Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  Pascal glanced toward Gini and Mary. Both were wearing black. Gini’s face was tight and pale; Mary was close to tears. He looked down at his order of service, which he saw was to include readings from both the Bible and Shakespeare, and the “Sanctus” from Mozart’s Requiem. His mouth tightened as he thought: All the best strings will be pulled.

  The very front row of seats to the right of the nave were still empty: the family, Pascal knew, would sit there. He thought of the funeral Hawthorne had been given at Washington’s Arlington Cemetery, which he had watched on CNN. That had been dominated by the presence of Hawthorne’s father, in his wheelchair at the graveside, and by the frail, veiled, black-clad figure of Lise, who had stood beside her father-in-law, her black-gloved hands on the shoulders of her two blond-haired sons. She had been escorted, on that occasion, by Hawthorne’s younger brother, Prescott, and flanked by his sisters and their children. He wondered now how many of that family group would have flown over, and would be here.

  He had the answer to his question shortly afterward. Beneath the magnificence of the music there was not complete silence in the cathedral but a decorous, just-audible hum as this distinguished congregation exchanged low-whispered comments: There was a feeling, despite the music, the incense, the quiet ministrations of ushers, subsidiary priests, and security men, that this was drama as well as a religious service; the atmosphere was akin to that in a theater in the split second when the audience realizes the curtain is about to rise. Abruptly, that background whispering stilled.

  The Roman Catholic archbishop conducting the service began to move forward up the aisle; he was followed by attendant priests, by a boy carrying a gold crucifix, and behind this slowly moving group by Hawthorne’s immediate family. Pascal saw the younger brother, Prescott, with a pale Lise on his arm; Hawthorne’s two young sons, various sisters; then, last of all, with a faint hiss and a faint whine, by the wheelchair in which S. S. Hawthorne was seated, flanked by two black-suited security men.

  When she heard that wheelchair, Gini averted her eyes. Pascal saw her stare straight ahead, into the high, dark, echoing spaces behind and above the altar. The music swelled and beat around his head. A few minutes later, the prayers and psalms began.

  Pascal could see that both Gini and Mary found the procedures confusing; neither was quite sure when to kneel, when to sit or stand. It was many years since Pascal had attended Mass, and the last occasion on which he had done so had been in a tiny village church in Provence. He found that a gap of some twenty years made little difference. These rituals and responses were in his bones; he knew them from his earliest childhood onward, and to his own surprise he found they retained a deep power over him.

  He found to his surprise also that he was deeply moved. He thought back to the time before he lapsed; he considered the fact that, in the eyes of his church, he had lived in a state of sin for many years. The church of his childhood recognized neither his civil marriage nor his divorce, nor the Anglican baptism upon which Helen had insisted for Marianne.

  His unease intensified as each minute passed. Was he justified in judging and condemning John Hawthorne? Before entering the church he would not have hesitated to do so; now, suddenly, he felt less sure. On an impulse, he rose abruptly to his feet. He was in an aisle seat, and could leave quietly without attracting attention. Suddenly he felt he had to leave: It felt unbearable to be here.

  Gini glanced toward him as he rose, then looked away. Mary had already begun to cry. Pascal turned, and walked out. He stood on the steps outside the cathedral. It was a sunny, cold March day. He began to pace back and forth in an agitated way. Traffic passed. It was a day very like the one on which Hawthorne had died. Pascal thought and thought. He stared up at the small, tight clouds that raced across the sky.

  When, exactly, had he realized for the first time that none of them had seen the full extent of this story—not Gini, not himself, not John Hawthorne or his father, not even James McMullen and Lise. He had begun to understand, he thought, when he realized that McMullen, standing on that high platform with his rifle in his hand, had expected those black-clad figures to be below them in the courtyard. He had suspected the truth then, and he had known it for certain when he watched McMullen make his escape with men he believed to be aiding him, believed were his friends. When they shot him in the back, Pascal thought: I knew then.

  It angered him that he had not seen any indication earlier. He had enough experience after all. He had seen this kind of covert operation carried out elsewhere in the world: He had seen it in the Falklands, in Beirut; it was commonplace in Belfast. Why had he not guessed that McMullen was not simply a lone assassin, but a man who was being used, a man who would inevitably be dispensed with once that usefulness came to an end?

  So who had been using McMullen, and who had determined that John Hawthorne had to die? The CIA, or British security—or some unholy alliance between the two? Pascal could see that Hawthorne, with his pro-Israeli stance, would have made powerful Middle Eastern enemies; he could also see that vested interests in America—political, nationalistic, or even military—might have viewed Hawthorne as an embarrassment best removed, for with Hawthorne, of course, died the truth about an incident in Vietnam.

  There were numerous candidates, and Pascal—suspicious of conspiracy theories, that twentieth-century disease—was unwilling to select one, unwilling to enter that particular maze. Whoever had masterminded these events, was efficient, as were most of their kind. Even as he led Gini away from Regent’s Park that day, he had known what they would find when they returned to the houses they had been using: No evidence—that was what they would find.

