Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  Professionally, impressed by the coolness she showed, he did gradually accede to her requests. Ratchet by ratchet, he increased the risks. He allowed her to bear witness; he took her on the necessary stations: the rape victims, the dead, the dying, and the mutilations of death. She thought he could see what she found the hardest—after Mostar, he was certainly in no doubt; he could see that while she had learned to look at dismemberment, the grief of parents and the injury to children remained hard for her. The tears would spring to her eyes, and her hands would shake. He tried to avoid places and situations where such encounters were unavoidable, but even Pascal could not entirely succeed in this. In that country, predictions and plans could never be sure: mortar fire would suddenly open up in a remote and apparently deserted mountain pass; death could be across the next street.

  The proximity of death, the skull beneath the skin, the abomination around the corner, that was, for Gini, the essence of Bosnia. And it returned with her to London, although writing to Pascal, and telephoning Pascal, she never mentioned this.

  “You are sleeping, darling? You’re eating properly?” he would ask, and she would say yes, of course, her appetite was back to normal, she’d slept for ten hours straight the previous night.

  “And you are going out, darling? You are seeing people? Your arm—you’re sure it’s healed?”

  Yes, she would lie, she’d been to the theater, the movies, she had seen Lindsay, her arm was fine now that the stitches were out. How well she could act on the telephone! How well she could deceive when she wrote! The last thing she should do now, she knew, was burden Pascal with worries on her behalf, and so she would inject warmth, amusement, conviction into her voice. He was surprised, she suspected, but he was gradually convinced. He was lulled into postponing his return, when that return was the thing she most desired in life. Yes, she acted well, but she had had six months in Bosnia to practice—and she knew it was easier to convince someone who was himself working under great stress.

  Some of what she said was true: her arm had healed; but Gini, walking the London streets, knew her mind had not. How long did it take for a mind to cure itself, she wondered. Six months, a year, a decade?

  Nine weeks had achieved very little. The normality of London made it worse. Here, not surprisingly, people continued with their day-to-day lives, and Gini, trying to communicate with them, remained locked in some other private place. There she was, on the other side of a glass panel, gesticulating, trying to speak, trying to fight her way out of her mental war zone—and failing. Days passed: weeks passed: friends became impatient with her, and her sense of dislocation increased.

  Now, alone in their lovely apartment, alone in their lovely bed, she was beset with fears. She would begin weeping for children she wanted to save, and whom she knew were months dead. She would hear bombs and mortar fire, think of snipers, and remember that Pascal, said to lead a charmed life, could become a statistic like anyone else. There could be a telephone call, a somber visit from a stranger: Pascal might never come back.

  Fearing for his safety, she would open the closets and touch his clothes, take down his books from the bookshelves. She would read his letters, then reread them, until she knew them by heart, all these reassurances of his love. She would write, careful words that hid her despair, and she would make sure that no tears ever fell on the ink. At Christmas—she had been sure he would return for Christmas—she began to hope again. It would be their first Christmas together. She rushed out, bought a tree and tinsel and stars to decorate it. She bought him presents, and—rationing her joy—wrapped one present only each night so her happiness and excitement might last for an entire week.

  But Pascal did not return as planned; the opportunity suddenly came for him to get through to a zone in the north to which no journalists had had access in months. “You must take it—you must go,” Gini said on the telephone—and after some persuasion, he did.

  That was when the new fear gripped her. She had gone into the bathroom, switched on all the lights, and made herself confront the image in the glass. She could see, she made herself see, the physical effects of lack of appetite and sleep. She looked at the pale face in the mirror in front of her: she knew that Pascal found her beautiful, for he told her so often enough. She turned her face this way and that, searching for some sign of the woman he described, the woman he loved.

  She could not see her. She felt a flurry of panic then. This woman he would scarcely recognize, and surely could not love. She had a thin, tense, secretive look; her eyes were secretive, shifting away from her own glance. One secret above all, of course; one confession that should have been made in Mostar, but was not. That secret she still nursed. If Pascal had walked into the room now, she would have longed to voice it, but feared to do so: the words would stick in her throat.

