by Nick Salaman
She was sure she trusted Joe.
As for David, there was something about him that alerted a tiny part of her mind. Why would he turn up like that? Paranoia was an easy step from where she was now, and the people in the street seemed indeed to look at her strangely, but she told herself they looked at each other strangely too. Though there could be no doubt that Middleburg’s spies were out there somewhere.
She didn’t have that feeling at Merrymaids. The other Merrymaids were friendly, perhaps because to be a Merrymaid you had to be a bit of an outsider, and they recognised her as such. If there was any supervision by the management, it was purely professional, just like the routine medical check-up every other month.
Anyway, in spite of the question mark about his reappearance in her life – at such a time, at such a place – it had been good to see David again. Part of him was still the same boy, or the man the boy would have become: there was the same easy smile and the depth in the eyes and the promise of the pleasantly unexpected, but of course there was something else. A touch of worldliness and secrecy, which comes from growing up and working with other people. It was that she found unsettling. After all, she hadn’t changed much, had she? Or had she? Perhaps too little?
On the afternoon of the Monday she had fixed to see him, she redeemed the ring from the pawnbroker’s, even though the recently completed gravestone for Felipe had made fresh inroads into her funds. Joe had very kindly offered to contribute to it but she had declined: it wouldn’t have done.
In the shop, the old man smiled at her and said that he had had five offers for the ring but he had kept it for her, certain that she would come back. He did say, though, that he had had the ruby analysed by a friendly expert and that it was not an old ring. Indeed, it was a very new ring, with a very fine ruby in it. The design, of course, was ancient. Why would Middleburg have given her a very new ring, purporting to be old?
That night, she turned up at Gianni’s on 9th Street, the place David had suggested, a smart Italian restaurant, even smarter than her usual because this was where the stars went. She recognised Rock Hudson, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr and Lauren Bacall, all at different tables, all very lovely and elegant, but none of them wearing a golden ring purporting to come from a fifteenth-century design with the serpent of Laval engraved in ruby.
She was shown over to where David was sitting. He looked bronzed, handsome and prosperous. The three adjectives seemed to go together in LA, where only the unfashionable looked pallid, unprepossessing and down-at-heel. Everyone else shimmered like apples in a skin-care commercial. She noted that David had filled out a little, though no paunch was visible.
‘Hi.’
He rose from his chair to greet her, and kissed her on the cheek. She took the menu the waiter offered and looked across at her former lover. The last time but one that she had seen him had been on a cliff-top under the stars.
‘You look good,’ he said, ‘better than ever.’
‘You too. Put on a bit of weight. But in a good way. You seem bigger, taller.’
It was true, he had been a boy before. It was part of the glossy effect that LA seemed to have on people; everything was better. The waiter poured her a glass of wine from the bottle that sat in the cooler beside the table – a rather good Gewürtztraminer, drier than usual.
‘So tell the story,’ she said.
‘No, you.’
‘I asked first.’
‘There isn’t that much to tell. I went back home with my folks and then did post-grad stuff at Berkeley.’
‘Where you did a paper on…?’
‘Economics.’
‘Good sound stuff.’
‘I was determined to get a job and find myself somewhere to live. My father was especially … overwhelming.’
‘So you moved back to San Diego after Berkeley?’
‘Yes. It’s a good place, but I got lonely. I knew no one there any more. And then I met this girl.’
‘Did you ever think of me?’ She asked it out of interest rather than affront.
‘I thought of you a lot, but in that way of a hopeless dream. I had been warned off not just by my folks but by that man Prelati and the people round him. I had a letter from him telling me never to show my face again. You were off the menu.’
‘And that put you off?’
‘Yes. There just seemed too many things against us. Apart from the fact that we were only eighteen at the time…’
The waiter brought them each an insalata of lobster, not too much, not too little, and another waiter poured more wine.
‘This wine is good,’ she said. ‘An exquisite and poignant wine.’
‘It is, now you mention it. Anyway, it soon became apparent that we were after quite different things, luckily before we had any children. And then I found out that she was sleeping with a good friend of mine, and – you know what? – I was relieved, though I did strike my good friend off my tennis roster.’
She smiled but she was sorry she wasn’t the only person who had lain with him under the stars. But perhaps he hadn’t lain with anyone under the stars – only in very expensive penthouses. Time puts a patina on people, she thought, and the shine deflects from the real person that you once saw, and then the shine becomes thick shutters.
They chatted on. The lobster was replaced by tiny scaloppines of veal in marsala sauce served with fried zucchini. It was all delicious and rather sad. David understood it as well as she did. They tried valiantly but the kindling, which sometimes caught a spark and glowed and achieved a little smoke, never quite managed to catch fire. She couldn’t tell what he was feeling, but the old hurt and disappointment came back to her, checking her instinct, fighting with her first reaction of excitement on seeing him.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘What happened to you and how did you end up a Merrymaid in LA?’
