Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  Back in France, between wars, there was a long trail of women; he liked women, who sometimes accused him of using them, and he liked sex. Like most people, he had experienced good sex, bad sex, memorable sex, indifferent sex—but this, he had never experienced this.

  He stared down at the girl in bewilderment. From the distance came the rattle of machine-gun fire. The air in the room was stifling; both their bodies were slick with sweat. He looked down at her. He felt exultant, on the edge of some danger. He could feel the patterns of the world moving, altering, aligning themselves. They began to make perfect sense, perfect shape.

  This and this and this and this. The long, slow attitudes of lovemaking. He bent his head and kissed her breasts. He hardened inside her, and without withdrawing began to fuck again. He felt a determination, or absolute determination, to make her come. She was not, he thought, very experienced, but Pascal was; he was moved by her clumsiness, her awkward timing, her innocence of technique.

  “Like this,” he said. “Like this. No, more slowly. Don’t fight me. Yes, yes…” And slowly, stroke after stroke, it became sweet. Pascal forgot the tricks of pleasure, and the ways in which the correct touch, or word, or rhythm could make pleasure increase. He pushed into some oblivion, a dark place, and she went with him. It was frantic, then calm; first a kind of war, then a kind of peace. He reached across, found a pillow, raised her up on it, thrust deeper. When she came, she shuddered against him. Pascal was close to climax himself, but he forced himself to wait. He watched her abandonment move like waves of light across her face. She closed those astonishing eyes and arched her throat. He put his arm under her neck and brought her mouth up to his. He could feel her cunt pulse, and when he came he felt he came forever. Lying beside her, becoming calmer, he thought: I do not know her name. He began to stroke her hair, he clasped her hands. He kissed and licked the salt on her thighs, and her belly, and her breasts. There was blood on her thighs. She tasted of iron, and sweat and sex. He kissed her thighs, touched her, then drew her up. He held her close and met her eyes. It felt like drowning. He could feel the waters closing in above his head. He showed her his hand, which was sticky and wet with blood.

  “You should have told me,” he said. “I didn’t understand it was the first time.”

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “No.” He hesitated, then admitted the truth. “Nothing would have made any difference. Not once we were in this room.”

  “Before that,” she said. “On the stairs. I knew then. I knew in the street…”

  “So did I.”

  “I’m glad.” There was a triumphant candor in her face. “Today you showed me two things. Death and this. I’m glad, glad, glad you did that…” She broke off, then frowned. “I thought I hated you,” she went on. “At the hotel. I thought I hated you then. But I didn’t. Just the opposite.” She raised her eyes to his with a childlike directness. “Is it always like that? like this?”

  “Never, in my experience,” Pascal said.

  Later, considerably later, they left the hot little room and went out into the cool of evening streets. They walked by the harbor and watched the fishermen prepare their nets. They ate dinner by the harbor and watched darkness fall, and the city behind them become a place of shadows and moving lights. They talked. Pascal could remember, afterward, how they talked, but never what they said. He felt a sense of absolute communication; he sat watching her and wanting her across the table. He thought: How strange, so this is how it happens—without warning. This is how love feels, this is what it’s like. They had to touch each other, across the table, by the harbor, walking back through the streets. He had to clasp her hand, stroke her arm; in the dark, at a street corner, desire mounting, he had to kiss her mouth, open her blouse, kiss her breasts.

  They fucked again then, with a desperate urgency, in the darkness against the wall of an Arab tenement, her legs locked around his waist. They went back to his room, and still he wanted her. At three in the morning he took her back to the Hotel Ledoyen, he still could not leave her. He went up to her room. They talked, made love, talked: They had to be careful, she said, they had to be quiet. It was an expensive hotel, but the partition walls were thin.

  He remembered her father then, but her father was quickly dismissed.

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” she said, and a shadow passed across her face. She clasped Pascal’s hand tightly. “He never cares where I go or what I do. Anyway, I’m eighteen now. It has nothing to do with him.”

