Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  She allowed herself to be wrapped up like a parcel in layers and layers of unnecessary but loving protective clothing, then they set off for Shute. On the track Colin was armed with a glorious optimism; by the time they reached the wood, he felt he might not be worthy; crossing the deer park, he felt he might be, if Lindsay could help him.

  Colin went into his father’s study alone to break the news to him. His expression was anxious; Lindsay waited and communed with Colin’s dogs, stroking their rough fur and their elegant muzzles.

  Colin came out after some considerable time, his expression astonished. It seemed that Colin’s father, so soldierly, so old school, so imbued with a lifetime’s belief that a man under no circumstances showed emotion, had behaved in a way Colin could never have foreseen. He had said, ‘By Jove,’—his only oath—several times; several times he had remarked that he was so surprised that Colin could have knocked him down with a feather. He had begun on a few terse remarks about man’s estate and his son’s future responsibilities, frowning fiercely, his moustache bristling. Then, breaking off, he had embraced his son; much coughing, turning away and blowing of his nose had not been able to disguise the fact that he was weeping.

  It was bad enough that Colin should witness this weakness; for Lindsay to witness it was unthinkable. He would be coming out to her, Colin said, in a few moments, when he had regained his composure. His parting shot to Colin had been, ‘Damn good thing you’re making an honest woman of her tomorrow. Left it a bit late by my standards. Luckily for you, she’s an honest woman already. Knew it straight off. First second I laid eyes on her.’

  Colin’s father regarded this remark as a witticism of Wildean elegance. So pleased with it was he that he was to repeat it to Colin, at intervals, for some years to come. Being of the old school, it was not a witticism, needless to say, which he would have dreamed of expressing to Lindsay. To his daughter-in-law to be, he said in a gruff way that she was a good woman for taking this son of his off his hands. ‘By Jove,’ he added, coughing again, ‘thought I’d never get shot of him…’

  Lindsay smiled and kissed the old man, the kiss causing him to suffer severe bronchial disturbance; he bolted from the room immediately.

  Lindsay was very touched by this. A sojourn here was teaching her, she felt, the value of certain conventions.

  So the wedding passed off the next day, happily, and without untoward incident, at a small registry office in Oxford. Tom remembered the ring and attended the ceremony with Cressida-from-upstairs on his arm, having discovered that Cressida, a sensible girl, had a way of making Katya forgettable. This discovery he had made with a little assistance from Colin, who had suggested one day in Yorkshire that this friend of Tom’s might like to come up to watch a day’s filming; of this assistance, Tom remained unaware, for Colin was subtle.

  Colin’s father attended, and—while not disgracing himself with tears—blew his nose loudly and continuously throughout the ceremony. Pixie attended, looking formidable and smiling pityingly. Lindsay’s difficult mother arrived late, but was there, and remarked only a few times, as she clasped her headmaster husband’s arm, that she was glad to see her daughter at last following her own example. Rowland McGuire, unable to attend because of work commitments, sent excellent champagne, his love, and a telegram which, when read out by Tom, was agreed by everyone to be very dry, very witty, rather risque, but very Rowland.

  Lindsay wore a whitish ensemble bought in a great rush that morning, a blue garter borrowed from Pixie, and a ring—an old ring, Colin’s father assured her—which had once belonged to Colin’s mother. It was a beautiful ring, and although Lindsay believed Colin when he said its stones were very ordinary garnets, she also knew beyond a doubt that they were rubies.

  Markov telephoned at intervals throughout the day, requiring updates on everyone’s precise degree of happiness; he contrived to conceal his deep affection for Lindsay beneath remarks which, as usual, were both affected and waspish.

  Mellowing slightly by the time of his final call to Shute, he announced he had decided it was time he made an honest man of Jippy. He was starting to plan a marriage ceremony somewhere suitably charming, such as Big Sur, or Las Vegas. Signing off, he informed both Colin and Lindsay that they had his lover to thank for their present state of bliss. Jippy, he added, sent them both—or, rather, sent them all—his blessings.

