It was as if he had pressed the switch animating a mechanical toy. She snatched off the shawl and flung it down the hillside. It wheeled, spread, collapsed, and landed on a flowering broom, where it fluttered like a flag. She didn’t look at Ross, or speak to him as far as I could tell. He stood motionless behind her.
Then he turned and started back to the house. I couldn’t see the expression on his face.
The pantomime energized me. I wasn’t going to sit around another day while Vivien stayed in her room eating ham sandwiches and painting her toenails. I grabbed my clothes. Before going down, I checked the window again. Vivien was now sitting among the irises, hugging her knees, her head bent. She could have been in the grip of cosmic despair or a fit of pique. Ready or not, she was about to meet her ghost.
When I stepped outside I noticed how cool the morning was despite the bright sun. The shawl hadn’t been a needlessly fussy idea.
I approached through the scraggly olives. If she heard me coming, she didn’t look around. I was annoyed to think she might believe I was Ross returning for more punishment. When I was near enough I called out, “Hello!” with more cheer than I was feeling.
She started violently and turned, her eyes narrowed, fear and suspicion in her hunched shoulders and the arms that drew close to her sides. Why would the woman react like a trapped animal to “Hello”? Standing over her now I continued, “I’m Georgia Lee Maxwell.”
I shoved out my hand, and she took it. Hers was freezing, and the fingers hardly bent to grasp mine. I exerted momentary pressure and let go. She shaded her eyes to look up at me and said, in a throaty voice, “Ross was right. You are darling.”
I’m not too bad, but “darling” would be stretching it. I doubted Ross had used the word. As Vivien sized me up, I reciprocated. She was striking rather than beautiful, pale with pronounced black eyebrows. The severity of her chignon wouldn’t have worked for everyone, but it suited her uncompromising profile, with its prominent nose and firm chin. Her green eyes had a slight upward slant. Her toenails, I ascertained from a glance at her sandaled feet, were cherry red. She was showing fewer facial sags than I’d seen in her photos, and I assumed she’d had nips and tucks by a skillful cosmetic surgeon. She would have projected an aura of drama whether or not you knew her story.
I hunkered down and sat next to her in the midst of the irises. Chill from the damp earth quickly pervaded my rear end and seeped up my backbone. Down the hill, her shawl flapped on the bush.
When it became obvious she wasn’t going to start the conversation, I said, “I hope your head is better.”
She looked surprised. “What?”
“Your head. Didn’t you have a migraine?”
“Oh— yes, right. It’s much better.”
More silence. At last she said, “I’ve been dreading meeting you.”
“Why?”
“Because” —she laced her fingers together and twisted them— “I don’t know if I can do the book. I don’t know if I can.”
So much for her eagerness to tell her side of the story. “I thought you wanted to do it.”
She looked at me in amazement. “Wanted to! Why would I want to?”
Why would she, indeed? “I guess to set the record straight, to—”
She laughed jerkily. “Setting the record straight is beyond my powers. The record is bent and will probably stay that way.”
She was trembling. I saw goose bumps on her arms. “Why, then?”
Her jaw jutted out. “Money. I need money.”
Ross had told me as much. Since I was in it for the money myself, I couldn’t be disdainful.
She went on. “This house was loaned to us. Carey’s estate is tied up in a lawsuit by his relatives, who hate my guts. We keep expecting a settlement, but it never happens. The book is— a necessity.”
“Well, then—”
She twisted her fingers again. “I’m afraid. Afraid I can’t.”
Damn. I couldn’t work with a woman who constantly twisted her fingers and teetered on the edge of collapse. I was a ghostwriter, not a psychotherapist. I said, “We have a book to do. It’s a job. Think of it as a job, not a— catharsis.”
“A job.” I wondered if she’d ever had a job.
I was wishing I’d had a cup of coffee before launching into this when she rounded on me and said, “How do you feel about working with a killer?”
My stomach lurched. “I don’t—”
“Aren’t you afraid? What if I go berserk?” Her green eyes glittered.
