by L. J. Greene
I gave a shout, and Leo sat up at once, and waved. Cresswickham barely acknowledged me, lifting a hand in a half-hearted way before stretching an arm behind his head.
“Good afternoon,” Leo said, when I reached them. “Fancy a tipple?”
“Good afternoon,” I said back, the words stiff on my tongue. It was so different from his usual Hello, friend, that it was disconcerting. “Sure, I’ll take a drink.”
“Reggie?”
“It’s rather early, don’t you think?” Cresswickham said, and dipped his sunglasses down his nose to look at me.
I ignored the dig. “I had a brief chat with your—what is he, your butler? Gabriel, he said his name was. Quite an eyeful, eh?”
Cresswickham pushed his sunglasses back up and said incongruously, “Gabriel is one of our Angels.” Mancini had turned back to the wet bar and busied himself with the ice tongs.
“Angel? Don’t expect he actually fell from heaven, though, did he!” I said jovially. “Did you hire him here, or take him from New York?”
Leo said over his shoulder, “Reggie hired him here. Didn’t you, Reggie?”
“Did I?”
“Why, of course you did. Don’t you remember, the agency sent him over just a week or two back.”
“The agency,” Cresswickham echoed, and laughed. “Of course.” He looked at me and continued, “You may change in the pool house. Plenty of swimming trunks on offer.”
I took the bourbon Mancini pushed into my hand as I replied, “Think I’ll sit this one out.” Cresswickham said nothing, but Mancini widened his eyes at me. “On second thoughts,” I said with a sigh, “I believe I will change.” I downed my drink, and headed off to the pool house.
There was another drink waiting for me when I emerged in bright blue trunks, and Mancini sat me down on one of the lounging chairs before he made with the small talk, asking superficial questions about my writing, and easing me into a sweet glaze of inebriation as warm as the sunshine.
Cresswickham joined in the drinking soon enough, though he remained mostly silent through my sermon on themes in American literature that had been provoked by my nerves and bourbon. Mancini went over to the bar to fix us yet another round when I realized he’d not had a drop himself.
“But if I can just get the right phrase to close out that fourth chapter,” I was saying, my mind and eyes on Mancini, when the Englishman interrupted.
“My God, haven’t we had enough of this chatter for today? I thought you were here to interview me.”
“My apologies, Reggie,” I said, and gave a grin that showed more teeth than felt natural. I don’t know how he felt about me addressing him so informally. Every time the nickname passed my lips he gave a little twitch, but I never could quite tell if it was irritation or pleasure. I was taking liberties, but the man made my skin crawl. If I could get under his, I would take my chance.
He took off his sunglasses and regarded me. “You are proud of your work.”
It was not a question, but I treated it as one. “Sure I am. Don’t you think it’s something to be proud of?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“Reggie doesn’t like fiction,” Mancini called over. “He doesn’t see the point.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, and then looked at Cresswickham. His skin looked pink and plump, like a roasting chicken. “What does that mean, Reggie? Does there have to be a point to everything? Can’t something just be a bit of fun?”
Mancini materialized between us with our drinks and a warning glance at me. I crashed my glass into Cresswickham’s and said, “Here’s to crime!” before tossing it back. I felt giddy that day; daring.
“Is that your chief end in life?” he asked me, taking a sip of whisky. “To have fun?”
“I know you Englishmen are straitlaced, but maybe there’s something your former colonies can teach you. Enjoy yourself. Have a chuckle. Indulge.”
I saw his fingers contract around the glass. Mancini was hovering nearby and I felt the backs of my ears tickling, like he was trying to tell me something as hard as he could without words.
“I believe I’ve been very indulgent,” Cresswickham said, and stood up. “Have I not, Leo?”
He said quickly: “Oh, yes. Yes, Reggie. Very indulgent.”
I remembered, too late, that it was Mancini who would bear the brunt of any pique I raised in the Englishman. When would I learn to keep my mouth shut? I did the only thing I could think of that might draw Cresswickham’s attention away from Mancini, maybe make him forgive whatever imagined slight had occurred. I set my drink down and stood as well, moving into the space between the two men so Lord Cresswickham’s cold blue glare was directed at me instead.
