Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘No, I don’t look quite the same, do I? Perhaps I shouldn’t blame you – I’m hardly a little native girl in a sarong any more, am I? And you don’t look much like my handsome, brown-skinned husband either. But appearance isn’t everything, is it?’

  James had never considered the possibility that he would ever see the woman who had borne his children again. It had been unthinkable, and now that it had happened, and she was standing an arm’s length away from him, he was paralysed by fear. Some of his fear was rational: he was afraid for his rich comfortable life, for his impeccable reputation, for the love of his daughters, for his freedom, for his future. Deeper than these was an irrational fear, his old, eternal fear of the female, personified in this angry woman.

  She saw his fear and it gave her courage. ‘Don’t you want to know what I want? Don’t you want to know why I’ve brought you here?’

  He could not answer, so she continued. ‘You’ve stolen so much from me, haven’t you? My love, my happiness, my honour, my family, my home – everything that I had. When you took away my babies you took my whole life. This …’ she indicated the room, and beyond it her existence in Paris, ‘this is nothing. It’s just something that fills up the empty space, that’s all.’

  She walked slowly around him as if looking for the place to deliver the coup de gráce. ‘I know everything about you. I know much more about you now than when we were married. Don’t you think that’s curious? Your Australian friend used to tell me your news. Until you left Malaya, of course. He didn’t think you’d treated me very well, but I expect you knew that. And. I’ve paid people to watch you, the last few years. Lord James Bourton. And the little Misses Bourton. They’re lovely girls, you’re right. And I’m their mother, and I want them back.’

  ‘Never.’ The double shock unlocked his tongue and James spoke almost before she had finished. ‘Never.’ The sound of his own voice emboldened him. ‘I love my daughters and I’ll never let you have them. What kind of a life would you give them, anyway? If you dare …’

  ‘Do you love them? Do you love them the way you loved me? Or do you just love the life they brought you? That’s all you wanted them for, your inheritance, wasn’t it? My God, you’d never even seen the little one before you snatched her away.’ She was still and tense, like a snake about to strike, hatred glittering in her black eyes. ‘I’d have done anything, you know. I’d have been my own children’s amah for the sake of being with them.’

  He stood up, suddenly desperate to shatter the emotional web in which she was binding him. ‘I’m sure you would. You’d have done anything to get out of your little village, as I remember. You thought I was your ticket to a soft life and you still do. You don’t love the girls, you don’t know them, you’ve never known them – not the way I do, as people. They wouldn’t even recognize you, if they saw you. And if they knew what their mother was …’

  She drew a sharp breath and he knew that he had found a weapon that was potent against her. He was sure, now, that her elegant façade overlay some evil of which, at the bottom of her heart, she was ashamed. The impression of vice he had read in her face was correct. It had been enough merely to allude to it.

  The doors opened with a slight hesitation and a burly, olive-skinned man entered the room, taking command of the situation by his authoritative presence. He advanced towards James with a hand outstretched.

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself – Hussain Shahzdeh.’ Dumbly James extended his own hand to meet the Prince’s fleshy grasp. Despite the gesture of friendly greeting, he had a momentary impression that the other man was going to hit him. ‘Shall we sit down and discuss this situation like reasonable people?’

  The three antagonists sat, the Prince and Princess side by side on a long, grey sofa and James facing them, seated in the centre of a black leather couch. Ayeshah, desperately grateful that her husband had arrived to strengthen her attack just as she was faltering, slipped her arm through his.

  ‘I’m sure you will agree that my wife’s desire for her children is quite natural.’ James nodded. In the presence of another man his attitude was completely different, calculating and devoid of emotion.

  ‘Your concern, naturally, is that you acquired your inheritance, in accordance with a codicil to your father’s will, when you acquired your children. Of course, the children were legitimately conceived in wedlock and there is nothing at all to disqualify you from the bequest.’

