“So you and Truman live in London and life is good.”
“And there’s my nephew Chris. He’s here off and on. He’s not actually my nephew. My cousin and his wife were killed in a car crash years and years ago. Chris is their boy.”
“But you and Truman were never married?”
“Oh, what was the point? It’s not really that kind of relationship.”
“But you’re together.”
“I suppose we each needed someone to anchor our lives. We met at the right time. It’s been convenient … companionable. We stay very much to ourselves. I’m a London person and Alec is in the country much of the time and he travels a great deal. He’s … dependable.”
“Meaning?”
“Look, I went into a kind of prolonged shock twenty years ago. After Tangier.” She looked up at me from under the little pink cap.
“I know,” I said. “I really do know.”
“JC was gone … I wasn’t really surprised, he’d been slipping away from me, into his own world, for quite a while. And then suddenly he was gone. I wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t make it any easier. He had turned me—nurtured me, really—from girlhood into womanhood. Does that sound too sappy? Well, it’s true. A very sheltered girl is what I was. I was a model, but I was still living an English girlhood with my mother … JC was the first man in my life, and for a while he was so gentle—well, no point in going on about that. But then things began to go wrong, didn’t they? I went to bed at night not knowing where he was, who he was with, if he’d come back to me at all—I was so afraid someone would show up to tell me he was dead …” Her voice was quavering, she bit back tears. “Then he was gone. I wanted to hide …”
“I can relate to that.”
“I daresay.”
We’d walked a long way and stood above Cadogan Pier, staring down at the Thames dimpling in the rain. Sad dirty tugs and barges made slow headway beneath the low gray clouds.
“So Alec Truman came along and he wanted to take care of me and I thought about it. He was … he reminded me of JC somehow. Minus the craziness and excesses that came later. Who came along to take care of you?”
“No one. Whatever else it is, life is a bit easier if you’re on your own. And on the run, as I was.”
“On the run,” she echoed me. “From what exactly?”
“It’s way too complicated to explain, Annie. Believe me.”
We walked along the Chelsea Embankment for a long time but time didn’t seem to figure in it. She was for me the incarnation of the happiest, saddest, most vivid time of my life. I wanted to hold on to her as an aging warrior might clutch a fallen talisman and believe it will return to him his youth, his strength. It seemed to transcend reality and logic as if it were a thousand times more powerful than either.
I knew she kept looking at me from the corner of her eye, much as Sasser had done in Tangier, as if I were somehow not what she expected. I knew what it was. She couldn’t help it. She looked at me and she saw JC and she couldn’t quite believe it. She knew JC had decided to end it all when she’d left Tangier. He’d known she wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t take anymore. So he had to do something. The only life he’d ever known was coming to an end. She was right, he’d been an absolute charlie, but she knew he’d loved her and she knew it was her leaving that had pushed him off the edge. He hadn’t slammed his iron door against her. It had been just the other way around.
We’d passed the Royal Hospital and turned left on Chelsea Bridge Road and were walking slowly along the Ranelagh Gardens, the rain pattering on the leaves, cars with lights snapped on sliding through puddles.
“Look, this is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but bear with me. Some of my associates—and they are very, very serious people—would like a word with Alec Truman. It was felt that an approach through you might be more effective …”
She stopped and looked out over the gardens. “You mean that’s why you came here and found me?” Her voice was very quiet and strung tight as a wire. “You didn’t come to see me? I just want to make sure I’m following you—this wasn’t personal?”
“Of course it was personal. How could anything to do with you not be personal? All that matters to me in this is seeing you … I didn’t truly realize that until I saw you standing on your front step. But I grant you, I should have known all along. I’ve no excuses. None, Annie. I’ve waited too long to come see you—”
“Enough. You do go on so. What do you and your associates want to see Alec about?”
“They think he’s JC.”
She stared at me with her mouth open, a look of real puzzlement played on her features.
I laughed a trifle self-consciously.
