by Sally Mason
“But how can they be? The horse lost.”
“It came second. He made a place bet,” Darcy says, going back years to when her uncle used to lay a few dollars on the ponies, sitting at the kitchen table shouting at the radio when the race was broadcast.
Lakshmi stares at her in confusion.
Darcy says, “You still win money if the horse places second.”
“I see,” Lakshmi says, when she clearly doesn’t. “And this person, this bookmaker, held onto the ring why?”
“Oh, apparently there is a period of time in which appeals can be lodged. Horses running at the wrong weight or wearing the wrong shoes,” Darcy flaps her hand, her knowledge exhausted, “that kind of thing. Once the all clear sounds, the bets can be paid. Forrest, drunk as he was, left before everything was concluded. Fortunately the bookmaker is an honorable man.”
“Well, good gosh.”
Darcy is no liar and it’s tough not too wilt under Lakshmi’s stare.
She stands and walks through to the kitchenette and pours a glass of water which she pretends to sip from a greasy glass.
It’s not for Lakshmi to know that she stopped off at an ATM and found a credit card that had been in her purse since she and Porter were last in Europe—a back-up card that her ex-husband had organized before they left.
Had Porter forgotten about it?
Darcy fed it into the machine, keyed in the code, and when she asked for the maximum of ten thousand dollars, the machine whirred and gurgled and spat out the banknotes.
Darcy walks back to the bed.
“Lakshmi, this money will go quite a long way in India, won’t it?”
“Gosh yes, a terribly long way.”
“So, take Forrest and fly back home and get busy fixing up your palace.”
“Forrest told you about that?”
“He did.”
“I’m a little embarrassed.”
“There’s no reason to be. He tells me you want to open a hotel?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, perhaps Forrest’s crazy bet will enable you to make a start.”
“You think he would come with me? To India?”
“In a flash.” Darcy gestures around the room. “Things aren’t exactly working out for him here.”
“No, they’re not.” Lakshmi stares at Darcy. “What were you coming down here to tell Forrest?”
“Oh, I wanted to apologize for what he’d seen, but make him realize that we had no future. That he should continue with his life.”
“You really think that?”
“Yes,” Darcy says. “I do.”
She stands.
“I want you to do something for me, Lakshmi.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell Forrest that I was here. Don’t tell him about me going to see the bookmaker and getting his ring back. Just tell him you arrived and found him passed out on the bed with the money in his pocket.”
“He’ll smell a rat.”
“He was drunk. Tell him he has alcoholic amnesia. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Lakshmi rises and they embrace.
“The very best of luck to you, Darcy.”
“And to you.”
“Our doors in Jaipur are always wide open.”
Darcy leaves, and if there are tears streaming down her cheeks it’s not from any kind of emotion, it’s from the LA smog wreaking havoc with her eyes.
81
It’s evening and Darcy sits on her couch sipping wine, Eric lounging in the armchair opposite her.
“You really dropped that bundle of cash to send Forrest Forbes out of your life forever?”
“I did it for him, yes. And for Lakshmi. Maybe this hotel will be a second chance for them.” She drinks. “But, mostly I did it for me.”
“Yeah?”
“Forrest is a dangerous temptation, Eric. One that I find difficult to resist. But look at the man’s life: booze, gambling, weird hookers with beehive hairstyles?”
“That does sound pure John Waters. Even for Forrest.”
“I just don’t think I’m sophisticated or worldly enough for him.”
“Mnnnn.”
“I’m a small town house mouse.”
“I’m not so sure. Not any more.”
“Don’t be fooled. I am.”
“And what is the mouse going to do with her house?”
“I’m going to sell it.”
“Surely you’re not going to give Porter half?”
“Porter can, in the worlds of some teenage poet, swivel.”
She laughs, and so does Eric.
“No, I’m going to give a very generous sum of money to the Children’s Shelter, and then I’m going to get myself a small place to live and find myself a job.”
“A job?”
“Yes. I’m tired of being useless.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I have no idea. That will, as they say, be revealed in the fullness of time.”
“I’ll miss you, neighbor.”
“Oh, I’ll still be around. And we’ll still meet up all the time at the Book & Bean.”
“Surely you mean Brontë’s?”
When Darcy looks at him blankly, Eric laughs.
“Oh, darling, what a day it’s been! Poor Billy Bigelow appears to be wildly, crazily, head-over-heels in love with that pale and interesting waitress of his. So in love that he’s naming the place after her. In your absence he asked my advice and I told him it was a fabulous idea, so much more classy than the Book & Bean.”
“It is.” Darcy smiles. “I’m so pleased for Billy.”
“He goes by William now, I think you should know.”
“About time.”
Eric crosses to the couch and seats himself beside Darcy, putting his arm around her shoulders.
“I love you, Darce,” he says.
“And I love you, Eric.”
Darcy rests her head on his shoulder, closes her eyes and tries very hard not to think of Forrest Forbes.
82
After two months in India Forrest no longer hears the incessant cacophony of horns (buses, taxis, motorcycles) as he walks along the crowded sidewalk.
