by Lex Lander
Willie grimaced. ‘Are ye?’
‘Uh-uh. I was never in love in the first place. It was a collision of over-active hormones.’
He tittered into his wine glass; Julia clucked reproof. She could be maiden-auntish about topics scabrous.
‘He’s in love with Maura,’ she said primly, then as an afterthought, ‘or Liza.’
‘The former,’ I confirmed. ‘But it’s not getting me anywhere.’
‘Cannae think why,’ Willie said.
Because she doesn’t agree with my killing people for a living, was the explanation that dared not speak its name.
‘The trouble with you, André,’ Julia said, in the kind of tone that warned me a sisterly lecture was due to be delivered, ‘is that women come too easy to you. You have the looks of a movie star and that attracts women, I’m sorry to say, because they ought to be more interested in what’s behind those looks. In my experience, men who are really good looking are vain, spoiled, and self-centred, not to mention sexual predators.’
Was that me she was describing? Once upon a time, maybe. Nowadays less so.
‘Until you know a person, looks are the only thing on show.’
‘How true, brother dear. But the type of man I’ve just described almost always come across as vain, spoiled, etcetera from the get-go. That’s the time to pull back, take stock and, in most cases, get the hell out.’
‘Same goes for women,’ Willie said, grinning so as to take the sting out of it. ‘The vain spoiled part, I mean.’
Julia had been his wife too long to be offended. ‘That’s true too, darling, but women are generally expected to be more shallow and self-obsessed, so it’s not such a huge issue.’
Willie guffawed, turning heads in the vicinity. ‘Guid job I didn’t say that. I’d be lynched by the MeToo crowd.’
Julia’s homily had me pondering. My looks had indeed served me well in the female attraction department. Too well on occasion. Women I met often hung a ‘very good looking’ tag on me unasked and unwanted. Having heard it so often and ad nauseum, at least it had convinced me I wasn’t repulsive.
‘Speaking of Liza,’ I said, to steer the subject away from me and my looks, ‘did she phone again?’
‘And again, and again. And came in person last week, to see if I was lying about your not staying with us.’
My guilt about taking off and leaving no contact details plagued me still. I had sent a goodbye text but declined to read, let alone answer, her increasingly frustrated texts and emails to me. The calls I just muted.
‘Sorry about that.’
‘No need to be. I like her. We like her…’ Willie’s head bobbed assent ‘… but there’s something not quite … right with her, isn’t there?’
I grunted. ‘That’s a diplomatic way of putting it.’
I didn’t elaborate and she let it drop, moved on to a subject that had long been dear to her heart, namely settling me down with a respectable woman, preferably of my own age.
‘Come and stay with us for Christmas?’ was her next suggestion. ‘There’s a very nice widow living next door. We could introduce you.’
Some introduction. This is my brother. He’s free of baggage. Just fifty-odd corpses that would be walking around today if it weren’t for him.
‘I’ll think about it. I’m staying at the Connaught at the moment. I’ll probably spend Christmas in Spain.’ Conscious of sounding churlish, I touched her forearm. ‘Thanks for the offer.’
Julia was getting restive. I recognised the signs – she needed a smoke. I signalled a waiter to bring the check.
Julia and Willie started to speak together. Ever the gentleman, Willie backed off and left the floor to her.
‘Why not go on a cruise, Drew?’ she said.
‘Give me a break. A little while ago you suggested I fall out of love. Exactly how do you do that?’
‘How do you fall out of love?’ Julia checked them off on her fingers: ‘There’s no magic potion. You just fill every waking hour with activity. You impose on your friends and family to the point of pissing them off. You never sleep alone. You find a good cause to get involved in.’ She paused, threw me an engaging grin. ‘That do, darling?’
‘Yeah, for starters.’ I leaned across the table and kissed her cheek. She smelled of lilac. ‘It’s a pity you’re my sister, otherwise Willie and I might fall out over who takes you home tonight.’
She pretended shock, smacked the back of my hand. ‘You’re a bad boy to have such evil thoughts.’
‘Any port in a storm,’ was Willie’s airy contribution, which earned him a glare that would have burned a hole in sheet metal.
