by Janet Tanner
‘Thank you but I’m not in need of any assurance.’ Harriet pushed the door ajar and removed the keys from the lock. ‘If you’ll excuse me …’
‘I’m not selling insurance. I want to talk to you about quite a different matter. It concerns Paula Varna. Your mother, I believe.’
Harriet stiffened, totally taken by surprise and annoyed with herself for not realising the moment he mentioned insurance the reason why he was here. But it simply hadn’t occurred to her. Of course when one thought about it rationally it was obvious there was bound to be an investigation of some kind, but throughout the long flight she had been too concerned with the purely personal implications of the news item to give a thought to those who might have a financial interest in the story.
‘Paula Varna was my mother, yes,’ she said, oddly defensive. ‘But I’d really rather not talk to you or anyone tonight. I have only just flown in from Paris and I am very tired.’
‘It won’t take long,’ he persisted without so much as a hint of apology, ‘ Just a few questions and I’ll leave you in peace.’
‘Mr O’Neill …’
‘It might be easier if we talked inside.’ Again, that suggestion of authority. Harriet bristled.
‘I’m not in the habit of letting strangers into my flat – especially at this hour. How do I know you are who you say you are?’
‘My card.’ He passed it to her and she examined it briefly. Somehow she had no real doubts as to whether Mr Tom O’Neill was genuine. She almost wished he was not.
‘You’d better come in then.’
She led the way into the communal hall which she personally had taken upon herself to brighten up with a vase of dried flowers and a couple of good, but ancient, rugs which she had picked up for a song at an auction sale. In the full light she was surprised to see he was much younger than his bulky, overcoat-clad figure had led her to believe – and a great deal better looking. Not handsome exactly. That was not a word one would apply to Tom O’Neill. But certainly hunky, with strong, irregular features, a full, jutting lower lip and very blue eyes. She turned her back on him, unlocking the inner door, and as the warmth from the storage heaters wafted out to greet them she thanked God that she had had the foresight to leave them on – she didn’t think she had been properly warm since reading the newspaper this afternoon – no, not even on the plane. She was longing for a drink – some of her emergency ration of scotch – but she did not see how she could have one herself without also offering one to her visitor, something she had no intention of doing.
She switched on the fights, dumped her bag on the table and turned to him abruptly.
‘Well, what can I do for you?’
‘As I said, I’d like to talk to you about your mother.’ He was regarding her closely, his very-blue eyes disconcertingly direct. ‘As a representative of the company who insured both her life and that of Mr Martin, not to mention the boat, I am anxious to discover the truth of what happened.’
‘I’m afraid there is nothing I can tell you. I was four years old when my mother died.’
Something unspoken hung in the air between them. She felt it with her pores, saw it in the slight lift of his eyebrow and the way one corner of his mouth tucked. Then he asked suddenly:
‘When did you last see your mother, Miss Varna?’
‘I told you – when I was four years old. It was the night before she left for her trip. She came to my room to say goodnight to me …’ She broke off as another memory stirred … that same evening, but later, raised voices coming from her mother’s room, her child’s feet pattering along the landing, peeping through a crack in the door … Her eyes darkened as she relived it and his sharp investigator’s eye noticed it.
‘And?’ he prompted her. ‘After that?’
‘I tell you I didn’t see her again after that night.’
‘But something happened.’
‘Nothing happened. For God’s sake …’
‘What did she say to you, then, when she looked in to say goodnight? Did she seem her usual self?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. Mom was always … Mom. And I can’t see that what she said to me is any of your business.’
‘I’m afraid a quarter of a million pounds sterling paid out on your mother’s life makes it my business.’ He crossed to a small occasional table, picking up a silver-framed studio portrait. ‘When was this taken?’
Suddenly Harriet had had enough.
‘Put that down!’ she snapped.
‘It is your mother, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is. It was taken before I was born, as a matter of fact, when she was still modelling – she was a top model, you know. But you have no right to come in here meddling with my things. Even a policeman wouldn’t dare poke about without a search warrant – and you’re not a policeman. You are a private investigator. I don’t have to talk to you.’
He looked up from the photograph, totally unruffled.
‘I usually find that the people who lose their tempers when I start asking questions are the ones with something to hide,’ he said easily.
‘What the hell do you mean by that?’
‘I’m sure you can work it out for yourself, Miss Varna.’
‘No, I can’t. Spell it out for me, please. You’re accusing me of complicity in fraud, is that it?’
‘A four-year-old child? Heaven forbid! However, it would seem that Greg Martin, your mother’s companion when the yacht was lost, has been fooling us these past twenty years. He has turned up in Australia, hasn’t he?’
‘I’m sure you know a great deal more about it than I do. I only know what I read in the papers.’
His eyebrow lifted again, an expression of polite disbelief.
‘Really? Then this must all be very distressing to you.’
She ignored the somewhat patronising platitude.
‘As far as I can make out no one has yet said conclusively that this man is Greg Martin’, she argued.
‘True. That is something that has to be established. However, assuming it is, then we must look very carefully at what happened to your mother. After all, she too might have survived the explosion.’
