Slave to Love

by Rebecca Campbell

  And then a shape more solid than the others appeared to her. He was back. The Dead Boy was back. She didn’t want him; his presence, once so enthralling, was poison to her now. She tried to squeeze him out, to block his aura. But he came on. She saw his face, his eyes—his special eyes, the woman had said.

  She saw the smile.

  She saw the complete acceptance of death.

  At the time, and ever since, she had thought his acceptance was simply supreme grace, absolute courage, impossible coolness. But now she could see it as something else.

  The boy she had loved could never really have been a monster. He was a boy whose parents had died and who was then told to kill by people older than he; people who wanted to use him as a weapon.

  A lost boy.

  And not, when she knew him, a boy anymore. A man. A man who could look back and see what he had done. Understand it as a man. See again the flash of sunlight on the sneakers; see the thigh, the knee, the ankle, caught in his crosshairs. See the mother. See the father. See them, perhaps, every night. See them, as she saw him, whenever he closed his eyes. He saw them all and was forced to live it again and again through the heartless glee of the grandmother. Might it not be the case, then, that he longed for an end to it? Yes, he said to death. My turn now.

  All the time she had thought he had looked into her and felt the wonder as she felt it. But now, as she replayed it again, it seemed he wasn’t looking at her, wasn’t smiling at her. He was already somewhere else. She was just a thing in his line of vision, as insubstantial to him as these shapes passing around and through her were insubstantial.

  And at last the feeling came. She held on tight to a lamppost but it wasn’t enough, and she sank to her knees, still hugging the wet metal trunk. She had cried a lot this year, but we never run out of tears, just the feelings that make them. People stopped. An old Rasta man touched her on the shoulder and asked if she was okay.

  “Be careful of your purse, lady,” he said, in heavy Jamaican. “It showing in your bag. This is no place to be havin’ a sit-down.”

  But all she could do was shake her head and sob at the sadness of everything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Preparations

  AT 9 A.M. ON FRIDAY, December 22, a giant took hold of the Enderby building and gave it a violent shake, throwing everything and everyone within it into confusion, turmoil, and flurry. If our giant had peered through one of the narrow leaded windows above the Gothic doorway, he would have seen frantic figures scurrying through the public rooms, some carrying chairs, some with huge ornate mirrors, others with unidentifiable decorations, elaborate clusters of foliage or objets d’art. Disorder ruled, and chaos seemed disorientingly imminent. Nobody appeared entirely sure of what was supposed to be done, except for the redoubtable Pamela, who stood halfway up the grand stairway in the still magnificent reception hall, directing, cajoling, chastising, her soft bulk energized and thrumming with the joy of it all like a jellyfish zapped by an electric eel. The hallway—really a magnificent atrium—and the public gallery next to it, called, on this one day of the year, the ballroom, were the twin focuses of the energy, and one could just tell, if one squinted and used imagination, that something wonderful would be happening there.

  The frenetic activity was not primarily a consequence of the Audubon sale, quite possibly the most important event in the two-hundred-year history of Enderby’s. That had, of course, made its contribution to the bustle and excitement, but most of the preparations had been made—the main auction room readied, the links for the telephone bids established, the invitations sent, the press alerted—well in advance. No, the commotion was mainly to do with the famous Christmas costume party, and Pam was its presiding genius. The Americans, ignorant of or uncaring for tradition, had tried to change the date and had even proposed canceling Christmas, but Parry Brooksbank for the first time in his career had put down his foot, invoked what moral, historical, and financial authority he had, and insisted that the Enderby party was to be, as it had ever been, on the last Friday before Christmas week, and that was that. The Slayer, making quick calculations, accepted that the hassle of running the two events on the same day was probably less than the potential trouble, sulking, and bad blood that would result from stopping the party. She closed her heavy-lidded eyes and numbed the pain of defeat with thoughts of revenge in the form of tiny severance checks.