Then she put her arm through mine. “You never do change, do you? Always into mischief, Trip! But this one actually does take the cake …”
Eighteen
WHEN I GOT BACK TO the flat in Draycott Place I wasn’t ready for what I found.
Heidi was sitting on the couch with one arm resting on the back, her other hand holding what was clearly a martini. She looked like an advertisement for expensive gin and the inevitably sophisticated life that could be yours if only you drank enough of the stuff. Her eyes followed me but her lips were tightly compressed. She wasn’t saying anything and I knew this was going to be bad, whatever it was. What it was, however, took me entirely by surprise.
“You fucked her, didn’t you?”
The remark, half question, half rhetorical statement, was particularly ugly, far beyond the five actual words. Ugly, uncalled-for, vicious, disrespectful of Annie, and me, and in a way herself.
She’d made the mistake of timing on two entirely different levels. First, she caught me when I was feeling everything from the past overwhelm me because of Annie, when I was in a sense suffering a crisis of morality, a questioning of what I had done with my life. Second, she should have waited until I’d sunk down into one of the deep chairs. On my feet it was easy to get to her.
I took two steps and slapped that perfect lovely face just about as hard as I could with my opened right hand. Contrary to kung-fu movies, it made very little sound. Her head snapped around, the point of a canine incisor bit into her lip, blood spurted from her nose, she fell sideways against the arm of the couch, and the perfect martini in its crystal container shattered against the wall. The stain on the wallpaper looked like Bolivia. The olive bounced off down the hallway, and Heidi slid off the couch to a sitting position on the Axminster.
I stared down at her, not for an instant regretting having hit her. It crossed my mind to let her have it again, this from a man who’d never dreamed of striking a woman before. Well, dreamed, maybe. But I’d never done it. She seemed to have learned the drift of my mood. She looked up, cringing slightly, just in case.
“You really do piss me off sometimes,” I said. “Wipe your face.” I stood in the kitchen alcove and threw her a hand towel. “The scary part is I don’t regret hitting you. It’s important that you know that.”
She dabbed at her bloody nose. “My lip is cut.”
“We’re both lucky I didn’t break your neck.”
“Two people you’d have killed in three days. Enough to make a man want to stand up and pound his chest.”
“Heidi, Heidi … don’t push it.”
“You did, didn’t you—you went to bed with her, didn’t you?” She was still sitting on the floor, holding the towel to her nose, feeling her lip with her tongue. “Could you possibly make me another martini? Without throwing it at me?”
“No, I didn’t sleep with her.” I was already pouring the Bombay Sapphire into the pitcher, splashing vermouth, stirring ice cubes. She sat on the floor, watching me. She wasn’t doing a big number about my hitting her. I was shaking like a leaf, adrenaline spurting, and she just suffered the consequences of her performance and got on with it. You had to hand it to Heidi. No quarter given, none asked. Very rare attitude in women, in my experience. Willing to take her medicine, pay
the price.
“Two olives, please. You’re lying. It’s your nature, you can’t help it. Maybe I forgive you.” She took the martini. “You need one yourself. Not even I—and I definitely have your number, Lee—not even I think you habitually beat up on women. Or even enjoy it.”
“How generous,” I said.
“But you did sleep with her. No, you fucked her—”
“What is the matter with you? What if I did? I didn’t, I haven’t seen her in twenty years, I didn’t take her to bed—but what if I had?”
“Think of it, though, Lee—your brother is finally out of the way! Now’s your chance. Make the most of it!” She didn’t sound quite right. She was trying to mask something. Hysteria. She sounded like a woman betrayed, wronged, scorned. She sounded like a wronged wife. She’d mentioned it, when she told me about hearing me in the night, saying Annie’s name in my sleep. She’d said she’d felt like a wife.
