Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  “Have a drink.” She had moved to the sideboard. “Come on, Pascal. Ralph won’t be back for an hour at least. You can stand my company for ten minutes, surely? And you look as if you need one.”

  “All right. A whiskey—neat. Thanks.”

  He began to move around the room in an aimless way as Helen poured the drinks. Helen’s second husband, he thought, had been able to give her everything she had always wanted, all the material things he himself had failed to provide. Looking at the room, with its expensive furniture, wall-to-wall carpeting, predictable paintings, costly upholstery and curtains, it seemed to him both soulless and curiously bogus—like a stage set for some thirties drawing-room comedy. According to Helen, it had been redecorated at her behest, by one of the top interior designers in Paris. Her husband, Ralph, it seemed, had had simpler tastes, but Helen had converted him, of course.

  Pascal sat down on a sofa covered in a Bennison floral chintz. He rested his arm on a riot of faded roses and accepted his drink. Helen pushed several little silver dishes toward him, little dishes containing pistachios, black olives. They were arranged on a huge glass coffee table on which rested a vase of lilies and several piles of coffee-table books. Picture books about houses and china and rugs and paintings and furniture—about things you could buy. Were the books consulted? Pascal wondered. He could scarcely believe they were read.

  Helen was wearing a flattering wine-red woolen dress. Her dark hair was cut in a new style that suited her. Her jewelry was discreet. She was looking well, he thought; she was looking poised, rich, attractive. She looked like the wife of a man of means—which was, he supposed vaguely, how she had always wanted to look.

  How could he have been married to her for five years and known her so little, he thought. And the idea of his own mistaken conception of her deepened his depression. Helen liked material things—it was as simple, as basic, as that. Pascal, indifferent to possessions—interested in art, for instance, but perfectly content to travel to a museum or gallery to view it, and with no desire to acquire it himself—had assumed that Helen felt the same way. Surely, when he had first met her, she had been concerned with things other than acquisition? He could remember talking to her about politics, plays, books, films—and being certain at the time that she was as genuinely interested in them as he was himself. But perhaps she had not been. Perhaps he had simply failed to see her, or to understand her from the first. Perhaps the same was also true of Gini. I am a photographer, Pascal thought; it is my job, my life, to see—and yet I’ve been blind. He swallowed half the whiskey in one gulp, and, ignoring Helen’s little pout of displeasure, lit a cigarette.

  Helen had been watching him closely. “What’s wrong, Pascal? Because something is. You arrived with a face like thunder. I can see the storm clouds right now.” She paused, eyeing him in a meditative way. “You’ve quarreled with Gini—is that it?”

  “Just leave it, okay, Helen? I’m tired, and I’m not in the mood for one of your interrogation sessions—all right?”

  “As you like.” She shrugged. “It’s perfectly obvious, nonetheless. You should learn to talk to people about your problems, Pascal. It’s not good to bottle things up the way you do.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Who says I have a problem?” He rose, paced the room, and then, with a cold glance in her direction poured himself a second drink.

  “When you have a problem,” Helen said in a sweet voice, “you glower, then you pace. Deny it all you like. And in your present mood, I wouldn’t advise another drink.”

  “Why not?” He turned to give her a cold stare. “Maybe I feel like getting drunk for once in my life.”

  “It’s your funeral. Just don’t get drunk here.” She gave another irritable shrug. “How much longer are you staying in Paris?”

  “I’ll stay until Marianne’s birthday next Monday. I’d like to see her on her birthday. If you don’t object.”

  “No, Pascal. I don’t object. You can come to her birthday party. I told you. There’s no reason now for any hostility. We can all be friends. Ralph and you, Gini and me. We can be civilized.”

  “Sure.” He gave her another cold look. “We can have nice civilized meals together. A little civilized lunch, perhaps?”

  “Oh, I see.” She caught the inference at once. “That’s the problem, is it? I’ve sinned. I’ve actually dared to go out and have a normal lunch and a normal conversation with another woman. Oh, sorry, Pascal. My mistake.”

  “Not any other woman. Gini. And I know precisely what you said at your ‘normal’ lunch, so don’t bother denying it. You were making trouble, as usual.”

  “As a matter of fact, that’s not true.” She turned and gave him a smile. “I took Gini out to lunch because I thought I could get to know her better. Since she’s going to be helping to look after my daughter when Marianne stays with you, I thought that was quite a reasonable course to take.”

  “And that was necessary when you’d already met Gini twice? Don’t lie to me. I know you too well. I damn well know why you talked to Gini the way you did.”

  “For heaven’s sake. I simply thought I’d try to get to know her better. And I may as well say it, Pascal—when I saw her I was shocked.”

  “Shocked? Why? No doubt your female intuition went into overdrive. It usually does.”

  “You don’t need intuition to see when a person’s ill—miserable, deeply distressed. I was appalled by the state she was in.” She turned angrily, to top up her drink, then rounded on him again, her face tight with indignation.

