She pressed a towel to her forehead. ‘I’m not very fit.’
‘It was a good idea, I feel better.’
‘Let’s have a shower,’ she said, and limped towards the stalls, peeling off the top of her bathing suit.
I stood under the hot water trying to frame what I’d say to Angela Lang. Mazarine emerged from the shower next to mine and stood naked, both hands up as she untangled an elastic tie from strands of her golden hair, water streaming off her body, a spot of soap foam on her hip, dimpled thighs, broad shoulders; she turned, I looked away over her shoulder and she walked past me with her body now firmly swathed in a white towel, taking short little steps on the slippery floor.
When we had both dressed and I was heading for the exit she stopped me with a hand on my shoulder, and drew me close. My nerves flared, the blood swarmed under my skin. She put her mouth close to my neck, talking quietly.
‘I’ve hidden it here.’
‘What?’ I scrunched up my shoulder, sound roaring in my ear. My face was burning.
‘The flash drive — it’s bad karma.’
‘Karma?’
‘It’s like an unlucky charm. We can leave it here for now. Look.’ She showed me. ‘Under the shelf here, see. It’s so small. No one will ever—’
I shivered.
‘Are you cold? You’re all goose bumps.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
In a café in Lamb’s Conduit Street I remembered the books I’d bought, a new imprint of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black for me, and two crime thrillers for her.
‘I bought these for you.’
She clasped her hands. ‘For me?’
‘You said you love buying books. But it’s too—’
‘Oh. You remember me saying that?’
‘Sure.’
I held up the crime novels.
She took the books, turning them carefully. ‘And Stendhal for you.’
‘I last read it when I was a student. It’s quite absorbing, I seem to remember.’
‘You don’t like thrillers?’
‘Well, they’re not usually all that subtle.’
‘Anyway, thank you.’
She tucked the books in her bag and worked her way through a triangle of vegetarian lasagna while I stared out the window, tensely watching the street, wincing at the pompous tone I’d slipped into, out of embarrassment. Quite absorbing indeed.
‘Frances?’
I focused on her.
‘Did you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Mazarine rested her chin on her hand. ‘You zoned out again. You seem to be—’
I cut her off. ‘No.’
Silence.
‘So, don’t you want anything?’
‘Just coffee.’
‘You should eat.’
She talked about ‘wellness’: diet, vitamins, nutrients, the need to be mindful.
I was thinking about Angela Lang.
‘Because you have to love yourself,’ I heard her say.
I broke in, ‘But how’s that done? Loving yourself? I can’t see how that’s conceptually possible.’
‘You can’t love others until you love yourself.’
‘Isn’t that just a popular cliché, a truism? I love Maya, but I can take or leave myself.’
‘It’s a matter of taking care, of accepting yourself.’
‘Yeah. Well, maybe.’
Her expression was serene, her cheeks glowed with the recent exertion. She smelled of shampoo and chlorine. Strands of her hair had turned static and floated around her head, catching the light.
‘If you don’t accept yourself, you’ll find it hard to trust others.’
I stopped shrugging and looked at her. Silence. I had a sudden mental image of her naked at the health club, the water shining on her skin. It made my heart speed up.
Her expression was composed, tranquil.
‘I’ve started noticing women,’ I said.
Her look turned quizzical. ‘Noticing?’
‘Actually seeing them. Maybe I was blanking them out.’
‘Really? You don’t normally see women?’
‘Oh, never mind.’
‘No go on, tell me.’
‘I get on fine with men, but I can’t read women. I’m basically like one of those men who say, “Women are lovely, but I don’t understand them at all.”’
‘Fascinating,’ Mazarine said.
I tried to gauge her tone, was she joking, serious?
‘So, you can’t read me?’ Playful, mocking. The low sun through the window fell on her face, the light picking out the small black flaw in her iris, the coloboma.
‘You’re not an open book, no.’
