini; she suddenly felt that the age gap was much greater than that.
“So what happened, Gini?” she said more gently, and thought: How can I explain, how do you talk someone down from this?
“What happened? My father happened. He found out.” Another turn, another wild gesture of the hand, another swirl of hair.
“And that was it?” Lindsay said. “Nothing afterward?”
“Just silence,” Gini said. “Silence. I met him once, by accident, in Paris. But that was all. Just silence, until I met him again this week.”
“The kind of silence that talks?”
“On my side. Not on his. He married. He had a child. He divorced—”
“Did he contact you then?”
“No.”
“Did you hope he would?”
“When I let myself. Yes.”
Pride flared in her face. She turned away. There was a long silence. The lights flickered. Outside, the rain lashed the windows. Several stories below, a truck passed. In the outside office a telephone rang.
“Three weeks, then twelve years of silence?” Lindsay said slowly, “Gini, do you want to get hurt? Again?”
“No. I want God to intervene and make everything wrong come right.” Her voice dipped, then rose more strongly. “Failing that—if it comes to a choice, something happening and getting hurt, or nothing happening and I stay safe—then I’d risk getting hurt. I’d even rather get hurt. I wouldn’t care.”
“That’s not very sensible.”
“Sensible?” She turned and stared at Lindsay. Her face contracted for an instant. “I don’t even know what that means anymore. It isn’t part of the equation. I can’t go through this inch by inch, measuring this, accounting for that.”
“So tell him, then,” Lindsay said a little sharply.
“No. No. I can’t do that. That’s the one thing I can’t do. You don’t know what he’s like. He’s just been through a horrible divorce. The last thing he needs is more problems.”
“Rubbish.” Quite suddenly Lindsay lost sympathy and patience. “He sounds like a first-class bastard to me, Gini.”
There was absolute silence. Gini’s face went white. “Why do you say that?”
“Oh, come on, Gini. Grow up. Three weeks in a war zone and a twelve-year silence? That sounds like indifference to me. Exploitation and
then indifference.”
“You’re wrong. Totally wrong. It wasn’t like that. He was never like that. He isn’t like that now.”
“You’re sure?” Lindsay said more kindly. “Or is that you, Gini, writing his script?”
There was another silence, briefer this time. Then Gini whirled around. She began putting on her coat, her gloves, her scarf. She picked up her bag.
Lindsay said nothing. Gini had not touched her coffee, and was now hesitating by the door, a stricken look on her face.
“Lindsay…”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you with all this. It’s—it’s not something I’ve ever talked about before.”
“I can see that.”
“You won’t tell anyone else? You promise me?”
“Come on, Gini. You know I won’t.”
Gini did know that; she hesitated again, then made a little half-pleading gesture of the hand. “Lindsay, what you said about indifference—is that really what you think?”
Lindsay sighed. She rose, and they hugged each other. “Come on, Gini,” she said. “You know I can’t judge. Outsiders never can. But just reading the facts—no, they don’t look good. I’d be lying if I said they did.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Gini’s face took on a closed, blank look. “I mean, I always knew, in a way. Twelve years of silence. I had been dealing with it. Really, Lindsay, I’d almost put the whole thing right out of my mind. It’s just meeting him again, so unexpectedly. It brought all the past back.”
“As long as you remember it is the past, Gini.”
“Yes. Except we are our pasts. He is a part of me. …”
Lindsay began to protest, and Gini gave herself a shake. She smiled. “No. No. You’re right. Grow up. That’s just what I should do. Thank you, Lindsay. Have a wonderful time in Martinique.”
A few minutes later Gini left. She took with her the directories for the model agencies. She crammed them into a shopping bag and hurried out of the building.
It was past four o’clock. Rain was falling heavily, sluicing the streets. If she was quick, she could make it easily to the City and the ICD offices before Susannah left. Perhaps the woman who had delivered those parcels had indeed been a model, just as Susannah had assumed, a model hired to do an unusual job. Perhaps, if Susannah went through these directories, she would recognize the woman’s face.
It was a long shot, but worth trying. Then, when she returned home to Pascal, she would have made more progress still. Another part of this puzzle would have slotted into place.
She stopped abruptly, in the middle of the street. Home to Pascal—why had she allowed herself to think that? She would be going home, to her apartment, and Pascal might be there, but she was not returning home to him: It was vital she remember that.
She stood for a moment, the rain beating down on her head. Throughout the conversation with Lindsay she had known that Lindsay was correct in all she said, that she gave sensible and good advice. Her mind did not doubt that, but her heart did. I loved him, she said to herself. She let the words repeat, and repeat, until they were just a refrain, utterly meaningless, a fifteen-year-old girl’s delusion, a delusion she should have had the strength to discard years ago.
When she was certain she saw that delusion for the foolish thing it was, she began to walk. There were no taxis. All the buses were full. She walked the whole way back to the City, and she discarded the illusion, tossed it aside like a physical thing, into the gray water of the Thames, as she passed by Tower Bridge. She felt light, unburdened, and empty, insubstantial. She felt a quick furtive sense of betrayal, then walked on. The pain was intense.
Chapter 13
JAMES MCMULLEN’S SISTER WAS called Katherine, or, as she always insisted, Kate. She lived in a small three-story house in Chester Row, Belgravia, leased at enormous expense from the Westminster estate. Modest enough from the outside, but in a prime residential area, the house was an extravagance. The lease had been purchased some twelve years before, when Kate had been younger, prettier, and still in demand as an actress. She had then been a household name, thanks to her twice-weekly appearances in a prime-time, highly popular TV soap.