I made myself lay a hand on his hipbone. “You need to indulge yourself, Reggie. That’s what I mean. You deserve some fun.” I paused, and slid my hand lower, under the waistband of his trunks. “Maybe we could have some fun together.”
One minute I was standing there making a poor attempt at seducing Cresswickham, and the next I was taking in a lungful of chlorinated water. The world had turned wet and blue. It took me a moment to get my bearings, but when I did I resurfaced, spluttering.
The two of them were laughing at me so hard they could barely stand up.
“What’s the big idea?” I coughed, and Mancini pulled himself together enough to respond.
“I thought maybe you should cool off a little. Oh, you should have seen your face. You were so surprised. Wasn’t he surprised, Reggie?”
“Terrified.” I’d never imagined Cresswickham could be so overtaken with emotion, grinning so hard his face might’ve split in two. “You looked like you were going to scream bloody murder just before you hit the water.”
He was laughing so much at his own remark he missed the dark look I gave him. Mancini caught it, though, and took a dive into the pool. He surfaced near me and tossed his head to get his wet hair out of his eyes. Still smirking, he pulled me close as if to kiss me, but dunked me instead, holding me under until I started struggling. He let me up only to dunk me again, like he couldn’t bear for me to get any air he wasn’t directly providing.
“Quit it,” I snarled, when I got away from him. We’d floated further down the pool. I couldn’t quite touch the bottom with my toes. He laid his hands on my waist and we bobbed together.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he murmured, the same silly grin still plastered on his mug. His eyes were hard.
“I was trying to help you.”
“Don’t ever touch him. Capisce?”
“You’re as cuckoo as he is. Let go.” I swam my way to the steps at the other end and sat on them to catch my breath. Mancini swam slowly after me. Cresswickham had lain back on his lounger again, one hand behind his head and the other on his fuchsia chest. His eyes were still on us, but as I watched, he blinked like a sunning lizard: slower and slower, before closing for good.
Mancini pulled himself out of the pool and walked back to the loungers, where he stood over the Englishman with his hands on his hips. “He’s asleep,” he said to me when I came up behind me. “Help me move this sunshade, will you?”
“He can burn for all I care,” I muttered.
“I’d rather he didn’t,” Mancini said lightly. “Last time he caught a sunburn he found very creative ways to show me how painful it felt to him.”
I helped him move the enormous pool umbrella until Cresswickham was shaded. We walked off to the bar to talk, and I tried not to let the noise the slumbering aristocrat was making remind me of death rattle I’d heard my father make. “It was a mistake, my coming here,” I whispered. “I can’t stand to see you like this, and I don’t understand why you put up with it. It can’t be worth it to you, the money. You can’t be willing to put up with this just for the sake of a nice shirt now and then, or a goddamn vicuna coat.”
Mancini lit a cigarette before replying. “Money is very important. You of all people should know that.”
“That�
�s a low blow.”
“It wasn’t meant as a slight. You used to drink at Chateau Marmont even though you couldn’t afford it, so I thought you’d understand. But perhaps you don’t.” He wandered to the poolside again and stared at the waters. “Do you know, I think this water might be the same lovely cerulean as your eyes.”
“The hell with my eyes,” I snapped, and grabbed him by the shoulders to shake him. “And the hell with him, for whatever hold he has on you, and—and the hell with you for not telling me straight out what it is. Is he blackmailing you?”
“Let it go, will you? I don’t want to discuss this with Reggie sleeping right there.”
“No fear of him waking, though, after you make him a drink. Is there?”
His smile dropped. “Ah,” he said. “So you’ve noticed that.”
“A toff like him doesn’t snore at the dinner table, no matter how much he’s sunk. And now he’s sleeping like the dead after three whiskies? No, sir, that’s not natural. Didn’t take much to work out you like to drug him.”