  For twelve years, Pam had been in charge of the annual party. She acted as Secretary of the Party Committee, the ten members of which were elected from the various departments and who then in turn elected a chair. The committee would decide on the overall theme, source the fine wines and other refreshments, haggle endlessly over trivial detail (the proportion of vegetarian to other buffet items had proved particularly troublesome this year; yes, Clerihew was representing Books), break up in rancor, reform, sample the fine wines, and finally dissolve itself and pass its full authority on to Pam, the executive to its legislature. The power invested in her by the committee made Pam, for the week or so of preparation, the most important, loud, annoying, overbearing, ubiquitous, and essential person in the whole of Enderby’s. Hers was the task of making sure than everyone properly entered into the spirit of the thing, offering costume suggestions to the unimaginative and playing Cupid (this her own idea) to potential office couplings, given that, as she insisted on telling anyone who’d listen, “What’s Christmas without a little scandal?”

  This all came to a head on the morning of the party, when the stage had to be set, scenery moved, pumps primed, and mistletoe artfully arranged.

  “You there,” she bellowed, to a swarthily handsome man in a long black coat, who stood in the midst of the maelstrom. His stillness could have been the result either of confusion, indecision, or passivity. “If you’ve nothing better to do, could you help Trevor and Tony with that torso, please?”

  As the general public, carrying their useless knick-knacks and gewgaws, their chewed teddy bears, and their childhood albums for valuation by the bored experts were not allowed into the building before ten, it was perhaps understandable that Pam should have mistaken Edward Lynden for an Enderby toiler in need of direction.

  “Actually I’m here to see someone,” he replied, with unaccustomed mildness.

  EDWARD LYNDEN HAD known for a long time that his life had been a failure, measured by the only rule that counted: What use have you made of your talents? He knew he had been endowed with abilities that, if not great, were considerable. He knew he could have been a good stage actor. He knew he had the looks and the raw charisma to have made it as a star of at least middling magnitude in the film industry. Everything had been in place; there had been no disadvantaged background to hold him back: the opposite. There had been the trouble with his father, but then doesn’t everyone have trouble with parents? Not even in his weakest, blackest moments could he blame the old fool for his inadequacies.

  So, yes, for a long time Lynden had perceived that his life had been wasted. But it was only when he told the story to Alice, back in the library, lifetimes ago, that he fully realized its unattractive self-pitying ring. When and how had he become a whiner? He wanted that to stop, he wanted to change, and in his mind Alice had become the agent for that change. Her simplicity and directness made her seem like the rock on which he could build a new self. He saw a new life, he saw the chance to slough off the tired old skin. And, of course, she was beautiful: not with the glamorous, head-tossing, show-stopping beauty of Ophelia or some of the other women he had known, but with a hidden, burning beauty, like a secret shared.

  He had even managed to forget, for a while, the other thing.

  Grace Harbour had first come into his life after his mother died, when he was thirteen. She was barely twenty then. His father wanted someone there all the time, to help with cooking and some other jobs that fell through the cracks. She had never been particularly pretty, but she brimmed with joy and life as a girl, and her laughter filled the Cave of Ice. His adolescent fan
tasies soon took and twisted her into sensuous shapes, only dimly related to the real Grace. In the school holidays he would sit alone in the library or one of the other cold rooms, waiting for her appearance. But he was always too shy to speak to her.

  And then, at fifteen, home from school, he had found her unexpectedly in the kitchen, washing dishes. The sunlight came through the window and turned her brown hair to gold. More than that, its touch gave a transparency to her cheesecloth blouse. He saw the fullness of her breast, and with a groan he realized that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Trembling, he stood next to her to fill a glass with water. They touched at the shoulder and hip, and he had to spin away to hide his erection. And then he turned to face her, the blood loud in his ears, and lunged or fell toward her, clutching with his inexperienced hand at that breast. His lips were on her neck, and then her mouth. She pushed him away, laughing, and he ran from the kitchen and on to his bedroom.

  What had most astonished him in the encounter was the knowledge that she had wanted it too, had delayed the push and the laugh just long enough so she could feel and enjoy the force of his erection against her thigh and taste his eager tongue deep in her sweet mouth, soft as risen dough yet cool as rainwater.