I thought maybe she had gone berserk. I started to get to my feet.
She continued, bitterly, “What if I pick up something like— like that rock there” —she pointed to a nearby stone— “and batter—”
A voice said, vehemently, “Stop it!” I turned to see Ross. His face was hard and angry, his fists clenched. Vivien glared at him, but fell silent.
He said, “Georgia Lee may not care for amateur theatricals, Vivien, so why don’t you can it?” He looked steadily at her for several seconds, as if daring her to begin again. Then he said, “Coffee’s ready.” He walked back toward the house.
When he was gone Vivien said, conversationally, “Being known as a killer has its good side, though. You’d be amazed how I always get the best table in restaurants.”
I was shaking. She stood up beside me. The cream-colored shawl still fluttered below. On an impulse, I pointed and said, “What’s that?”
She glanced and said, carelessly, “My shawl. The wind was blowing hard earlier and snatched it right out of my hands.”
The explanation had an air of perfect spontaneity. She picked her way down the hill to retrieve the shawl. I didn’t wait for her. Coffee was ready.
UNDER THE OLIVES
After that unpromising beginning, the work situation was as rocky as I’d feared. Vivien was quavery and seemed pressed to the limit. She frequently balked, cut our sessions short, or pleaded ill health and wouldn’t work at all. She spent hours on the phone in murmured conversation with her lawyers in New York.
Still, we managed to refine the working outline we’d agreed on in our previous exchange of letters. The book would start with the night of Carey Howard’s murder: The quarrel between Carey and Vivien, Vivien’s going to spend the evening with Ross, her return to the apartment, where she found the police and learned that Carey had been killed. Then we’d flash back, touching briefly on Vivien’s early life and her first marriage, to the poet Denis McBride, the father of Alexander and Blanche.
The accounts I’d read portrayed McBride as a rambunctious drunk famous for the mesmerizing, incantatory performance of his work at public readings. Comparisons with Dylan Thomas abounded, more so because McBride had taken his last few-too-many at the White Horse Tavern in New York City, once a Thomas watering hole, and had staggered into Hudson Street to be dispatched by a speeding taxi. His attention-getting demise had conferred a certain chic on Vivien, I gathered, and had led to her meeting and eventually marrying Carey Howard.
Anyway, after grief-stricken widowhood, we had marriage to Carey, then the marriage going sour, Vivien’s seeking comfort and intimacy with the dashing artist Ross Santee, and back to Carey’s murder. Having come full circle, we’d cover the aftermath: the inquest, the harrowing glare of publicity, the shattering of her life, the tentative attempts to put it back together. We’d end in a blaze of positive thinking with her determination to write this book and put herself on the record.
It was slick as a whistle and probably ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent horse manure, but I thought it would work. I wouldn’t actually write it until I was back in Paris after the interviewing was over. When I could get her to talk, I could see Vivien had her tale worked out to the last nuance, which was to be expected from a woman who’d spent considerable time being grilled by the New York City police. Plainly, the book would contain no revelations that couldn’t have been found in any newspaper at the time, but as long as nobody claimed it
did, I saw no problem.
Even on the rare occasions when we kept to it, the schedule wasn’t taxing. Vivien and I started late in the mornings, sitting with our notes at the stone table under the olives and working until lunchtime. After a siesta, we’d get together again in mid-afternoon and go on until time for before-dinner drinks. Because she was so skittish and unpredictable, I thought we’d need extensive preliminaries to get her used to talking with me before we started taping. I wasn’t sure how well it was working. Sometimes she chattered breathlessly, hectically, about trivialities; at other times she hardly spoke, sitting choked and morose, giving monosyllabic answers. I didn’t know how hard ghostwriters usually had to work, but I could see I was going to earn every dime.