“Hm.” He lit up another Gauloise as though he’d forgotten the one he just smoked. “He’s a terrible insomniac, you know, if I don’t. Wanders all over the house in the dark because he can’t sleep. It’s downright dangerous.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure you’re very concerned about his welfare. Was he in danger of drowning this afternoon?”
“For God’s sake, you could see he was working himself up to something. I was protecting you. In any case, you’d better hightail it. One never knows when pharmaceutical relief may fail us.”
Cresswickham was not the one who’d shoved me into the water, I could have pointed out, but I didn’t bother. “I hoped to see Alice again,” I said instead, and Mancini slid me a look from eyes half-closed against the smoke spuming from his lips.
“Alice, eh? Better if you’d keep your distance from her. Reggie wouldn’t like it.”
“Nevertheless.”
“She’s sequestered. Has a migraine.” In his chair at the head of the pool, Cresswickham choked for a moment, before he resumed his labored breathing. Mancini flicked his cigarette in a balletic arc into the pool. As the sizzle sounded, he pulled me in to kiss. His mouth was acrid with nicotine, but it may as well have been dripping with honey to me. Kissing there in broad daylight, his keeper only a few feet away from us—it was exciting to me, even though I felt like a dog about it.
He cupped me over my swim shorts, and I couldn’t help pushing into his hand.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “Isn’t this an occurrence?”
I flushed. The last few times we’d been together, I’d had some troubles downstairs. It was the drink and I knew that, so I hadn’t cut up over it, and things had come right in the end. Mancini, if anything, seemed to take a great interest in my limp state. Yet here I was, alert and firm in the most awkward circumstances.
“Leave it, damn it,” I muttered into his neck. “Not with him over there.”
“But I believe you enjoy the thought of it. Is that what you’d like, hm? Shall I bring you off on the lounge chair, right next to him?”
I swallowed hard and pushed him away. Maybe he was joking. Maybe he was testing me. I only knew that I wouldn’t do it. “I would never—could never—not when I think about what he might do to you. If he woke up—” I couldn’t go on, my throat closed up on me and I had to stop. My excitement had died along with my voice.
He gave me a curious look. “Why, I believe you really mean it.”
“Of course I mean it! My God, do you think I want you hurt over me?”
His wonder was, perhaps, the most genuine emotion I’d seen from him: his real self, peeping out from behind the shutters. “How charming of you,” he said. He made an attempt at irony, but the smile gave him away.
I chanced another kiss, running my fingers through his damp hair. “You goose,” I told him. “I’m in love with you. Don’t you know that by now?” Looking back, it seems like a farce, that declaration of my heart’s passion with a wheezing aristocrat in the background and my head spinning like a top from bourbon. Yet the way he gazed at me, his eyes wet and unshielded, his mouth trembling—I can see him still, and even after everything, the memory of that look stokes the embers of my soul. And I was in love with him. There was no denying it.
He kissed me gently, his fingers tracing over my closed lids, ruffling my eyelashes. His mouth was as soft and sweet as it had ever been. “I’ll make up some excuse for you not staying, but you’d better go now,” he said. “There’s no telling when he’ll wake.”
“We have to do something,” I insisted. “For your sake, and for Alice’s.”
“Alright, sweetheart,” he said. “We’ll think of something. Now, off you go.”
Chapter 11
I ran into Betts on my re-entrance to the parlor. “Hullo,” he said in surprise. He was laying out a game of Solitaire. “What do you think you’re doing, creeping around the gardens?”
“I’m an invited guest,” I snapped. “Why’ve you taken such an instant dislike to me, Mr. Betts?”
He went on playing his game for long enough that I thought he was ignoring me, so I continued through the room. “Did you mean what you said last night?” he called out, just as I reached the arch leading to the foyer.
“I did,” I said, coming back towards him. “I don’t like this set up, much. Doesn’t seem quite right. And a girl like Alice…”
He gave me a hard look. “Yes?”
“Well, she should be out enjoying herself,” I finished awkwardly.
“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for her?” he said, but he seemed more rueful than angry.