He has become used to the constant press of humanity, too, negotiating the hawkers and the beggars as he strolls.
But the smell still intoxicates him: a heady mix of dust and dung and spices.
A smell that is unique to India.
A cow has wandered into the road to graze at something lying on the asphalt, and the surging traffic streams around it, the animal standing chewing, tail twitching, completely unconcerned.
Forrest has been to the post office to post a letter.
A letter to Darcy Pringle.
He could have sat at Lakshmi’s laptop, of course, and knocked off something, pressed send, and that would have been that.
But this quaint, outmoded form of communication seems well suited to Rajasthan, where bespectacled Mr. Sharma—wearing a jacket and tie over a dhoti—sits cross-legged on the sidewalk with his ancient Royal typewriter, selling his services to the illiterate as a letter writer.
Forrest, of course, wrote by hand, in his rusty but serviceable copperplate.
He went through a number of drafts—the letter took him weeks to compose—before he was satisfied with the version that will now wing its way to Santa Sofia.
Lakshmi, after watching him sitting in his room writing, day after day (oblivious to the shouts of the builders who scrambled up and down their bamboo scaffolding, repairing the east wing of the palace) eventually could contain herself no longer and said, “Why don’t you just telephone her, Forrest?”
“Who?”
“Oh, don’t play the fool with me. Darcy. Darcy Pringle, that’s who you’re writing to isn’t it?” He nodded. “Then just pick up the phone and call her. Stop mooning away up here like Mr. John bloody Keats.”
Forrest shook his head.
“I’d feel too exposed. A letter is
about all I can manage.”
Lakshmi gave him that look again, that look he’d seen since he awoke massively hung over in that hovel in Hollywood and allowed her to shovel him onto the plane to Mumbai.
The look of a woman with something to hide.
But she’s stuck resolutely to the story of him winning the money.
Money that bought them coach tickets to India (a new and painful experience for long-legged Forrest) and paid for the first renovations on the palace.
When he’d confronted Lakshmi with sketchy memories of losing the bet—and losing his mother’s ring—she’d laughed him off.
“Alcoholic amnesia, Forrest. Plain and simple.”
As he walks through town he stops off at a sidewalk vendor and buys a bottle of water (kept cold in a bed of ice in a plastic cooler) to sip on his return to the palace.
Forrest has been sober since they left the States.
He drinks water and tea and sweet lassi.
But no booze.
For the first time since he was fifteen, he’s seeing the world unmediated by alcohol and chemicals.
And what a strange and fantastical world it is.
Yesterday, Forrest wandered into an internet café and Googled Mr. Darcy.
After wading through pages of references to Jane Austen’s hero, he finally found the horse.
The race that Forrest had bet the ring on had been the stallion’s last, and he was now out to stud in Kentucky, which sounded like a fine way to end a life.
But Forrest was interested in the details of the race on which he had supposedly won money on a place bet and he saw that Mr. Darcy had, indeed, come in second to Skylark that day at Hollywood Park.
So it was theoretically possible that Forrest had won the money.
Theoretically.
Forrest, walking along the Rajasthan sidewalk, the domes of the old palace appearing above the rooftops of the crowded town, shakes his head.
Never in his life had he wagered on a place bet.
Place bets were for ninnies.
Fence sitters.
Fellows with no gumption.
You bet to win or you didn’t bet at all.
So, Forrest had a theory.
And it was this theory that he had spent many weeks crafting into a letter to Darcy Pringle.
His theory was that he had lost the bet and the ring.
That Darcy Pringle had gone to Raymond and (who knew how?) had persuaded him to return the ring.
And that sweet, generous Darcy had provided the ten thousand dollars and called them Forrest’s winnings.
Lakshmi, of course, had denied all of this.
“I saw neither hide nor hair of Darcy Pringle that day, Forrest. I found you in a state of total inebriation in your revolting apartment with a pocket full of dollars.”
“She told you to stick to that story, didn’t she?”
“There is no story, Forrest. There is only the truth.”
“You’re lying, Lakshmi.”
“I am not!”
His friend’s indignation hadn’t fooled him.
Lakshmi was lying, okay.
If Darcy Pringle had been nowhere near Forrest’s Hollywood hole-in-the-wall that day, then how had a tube of her trademark lip stick (Dolce & Gabbana Mandorla) landed halfway under the bed for him to find when he dragged together his few pitiful belongings the morning he and Lakshmi fled LA?
The tube of lipstick that’s in his pants pocket right now as he crosses the road—the seething traffic somehow leaving him unscathed—his fingers stroking the metal tube like it’s a good luck charm.
No, Darcy had been there that day.
She’d come looking for him.
She had not lost herself in the arms of her oafish ex-husband.
This Forrest Forbes has to believe.
And, as he walks into the grounds of the palace and joins the old mahout, Bhogilal, who washes down Kipling—the elephant grown now, only a few years younger than Forrest—and feeds the animal a juicy red apple, Forrest has to believe that Darcy will respond to his letter.
