She had mentioned someone named Emily but no other names, and he noticed that there was no wedding ring on her hand, nor had there been mention of any partner or suitor – no, suitors, since there must be many more than one of them. But though he was convinced he didn’t stand a chance with this woman, he was still sufficiently enthralled that he was scared to spoil it – though what was it? He just knew he was in the presence of something he hadn’t felt before, and he was daunted by whatever this feeling was. He had the sense that he needed to be the best he could with her, as well as the intuition that it would be worth the effort. There was a sense of challenge about her, an attractive one – not daunting but simply . . . challenging.
Forget it, he suddenly told himself, reining in the fantasy. It’s just lunch! Strictly speaking she shouldn’t be sitting with him at all, but instead be with Eckerly having one of the healthy alcohol-free catered lunches visiting big shots were given in the board-room – a place where Renoir only appeared when he had to report on any especially tricky employee issue which might land the company in trouble.
‘So,’ she said lightly, ‘do you always get your man?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, like John Wayne.
‘Don’t they ever get away?’
‘Never,’ he said with mock finality, then he admitted, ‘though one almost did.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she said, and he was pleased she didn’t seem in any hurry to go.
‘There was a woman in marketing who suddenly left the company, without any warning. When we searched her computer at work we discovered she had hacked into a board member’s PC to look at the quarterly results – before they’d been announced. She must have made a killing shorting the stock, because when she disappeared she took bearer bonds with her worth $600,000. But we couldn’t trace the trade.’
‘Why not?’
‘Usually with insider trading, people either make the trade themselves or get a relative or friend to do it for them. Easy to trace – that’s why they get caught. But this woman was too smart for that. She had opened an account with some old boy she’d met on vacation in La Jolla. Not long after, the old boy died. But she kept the account alive. That meant that when the Feds checked the particular trade in our shares they hit a brick wall. All they found was an account in a dead man’s name. The money was long gone – she must have moved it offshore, and kept moving it until it was untraceable.’
‘But how did you figure all this out?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said a little sheepishly. ‘The Florida police arrested her eighteen months later, using a fake ID to cash a cheque in a drugstore. They ran her prints through the missing persons database and discovered we were looking for her. She panicked and spilled the beans. If she’d kept her nerve we could never have proved a thing. In fact, if she hadn’t run away in the first place, I don’t see how she’d ever have been found out. It’s only when she disappeared so suddenly that we got suspicious. Ticky and I call her scam the Dead Man’s Hat.’
She laughed, and he looked at his watch and discovered they had been seated at the table for over two hours. It was almost four o’clock and very few people were left in the restaurant. Have I bored her? he suddenly wondered, and called for the check.
He paid and they went out into a sky-blue afternoon, where he had to resist the temptation to ask her if she’d like to drive to Monterey, or, closer, Santa Cruz, or maybe just Golden Gate Park – anywhere but back to the office, though behind the fantasised offer he had in mind the attractions of a $59 motel room of such spare decor that they would have no choice but to go to bed together right away. Why was he having this fantasy about a woman he had never met before and would never meet again? That’s why, he thought, and that’s why you’ve talked so much about yourself. Because you’ll never see her again. So you’re safe. ‘Safe’ – he even liked the sound of the word.
As he unlocked the driver’s door to the ageing Saab he had bought off an old army buddy down on his luck, she asked, ‘Do you live near here?’
He shook his head. ‘I live in San Francisco. We have an office where I’m based about half the time. Though not when important guests come to town.’
She laughed. ‘So what’s there to do in the city at the weekend?’
He shrugged. ‘Not a lot compared to London, I bet.’ Until they broke up he’d spent weekends with his girlfriend, Jenny. She worked on Saturday mornings, in the antiques shop she owned off Russian Hill, and he would meet up with her in the afternoon, have dinner out – nothing fancy, Italian or a bar and grill – then together they would usually go back to his place. Lately nothing much had changed – well, except for no steady girlfriend. Sometimes he had a ‘date’, and sometimes Saturday night he didn’t sleep alone. Now he remembered: ‘Actually, this weekend I’m going away.’
