Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  He went out. With a sigh, Gini sat down at the table; she moved papers and files in a desultory way, back and forth. She glanced over her shoulder, because when the house was quiet, she could never rid herself of the sensation that at any moment the door would open and her father would come in and ask her what right she had to be here, in his house.

  She had no right—she felt that. In front of her now were all the files and papers which confirmed her daughterly role: the letters from lawyers and real-estate agents; the letters from the IRS, from brokers, from banks. To these correspondents, she possessed the authority of daughter, executor and sole heir, as certified by a brief cold will made some twelve years before and never revised: ‘I hereby give and bequeath to my only child, Genevieve Hunter.’ Only her father, she thought, could contrive to leave her everything, yet make her feel disinherited. And she saw him again, as he had been in the last week of his illness, when he realized he was dying, and that the years of alcoholism had finally caught up with him. It had been the day before they put him on a morphine pump and he lapsed into unconsciousness. She had been sitting there, holding his hand, until she had realized that, for some while, he had been struggling to free himself.

  ‘Just for Christ’s sake let go of me,’ he had said. ‘And for the love of God, go somewhere else.’

  She knew, with a dull and painful certainty, that those words, spoken with a bitter amusement very characteristic of him, would remain with her for the rest of her life.

  Pascal was right, she thought; she had to escape from this house—and the sooner she did it, the better.

  She picked up the New York Times interview she had written, together with its covering letter, and fed it into her fax machine; she had asked Natasha Lawrence to reply by the end of the following day and to restrict any queries she might have to facts, but she felt no great optimism that the actress would listen to either request.

  She glanced towards the windows and the quiet, empty street beyond, hesitated, and then drew towards her the file of condolence letters. Only half of these had been answered, although she had set aside an hour each morning for the task. Here were all the gentle fictions from her father’s past friends, erstwhile editors and colleagues. They wrote kindly and with ingenuity, avoiding the issue of his drunken, wilderness years; she answered with similar evasions and reticence.

  Pushing aside the top-most letters in the file, all of which Pascal had seen, she drew out the one letter she had not shown him, the letter received almost a month before, from Rowland McGuire.

  The letter was brief, handwritten, and formal in tone. ‘I was sorry to hear the news of…’ Rowland wrote in black ink, on white paper, his handwriting firm and clear. The phrases he used were those of a polite acquaintance, observing the formalities, yet she could not hold the letter in her hand without remembering their brief affair. His letter brought him back—the strokes of his pen made her see his face and hear his voice; worse still, they made her remember a particular expression in his eyes, at a particular time. Closing her eyes now, she let herself watch an act impetuously and urgently begun, then repeated throughout a long night. She allowed herself to remember and, to her shame, she felt a brief pulse of physical longing for him, a faint echoing in her body of past sexual excitement and desire.

  This had never happened to her before. With a low exclamation of anger and distress, she rose from her chair and began to pace the room. A car passed in the street beyond; the air in the room suddenly felt thick with a choking despondency. Too many ghosts, she thought, and this house was to blame. She met her childhood self in the dark at the turn of the stairs; the past spilled out of these packing-cases; uncertainty was disgorged from these files.

  She moved towards the door, then stopped, catching sight of herself in a dusty mirror which had not yet been packed away. There, behind the veiling of dust and mercury scars on the glass, she saw herself: a pale woman, with pale hair and a striving expression. Examining her, she realized that this woman, with her vacillating gaze, had lost the first bloom of youth, was visibly in her thirties, and would soon look middle-aged.

  Wife. Mother. She mouthed these words at her own reflection. She thought of her son, whom she loved with the greatest intensity, and of Pascal, a gentler, quieter man now than he had once been. Fatherhood became him—but she was afraid sometimes, although he never spoke of it, that he regretted the decision to give up photographing wars.

