Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  He ripped both letters into confetti, consigned them to his metal waste-bin, then, knowing both Emily and Frobisher were capable of snooping, set fire to them. He burned his hand, scorched a fine Persian rug and filled the room with choking smoke. Waving his arms and swearing, he leaped across to the window and flung it wide open. It had begun raining; the air was chilly and a fine mist hung above the trees of Central Park. He stared out at the same moon Tomas Court had found thin and sickly, and it seemed to him enchanting, creating a silvery city, a Manhattan of monochrome. Only the constant restless surge of the city and the ceaseless panic of its sirens disturbed him. When they intruded too much into his reverie, he closed the window again and leaned against the glass, surrendering to the homesickness for Shute that was never far from him, and which now welled up in his heart.

  He thought of the peace of its parkland, the grace and charm of Shute Court’s south façade. Beautiful in all weathers and all lights, the great house had a particular magic by moonlight. Perhaps, he thought, he could contrive it so that Lindsay saw Shute at night and by moonlight, when he showed it to her for the first time.

  A week after she moved into the estate farmhouse, perhaps? Two weeks? He wanted her to have time to fall in love with the beauties of the place, but he knew that once she was actually there, his deceptions could not be protracted too long, and the risk of accidental discovery was strong. He would have liked to take her there now, he thought; he wished that, at this very moment, they were walking hand in hand through the copse and out into the enchantment of the deer park.

  Within seconds, he was seeing, then scripting, this first encounter; then he was scripting Lindsay’s first meeting with his father—a little difficult this, for although Colin loved his father dearly, he knew his eccentricities were marked. Then he was introducing Lindsay to his two beloved lurcher dogs, Daphnis and Chloe; now they were in the Great Hall, now in the kitchen, and suddenly, he discovered, in his bedroom, in the peace and privacy of which room, Lindsay began to say and do the most marvellous things.

  Colin lay down on his bed and closed his eyes; his imagination now beginning to gallop, he gave it a lover’s free rein. He worshipped the roundness of Lindsay’s breasts and the smoothness of her thighs; he discovered she possessed a loving agility; locked in each others arms, they were just moving from a long adagio of kisses and caresses towards a crescendo of desire, when the telephone rang.

  Colin looked at his bedside clock, discovered it was three in the morning, and was immediately certain that only one person in the world could be telephoning now. He grabbed the telephone, waited for that wonderful voice with a catch in it, and discovered he was listening to the very different voice of Thalia Ng.

  His mind grappled with this disappointment and its detumescent effect. Gradually it began to register that Thalia, for once, was not swearing, and that she sounded both shaken and alarmed.

  ‘I need your help,’ she was saying. ‘Get a cab, Colin, and come down to TriBeCa—’

  ‘TriBeCa? Now?’

  ‘Yes, Tomas’s loft. And make it fast.’

  Colin’s cab dropped him on the corner of Court’s street. As he turned into it, he heard voices and running feet, then the slam of a vehicle’s doors. He saw that a long white unidentified van, too small to be a hospital ambulance, but possibly a private one, was pulling away from Court’s building. It moved off fast, without sounding its siren, but with the blue light on its roof flashing fear out of the shadows of the street and striking panic into Colin’s heart. He ran the last few yards, entered the building and, ignoring the elevator, ran fast up the stairs. The door to the loft was wide open and he could just see Thalia Ng, standing on the far side of that long black work table where they had both spent most of the preceding day.

  Colin moved forward into the doorway, questions on his lips, then stopped dead as he saw the extent of the damage in the room beyond. He stared around him, in shock and bewilderment. ‘Oh dear God,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Christ—what’s happened here?’

  Thalia was supporting herself, he realized, by leaning against the table. Her face was drained of all colour and she was trembling.

  ‘He called me,’ she began, in a low unsteady voice. ‘He called me an hour ago. I came straight over. I called his doctor from home, before I left, because I could tell—from his voice, the way he was breathing…’ She fumbled for a chair, then sat down. ‘Shut the door, Colin. I need a drink—find me something. Brandy, Scotch—whatever. I don’t care.’