  She spent a sleepless night; the next morning, febrile with new resolve, she did the sensible, the obvious thing. She consulted a doctor. It was a necessary step—and one she had been avoiding for two months.

  The doctor was a stranger. His office had been closed over Christmas, and there was a backlog of patients. Gini sat in the crowded waiting room, an unread magazine on her knee. She tried to block out the sounds of fractious children and squalling babies. She was trying to decide how much to tell the doctor, and how to make her explanation brief.

  She thought: I must be clear and concise. I must tell him I was in Bosnia. I must mention the hours we worked. I must explain that I thought I could cope, and I tried to cope, but I found it very hard to look at—death. Yes, she thought, that was the word. Just death. No need to be more specific than that. She jumped; her name was being called for the third time by an irritable receptionist. Clutching her purse, she rose to her feet.

  She found the doctor in a room the size of a small cubicle, a young man of about her own age, with a harassed air, who said without preamble, “What’s the problem?”

  Outside, telephones rang; a child shrieked. Gini fixed her eyes on an antismoking poster. It was immediately clear to her that she could not mention Bosnia to this man; she could not mention Bosnia in this place. It would be too long, too complicated; it would be too cheap.

  The doctor was staring at her, tapping his pen.

  “Symptoms?” he asked. “What symptoms are troubling you?”

  “I—can’t sleep,” Gini replied. She was starting to sweat. The room felt airless; the pen tapped. “I’m having nightmares. I’ve been under—some stress. I’m not eating too well. I’ve lost weight—about fourteen pounds, I guess…”

  The doctor was scribbling notes. He did not appear sympathetic. Gini was unsure whether that was because he viewed unmarried women with sleep problems as neurotic pests, or because his ballpoint was refusing to work properly. He shook it irritably.

  “I—cry sometimes,” she went on, “for no reason at all. I’ll be in a grocery store, or just walking along the street, and—I can’t seem to control it. It just happens. I can’t stop.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Around two months.”

  “What triggered it?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Bereavement? Divorce? You lost your job?”

  “No. I’m not married. I—”

  She stopped. Bereavement: she tried the word in her mind. Perhaps that was the word she should use. Except no, bereavement implied the loss of someone you knew and loved—a mother, a father, perhaps. Could the deaths of strangers be described as bereavement? No, she decided, she could not use that word; she did not have the right.

  “The weight loss is rapid. Anything else? Vomiting?”

  “No.”

  “Periods normal?”

  “No. I haven’t had a period in four months. I’ve been—abroad, and they stopped while I was out there. But that can happen to me, it has before. If I’m working hard, if I’ve been under stress, and—”

  “Abroad? Abroad where? Not India, Africa, anywhere like that?”

 
“No. I was in Eastern Europe.”

  He lost interest at once. He was writing again. He wrote a “4,” and drew a circle around it. Over and over, above the noise of children and telephones, Gini could hear the rattle of machine-gun fire, the soft crunch of masonry falling. This happened sometimes, and it had to be controlled, because if it was not, those sounds would take her back to Mostar, back to that hospital ward, and back to a certain young boy there. She would remember his eyes. She gripped the arms of her chair tightly. She spelled out the words on the poster, letter by letter.

  “You’ve been tested presumably?” The doctor glanced up.

  “Tested?”

  “You’ve had a pregnancy test?” He shot her a cold look, as if her stupidity irritated him. “I would assume you have, since you haven’t had a period in four months.”

  “Yes, I have. While I was away—I had a test out there…” She hesitated, coloring. “As soon as I missed the first time, I went to a doctor, and—”

  “That would be too soon. Didn’t you know that?”

  “Yes. I suppose I did. It was just—I was eager to know, and…And anyway, I’ve tested myself since. Last month. This month. I bought those kits. In a pharmacy—”

  She broke off. She could hear how odd and breathless her voice sounded. The room felt insufferably hot. The pen was still tapping. He looked at his watch.