“Listen, Heidi, why don’t you drink your drink and think what you’re saying—”
“I’ve thought about it a lot.” She was holding a book I hadn’t noticed, an old book with a faded, tattered dust jacket. “I’ve thought about you, trying to get a line on you. It’s just that you’re not only a liar and a scoundrel and a bastard—”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“—but you’re such a hopeless anachronism … you’ve been on auto pilot since the sixties, you never did get over the sixties, did you? Something happened to you twenty years ago, your brother died but something went out of you too, something like life. There’s an aura about you, Lee. You just don’t give a damn, you just couldn’t care less, you came to a halt when your brother died, when the sixties died, it’s as if you somehow became someone else, insulated, self-protective, so much more remote than I am, like a dead star—you have no idea how involved in all this I am, no idea. In your soul you’re still a Carnaby-Street type, Peter Max, The Yellow Submarine, and your poor tired old soul still wears flowered shirts and bell-bottoms. That’s why I don’t believe you about Annie DeWinter. She’s a relic and so are you, two fossils of a lost age. The sixties might as well be the Paleolithic and you might as well be a pair of museum pieces—it’s gone and the relics are just waiting it out, waiting for the end—”
“Where are you getting all this? Why, I haven’t worn my bell-bottoms in ages—”
“And all you can do is make a stupid joke. It’s pathetic, I don’t know why I love you!”
“Beats me, too. Let’s call it perversity.” Good God, now it was in the open. Love.
“Did she put on her old Courrèges boots? The Mary Quant mini? Does she look the same? I’ll bet she does—it was her time, she’ll never change, she’s stuck with being a symbol—”
“Well, if it works for you, stick with it, that’s what I always say.” I was holding my temper in check. “Her look was better than my bell-bottoms and shoulder-length hair—I was a bit of a mess. Annie, though …”
“Yes?”
“She was as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen. Right there with Julie Christie and Jean Shrimpton—”
“Oh, please!”
“You’re right. What difference does it make?”
She opened the book to a marker and began to read aloud.
“Valerie Kipp was the girl of the moment and she had something you couldn’t define, no more than you could define what you felt when you heard and saw Joe Cocker or Bob Dylan. Valerie had a way of happening to you. If she came into your orbit there was no avoiding her. Max Beerbohm would have understood. Valerie was a sister to Zuleika. She was everywhere, in every magazine and on half the billboards in London. Piccadilly, Hammersmith, the West End and Birdcage Walk and Sloane Square and Golders Green, and flying kites on Hampstead Heath and stoned out of her mind in a punt on the River Cam. Walk down Regent Street or survey the crowds in Oxford Circle or have a look at the girls on the Left Bank or Greenwich Village or Rodeo Drive or the Via Veneto and you would see a million Valeries, everywhere you looked. Gawky, big-eyed, openmouthed. But those girls—all they know of Valerie, our Valerie Kipp, is on their faces. Kippy, we called her, and to do a Kip wasn’t very nice. She couldn’t know a man without seducing him, and when it came to girls it was all the same to our Kippy. But it wasn’t sex as others knew sex. All of Valerie’s sex was with herself because she was Lilith. It was her own image that she loved, the reflection of herself that she saw in the eyes and rapt faces of others, in their ejaculations and orgasms she saw her power, her own obsessions. We all thought she would die soon, never make it to thirty. She was consuming herself and others, greedily, and they were all victims of her narcissism. The question we asked ourselves was simply this: Was she worth it, worth destroying yourself? She was infinitely desirable, every gesture, every expression, each carefully guarded syllable—guarded as if she actually had something to say. She was the kind of woman who made you give up whatever you had, say the hell with everything, the future and your hope and all the rest of it, if you could get your hands on her, get within her body and feel what it was like before there was the blinding flash and empty void of darkness that sooner or later was bound to follow and envelop you and destroy you.”
She closed the book, placed it on the end table and took a slow sip from her martini.
I said, “Have you got this Valerie’s phone number?”
“Such an asshole,” she said. “You are doomed.”
“Just a joke, for God’s sake.” I sighed. “All right, I’ll bite. What was that all about?”