  ‘He doesn’t drink…’ Colin closed the door and looked around him helplessly. He took a step forward, heard glass crunch under his feet, and realized that there was blood on the floor.

  ‘I know, but he keeps some for other people. In that cupboard over there.’

  Colin made his way to the cupboard with care. His passage was blocked by up-ended, smashed chairs, by a blizzard of paper, ripped photographs and coils of cinefilm. One of the cupboard doors had been wrenched off its hinges and most of its contents lay smashed and spilled on the floor. At the back of it, he found an unopened bottle of bourbon and one wineglass. He brought these back to the table, righted a chair and sat down next to Thalia.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Drink it slowly—’

  Thalia took a swallow, half choked, then swallowed a little more. Colin looked at her untidy frizz of grey hair and at her clothes, which had obviously been bundled on in a hurry. He realized that she was much older than he had first thought, nearer sixty than fifty, and that she had been crying. Gently, he took her hand.

  ‘Take your time. Thalia, can I get you something else? Tea? Sweet tea? You’ve had a shock—’

  ‘Tea? Are you kidding?’ Some colour had returned to Thalia’s face. ‘You have a cigarette? I know you smoke sometimes—’

  Colin hesitated, his eye caught by one of Court’s asthma inhalers, lying amidst shreds of paper on the floor.

  ‘It’s OK. Tomas would forgive us, in the circumstances. Besides, he isn’t here…’

  Colin lit cigarettes for both of them. Thalia inhaled, then, to Colin’s consternation, began crying again.

  ‘I thought he was dead,’ she began. ‘I thought he was dead. I walked in and he was lying on the floor right there, and I thought I was too late. Oh shit.’ She pulled off her glasses, and rubbed at her eyes ineffectually. Colin produced a handkerchief and handed it across. Thalia looked at this immaculate square of white linen, laughed, then began to cry again.

  ‘I might have known you’d carry one of those. You’re just so goddamn English, you know that?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Colin, ‘I do try. I just seem to revert now and then.’

  Thalia laughed again and dried her eyes. She took another swallow of bourbon and another deep inhalation of her cigarette.

  ‘You’re OK,’ she said at length, in a shaky voice. ‘Tomas thinks so. I think so—and that’s why you’re here. Tomas doesn’t have any friends. I couldn’t call Mario, because he talks. In fact, I couldn’t think of anyone who wouldn’t talk, and then I thought of you.’

  ‘I won’t say anything.’ He looked around at the chaos of the room. ‘Thalia, what in God’s name happened? Is Tomas all right?’

  ‘No.’ She blew her nose. ‘Shit, my hands won’t stop shaking.’ She swallowed a little more bourbon. ‘No, he’s not all right. He hasn’t been all right for quite some time. The asthma’s worse and—there are other problems: stress, overwork, lack of sleep, anxiety.’ She looked away. ‘So—something happened here tonight, and I don’t know what it was. There’d been a break-in, I guess. Tomas—someone had hit him. His hands were bleeding and there was this gash on his face, but the doctor said that wasn’t serious…’

  ‘But he’d collapsed?’

  ‘Yes. He was semi-conscious; he couldn’t speak. It was a bad asthma attack—one of the worst I’ve seen.’ She broke off and stubbed out the cigarette, grinding it in an angry way in a broken saucer that lay among the ripped papers on the table. ‘But he�
��s going to be OK—the doctor says so. He will be OK. Rest, medication—they’ll pull him around. Meantime, I need your help. You’re going to help me clean up this shit here.’ She gestured around the room. ‘And you’re going to help me fix up a convincing cover story, because we need one, fast.’

  ‘A cover story?’ Colin looked at her in confusion. ‘Why, Thalia? Shouldn’t we call the police? Natasha Lawrence—have you called her, Thalia? She has to know—’

  ‘She’ll know in my good time, if at all. I don’t want her involved now, and Tomas wouldn’t either. As for the cops—no way. Give me another cigarette and I’ll explain.’