  “As it happens, I was also touched by her loyalty to you, and her efforts to disguise how unhappy, how obviously unwell she was. So don’t bloody well preach at me, Pascal. You’re so blind. That hadn’t happened to her overnight. She’d obviously been that way for months. So why didn’t you notice when you were in Bosnia together? Why, in your usual way, didn’t you come home when you said you were coming? She thought you’d be back for Christmas. I damn near wept…”

  “I don’t have to account to you for my movements. Gini agreed I should stay on. There were aspects of that war I still hadn’t covered. And Gini understood that a great deal better than you ever did.”

  “Did she indeed?” Her mouth tightened. “Dear God, Pascal—you haven’t changed one bit. I begin to think you never will. Don’t you ever get sick of your everlasting wars? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you can’t spend your entire life sacrificing everyone, including yourself, to this obsession of yours? I thought you’d learned. I thought you’d begun to see that you can’t always put work first, second, and third, and everything else a poor fourth. Obviously not. I might have known it. The three years when you didn’t photograph wars taught you nothing. The second you got to Bosnia, you reverted.”

  “Yes, well, you, of course, wouldn’t begin to understand that.” He slammed down his glass on the table. “To you, my work never mattered. All it did was pay the goddamned rent. It would have been so much nicer, of course, if you’d married an ordinary businessman who worked regular hours for a great deal of money and came running home to you at six o’clock every fucking night. To you my work was always an inconvenience—a tiresome irrelevance, some eccentricity on my part. We’ve been over that a million bloody times, and I don’t intend to go over it again.”

  “Don’t imagine I want you to. It makes you angry and defensive—and boring—if you want to know. One can get awfully tired of crusades, Pascal. I certainly did. Take care that Gini doesn’t.” She looked at him sharply. “You have quarreled, haven’t you, Pascal?”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s over.” His face darkened. “No doubt that delights you. Go on. Here’s your perfect opportunity. You were always expert at hitting someone when he’s down.”

  “I gave as good as I got,” she said. Then: “Look, Pascal, I’m sorry if you and Gini have argued. No doubt you’ll make up. This time. And the time after that. You’ll make up because you love her a great deal more than you ever loved me.” As if ga
thering her courage, she added:

  “She’s not right for you, Pascal.”

  She spoke the words just as he reached for the door. Her timing, Pascal thought furiously, had always been good. He turned and gave her a look of contempt.

  “You imagine I’m interested in your opinions of Gini? Keep them to yourself.”

  “As you wish.” Her face became set. “But I’m damn well going to say this, Pascal—and you’re going to listen for once. What you do not need, Pascal, is a woman who’s highly sensitive, highly intelligent, whose emotions are very close to the skin—and Gini is like that, as even you’d admit.” She gave him a cool glance. “In fact, if you want me to be perfectly frank, what you need, Pascal, is someone older, with no interest in a career, and someone with whom you yourself are not passionately in love. You need an undemanding wife. Your life makes too many demands. Your work does. Your character does. And too many demands cause strife.”

  “Oh, fine.” He gave her a look of pure dislike. “So I need someone stupid, someone insensitive? Someone I don’t love? That’s my ideal wife? Point me in the direction of this paragon of dullness. I can’t wait.”

  The reply made Helen laugh; then her face became serious. “I didn’t say you couldn’t love her, Pascal. I said not being passionately in love with her would be an advantage.” She hesitated. “Do you imagine I’m passionately in love with Ralph?”

  “I haven’t considered the matter. Frankly, I couldn’t care less.”

  “Well, I’m not. I love him in a quiet, companionable way—”

  “Oh, I’m sure you do. And would you still feel that kind of affection if he were less rich?”

  She flushed, hesitated, then, to Pascal’s surprise, gave him a rueful look. “Very possibly not. I’m a realist. We have different priorities, you and I, Pascal—we always did. I don’t believe it’s such a terrible sin to want nice clothes, a nice apartment. And it’s not just for my own sake. Ralph is in a position to give Marianne so much. A lovely house in England, ponies, the best schools—with your consent, of course. It will be stable, and it will be privileged. Put your hand on your heart—could you ever have given her that?”

  There was a silence then—a long silence during which Helen had time to regret the tone she had used and to appreciate that she might just have made a strategic mistake. Pascal’s anger seemed to have gone; his eyes rested on her face; she could sense—and it perturbed her—both disapproval and regret.

  “I give her my love,” he said at last. “Isn’t love the best gift?”

  He had spoken very quietly. Helen turned away with a small gesture of distress.

  “Yes, well,” she said quickly. “You’re right. I wouldn’t argue with that—who would? Don’t make me feel small, Pascal.”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “No. Maybe not. Oh, dammit—you could always do this. And I thought I was cured…” To his surprise he saw she was suddenly close to tears. She brushed them aside angrily, then steadied her voice. “I shouldn’t have said that about Marianne. It was cheap. And as for Gini—” She hesitated. “I do try to be impartial. I do genuinely like her. I do want it to turn out well for you both. I don’t want Gini to end up as unhappy as I was. I don’t want you to end up miserable and embittered and alone. I’d like this particular fairy tale to have a happy ending… in my better moments I do want that.”

  She looked at him with a wan smile.

  “And some of what I said—it wasn’t that wide of the mark, was it?”

