Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  “Look, Gini,” he said in a quieter tone. “Can you just stop and consider what’s at stake here? We’re talking about John’s life, his reputation—you know what happens when this kind of thing gets out of control. People talk. Even if you don’t publish, people talk, and the rumors get wilder and wilder. …Well, I’m not about to let that happen. That’s why I’m here.”

  He paused, glanced at Hawthorne again, and then continued. “Look, Gini—okay, I lost my temper just now. I do that. I’ve got a short fuse. But I’m not blaming you for this, not really. The way I see it, you’re just way out of your depth on this whole thing. And it’s not goddamn well helped by Lamartine’s involvement. I’m not going to rake up the past—I don’t need to. If you didn’t learn your lesson about that man twelve years ago, learn it now. Just take a close look at the work Lamartine does, Gini. That’s not journalism, and it never will be. It’s goddamn muckraking. Lamartine’s scum.”

  There was a silence. Hawthorne remained staring down into the fire. Gini looked at her father, and then looked away. Behind her, Mary moved. She too rose.

  “Gini,” she said in a quiet voice. “Think about what Sam says. I don’t want to make a judgment on Pascal Lamartine as a person. As I told you, I quite liked him as a man. But Sam is right. You can’t ignore the kind of work Pascal Lamartine does now. It’s cruel and intrusive and unacceptable. You can’t believe it’s ethical, that work, any more than we do.” She glanced at Hawthorne, then continued. “Gini, I think you should ask yourself, how much have you allowed your feelings for Pascal Lamartine to influence your judgment here? Would you have gone on with this the way you have if you hadn’t been working with him? He’s been a corrupting influence, Gini. I’m sorry, but I do believe that.”

  “Mary, stop. I’m not going to discuss this. And what you’ve just said isn’t true.”

  “In that case”—Mary sighed—“we go back to what I said before. You’ve been very foolish, Gini. Both you and Pascal Lamartine have been misinformed. Cleverly misinformed. If you won’t listen to us, then I just hope you’ll come to realize that. Very soon.”

  Her voice had sharpened, and she now made no attempt to disguise her reproof. She began to turn away, and as she did so, John Hawthorne looked up and spoke.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” he said. “But I’m not prepared to wait for Gini to see the light. I will not take that risk. Lise is involved. I will not stand by and see my family damaged by all this. I have to think of my children. God knows, they’ve suffered enough.”

  He turned away with a gesture of quiet anger and disgust. Gini stared at him. She could now see that he was deeply moved, almost unable to speak; she felt doubts begin again at the edge of her mind. There was another silence, then her father cleared his throat. He glanced at Hawthorne again, as if seeking permission.

  “John?”

  Hawthorne nodded.

  “Very well.” Her father turned back to her, his face serious now. “I’ll say this just once, Gini. I’ll keep it brief. There’s no point in all this fencing around. What I have to say is between us. In confidence. It doesn’t go beyond this room, you understand?”

  Gini nodded.

  “Very well. The truth is, for around four years now, ever since John’s younger boy was so ill, Lise has been a sick woman. She’s been diagnosed as manic-depressive by specialists in Washington, London, and New York. She’s on constant medication. She’s had electroshock therapy five times. She’s tried to kill herself on two occasions, once back in Washington, just before John resigned from the Senate, and a second time a month after they arrived here. She can’t be left alone, unsupervised, except for very short periods. As a result, her feelings of paranoia and persecution have increased. John’s done everything in his power to help her—and don’t imagine it’s been easy. He gave up politics for her because she claimed she needed him there with her and the boys. He agreed to take the post here because she was wild for him to do it, and said she wanted a bigger role. John thought it could help—a new city, a change of scene, new friends. But it hasn’t helped. Her condition has deteriorated. It’s been made a whole lot worse by her involvement with McMullen and the way he influences her. According to her doctors here, Lise needs urgent hospitalization and they’ve been saying that, Gini, since last summer. John has been fighting that. Unwisely, in my view. Lise is a lovely woman, Gini, but she’s a very sick woman too. She can’t distinguish fact from fiction.” His voice hardened. “And there are a few other problems too. It’s not my place to discuss those. But I’m here to bear witness to the fact that she’s very ill, well-nigh schizophrenic. Mary can vouch for that as well, can’t you, Mary? Yes or no?”