“Austin Gilbert’s novel, published in 1971. It was called Gone Glimmering. You probably weren’t reading much in those days, but it’s one of the first cult classics about those years. I don’t know if it was even published in the United States. It was what is called a roman à clef, all the characters were based closely on real people—”
“No kidding? I always wondered what that meant … sounds to me like Austin Gilbert ought to take two aspirin and have a nap.”
“What I just read you was Gilbert’s description of Annie DeWinter. Several newspapers published reader’s keys to the novel, so you’d know who was who. Annie was Valerie Kippy. So, tell me, Lee, does she make you want to say the hell with everything else?” She dabbed at the dried trickle of blood beneath her nose. “Well, does she?”
“You want the truth?”
“Damn stupid question.”
“Frankly, all the way back there I kept looking for a bus to run in front of for the sheer love of her. Why, I got to thinking about that blinding flash—”
“You are a cold shit, aren’t you?”
“Heidi, relax, for Christ’s sake.”
“Tell me, did your brother treat her the way you treat me?”
“Talk about damn stupid questions.”
“Why?”
“Because JC loved her. You and I barely know each other. I’m discovering I don’t know you at all.”
She threw the book at me, caught me on the side of the head. It bounced off, lay facedown on the floor.
Heidi and I made a lovely couple. We were both crazy.
Heidi had in her peculiar way discovered where Alec Truman was. He was, in fact, where he spent most of his time: sequestered away in the country, in the Cotswolds, not far from a village called Gurney Slade. She had fixed it on one of those incredibly detailed English maps which show you damn near every bush and twig. Ordnance Survey Maps, I think they call them.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her I had associates who thought Alec Truman might be JC.”
“What did she say?”
“When she stopped laughing she said she thought that was ‘grand.’ She told me she didn’t know where he was—thought maybe he was out of the country. She didn’t seem terribly involved in his daily life.”
“Laughed, did she? Well, I intend to put her sense of humor to the test.”
“The fellow who wrote the book obviously never met her, knew nothing about her. She
has a lovely sense of humor.”
“I’ll bet. We’ll go to Bath by train,” she said, choosing not to fight it out, “and there’ll be a car waiting for us. Then we’ll go take your dear cuckolded brother by surprise. You’ll look him in the eye. It will be what can only be described as a moment to remember.”
“You’re quite wrong. Alec Truman is neither my brother nor a cuckold—”
“I prefer to use Austin Gilbert as my authority, thank you. He is certainly a cuckold. Be honest, Lee. You had her twenty years ago, didn’t you? When she was his girl—”
“Your dignity, once so impressive, is only a faded memory, my dear girl.” It drove her crazy when I kept smiling at her. I think she preferred me in a mood to swat her one.
“I have to go see Allan’s agent. Now you can go dashing off to screw your brother’s girlfriend.”
“Lucky me,” I said.
“But don’t tell her about the plan. You do understand that, don’t you? Alec Truman must not be warned. Agreed?”
“Of course.” She was standing by the door to the flat. We’d spent one night in London, after I’d seen Annie and we’d fought about her, and now she, Heidi, looked weary, as if she hadn’t slept. “Why are you crying?”
“I’d sell my mother for a chess computer right now!” She sighed, then looked up. “You call this crying?”
Then she slammed out of the room, the door reverberating in its frame.
Twenty-four hours after seeing Annie come out of the door in her long pink duster I was back in Hans Place with the sun pouring gold across the wet rooftops, gilding the slick street It was cool and cleansing and I’d been trying to decide what to say when I got there, when I saw her again. Maybe I just wanted to see her face and hear her voice and make sure I hadn’t dreamed yesterday. But I also wanted to let her know about Heidi’s surprise for Alec Truman. Annie could decide what to do about it. If she wanted to warn him it was fine with me. If she figured he could handle it on his own, that was all right too. I wanted to see Annie and I wanted her to trust me as she once had. That was all I cared about just then. The hell with everything else.
The Suspense Is Killing Me Page 22