  James nodded again, only partly reassured by the man’s amiable tone. Hussain was a type he detested, a cheap market-trader masquerading as a gentleman, a greasy Arab trying to ape European ways while at the same time eating away the fabric of the country which had given him shelter. James was not afraid of him, as he had been of Ayeshah. He had been lifted out of the quicksand of sexual guilt into which she had pushed him. Now that the whole affair was assuming the tenor of an irregular business deal, his concern was to find the most effective way to walk out.

  ‘That’s completely correct,’ he announced. ‘My concern is not financial, it is for the welfare of my daughters. If they were to learn, at this stage in their lives, that my wife, whom they have looked upon as their mother, was not in fact their mother at all, it would be a devastating blow. Absolutely devastating.’

  Equally, Hussain loathed James from the depths of his soul for being a threadbare, decadent aristocrat whose fine sentiments disguised emotional bankruptcy. He swallowed his dislike and continued, ‘Naturally. So how shall we resolve this situation?’

  ‘There is nothing to resolve. I shall not permit any degree of interference in my children’s lives, on any pretext whatever. That’s all I have to say.’ He stood up, preparing to leave, but Hussain made no move.

  ‘As my wife mentioned, we have made some enquiries, Lord James, and it seems to me that there might be certain advantages to you in coming to an agreement with us.’

  ‘What advantages?’

  ‘You have a few small debts, I believe. Some of the arrangements which you have made with the trustees of your father’s estates are perhaps what might be called …’

  ‘Absolute nonsense.’ James was outraged that a man he considered to be little better than a racketeer was criticizing the probity of his own dealings. ‘I’ve never heard anything so absurd. You’ve no right to pry into my legal arrangements and when I find out who is responsible, who you’ve been dealing with, there’ll be hell to pay. Good God, do you think you can stand there and try to buy your way into my family?’

  He advanced to the door as fast as he could without appearing to flee from the room. ‘As you yourself have pointed out, I’ve nothing to fear, from you or from anyone. If you were ever foolish enough to try to embarrass me with this fantastic story you’d get nowhere, precisely nowhere. You’ve no proof, I’ve done nothing wrong. If you have any love at all for those children,’ he looked directly at Ayeshah as he spoke and saw with satisfaction that her face was drawn with terrible distress, ‘you’ll stay away from them, leave them as they are, for your own sake as well as theirs. They’ve been brought up as two nice, normal English girls; I’m sorry to speak bluntly, but a woman like you is everything they have been taught to despise. Good morning to you.’

  While his words still echoed in the room, James snatched his coat and hat from the hands of the startled servant and bolted through the door, out into the sweet, fresh air and the safety of the street. His heart was hammering in his chest. At the street corner he hailed a taxi, suddenly feeling that he had no strength to walk any longer.

  Anger and grief broke over Ayeshah like a wave. ‘I’ll kill him,’ she screamed, ‘I’ll kill him, kill him, kill him.’ Her face was skull-like and her eyes seemed to protrude with the force of the emotion which animated her. Protectively, her husband soothed her.

  They had already discussed what they would do if James rejected their approach, but Hussain rehearsed the plan to her one last time. ‘Now I want you to think about one thing,’ he said, with the deepest gravity. ‘Which d
o you want – your children or to destroy their father? Because you must realize that if we succeed now – which we will – and if they ever discover what you have done – which they may – they will hate you.’

  ‘I’ll make them love me,’ she answered.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Monty looked at herself in the mirror; she was not an alluring vision. Her hair was still long at the back, but scorched and frazzled, and it was mere stubble at the front. It had a revolting singed smell. Her eyebrows were gone, and her eyelashes were less than a millimetre long. Her face, neck, breasts and arms were smeared with orange ointment. Her hands were bandaged. To deal with the agony of her burns she had accepted four-hourly pain killers, which made her feel half-stoned. This filled her with fretful anxiety – there had been a substantial proportion of addicts at the Centre who had become dependent on substances prescribed by their doctors for the purest of motives.

  ‘OK – that’s enough bad news for one day,’ she said to Cathy, who helped her put the hospital gown on and get back into bed.

