Untold Story

by Monica Ali

  It was good to see Alan. I wonder if he could be prevailed upon for the eulogy. What is the form? Should one organize such things oneself ? A word with Patricia might suffice, although she does flinch rather when I attempt that type of forward planning.

  7 February 1998

  How many times did I go over “our little plan” while sipping Earl Grey, Darjeeling, or Lapsang souchong? I wanted every detail to be clear, every obstacle outlined, every tactic for overcoming them understood. I repeated myself ad nauseam, although in the end I knew I had passed the point of delivering any useful instruction and was merely becoming a bore. Let’s think it through, I would say, you establish a pattern early on in the holiday of taking a morning swim. At first you will be photographed doing so. You will comment privately that you find this to be a nuisance and that you intend to beat the paparazzi by swimming earlier. You bring forward your swim times and alert the crew to be on watch for you. You swim farther and farther from the yacht, to the point where they begin to be discomfited. What will you do if they attempt to put a stop to it?

  She rolled her eyes. “I’ll seduce them.”

  I always like to imagine that when she teases like that I take it well in my stride.

  She laughed. “Do you really think I would? What a low opinion you must have.”

  It had already been worked out, in any case. The plan was that she would continue with her early swims and, in the final days, take her swim before anyone else was awake but be sure to let them know, as soon as they got up, that she had already been out. Her beau would remonstrate but she knew where the power in that relationship lay. He wouldn’t dare to risk thwarting her. As extra insurance, on the penultimate day she hopped on a launch with a bodyguard and headed to the motorboat carrying reporters from the Mirror, the Sun, and the Daily Mail. For ten minutes or so she chatted about life on board the Ramesses and then dropped into the conversation that she intended to do some Jet Skiing just before lunch the next day. With that promise of an ideal photo opportunity (the story would get around to the other press boats) we could be sure that the reporters and photographers wouldn’t bother to leave their hotels and start buzzing around the Ramesses at the crack of dawn, only to get boring pictures of her doing a steady breaststroke.

  All of this, as intended, surfaced in the media. At first her beau was at pains to suppress the information about her taking early and unsupervised swims. The crew and the bodyguards were instructed not to talk, but that broke down as soon as Scotland Yard arrived at the scene. Even prior to that, someone had leaked to the press. It was all to the good. It provided a smooth arc to the narrative.

  8 February 1998

  The context, in terms of her behavior, was far wider, and it reached back a considerable way in her history. But last summer it did seem that she really had lost control. “Lawrence,” she had said to me (we were at KP, it was immediately after she’d had the place swept for bugs for a second time), “I know how I’ve got to behave in these last months. I’ve got to be very calm and collected. No antics, no outbursts. Nothing that might lead people to suspect that I’ve had a breakdown and run away.”

  I said I thought that to be a reasonable calculation and moved on to reviewing once again the mechanics of the finances. It was a subject that bored her despite its being vital to the whole enterprise. The amount was all that interested her and although I tried to explain why just under one million was the maximum I could spirit away without leaving traces, she merely sighed and said, “Do try again, if you can bear it. I won’t have a single stitch to my name. Will I even have a name?” I reassured her once again about the construction of an identity, how the passport and documentation would be sound. These things can be done, with a little insider information. False passports can, of course, be purchased (and are, by the hapless souls who are desperate to enter our country) but I had no intention of going down that route.

  Her understanding, in any case, was that she should be on her best behavior in the run-up to her disappearance. I can’t say she managed that.

  The pressures under which she was operating were almost unspeakable. A trusted confidant (a quack therapist-cum-mystic, how did she fall for these things?) turned out to be in the pay of the tabloids. Her own mother had given a paid interview in a gossip magazine. One could blame the booze, which had got the better of mother dearest, but if one’s daughter is a princess, no excuse is good enough. Communications severed. The “love of her life” (there have been a few) had made it clear earlier in the year that he would not marry her, and dashed all her hopes once again. Her ex-husband began, as she saw it, “flaunting” his long-term mistress in public, and there was no doubt that the palace PR machine had begun to market her, with flagrant disingenuity, as “the woman who waited.” Such cheek.

  On top of all that there was her charity work and her campaign about land mines. Undoubtedly it fired her up (she felt her power then, and as a force for good) but the cognitive dissonance of spending one day talking to amputees in Sarajevo and the next being pursued by paparazzi while wearing a tiger-print bathing suit is hardly a recipe for emotional stability.

  9 February 1998

  She called me when she was away over those summer months, but no more than usual. I had impressed upon her that after her “death” her phone records would be checked and any strange pattern investigated. Having been through the “phone pest” scandal a little while ago, it was a lesson she easily took to heart. That particular front-page story had distressed her greatly. It was true that she’d been calling her lover’s home late at night from public phone boxes, hanging up when his wife answered. But it was loneliness, not malice, that drove her to it. And it cut her to the quick that he did nothing to defend her.

  Even without her phone calls to me, thanks to the daily deluge of photographs and reporting in the media and on the Internet, I could follow her every move. That came in useful for the Pernambuco assignation—I couldn’t be sure in advance of the exact date of her arrival, but I could be sure to track her progress via the media.