* * * * *
The door of Toby’s Belgrave Square flat had grown a peephole since my last visit. A concession no doubt to the increasing number of break-ins in the district, often accompanied by acts of violence towards the occupant. Toby, mildly complacent, had at last conceded that if his home was to remain his castle it needed to be done up like a fortress.
Music – a plodding piano – wafted out past me with the opening of the door. Toby’s live-in maid, a pretty thing with a vacant expression that belied a sharp wit, let me in.
‘Oh, it’s you, Mr Warner,’ she cooed in an Eliza Doolittle take-off, making humming bird’s wings of her eyelashes. ‘’Ow nice to see you, I’m sure.’
‘And you … er …’ What was the girl’s goddam name?
‘Victoria. Fancy you remembering. I am flattered.’
I grinned crookedly and proceeded down the narrow hallway into the vast sitting room, source of the festivities.
‘André – darling!’ Sam, always an exemplary hostess on the alert for newcomers, lunged towards me through the islands of threes and fours that people invariably form at these events.
‘How lovely to see you!’ She pressed her warm cheek to mine – in heels she was almost my height, so I wasn’t required to stoop. Her auburn hair was prickly, like wire wool.
‘You’re looking marvellous!’ I said, and in her case it wasn’t just flattery. Her dress was full length and glossy as polished armour, a blend of colours that swam together like oil on water. It was loose, disguising her shape, which was a shame. For her fortyish years she was well-preserved.
‘You can pour your smooth-tongued balm over me later, if you must. In fact, I insist. But first a drink for the poor homeless, abandoned waif.’
A gin and tonic was summoned, a little too heavy on the hard stuff for drink and drive laws. I resolved to sip rather than gulp.
Sam, catching and interpreting my frown, said, ‘Stay the night if you’re troubled by plastic bags and green crystals and all that nonsense.’
‘They don’t have those anymore,’ I said absently. ‘It’s a little computer gadget now. But I might take you up on the invite anyway – get rid of Toby and let’s make a proper night of it.’
‘Naughty, naughty,’ she said, adept at fielding risqué quips. ‘Now …’ She jutted her chin, a bird-like movement that exposed some unflattering creases under her jaw, and cast about the room. ‘Where’s Toby got to?’
A good forty souls were gathered about us, mostly middle-aged and rising. My own younger set – forties, ha-ha – was not well represented. Toby’s parties were a far cry from the frenzied splurges of his Belgravia contemporaries, affairs that were calculated to kill, cure, or infect, depending on your chosen pleasure. The music was low-key and high-brow, a background to sober discourse. Later, it would be pepped up.
The room was long and L-shaped and normally cluttered with restored Regency furniture and knick-knacks. Much of the former had been shunted aside to create an area in which people might congregate into their inevitable cliques and name-drop, name-swap, and dissect Brexit and Donald Trump’s suitability as leader of the free world.
Sam had spotted her husband, not too difficult since he stood half-a-head taller than the others in his immediate circle. She lugged me off his-away, weaving skilfully through the clearings.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to anyone?’ I said, feeling like a railway carriage hooked up to a runaway locomotive. Some of the faces were familiar, most were not. Toby tended to rub shoulders with a different stratum of society from Cassandra – staider, more sober society. He was a career diplomat with the Home Office, quite high level according to hearsay, though he pretended otherwise. Cassandra cultivated the young and hip, though her qualifications for membership of that cult were becoming marginal.
‘Toby will take care of all that,’ Sam said, half-turning and promptly running into a tippling male guest, slopping his drink. ‘Oh, Charles, how clumsy of me …’ And ‘Charles’, roly-poly, florid complexion, replying with a chortle, ‘Think nothing of it, m’dear. Any excuse for a refill, what?’ He patted her behind as she charged on, her grip on me as tight as ever. Then we came to our terminus, and Toby was towering over me, reducing my six feet one to the comparative stature of a circus midget. He drew me inside the exclusively male congregation he had assembled. Sam melted away behind a spate of blown kisses. She knew her place. Or acted as if she did. ‘André, so good to see you. How are you? Have you met the Hon. James Pelligrew? James … André Warner, a friend of Cassandra’s. Ex-friend, I should say.’ A ripple of amusement. ‘André … Robert Ludlow … Lord Swanley … Trevor Robinson …’ Nods, handshakes, the usual murmured bromides. All were strangers to me, although Robinson I knew by sight and repute as a self-made plutocrat, risen from the unswept gutters of Bermondsey. The sort of go-getting, wealth-generating IT baron that Toby was mixing with of late. Seeing the breed perhaps as the backbone of Britain in an EU-free zone, powers-to-be in the land.