  Gini turned to look at Mary, whose face met hers with an expression of unhappy concern.

  “Yes, I can,” she said quietly. “Gini, I told you before about the scene I witnessed. It was terribly distressing for me, and quite appalling for John. You have to understand, John is in an impossible position. He has his public duties to perform. He’s been trying to keep up appearances, trying to protect Lise from herself. He has to think of their sons. And he’s borne all this on his own. He couldn’t even discuss it, except with the doctors. Gini, just try to imagine for a moment what he’s been through—”

  “I’m partly to blame.” John Hawthorne spoke suddenly. He had turned back to face Gini. The pain in his eyes was now unmistakable. He passed his hand tiredly across his face. “I have to recognize that fact. I have to live with it day and night. I should have acted sooner. I should never have allowed my sons to witness what they have witnessed. I should probably never have accepted this position—and I should certainly have taken the doctors’ advice months ago. But you see…” His voice trailed off. After a moment he composed himself and continued. “It’s such a cruel disease. There are periods when Lise is almost her old self, when I start to hope again. And then there is always a relapse…and she turns into a person I hardly know. She’ll suddenly have one of these terrible rages. Or she’ll seem perfectly normal—and then she’ll tell some extraordinary lie, when there’s no apparent reason to lie at all.”

  He looked at Gini and at Mary. “You remember the night we came here for your party—it was Lise’s birthday?” Mary nodded. An expression of pained bewilderment now came into Hawthorne’s features. “Well, that was one of the occasions when I thought she seemed better. She was animated, almost the way she used to be. And then, when we were about to leave—you remember, Mary? She showed you her coat, and the necklace she was wearing and she said they were my birthday present to her that day?”

  “I remember,” Mary replied.

  “Well, that wasn’t true. I gave Lise the coat and the necklace last year, back in the fall. I took her away for the weekend then, just the two of us, to the country. It was our wedding anniversary. I wanted…I tried—” He broke off, then controlled the emotion in his voice. “I thought if we could just have two days, two quiet, normal days…And she seemed pleased with the coat and the necklace. Then she put them away. She never wore them, not once, until the night of your party. Then she lied about when I’d given them to her. Why? Why? I can’t tell whether she genuinely makes a mistake or whether it’s aimed at me, as if she wanted to forget that weekend, forget our anniversary, forget our marriage. I just don’t know anymore….” He turned away. Mary rose to her feet and crossed to him. She put her arm around his shoulders.

  “John, don’t. Don’t,” she said quietly. “You’re crucifying yourself over this, and that doesn’t help anyone, you know. It’s better if you talk about it. You should learn to talk to your friends. Look. Have a drink. You’re exhausted, let me get you a whisky. Don’t argue. Just a small one. Come on.”

  She crossed back to the drinks table, and poured the whisky. Gini looked at Hawthorne’s tense figure, and a terrible sick sense of doubt welled up inside her. She thought: What have I done? I’ve been wrong, totally wrong….

  There was a long, awkward silence then. Hawthorne accepted the d
rink from Mary, who returned to her chair. Gini saw her father look at Hawthorne with a kind of embarrassed concern.

  “Shall I go on, John? Gini might as well know it all.”

  “Why not?” Hawthorne gave a bitter dismissive gesture of the hand. “You explain. I can’t stand to talk about it anymore.”

  Sam turned back to Gini. He took a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “Read that later,” he said. “It’s a copy of an article I wrote twenty-five years ago. It describes a mission John’s platoon went on in Vietnam, in November 1968. I was attached to his platoon. We were cut off, upcountry, in the jungle south of Hue, south of the seventeenth parallel, not far from a village called My Nuc. John’s platoon was under Vietcong fire, pinned down, for over five days. More than half the platoon were killed.” He paused. “Has McMullen made allegations to your newspaper about what happened at My Nuc? Because believe me, Gini, if he hasn’t yet, he will.”