Too much had happened in the intervening months and years. She felt the weight of it bearing down upon her. ‘Do you mind if I keep that for next time,’ she asked. ‘I need to be in the right frame of mind for that, because some of it is strange – pretty depressing – something to do with my father who, as your parents pointed out, was a very bad lot. I felt I had bad blood.’
‘You know, I never minded about that. It was my folks who…’
She reached across and clasped his wrist. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You weren’t like that.’
But he had gone along with it. Sure, it had been hard for him, but he had shown his colours. When the meal was over, it was almost a relief. She could not tell him about the baby. It would only distress them both and there was nothing to be done. A sadness, possibly caused by tiredness, had settled on her. They were not going to get together. The baby was lost in any case, halfway to wherever it was that Fist took babies. The woman had said California, but she’d been told to lie.
Outside the restaurant they kissed briefly, as people do.
‘Where do you live?’ he asked.
‘Oh, just down the street.’ She wasn’t going to ask him in for coffee. ‘What about you?’
‘Out in Beverly Hills.’
Cheek by jowly jowl with the Holdsworths and Middleburg, no doubt. She wondered for a moment if David was part of the plot, and then decided that would be paranoia.
‘We must meet up again,’ he said.
‘We will always be friends.’
‘Of course we will. Sure I can’t give you a lift?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to get rid of me this easily.’
‘I don’t want to get rid of you. I’m just not sure about not getting rid of you.’
‘I never forgot you, you know. My wife used to tell me I was thinking about someone else.’
‘You probably were, but I’m sure it wasn’t me. I have to go now.’
‘Say you’ll see me again.’
‘You’ll see me again. Goodnight, David.’
They kissed again, the way a swallow drink
s from a swimming pool. A butterfly, just a little skipper, stirred in her stomach and then it was gone and so was he. She felt that he might still be in love with her, but how did he feel about it? He had let her down. A rather horrible phrase that someone had said to her once, probably in Merrymaids, came to her mind: you can’t warm up old meat. Anyway, she didn’t want to be in love again. It would be a distraction when what she really needed to do was sort out the matter of her father.
And then she thought, no, David couldn’t be going again. They had only just re-met.
‘David,’ she called, running after him. ‘Mephistopheles…’
He was just about to hail a cab, but turned at the sound of his old name. And then he smiled at her and held his arms wide as she ran towards him.
‘We had better go and get a coffee and start from the beginning,’ he said, when the embrace was over.
They found a quiet corner in a quiet bar – it was a Monday night after all – her fatigue lifted and she told him all that had happened to her since they’d last met, only missing out a little bit of the wild week with the salesman – well, quite a lot of that, actually – and the bit about the baby. She wasn’t ready to tell him about that yet. But what she did tell him about the rest of her experiences was enough to leave him open-mouthed.
‘They killed the clock man and they actually kept you in a house here, drugged?’ he exclaimed. ‘Man, that’s way over the top.’
‘I couldn’t really see any reason for trying to escape. I suppose that was the effect of the drug.’
‘You should tell the police. But…’
‘But what?’
‘If your Middleburg is the same as the one I’m thinking of, he’s pretty big round here. He’s a major shareholder in TOJI with other irons in the fire. He’s a German, some say a Nazi. What’s he got over you?’
‘He’s sort of a guardian. He’s a friend of my guardian in England. He looked after me when I was ill, then he wanted us to be engaged, to be my fiancé, but I think we can say that I’ve broken that off now. I ran away. I don’t seem to have anyone else. I have no other family. My unfortunate father is dead. I don’t even have a passport or a green card, so in theory – and in practice – he could have me put away or sent back to England. He can do what he likes with me. And I don’t know how or why.’
‘Is he generally kind?’
‘He is always polite. He seems considerate, but I have the feeling there is some other game he’s playing.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start. Things happen out of the blue. He has this castle up in the hills. It seems to be connected with my family and my father’s disgrace, but there’s something weird about it. I think my father was framed. I was given this ancient family ruby ring but it turns out the ring is not ancient at all, though it is ruby. He gives with one hand and takes away with the other. There must be some purpose, some end to his game, and I feel I should find out what it is. It’s to do with my father, with the castle, with my being twenty-five. And something more – maybe not all about money at all…’
‘They have been messing with you. It can only be about money. Power and money, especially money,’ David said.
‘I need to get into the castle and see what’s happening,’ she told him.
‘I should come with you. How would you get in?’ said David.
‘I have a friend called Joe. He delivers wine there.’
‘A friend or a good friend?’ David’s eyes were amused.
‘A very good friend but not a lover,’ she said. ‘I met him in the course of my duties.’
David seemed saddened by her news. She realised that he too must have felt what a waste of time it had been for them to be separated. She decided to tell him about their baby.