“Maybe just a mite,” I admitted, and sat down on the sofa opposite Betts. My heart belonged to Leo, but there was something about Alice that still tugged at the strings. She was lonely, and I knew about loneliness.
Betts gave a loud, startling shout of laughter. “You’re not the only one,” he said, laying out his cards. “We’re all a mite in love with her. Yes, all of us in our own way...even his Lordship.” His face darkened as he said it.
“Lord Cresswickham’s love seems like it might be…” I hesitated. I didn’t want to step wrong. “Turbulent?”
Betts scowled at his cards. “I do my best to protect her Ladyship from the worst of it. So does your fairy friend, Mr. Mancini.” He waved away my protest. “Oh, I have no quarrel with the lot of you. I’m not interested in what you do in your beds. I’m interested in her Ladyship, and what’s to become of her. She’s not well.”
“I can see that.”
“She needs saving.”
“We are agreed, then. Mancini has explained the situation to me, and we’re working on a plan.”
Betts raised his eyebrows in amusement. “Oh, ho. I wonder if Mr. Mancini really sees the problem in the same way I do. As far as he’s concerned—” He stopped himself.
I said hotly, “I don’t know what you’re trying to insinuate. He cares very much for Alice, and he’s just as much a victim of Lord Cresswickham as she is.”
“Well, well. Perhaps you’re right.” He was seeking to soothe me now, as though he thought he’d gone too far. Maybe, I thought, he was worried I’d complain about him to Mancini. “Very kind Mr. Mancini has been to her Ladyship over the years, there’s no doubt about that. And you say you’re working on a plan?”
Slightly mollified, I nodded. “Working on it.”
“And you’re not going to give up just because she tells you to? Or because it’s dangerous and it might bring harm to you? I need to know that you’re a man of honor.”
I picked myself up off the sofa. Somehow I had gone from wanting to run away with my tail between my legs to feeling like I could blow down the house with one puff of my indignation.
“Mr. Betts,” I told him, “I am an American. If there’s one thing we do better than any other nation, it’s riding in to save the day when all seems lost.”
His severe face cracked into a grin, and
he offered his hand. “Just Betts will do,” he said as I shook it. “Seamus Betts. I had the pleasure of serving with Americans during the war, and you’re not wrong, boy-o. You’re not wrong.”
My patriotic passion assuaged, I was tired again. “Betts it is. Now, can you call me up a taxi again? I’m beat, and I need to get the hell out of here before I lay my fists into an unconscious aristocrat.”
Mancini did not join me at the bungalow that night, or the next, or the next. I was in an agony over it: had Cresswickham twigged to our relationship? Had he beaten Mancini, tortured him? Had he—oh, God, had he gone too far?
I tried to type up my piece on Cresswickham for the Examiner, but every sentence was a struggle. I wanted to keep my base disgust for the man out of it, but it was leaking through despite myself, and I went through an awful lot of typing paper before I gave up. Until I knew Mancini was safe, I couldn’t lie my way through a story. I couldn’t write my book, either. Dread and fear filled me up sure as bourbon ever did, and I found it easy to stay within the confines of the Chateau. I didn’t know what was waiting outside the grounds for me, and I stayed in my bungalow as much as possible. I turned down another dinner invitation from Montgomery Clift, and I kept an eye on the concierge, just in case Mancini tried to get a message to me through him.
I called Fred King to ask him about the town car, but he was out to lunch again. “That man eats enough for an army,” I growled at Joan, his secretary, but she just laughed and told me she’d give him a message.
I bumped into the Magnolia Girl again one morning when I was hanging hopefully around the lobby on the fourth day. She was wearing her hat as always, but had removed her sunglasses to argue with the concierge. She was a knockout, even in such a dark mood.
“I specifically said: no calls, no deliveries, no nothing.” Her accent was broad Queens, and I smiled to hear it despite my worry.
Monsieur Antoine spread his arms in an approximation of French manners. “Je suis très désolé, madame. I did not imagine that a delivery of such beautiful flowers would be forbidden—”