And respond to his invitation to come to India.
To come to Rajasthan.
To come to him.
83
Carlotta McCourt, habit keeping her at her post at the bedroom window, feels curiously deflated as she surveys her enemy’s house.
There has been precious little to gossip about these last months.
Darcy has lived quietly, by all accounts spending her days doing volunteer work at that children’s shelter in Bascomb (how saccharine and sanctimonious) and meeting her fruity little friend for coffee in the afternoon at the Book & Bean.
There is no way Carlotta will ever bring herself to call the dive Brontë’s.
It’s bad enough that she has to watch that stuck-up little bookworm parade around like she’s Emma Thompson, sneering at the customers.
In protest, Carlotta and her tribe of gossipers tried migrating to a new coffee shop in the strip mall, but it was gloomy and dim and went out of business within a month.
Billy’s place, by contrast, is booming.
Hideous new name or not.
Go figure . . .
Carlotta perks up a little as she watches Darcy walk down her pathway, past the FOR SALE sign, and check her post box.
She lifts out a letter, and from her body language Carlotta can see that the letter surprises Darcy.
Darcy seems about to open it when a car pulls up and Kathy King, the realtor, climbs out.
The two women chat and smile and then Kathy crosses to the sign and attaches a SOLD sticker.
So, the end of an era.
Darcy, still carrying that unopened letter, gets into her SUV and drives toward town.
A sound disturbs Carlotta and she turns to see Walt—how come he’s not on the golf course this time of day?—yanking clothes from his closet and dumping them in a heap on the bed.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m moving out.”
“What?”
He looks at her without expression.
“I’m moving out.”
Carlotta strides across to him.
“Walter McCourt, you stop what you’re doing right this instant, you hear?”
Unperturbed Walt continues unpacking his clothes.
She sees he has acquired a large Samsonite suitcase.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve got myself a condo at that new golf estate. A nice little two-bedroom on the 18th fairway.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Remember that Glenhaven development of Porter’s that went belly-up when he filed for chapter eleven last month?”
She nods.
The town had been abuzz with tales of high-flying Porter having lost everything.
Even his pregnant wife had fled back to her parents in Montana or Minnesota or whatever hick flyover state she hailed from.
“Well, me and some of the boys got together and bought the estate on auction. Got it for a real good price too.” Walt is beaming as he starts to shove his clothes into the suitcase. “And I got me the pick of the condos.”
“Who is she?”
He stares at her.
“Huh?”
“Who is the little floozy?”
He laughs and shakes his head.
“Believe me, Lottie, there’s no floozy. There’s only peace and quiet and days of golf and nights of sport on TV. Hog heaven.”
Carlotta feels a little dizzy and has to sit down on the bed.
“You can’t just walk out on me.”
“C’mon, Lottie, this is no way to live. You hate my guts, admit it. You’ve always hated me for being fat, ugly Walt McCourt, not pretty, slick Porter Pringle.” He dumps pairs of shoes into the suitcase. “Look where that pretty face got him . . .”
Walt looks up at her and he finds a smile.
“It’s for the best. The twins will be at UCLA in a couple
of months. The timing couldn’t be better.”
“What about me?”
“You can keep the house, of course. And I’ll be more than generous in the settlement.”
“Settlement? You’re divorcing me?”
“I think that would be best. Let’s put this whole sorry mess behind us.”
He zips up the suitcase and wheels it toward the door.
“You take care now, Lottie. I’m on my cell if you need me.”
He leaves her sitting on the bed in a state of shock.
How will she live without having her loathing of Walt McCourt to sustain her?
Carlotta sees her life stretching into an infinite emptiness.
A future in which she’ll fight—and lose—the battle to stay young.
And she knows that for all the Botox sessions and the painful ordeals under the knife of her cosmetic surgeon, age, gravity—and less than stellar genes—will win out and she’ll become one of those sad, wrinkled trolls that wander the streets and the malls unseen and unloved.
And then another unpleasant realization strikes her.
Gossip-starved Santa Sofia will have a juicy morsel to chew on now.
The whole town will be giggling about how Carlotta McCourt hasn’t even been dumped for a big-breasted bimbo . . .
She’s been dumped for a little white ball and ESPN.
84
Darcy walks into Brontë’s and exchanges waves with the love birds behind the counter.
William and Brontë were married in a small ceremony a few weeks ago, the reception held at the community hall near the beach.
Darcy organized the décor and the catering, and persuaded the guitarist from the band that had played at the Spring Ball to come up from LA and serenade the couple on a lute.
Even the gossips of Santa Sofia—with the notable exception of Carlotta McCourt—had agreed that it was an event of surpassing sweetness.
Darcy, with a glass of Perrier in front of her, still has a few minutes before the ever punctual Eric Royce arrives, so she lifts the letter from her purse.
It is in a plain white envelope.
There is no return address, but the Indian postmark is the giveaway.
Looking down at the letter lying on the table, Darcy realizes she’s holding her breath.