‘My God!’ he exclaimed, almost shouting in his shock. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
It was shock, even concern – but not exactly paternal excitement.
‘I didn’t know where you were. And I didn’t feel like being rejected again by your parents. They would have thought I was using you.’
‘Of course, I understand. But how did you manage? I could have helped.’
‘I don’t think so. You were at Berkeley. The last thing you would have wanted was a baby on your hands.’
He shook his head and then he asked: ‘Where is the baby now?’
She had thought she could cope with this question, but she had been wrong. Her eyes filled with tears. ‘They took her away,’ she said.
And then it all came out. The flight from London, the storm, the violent men, the house with its oppressive comfort and ruched curtains, the birth and then the ejection from the house, the shelter in the Peggotty hulk on the marshes, the fever and then the kindly man who took her under his wing.
David’s eyes blazed with indignation and fury. ‘He did all this to you and took our baby. My God, I’ll make him suffer…’
‘It’s not as easy as that.’
‘There are laws; there is justice. There is common humanity. However rich he is, he’s going to pay.’
‘You don’t understand. He’s not just a rich man. He is a sort of Prospero. A wicked Prospero.’
‘I can understand how you would think that, but he’s flesh and blood like you or me.’
‘He is not like us. He has become something else. You will understand when you meet him.’
‘You think he is evil?’
‘He is on top of evil.’
Finally, David took her home to her little back street. ‘You live here?’ he asked incredulously. It had that effect on people from outside. He made a slight noise, a reflex to the place, almost an ‘nf’.
‘I live here, and I like it,’ she said firmly.
Even if he disapproved of the location, he looked as if he wanted to be asked up for coffee, but she wasn’t ready for that yet. He seemed disappointed.
‘Hasten slowly,’ she told him.
The nuns at school had been almost obsessively fond of the phrase. It was almost their motto.
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Good old festina lente. But I am going to darn well hasten when it comes to that man. He has kidnapped our child.’
She kissed him.
‘I’m glad you told me,’ he said. ‘It was a bone of contention between me and my wife. She never wanted a child. And now I discover I already had one.’
‘I’m not so glad I told you,’ she said. ‘He won’t hurt me but he could easily dispose of you. It’s no use going off like a bull in a Wedgwood display. Don’t do anything. Have patience. In the short term, Lily is safe. I am sure she is alive. Much too valuable to him, don’t you think, as a pawn? Poor little pawn. I try not to think about her except at night.’
‘Of course, they’re an awful lot of trouble,’ he added, and then as an afterthought, ‘as well as being a good thing.’
‘What are?’
‘Babies, you know.’
Of course, he didn’t really mean it. It was just his way.
***
Two days later, in that coincidental way, Marie received a note from Middleburg, delivered with a bunch of roses to her tiny apartment. The fact that he knew her address was not a surprise; it had to happen. The note came in an official-looking envelope and was written on The Other Judas, Inc letterhead, couched in friendly terms as though the days of house arrest had never been and nothing had passed between them since they’d first met on an aeroplane returning home from Nice airport.
It invited her to come and see him at his offices in Wilshire Boulevard. He suggested Tuesday of the following week at an hour when he could give her ‘some rather good English tea’ and a chocolate Bath Oliver. If she would like to bring a friend he would be delighted to meet him, or her.
She showed the message both to Joe and to Margot – David was away in San Francisco on real-estate business – and asked them for their views. They each advised a cautious acceptance, to see what the man was up to and, since Joe wa
s out on wine matters on the day in question, it was agreed that Margot should go with her.
That afternoon, she did a recce by herself on the The Other Judas, Inc – or TOJI – offices in downtown Wilshire Boulevard. It was a great, shining white edifice, proclaiming its power to those outside and, to those entering through the great swing doors, the prospect of impending entitlement. There was official bonhomie, there was welcome, there was also the coolness of formality – but above all was the impression of magnitude. This was the headquarters of a ‘conglomerate’, one of the new super-corporate entities of the sixties which had hardly existed before this decade. Discussed in the press, praised by some, feared by others, the subject of questions by politicians, TOJI embraced vast retinues of international brands, covering horizon-wide echelons of products.
Inside, through the swing doors, a beautifully coiffed and manicured receptionist called Jeannine held sway behind a high blond-oak desk. One look from her was enough to send the impertinent scrounger or curious intruder back to the outsider-land of the street. She was particularly hard on motorbike messengers and knew, just knew, who it was who had scratched FUCK on the elevators’ graffiti-proof walls. She was just beginning to be aware that Marie had come in and was not doing anything constructive; she was not coming, she was not going and that always stirred the hypersensitive cilia in Jeannine’s organs of reception propriety. Marie continued to gaze in exasperated awe at the assertive smoothness of Middleburg’s citadel.