  In July she flitted between the Mediterranean and London and various charity commitments. At least she had her boys for most of that time. They were introduced to her beau’s family and the press reaction was excoriating—should the heir to the throne be mixing with such folk? (Fascinating how the nouveau riche are looked down upon not merely by the Establishment, but also by the readers of the tabloids.) Her behavior could at best be described as volatile. One minute she would be posing for the photographers, the next she would be trying to hide. She initiated impromptu press conferences and then denied they had taken place. She gave tip-offs to photographers and was apparently furious when they turned up. I read every bit of coverage I could find. A photojournalist who had covered her for seventeen years wrote that he had “never seen her act more bizarrely.” Apparently she had crawled along the balcony of the villa, a towel over her head, and then followed up by posing on the front stairs.

  If I feared for her sanity, I could see too why a desperate remedy might be required.

  10 February 1998

  In early August, the antics that she had said she would avoid intensified. With the boys at Balmoral (always a low point for her) she could not be still—except in the embrace of her lover with a long lens trained on them. Then there was the Paris fiasco. Rumors of an engagement, ceaseless comings and goings within the two-day trip, an aborted dinner at the Ritz, a near-riot of paparazzi every time they moved. And move they did. No sooner, it seemed, than they reached a cocoon of luxurious privacy, they were in the car again. Why did she do it? I have not discussed it with her. I would have talked to her about it as it pertained to a forward strategy, but during our brief and infrequent phone conversations I always sensed another presence in the room with her. Afterward, the analysis bore no relevance and it would have been an impertinence on my part. A courtier to the last.

  I did, however, give the matter a great deal of private thought. As it related to our project, I
came to the conclusion that contrary to our previous supposition, it did no harm. After she had behaved in a somewhat extreme and unpredictable manner, the closing chapter of her life, though shocking, would take on an air of inevitability.

  The apogee came with the “Near-Fatal Car Crash” as it was hysterically billed. The fact that the driver, who had not been wearing his seat belt, was the only one hurt, and not even seriously, did nothing to discourage the headline writers. The “near-fatality” angle was cooked up by saying that had the swerve to avoid the photographer on his motorbike come earlier, say in the Alma tunnel when the car had been clocked at around ninety miles per hour, death would have been instantaneous. There was, I suppose, a grim—if twisted—kind of logic to the headlines. What the press wanted to focus on was how she could have died trying to escape the paparazzi (the pursuit had certainly been reckless, if not downright crazy), a story of which they were robbed, albeit temporarily. It ran as a kind of rehearsal to the main event—when the mainstream consensus was that she died because she had tried to elude the press.

  I do not believe, though, that she manipulated the circumstances. She can certainly, though it pains me to admit it, be manipulative. I think that she was sinking. Her manic need to be seen was a form of self-harm. Worse still, it harmed her children. She knew it. It was her worst addiction, one for which there is no recognized treatment or cure.

  From London and then Washington I watched her closely, and by the time they flew into Montevideo in mid-August I was hugely relieved that we were moving into the final phase.

  Chapter Twelve

  Carson’s first job had been as an insurance clerk and he had hated it. When Sarah left and took Ava with her all the way to the other side of the world he had stuck with it because he wanted to save up enough money to visit his daughter. That didn’t pan out so he quit and drifted for a while. He worked dead-end jobs, busing tables, dealing cards in a casino, valeting cars, anything mindless and busy. One evening he went for a drink with his old boss, who started giving him a hard time. Know what your trouble is? The man looked like a wilted houseplant, not enough nutrients, but Carson liked him. He’d doubled his workload when Sarah took off and Carson understood that as a silent kindness. Know what your trouble is? You’re a snob.

  Carson knew he was anything but. He was hosing down cars for a living and got along with his colleagues just fine. He was nearly fluent in Spanish by then. Couldn’t care less about his college degree.

  No, said his old boss. You’re a snob. You didn’t go to grad school so you’re dropping out. You think it’s beneath you to work your way up in the office, too dull. Let me tell you something, you’re wrong about that.

  Carson went back to the company, not because he thought the old man was right, but because he didn’t care what work he did anyway, how boring it was. And he didn’t like being called a snob.

  He trained as a claims adjuster and that was still what he did, though he was on his third company now.

  “Last week I went out to a family whose house burned down in the middle of the night.” Lydia was sitting on the swing seat on the deck and Carson was lying on his side, just out of kicking distance, he said. “Situation like that—I’m there the morning after they just lost everything—you have to understand how they’re feeling. You have to deal with them right. Their world got torn apart, and there you are with a set of forms.”

  “What happened?” said Lydia. “The whole house burned?”

  “Electrical fault. That’s what it looks like. You always have to consider arson, but you can tell a lot from how people act. You learn how to read them, figure out who’s faking, who’s got something to hide. The investigation has to happen, but I usually know if it’s going to turn up anything.”

  “He was right, then, your old boss. It’s not a dull business.”