We were smiling, then she swallowed, looked conscientious. ‘I should explain myself as I go along.’
‘No. God, I don’t need a running commentary, honestly.’
‘Perhaps you do.’
‘Forget about it. It’s just that I’ve noticed a change. I was looking at a couple at breakfast, the pair with the iPad next to us, and really noticing the woman, actually seeing. And then at the gym today, too.’
‘Maybe you just feel a new openness.’
She spread out her hands, palms up. Beatific. Mazarine’s smile. Honestly.
I walked from Lamb’s Conduit Street and arrived early at the Rosewood Hotel, pushing through the doors that led to the beautifully lit Holborn Dining Room, then into Scarfes Bar, which was quiet, almost empty. I waited in the lobby reading The Guardian on my phone until Angela Lang came through the door, a tall, slight figure in dark jacket and trousers, a black bag over her shoulder, her straight sandy hair tucked behind one ear.
We shook hands. Her eyes were pale blue, her face was thin, with smooth tanned skin and sharp cheekbones, her teeth slanted just slightly inward, giving her a hungry look. I saw the doorman noticing her as we passed into the bar.
She signalled to a waiter, we conferred, ordered two glasses of sauvignon; she laid the wine list on the table, tapped it and said, ‘How is your daughter?’
‘Very well, thanks. She’s out of town.’
‘Oh?’
‘Budapest, Ibiza, Valencia, all over the place. I can’t keep up.’
‘Is she all right? After Aiden, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, good.’
Her accent, the clubby, clipped enunciation, suggested poshness muted, disguised.
‘Maya’s a very stable young woman,’ I said.
‘Stable, I see that. So. You must be keen for her to be back in town.’
‘Absolutely. Meanwhile I’m doing some research for a novel.’
‘Oh yes, Maya said you write. What kind of fiction?’
‘What kind?’
‘Crime? Romance?’
‘I don’t write genre fiction.’ I heard myself, all affronted, nose in the air. ‘Actually, I’ve published a collection of short stories.’
‘Great!’
‘I’m planning a novel set in London and Paris.’ I stared into her pale eyes, improvising, without any great faith that I sounded convincing. I thought of telling her its title, Self State, that I’d conceived it as my Tale of Two Cities, but only said, ‘It’s about a woman with a divided self.’
‘Ah. Psychological thriller.’
‘Well, contemporary literary fiction,’ I said in a reedy voice. ‘About a woman who can’t understand other women. Who never learned the language.’
‘Grew up in the wild?’
The waiter was placing the glasses of wine on the table.
‘Not the wild as such. Although, New Zealand …’ I smirked but she only nodded. She gave the impression of humourlessness, or perhaps just an intense focus on something else.
‘I was so sorry to hear about Aiden,’ I said.
She raised her eyes. ‘Yes, it was a shock.’
‘He must have been very depressed?’<
br />
‘Well, he hid it but everyone noticed. The moods had intensified. Whole days when he couldn’t seem to …’ She sipped her wine, her eyes on me.
‘How awful.’
‘I know Sophie tried to help. But she works long hours at Gillmans, and anyway, once things get that bad you have to rely on the medication, and if that’s not working, it becomes very difficult.’
‘Sophie?’
‘His partner. She’s heartbroken, obviously. Probably feels guilty, which is absurd, but you know, human nature. Anyway, it must have been awful for Maya. Has she told you much about Aiden? The work? They had some brilliant projects on the go.’
‘There was a book by a boy who escaped Isis.’
‘That was a bit before Maya’s time actually. Did she tell you about the things she worked on?’
‘Some.’
‘Where is she, did you say?’
‘Travelling. Europe. All over the place.’
She waited for me to go on.
I said, ‘Do you have kids?’
‘Yes,’ she said, surprising me. ‘Three daughters.’
‘Three. You look far too young.’
‘Thank you.’
