by Don Boyd
“I would love to know what prompted you to say that to me? Do you have any idea how cruel that was? Why are you being so aggressive? I have no real idea why you want to see me, but I am here to try to help you. That is my job.”
And then Laura screamed at her. “Well you fucking well should, you cold-hearted cow!” And after the scream, she was in floods of tears.
Margot watched this display analytically. She had seen many other outbursts. Was this an act or was this some kind of manic call for help? She gave Laura the benefit of the doubt.
“I am so, so sorry. I really am. I had no right… I will leave in a minute. Please forgive me. I am so tense. Frightened. Desperate. Please forgive me… This Paolo thing. I met him and his sister once, when I came to this city…”
She was hysterical. Margot went to the bathroom and poured a glass of water for Laura, who was trying to wipe her mascara-stained face which now looked like a porcelain doll with a black streak leaking down each cheek. She stood up as if making to leave.
“Stay, Laura, please!”
Laura was in Margot’s arms now, crying like a child.
“Let’s start again.”
Laura sat down, gingerly. “Eusebio Casals said that you were one of the most wonderful women he had ever met!”
Margot knew too much about Paolo’s step-father to take anything he said that seriously. But she accepted the compliment gracefully and sat down.
“Eusebio? He probably says that of all the women he has tried seduce but I love him to pieces!”
She laughed and then realised the significance of what Laura had just said to her. “Of course, he must be absolutely heart-broken. He tried to be a good replacement father to Paolo despite all the complications. And he adored Tilly.”
Laura managed to eke out a small smile. “I know what you mean about Eusebio but, yes, he is obviously very upset. He wanted to be my lover too, for many years. I have a wonderful flirtatious friendship with him.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes… but…”
Margot waited. The inevitable confession.
“I don’t know where to start… I am married, yes, and until six months ago, I was a happily married woman. Faithful, loyal, all that stuff… even the sex was good. I have two beautiful children; a six-year-old called Tom and a nine-year-old girl called Terry… Teresa… the two T’s…”
“And Eusebio?”
“We flirted over the sculptures in his studio once and that was it… and there were other temptations… but I loved, love Reggie, my husband… we have known each other since childhood!”
Laura took another sip from the glass of water and pulled another tissue from the box of Kleenex Margot religiously had at easy reach. She blew her nose.
“Can I be a client? Please! I so need you.”
Margot was firm and gentle. “Let’s take it slowly… I promise to help you out, even if it is just to listen to your story.”
“I need more than that.”
Laura looked desperately lonely.
“Don’t worry, we’ll work something out.”
Margot was still recovering from Laura’s outburst.
And Laura, as if reading Margot’s mind, said quickly and quietly, by way of a defence, “I never scream and very rarely swear! I am so sorry. My job requires it.”
“Okay, Laura. Let’s give it a go! Do you want to postpone this until we meet again?”
Laura’s face immediately transformed and she sat back. “Thank you so much. No! I need to tell you my story…”
Margot laughed sympathetically. Laura looked at her watch. “We only have half an hour left. Is that going to be enough time?”
“No. Not nearly enough. You are right. We shouldn’t rush. Let’s leave it… until after Paolo’s funeral? I can see you then, here at five.”
Margot remembered that she needed a good excuse not to attend the wake. She hated wakes and wanted to avoid a confrontation with Tarquin and Sabrina.
Laura seemed surprised. “Are you sure…?”
“Yes. Quite sure.” Margot smiled. Laura looked relieved, grateful.
“Five o’clock, after the funeral. By the way, he’s called Reggie… my husband. Reggie. We are going to come with Eusebio and his family.”
They stood up at the same time and looked at each other shyly. Laura went to the bathroom, emerging immaculately with a pair of sunglasses to hide her reddened eyes, and when Margot had finished writing the time and date for their next session in her appointments book, Laura crushed a wad of notes into Margot’s hand with a very embarrassed and awkward lunge.
“The custom, I believe.”