  “There’s the paperwork,” said Carson. “But there’s a lot more to it. Last year I had a claim made by the university. They’d insured an exhibition of artworks that was moving around the country. It was being displayed on campus for three months—big sculptures made out of scrap metal, road signs, fenders, railway sleepers. There were twenty-three pieces out on the lawns, and one goes missing. I drive into the city and go to the campus to see the dean of arts. I interview her and her colleagues and I’m getting nowhere. The best theory we have is someone’s come with a truck and stolen this sculpture in the night.”

  “What would they do with it?” said Lydia. “Who’d put it out on their drive if it’s stolen?”

  “Right. So I ask the dean to show me where this sculpture had been and we walk across to the other side of the campus. There’s nothing to see but I ask what’s in the nearest building and she says it’s the workshop, where the maintenance guys hang out. I say I’d like to talk to them. The head of the workshop doesn’t know anything, so I say my good-byes and get in the car to go home and make my report.

  “But as soon as I turn the engine on it strikes me that the workshop guy was holding back. As we were talking he never looked away, not even once. People who lie overcompensate because they’ve heard that liars can’t meet a gaze. That’s the popular opinion out there.”

  “What did you do?” Lydia slipped off the seat and sat cross-legged on the deck. A papery moon had insinuated itself into the pink and gold sky. A flycatcher took a bath in Madeleine’s water bowl.

  “I go back to the workshop and say, I think there’s something you’d like to tell me. This time the guy looks away to the back of the room. There’s a long workbench that’s been put together out of different metals. I say, where’s the rest of it? Alessandro, one of the workers, took the aluminum siding to repair his trailer. Pablo thought the railway sleeper would make a good mantel for his fireplace. Nothing had been wasted. They were recycling a heap of dumped garbage as far as they were concerned.”

  Lydia laughed. “Good for them. I hope they didn’t get in trouble.”

  “We worked it out,” said Carson. “Sometimes you catch a bad guy in this business. This wasn’t one of those times. Sometimes,” he rolled onto his back and rested his head on clasped hands, “the bad guy is the insurance company. There are companies that aim not to pay out anything, even when the claim is fair.”

  “That’s terrible. Imagine if your house burned down and you couldn’t get the insurance money.”

  “Yup,” said Carson, staring straight up at the sky, at the few shy stars overhead. “I do. Imagination is part of the job. Thinking yourself into someone else’s shoes. Now I’m imagining you might be getting hungry and I’m imagining driving over to Dino’s and getting us a pizza. How does that sound?”

  While he was out Lydia worked through the magazines and found what she was looking for in four of them. Her sons were organizing a concert in Hyde Park in September to commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death. She didn’t experience the agitation she had expected. She knelt with the magazines open on the couch in front of her, looking at the photographs. “Thank you,” she said out loud. The concert was a lovely thought but she was grateful most of all for the way they had got on with their lives.

  Rufus scrambled onto her knee and she put her hand on his back and felt the rapid rise and fall of his rib cage. She picked him up and buried her face in his fur.

  When she heard the door she closed the magazines and tossed them into a pile. She followed Carson into his kitchen and watched as he cut the pizza into slices and got out the plates.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “You’re thinking how lucky you are to have such a handsome dude at your beck and call. Am I right?”

  “Something like that,” said Lydia. She’d been thinking Lawrence wouldn’t disapprove of this. She wasn’t letting him down. “I was thinking about how I’m doing okay. How I’d do just about anything not to rock the boat. I’d like things to stay as they are.”

  He turned around to her. “Done enough of the boat rocking, huh? Next
up for you, the rocking chair.”

  “You’re not out of kicking distance anymore, so watch it.”

  “Not out of kissing distance either.”

  “The pizza will go cold,” said Lydia.

  “I’ll heat it up. Right now I’ve got something more interesting in mind.”

  Later they watched cable, a slick heist movie that slid down like a pint of ice cream. When it was over Carson went into his study and came out with an envelope.

  “Here,” he said, “the last photo I’ve got of Ava. Her handprint’s in there as well.”

  Lydia opened the envelope. “She was three? Four?”

  “Three and a half.”

  “She’s gorgeous. Those pretty little teeth.”

  He sighed. “For a long time it made me so upset that her mother couldn’t send me a letter or a photo. Once a year would have been fine. But I gave up my rights. And she never responded to anything.”

  “That must be tough.”

  “Maybe she was right, though. Maybe it was better that way. Clean break. It might have been harder to see her growing up from a distance.”

  “I don’t know,” said Lydia. “I don’t know about that. At least you’d know that she’s okay.”

  “She could find me now, if she wanted. Ava, I mean. She’s twenty-five, an adult. If that’s what she wanted, she could track me down.”

  “Oh, Carson, she might not even know about you. Or she might think you wouldn’t want that. And it would be so difficult. It wouldn’t be easy, unless you’re still in touch with her mother.”

  He sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. She slid a couple of fingers between the buttons of his shirt. “Sarah moved,” he said. “My letters came back. The phone number I had didn’t work. I think about getting on the Internet, but then I think it should be Ava’s decision, her choice.”

  “I’ll bet Ava grew up fine.”

  With his free hand he cupped her chin and drew her face very close. He didn’t speak. Then he let her go. He took the photograph and the handprint and put them back in the envelope.