  “They were negative. I knew they would be. I’m not pregnant. I’m on the pill. At least—I was on the pill. I stopped taking it when I returned to London.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I—well, I’m not sleeping with anyone in London…”

  “That could change, presumably.”

  His tone was dismissive. The femaleness of this was beginning to annoy him, she could sense.

  “In any case”—he made another note—“those pregnancy testing kits can be unreliable unless you follow the directions on the package exactly.”

  “Look, I can read instructions on a kit, all right? A five-year-old child could understand those instructions. I just—”

  “Of course. Of course.”

  Her voice had risen; her tone had been a mistake. He became instantly soothing, a veneer of calm over a deepening lack of sympathy.

  “Well, I very much doubt that there’s anything seriously wrong. You’ve been overdoing things, I expect. We’ll take our own sample, however, so we can rule out pregnancy for certain. I’ll run a blood test too. I don’t like the weight loss. See the nurse now and come back in three days. I’ll see you then.”

  Gini returned three days later. She saw a different doctor, the first being out on emergency call. The second, a woman, was cheerful and brisk. The pregnancy test was negative. The blood test was normal. She diagnosed stress. She prescribed a short course of Valium. Gini collected the pills, took them home.

  They made her violently angry. She tipped them down the sink.

  CONFRONT THE DEMONS: THAT’S what Pascal would have said. Her stepmother, Mary, her friends—they might have given the same advice. But Mary, to whom she was so close, was away on a three-month trip to the States, and Gini did not ask her friends, not even Lindsay. To confront demons properly, she believed, you had to do it alone.

  She tried to work, and failed; she tried to sleep and mostly failed. And, in the mornings, to make the day move, time pass, she walked.

  No set pattern. That Friday, the Friday she was due to meet Lindsay, she walked north to Portobello, then south to Holland Park, then west to Shepherd’s Bush, then back along the main road to Notting Hill Gate. It was raining, a fine, thin rain, and cars hissed by on the streets. All the shops and restaurants seemed to buzz with a peculiar disjointed, distant life. Normal, normal, normal, Gini said to herself. This is normal—people shopping, friends meeting. It will be a normal weekend. I shall be my normal self. I’ll talk to people and function properly. I’ll stop sleepwalking through my life.

  “A weekend in the country,” Lindsay had said. “Do you good, Gini. You like Charlotte. You like Max. You like their kids. You’re turning into a bloody hermit, a recluse. You’re coming. I’m driving you. No argument. That’s it.”

  Gini had argued. She said a country weekend was just another kind of Valium. She said she wasn’t turning into a hermit, or some dotty recluse, she just liked to be alone, and she needed time to think.

  “Bullshit,” Lindsay said. “You think too damn much. You always did. Pascal will be home soon…”

  “It might be soon. It might not.”

  “…And when he gets back, what’s he going to find? A wreck. You’ve lost too much weight, you look ill and sad. You’re not working, not writing, not going out. You’re getting peculiar. So stop.”

  “All right,” Gini said obligingly, anything to make Lindsay stop nagging. “I’ll come. I won’t shame you. I’ll talk. I’ll eat. I won’t twitch.”

  “You don’t twitch,” Lindsay replied fondly. “Not yet anyway. But you have to reform. Twitching’s next.”

  She had arrived, Gini saw now, at Lindsay’s house, although she had no recollection of aiming for it, or turning into the right street. She mounted the steps and rang the bell, and after a long delay it was answered by Tom.

  “Oh, hi,” Tom said, leaving the door wide, and sprinting for the stairs. “Come on up. I’m alone. Gran’s out. Mum phoned. She said to make you a sandwich, she’s going to be late. I said I would make a sandwich, but there wasn’t any bread. She said there was a shop on the corner, and she hung up. She sounded mildly premenstrual, but then, she often does. I had a temperature of 102 two days ago, did Mum tell you? Extreme, huh? I mean, four more degrees and your brains boil. Did you know that?”

  “Not consciously,” said Gini, reaching the top floor and the kitchen. “But it makes sense.”