  And so it went on, day after day, night after night. It never once occurred to Pascal that she might have lied, or misled him. It was impossible: When he looked at her, when he touched her, he doubted nothing. Her eyes mirrored the love and need in his. When he looked into them, he saw only truth, a perfect mirror image of the love he himself felt. It filled him with desire, and with a measureless contentment.

  Day after day, night after night, week after week. They had no sense of time, time now could expand or contract A day together passed in a second, an hour apart felt like a century. When Pascal held her he felt he held the future: There was the rest of their lives in his arms. Sometimes, he could see, she looked ahead and feared; sometimes she would share his blithe optimism, but at other times she would doubt. The summer was passing. Her father would not let her remain in Beirut forever. He was already planning his own return to the States.

  “He’ll make me go back to England,” she said.

  Pascal clasped her in his arms. That was out of the question, he replied. “No,” he said. “We’ll go back to France. We can be married in France. I want you to meet my mother, my friends. I want you to see my village. It’s very beautiful. It’s in the south, in the hills. My father is buried there, in the little graveyard by the church. We could marry in the church, then drink wine in the cafés, dance in the square. Darling, I want you to see my home, to see Provence. …”

  He could see all these events and these places as he spoke of them, and he thought she could see them too. They would light her eyes and transfigure her face. But then, a few hours later, or a few days later, he would see that belief drain away, and a curious sadness return to her face.

  Once or twice he wondered if there could be some difficulty, or some doubt which she refused to express, but whenever he questioned her, she would deny this. He could not understand how she could seem to hesitate, or fear, when for him their future was so vivid and so inevitable. Perhaps, he thought, she doubted him, doubted his love for her? He found that idea unbearable. Waking once, seeing her standing by the shutters, her lovely body striped with dawn light, her face sad and thoughtful, he felt his heart contract. He must have used the wrong words—words were the problem: They were too small, too inexact.

  “Darling, don’t be sad. We’ll find a way,” he said, and drew her back to bed. When she was there, in his arms, he spelled it out for her as exactly as he could. He told her again that he loved her and always would.

  “This cannot change.” He caught her to him. “If it could, then nothing has any meaning, nothing.” He touched the tiny earring she wore, then bent and kissed it. “You should have let me buy the ring,” he said. “I wanted to buy the ring. I wanted you to wear it I don’t care about ceremonies, pieces of paper, priests. When we marry, it will alter nothing. You are already my wife.”

  She believed him then, he was certain. He could see belief, blinding, in her face. That blindness, of joy and desire, and love, they both shared—later he came to understand that. It made the rest of the world recede. It never occurred to him, nor—he thought—to her, that others were less blind, that they might talk.

  Talk, however, they did. And one night, when Gini was at her hotel and he was returning late, around three in the morning, from seeing Arab contacts he used in West Beirut, he entered that small room by the harbor and found Sam Hunter sitting on a chair behind the door. Pascal did not see him at first. He was staring into the room beyond. The room had been trashed.

>   There were very few possessions in the room, and there was very little furniture, but what there was had been smashed. The shutters were open, and in the moonlight, in that strange, eerie, cold white light, Pascal could see how effectively someone had done this work.

  The single lamp, a chair, a table, lay broken in pieces. Film coiled across the floor. Pascal’s spare cameras lay smashed in fragments. His photographs, his precious photographs, covered the floor like fallen leaves. They were crumpled, slashed, ripped. In the center of the room the bed had been stripped. The sheets, stained with the evidence of the previous night’s lovemaking, had been laid out on the floor, as if made ready for some inspection by the police.

  As Pascal entered the room, and stopped, staring at this destruction, Hunter rose out of the darkness by the door and lurched to his feet.

  He reeked of liquor. Pascal could smell the bourbon at four feet. Hunter wasted no time on preliminaries. He swung a punch at Pascal’s head, missed, almost fell over, then righted himself. He propped himself against the wall. The moonlight caught his face, a wet blur of rage.

