There was a stepfather who was a little like Ned Calvert, and a mother, now dead, who was very like Violet. From this family, in particular the stepfather, she had run away. He might look for her, she told Thad earnestly, but he wouldn’t look very hard, and even if he found her, she would never go back.
Thad never uttered a word. He just listened; his small dark eyes never left her face.
When, finally, she finished, Hélène looked at him anxiously. Somehow it was important Thad should believe her: the story was like an audition, or a test.
Thad made no comment at all. When she stopped speaking, he sat silent for a while, and then shook his head. He looked at her solemnly.
“Wow,” he said. “Some story.”
Hélène despised him a little at that moment. He had been so easy to take in.
It was a long time before she realized her mistake.
There was only one painting in the Principessa’s bedroom, and it hung directly above the bed. It was a Dali.
Kneeling on the black silk sheets, while the Principessa went through a repertoire that had made her celebrated on two continents, Lewis Sinclair found that, unless he closed his eyes, he could not avoid looking at it.
For what seemed to him an eternity, he stared at a putrefying desert landscape in which detumescent flesh, propped on crutches, merged with the sand. A deliquescent watch face, without hands, mocked the minutes: Lewis measured them in the soft interminable lappings of the Principessa’s practiced tongue.
It was hardly a turn-on. Lewis, always a pragmatist, and aware it was important to please the Principessa, took the coward’s way out. Feigning a pleasure he did not feel, he shut his eyes. When the Principessa stopped her ministrations, she did so abruptly, and not, Lewis thought, at the most logical or the most tactful moment. His eyes snapped open to see the wide lips draw back from the little nibbling pearly teeth in a sweet smile. “Your turn, Lewis, mi amore…”
Fuck you, Lewis thought, and did so, roughly.
When it was over the Principessa yawned, and stretched her tawny limbs. She stroked the marks on her arms where Lewis had left scratches, and favored him with a long slow satisfied smile.
“Lewis. Lewis. What a very wicked boy you are. Surely you didn’t learn such things at Harvard?”
“Baltimore.”
Lewis reached across for the cigarettes, lit two, and passed one to the Principessa. She levered herself up on the black silk pillows, and inhaled deeply.
“Baltimore. Baltimore?” She frowned. “Where is this Baltimore?”
“It’s a port, Principessa.” Lewis gave her his best boyish, slightly crooked grin.
“Near Boston?”
“Near Washington. But worth a detour…”
The Principessa laughed. “Lewis, Lewis…and I thought you were a good American boy. I can see I underestimated you…”
Her eyes clouded speculatively, and Lewis shifted in the bed. It looked as if a further demonstration of his own virtuosity might be needed to clinch the deal he had in mind, and—just then—he didn’t have the energy. Fortunately, the Principessa appeared at least temporarily sated. She coiled one magnificent leg around his hips and rubbed up against him in a serpentine fashion, but then she drew back thoughtfully. She lay there, smoking her cigarette—recharging, no doubt, Lewis thought. She reminded him at that moment of a great python enjoyably digesting a substantial supper, resting awhile, appetite only temporarily in abeyance. Lewis was unsure whether to broach his deal now, or wait.
“So—you are going to make a film, you and your friends, Lewis. Mmmm, my clever little godchild…” She laughed, and flicked her tongue across the tips of Lewis’s nipples. Lewis wriggled.
“You should have told me before.” Her large dark eyes looked up at him reproachfully. “I could have introduced you to so many useful people. Federico now—you know Federico? He would adore you, Lewis…”
“He would?”
“But certainly. So blond. So golden. So…well, perhaps not. It is no matter.” She paused thoughtfully, stroking his thigh with one long pink opalescent nail. “What kind of film, Lewis? You didn’t tell me.”
“The cheap kind,” Lewis said firmly. “We haven’t got a lot of money.”
“And your friend, the ugly one, he will direct it? Oh, Lewis, is he any good?”
“He’s good.” Lewis shrugged. He knew what she was leading up to. “Better than good, maybe.”
“And the girl, Lewis—is she going to be in it?”