  Gini hesitated. She looked down at the floor. All three were now watching her closely.

  “Come on, Gini,” said her father impatiently. “We know pretty much what McMullen’s been saying about John and his marriage. Has he made allegations about Vietnam as well?”

  “I told you,” Gini replied. “I’ve never spoken to McMullen. He’s disappeared. All I was doing was checking out rumors.”

  “About my marriage?” Hawthorne said sharply.

  “Yes.”

  “And about the events at My Nuc?” This time it was her father who asked the question.

  Gini shrugged. “I was told allegations had been made about what happened there. Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Her father shot Hawthorne an angry look. “Okay, Gini. My book on Vietnam is due out later this year—maybe that helped trigger McMullen—but let’s get this straight. McMullen’s raised questions about My Nuc before. He’s made allegations before. Twenty goddamn years ago. Did you know that?”

  Gini hesitated. “No, I didn’t,” she said.

  “Well, he did. Atrocities, rape, murder of noncombatants. He made them first to a U.S. senator who’s now dead. He took the story to two U.S. newspapers back in 1972, when he spent six months in the States. They’re a fabrication from beginning to end. None of it happened, Gini. None of it. When he tried to get newspapers interested back then, he was laughed out of town—and he didn’t like that, not one little bit. Gini, I was goddamn well there. I was with John the entire time. The village of My Nuc had been razed before we even got there. When we reached it, everyone in it was dead, including the girl McMullen claims was raped. Everything I wrote then is God’s own truth. I was a goddamn eyewitness, Gini, believe that.”

  There was a silence. Out of that silence, John Hawthorne spoke.

  “McMullen has always claimed to know of witnesses also, Sam. I imagine Gini’s heard that. There’s no point in this claim and counterclaim, not twenty-five years after an event. What Gini should do is take a very close look at when McMullen made those accusations, and what he has done since.” He turned his eyes coldly in her direction. “Since last July, when McMullen began on a campaign to influence my wife—knowing full well, I believe, how ill she was—I’ve made it my business to have McMullen and his allegations checked out. The woman he claims was raped was not some peasant living in a tiny remote village. For a start, she was from North Vietnam, not the south. Her father and her brother were both prominent Hanoi activists. In fact, her father was on the standing committee of the North Vietnamese national assembly. She was twenty-five years old when she died and she’d been a political activist since the age of sixteen. She was half French and she was extremely well educated. She had not only studied in Hanoi, but also Paris, Prague, and Moscow. So I think there are some questions to be asked about what this woman was doing in My Nuc, in the south.”

  “She was a fucking NLF agent, that’s what she was,” Sam burst out. “She was working with the Vietcong, Gini—have you got that?” He threw up his hands. “Jesus, John, this is a waste of time. Gini knows nothing about that war.”

  “All right.” Hawthorne showed no sign of emotion. “Then perhaps she will understand better if I explain McMullen’s situation. At the time of this woman’s death, he had known her, in Paris, for precisely two months. When news of her death finally reached him, he had a mental collapse—a complete breakdown. His parents tried to hush it up, but medical records exist. When British security started checking him out last summer, at my behest, they discovered McMullen left Oxford and spent six months in a private nursing home. It was after he left there that this obsession about My Nuc began. When my people started checking back, they found he’d even written three times to my office for information about my military record. I had never even seen those letters until now. They were filed as routine request, dealt with by a junior secretary, and forgotten.”

  “He wrote to me too,” Sam burst out “Twenty goddamn years ago he wrote. I put my lawyers on to him, and never heard another word. I just wrote it off, forgot it. Gini, you should know, all journalists get those kind of letters, alleging this, alleging that. For a man like John, it’s even worse. Every time he makes a speech, every time he’s on TV, there’s some asshole writing in, claiming to be his long-lost son, claiming John’s sending the guy personal messages over the airwaves in code—there’s a lot of nuts out there. If you want to stay sane, you ignore them. Usually, they go away.”