  “You fucking bastard,” he said. “You goddamned fucking son of a bitch. You’ve been screwing my daughter. She’s fifteen fucking years old. She’s still at fucking school. Jesus Christ, you bastard. I’ll kill you for this.”

  He came at Pascal again, fists windmilling. Pascal stood absolutely still. He thought: fifteen—and one of the random blows connected. Hunter was a big man, a heavy man, and though he was drunk, there was force behind the blow. It struck the side of Pascal’s head, and Pascal reeled back.

  The anger then, swelled by sudden pain, made his mind blank. He looked at the sheets, and the torn photographs, this desecration both of Gini and of his work. It took thirty seconds, if that; then he swung around and hit Hunter back.

  It was, after that, an unequal contest. Hunter was the heavier of the two, and the slower. Pascal was lithe, strong, young, and fit. Hunter had once boxed for Harvard, but Pascal had grown up in a small village, where no one used the Queensberry rules. He smashed his fist blindly into Hunter’s face, punched him low in the stomach. Hunter attempted to grapple with him. He grunted, made a grab, lurched against Pascal with his full weight Pascal hit him again; Hunter grabbed his throat.

  Pascal punched him hard in the neck, then kicked him in the ribs. Hunter made a choking noise, and slumped. He fell to his knees and crouched there, breathing heavily. Blood was smeared across his face. He levered himself slowly to his feet, then lurched to the door. He stood there, breathing heavily, dropping blood on his Brooks Brothers shirt.

  “You piece of shit,” he said at last. “You motherfucker. Just wait. I’ll get you for this.”

  And, of course, he did. Pascal saw Gini just one more time, the following morning, at the Hotel Ledoyen. Her father was present throughout the interview, and the circumstances of that interview Pascal had no wish to recall even now, twelve years later. It lasted half an hour. By noon Gini was on a plane, under escort from Hunter, leaving Beirut.

  A day later, his commissions began to dry up. The New York Tunes cabled, then The Washington Post, then Time. For two years after that, Pascal sold not one single photograph to any major outlet in America. He neither forgot nor forgave Hunter for this. He felt, for Hunter and for those Hunter could influence, the deepest and most bitter contempt. It was from this period of his life, as he knew, that he truly began to take risks. Adrenaline sickness, perhaps, but Pascal believed the condition went deeper than that. In war zones it was easier to take good pictures if you did not care whether you died or lived. It was from that date that the myths about him really began: That Pascal was indifferent to danger and its possible outcome was something his friends and rivals refused to accept. They glamorized his ennui, Pascal thought. While he endured two years, three, of this withering state, they claimed—wrongly—that it was excitement that motivated him, a death wish.

  Pascal knew that to be untrue. During this period there was a void at the heart of both his personal and his professional life. Both the seductions of work, and of women, left him cold. He used women to provide brief sexual satisfaction; he used men, women, and children ruthlessly to get the pictures he needed. He moved on, to the next assignment, the next woman, untouched.

  He felt neither love, nor compassion; he was distanced, alienated, and cold. It was, he thought sometimes, a kind of living death, and it brought only one benefit: His new cold eye, his disregard for danger, gave his pictures a distinctive edge.

  His friends, not understanding that he was dying inside, that he could feel death in his brain, heart, and bloodstream, claimed he sought death out, courted it, made love to it. Pascal didn’t bother to argue with them, or correct their mistake—let them weave their myths. Why would he court death when he had already possessed it? He and death were intimates, lovers: Death was beside him while he worked; death sat down at the table when he ate and drank; death watched when he had sex; death greeted him every morning on waking and waited for him faithfully every night when he slept.

  That period of his life was not something he liked to recall now. It had, in due course, become less grim. He had almost persuaded himself that it was possible to escape from that prison cell. He had married, believing this. He had tried hard to hide the darkness that clouded the edge of his vision from his wife. When she was expecting their first child, he allowed himself to hope—and he continued to cling to hope even after the miscarriage. Later, there was Marianne, and he saw her, his living child, as a great gift. Amid the tumult and wreckage of a dying marriage, Marianne was music: By her very existence, through the passionate and protective love he felt for her, she sounded a sweet, pure, and enduring note.