And before Margot could reiterate that she didn’t expect to be paid at the first visit, Laura was running down the staircase. Her high heels echoed heavily around the elegant stonework and her footsteps lingered in Margot’s mind like that sound effect in an episode of an old American radio serial, when the producers wanted to emphasise the vamp-like characteristics of their femmes fatales.
Margot returned to her old desk and watched Laura as she crossed the small square in front of the building. She sat down and neatly put the notes Laura had given her into a small cash-box in the top drawer of the desk. She reached for the handset of her ‘phone and dialled. The answer machine silently continued to remind her that it was full. She pressed the play button and gave up after about eight apologies of cancellation and several hang-ups.
The machine fast-forwarded to the last message, which was from Archie, apologising for his strange mood, earlier. “I love you, my darling Margot. I have left this message on your mobile, too. See you at the funeral tomorrow.”
Nothing else of any significance.
She opened her laptop and logged on. There were hundreds of unanswered e-mails; she often left them for three or four days at a time. This had always annoyed Archie, who didn’t see the point of late e-mails. Only one old one caught her attention. It was from Tilly. There was no subject line, and no message. Just a web address and the words, ‘with love from Eulalia. xx’. Margot clicked on the underlined address which was highlighted in bright turquoise…
Chapter Sixteen
St Eulalia: http:/www.videogramaticca.com
Margot clicked the web address, which had been pre-programmed to automatically log her into the site. But she needed a password. She reached over to a shelf behind her and picked out one of about a dozen black, hardcover notebooks. These were her most recent case notes from her sessions with both Tilly and Paolo. She flicked through it, pressed the pages down and returned to her computer and its browser.
Home page. Clips. Contributors. Upload.
Register. Log In. Password.
Clips. Play List. The Martyrdom of St. Eulalia. Search.
QuickTime Player.
Play.
Domatilla and Paolo’s DVD had been uploaded, perhaps the last act of a dying woman. Margot couldn’t face watching it again but she gave it a five star rating – its first. She trawled down the long list of clips on the playlist. Hundreds of video clips. Mostly rubbish. One or two clumsy and blatant movie promotions posted by Hollywood studios desperately trying to woo the Internet audience. Fatuous comedians. Amateur videos. Nothing pornographic. She logged out. And then wrote in the notebook…
Xavier? They had never mentioned him. But why had Robert never mentioned him? Why did he leave the opera so abruptly on the night of the murder. Robert?
Margot closed the notebook and laid it on the side-table next to her chair with an air of finality. She continued to sit there, and began to think about the games she had played with Xavier when they had met at lunch for the first time. The sex. And the unthinkable. Could there be any correlation between that encounter and the deaths of her young friends? The paraphernalia in his apartment alone was reason enough to be wary of him, and yet she had been perfectly happy and finally comfortable about everything that happened. He hadn’t been threatening. He had gone out of his way to make sure that she wanted t
o go along with his games. He hadn’t seemed remotely violent or murderous! She forced that horrendous possibility from her mind.
She thought again about Xavier’s physicality. His voice. His body. His eyes. His taste. His hard, beautifully proportioned cock. Margot’s physical excitement at the thought of another encounter with him had so unbalanced her presence of mind that she began to behave like a pre-pubescent teenager on heat. Rather than triggering any normal feelings of grief and remorse, the horror of the murders had perversely heightened her sexual appetite. She tried to feel guilty about this but her sexual urges overcame her. Luxuriating in the cosy, seductive privacy and personal comfort of her consulting room, she moved her left hand inside her pink shirt, unstrapped her bra, and with her thumb and index finger tweaked her hard, erect right nipple and massaged her breast gently with the rest of her fingers while her right hand went down to her knickers, and with her forefinger she probed deeply into her tight but very wet vagina. Stroking her hard clitoris gently, she slowly and methodically brought herself as close to an orgasm as she could without having a climax. Closing her eyes and moaning as if in a trance, she slouched back into the soft leather of her Eames chair like a lifeless doll. She stayed like this for five minutes, until the church clock struck a quarter of the hour. She leapt up like a guilty schoolgirl who had been caught behaving badly, settled her clothes and walked back into the office area of the studio.
