“Marcus…”
“Robert, thank God I’ve got you at last. Did you get my message?”
“Three of them. But I said I would call you about Farnaby.”
“This isn’t about Farnaby. This is much more important. This is about Ben Litton.”
* * *
There was a dress, seen in Paris, wildly expensive, coveted, and finally bought. It was black, sleeveless, very plain. “But when will you wear such a dress?” Madame Duprés had asked, and Emma, basking in the luxury of possession, had replied, “Oh, some time. Some special time.”
There had never been such an occasion until tonight. Now, with her hair coiled high and pearl earstuds set in her ears, Emma drew the black dress carefully over her head, zipped it up and fastened the tiny belt, and her reflection in the mirror reassured her that all those thousands of francs had been well-spent.
When Robert came, she was in the kitchen, struggling with a trayful of ice-cubes for the Martinis that he had promised to make. She heard his car, the slam of the door, the gate open and shut and his footsteps as he ran down the steps, and in a panic, she tumbled the ice into a glass dish and went to let him in, and found that the sullen day had turned into a clear and perfect night, jewel-blue and scattered with stars.
In surprise, she said, “What a beautiful night.”
“Amazing, isn’t it? After all that wind and rain Porthkerris is looking like Positano.” He came into the house and Emma closed the door behind him. “There’s even a moon rising over the sea to complete the illusion. All we need now is a guitar and a tenor singing Santa Lucia.”
“Perhaps we’ll find one.”
He had changed into a dark grey suit, a starched shirt with an impeccable collar and a gleam of white cuff, linked with gold, showing at his wrist. His tawny hair was once more tamed and smoothly brushed, and he brought with him the crisp, lemony smell of after-shave.
“Do you still want to make a Martini? I’ve got everything ready, I was just trying to get the ice…” She went back to the kitchen, raising her voice to talk through the open door. “The gin and the Martini are on the table and a lemon. Oh, and you’ll need a knife to cut the lemon with.”
She opened a drawer and found one, pointed and very sharp, and she carried the knife and the bowl of ice back into the living-room. “What a pity Ben isn’t here. He adores Martinis, only he can never remember the right proportions and he always drowns them with lemon…”
Robert made no reply to this. It occurred then to Emma that he had made no effort to make himself at home. He had done nothing about their drinks, he had not even lit himself a cigarette, and this in itself was unusual, for he was normally the most relaxed and composed of men. But now there was a definite constraint about him, and with a sinking heart, Emma wondered if he was already regretting the evening they were to spend together.
She went to put the lemon down beside the empty glasses, told herself she was imagining things, turned to swiftly smile at him. “Now, what else do you need?”
“Not another thing,” said Robert, and put his hands into his trouser pockets. Not the gesture of a man who is about to make a Martini. In the fire a burning log settled and broke, sending up a shower of sparks.
Perhaps it was the telephone call that had upset him. “Did you speak to Marcus?”
“Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, he’d been trying to get me on the telephone most of the afternoon.”
“And of course you were out. Was he pleased when you told him about Pat Farnaby?”
“He wasn’t calling about Farnaby.”
“He wasn’t?” Suddenly she was afraid. “Is it bad news?”
“No, of course not, but you may not be very pleased. It’s about your father. You see, he called Marcus this morning, from the States. He wanted Marcus to tell you that yesterday, in Queenstown, he and Melissa Ryan were married.”
Emma realised that she was still holding the knife, that it was very sharp and that she might cut herself with it, so she set it down, very carefully, alongside the lemon …
Married. The word conjured up a hysterical image of a wedding; of Ben with a white flower in the button-hole of his sagging corduroy jacket; of Melissa Ryan in her pink wool suit, misted in white veiling and paper confetti; of demented Church bells jangling their message out across the verdant Virginia countryside that Emma had never seen. It was like a nightmare.
She realised that Robert Morrow was still talking, his voice even and calm.
“… Marcus feels that in some obscure way, he is to blame. Because he thought the private view was a good idea, and because he was with them in Queenstown—he saw them together all the time, and he never had the faintest inkling that this was going to happen.”
Emma remembered Marcus’ description of the beautiful house, saw Ben caged by Melissa’s money, a pacing tiger with all his creative impulses smothered by luxury; and she realised that she had underestimated Melissa Ryan in imagining that Ben would be put off by having to fight for what he wanted. She had not appreciated how much he would want it.
Suddenly, she was angry. “He should never have gone back to America. There was no need. He simply wanted to be left alone and to get on with his painting.”
“Emma, nobody made him go.”
“It isn’t as though the marriage will last. Ben’s never stayed faithful to a woman longer than six months, and I can’t see Melissa Ryan standing for that.”
Robert said mildly, “Perhaps this time it will work, and it will last.”
“But you saw them together that day they met. They couldn’t keep their eyes off each other. If she had been old and ugly, nothing would have dragged him away from Porthkerris.”
“But she wasn’t old and ugly. She’s very beautiful, and highly intelligent and very rich. And if it hadn’t been Melissa Ryan, very soon it would have been somebody else, and what is more…” he went on, swiftly, before Emma could interrupt, “… you know as well as I do that that is true.”
