With a better boatman, she might even have got away with it, but, like me, she assumed his competence and that was where we both made a mistake.
Her try at escaping began beautifully and it would have been a very stylish maneuver. She needed to turn into the wind, but sharply so that she could free-run toward the beach and build up a lead, while we were making our turning circle. I saw her moving slowly toward the bow of the board, ready to do the elegant little two-step around the mast necessary to go about into the wind.
I signaled to the boatman that she was going to turn—believing that he would have worked it out for himself anyway— and gestured to him to cut the engine and swing his nose around when she had passed. I made the gestures clear enough, and anyway it didn’t take a master mariner to figure out how to come alongside her immediately after the turn. Or so I thought.
She began to go about and the next thing I knew, we had sliced the nose right off her board and sent her spinning into our bow wave, her head inches from our hull.
For a second I thought we’d killed her. I couldn’t believe any professional seaman could have done anything so stupid. I stared desperately into the wake, then I saw her head appear in the flurry of foam and saw that she was still conscious. I jumped over the side and grabbed her before she went under, and signaled to the boatman to cut his engines so I could haul her aboard over the flat transom without getting tangled in the screws.
This time he got it right, but it took us both all our strength to manhandle her and by the time I’d followed her in, she’d gotten enough of the water out of her nose and lungs to start yelling and throwing punches.
There was no time to be subtle. I grabbed her in a bear hug which looked very approximately like a tender concern, for the boatman’s benefit, but which in fact pulled her arms into her body so tightly she started coughing and choking again.
‘Quick,’ I said, ‘get her back to the beach. Leave the board. I’ll pay you to come back for it later.’ The boatman didn’t argue. He’d obviously been expecting me to blame him for the accident, and he turned his back on us before I could begin and I concentrated on holding Seagull immobilized, using a military police hold. I forced her into a rough fetal crouch, with her head buried in my chest so she couldn’t shout, which was fine in the boat, but I’d no idea what was going to happen once we landed. She had only to shout rape, or even start to struggle, and I’d have the police or the lifeguards on me in seconds.
If they’d seen the accident the lifeguards would come anyway, so I decided to have one more try at persuasion.
‘Seagull,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I need to talk to you. Really need. Wouldn’t have done all this if it didn’t matter.’
When she didn’t answer, I looked down and realized she was unconscious. I knew instantly what I’d done. I’d pressed too hard on her neck veins while trying to keep her head covered. I’d practiced often enough applying the hold without too much pressure and twice I’d accidentally put a partner out in the RMP gymnasium. I eased myself around to shield her fully from the boatman’s view and checked her eyes and her breathing. She would be all right, but she could be out for several minutes and I was going to have a lot of explaining to do when we got to the beach. But I’d underestimated Cox. When the boat touched the landing stage he was there, ahead of the lifeguards, waving a set of car keys.
‘Docteur, Docteur’ he shouted in French. ‘This way. The car’s waiting. You can take her straight to the surgery.’
I picked her up gently, stepped out of the boat, and said quietly to Cox in English, ‘Stick my wallet in my trunks. Pay the boatman to get the wind-surfer, then wait for me in St. Tropez. The Bar du Port.’
Cox nodded, signaled to the boatman to wait, then started to clear a path for me across the beach. The lifeguards stood back at the magic word ‘doctor’—no one in France ever harasses the professions—and I was halfway across the beach with Seagull in my arms when I heard Cox hiss behind me, ‘Chief. It’s Guerard. Just coming ashore. The red sail with the white stripe.’
I looked back and saw the sail. On the board was a tall, fit-looking man in his thirties with long, dark wavy hair and a deep tan.
If we’d been alone, there would have been no problem; he looked too vain to be much of a fighter. Even as he skimmed toward the beach, believing he had to deal with some emergency affecting his lover, he still made a point of making a stylish and unnecessary maneuver as he passed by the raft full of teenage girls moored just offshore. But if he once reached us, I couldn’t see any way of getting off the beach. The lifeguards and others at the club would know he was a doctor and I couldn’t brazen it through with the idea of taking Seagull to my imaginary surgery.