Then, not six months after she’d signed the lease, that bastard of a producer had walked out on her, and two months after that her character started slurping pills and within a month—a little month, Kate thought vengefully—well, what do you know? Her character was dead.
And so was her career. This idea, not a pleasant one, recurred now and then. Kate pushed it to one side, or drowned it in a vodka tonic, whenever it popped up. The truth was, TV chewed you up and spat you out, but she refused to give up. She still found work occasionally. Any day now, in the very next mail, the perfect script, the perfect part might plop onto the mat.
Meantime, she thought grimly, returning to Chester Row after an unsuccessful audition for a TV detergent ad, meantime this sweet little doll’s house cost too much. But it helped to keep up appearances, and appearances mattered in this business. She’d taken great care with her appearance today, but had she gotten the job? No, she had not. And now, to add insult in injury, it was raining again. She paused to glare at the sky, then quickened her pace;—her house was in sight now—and then stopped.
A man was standing on her doorstep, an extremely handsome man, an utterly gorgeous man, just the kind she liked. He was tall, with black hair worn rather long: designer stubble, long legs, narrow hips, tight black jeans, a black sweater, a black leather jacket. He looked moody and dangerous, like a French movie star. He looked like the kind of man who made love magnificently, then smoked a Gauloise in bed. He looked like trouble with a capital T—and he was ringing her doorbell. She increased her pace rapidly. Things were definitely, but definitely, looking up.
She arrived at her doorstep out of breath. The man looked down at her. He had wonderful smoky gray eyes, and an astonishing smile. When he spoke, the accent was the kind that made her knees weak.
“You must be Katherine,” he said. “I’m a friend of your brother, James.”
Kate didn’t give a damn who he was. He could have been James’s sworn enemy for all she cared.
“My name’s François,” Pascal said. “François Leduc.”
“Oh, of course…” The name meant nothing to Kate. She gave him a radiant smile. “James is always talking about you. God, this rain! Come in, come in and have a drink.”
“So, François,” Kate McMullen said. “There’s vodka and then there’s vodka. Is vodka all right?”
Pascal inclined his head politely. “Merveilleux,” he said. He looked around him. The drawing room was dated, cluttered, and not very clean. There were dirty glasses everywhere. Paisley shawls were draped across the sofa, scripts were piled on the coffee table, the room smelled of joss sticks or possibly marijuana. Chelsea, he thought, circa 1968.
He was surprised to find himself inside it so easily, but Katherine McMullen seemed unconcerned. She was rummaging around for clean glasses: a tall woman, slightly overweight, once attractive perhaps, but now in her mid-forties and aging badly. She had long, thick hair, heavily hennaed and tied around with a hippie-ish scarf. A great many bangles on her arms; she was wearing too much makeup and a voluminous multilayered dress. Over this she wore an embroidered Afghan coat; it was a getup some twenty years out of date, and Katherine McMullen very nearly carried it off. She gave a grand gesture of the hand—chipped nail polish—and waved the vodka bottle.
“Sit down, sit down. Oh, Christ, I’m out of tonic. D’you mind it straight?”
Pascal said straight would be fine. He said, “Thank you, Katherine.”
“Kate,” she cried dramatically, removing her coat. “Please. Kate.”
“I am not inconveniencing you, I hope?”
“Christ, no. Quite the contrary. I’ve had a bitch of a day. I was auditioning. I need cheering up.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. James told me you were an actress.”
&nbs
p; “For this TV ad. This stupid, pathetic, feeble detergent ad. Two tarts in a kitchen. That’s what they call them, those ads. And this little creep from the agency, five feet nothing, covered in pimples, aged approximately fifteen, can you imagine, he says I don’t look right. He says I have the wrong accent. The wrong accent!” She made a violent gesture.
“So I told him—listen, darling, any accent you need, I can do. I’m an actress, remember? You want Scots, I’ll do you Scots. I can do Irish, I can do Liverpool, London, Manchester. I can do American. I can do Australian. If you really twist my arm, I can do you bloody Welsh.”
She plonked a very full glass of neat vodka down on the table in front of him. Pascal smiled encouragingly, waited for her to sit down, then sat down himself.
Interesting, he thought, the question of accents in this case: an English voice on the telephone to ICD, then an American delivering the parcels. It was something he must mention to Gini, Kate McMullen’s boast.
“You must forgive me,” he said with studied politeness as she reached for a cigarette. “Turning up on your doorstep like this. But I was hoping to see James while I was in London, and I thought perhaps you could point me in his direction. I’ve tried several friends. None of them seemed to know where he was.”
“Oh, James…” She gave him a slightly sullen look, as if this explanation bored her. “Wouldn’t we all like to know? I’m entirely pissed off with him, actually. He swore blind to me that he’d try to get back for Christmas. We always go home to the aged parents then—you know how it is. Well, bloody James never turned up. Guess who had to help stuff the turkey, and walk the damn dogs? Shropshire in December is not exactly my idea of fun.”
“Swore blind?” Pascal leaned forward to light her cigarette. “You’ve seen him recently, then?”
“Seen him? You must be joking. No such luck. I haven’t seen James since last summer. He’s far too busy to bother with me. Always rushing around, doing God knows what. No, he telephoned. Said he was going off skiing with some bloody boring friend of his. And that wasn’t even true either, because I ran into the bloody boring friend at a party two nights later, and he hadn’t even heard from James, for months.”
Lovers and Liars Trilogy Page 19