  Colin lit another cigarette for her; she drew on it, then sighed. ‘You know how hard it’s been for Tomas to get health insurance on this movie?’ she began. ‘Very hard. He had to have three different medicals. The doctors didn’t like the condition he was in, and they liked it a whole lot less when they found out he was facing a tight twelve-week shooting schedule in the north of England, in winter. The insurers finally signed a week ago, but they put in a back-out clause: any worsening of his condition before the start date and they withdraw cover. You know what that means? No movie is what it means. This movie has a seventy million dollar budget—you’ve seen the figures. Unless Tomas is insured, the studio stands to lose most of that if he cracks up during filming; they won’t risk that. No insurance, and they’ll pull the plug on the entire project…So, no-one finds out what happened tonight, you understand?’

  ‘Of course I understand. But Thalia, this can’t work. You can’t keep this sort of thing under wraps. What about the doctor tonight? The ambulance men?’

  ‘His doctor will keep his mouth shut. He’s paid to do that, and paid well. They’ve taken Tomas to a private clinic so fucking discreet you’d think the CIA was running it. He’s been there before. He goes in under an assumed name and he comes out under an assumed name, and if anyone there recognizes him, they get a fit of amnesia, you understand? The doctor says two or three days should do it. Then he flies back to Montana and he stays in Montana. I’m going to make him do that until we’re ready to film. And as far as the studio is concerned, or anyone else connected with this movie is concerned—including Mario motor mouth—Tomas is in Montana now. Change of plan: he flew out there tonight—you got that?’

  ‘Will that work?’

  Thalia shrugged. ‘It’s worked before.’

  There was a silence. Colin began to understand. He began to see why there might have been those months of uncertainty as to Tomas Court’s exact whereabouts. He began to see why, when he was location searching, it had sometimes proved so difficult to locate his director. He began to understand, now, the numerous occasions when, unable to reach Tomas Court himself, he had had to wait for Court to contact him.

  ‘Thalia, how ill is he?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her face contracted. ‘I just know he’s better when he’s actually working. He’s better when he isn’t breathing in all the filth in this fucking city, and he’s better when he’s away from that ex-wife of his, as well.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he loves her too much. It’s like a sickness with him.’ Her face took on a closed expression. She rose. ‘Anyway—that isn’t my business, and it certainly isn’t yours. I’ll call her later today and tell her Tomas had to go back out to Montana. I’ll say some suit is flying out from the Coast to see him there—’

  ‘Thalia, you can’t do that. He’s ill; he’s in hospital—what if something happened to him?’

  ‘It won’t, and I can’t think of a quicker way to bring on another attack than have her weeping by his bedside. I’m telling you, he won’t want her to know. He never does—’

  ‘Why not, for God’s sake?’ Colin burst out. ‘Why all this secrecy? They were married; they have a child—’

  ‘He doesn’t like her to see him sick.’ Thalia made a grimace. ‘He doesn’t like her to see him weak. And you know what? He’s right. That woman can smell weakness in a man the way a shark scents blood in the ocean.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. That can’t be true.’

  ‘It is true. I know her. Take it from me.’

  Her tone was very certain. Colin looked at her, then sank his head in his hands. He could feel unease welling up inside him; his mind felt dazed and confused. Lack of sleep was beginning to tell on him, but he knew the problem lay deeper than that. He did not have the right kind of intelligence, or perhaps character, to understand the complexities here. Love was love, he said to himself, and he could not understand why it should be twisted into some power game. How could love be a sickness? Love seemed to him both direct and simple: he loved his father; he had loved his brother; he loved friends such as Rowland; he tried to imagine his relationship with Lindsay in terms of deceit or malaise or a power struggle and found it unimaginable. Just to prevent himself from making a declaration, from flinging himself at her feet as it were, required all his self-control. Love ought to be freely and openly given, he thought, looking around him at the chaos of this room. He could not wait to tell Lindsay the truth. Why did people feel the need to distort love with lies and evasions and pretences? Then it occurred to him that those who did so perhaps enjoyed greater success than he himself had done. His own record, of pursuit by women who proved to be interested only in his money, or of rejections from women who preferred colder men to Colin, was no advertisement for the virtues of baring the soul.