  It was that night in New York, much affected by that day’s events in England, which he had watched from afar, that Jippy began dreaming.

  These dreams, which first came to him that night, and continued for some nights afterwards, came to him when he was lying beside Markov, in a state between waking and sleeping. In these dreams, he discovered, he watched present and future with a steady tranquillity. This form of precognition had never happened to him before and he much preferred it to those flashes and flickerings which had previously constituted his clairvoyance.

  In these dreams, he found, he could watch over those he loved, such as Lindsay and Colin; he could watch them and others, with engagement, yet with distance. He could feel, as he watched, pity, fear and compassion, yet he no longer wished to intervene; he no longer had that painful need to seek to spare and protect; he no longer attempted to pull the invisible strings he saw manipulating this universe. He watched and accepted these inevitabilities.

  And so he saw, in these nights of dreamings, that the outcome for others was less benevolent than it had been for Lindsay and Colin. He watched the director Tomas Court complete a movie which, from start date to final cut, was almost the same length of time in gestation as a baby. Nine months, and the visions Court had seen in his mind, those ghosts, were fixed upon celluloid. Tomas Court, with whom Jippy felt a certain fellowship, moved on to his next movie. Jippy could see that ultimately his health would fail him; he could see, meanwhile, that the loving war—or warring love—with his wife was still continuing.

  Jippy watched this man and this woman and their son at a ranch in Montana, near Glacier. Then, with some reluctance, he scanned away from them, moving off on his dream thermals, to look at another man, woman and son, whose future lay, clear as a lake, spread out to his view below him. He watched Pascal Lamartine meet a fate that had dogged his footsteps for many years, and which Jippy had seen plucking at his sleeve that Thanksgiving night at the Plaza.

  It could only have gone one way, the dreaming Jippy felt, and he sensed that this person, who had been waiting for Lamartine so long, was someone Lamartine himself had been seeking. He might have taken many forms, this person, and he might have issued forth in the course of almost any war, in any country. It could have been Beirut, or Mozambique, or Bosnia: it proved to be a small town of little importance in Sri Lanka. The instrument was not a mine or a bomb, as it might have been, but a boy—a frightened boy, toting a scavenged rifle, who fired out of panic and confusion, as Lamartine raised his camera.

  The boy, horrified to see the realities of guns for the first time, bent over the body and touched the blood with a wondering finger. He had not quite believed, until that moment, how easy it was to kill a man, and he had not foreseen that a killing could happen so very quickly. He looked at the eyes of this stranger, which were glazing, then ran away, hid, prayed to his gods and vomited. Later, astonished that this event had been so simple and that he had survived it, the boy came to boast of his feat. He added embellishments; he fictionalized it. And dreaming Jippy, sorrowing for the dead man, sorrowing for the boy, saw that this fictionalizing, like the death, was inevitable and unremarkable. Similar things happened every second of every day and, sensing their clamour, dreaming Jippy moved onwards.

  He watched the consequences of this event, which he had only been able to glimpse before, and now saw through his dark glass clearly. Lamartine’s wife was graceful in her widowhood, assiduous to her son’s welfare, and assiduous in preserving her dead husband’s memory. Some years later, she married an American—a man old enough to be her father, her friends said—whom she had first encou
ntered at her father’s funeral.

  Was she happy then? Jippy did not stay to watch over her future happiness or lack of it. He moved off again on his thermals, which were swifter and more powerful than a jet plane. He could have paused in his dreamings in a thousand places; travelling on, he could feel their stories rising up at him. Sorrows drifted up like smoke as he passed, but Jippy, a kind man, wanted benevolence, so he moved on and on, pausing only when he was in its vicinity.

  So it was that Jippy saw Dr Miriam Stark return home one day from her women’s college, her mind preoccupied with thoughts of Rowland. She was a woman who lived her life by rules, and one of those rules—to let no man come close to her—she was beginning to fear she had broken.