“She might be. It’s up to Thad really. If he wants to use her. Something small, you know. I couldn’t care less. If it keeps him happy…”
“Is he screwing her?”
“Who knows?” Lewis looked away.
“Are you screwing her, Lewis?”
Lewis knew the answer had to be quick, and convincing. If the Principessa suspected his interest in Helen, her vanity would be wounded. Then she wouldn’t help them.
“Me? That kid?” He smiled. “You’ve got to be joking.”
The opalescent nail dug a little more deeply into the muscles of his thigh.
“But you’d like to?”
“No way.” Lewis lowered his mouth to her arched throat. “Not my type at all, Principessa.”
He did not lie well, but, luckily, this lie seemed to convince her—the lie, and what he did next, which was almost one hundred percent guaranteed to distract her. The Principessa sighed.
After a brief pause, in which the appetite of the python showed signs of reawakening with alarming rapidity, Lewis lifted his head, and, keeping her pinioned beneath him, said, “So—how about it? Can we stay here? Can we film some scenes here? Yes or no?”
“Evil boy.”
She pouted, an expression that made the wrinkles in the lovely face more noticeable. Tough, Lewis thought, looking at her with that expression of lazy lust that had always come naturally, and which years of practice had perfected; tough—how even the best plastic surgeons couldn’t keep the ravages of time at bay forever.
“I suppose you could…” She paused teasingly. “I shall be away three months. You can stay here that long. Maybe…If you promise to behave. No scandals, Lewis. Raphael wouldn’t like it.”
Lewis smiled. Prince Raphael, descendant of the Sforzas and Medicis, was as famous for his complaisance as was his wife for her erotic inventiveness. Since he preferred the company of adolescent boys, such complaisance was understandable. Lewis bent his head, and nuzzled the Principessa’s nipples; they were rouged.
“No scandals, Principessa. Promise.”
“No parties, Lewis. You swear to me?”
Lewis thought of the Principessa’s own party, the previous evening, which he had attended alone—fortunately. In the course of it, two dwarves had proved that all the inflammatory rumors about the size of their sexual organs were well-founded, and a man dressed in cardinal’s robes—and, it proved later, little else—had propositioned him flagrantly amid the resplendent, and recherché, volumes in Prince Raphael’s ancestral library. Lewis sighed, and raised his clear hazel eyes.
“Principessa—would I?”
“You might, Lewis, you might. I’ve heard rumors…”
“All lies. I’ll be the perfect house guest. I’ll keep an eye on the servants, and the guards…”
“You will?”
“I’ll look after the dogs. You know I love dogs, Principessa…”
The beautiful face clouded. “Oh, my poor babies. I shall miss them so much. They’ll pine, Lewis, they always do…”
Lewis suppressed a groan. He hated dogs, and the Principessa had twenty-seven, not counting the Dobermans that guarded the estate grounds.
“Prime steak twice a day. Proper exercise. They’ll live like kings.”
“You swear, Lewis?”
“I swear, Principessa.”
“All right. You’ve persuaded me. You evil boy.”
Big deal, Lewis thought. The Principessa had three houses in Italy, one in Monte Carlo, on
e in Tangier—though that was primarily for her husband’s benefit—one on the beach in Jamaica, and one just off Fifth Avenue in the East Sixties. Most of them, at one time or another, were occupied by a sequence of spongers whom the Principessa found diverting—which was why he had come to her in the first place. That, and the fact that this palazzo, in the hills some ten kilometers outside Rome, was like a fortress. There were the Dobermans; there were hired hoods on the gates; there was twenty-four-hour security. No one could get in, and—more to the point—no one could get out. Helen would make no further unscheduled disappearances: of that, Lewis was determined.
“You’re using me, you wicked boy. Don’t think I don’t know that…” The Principessa gave his arm a painful pinch.
“I love you too. Turn over.”
Lewis gave her a slap, a playful slap, quite hard. The Principessa moaned; she turned over onto her stomach obligingly. Lewis, averting his eyes from the Dali once more, prepared to give her full recompense for her generosity.