When I next glanced at my watch it was already after eleven. Apart from Sam I hadn’t conversed with a single female the whole evening, possibly a personal record. I decided to circulate. Toby was lecturing the shifty-looking Editor of the Guardian about the need for more restraint in reporting on people’s private lives (a subject dear to him), and I was able to slip away unnoticed. Except by the woman into whom I reversed.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, in a Transatlantic twang as alien in this gathering as a dog’s bark in a home for stray cats. It made me feel a little less lonesome.
‘Entirely my fault.’
As women go she was far removed from my type: a plumage of brassy blonde that could only be fake, a good fifteen years my senior, buxom and broad of hip. But she was new company.
‘You’re American?’ I said, for something to say. ‘In one. Don’t exactly sound like a Brit yourself.’ ‘Transatlantic. Anglo-Canadian, to be specific. You live here?’
‘For the time being.’ She held out her hand to be shaken. Her nails were silver-painted and too long for natural growth. Her grip was as firm as a man’s. ‘Rosalie Pridham.’
I winced inwardly at the ‘Rosalie’.
‘Warner. André Warner.’
‘Like the movie company, eh.’
I nodded.
‘Well, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance. And what’s a tall, blue eyed, blond haired, handsome Transatlantic male doing here all on his ownsome? If I wasn’t burdened with my other half … ah, God dammit, here he is in the flesh. Allow me to present my incredibly boring husband.’
A lofty, spare, bespectacled man – the physical flip-side of his wife – eased into the gap between us. Unsmiling, though there was humour in the hazel eyes with crow’s feet at their extremities, magnified by horn-rim glasses. His grey hair was cut en brosse.
Rosalie did the introductions.
‘Hi, André,’ her husband said laconically, instantly informal in true North American tradition.
‘Hi, Dave. Are you a friend of the family?’
‘Professional acquaintance.’ He sipped from the glass of wine in his fist. ‘You?’
‘The same. How long have you lived in the UK?’
‘For the last four years.’ This from Rosalie. ‘My husband is something at the Embassy. Not sure what.’
The music, some dreamy sonata, was abruptly cut off. I exchanged enquiring eyebrows with my companions. Conversation around us dried up as if in expectation of some announcement along the lines of ‘We interrupt this programme …’ Then a thudding beat boomed from the speakers, grossly over-amplified, was hastily lowered. A space opened up in the centre of the block floor and some of the less geriatric couples began to gyrate.
‘About time too,’ Rosalie Pridham grumbled. ‘I’ve been dying for a jive all evening. C’mon, André.’
She whisked me away before I could dig in my heels, her complaisant spouse taking charge of our drinks.
She had a sight more energy than women her age and shape usually generate. After three hectic numbers I was starting to feel all my forty-plus years while she, barefooted, having kicked her shoes into orbit, was still full of bounce.
‘Once more then,’ I agreed, ‘then I’m done.’
We whirled off to the metallic outpourings of Beyoncé.
Dave Pridham was tucking into a plateful of calorie-loaded pastries when we rejoined him. He commiserated.
‘Sure am grateful, André. My wife can go on like that all night long and if there’s no other willing sucker within grabbing range, I get to do the partnering.’
‘You poor decrepit thing!’ Rosalie extracted a cigarette from a hammer-finish case on the buffet table. Dave lit it for her from a book of matches bearing the “Annabel’s” logo.
‘Another of my vices,’ she said dismissively, funnelling smoke at me. ‘Helps pass the boring time. Tell me, André, do you find time boring?’
‘From time to time,’ I punned.
She snorted and smoke puffed from her nostrils. It stank like a joint.