His words jarred Harriet and she swallowed at the ball of nerves that suddenly seemed to be constricting her throat. In a way he was only echoing her own thoughts but to hear them spoken aloud and by this unsympathetic stranger was oddly disturbing.
‘And if she isn’t dead then where the hell is she?’ she demanded.
‘That is what I am being paid to find out. I had hoped you would be able to help me but since you say you can’t I shall have to pursue other avenues. It may take me a little longer but …’ he smiled, and his confidence made her dislike him more than ever, ‘ I promise you I shall get there in the end.’
‘Then in that case I suggest you make a start right away,’ Harriet said. She crossed to the door and threw it open. ‘ Goodnight, Mr O’Neill.’
‘Goodnight Miss Varna. Thank you for your time.’
She did not reply, simply stood holding the door until he had gone. Then she leaned against it, realising that in spite of the fact that she was still wearing her ski jacket in the warm flat, she was shivering again. She levered herself away from the door, crossed to the heavy old sideboard and took out the bottle of whisky and a glass. Taken neat the spirit burned her throat and she held the glass cupped between her hands, staring into space.
Was it possible Paula was still alive – and did she even want her to be? Of course the immediate answer was ‘Yes! Oh yes!’ but in truth it was not that simple. What sort of woman would willingly choose to leave her husband and child without a qualm, allow them to grieve for her and believe her dead? Certainly not the dream mother a bereaved child had created for herself. With a sense of shock Harriet realised that in the last hours Paula had become more of a stranger to her than she had ever been during the twenty years she had believed her dead. A beautiful face in a photograph, a few misty memories, a haunting perfume
tugging at her senses, and Paula had been whatever Harriet wanted her to be. Now for the first time she was face to face with fragmented suggestions of reality, distorted perhaps, like the sun glancing on water, but hinting at something very different from the fairy tale princess the child Harriet had claimed as her own.
Could you have done such a thing, Mom? Harriet asked silently and was as far as ever from an answer. The image was all she had. She knew nothing of the real woman behind it.
The long hours of the night stretched ahead of her and the prospect opened a well of loneliness within her. Despising herself for her weakness she reached for the telephone, dialling Nick’s number. For a long while the bell rang and Harriet felt the sense of loneliness deepen. He wasn’t there. Then just as she was about to replace the receiver she heard his voice, that soft familiar Scottish burr.
‘Nick’, she said, choky suddenly.
‘Harriet – is that you? You’re back then.’
‘Yes. Just. I was beginning to think you weren’t there.’
‘I’m listening to some music. I had it turned up a bit too loud. I didn’t hear the phone at first.’
In the background she could hear The Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore.
‘Nick – do you think …?’ she began hesitantly.
‘You want me to come over?’ he asked, reading her mind.
‘Would you? I know it’s late but . .’
‘I’ll be with you in … twenty minutes.’
‘Oh Nick – thanks!’
‘My pleasure,’ he said drily. ‘You ask me, Harriet, all too seldom.’
‘And for goodness sake,’ she said, looking at the almost-empty Scotch bottle, ‘bring something good and strong to drink with you.’
In the time it took Nick to arrive Harriet forced herself to wash and change into a clean sweatshirt, though the most mundane of everyday actions seemed a huge effort. By the time she heard his car squeezing into a parking space outside she was calmer, at least outwardly, opening the door to him with what she hoped gave the appearance of nonchalance.
‘Hi! Sorry to drag you out on a night like this.’
‘Don’t even think of it.’ He kissed her briefly on the lips and came into the flat, a slightly-built sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties wearing a heavy black overcoat over a sweater and cords. From one of the voluminous pockets he produced a bottle of Scotch and put it down on the table. ‘Drinks – as ordered. I take it you are in need.’
‘Too true! What a day! Oh, bless you Nick.’ She fetched her glass. ‘Pour me one, will you, when you’ve taken your coat off. And what about you? Are you drinking too?’
‘I’ll keep you company. But better make it a small one – if I’m driving.’ There was just the hint of a question in his tone. She ignored it, habit making her play it coolly even now, in her moment of need.
‘I got the pictures, Nick. Some beauties, I think.’ She was annoyed to hear the slight tremble in her voice.
‘Great.’ He had tossed his coat over the back of a chair and was pouring whiskies. He handed one to her, looking at her directly. ‘You didn’t ask me over here to discuss the pictures though, Harriet – admit it. It’s … the other business, isn’t it? I take it you did as I suggested and got hold of a paper.’
‘Yes.’ She gulped at the whisky, then thought better of it. ‘I’ll get some ice.’
When she returned from the kitchen he had made himself comfortable on the sofa. She went over and perched herself on the ottoman at his feet.
‘I’ve had the insurance investigators here,’ she said.
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Already? They don’t waste time.’
‘No. I suppose, as the man said, with at least a quarter of a million at stake they can’t afford to, but all the same, it wasn’t very pleasant. Especially since I’d only just arrived back from Paris.’
She proceeded to relate the interview, keeping nothing back apart from the effect it had had on her, but Nick knew her too well to be fooled.
‘It must have been pretty gruesome,’ he said.