The Principessa arched her back, still unsuspecting. Her hands on the black sheets flexed and unflexed in pleasurable anticipation. Lewis maneuvered himself into position; slapping her had made him hard.
“Oh, Lewis…” She gave a little sigh. “You’ve grown up so fast. To think—I held you in my arms when you were a little little baby…I was very young myself then, naturally…” Lewis held himself poised above her. The Principessa had no children of her own, and she was the same age, exactly the same age, as his mother. Did she think he didn’t know that, the vain stupid bitch?
“Oh, yes?”
He moved suddenly, taking her completely by surprise. Her cry of pain encouraged him.
Face set, eyes shut, Lewis thrust. With a force he enjoyed, he showed her a few other things he’d learned in Baltimore.
An hour later, Lewis returned to the café in Trastevere where Thad and Helen were waiting for him. He saw them before they saw him. From a distance, it looked as if she was speaking; then Thad looked up, peered nearsightedly across the square, and turned back to her. As Lewis came closer, it was the drone of Thad’s voice he picked up.
“So—he did it by process. He must have.” Thad placed his plump elbows on the table. “It’s the only way he could have gotten the effect. First he must have done the separate dolly shot down the stairs. Then he must have filmed the actor, in front of a transparency screen, and—”
As Lewis reached their table, he stopped in mid-sentence. Helen looked up, but made no other acknowledgment of Lewis’s presence. Beauty and the beast, Lewis thought. He smiled as Thad raised his face inquiringly.
“Hi, Lewis. Fixed?”
“Absolutely.”
“How long have we got?”
Thad didn’t attempt congratulations or thanks, and Lewis felt a second’s passing irritation.
“Three months. She’s away three months. That long enough?”
“Yeah. More than.”
“How long do you need then?”
“Six weeks.” Thad looked bored. “Six weeks two days maybe.”
“Jesus, Thad, you’re such a bullshitter.” Lewis slid easily into a chair beside them. “You can’t know that exactly…”
“Yes, I can. I have a shooting script. Everything.”
“It’s news to me.”
Lewis gestured to the waiter to bring him some coffee. It was unlike Thad to show off, he thought. Perhaps it was for Hélène’s benefit. He turned back and leaned across the table.
“Well, if you have it, Thad, can I see it?”
“No.”
“Why not? Where is it, for God’s sake?”
“In here.” Thad tapped his own forehead, and giggled.
Lewis shrugged. He turned away to Helen, took her hand, and lightly pressed it.
“How are you feeling now—okay?”
“Fine. I’m fine.” She withdrew her hand.
“You’ll like the Principessa’s place.” He tried to sound encouraging. “It’s huge. The perfect base. And for the filming—well, there are rooms there that just blow your mind. Also…” He hesitated. He had not told Helen about the man who had come to the Strasbourg asking for her, but she might have guessed. “Also—it’s very private. Quiet. So—”
“It sounds perfect.” She cut him off with that cool English voice, with a glance of those remote gray-blue eyes. “Was it very difficult to persuade her, the Principessa?”
Something in that cool appraising glance made Lewis blush; he hoped she did not notice.
“Easy,” he answered quickly. “She’s very generous. An old friend of my mother’s, you know…”
Thad giggled. Lewis gave him a hard stare. Sometimes Thad’s tactlessness and general uncouthness got on his nerves.
“She knows everyone,” he went on reprovingly. “Artists. Actors. Writers. Directors. She would have introduced us to Fellini, she said so…”
“Tell her not to bother.”
Thad took off his glasses, panted on them, then polished them on his greasy sleeve. Lewis watched him with distaste.
“You don’t want to meet Fellini? Why not?”
“Fellini’s films suck,” Thad pronounced, and replaced his glasses.
An English garden.
The black Rolls-Royce Phantom had met Edouard’s plane at Plymouth airport. It was now driving through the increasingly narrow Devon roads, going northward. It was a cold gray day in early November—early afternoon, and the light was already failing. Christian glanced at Edouard, who had not spoken since they climbed into the car; his friend’s face was averted. He was staring out at the high banks and hedges that lined the roads, his face pale and expressionless.