We sipped our wine, smiling vaguely at each other. I noticed that her fine, delicate jaw was ever so slightly uneven; perhaps it had once been broken.
I said, ‘Maya has talked about the books. There was a memoir by someone who married an Inuit. One by a guy who’d served in the British Army in Northern Ireland. A biography of a famous Czech, I think?’
‘Aiden did great things with the non-fiction list,’ Angela said.
I watched her. She checked her watch, glanced around the room, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
‘Maya mentioned they met a London fraudster,’ I said.
Angela stopped fidgeting. She traced her thin fingers slowly around the rim of her glass. ‘A fraudster?’
‘I mean a hacker.’
‘What happened?’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘Omerta.’
‘No information?’
‘Apparently not. Aiden didn’t pursue it.’
She shrugged, smiled at the passing waiter, checked her watch again, giving the impression of being distracted.
‘Didn’t you know about it?’
She hesitated, grimaced in a friendly way. ‘I did know about that, come to think of it.’
‘Come to think of it,’ I repeated, which was rude enough to make her focus on me with a hard little smile.
‘Dominic Something-Godwin,’ I said. ‘You introduced them. I can’t remember his full name.’
‘Hay-Godwin.’ She studied my face. ‘What did Maya tell you?’
‘Nothing really.’
‘Dominic. I’ve known him quite a long time, since I was at The Independent. He comes from a London crime family; he’s served sentences for cybercrime, among other things. Aiden wanted to get to know him, so I introduced them, but Dominic’s only interesting if you’re a criminologist. He’s pleasant in the right circumstances, but a bit of a sociopath.’
‘Not a bigwig then?’
She smiled without warmth at the quaint word. ‘A bigwig. Hardly. Just a hacker. I think Aiden had in mind a kind of portrait of London, like Peter Ackroyd’s London biography, something ambitious and sweeping involving types. Hay-Godwin was a type.’
‘Was?’
‘Is.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘At the moment? How would one know? Sunning his skinny arse on the Costa del Sol presumably. But how on earth did we get onto him?’
‘Was it a risk for them to meet him?’
She widened her eyes. ‘No, not at all.’ She softened her tone. ‘You know what? We should be talking about the people Aiden left behind. Sophie, Maya. His team at work.’
‘You,’ I said.
Her fingers lightly touched the rim of her glass, the table. ‘Me? Yes, me. Aiden was one of my closest friends.’
‘Did Aiden know he was meeting with the Mafia? He took Maya along with him.’
There was a loaded silence. She stared at me with pale, unblinking eyes.
‘You think I shouldn’t have got them together? But there was no harm done. I meet people all the time, for my job. So do Aiden and Maya, obviously, for the books. Did.’
Her dismissiveness was provoking.
‘Is it certain — is it known how Aiden killed himself?’ I was immediately embarrassed by the question, its blundering tone so at odds with Angela Lang’s stillness, her subtle expressions.
She parted her lips. Incredulous. ‘Known?’ Then in that patient tone again: ‘Yes, he killed himself. He went under a train. It’s recorded on CCTV.’
‘Oh. Have you seen it?’
‘The footage? Of course not. He’d checked in as a voluntary patient in a psychiatric clinic in Hampstead. Someone let him out early in the morning, when he was still unwell. Which they shouldn’t have done. He went straight to the West Hampstead station.’
‘A clinic. Maya didn’t mention that.’
‘His colleagues, friends even, didn’t know about it. He was living alone, he and Sophie weren’t partners anymore. They owned the flat together, but they were seeing other people.’
The waiter hovered; Angela said something I didn’t catch.
Silence. She studied me closely then asked, ‘What’s Maya said about Dominic? Did he tell them anything interesting?’
‘Nothing really.’
‘So, there you are, he wasn’t particularly useful.’
‘You were there, weren’t you? At the meeting. Where was it by the way?’
‘Oh.’ She flapped her hand impatiently. ‘St James’s Park. But do you think they had other meetings?’