  “No.” He shrugged. “Your analysis of my defects—that was accurate, at least. Helen, look—I should go.”

  “Don’t forget tomorrow.” She moved toward him. “You have to collect Marianne, and stay with her, and bring her back. You have to provide fatherly moral support—at which you’re excellent when you choose.”

  Pascal gave her a shrewd look in which she detected a glint of amusement, but he made no comment.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll collect Marianne around nine-thirty. Good night.”

  Pascal had arranged to borrow a friend’s apartment in Montparnasse. He stood at its windows, looking down over Paris, winking back over Helen’s words. He could sense desperation very close. Angrily, he opened a bottle of whiskey, poured a large glass, and tossed it back.

  He waited, furious with himself. The alcohol refused to kick in. He remained stone-cold sober, and with a cold sobriety he examined his own behavior, the patterns of his life.

  He could see now, with a painful clarity, that if Gini had erred, he had erred also. He should not have allowed his obsession with his work to keep him in Bosnia so long; he should have understood the depth of her distress. It had, of course, been convenient for him to be reassured by her letters and telephone calls, to tell himself that since she was coping so well, so much better than he had anticipated, it was acceptable to remain another week, and then a week after that. Working, he had little sensation of time passing. He measured it in terms of the pictures he obtained. To put his personal life on hold, to concentrate entirely on documenting events that would eventually become part of history—indeed, as Helen had said, he had reverted to that state of being too easily and too immediately. He now deeply regretted that. Yet beyond that failing lay another—deeper and less easy to assess. He should have seen Gini’s desire for a child; he should have understood its source. In the play and flex of their relationship, it was necessary that he be tempered by her qualities as she was tempered by his. Her reaction to the events they had witnessed, a reaction he could sense but not analyze too effectively, seemed to him peculiarly female; trying to define it, he thought of it as watery, as springing up from the ground, as carrying all before it, as subject to currents, as flowing, so that between those she encountered—that boy in Mostar, for instance—and herself, there was and could be no divide: something Pascal could not define, an outflowing of spirit perhaps, passed from these people and rushed into Gini herself.

  This was not his way of operating. He had in the past always depended on those virtues which, he supposed, he thought of as male: a capacity for detachment, rationality, the negation of emotion as a tactic for survival. You could not weep and take effective photographs; indignation and anger were of no help when deciding on the technicalities of focus, film, and shutter speed under fire, or under stress. He had, and he knew this, dehumanized himself for at least the duration of his assignments. It was a strategy that had always served him well. Now, reexamining it, it filled him with doubts.

  None of this in the end truly mattered, he thought, rising, and beginning to pace. He could unravel his past actions and hers a thousand ways; he could not explain her infidelity, and he doubted very much that Gini could herself. It was an action so out of character and so utterly unforeseen by them both that it still left him feeling concussed with pain and uncertainty, half blind and half deaf.

  It did not, of course, prevent his loving her, or even diminish the love he felt for her; if anything, and with an evil ingenuity, the doubts the action engendered made the love more agonizingly intense. Was this event small, or large? He paced again, back and forth, until finally some hope returned, and he could again foresee some future life, many years hence, in which his continued closeness to Gini and hers to him had rendered that infidelity an event of minor importance, and one which had brought them closer, made them more rich in their love, not less.

  Instantly gripped by the old conviction, unable anymore to tolerate the patterns he saw in his own life, he reached for the telephone and dialed her hotel. Gini was now in Room 615. She picked up on the third ring.

  Their conversation was brief. No apologies, no recriminations, no interrogations on either side. Pascal was afraid of the damage of too many words; also he could hear pain, but possibly alteration, even obstinacy in her voice.

  He suggested they meet now. She quietly refused. He suggested she meet him the following morning, and explained his appointment with Marianne. He
suggested they meet immediately after that. She refused these proposals as well. They both needed time, she said, then apologized for this cliché. There was a pause; she would be working the following morning, she said.

  Pascal looked at the void that had opened up in his life.

  “I love you,” he said.

  He said the words first in English, then repeated them in French.

  He expected, or at least hoped, that this must effect a translation. It did not. She gave a small gasp he was unable to interpret, then replaced the receiver.

  The following morning, setting off to collect Marianne, Pascal, who had finally forced himself to sleep, was making plans. As soon as Marianne was safely delivered home, he would go straight to Gini’s hotel; if Gini was not there he would track her down. Not another day would go by without resolving this.

  Reaching the rue de Rennes, he was astonished to find that no search for Gini would be necessary. Turning the corner, he saw her waiting on the sidewalk opposite Helen’s apartment building, standing in the same place he had glimpsed her the night before. When she caught sight of him, she ducked back into a doorway. He followed.

  To see her was like a blow direct to the heart. It did not occur to him for one second that she could have any purpose here except to see him—but that supposition proved wrong.

  She claimed she was there to watch an apartment; she was there to work, and she would prefer it if he would leave. Another man might have argued, but Pascal, who could read her eyes, did not. He turned away, collected Marianne, and left with her, hand in hand.

  As Pascal and his daughter rounded the far corner and passed out of sight, Gini watched their departure from the doorway of the apartment building opposite.