  On a summer’s evening, heavy with the scent of roses, she let herself into the small house to which she had refused Rowland admittance. It was situated in that part of Oxford where a confluence of rivers and a canal create small packages of land; her house, looking out over water, filled with the sounds of water, was virtually moated. This house, quiet, scholarly, calming and familiar, she found both unchanged and changed that evening. Its rooms, as always, were orderly, but she could not look at them, as she usually did, with serenity.

  She had done wrong, she felt; she had done wrong to create this cool, quiet, virginal enclave. She walked through its peaceful rooms with a sense of mounting perturbation; in her sitting-room, with its books and its French windows opening onto the garden, she found her son; he had fallen asleep on a couch. He was still wearing his tennis clothes—he had been playing tennis with friends all afternoon—and his racquet lay beside him. He had a book on his knees, and in front of him, switched off, was a television bought by Miriam and rarely watched by either of them.

  This boy was fourteen, now approaching his fifteenth birthday. When awake, he had the clumsiness and awkwardness of any adolescent, but asleep, he was beautiful. Miriam stood there for some while, looking down at him. He was sprawled full-length, his long golden limbs stretched out, with the easy grace of some youth, some Adonis in a Renaissance painting. His head was tilted back, exposing the line of his throat; his face was flushed from the sun and from sleep, and his dark hair, in need of cutting, curled with a girlish grace around his neck and forehead.

  He was going to be as tall as his father was; he had his father’s hair, his father’s features and his father’s extraordinary eyes; this beauty was inherited. In the past, watching it form, Miriam had regretted this and tried to make herself blind to it. She had wanted this child as her child only, and she had wanted to deny the part his father had played in his making. It was, after all, the most minimal possible—the fatherhood here came about as a result of chance, a miscalculation, a copulation neither partner had intended to take place, which, afterwards, had dismayed both of them.

  The Rowland McGuire of that time was a very different man to the one she had remet recently: he had been more markedly arrogant, less scrupulous and more impatient. He was making a career for himself, as she was, and shortly after their one night together, he left to take up the first of his postings in America. She, glad he had left, glad he need not threaten her equilibrium, had continued to write her book. When, two months later, having heard nothing from Rowland McGuire in the interim, she discovered she was pregnant, she had felt a fierce angry pride rise up in her; she would have died sooner than inform him.

  So she had brought up her boy alone, without male aid, and this too she took pride in. She felt scorn at the need other women seemed to have for male companionship, finance and protection. She needed none of it. This scorn, and this shrinking from the male sex, from men who conquered and colonized females with such ease and such carelessness, remained with her. She wanted a lover only occasionally, and she hated the idea of a husband.

  So she did not regret her past actions; she did not for one instant believe in, or wish for, any future for herself and Rowland. Certainly not; yet still there was that sense, that perturbing sense of her own wrongdoing. Rowland McGuire now mourned his single state and mourned his childlessness; this boy, she saw, was not solely her possession.

  And so, later that night, when her son was in bed and asleep, a dreaming Jippy watched her pace her room, then, with reluctance, breaking off then recommencing, begin to write a letter. Jippy watched her pen move across the paper; he watched the black ink flow. Words, words, words. It was late, very late, before she finished the letter.

  Did she send it? Jippy saw her carry it as far as the front door of her house; he watched her hesitate. Then his air thermals lifted him away, to a house in London, a house overlooking a Hawksmoor church, the spire of which could be seen from its main bedroom. Rowland McGuire did not sleep, he saw; watching him, Jippy felt he might act, or he might not act. He might receive the letter, or, not receiving it, be told its contents in some other fashion, on some other occasion. In his dreamings, Jippy, who was soft-hearted and given to optimism, bestowed on this scholarly woman and this solitary man, a wish for a benign resolution. He stayed to see Rowland McGuire open his shutters to the morning and pick up the telephone—then he moved on for the last of his visitations.

  High summer still and he found himself in—ah yes, a hospital. There, his Lindsay, his dear Lindsay, and his good Colin, were watching on a black and white ultrasound screen, for the small fist, the foetal shape of their unborn baby.