Margot pulled down her blinds, gulped down a contraceptive pill and changed her clothes. White dress, black leather belt. No underwear. Same perfume. Cheap Swatch. No jewellery. Flat, pink shoes. Very faint pink lipstick. She pulled off her wedding and engagement rings, hiding them guiltily in a secret compartment deep in the belly of her beautiful, late Victorian bureau desk – another Archie indulgence. The thought did occur to her that she might bump into him at the Academia, but Archie was almost certainly buried amongst his students and anyway she often removed her rings – to swim or to play badminton. (What other reason would Margot have had to take off her wedding ring?) She then sent Archie a text message to say that she was going to spend another night at the studio. “More early morning clients”.
The Café de L’Accademia is one of Barcelona’s most popular restaurants for those who live in the city, and it was Margot’s favourite haunt for lunch. Tucked behind a secluded Plaça opposite the tiny mediaeval church of Sant Just, it serves very simple Catalan food to both its small loyal local clientele of cognoscenti and to a steady stream of tourists and foreign businessmen savvy enough to have conducted their gastronomic research. The kitchen is miniscule and the small counter area offers a cut rate set lunch – a Catalan tradition which dates back to the turn of the nineteenth century when a law was passed by the Catalan parliament insisting that as part of their licence, the city’s workers could eat lunch at an affordable rate at all the city’s restaurants.
Margot was five minutes early, and because the first sitting of customers had shuffled off for their siesta, the counter area was temporarily empty. Margot told the small, pretty Catalan waitress that she was reserving one of the bar stools for a friend. She hadn’t seen Xavier tucked into a corner at the back of the room under dark, oak-beamed ceiling. He came up behind her and sat on the stool next to her. She jumped off her stool when she realised that he was there.
“Where did you come from? I have been watching the door.”
“Snakes and ladders.”
He kissed her on both cheeks, lingering perhaps just a millisecond more than was customary. Margot noticed and leant into him by way of acknowledgement.
“You have the knack of appearing from nowhere. It was like that in the box at Le Liceu.”
“I have never been one for the grand entrance and anyway I beat you to it first time around; you should have known I like to be early for lunch. What shall we eat? I always have the menu of the day with its free carafe of wine – red this time. I think that you should do the same. There is usually a choice between fish or meat…”
Margot agreed. It happened that she did exactly that when she came here alone, anyway.
“I was hoping that you might be wearing the same delightful clothes you wore the last time we met,” Xavier said, mischievously.
Margot blushed.
“I had to throw my dress away… We didn’t really learn much about each other, did we?”
“I learnt a great deal about you.”
“I doubt it. What did you learn?”
And then he leant forward over the bar and whispered lasciviously into her ear, “You don’t scream as loudly as some of the women I know! I want you to scream louder than anybody else for me.” He almost cackled as he picked an olive from the small bowl in front of them.
“I see. Have I disappointed you? ”
“Not at all. I felt that I had failed to take you to those unimaginable heights.”
“You certainly managed to do that! Look, we can’t talk about some things here and anyway, you are being much too presumptuous.” She hit him with a fake laugh.
“I will try to behave myself.”
The restaurant was relatively quiet, which of course inhibited their conversation. Rosa the waitress smiled at Margot as she greeted Xavier with a question about his choice of food. For some reason, he had merited her immediate attention. Margot agreed to go along with what he ordered.
In a deliberate attempt to reduce the sexual tension, she told him a little more about her ever-so-happy marriage to Archie and the privileged, protective childhood she had enjoyed in La Jolla before she went to Chicago. He asked about her sex life.
“A couple of very chaste teenage obsessions. A boring boyfriend who fumbled his way around my virginity. And one lover who taught me about the naughty bits but turned out to be gay! That was it before Archie! Goody two-shoes!”