It was Cox, as usual, who came up with a solution. Before Guerard had even beached his surfboard, Cox ran back to the water’s edge, grabbed hold of his arm.
‘Yves, Yves,’ he shouted in loud, piercing French, ‘don’t leave me for that man. He’s old and ugly,’ he shouted, pointing at me. ‘And look, he prefers women. Can’t you see he’s not for you?’
The scene stopped even me dead in my tracks and Guerard just stared at Cox in disbelief. It wasn’t just surprise; he had no idea at all how to deal with this outburst of homosexual jealousy by a frail-looking, bony man he had never seen before.
First he stood still, uncertain whether to try to throw Cox aside or reason with him. I stood still also, not wanting to provoke him into action, waiting for Cox’s next move.
Cox went on yelling, then started to pull Guerard back into the water as a crowd of fascinated sunbathers started to close in around them. When Guerard saw his way was being blocked by the onlookers, he made another attempt to get free of Cox’s nagging grip. Cox let out a high-pitched wail and started flailing at Guerard with both fists. I watched fascinated. Anyone who didn’t know Cox would see only a pathetic flurry of blows from an apparently hysterical gay youth, but I could see that Cox knew exactly what he was doing. He was obviously a skillful boxer with the speed and intricate footwork of a featherweight and he was placing blow after blow under Guerard’s half-hearted guard, straight into the gut.
I knew Guerard’s wind wouldn’t last long. And I knew Cox well enough to be sure no one would get them apart without killing him. It was time to move and, when in doubt, it’s usually best to do the simplest thing—so I picked Seagull up again and ran straight off the beach.
10
When Jennifer eventually came around, the first words she said were, ‘God, I need a cigarette.’
‘Seagull,’ I said gently, ‘you’ve only just got the water out of your lungs.’
She turned sideways in the front passenger seat and watched me drive.
‘John Railton. In the last half hour you have almost split my head open with a speedboat, almost drowned me, almost choked me to death, and as a bonus you’ve also scorched my back by dumping me wet on a red-hot leather car seat. I’ll worry about my health. Just give me a cigarette.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t have any.’
‘Well, bloody well stop and buy some.’ She looked around angrily, trying to get her bearings. ‘Turn left at the next fork, there’s a tabac about half a mile on.’
We were already well out of Gigaro. To avoid being caught in traffic, I’d taken a minor road, straight up the hillside into the woods above the bay. Across the valley I could see the Saracen village of Gassin, but I wasn’t sure exactly where I was in the confusing network of roads crossing the St. Tropez peninsula.
Seagull closed her eyes again and didn’t answer when I asked how she felt. I drove on, found the tabac, and stopped the car. I hesitated before getting out and, without opening her eyes, Seagull said, ‘I won’t run away. I’m too wrecked. Just get me a packet of Gauloises Filtres and a box of matches.’
As I bought them, I watched her through the window of the little grocery store, but she didn’t stir. When I gave them to her, she lit one and said, ‘Follow the road marked Amari
n. Take the first left, then a right. The signpost says Vallieres.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I have a place up there.’
I was going to say something about the flat but I decided against it. It was going to be awkward enough explaining how I’d found her and it wasn’t the moment to let her realize she’d been under detailed surveillance.
I followed her directions and we began to climb more steeply, making several hairpin turns around trees which formed a shady canopy over the road. Already I could make out four separate hills on the peninsula and see the sea on both sides. On the horizon, I could see an aircraft carrier outside the bay. I knew it was the U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower on its way back from an Indian Ocean flag-showing cruise to take part in the NATO exercises. For the first time in more than a decade French troops were taking part, and the papers I’d seen at Nice airport had carried reports of protests in Paris and Lyons.