  She looked at Tom, whom she had not seen since leaving for Sarajevo. He had grown a ponytail since she last saw him, and he seemed to have acquired new powers of speech. He was wearing a torn sweater, torn jeans, and he had nothing on his feet. He was about to be a man, and about to be handsome, Gini thought, but he had not yet acquired a man’s social duplicity. He was staring at her; then he blushed and his eyes slid away from her face.

  “I know,” she said. “Didn’t Lindsay tell you? I’ve lost weight.”

  “I’ll make some coffee…”

  He was already turning away in embarrassment, trying to fill the kettle at a sink overflowing with unwashed dishes. “Shit,” he muttered. “Maybe I’d better clear up a bit, before Mum gets back. It’s Gran’s turn—we have assignments now, Mum’s latest ploy to keep chaos at bay. Gran skives off though. She doesn’t like washing dishes. She says the detergent gives her a rash.”

  “Convenient,” said Gini, who knew Louise of old.

  “Yeah. That’s what I said.”

  “I’ll help. If I wash and you dry, it won’t take long. What time is Lindsay getting here?”

  “She said one-thirty. Maybe two. She’s in a flap because she’s off to Paris Monday. Away this weekend with you. The social whirl.” He grinned. “That makes her guilty. When she’s guilty she gets, like seriously premenstrual. Plus there’s some creep at her office and they’re at war, about to go nuclear, and this creep held her up.”

  “Concise,” Gini said, running hot water. “Perhaps a little crude on the female psychology, but I get the picture. You didn’t want to join us at Max’s, then?”

  “Not my scene.”

  “It was once.”

  “Not anymore. Too many babies. Charlotte’s pregnant again, and—What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I just scalded myself, that’s all. This water’s a bit hot.”

  “Anyway, there’s a Bergman retrospective at the NFT this weekend. Twelve hours’ solid viewing. Immaculate art.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Bergman. Antonioni. Fellini. Godard. Not your American directors. Not anymore.”

  “You used to like my American directors. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. The Godfather. We saw The Godfather t
hree times at least, Tom.”

  “Yeah. Well, early Coppola’s okay. And Scorsese is great. Did you see Goodfellas? Oh, and Tarantino, of course. I mean, Tarantino is seriously amazing. You’ve seen Reservoir Dogs? Pulp Fiction?”

  “No.”

  “The two greatest American films ever made. Bar none. Postmodern cinema. They’re violent, of course.”

  “So I hear. I’m not in the mood for violence right now. I’ll catch up with them eventually, I guess…”

  “You must. There’s this scene in Pulp Fiction—I don’t want to spoil it for you, because he plays these narrative games, of course, but there’s these college kids, and you know they’re about to get shot, and Travolta gets out his gun, but he doesn’t point it at them or anything. He’s just standing behind them, and then—” Tom stopped.

  “Hey, look. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have started in on that. Mum warned me. She said—”

  “It’s fine, Tom. Really. Don’t worry about it. I’m okay. Just pass me that saucepan, would you?”

  Tom passed it across. He stood beside her, wielding his dish towel ineffectively, occasionally glancing in her direction.

  “I would like to know—” He hesitated. “I mean, what happened to you in Sarajevo? Do you talk about it? Mum says you don’t talk about it. Not to her, not to anyone. Why?”

  “You used not to talk,” Gini countered. “Tom, for three years, four years, you scarcely spoke at all. It drove Lindsay wild with anxiety and guilt. I’m sure you had thoughts, ideas, feelings, that you could have chosen to communicate. You decided, for reasons of your own, not to do so. And I don’t think I badgered you, Tom, at the time…”

  “No. You didn’t You were cool.” He paused. “That’s okay. I can read that. People talk too much anyway. In this family they talk all the time. Mum never draws breath. Gran never draws breath. I just needed a bit of space. A bit of silence for a while.”

  “Yes, well, sometimes that can help.” Gini looked away.

  “Sure. No sweat. You used to talk, that’s all. I liked talking to you—you remember that? We’d go out, you’d treat me to a movie, grab a hamburger. It was fun.”