The thin light, the low scudding clouds, the high banks, all gave Christian a sense of claustrophobia, of driving down a tunnel. When, occasionally, there was a gate, a gap in the banks and hedges, he looked out across the landscape with a sense of relief. Even then, though open and beautiful, the scenery was bleak: few houses; tracts of newly plowed fields with furrows of neatly turned red earth; some clumps of hawthorn bent and twisted by the prevailing winds from the coast. As they crested a rise, Christian glimpsed the sea for the first time; it looked flat, metallic gray, and endless, the horizon invisible behind the banks of low cloud.
“It is near the sea. Just as she said.”
Edouard spoke suddenly, making Christian jump. Then he turned his face away again, back to the window. Christian, with a sigh, looked down again at the book that lay in his lap.
Both Christian’s parents, but particularly his mother, who was a friend of Vita Sackville-West’s, were passionate gardeners: he was therefore familiar with the publication in front of him, The National Gardens’ Scheme, a guide to gardens opened to the public to raise money for charity. Indeed, his parents’ home, Quaires Manor, was listed in the section for Oxfordshire.
It was, Christian thought, a quintessentially English publication; though some small and more modest gardens were included, it was, in the main, a testimony to the obsession of the English upper classes with horticulture: shire by shire, manor by manor, it painstakingly listed the features of the gardens concerned, an herbaceous border here, a bog garden there, topiary work, rose collections, rhododendron collections—and then provided extremely detailed instructions for finding the house and garden concerned, together with the name and title of its owners, and their telephone number. Christian had once annoyed his parents very much by remarking that it ought to be called the Burglars’ Bible.
It was not the kind of publication with which Christian would have expected Edouard to be familiar—but then, Edouard’s range of interests was wide, and he often surprised Christian with his knowledge of the most esoteric subjects. It was Edouard who had thought of consulting this guide, and who had, in the section devoted to Devon, marked one entry with a thin black line:
Penshayes House (Miss Elizabeth Culverton), Compton, near Stoke-by-Hartland. Two miles south of Milford, right off the B2556, turning sign-posted Hom
e Farm. Seven acres of gardens in a valley within 600 yards of the sea; created by the late Sir Hector Culverton. Historic woodland garden; notable collections of shrub roses and ericaceae. Kitchen garden.
Christian smiled: entrance was a modest one shilling. Hélène’s aunt opened her garden every second Wednesday of the month, for three months of the year. The place was remote, and Christian doubted if she raised more than ten pounds a year from her efforts: still, as his mother would have said, that was not the point. The point, as far as Christian could make out—and he was profoundly indifferent to gardens—was that they broke your back and broke your heart, and reverted to a wilderness six months after you died, quick repayment for a lifetime of care. Gardens and women, in Christian’s opinion, had much in common with each other: men attempted to tame and train them, and ultimately they failed. It was not an opinion he had expressed to Edouard.
However, it seemed that in one respect at least, Helen had told the truth, partial truth, anyway. The garden overlooking the sea existed. The aunt existed. She had been traced, with the aid of this publication, by an extremely discreet firm of private investigators, retained by an even more discreet firm of City solicitors employed by Edouard.
The investigation had taken some weeks, but it had proved more fruitful than the search for Lewis Sinclair which, Christian knew, had been proceeding simultaneously. Sinclair, of course, moved around, which made it more difficult. The file gradually assembled on him had been a full one; Sinclair’s movements in the three years since Harvard were well-documented in a series of gossip-column clippings. A well-heeled hell raiser: parties in New York; parties in Los Angeles and San Francisco. A spell in London, which included a party in Chelsea raided by the police. Gstaad the previous winter. A brief return to Boston, then more partying. All Christian could remember of the files was a series of pictures of Sinclair in disheveled evening dress: in each picture there was a different woman on his arm. So Sinclair moved around, which made the fact that he had now gone to ground so effectively all the more interesting: clearly, Sinclair was being careful.
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