  The ultrasound operator, a young woman used to the emotionalities of these moments, kept her eyes on the screen as she moved her magical device across Lindsay’s bared stomach. Lindsay, as she never stopped telling everyone, was very large, was hugely pregnant, was carrying about a giant of a baby. This baby, limbering up for birth, gave her permanent and acute indigestion. He or she never appeared to sleep, but was ceaselessly and exhaustingly active. He or she liked to calm down a little in the evenings, and wait for the moment when Lindsay hauled herself into bed with Colin. Then, just when they were curved together like two spoons, in a state of the most peaceful contentment, this baby would remind them of its presence. It would punch, kick, roll, somersault, perform uterine headstands. This baby was a wrestler, a boxer, a gymnast; this baby was a Judo black belt, and it was working on its foetal karate.

  Both Colin and Lindsay, needless to say, were immensely proud of these feats. They would complain, and they did complain, but they did so while exchanging glances of marital and parental complicity. Both were clear that their baby was unique; no other baby in the history of the world had ever manifested such prowess, such interesting characteristics. Colin, desperate for sleep, drugged with exhaustion, could still roll over at three in the morning and, with an expression of wonderment, rest his face or his hands against his wife’s stomach, so that he could feel the miracle of these kickings and strugglings.

  Now, holding Lindsay’s hand very tightly, Colin fixed his eyes on the screen. Science took him on an odyssey into the interior of the womb—and he found it was the strangest of journeys. He had expected this interior world to resemble the diagrams in the pregnancy textbooks he now consulted twenty times a day. But this world, he found, resembled none of the maps and sketches in those textbooks. What he saw resembled a canyon, a moonscape, or some deep trench under the ocean. He could see shapes that might have been rivers, rocks, or chasms, but none of these shapes was fixed; there was constant flux and movement; there were blips, as the operator, frowning, made some adjustment. Here, somewhere, floating in that mysterious amniotic sac, was their child, their fully formed child, whose small heartbeats he could feel at night when he touched Lindsay.

  He found tears had come to his eyes, for what he was seeing was so ordinary and so miraculous. Ah, dear God, let this child be well, he thought; let this child be whole and unharmed and born safely. Let Lindsay and me know how best to care for, console, guide and protect it from now onwards.

  The screen gave one of its blips; the landscape, or seascape, reformed. His wife gave a low cry, and the operator a nod of satisfaction. Colin saw his child. He could
see the curve of his spine, the outline of his skull, and a tiny clenched hand; this child flexed its fingers.

  ‘Goodness me,’ said the operator. ‘I think—just one second…’

  Colin’s heart stopped; Lindsay’s face drained of colour.

  ‘No, no, don’t worry,’ said the woman. ‘Everything’s fine; everything’s normal. It’s just that I thought…one moment.’ She gave a bright professional smile. ‘Have to adjust. This is a bit tricky…Ah yes. There. The cunning little…’ She blushed. ‘Sorry. Congratulations. There are two of them.’

  ‘Two?’ said Lindsay.

  ‘Twins?’ she and Colin said in unison.

  ‘Absolutely. No doubt about it. Look…’ She pointed. ‘There’s one, and there’s the other. Shall I tell you the sex?’

  ‘No,’ said Lindsay.

  ‘Yes,’ said Colin.

  ‘You’re right. Yes, yes, yes, tell us.’

  ‘A boy. And—wait a second…A girl.’

  ‘Oh, God, God, God. Darling, you’re so clever…’

  ‘I don’t believe it. I told that doctor. I knew I couldn’t be this big with just one in there. Oh, Colin…’

  ‘The girl’s the smaller—as is usually the way,’ the operator continued, frowning at the screen. ‘She has a powerful kick though—look at that. And she’s been hiding herself away behind her brother. They do that sometimes. Well now, Mrs Lascelles, are we excited? Isn’t that a lovely surprise? I—Mrs Lascelles, is your husband all right? He looks rather pale…’

  Colin heard these words from a great distance. They were small fuzzy words, receding from him fast. The room, beginning to tilt, was not recognizing the usual rules of the universe. Intent on not disgracing himself, he sat down on a small hard chair, and stared at the wall. He was a father now—no more tears, he told himself, and certainly no faintings.