  It was the right decision, she told her own reflection: his work had contributed to the break-up of his first marriage, and photographing wars as Pascal did was dangerous; it was not a suitable occupation now that he was the father of her child. She looked in the mirror uncertainly, but her face did not reproach her for a decision she knew was influenced by her. ‘The right thing to do,’ she said, turning away from the mirror. She sat down again at the table, and quickly, before she could change her mind, wrote a brief answer to Rowland McGuire.

  Rowland wrote formally: she found she could master this language equally well. A sentence of thanks for his letter; a sentence for her father and the funeral; a brief mention of the planned book; a final sentence for herself, Lucien and Pascal. She ended the letter ‘Yours sincerely’, as he had done. She was about to fold it into its envelope when the fax machine rang, then whirred. She had been concentrating on her task so deeply that the sound made her jump; she swung around, as if someone unseen had just crept up behind her and touched her arm.

  To her surprise, she saw that Natasha Lawrence was already replying. A brief handwritten note from the actress was scrolling out from the machine. She thanked Gini for an interesting interview, complimented her on her understanding of the acting process, and assured her that she had no objections to raise.

  This letter made Gini unaccountably uneasy. It was too complimentary; it was oversweet and artificial in tone. The lady doth protest too much, she thought, and wondered why.

  Tossing it to one side, she picked up her own letter to Rowland McGuire. On second reading, its tone seemed less unequivocal than she had intended. She would rewrite it tomorrow, she decided, and glancing up, she saw that Pascal and Lucien were returning from their walk. Pascal was laughing and lifting Lucien up; his son, who resembled him so strongly, with the same dark hair and the same grey eyes, was also laughing and chattering away in his touching approximation to language, a tongue composed of recognizable words and invented ones of his own.

  She saw them as if in a photograph, a shutter clicking and freezing this moment in time. As they were then, she would always remember them, she thought; in this she was correct. She would also remember her own immediate response, which was to hide Rowland McGuire’s letter, and her reply to it, at the bottom of that condolence file.

  In New York, at the Carlyle, Tomas Court watched his wife return to the sitting-room with the faxed New York Times interview in her hand. He had arrived here only a short while before, and the atmosphere in the room felt edgy and duplicitous, although he could not have said why.

  He was sitting in front of the television set and talking on the telephone to Colin Lascelles in London; as he spoke and listened, he flipped the video controls, and on the TV screen a perfect Wildfell Hall fast-forwarded, rewound, paused. He examined a louring doorway, dark ranked windows, a crumbling façade; he surveyed moorland, then tracked down to a deserted horseshoe-shaped beach, while in his ear, Lascelles’s very English voice continued to explain the security arrangements his assistants were making at various English location hotels. Behind and through his words came the pop, thunder and fizz of mysterious explosions. Court covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

  ‘You’ve passed that article?’

  He glanced across at his wife. She nodded, then, as he snapped his fingers at her, handed the pages across.

  ‘You can’t watch, listen and read, Tomas,’ she said, in a mild tone.

  ‘You’re wrong, I can.’

  She gave a small shrug, then crossed to her son, who was waiting in the doorway
with a stout, well wrapped-up Angelica. Natasha adjusted his scarf and zipped up his scarlet anorak. Jonathan and Angelica, together with some new, recently hired bodyguard nicknamed Tex, were about to make an expedition to feed the zoo animals in Central Park.

  Apparently, they did this every Wednesday; apparently, the new bodyguard was a great favourite with everyone, especially Jonathan; apparently, no-one had expected Tomas Court until later, and Jonathan would be disappointed if this expedition were postponed. Apparently, in the month since his father had last seen him, Jonathan had become obsessed with animals, birds, bats, reptiles and insects, books on which now surrounded Court on all sides. Court looked at the Times article and the books somewhat sourly. It seemed to him that apparently Jonathan had grown used to being mollycoddled by his mother and all the other attendant women who came and went here; Jonathan was apparently in danger of being spoiled.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘leave the boy alone, Natasha. He’s going to Central Park, not the North Pole.’

  The response, as he could have predicted, was a female closing of ranks, a shushing and scurrying, a furtive maternal embrace. Angelica turned her back on Court; Jonathan was hustled out; the door closed.