‘You married?’ she said.
‘Not right now.’
‘So you were once?’
Dave Pridham didn’t seem disturbed by his wife’s nosiness. Developed an immunity to it, I expect.
‘Way back when.’
‘You’d make a great spy judging by how much you don’t give away,’ Rosalie said with a yelping laugh. She flicked ash indiscriminately. Some of it landed on the broad lapels of her husband’s immaculate lightweight suit. He made a hole in the corner of his mouth and blew it off.
‘Any kids?’
‘Nope. Someday maybe.’
She glanced at her husband. ‘Talk about economy of speech. Maybe you should give this guy a job. You could lay off a coupla dozen of those nattering old women you keep in idle luxury at the Embassy.’
He expressed faint mirth.
Her brusque, outspoken style didn’t put me off, though it’s a North American trait some Brits can’t abide. For me, being a half-breed, it was close to home.
‘Do you have any children?’ I asked, just making polite conversation.
It was Dave who answered. ‘We have a daughter – Linda. Or we think we have.’
I said nothing. Simply left a conversational void in which he could elaborate or change the subject as he saw fit.
‘She went to live in Spain two years ago,’ Rosalie said, no longer bantering.
‘She’s … er … grown-up then.’
‘Sure.’ Dave again. ‘Twenty-eight, rising twenty-nine. And verrry independent.’
Some semi-drunk reeled into our midst – slack-jawed, hiccuping, tie askew.
‘Saw you dancing just now,’ he burped at Rosalie. ‘Terr .. hic.. ific. Want some more?’
Rosalie smiled brightly into the drunken face. Diplomatic responses were second nature to a diplomat’s wife.
‘Sure, Bozo, why not?’ She donated her lipstick-tipped cigarette to Dave and hauled the semi-drunk away to the dancing zone, now the most popular part of the room. While Dave was disposing of the cigarette, I looked around for Toby, sighted the back of his well-groomed head chairing another debating society. Talking was his favourite pursuit.
‘What does your daughter do in Spain?’ I asked Dave. ‘Work for the Embassy?’
‘Worked, past tense. I fixed he
r up with a job there, but she quit after a year and moved down to Malaga to join some travel outfit. Then she left that job, oh, three months back. Since then …’ A spread-hands gesture, a mix of bafflement and frustration. ‘Not a word. She doesn’t answer her cell. No texts, no emails. We have an address for her, even wrote a letter. Never heard back. We’ve made enquiries, informed the police, hired a private dick. She moved out, no forwarding address.’ He shrugged again, his distress all too apparent. ‘Get the picture?’
I clicked my tongue in sympathy and made ready to move on to subjects new.
‘She’s our only daughter,’ he said, forestalling me. ‘Naturally we’re worrying ourselves crazy about her.’
It’s said that the Devil makes work for idle hands. Right then he was busy making some for me.
‘I keep a boat at Sitges. Been thinking of cruising down the coast to Gib, probably over Christmas. If you like, I’ll stop off at Malaga and check out her address. At the very least, I could stir the police up a bit.’
It was the sort of gesture you make just to be friendly, on the same level as inviting people you dislike to come to dinner ‘sometime’. You don’t expect to be held to account over it. A miscalculation in this case, as he almost pounced on me, his hand gripping my arm, fingers pinching the flesh.
‘Would you do that, André?’ He blinked behind his horn rims. ‘Truly?’
‘Be a pleasure.’ His eager, even desperate acceptance of my offer caught me wrong-footed. Backing out wasn’t an option, so I took out my cell phone. ‘Linda Pridham – right?’ I entered the name on the contacts page. ‘What’s the address?’
Reading from a pocket diary with the US Great Seal embossed on the front, he spelled it out – Calle Hinojo, 14B, Fuengirola. South of Malaga. I tapped it out dutifully, plus her cell phone number and email address. For good measure we exchanged our own cell numbers too.
‘We’ve a good likeness of her at home, a studio portrait, taken just before she left for Spain. I’ll mail it to you tomorrow.’
‘Great idea.’ Much relieved, I stowed the diary away. By morning he would have forgotten he ever met me.
‘Give me your address, will you, André?’