She looked at him coolly then raised a mild eyebrow until he explained. ‘I’m going out to the foothills of the Sierra, to a cabin of some friends of mine. Kaufman, the investigator, he and his wife are in New York for a couple of months so I said I’d open it up for them.’
‘Nice country?’
‘Beautiful, though it’s a long drive to get there. There’s a big lake and a long swelling hill – a kind of mini-mountain. It’s halfway up it, in a big stand of virgin pine, so it’s cool even this time of year.’
‘It sounds heaven,’ she said.
‘It is,’ he said, not thinking much about the way she was looking at him.
‘Does your girlfriend like it?’
‘She would,’ he said slowly, watching her expression. It was hard to read. ‘If I had one.’
She gave a small smile which looked involuntary; the muscles just below her eyes contracted momentarily. ‘I’m not flying out until Monday. Can you recommend places for me to go?’
‘You mean in the city?’
‘I suppose so. I don’t have a car.’
As he drove her back, he reeled off a list of sights: the Embarcadero, the boat trip to Alcatraz, a bus tour of Marin and the national park, Fisherman’s Wharf, the trolley car in Union Square. Not his San Francisco, perhaps, but this covered the tourist beat and then some, though he couldn’t tell as he talked whether she was listening carefully or not.
At his office she came up with him to phone for a taxi, and while she waited he took a call from the Pentagon, which he regretted when he couldn’t get the man off the phone – Renoir suddenly realised that while he was discussing the ambiguous polygraph of a low-level coding applicant, she would be leaving. Then just as he finally got off, her cell phone rang and she picked it up, listened and said, ‘Tell him I’ll be right down.’ She looked at Renoir. ‘My cab’s waiting for me,’ she declared. She extended her hand. ‘It’s been nice meeting you. Thanks for your help.’
‘It was a pleasure,’ he said with a slight stumble to his voice, wishing there were some way to prolong the conversation. What had happened to their easy lunchtime talk? For a moment the silence hung between them like the thickening mist he’d grown up with in the Sunset District, rising to obscure a view which only moments before had been clear and beautiful. She turned and walked briskly out of the room, though he thought that as she neared the door she paused ever so briefly. Then she was gone. He wondered what to do as he listened to the noise of her heels clicking along the corridor floor, then heard the dual doors to the central stairs swing once, then twice, as she walked through them. And he stood feeling absolutely terrible, imagining her descending the stairs, then out through reception into the parking lot; seeing her in his mind’s eye as she got in the cab and drove right out of his life.
Suddenly he was moving fast down the corridor, then faster down the stairs – two at a time – and as he powered out the front doors he was calling to her even though she hadn’t made it to the cab, but he was taking no chances now, and as he sprinted she turned and looked at him with a small wry smile and he came to a halt before her, slightly out of breath, and lifted his head up as he inhaled and watched the
inquisitive look in her eyes and the quizzical tilt to her head and he said in a breathless rush, ‘Do you want to come too?’
And she immediately knew what he meant, for all she said, quietly now, was, ‘I’d love to.’ And then she laughed – the gutsy laugh he already liked to provoke, and he stopped feeling quite so foolish and laughed too.
*
He picked her up in downtown San Francisco at the Malmarlot Hotel, which was small, tasteful and expensive. It was an unusual choice for an oil consultant (he had expected the Hilton), but then so was opting for a weekend roughing it in the Sierra foothills. Did she have any idea what she was in for? He’d had several hours to think about this trip and worry that he hadn’t warned her that it was really the most primitive of cabins in remote and rugged country, and that the nearest town was rough and ready rather than touristy or smart.