  He rose to his feet and tried to focus his mind on the realities of this room. It looked as if a fight had taken place in it, as if Tomas Court had surprised an intruder, yet the damage here, it seemed to him, was greater than any fight could explain. A fight might account for the broken chairs, smashed china and glass, but surely not for this blizzard of torn papers covering the floor, and not for a leather sofa, oozing rubberized stuffing, a sofa that someone seemed to have tried to disembowel.

  He passed his hands across his face and turned back to Thalia.

  ‘I still don’t understand. What can have happened? When Tomas called you, did he explain?’

  ‘No. He could scarcely speak. He just asked me to come over. When I got here, the door was wide open and Tomas was on the floor, like I said. There was no-one else here—’

  ‘But who would do this? Has anything been stolen?’

  ‘There was nothing to steal.’

  ‘Is it just this room?’

  ‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘He’d been in the bedroom too. I—I closed the door. You’ll have to deal with that. I’m not going in there.’

  Her tone was flat. Colin bent and picked up at random some of the papers torn and scattered at his feet. He leaned towards the light on the table and began to examine them. The first was a copy of the New York Times Arts section, dated a few days previously; it was folded back at an interview with Natasha Lawrence he had already seen, an anodyne piece written by someone called Genevieve Hunter, whom Lindsay had mentioned she knew. The photograph of Natasha Lawrence had been smeared with some whitish substance. The quote referring to her future home in the Hollywood hills had been circled in green ink; the words LIAR BITCH CUNT had been written next to it in capitals.

  He began to feel sick. He dropped the newspaper and examined the other fragments of paper one by one. Some he recognized as the various revised shooting schedules that had been littering the table the previous day. There were several others which concerned the Conrad building, some torn from books, others, to judge from their paper and wording, from architectural journals. Finally, there were scraps of what appeared to be letters, handwritten, again in capitals, and again in green ink. He peered at the words, which seemed to concern Natasha Lawrence and bodyguards; then he came across the first reference to animals. He crimsoned and let the scraps of paper fall.

  Thalia, who had been watching him in silence, gave a gesture towards the sea of fragments covering the floor. Colin saw there were more communications in green ink, hundreds of them, perhaps more, all of them ripped and
shredded and trampled upon.

  ‘You’ve heard about Joseph King?’ Thalia said, her face expressionless.

  ‘Yes. Mario told me.’

  ‘You heard he might have died, last June—killed himself maybe?’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘That was what people hoped. Those are his letters. Five years’ worth of letters—’

  ‘But he can’t be dead,’ Colin picked up the newspaper, then held it out to her. ‘Green ink, the same writing. This paper is dated four days ago.’

  ‘I know. I saw it before you arrived. In fact…’ Thalia paused, ‘it’s partly why I called you. I got afraid. I think he’s been here tonight. I think Tomas caught him in the act of going through these letters. I think he’s been listening to the tapes of his phone calls as well…’

  ‘Those tapes in the bedroom? Those are his?’ Colin stared at her. ‘I saw them yesterday—the door was open. Thalia, why would Tomas keep them? I don’t understand.’

  ‘He likes listening to them. Don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t dare ask him and I prefer not to know. But those tapes were playing when I arrived and they’re probably still playing now. I wasn’t going to go into that room and I won’t now.’ She gave herself a little shake. ‘So you’re going to have to do it. You’re going to switch the fucking thing off, then we’re taking all the tapes and we’re going to box them up along with the rest of this filth. Then I’m taking it all away and I’m getting it burned, which is something I should have done a long time ago…’

  ‘Thalia, we can’t do that; we don’t have the right. This is Tomas’s property, in the first place—and in the second, it’s evidence. We have to call the police.’

  ‘This stuff is killing Tomas.’ She turned away. ‘I’ve watched it poison him and I’m not watching it any more. And we don’t call the police. We do that and this whole story’s splashed across the tabloids tomorrow. There’ll be reporters and photographers crawling all over this. They’ll have tracked Tomas down to that clinic by tonight. Some ass-hole cop will be slipping those tapes to some contact of his, and before you know it, this shit will be all over the front pages, and the National Enquirer will be taking their marriage apart…’