  Colin Lascelles, Court thought, with a certain dour amusement, returning his attention to the telephone, was now sounding more confident than he had in weeks. The particular game Court had played with him, a game often employed before, had proved effective. Court had wanted to see if Lascelles buckled under pressure, and had he done so, would have discarded him. Lascelles had not buckled, and he had finally found a house that was everything Court desired, the Wildfell Hall of his imagination, that place of exile and retreat which, for nearly two years now, had occupied his thoughts and appeared to him in dreams.

  One day, he thought, he would perhaps tell Colin Lascelles why he had hired him—a decision he had reached during their first meeting in that Prague hotel room when Lascelles, vulnerable, voluble and ill at ease, had told him that story about a woman once encountered on a Qantas flight, a story Court had found touching and absurd.

  Lascelles probably imagined, he thought, listening to him, that he had been hired for his professional abilities, which were considerable; and indeed, those abilities had weighed with Court, obviously so. Before even speaking to Lascelles, he had viewed every major movie on which he had worked and talked to numerous directors who knew him. He had acquainted himself with every detail of Lascelles’s background: his family, his privileged schooling and his training.

  He had known that Lascelles was the heir to a large estate in England, and had been since the death of his elder brother. He further discovered that at the age of eight, and on the death of his American mother, he had inherited a fortune from her family, the Lancaster clan. That fortune had been held in trust for him, but from the age of twenty-one Lascelles had been a very rich man, one who need never have worked again. He had worked, however, and worked hard. That fact interested Court, whose own background was poor.

  Court, meeting Colin Lascelles for the first time, had discovered that he resolutely avoided all mention of this background; he let not one single detail slip regarding his parentage, his wealth, his privileged schooling, or his celebrated home, Shute Court, where his family had lived for over 400 years. Court found that he liked this somewhat innocent and engaging man. He could see that Lascelles was trying to perfect the classless argot of the international movie world, and that he was not altogether succeeding. He noticed—such details always interested him—that Lascelles had the English gift of appearing elegant and shabby at once. He noticed too that the camouflage of the clothes was imperfect: Lascelles might be wearing jeans and a shirt with fraying cuffs, but the discreet watch half hidden by those cuffs was a Patek Philipe, and the shoes were handmade.

  ‘I first saw her at the Qantas check-in,’ Lascelles had been saying. ‘I wasn’t in very good shape. I had a hangover. It was the anniversary of—well, of my brother’s death, actually. I managed to get my seat changed, so I could sit next to her, then I saw she was wearing a wedding ring, so I never said a word. I just sat there and looked at her for twelve thousand miles…’ He had paused. ‘So when I read your script…I can understand that hope. I think everyone secretly believes that one day they’ll meet the—well, the right person. Only no-one ever admits it these days…’

  And then, right then, Tomas Court had decided to hire him—not, ultimately, for his professional abilities, considerable though these were, but because he saw that this troubled, inarticulate Englishman might understand obsession. The discovery had surprised Court, who believed all Englishmen to be cold-blooded, particularly Englishmen of Lascelles’s class.

  Court looked across at his wife, whom he had been carefully ignoring. ‘Checking the fire-escape situation,’ he heard Lascelles say now. Again, he placed his hand over the mouthpiece. He flicked the faxed pages of the Times article, written by some woman journalist called Genevieve Hunter, of whom he had never heard.

  ‘Why did you pass this? You scarcely read it, Natasha.’ His wife, back to the door, looked at him uncertainly.

  ‘It’s only short, Tomas. It’s fine. I was careful; I had to be. She’d been talking to someone and she mentioned the Conrad building.’

  ‘She doesn’t mention it here.’ He gave a gesture of annoyance. ‘And it wouldn’t have mattered if she had, since you’re not going to live there.’

  ‘You may have decided that, Tomas; I haven’t. And I’m not going to have that argument again.’

  ‘Fine. Drop the subject.’