So he was relieved that she was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt; she carried a jacket and a small overnight bag which she threw in the back seat. He navigated through Union Square then joined the line for the Bay Bridge. Neither spoke and he turned the radio up, partly as cover for the awkward silence that sat between them, partly to listen for traffic jams. It was only as they moved onto the bridge that he turned it down.
‘Were you always from San Francisco?’ she said, stretching her legs and sitting up in her seat.
‘Pretty much. Do you know Haight Ashbury?’
‘Just by reputation. Hippies. Acid, Free Love.’
He nodded. ‘That’s where I was born.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Somebody had to live there. And my mom and I did.’
‘Your father?’
‘Never knew him. He was gone before I was two. The last my mother heard of him he was playing piano in a bar in Alaska. But that was over thirty years ago.’
‘Didn’t you ever want to find him?’
‘Nope.’ I had a father figure, he was tempted to say but didn’t. Somehow it would have been a betrayal if he’d gone looking for the bum who’d given him his gene pool and nothing else.
‘So it was just you and your mother.’ No, he thought to himself, it was just me. ‘Is she still alive?’
‘No. She died last year.’ He paused. ‘She was in a home in Daly City – that’s on the south side of San Francisco.’
‘So you saw her a lot.’
‘Not really. The last time I visited she didn’t know who I was.’
‘I’m sorry. Alzheimer’s must be terrible.’
‘If that’s what it was. My mother was a drinker, high on the alcoholic Richter scale.’ They were moving at speed, with the Bay on either side and the exit for the anomalous lump of Treasure Island fast approaching.
‘What did she do for a living?’
‘She was a singer. Backing, but a good one.’ He smiled slightly. ‘She backed Janis Joplin for a while, until my mother’s drinking proved even too much for her.’
‘Still, it must have been an interesting world to grow up in.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘Was it?’ she insisted.
‘Not really,’ he said, thinking furiously, for he was worried she would ask what happened next. ‘Anyway,’ he said, softening his voice, ‘it all got too much for her. So I went and lived with my grandmother. My mother was pretty much out of it from then on.’
Kate suddenly yawned, putting her hand to her mouth too late to suppress the exhalation.
‘That sounds tired,’ he said. ‘When did you get into town anyway?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘From Santa Barbara, right? Were you somewhere else before that?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I came straight from London.’
‘You must be exhausted,’ he said, though his familiarity with jet lag was strictly second hand, since he had never been east of an American time zone.
‘I’m okay,’ she said, but immediately had to put her hand to her mouth to stifle another yawn. She giggled lightly, dozily.
He reached behind him with one hand and felt on the back seat for his windbreaker, which he handed to her. ‘Use that as a pillow,’ he said. ‘We’ve still got ourselves a way to go. You might as well take a nap.’
And ten minutes later he snuck a sideways look and saw from the simple rhythms of her breathing, and the way her throat was relaxed as she lay with her head against the scrunched up jacket, that she was asleep. And though he had to concentrate on the road, since dusk was rapidly turning to dark, he couldn’t contain himself entirely, and snuck glances at her face with a mix of shyness and appreciation.
Why did this woman have to flit across his horizon now – she’d be flying home Monday, wouldn’t she? – just when he was most alone. It was only six months since he’d split up with Jenny, or rather she had split up with him, despairing over his reluctance to get married and his even greater reluctance to come out and admit it. He looked over now at the English woman again. She was breathing with her mouth slightly open, her lips puffed as if ready to be kissed. He felt a sudden tenderness for her, then told himself the feeling was ridiculous – she was virtually a stranger.
What had ended his feelings for Jenny, and kept him during these last six months from missing her? He supposed it was whatever had always limited his feelings for any woman other than his mother in the early years . . . and Maris. Women will leave you in the end, he had long ago decided, so what was the point in caring if they did? With men it never mattered, this kind of distancing, since a heterosexual could proceed with male friendships under an umbrella of camaraderie and shared experience – for Renoir the army, but for others school or sports or work.