He was attentive and parried with some witty stories about his encounters with the parents of the boys he had taught at the private school where he had worked in Scotland. Margot let these stories ride without any reaction. She had decided to suspend her anxieties. Xavier’s spells were working. He recounted how one very rich Portuguese woman had invited him to Rio de Janeiro for a two-week holiday, ostensibly to give her son Spanish lessons. When he arrived he realised that she had really wanted him to be her sexual playmate. She lived alone on a small, self-sufficient island off the coast of Brazil, which included huts full of white rabbits bred and killed to provide a special skin graft used in cosmetic surgery – her husband was a plastic surgeon and spent most of his time in Hollywood. Margot half-believed his stories and laughed at the graphic descriptions of his escapades.
“I’m not sure that I should come back to your flat again, Xavier,” she lied.
“That would be a disappointment. I wanted to show you something I have prepared especially for you.”
“I bet you say that to all your lovers.”
“You used the same line before. I only have one lover at a time,” he remarked.
“Is this the start of another game of Snakes and Ladders? Or is it a little more adult than that? Dungeons and Dragons, maybe?” As a teenager, Margot had loved role-playing fantasies of wizards and monsters, heroes and beautiful damsels in distress.
“Nothing so tame!”
He threw his head back with a powerful laugh. The restaurant reacted with a sudden moment of empty silence, bar the clatter of plates in the kitchen. Xavier asked the waitress for the bill.
“On y va, ma chérie!”
“You go ahead. I am going to sit here and enjoy another glass of wine… I will come by in about half an hour.”
Margot had almost imperceptibly lapsed into the American conversational slang of her childhood to counterbalance his pretentious command.
“À toute à l’heure, Margot, but remember that if you don’t pitch up you will never see me again!”
He planted a peremptory kiss on both cheeks and with smooth insouciance walked slowly out of the restaurant as if he had just said goodbye to a jun
ior business colleague.
The trouble with my job is that I have to suffer in silence. There is no alternative. Why would a woman who would seem to have everything which could allow her to lead a happy, stimulating life, be on the verge of triggering an appalling, apocalyptic personal tragedy? Have I had too much happiness? I have been spoilt… Perhaps that’s it. All those simple pleasures and special treats, and yes, those luxuries that only a very few privileged elite can enjoy: were they just apples in a basket of fruit which was now going to throw up something rotten?
Unpicking the fucked-up psyches of my clients had been such an easy process. I could see them in the context of my own spectacularly contrasting childhood experiences. During the many years of training, my own therapist had despaired. She used to say, with no sense of irony, that she had never before been confronted by such a blank sheet of psychological blemishes – my past contained precious little meat and drink for any self-respecting therapist! She had been desperately reduced to examining in minute detail, those nigh-on perfect moments in my childhood as her clumsy attempt to uncover any recurring, carefully disguised flashpoints which could balance the almost sickening perfections of my upbringing in suburban San Diego. Even the pink stucco architecture of downtown La Jolla had been scrutinised for potential iconographical references! I used to laugh out loud at her frustration, especially when she resorted to exploring a girlhood visit to the mall as a pretext for a deeply buried psychosis. I actually adored the process of shopping in the supermarket there. The people, the air-conditioning, the ordered and manipulated lay out, even the laughable regimentation of the check-out provided me with amusement values, but they denied her any clues which hinted at my need to go into the deep analysis she so wanted to subject me to. Sickening perfection is what I called it.
My father and I loved to play chess together. We still do when we meet; always sitting opposite each other, pouring over the same beautiful table in our den at home. Black ebony and white ivory chess pieces brought back from a trip to Kenya. Simple wooden board. When he started to teach me, he would allow me to win the games because he didn’t want to sap my confidence while I developed strategies. On one occasion, I noticed that he had varied a favourite opening ploy with a move of staggering stupidity. I smelt a rat, pulled him up and he let out a belly-laugh of Dickensian proportions – he is a large, portly man with very bushy eyebrows and beautiful blue eyes. “Ok! I am going to win this one!” he warned, proceeding to demolish me in about a dozen brilliant moves, after which he began to teach me notation. I was humbled and inspired, and hugged him when he came to say goodnight.