  ‘When will they let you out?’ her sister asked, plumping up the pillows.

  ‘When I’ve got some skin on my tits, the doctor says. They think I may get away with no scars at all, as long as my hands don’t get infected. They got the worst of it. I’ve got a few little cuts from bits of metal, but I was lucky. You should have seen the car, Cathy: it was a total wreck. Joe will go bananas when he finds out his darling Chevvy is in bits all over Paddington.’

  Cathy shook her head, half exasperated and half sympathetic. ‘Once upon a time I had a sister who stood up, talked back and hit out when she was angry. She was a pain in the ass a lot of the time, but she used to get her own way. Now I’ve got a sister who crumples like a paper bag whenever fate deals her a dud card. What happened to you, Monty? Where did all the fight go? Now you’re so frightened all the time. Why should you care about Joe’s darling Chevvy? What about your hands, your voice, your face, your career?’

  ‘It was the dope,’ Monty told her bleakly. ‘It was easier to find some drugs to make life bearable than to go out and fight for what I wanted. And it was easy for me to make a lot of noise when I was a kid and didn’t have any real problems, but when the going got tough I got scared. Now I’ll have to start again from the beginning.’ Monty sighed and looked at her bandaged hands. ‘I’m just not as strong as you are, Cathy. And I can’t work the same way. I need people, to be with me, to support me, to share my life, to love me. I can’t thrive on fighting everyone the way you can.’

  Cathy tipped grapes into a bowl. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t bully you, darling. You’re right, I know you are: we have to do things our own different ways. Look,’ she put a stack of paperbacks on the night table, ‘I brought you the complete works of Jilly Cooper – that should keep your spirits up. I’ll come again tomorrow. Will you need a nurse or anything when they let you out?’

  ‘I don’t know – I might. My hands won’t be any good for at least two weeks.’

  As Cathy left, Swallow arrived, and they squeezed past each other in the doorway, Swallow almost spherical in her purple jumpsuit and Cathy slender as ever in her new brown Armani.

  ‘Christ, you look a mess.’ Swallow sat awkwardly on the end of the bed. ‘Joe Jones wants to come and pay his respects to the body. Is that OK?’

  ‘Oh, Lord. Is he very angry, Swallow?’

  ‘He sounded absolutely choked when I told him.’

  Monty looked listlessly at the dingy ceiling. She was going to have to face Joe sometime and take whatever was coming; she didn’t want anyone to see her looking the way she was, but maybe he wouldn’t be too angry if he saw her looking pitiful. Monty smiled and winced with pain as her traumatized skin was stretched by the movement.

  ‘Tell him he can come whenever he wants,’ she said to Swallow. ‘Isn’t life rich? To think I was trying to make a pass at the guy and instead I went straight out and got his car blown up and ended up looking like Mrs Munster.’

  Joe came the next day, his face set. He brought a bunch of flowers and her tape-player with some tapes.

  ‘How bad is it?’ he asked, speaking low and fast as if he wanted to get the politeness over with as quickly as possible.

  ‘Oh, not too bad,’ Monty lied. ‘I’ll be fine as soon as my eyebrows grow back.’

  ‘You look like a Japanese mask,’ he told her. ‘Your eyes really turn up at the corners, don’t they?’

  OK, time to bite the bullet, Monty thought. ‘Joe, I’m so sorry about the car,’ she said, trembling inwardly. ‘There was nothing I could do about it …’

  He smiled, which he didn’t do very often. ‘You hated that car, didn’t you?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, what matters is that it was yours, you liked it, I got it wrecked and I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it matter – how you felt about it?’

  ‘Well …’ Monty was puzzled. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to call her an idiot, make some general observation about the incompetence of women in general, then zap her with a mighty verbal punch designed to lay out her ego for the next six weeks. ‘Well, it wasn’t my car, was it?’ she offered uncertainly.