  He had warned Gini, who had not believed him, and who in any case was in a state of shock so deep she could not care. And he had been right. In St. John’s Wood, in Hampstead, in Islington: no film, no tapes, no notebooks, no disks, no handcuffs, shoes, stockings, wrapping paper. Every single fragment of evidence had been painstakingly removed.

  “None of it happened,” he had said to Gini later. “None of it. That’s the effect they’re after, darling—can you not see? They’ve taken the last two weeks, and they’ve made them a fiction, a dream.”

  So who were these shadows who had decided the time had come for John Hawthorne to be surgically removed? Pascal suspected that both the Americans and the British were involved, and that whoever gave the final order was highly placed. That suspicion was confirmed when, as the dream-spinners and the news-novelists got busy with the headlines, and the authorized version of John Hawthorne’s murder began to appear, the first discreet pressure was applied.

  Within twenty-four hours of Hawthorne’s death, a meeting was arranged. It took place on the morning following Hawthorne’s killing, in an anonymous apartment in Whitehall. Present were Gini and Pascal, an Englishman whose name was never used, an American who said little but listened professionally, and that security man drafted in from Washington, Malone.

  The Englishman wore an unlikely tweed suit, and looked as if he had just wandered in from some country estate in the shires. This was deceptive: He asked a great many questions to which Pascal was certain he already knew the answers; he had a chill manner and highly intelligent, highly alert eyes. When he paused, the quiet American took over; he concentrated on Gini, Pascal noted: The manner he affected was sympathetic and warm.

  It went on for over two hours. Pascal adopted the procedure that had served him well enough in the past: He simply denied everything. He had been nowhere, seen nothing, and had nothing to report. This, he could see, did not please them. The Englishman in particular was riled by his increasingly insolent tone.

  “Monsieur Lamartine,” he said, leaning forward. “Could we stop this pretense and stop it now? If you have no story, were not working on any story, and therefore have no intention of trying to publish your nonexistent story, why did you telephone two American magazines yesterday evening, and this morning why did you contact Paris Jour?”

  “Routine.” Pa
scal shrugged. “I work for those editors all the time.”

  “Look.” It was Gini who spoke, making Pascal start. She had so far said very little, and her answers, though more polite than Pascal’s, had been noncommittal.

  “Look,” she said again quietly, her voice very firm. “Why don’t we all stop this pretense? Pascal and I know quite well why we’re here. He has no film, no photographs. I have no notes and no tapes. You needn’t have bothered to organize this kind of clean-up operation. I discovered very little about John Hawthorne, and what I did discover, I have no intention of publishing at all. I am not going to write this story. And I’m leaving here right now.”

  The quiet American and the tweed-suited Englishman exchanged tiny glances. The American nodded. Malone rose and moved toward the door. As she and Pascal were leaving, Gini stopped and looked at Malone closely; she said, “Did you know?”

  Malone had honest eyes, Pascal thought—insofar as anyone in his profession did. His gaze met Gini’s without wavering.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I give you my word.”

  “Your word?” Gini gave him a cold look. She glanced back at the two silent men behind them, and the scorn in her voice was clearly directed at them as well as at Malone. “You’re trained liars, all of you. ‘Give me your word’? That’s a worthless assurance—and a meaningless term.”

  That view, that however rotten Hawthorne had become, his deceptions were mirrored by the world in which he moved, was one Pascal partly shared. It made him all the more eager to expose the truth, even though he knew they lacked the means. Gini was as angered by their predicament as he was, but more realistic:

  “No,” she would say whenever he raised the subject. “No. In the first place, I can’t prove anything, and in the second, I prefer the authorized version. Let them spin their myths. I don’t want to disillusion Hawthorne’s sons. Let them grow up believing in him. I don’t want to disillusion Mary. What’s the point in destroying his reputation now? He’s dead. I won’t do that, Pascal.”

  “Okay. What about his father?”

  “His father is a dying man. A broken man now too.”

  “All right—what about Lise? She’s every bit as responsible for Hawthorne’s death as McMullen was. She’s halfway insane—and she now has custody of their sons.”

  “I know all that. And I can’t prove it, any more than you can. Besides …” She hesitated. “I think Lise will be punished sooner or later, for sure.”

  “You mean that overdose will be arranged? But, Gini…”

  “Possibly. I think it’s much more likely that Lise won’t need any assistance. She’ll go right over the edge on her own.”

  “Gini, wait—think a little…”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  And then she would always turn away from him, and refuse to continue this argument. Once or twice Pascal suspected that there was one last thing here that Gini was not telling him, but even of that he could not be sure.

  And so, with Gini immovable and himself unable to act, the weeks had passed. John Hawthorne’s death held the headlines for four days; then there was another IRA bombing, further outrages in Bosnia; the matter was relegated to the inside pages, then disappeared. James McMullen was depicted as a lone killer, a man with a medical history of mental instability, who—after leaving the army—had become progressively reclusive, obsessive, and deranged. Although very few details of his military career emerged, some material was leaked that suggested links with and sympathy for Arab activists dating back to contacts made when serving in Oman.