  She gave him his heart back; in his capacity as her father, if in no other, he could know death receded and he lived. Marianne was his comfort, the one person who could give meaning to his life. Yet now he could not be with her, except by appointment, by permission, and so even this last hope was marred by grief.

  It was now four in the morning, still dark outside, the deadest time of night. With a sudden desperation Pascal rose to his feet. He walked back and forth in the room. With despair he examined and reexamined these incidents, these states of mind, this plot that was his life. It seemed to him then, momentarily, that all the wrong turnings he had taken linked back to the same time, and the same place. That little room by the harbor, in a once-beautiful city. How different might things be now if he had acted differently then?

  He stopped pacing, crossed the room, and stood silently by a door. Beyond that door, Gini slept. For an instant he felt a wild and heady conviction that if he opened that door now, even if he spoke to her only, and did nothing else, he could perhaps undo time, mend, amend, the course of his past life.

  He actually allowed himself to touch the handle of the door, and to turn it. Then he stepped back. The conviction fell away, and he saw it for what it was: a by-product of fatigue, a delusion fed by despair and lack of sleep. He was, he thought, no longer that impetuous young man he had been in Beirut. These days he placed greater value on friendship than on love. Friendship was less combustible, but endured longer. Love affairs, for the most part, had painful, messy conclusions. He believed now that their corollary was parting, just as the corollary of marriage was disillusion, a hurt child, a broken heart, and divorce.

  He returned to the sofa and lay down. He extinguished the light. For the rest of the hours remaining before dawn he forced himself to think only of work, and of the Hawthornes, that perfect couple who might or might not have achieved that rare thing, a perfect marriage. His mind dwelt in their story, their space. The hours passed; he did not sleep.

  In the room beyond, Gini also lay awake. She heard Pascal’s footsteps approach her door, then turn back. She almost called out to him, then remained silent instead. Shortly afterward, the band of light beneath her door disappeared. Gini lay in the dark and tried to will herself to sleep. When sleep finally came, she dreamed vividly. S
he was searching a war-torn city, despairing and frantic. The object of her search was uncertain, and the details of the dream shadowy. Sometimes the city resembled London, and sometimes Beirut.

  She woke exhausted. Gray light filtered through her curtains. From beyond came the sound of rain beating down on the small enclosed yard behind the house. When she went out into the living room, Pascal was standing by her desk. His back was toward her; the air was rich with the smell of coffee brewing. There was a faint hum of machinery. When Pascal turned, she could detect no signs of strain or sleeplessness. His face was concentrated and alert. My colleague, Gini thought. He held out to her a fax.

  “The story continues,” he said. “It’s speeding up. Appleyard has just surfaced, look. He’s flying into London this morning, he says. He’s proposing a meeting—and we can fit it in, just. We can see him, then go on to your stepmother’s house. Meet the Hawthornes as planned.” He paused, half smiled. “It’s Saturday today, Gini,” he said.

  Gini said nothing. Her dream was still with her. She was not certain of the year, she felt, let alone the day of the week.

  She took the fax from Pascal. It was brief, typed, but otherwise characteristic of Appleyard. Assuming availability, he was proposing they meet for dinner at a Mayfair restaurant, at eight o’clock that night.

  Chapter 15

  THAT SATURDAY MORNING MARY rose early. There were twenty people coming to dinner. She could no longer afford staff, and twenty people to feed meant hours of work. Mary did not mind this; from her childhood, it had always given her pleasure to cook. Sometimes, it was true, she would look back with a certain wry nostalgia to her embassy days. She would think of her father and mother’s perfectionism, and then of her husband’s and her own: such a retinue of cooks and secretaries and butlers and helpers. All she had had to do was fuss about placements and precedence and how she would dress. All those years spent carefully entertaining a succession of strangers—she looked back and found she did not regret them one jot.