I wished suddenly that the whole Starburst nightmare would just evaporate and I could be left sitting beside this beautiful, bronzed, almost naked woman, with no other problem than to find her a shirt so I could take her to dinner in one of the hilltop villages and watch the sunset.
I had no idea how I was going to begin to question her. Even ‘wrecked,’ as she put it, she was still far too bright to be led sideways into an issue, and there was a real chance that she would simply say ‘No, I don’t want to talk about it.’ I could then assume her guilt, but where would that leave me? Should I have her arrested? And anyway, could I? And if I did, was my career irretrievably lost? Or what if I did nothing? I’d been turned loose on a very tight rein to try to unravel some threads that Ryder’s men hadn’t managed to do. If I couldn’t undo even the first skein, would I simply be formally interrogated and forced to resign?
I was thinking about the options when suddenly a completely naked woman stepped out into the middle of the road. I could hear laughter coming from under the trees at the side of the road, and the sound of clinking glasses. There was obviously a party going on in the grounds of the red-tiled farmhouse, and the woman had gone to get something at the main house. I braked and she waved and continued her crossing unruffled, and disappeared behind the wall. It was an extraordinary sight and yet quite natural. She seemed to be simply part of the wildlife of the peninsula—like the deer in Windsor Great Park.
Jennifer didn’t react. She stared ahead through the windshield as though she hadn’t noticed and I knew it was her way of telling me she was still angry. She had told me once that she liked to amuse herself by trying to see things through a man’s eyes, and normally she would have made a joke or a teasing sexual allusion.
I stopped the thought short, knowing I was being ridiculous. I was recalling a woman who probably had never existed. The reality was this sullen, angry creature slumped beside me whom I had somehow to provoke into responding to me.
‘Look, Seagull,’ I said, finally, ‘I’m sorry about what happened at Gigaro. I know it doesn’t make up for it. But what else can I say?’
When that didn’t get any reaction, I added, ‘And I’ll pay for the surfboard.’
She drew on her cigarette.
‘Cash or by installments?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Last time we met, you were worried that your divorce was going to ruin you. I gather it didn’t, finally.’
I managed a smile. ‘It left me enough to buy a wind-surfer.’
‘How bad was it?’
‘The settlement?’
‘Yes.’
‘About what you’d expect.’
‘Did it help my not being there?’
‘Yes. Though they knew about us, in the end. I wanted to give Nancy most of what I gave her. I felt I owed it to her. But if I hadn’t, Sellinger would have seen she took it.’
‘But it helped? My going away?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why didn’t you keep your side of the bargain? We had a deal. We promised each other a nice smooth ending. You didn’t want me to get involved in the divorce. So we parted. Two free beings. Now you’re back.’
‘Seagull,’ I said gently, ‘let’s stop playing games with each other.’
‘What games?’
‘Plowing through dialogue about divorce and partings and free beings. You know very well I didn’t-come here to try and pick up where we left off, or interfere with your life here.’
‘Then don’t interfere. Just go away.’
‘Seagull, we’ve been through this once.’
‘So what are you going to do? Drive another speedboat over me?’
She leaned forward and pointed through the windshield.
‘Break. Bell. End of round one,’ she said. ‘We’re there. That’s my place.’
I looked up and saw a small campsite and beyond it, half hidden in some trees, a Provencal cottage with a red-tiled roof.
‘The house? How do I get to it?’
‘No. Not the house. The tent. Just drive straight across the field.’
I did as she said and parked beside a big orange ‘bungalow’ tent big enough to sleep five or six people. The flaps were closed but there was an awning projecting forward on two poles, making a terrace, with three canvas chairs grouped around a plastic table.
‘Help me open it up,’ she said, ‘It’ll be as stuffy as hell until we get a breeze through it.’
Though we had to be several hundred feet up, the air was dry and the breeze felt hot on the skin. The grass was so brittle that it crackled as we walked over it, and I noticed a sign on the tree beside the wall warning of the dangers of fires. As a further reminder, there was a grove of charred trees lower down the slope.