  John Hawthorne’s reputation as a politician of exceptional promise, as a servant of his country, as a father and as a husband, remained unimpaired. Some of the most laudatory articles about him were published in Gini’s own paper, the News: Pascal believed that was easily explained. Nicholas Jenkins, far from being fired, had been just recently promoted. He was now executive editor of the entire group of Lord Melrose’s newspapers in Britain, and had been awarded a seat on the board.

  Pascal gave a sigh and tried to push these recent events from his mind. He began to pace the cathedral steps again. From behind him, through the thick doors, he could hear music and the voices of the choir. The rest of the service would not last very long.

  He leaned up against the doors and listened to the music. It quieted the angry resentment he still felt at the ways of his profession and the ways of the world. Perhaps Gini was right, he thought; perhaps some of his own motivation here was both personal and jealous; perhaps, indeed, Hawthorne might be better left in peace, and this story be better left untold.

  Within the cathedral, the choir’s voices rose. Mary was now weeping openly; Gini stared straight ahead of her. She felt as if she saw John Hawthorne through the music; in its cadences she could sense his paradox—the frailty and the good in the man.

  Her interpretation might be judged wrong by others, but she felt it to be true; indeed, from the mesh of deceptions here, the claims and counterclaims, it was the one certainty she retained. If she could not condone his actions, neither could she condemn the man.

  As the music drew to a close, she shut her eyes. She knew that she had made the right decision in remaining silent, and she believed that with time, Pascal would come to believe that too. She had told him, these past weeks, every detail of what had happened to her that weekend, as he had told her of his experiences. She had left out only one thing; although she had told him about S. S. Hawthorne’s threats to him and to herself, she had not mentioned the threats against Marianne. It was better, she thought, to shield Pascal from that fear, and she was certain now that Hawthorne’s father could never present a serious danger to them or to anyone else. She wondered, glancing across at him now, if he might have suffered a second stroke; she thought: he too has been punished; he will not live very long.

  The choir was singing the Mozart “Sanctus” now; it seemed to Gini as she listened that both she and Pascal had learned and gained from this story, and experienced doubt and pain as well. Pascal had found the strength now to abandon the type of work that had occupied him these past three years; she knew he would never undertake it again, and she thought that among the other types of work he would now look to, he would almost certainly return to the thing he had always done best, the coverage of wars.

  And she herself had learned too: Somewhere in these past weeks she had lost her dependency on her father: She had seen, by way of example, the destructiveness of Hawthorne’s father’s influence on him; her meeting with Sam had been a final reckoning; a burden long carried had been lifted: She no longer felt like a daughter, she felt her own woman now. She had little wish to see her father again; if she did, she knew she would have no illusions and make no excuses. It’s over, she thought; I’m free.

  As the “Sanctus” reached its close, the service ended and the congregation rose. Hawthorne’s family left first, proceeding slowly down the center aisle. As S. S. Hawthorne came closer, she could see clearly that these eight weeks and the loss of his elder son had affected him like the passing of twenty years. He sat hunched in his chair, which was pushed for him; his hands were trembling uncontrollably; he looked like a lost and frightened old man.

  Lise clutched tightly at Prescott’s arm. Her white face wore a dazed expression, as if she did not understand where she was, or what her purpose was here. She walked stiffly down the aisle, staring straight ahead of her, like a woman in a trance. Her two small sons, Gini saw, had been detached from their mother—and she suspected that this arrangement was likely to continue in a more formalized way. Behind Lise, the rest of Hawthorne’s family bunched: They gave the impression of a clan. Hawthorne’s two boys now walked with his eldest sister, flanked by her sons. Both Hawthorne’s father, and his wife, Gini realized, were the outsiders here as the rest of the family closed ranks, defending his reputation, and his children. Gini looked at the pale, set faces of the two young boys; the elder, in particular, was very like his father. She looked away and let th
e music from the organist calm her. Mozart. She thought of John Hawthorne, playing her a Mozart opera in his car. I find it gives me hope—while the opera lasts.

  She remembered the instinctive liking she had felt for Hawthorne then, and that odd, brief pulse of attraction she had experienced when sitting alone with him that night in her apartment. Now that she knew exactly how ruthless and how amoral he had been, the remembrance shamed her. But however much she loathed to admit it, the memory could not be denied, and the feeling—unimaginable now—had been there. Neither she nor Pascal, she thought, had been able to approach this story with that cool analytic detachment she had always claimed was essential to journalism—she was not even sure now that such detachment was possible. Journalism dealt in facts, yet the true story here lay beyond and behind facts. If she had been able to publish this story, she realized, she might have been able to document a particular instance of corruption, but she would still not have answered the central question: what was the source of the evil in Hawthorne, and why did evil lodge itself so effectively in the heart of such a man?

  The music in the cathedral came to an end. The general exodus from the church was beginning. Turning, she took Mary’s arm. Mary was wiping her eyes. Gini put her arm around her; she said, “Pascal will be waiting for us outside, Mary. We’ll take you home.”

  “What I believe, what I truly believe,” Mary said some while later, “is that John’s father was to blame. You remember that story I once told you, Gini—about how John struck his father when he was only a child?”