  The incident was not repeated. Years passed: Drama school, Gudrun, India. Grace stayed on in the house, looking after the old man. And then he died. Lynden returned, lost, brooding, shattered. On the first night she came into his bed, plumper now at forty, but still an attractive woman; and there, on and off, she had stayed. Not even the short-lived marriage had done much to change the course of their lives. The woman had come; she had her daughter; she left. Grace learned to feel some affection for the child. Soon things were back as they had been.

  He had never made any promises to her, had never hidden his other affairs or infatuations. Perhaps it was his very honesty, the refusal to offer her the chance to dream, that had so dulled her over the years, taking her vivacity and replacing it with stoicism and rigidity. She had sacrificed everything and asked for nothing in return; all she had was his cold dark presence and the weight of him, the weight of him.

  She had known, even as Lynden knew, that Alice was different, that Alice might take away even the weight.

  “I’m going back now,” she had said, just when he thought that happiness might be within reach. Before she had time to say, “How long has Grace Harbour been your mistress?” he had seen the resolution in her face, a resolution mixed with contempt and scorn. Had she somehow found out about the old intimacy between him and Peter Conradian? But that was drama school. Who did not experiment a little there, back in those louche days? Surely she couldn’t object?

  But no. He knew.

  And then she asked the question. With the question came the end of everything. For an hour he wandered through the blighted estate, past broken fences and barren fields. He felt nothing at all. Somehow he found himself in the village pub. He drank beer, and then he drank whisky, and then he drank beer again. At last some feelings came. When he arrived back home, soaking and chilled, the house was silent. He went to the woman and fucked her out of hatred, fucked her till she cried out in pain and then ecstasy. When they were finished, Grace pushed him off.

  “Go to the bitch,” she said. “I don’t want you.”

  HE PUT ON his clothes and left the room. The Cave of Ice was always at its most beautiful on clear nights, when the stars and the moon would glitter through the glass walls. But tonight there were no stars and the corridors and rooms were dense with darkness. He found his way to the library and sat at the desk. He put on the lamp, opened a drawer, and pulled out a checkbook. He wrote the name Grace Harbour, and then the sum of five hundred thousand pounds. He paused over the date. How long would it take for the money to come into his account from the sale? He dated the check for a week ahead, and then scored it out and made it a month, carefully initialing the change. He put the check in an envelope and sealed it. He then turned out the lamp and moved to the table where, for so many years, the Audubon volumes had been kept. The table at which Alice had sat, so patiently. He put his cheek to the old wood and tears flowed from his eyes, although he made no noise. And then he slept for a little while. At dawn he went to the Land-Rover and drove into London, where he booked into his usual room at the RAC club (his membership was a curious family heirloom), where he’d stayed ever since.

  PAM LOOKED UNCONVINCED by the excuse. “Do they know?” she asked, accusingly.

  Lynden was spared having to answer by the arrival of Alice, who swept past Pam and then paused on the last step. It was another of the days when she was paying attention to her appearance. Insisting that she needed something nice for the sale, Odette had helped her choose a skirt and top that didn’t hate each other, and for once her hair looked like it had been cut by scissors rather than garden shears. Alice was self-conscious about the top, which made the best of her neat waist and full cleavage, and she pulled nervously at the neckline, inching it higher.

  “Hello, Edward,” she said evenly. He looked even wilder than she remembered, and more gaunt. The long black coat was obviously expensive, but it was splattered with mud. “I’ve booked a meeting room. It’s probably easiest to take the lift.”

  At that moment the lift door opened and Oakley stepped out. He bustled over to Lynden and reached down to grasp his reluctant hand.

  “So pleased to meet you at last, sir. What an honor this is; really, what an honor. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to greet you at the door. It was only good fortune that allowed me to discover that you were here at all.” He looked back over his shoulder at Alice, his fawning turning to disdain on the way. Clerihew or Ophelia must have told him why Alice had been called down to the lobby.

  “Who are you?” said Lynden.