  ‘I was alarmed when she mentioned the Conrad, Tomas—obviously. People will gossip. Word gets out. And I have to be so careful…’ She hesitated. Her voice, which had sharpened a moment before and taken on that tense obstinate note he most disliked, now softened and became conciliatory.

  ‘Anyway, Tomas, you’d have been proud of me. I told her I’d bought a house in the Hollywood hills. I made up all this rigmarole about it on the spur of the moment—and she bought it. She mentions that plan, and I knew she would. Journalists always love it when they think they’ve prised some new information out of you.’ She gave a half smile. ‘So you see, I can lie quite well, Tomas, when I have to…’

  That reply did not appear to please her husband, whom she could never think of as her ex-husband. He scanned the pages, then tossed them aside.

  ‘Maybe. You lie better when I’m scripting you.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes, but you’re right, the article’s fine. She didn’t get close; a million miles wide. Look.’ He flicked the video controls again. ‘Here’s your Wildfell Hall.’

  His wife, and Court knew he would never be able to think of her as his ex-wife, moved slowly forwards a few paces and looked at the screen. She examined the stern, gabled façade, the moorland, then the track, the cliffs, and the horseshoe-shaped beach below.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, on a slow exhalation of breath. ‘Yes. Except—the house isn’t that close to the sea in the novel.’

  ‘We’re not filming the novel; we’re filming my script from the novel. I need the sea; it’s better that way.’

  ‘Maybe so. Maybe so.’

  She retreated again a few paces and stood looking at him quietly, her long pale hands clasped at the waist of the grey dress she was wearing.

  Quiet as a nun, her husband thought, and with a sense of anger realized that it was a double quotation, from a poem by Milton in the first place, from the taped telephone calls of their persecutor in the second. He thought: the Collected Works of Milton; the Collected Works of Joseph King. Did the use of such quotations mean that King, who had a flat Midwestern accent, a somewhat mordant sense of humour, and an undoubted gift for language, was an educated man?

  King could be lyrical, also crude. The police might choose to categorize him as yet another weirdo, as wacko, as some sleazeball or screwball; Court did not agree. King was subtle and certainly intelligent; his phrases stuck in the mind. In one r
ecorded call, he had described, for instance, this grey dress Natasha was wearing. Natasha, who had been protected from some of King’s calls, was not aware of that fact, but King had described the dress, its soft cashmere, the way her body shaped the material, very well.

  Something small, fiery and malevolent began to stir deep in the recesses of Court’s mind. In his ear, Colin Lascelles had continued to speak all this while. He was explaining that they needed to discuss weather cover, and that he would be arriving in New York the next day, in the morning; he had switched to an earlier plane.

  ‘Come to TriBeCa,’ Court said. ‘I have a loft in TriBeCa. You’ve got that address? Come there.’

  Lascelles agreed and reverted to the question of security. Court’s requirements, he said, had astonished the various hotel managements. They had emphasized that Yorkshire was not like New York or Los Angeles, and that the crime rate was low. Why, so secure did their guests feel, even their American guests, that they often did not bother to lock their doors…

  ‘You’ve tied your hair back.’ Court covered the mouthpiece once more. ‘I hate it that way. Undo it…’

  ‘Now? Tomas—’

  ‘Undo it. I’ve been away a month. It’s not much to ask.’ He could see, almost smell, her reluctance. She hesitated, glanced towards the door, then lifted her arms. Her long hair was tied back with a black grosgrain ribbon. Slowly, she untied it and began to wind it around her hand. Blood mounted in her neck, then suffused her face. She lowered her eyes.

  ‘Tomas—Jonathan will be back soon. They’ll all be back…’

  ‘This new bodyguard—how old is he?’

  ‘Tex? I don’t know—young. Twenty-five, twenty-six. He’s been protecting some oil billionaire. The agency said—’

  ‘Good-looking?’

  ‘Tomas, what does that matter? He does his job—’

  ‘Is he good-looking?’