She said bitterly, “But at least we would have had more than a month together.”
Hopelessly, Robert shook his head. “Oh, Emma, let him go.”
His tone infuriated her. “He’s my father. What’s wrong in wanting to be with him?”
“He’s not a father, any more than he’s a husband or a lover or a friend. He’s an artist. As that dedicated maniac we went to see this afternoon is an artist. They have no time for our values or standards. Everything, and everybody else, has to take second place.”
“Second place? I wouldn’t mind taking second place, or third, or fourth. But I’ve always come at the bottom of a long list of priorities. His painting, his love affairs, his perpetual shunting about all over the world; even Marcus, and you. You’re all more important to Ben than ever I was.”
“Then leave him alone. Think about something else for a change. Chuck all this, leave it behind. Get yourself a job.”
“I’ve done all those things. I’ve been doing them for the past two years.”
“Then come back to London with me tomorrow and stay with Marcus and Helen. It’ll get you away from Porthkerris, give you time to get used to the idea of Ben being married again, decide what you want to do next.”
“Perhaps I’ve already decided.”
It was there, in the back of her mind. Like watching the revolving stage from the darkened auditorium of a theatre. One set moves out of sight and as it does the new scenery comes slowly on to the stage. A different set. Another room, perhaps. Another view from another window. “But I don’t want to come to London.”
“And this evening?”
Emma frowned. She had forgotten. “This evening?”
“We’re having dinner together.”
She felt that she could not bear it. “I really would rather not…”
“It’ll do you good…”
“No it won’t. And I’ve got a headache…” It was an excuse, made-up, and it was with astonishment that she realised it was true. A pain th
at felt like the start of a migraine, with her eyeballs dragged by wires into the back of her head; the thought of food, chicken in gravy, ice-cream, was nauseous. “I couldn’t come. I couldn’t.”
Robert said gently, “It isn’t the end of the world,” and the old, comforting cliché was somehow more than Emma could take. To her horror, she began to cry. She covered her face with her hands, pressing her finger tips into her thudding scalp, trying to stop, knowing that crying would make it worse, that she would be blinded with pain, that she would be sick …
She heard him say her name, and in two strides he had covered the space between them, and he put his arms around her, cradling her, letting her cry all over the immaculate grey lapels of his good suit. And Emma did not try to move away, but stayed still, tightly clenched against her own grief, rigid and unresponsive and hating him for what he had done to her.
7
Jane Marshall, her hand curved round a half full tumbler of Scotch-on-the-rocks, said, “… so what happened then?”
“Nothing happened. She didn’t want to come out to dinner, and she looked as though she was going to have a bilious attack, so I put her to bed, and gave her a hot drink and an aspirin, and then I went back to the hotel and had dinner on my own. Then, the next morning, the Sunday, I went down to the cottage to say good-bye before I drove back to London. She was up and about, rather pale, but she seemed to be all right.”
“Did you try again to make her come back with you?”
“Yes, I did, but she was adamant. So we said good-bye, and I left her. And since then there has been no word.”
“But you can surely find out where she is?”
“There is no way of finding out. There’s no telephone, never has been. Marcus wrote, of course, but Emma seems to have inherited Ben’s built-in aversion to answering letters. There hasn’t been another word.”
“But this is crazy. In this day and age … there must be someone who can tell you…”
“There’s no-one. No-one Emma ever talked to. There was no daily woman, coming in to clean, she did it all herself. That was the big reason for going back to Porthkerris in the first place, so that she could keep house for Ben. Of course, after two weeks of frigid silence, Marcus could stand it no longer, and put through a telephone call to the landlord of the Sliding Tackle, which was the pub Ben used to frequent, but Ben had been gone for six weeks, anyway, and Emma never went near the place.”
“Then you’ll have to go down to Porthkerris and ask around.”
“Marcus isn’t prepared to do that.”
“Why not?”
“For reasons. Emma isn’t a child. She’s been hurt, and Marcus respects the fact that if she wants to be left alone, he has no right to interfere. He’s asked her to come to London and live with Helen and himself … anyway until she’s found her feet again. He can scarcely do more. And there’s another reason, too.”
“I know,” said Jane. “It’s Helen, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” said Robert, hating to admit it. “Helen has always resented the hold Ben has over Marcus. There have been times when she would gladly have seen Ben at the bottom of the ocean. But she’s accepted it because she had to, because wet-nursing Ben’s career is part of Marcus’s job, and without Marcus to keep him, more or less on the rails, God knows what would have happened to Ben Litton.”
“And now she doesn’t want him to start killing himself over Emma.”
“Precisely.”
Jane rocked her glass, letting the ice clink against its side. She said, “And you?”
He looked up. “What about me?”
“Do you feel involved?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“You sound involved.”
“I scarcely know the girl.”
“But you’re worried about her.”
He considered this. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes, I suppose I am. God knows why.”
His glass was empty. Jane laid down her own drink, and got up to take his glass and pour him another whisky. From behind him, busy with ice, she said, “Why don’t you go down to Porthkerris and find out?”
“Because she isn’t there.”
“She isn’t…? You know? But you never told me that.”