  “Oh, so sorry, sir. Of course we’ve only spoken by telephone. I’m Colin Oakley; I’m in charge of Books, Manuscripts, and Other Printed Matter.” He laughed nervously. “Alice is one of my girls. A rising star. If you’d like to come and take tea in my office. Or coffee if you prefer. We can talk over the sale. And there’re some papers you might like to look at. To sign. Ha-ha-ha.”

  Alice wasn’t really paying attention, but she suddenly remembered Andrew’s complaint that Lynden hadn’t been asked to sign the contract that would indemnify Enderby’s if the Audubon were withdrawn. He had brought the matter up several times with Oakley. “That’s for riffraff, not a man of Baron Lynden’s stature,” Oakley had responded complacently. “He’s hardly going to run away when he stands to make six million pounds. No, he’s a gentleman, and we have a gentleman’s agreement. You really have a lot to learn, young man, about how to deal with the clients.”

  “But it’s standard procedure.” One or two people in the office laughed at that. Andrew did, actually, sound a little ridiculous. It wasn’t like him to bother with formalities. Alice wondered if he still felt resentful about Lynden, despite her break.

  “Flexibility, thinking on your feet, that’s the new way. Surely you went to the seminar Madeleine Illkempt gave? We’re not a Stalinist bureaucracy anymore. Judgment and discrimination are what we need, not forms and fussing.” He went back to his office, shaking his head and laughing, and Andrew blushed like a girl and called him a cunt twice under his breath.

  But, thought Alice, had Oakley changed his mind? Perhaps he’d panicked at the last minute. Or had the Slayer had a quiet word?

  “I’m here to talk to Alice,” said Lynden quietly, but Alice could sense the barely controlled fury. He turned to her. “You said there was a room?”

  “Oh, of course,” cut in Oakley. “I’m sure you have some preliminary . . . ah . . . some things. . . . And in due—um, we’ll see about it later, okay? Sir?” But Alice and Lynden were already in the lift.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Declarations

  “YOU WERE GOING to tell me about Grace.”

  They’d been sitting silently in the bright, bare little room for what felt like hours but might have been a minu
te.

  Lynden was stretched out on a hard chair. He looked lean and gaunt and dangerous. A table was between them. Alice noticed with annoyance the brown sticky circles of coffee and the gray dusting of ash. The room had no windows, and smokers would sometimes sneak in here when it rained outside. Despite the fierce suck of the whining air conditioner, the stale smell of cigarettes lingered. Alice’s head felt both full and empty, like a balloon: She had no space to think, no way of getting a perspective.

  “Yes. I was going to tell you about Grace.”

  And so, slowly, Lynden told Alice about Grace. He began falteringly, but soon his training and his innate sense of drama took hold. Perhaps even the hesitant beginning was part of the performance. Throughout the account he kept his eyes fixed on hers, and she lacked the willpower to pull away. He did not attempt to gain her sympathy, at least not by explicit pleading or obvious self-serving distortions. The message was rather: This is what I did. I took a woman to my bed whom I did not love, and she stayed there through inertia and perhaps need, but now I have outgrown her and I want you. The bad things I have done were just the everyday bad things that people do; please don’t condemn me to unhappiness because of them.

  “You do know that I love you,” he concluded, with simplicity and dignity. She did know, and she looked down.

  “I’m glad you told me all this. I wish you had told me earlier.” Alice still couldn’t think clearly. The words felt thick in her mouth. She wanted some water.

  “When? When I first offered you tea?”

  That made Alice smile for the first time, and then he smiled too. Alice noticed again that, despite the gauntness, he really was a very handsome man. She kept wanting to feel sympathy, even pity, for him. She was by nature compassionate, and she felt powerfully for the suffering of others. But Lynden was a hard man to pity; his egotism and habitual belligerence would always get in the way. Had she felt pity, although it would have been more difficult for her to dismiss him, as rejection would mean inflicting pain, it would also have meant anything other than rejection would have been impossible: Lynden could not exist for her as an object both of pity and of erotic interest.