The other members of the household kept out of our way. Blanche treated us and the surrounding countryside to troubadour music at thundering volumes on her boom-box cassette player. Otherwise, she was so unobtrusive as to be nonexistent, sliding in and out of view like a will-o’-the-wisp. Ross ran every day, returning after God-knows-how-many miles, looking wasted and slick with sweat. Sometimes he shut himself in the shed, off-limits to everybody else, but if he was in there working he didn’t talk about it. Pedro’s main function seemed to be mixing drinks, but he also ran errands, driving down to Beaulieu-la-Fontaine to get newspapers, rubber bands, suntan lotion, or whatever else anybody wanted. Occasionally, he stood at the edge of the bluff fouling the air with his poisonous black cigar smoke. Marcelle broiled trout, roasted lamb, stewed beef, and stayed away from local delicacies like calves’ feet or tripe.
Saddled with a difficult task, living with people I didn’t know, I often felt lonely. One afternoon, I decided to get better acquainted with Blanche.
I had been for a walk, strolling down the road to the end of our wall. Beyond it, past a thicket of spiny, white-flowered eglantine, a gravelly path led up a slope. I followed it. From this vantage point, I could see the house, a pink Easter egg in a nest of green. I continued along the path, which followed the ridge past a knoll thickly grown with bushes and trees. Just beyond the knoll was a young cherry orchard, small trees hung with pale yellow fruit. I wandered among the trees to the edge of the bluff, where the path ended. Mas Rose, as far as I could tell, was the only house on the ridge.
When I returned, I saw Blanche bent over a notebook at the table under the olive trees, writing furiously. Several books were stacked beside her. Across the yard by the shed. Ross, in running shorts, was doing warm-up exercises. From a distance, Blanche made a delicate picture. With the sun sifting through the silver leaves and brightening her blond hair and fuzzy pink sweater, she could have been the centerpiece of a perfume ad. Closer, her strained look and the downward curve of her mouth became noticeable.
I said, “Hi,” and she closed her notebook before responding with a tentative smile. I went on, “Don’t let me disturb your writing.”
She shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
I was curious. “You seemed busy.”
“No.” She looked down at her hands, which I thought were positioned to hide the spiral binder’s pale green cover.
One of the books in front of her was entitled Medieval Song. “Still reading the troubadours?”
“Yes.” More downward staring.
I was lonely, but maybe talking with Blanche was too tough. Just as I’d given up she said, softly, “I’ve been interested a long time. Since I was a little girl.”
I sat down across from her. “Really?”
“I learned about the troubadours from my father. He was a poet, too, you know.”
“Yes.” Blanche had been five years old when her father stumbled in front of the taxi. “He admired them?”
“Oh, yes.” I saw Blanche smile for the first time. Not at me, but at the memory of Denis McBride. “He would’ve liked to be a troubadour himself— traveling to all the castles, performing his work.”
“They wrote about courtly love?” I prompted.
She nodded. “Secret love, impossible love. That’s the only kind that counted for them.”
Ross was bracing himself against the shed, stretching his hamstrings. I thought of Blanche’s jibe at him when we had drinks. “They yearned after other men’s wives?” I asked.
She nodded. “Their patrons’ wives, mostly. It was a convention.” Again, I thought of Ross and Vivien. Blanche went on, “There were women troubadours, too.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. A woman wrote this. The Countess of Dia.” She picked up Medieval Song, found a page, and read, with a surprising amount of expression: “Lovely lover, gracious, kind, When will I overcome your fight? O if I could lie with you one night! Feel those loving lips on mine!”
Her eyes veered toward Ross, and he straightened and looked at us. Color surged into Blanche’s face.
Lovely lover, gracious, kind— Ross’s reddish hair was tousled and perspiration gleamed on his bare torso. His legs were long, well shaped, and muscular. It seemed bitterly inevitable that Blanche would be in love with him.
I didn’t know if he’d heard. He smiled blandly and waved to us as he trotted past. Her eyes followed him out the gate. We heard his feet hitting the road outside. Her attention distracted, Blanche had moved her hands away from her notebook. I looked down at the words she had printed in block letters on the cover: The Book of Betrayal.