“After the abortive telephone call to the Sliding Tackle, Marcus got the wind up. He rang the local police, and they found out a few facts and called us back. Cottage closed up, studio closed up, Post Office told to keep all mail until further notice.” He reached up to take the fresh drink that Jane handed him over the back of the sofa. “Thanks.”
“And her father…? Does he know?”
“Yes, Marcus wrote and told him. But you can’t expect Ben to get unduly excited. After all, he’s still in the throes of what is virtually a honeymoon, and Emma’s been sculling round Europe on her own since she was fourteen. Don’t forget, that this is not a normal father-daughter relationship”
Jane sighed. “It most certainly isn’t.”
Robert grinned at her. She was a comfortingly down-to-earth person and it was for this reason that, on an impulse, he had dropped in this evening for a drink on his way home from work. Usually, the double life he led with Marcus Bernstein, working with him at the Gallery, as well as living in the same house, offered no strain at all. But just now, things were difficult. Robert had come back from a business trip to Paris, to find Marcus on edge, and unable to concentrate for very long on anything but the problem of Emma Litton. After discussing it with him, Robert realised that Marcus blamed himself for what had happened, and refused to be talked out of his guilt. Helen, on the other hand, was unsympathetic, and determined that he should not get himself more deeply involved in the whole sorry business, and for the moment the tensions had got on top of them, and split the menage at Milton Gardens from top to bottom.
The situation was not improved by the weather. After a cool spring, London had suddenly been caught up on the throes of a veritable heatwave. The early mornings broke in a pearl-like mist which gradually dissolved into day after day of baking sun. Girls went to work in sleeveless dresses, men shed their jackets and sat at their desks in shirt sleeves. The parks at lunchtime were filled with recumbent picnickers; shops and restaurants sprouted striped awnings, windows were flung open to the smallest breeze, and in the streets, parked cars frizzled and pavements glared, and melted tar stuck to the soles of shoes.
The heat, like some monstrous epidemic, had invaded even the quiet, pond-green recesses of the Bernstein Gallery. All day long there had been an endless stream of visitors and prospective clients, for the trans-Atlantic tourist season had started, and this was apt to be their busiest time. And at the end of it all, Robert, driving home, had found himself longing for a new face, a cool drink, and some conversation that had nothing to do with Artists, be they Renaissance, Impressionist or Pop.
Jane Marshall sprang immediately to mind.
Her little house was in a narrow mews between Sloane Square and the Pimlico Road. As he turned the car into the street, and eased down over the cobbles, he gave a double toot on the horn, and she appeared at the open upstairs window, her hands on the sill, her fair hair falling over her face as she leaned out to see who it was.
“Robert! I thought you were still in Paris.”
“I was till two days ago. Have you got such a thing as a long, cool, alcoholic drink for an exhausted working man?”
“Of course I have. Hold on. I’ll come down and let you in.”
Her tiny house had always charmed him. Originally a coachman’s cottage, it had a steep, narrow stair, which led straight up to the first floor. Here there was an open hall-way, a sitting-room, and a kitchen, and upstairs again, in the slope-roofed loft, her bedroom and bathroom. As such it was inadequate enough, but since she had started her interior decorating business, it had become a joke. The sitting-room she had turned into a workroom, but still the bales of fabric, the fringing and the cushions, and the small bits of bric-à-brac she so cleverly picked up, overflowed
into every available corner of space, rendering it all as gay and colourful as a patchwork quilt.
She was delighted to see him. She had spent the morning with a tiresome woman who wanted her entire house in St. John’s Wood done up in cream, which she called “Redecorating in Magnolia.” And then there had been a session with a young and rising actress who demanded something startling for her new flat.
“She sat here for hours, showing me pictures of the sort of thing she had in mind. I tried to tell her she should get a bulldozer in, not an interior decorator, but she wouldn’t listen. These people never do. Whisky?”
“That,” said Robert, collapsing on the sofa in front of the open window, “is the nicest thing anybody has said to me all day.”
She poured two drinks, made sure he was supplied with cigarettes and an ashtray, and then settled herself composedly down to face him. She was a very pretty girl. Her blonde hair was straight and thick, cut in a curve to her chin. Her eyes were green, her nose tip-tilted, her mouth sweet, but implacable. Her broken marriage had left certain scars upon her character and she was not always the most tolerant of people, but there was a directness about her that he found as refreshing as a drink of cold water, and she always looked delicious.
Now he said, “I came here with the express purpose of not talking shop. How did we get on to the subject of Ben Litton anyway?”
“I brought it up. I was intrigued. Every time I saw Helen, she kept dropping maddening hints and then refusing to say more. She feels strongly about this, doesn’t she?”
“Only because, in his day, Ben Litton has run poor Marcus ragged.”
“Does she know Emma?”
“She hasn’t seen her since she went to Switzerland six years ago.”
“It’s difficult,” said Jane, “to be fair about people if you don’t know them very well.”
“It’s sometimes difficult to be fair even if you do. And now…” He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette. “Let’s drop the subject and make a tacit agreement not to mention it again. Are you doing anything this evening?”
“Not a thing.”
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