  He glanced at Hawthorne, then turned back to Gini. “Just remember, Gini, sometimes they don’t go away. Any American knows that. Sometimes they hole up, and they let their fantasies fester away and then eventually, they surface. They go out one day and kill a president or slash a movie star, or go into a playground and shoot up all the little kids.” He paused. “Now, I’m not saying McMullen is that kind of psychopath, but I am saying he’s badly disturbed. And I am saying he’s been trailing John for twenty-five years with this goddamn crazy fantasy of his.”

  There was a silence.

  “Trailing?” Gini said.

  Hawthorne gave a sigh. “Take a look at the pattern,” he said in a cool voice. “McMullen pursued an active campaign on the question of My Nuc for three years. He wrote to me and to Sam. We now know that he made more direct allegations in the same period, immediately after his breakdown, first to Senator Melville, then to two American newspapers. But he did more than that. As Sam said, toward the end of this period he spent six months in the States.”

  He stopped, and looked at Gini coldly. “Do you know who he spent those six months with? With some very distant friends of his mother’s. The Grenville family. Lise is distantly related to them. I am more closely related. They are my first cousins. I visit them often. That was when I first encountered James McMullen, their pleasant young English friend who was staying with them while he recovered from a somewhat vague illness. I met him first in 1972, Gini, at their house. It was the same occasion on which Lise first met him. She and McMullen became close friends, and remained friends afterward. They shared an interest in art, a passion for Italy. I always suspected McMullen was a little in love with her—his devotion to her always amused Lise. She and I used to tease each other about it. He’d actually proposed to her at some point, or so she told me.”

  His gaze became intent. “I now believe there was much more to that meeting, and to McMullen’s continuing contact with Lise, than I understood at the time. McMullen may well love Lise in some strange way of his own, but he is also prepared to use her. Through Lise he remains in close contact with me. And through Lise, and her illness, he thinks he has finally found the means of destroying me. It’s taken him twenty-five years. No doubt the revenge tastes all the more sweet for the delay.”

  He turned away with a curt gesture as he said this, and stared down into the fire. Gini looked at the pale, tight line of his profile, and she thought: I was right. Hawthorne might now have given her further substantiating detail, detail McMullen had been careful to leave out, but in essence the suggestion he was now making wa
s the one she had made to McMullen himself. It was left to her father to drive the nail home, and he did so at once.

  “Come on, Gini”—he took a long swallow of bourbon then slammed the glass down on the table beside him—“you’re not that naive. You can see the pattern here. This guy’s been nursing this grievance a long time. Now my book’s due out and Lise’s illness, her fantasies about John—they give him the chance he’s been waiting for. So he moves in for the kill. This time, when he goes to a newspaper, he makes sure he’s got a very different story to peddle. A sex scandal about an eminent man—about the one American politician I know who has a clean pair of hands in that respect. And who buys it? You do, Gini. You and that bastard Lamartine.”

  He turned away with a shudder of disgust. He refilled his bourbon glass, ignoring Mary’s protests. When Gini still said nothing, he threw up his hands angrily.

  “You talk to her, John,” he said. “I give up on this. Make her see sense. I can tell when she gets that goddamn mulish look on her face she’s not listening to me. You try.”

  “Very well.” Hawthorne put down his whisky and turned back to look at Gini. “I’ll say this. I don’t know what exact lies McMullen has been peddling this time. But I have a pretty fair idea. And he won’t have invented those stories either, though he may have embellished them. He’ll have gotten them from Lise. Because—and Mary’s seen this—Lise is tormented with jealousy. It’s tearing her apart. She imagines I have liaisons, affairs. She suspects any woman I have any dealings with in the course of my work. Nothing I say or do can reassure her—and McMullen has been working on that, to my certain knowledge, since the summer of last year.”