No, the problems for him arose with women, where his relationships were a catalogue of failure, at least the long-term ones. For intimacy was expected in any long relationship – sometimes even in very short ones – and this he could not provide.
He had been a late starter with girls, thanks to natural shyness and a strict parental figure, his grandmother, who had kept him on a tight rein throughout high school. In the military he’d cut loose, making up for lost time perhaps. He was drawn to overtly sexy rather than demurely pretty women, naughty girls rather than proper young women his grandmother would have approved of. After the army he tried to grow up, but with someone like Jenny – a nice, nice girl (she even owned an antiques shop, for Christ’s sake) – he found himself unable to compensate for the lack of sexual excitement with any other kind of intimacy. Once, during an argument, she told him he was a control freak – but not, she explained, in the usual sense of the term, for he never tried controlling her. ‘No,’ she went on, ‘you’re far too busy controlling yourself. You don’t get mad, you don’t get upset, I’ve never seen you cry. Nothing seems to move you.’
Which he knew was entirely true. He simply went along with what seemed safe, and steady, and secure. So he was a little sad but not surprised when, not long after this, Jenny announced she didn’t want to see him any more, and three months later married a fellow dealer in antiques.
The English woman named Kate Palmer only woke on the very last stretch of the trip, after he left the highway, drove through Placerville, then along the shore of the lake until the road turned away uphill. He stopped and got out to open the cattle gate. It was a warm, windless night, and a pale full moon cast light on the lake, creating silver sparkles on the surface of its thick and inky black. When he came back to the car to drive through he found her sitting up and rubbing her eyes. ‘Just five minutes more,’ he said. He drove through and stopped, but before he could even open his door, she hopped out of the car without a word and closed the gate behind them. They drove slowly along the track which traversed the hillside, winding slowly back and forth against the face of its steep incline, almost immediately entering a stand of trees, planted carefully and regularly. Kate sniffed appreciatively. ‘I smell balsam,’ she said. ‘And pine.’
A little higher up and the woods opened slightly to reveal the cabin, built to face the lake
below. They climbed the half flight of stairs to the front deck, and while Renoir fumbled with the key to the stiff front door, Kate stood leaning against the deck’s pine railing. Across the valley opposite were smaller foothills, their tops visible in the moonlight like ice-cream minarets.
Inside, he turned on the main light switch and was relieved that the power was on. To his eye, the Kaufman cabin was ideally simple: one large room with a small kitchen in the near corner, set apart by a curtain; in the back, a bathroom with a (leaky) shower. Set in a wall of the big room was a fireplace made of rough stone, with two armchairs drawn up close to it. In the middle of the room a table functioned as dining room, and at the back of the room, next to the bathroom door, were two bunk beds. They were fashioned out of cedar, and matched the colour of the walls; in the pale light of the shaded overhead bulb the wood glowed like burning oranges.
‘It’s kind of simple,’ he said with a slight air of apology. What had he been thinking, inviting her out here? She had been staying in one of San Francisco’s smartest boutique hotels. Here they would be lucky to have hot water.
‘Simple?’ she said. ‘You’ve got electricity, haven’t you? When you said “roughing it” I thought that meant kerosene lamps and no running water.’
‘It’s still pretty rustic. And cold,’ he added, rubbing his hands together. He had changed but was wearing only a light wind-breaker, too thin for the mountain nights even in May.
He brought in logs from the lean-to and found her kneeling in front of the grate, crumpling newspaper and using the hand axe to make kindling out of a large chunk of apple wood. She started the fire and when it caught added one of his smaller logs, then another, before sitting down in one of the easy chairs while he opened a bottle of red wine. He gave her a glass while he turned on the refrigerator and loosened the taps in the sink, then went back and ran the water in the bathroom. When he came back she’d left her chair and he found her standing in the dark on the deck, where he joined her with his own glass of wine.
Keeping Secrets Page 4