My face was hot, my legs ached from the exertion at the gym. I felt lightheaded, empty, and I had the urge to needle. Deep down I was frustrated, worried for Maya.
‘I assume Maya would have told you,’ I said.
She looked defensive suddenly, and older, and seemed to find the turn of the conversation frivolous or distasteful. There were violet shadows under her eyes.
She picked up her glass. ‘To Aiden.’
‘Right. To Aiden.’
‘He was a good friend,’ she said in a flat voice, the posh accent clear now, she was too distracted to mask it.
I raised my glass. The bar had filled up, the noise level rising.
She leaned closer, with a forced smile. ‘So, your novel. When will it be published?’
‘I have to write it first.’
‘You said it’s about a woman who can’t read—’
‘Who can’t read women. Can’t understand how to relate to them.’
She smiled, considering. ‘Lonely then.’
‘Yes. Lonely, and puzzled. Trying to understand why.’
‘Does she find the answer?’
‘Well, first she has to realise there are questions to be asked. Then face the fact that people don’t like her asking. Then try to find out …’
Angela assumed an expression of tranced politeness.
‘Are you a big reader?’ I asked, rather acidly anticipating, Hardly at all, the odd thriller, must attack that pile beside the bed.
‘I’m re-reading The Golden Bowl,’ she said, and went on, carelessly, to list her light reading for that month: an analysis of post-Soviet Russia, a little bit of Borges in the odd moment, someone’s critical essays on American literature.
I broke in. ‘You were at Cambridge with Aiden, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, we were there at the same time. Modern Literature, both of us.’
The lights dimmed suddenly, shrinking the space around us, and the background music grew louder. Angela’s features were delicate in the shadowy light, gaunt almost. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were alert, despite her air of abstraction.
‘My novel is about touch,’ I said.
‘Touch?’
‘The connected world divides us. Keeps us from touching.’
‘You mentioned a divided self—’
I interrupted her. ‘If you don’t learn to connect, you can’t connect.’
After a silence, she leaned across the table and said, ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’
At the bar, a group of men shouted with abrupt laughter. The barman held a glass up to the light, turning it.
‘Live in fragments no longer,’ I repeated. I was drunk.
She glazed over, lips moving, recalling. She held up her index finger. ‘Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.’
‘Very good.’ I raised my glass. ‘To E.M. Forster.’
We drank.
I sat watching the crowd while she went to the restroom. I was stumped, baffled, uneasy.
How would I report this exchange to Mazarine? Angela Lang was so smooth and inscrutable, she’d provoked me, I’d lost my way, babbled about a novel I’d scarcely conceived, a novel about touch, no less — where had that come from?; had questioned her about a random source of hers with no real purpose, only a recklessness born out of frustration and the sense that she had wanted something, yes, try to keep that in mind: she’d had no reason to meet me, but had seemed to want to find something out.
I’d said too much. Shown my cards. But what cards? Why this paranoid sense of groping in the dark, the anxiety that some wrong move would result in—
At the bar, a woman with her back to me swivelled her stool, the mirror reflecting her face. She had thin, straight brown hair, brown eyes, a turned-down mouth.
Angela appeared, holding her phone. ‘I had to call one of my kids.’ She gathered her jacket and bag. ‘I’m so sorry, something’s come up, I have to get going.’
We walked out into the summer evening. She gave me her card, warmly urged me to stay in touch. Turning back she said, ‘Did Maya ever mention Obshchina?’
‘No. What’s that? A restaurant?’
She glanced up, a quick smile.
‘A restaurant. Yes. Anyway—’
She said goodbye, looking beyond me.
FOURTEEN
Holborn was crammed with commuters and tourists, the Tube so banked up people were queuing to enter the station. Heat came up off the pavement and there was no breeze, the air sluggish and thick with floating dust. I walked slowly through the crowds towards Russell Square.
Mazarine Page 15