‘Yes – well – it’s such a damned cheek! First suggesting I was involved in some insurance fraud and then as good as saying Mom walked out on us! I realise from his point of view his company would be a quarter of a million better off if they could prove it should never have been paid in the first place, but … it is my mother he was talking about dammit!’
‘Oh Harri, darling Harri …’ He reached for her, pulling her up onto the sofa beside him and putting his arm around her. ‘And what do you think?’
‘What do I think? Well, she’s dead of course. She’d never do that to us …’ She broke off. ‘ No, to be truthful, that’s what I told him, but deep down I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.’ She gulped her drink.
‘Does it matter?’ he asked.
She shook herself free of his arm.
‘Well of course it bloody well matters!’
‘Why? You’ve lived the last twenty years without her, whatever.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Do you really want to know the truth? It might be a pretty upsetting business.’
‘I’m upset already,’ she admitted. ‘In any case – I’m going to have to face it sooner or later. That O’Neill man isn’t going to let up now he’s got his teeth into it. He’s going to dig and dig. God what a job! Imagine doing a shitty job like that!’
‘Not unlike a journalist really,’ Nick observed drily. ‘ Well, Harri, you can either sit back and let him do the digging or you can do a little investigation yourself.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether I want to.’
‘I was rather hoping you’d do a nice follow-up photo session for me’, he said slyly.
‘On what?’
‘That’s up to you. But you didn’t cover Kuwait in this lot, did you? Or the sweatshops of Korea, or the rip-off merchants in Hong Kong? A trip East may be just what you need.
‘Yes.’ But she sounded less than convinced.
They sat in silence for a while, then he looked meaningfully at the whisky bottle.
‘Shall I have another drink? Or am I going to be driving?’
She laughed shortly but it came out as a half-sob.
‘Oh Nick, what would I do without you?’
‘That is the first time I’ve heard you admit it,’ he said ruefully. ‘You generally seem to manage by yourself very well.’
She did not answer.
‘Well?’ he pressed her. ‘Do I have that other drink or not?’
She reached for the bottle and half filled his tumbler.
‘Have the bloody drink, Nick. And please … I would like you to stay.’
At first she slept, heavy, exhausted, whisky-induced sleep. Then suddenly she was wide awake, nerves jangling again, thoughts chaotic.
She eased herself out of Nick’s embrace and he did not stir. How she hated sleeping in his arms! Making love was all very well, pleasant and soporific if not exactly ecstatic, but afterwards … she needed her space.
I’m a bitch, she thought sometimes. I use Nick shamelessly and I don’t like myself for it. But he’s got no one to blame but himself. He allows me to do it. If I were a man I’d tell me to get lost – and fast!
Tonight, however, she had no room for such introspection. There were other things on her mind.
She eased herself out from under the duvet, reaching for her heavy wool man’s dressing gown and tying it firmly around her, crossed to the window. It had stopped snowing now and the sky was clear and black with a few stars. Beneath her window she could see the white humps of the pot in her backyard – pots that in summer she filled with geraniums and petunias in an effort to bring some colour to the uniform greyness, beyond them the wall that bordered the yard was also white-crusted. A familiar scene, yet one that had changed subtly since yesterday – just as everything else had been changed by that newspaper item, the whole of her life being undermined making her feel that nothing was quite as it had se
emed.
In one way, of course, Nick had been quite right when he had said that whatever the truth it made no difference. There was no going back now, no way to rewrite the years as she had known them. And they had been good years. With a child’s resilience she had quickly adjusted to the loss of her mother, who had never been more than a glamorous appendage on the periphery of her world, and Sally had stepped in to fill the breach more than adequately.
Now, looking back with the wisdom of adulthood, she could appreciate what she had taken for granted at the time. The moment the news had broken Sally had been there, comforting her, buffering her, cuddling her when she cried. There was a warmth about Sally that superceded all her amusing little vanities and softened the acid remarks she was prone to making – which were in reality a defence mechanism. Sally had a great capacity for love and a down-to-earth quality that Harriet presumed was a throw-back to her early upbringing and which had been honed and tested in the fire when she had given birth to – and kept – an illegitimate son in the days when illegitimacy was still a scandal. To Harriet Sally had become a surrogate mother and after she had married Hugo that position had been strengthened so that Harriet had felt secure and loved, never questioning her importance to the people who were important to her. Although the glamorous world of fashion and wealth spread wide around her, Harriet’s own family circle was tight – her father, Sally, and Sally’s illegitimate son, Mark Bristow.
Mark had been educated in England and later decided to live there, and it had been because of him that Harriet had first decided to come to London, though nowadays she saw little of him. He was in advertising; he and his partner, Toby Rogers, had their own agency, and paradoxically Mark had spent most of the last year back in the States. He was there now, setting up some important job or other. Had he not been she might have telephoned him instead of Nick, when she had been desperate for company. But then again, she might not. In a way Mark was too close to home, too much a part of the world whose foundations had just been rocked, yet somehow on the outside. No matter what the truth might turn out to be it would not affect Mark. The foundations upon which his life were built were intact. Winds of change might blow around him but his basics were not under threat.