She saw me looking and said, ‘They caught that one in time. Over at Cap Marie they weren’t so lucky. Forty thousand hectares went up in smoke. That thing doesn’t leak fuel or anything, does it?’ she added, pointing to the car.
‘Not as far as I know.’
I checked quickly under the tank, then went back to help Seagull open up the flaps of the tent.
‘Welcome to my studio,’ she said. The interior of the tent was divided into four segments: a kitchen, a sleeping area, and what would normally have been another ‘bedroom’ and an eating area, but which here were a clutter of artist’s materials, discarded sheets of paper and board and piles of paint-stained rags.
‘You haven’t changed,’ I said, remembering how I used to have to step over the same kind of clutter in her Hampstead flat.
‘I clean it up every night. I have to take most of the stuff away each time I come or it would get pinched. I leave the easel and the biggest board.’
‘You don’t sleep here then,’ I said. I stepped into the sleeping area, waiting to see whether she would mention Yves. She’d been unconscious through the confrontation on the beach but she must have guessed I knew. However I had traced her, I would presumably have found out about the flat in St. Tropez.
‘I sleep here sometimes. If I’m on a good streak.’ I looked around the bedroom for some kind of indication of how much she used the tent; I didn’t know what it would prove, but I wanted to stall to leave her to make a move.
She noticed my eyes scanning the small rack of washing beside the camp bed.
‘You haven’t changed either,’ she said. ‘Still looking for your frivolous woman?’
It was an old joke. She’d teased me once in Hampstead about being interested in her washing line. I’d told her how we used to look at everyone’s washing on the way to school and tell one another with boyish bravado that it never did any harm to know which houses had a girl with a frivolous taste in undies. It had amused her then as casual pillow talk, and I remembered kissing her and telling her I knew better now. I had never known a more sensual woman than Seagull, yet she always wore little-girl underwear—cotton bikinis that felt wooly to the touch from too many washings.
Now the joke seemed silly and strained, a reminder that there is nothing as awkward as sex gone sour. Which br
ought us back to the same nightmare question: Had there ever been anything to turn sour? Nothing she had said since I had spoken to her at the water’s edge had sounded right. She had been scared when she saw me and she still was, but she was also angry and not, I was sure, just because of the accident with the boat.
I decided it had to be faced. At least we were alone hereto talk, or to fight if we must—but we could easily be interrupted, by Yves or by someone from the house.
‘Seagull,’ I said, ‘it’s time for round two.’
‘Yes.’ The tone was cold, deliberate, not helping.
‘Seagull, I know about Yves. And your life here. I’m not trying to disturb any of that.’
‘How did you know where I was?’
I smiled. ‘Seagull, come on. I have two thousand-odd employees. Many of them get paid to find out simple things like what the President of the United States really said to the Pope during his state visit to Italy.’
I didn’t know whether she believed it, but it was plausible: I could have found out.
‘But the real question is how you knew I was coming.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You weren’t surprised to see me, and as for being worried at what a new lover will think because an old one drops by, Seagull, it was nonsense. You can handle that sort of situation in your sleep. You knew I was coming and you knew it wasn’t just to relive old times.’
Seagull paused. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘we’ll talk. I’ll get dressed. Get us some drinks; there’s a cooler in the kitchen.’
Dressing consisted of putting on a muslin shirt, and she was already arranging the chairs on the terrace when I had finished finding out what was cool enough to drink. There was no ice, but I had found some tonic floating in the melted water of the cooler, and some gin, and anything was welcome in the baking heat. The sun would be starting to go down in less than an hour, but the tent was still stifling from being closed up during the day and the little terrace wasn’t shady enough to deal with the glare from outside and the accumulated heat within. We sat facing each other uncomfortably and before she took a drink she stroked her neck.
Shadowplay Page 10