“I always wanted to come to Provence,” Blanche said.
“And now you’re here.”
“It’s too late now.” Her blue eyes were shadowed with unhappiness.
“It isn’t too late,” I said. “You’re here now, and you’re young—”
“Oh, please!” She pressed her lips together. She said, “I wanted to come to Provence. There was a program at the university in Avignon. They accepted me. It was the dream of my life.”
“And then—”
“And then Carey wouldn’t pay for it. That’s what he and my mother quarreled about.”
What was she telling me? “You mean—”
She shook her head. “I mean, it’s too late, now. It’s spoiled. That’s all.”
A silver-gray leaf floated down and landed on the table between us. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She picked up the leaf and studied it. “Maybe it has to do with my father.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why I like the troubadours so much. Why it seems more real to yearn for the lost and impossible than to have anything.”
My eyes stung. Yearning for the lost and impossible wasn’t Blanche’s exclusive territory. “I don’t know,” I said, and she turned back to her notebook as I walked away.
A LETTER
“Carey Howard was a supercilious shit, and the meanest bastard who ever lived,” Vivien said.
We were sitting in the solarium, a tiny glassed-in alcove off her bedroom. (She and Ross, I had noted with interest, had separate rooms.) We had barely enough space for two white rattan chairs and a low table for the tape recorder. In good weather it was probably a cheerful spot, but in good weather we’d have been outside. Today the sky was leaden, the treetops bending in a stiff wind that for all I knew was the mistral. Drops of rain spat on the glass around us. I felt chilled by the weather and the hate in her voice.
Vivien raved on, “He didn’t care about anything—anything— except being seen in the right place at the right time. The right shows, the right restaurants, the right parties—do you have any idea how exhausting that can be?”
She didn’t expect or need an answer. I continued to scratch supplementary notes on my yellow legal pad, trying to be unobtrusive.
“He’d never have married me if I hadn’t been Denis McBride’s widow. Not that he ever read Denis’s poetry, but he’d seen a story about Denis in some magazine. That ratified Denis for him. God!” She slammed her fists down on the arms of her chair. “Oh, I could go on and on,” she said.
I hoped she would. For the first time since we started taping, she was really loose. She s
tood up and looked out at the rain, pulling her cream-colored shawl close around her. “Jesus, I hate this weather,” she said. “I thought Provence was supposed to be sunny and warm.”
I didn’t want her to wander from the subject. “Carey was rich, and he was a nice-looking man. You must’ve found him appealing at first,” I said.
She wheeled toward me. “Are you joking? I was a widow with two kids! Take a guess how much of an estate a poet leaves! Sure, Carey was appealing!”
She dropped back into her chair. Watching the tape revolve, not wanting to prod too soon, I waited for her to continue. When she spoke again, her tone had changed from anger to self-pity. “I would’ve been better off on welfare.” She bit at a knuckle, her eyes reddening.
“Do you really think so?”
“Sure. Put Alex and Blanche in foster homes, whatever. Better than how we ended up.” She was sniffling, but that was to be expected. I remembered Blanche’s story of how Carey had refused to pay for the program in Avignon. “What about Alexander and Blanche?” I said.
She was immediately wary. “What do you mean?”
“How did they get along with Carey?”
She wound the fringe of her shawl tightly around her index finger and looked away from me. “Not too badly,” she said. “He was a stepfather. There was no love lost. But he was no worse to them than to anybody else.”
That was baloney. I had read in the clips that Vivien’s son Alexander had left home because he and Carey didn’t get along. “I thought Carey and Alexander had problems.”
She nodded, conceding the point. “Alex took off right after high school and went to California. He had things to work out. He’d been through a terrible time.” At the mention of her son, her voice softened.
“His father’s death, you mean?”
“Alex was ten years old when Denis died. It was rough for him. Denis was a scoundrel, but he could be— lovable. The children adored him. Then I remarried, and Carey was so different—” She sighed, leaving me to fill in the rest for myself.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 26