  ‘It wasn’t mine either. The boys wanted it, the record company paid for it, I only drove it. You’re not lying here thinking about the goddam car, are you?’ Now she felt stupid.

  ‘There’s nothing else I can do,’ she told him. ‘I can’t read those books Swallow brought me because they make me laugh and it hurts to laugh. I can’t even make phonecalls because of my hands. Thanks for bringing the tapes, Joe, they’ll be the main event of the day.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask you if you’d do something for me. I’ve brought a tape of some of the songs I’ve been doing with Al,’ he reached out to the table beside her bed and showed her an unmarked cassette. ‘Will you listen to it and tell me what you think of it? I’d particularly like to have your opinion of the third track. We’ve done it over and over again, and we can’t seem to get it right. I know I’ve approached it wrong, somehow. I just can’t put my finger on it.’

  She was surprised. The amazing Joe Jones, big in Japan, colossal in the States, seldom out of the top thirty the world over, was asking her advice. ‘Sure,’ she said, wary. Was this another rip-off in the making?

  ‘Can I come to see you tomorrow?’ he asked, taking his weight off the end of her bed. ‘Is there anything you need?’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ she told him.

  ‘What’s the food like in here?’

  ‘Garbage. And I can’t feed myself because of my hands, so I have to have some bloody nurse telling me to eat it all up.’

  ‘OK – why don’t I invite you for dinner tomorrow?’

  He arrived with more flowers, and some candles, and soon the room was transformed into a private world, flickering and fragrant. A waiter arrived from Mr Chow bringing them a banquet packed in foil trays. Joe poured a tiny cup of transparent tea and held it to her lips.

  ‘This is chrysanthemum,’ he told her. ‘I hope you like it. I thought it was right for you, more delicate than jasmine.’ He picked up the chopsticks, broke the gold paper seal, and selected a morsel from one of the trays. ‘This is melon stuffed with dreams.’ With the delicacy of a tiny bird feeding its chicks, he popped the food in her mouth.

  When the meal was finished, she felt luxuriously drowsy. ‘Do you want to know what’s wrong with your song?’ she asked, looking up at his shadowed face as he rearranged her pillows.

  ‘Not now,’ he said, pulling the sheet straight and tucking it under the hard hospital mattress. ‘Sing for your supper tomorrow.’

  Monty sighed as he blew out the candles and said goodbye. It seemed like the ultimate cruelty of fate to look like a nightmare and feel like hell and be cared for so tenderly by a man who could make her and several million other women melt with desire.

  A powerful mood of what-the-hell settled on her the next day, inspired b
y the doctor who signed her discharge form and told her she could leave.

  ‘The trouble with that song,’ she told Joe, recklessly tactless, ‘is that you’ve fucked it up; it’s quarrelling with itself. It’s got a really strong melody but there’s so much else going on you can’t hear it. You don’t need to dress up those harmonies with all that keyboard stuff you’ve put underneath. It’ll speak for itself if you let it.’

  ‘Less is more, huh?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’ He was sitting on the end of her bed, his jeans stretched taut over the massive quadriceps muscles of his thighs. ‘Why don’t you help me?’

  Monty looked at him with suspicion. Was Joe just another man who wanted to make use of her talent? ‘Will you credit me on the album and pay me a fee?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll get a contract drawn up for you at once if you agree.’ He looked quite hurt that she should make such conditions, but Monty knew now that one of the tricks of a great exploiter is to create a world of upside-down values in which the victim is persuaded that whatever the predator wants is worthless. She had resolved in future to fix her price first.

  ‘I’m not going to be much use around the house until my hands are healed.’ She held up her bandaged mitts to remind him.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, we’ll take care of you. Now, what are you going to wear to come home in? Your clothes must have been burned up.’

  ‘I told the nurse to throw them away. I’ll get Swallow to buy some for me later.’

  ‘Let me buy them. Tell me what you want.’

  ‘Anything – jeans or something.’ There didn’t seem much point in dreaming about lovely clothes when she hardly had any skin to wear underneath them.