Lovers and Liars Trilogy

by Sally Beauman

  “I know you enough.”

  “That can’t be true. You shouldn’t say such things. It isn’t fair to me. It isn’t fair to yourself.”

  “Isn’t it?” He gave her a hard look. “Why not? I can see the alternative only too clearly. I love you, Gini. I know what it would be like, walking out now, not seeing you, not hearing your voice. That half-life. Dear God—I can see that so well…”

  “It needn’t be like that…” She covered her face with her hands. “Rowland, you know I’m right. Those feelings don’t last. You may feel like that now—I may… But if we’re determined, if we ignore them, avoid meeting—we’ll forget. All this, all this—it will become weaker and weaker, and finally absurd, and then one day we’ll both look back, and we’ll think—Thank heaven I was sensible. What a fool I was—how could I ever have imagined—”

  She stopped. She watched his face, lit by concern, become still and set. He took her hand in his.

  “You think we’re imagining this?” he said quietly. “If so, thank God for imagination. I trust it beyond reason. Are you telling me you don’t?”

  There was a silence then while he waited for her reply. Outside the room, a church bell tolled the hour, traffic passed, voices from other lives floated upward from the street. Gini looked at her imaginings, and his. She could see a possible future, just as he did. It was hazy, a little misted, like the light of a spring morning in which the loveliness of the day to come is glimpsed. She watched her life fork, north, south, right, left. The vision she now saw was very like the bright panorama Pascal had first opened up to her eyes. Both men seemed able to dismantle some defense in her mind, flooding it with illumination and promise. She was unsure if their ability to do this was innate, or if she herself gifted it to them. To discover that another man besides Pascal, and so soon after Pascal, could achieve this, confused her. It made her distrust joy, and it also made her distrust herself.

  Besides such insubstantiality, duty and loyalty and the settled dailiness of established love seemed so sure, and so commendable. It was a question of discipline, she told herself, of honoring vows made, and remaining true, therefore, to Pascal and to herself. She looked one last time at the other Gini, the mirror woman who was so much more prepared to flout rules and take risks, and she rejected her, canceled her out.

  She felt an immediate diminution, an intense stab of loss. This she ignored; if she felt unaccountably less now, she told herself, she would feel more, she would feel enfranchised, in due course.

  “You have to catch a plane. I have to go to the hospital,” she said.

  “I see.” Rowland at once released her and stepped back. “That’s your final decision?”

  “Yes, Rowland. It is.”

  She saw the reply glance like a blow across his face. He half turned in a blinded way, then turned back. He glanced down at his watch, checked the airline ticket in the pocket of his coat, braced himself, and then said in a stiff, abrupt way the one thing she feared most.

  “We had unprotected sex,” he began awkwardly. “I’m sorry, but I have to say this. I broke one of my own inviolable rules in that respect. If there were any possibility that you could become pregnant—I couldn’t walk away from that. You do understand?”

  “I’m on the pill, Rowland,” she replied, and looked down. She stared at the carpet, at the patterns that separated them. She watched him approach. He stood for a while, looking down at her without speaking. Then, very gently, he lifted her face and inspected it.

  “You’re not telling me the truth,” he said in a quiet voice. “I understand why—but don’t lie to me, Gini, not about something as important as this. Look at me. I want you to make me a promise. All right, I’ll go now. But when you know for certain, either way, then you send me a telegram, or you make one telephone call. Just tell me, Yes, I am—or no, I’m not. You promise me you’ll do that?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  He took her hands in his. “If the answer is no, very well, I’ll obey your wishes. I’ll stay away. I’ll get on with the rest of my life. But if the answer is yes, I don’t care where you are in the world, or whom you’re with, I’m on the next plane. And you won’t find it so easy to persuade me to leave then. Are you clear about that?”

  He watched her face change, and her eyes flood with assent. At that point, curiously certain that he would eventually be recalled, he had intended to leave, and even turned to go. But she made some inarticulate sound, or gave some inarticulate gesture, and then—being human, being male, and far less resolved than he wished to appear—he gave way and kissed her on the mouth. Sensing her response, he might have stayed even then, especially then, but she took him by the hand, led him firmly to the door, and closed it quietly but firmly on him before either of them could risk further speech.

  Chapter 22

  LEAVING THAT PARIS HOTEL, Rowland had felt blind. He felt blind in the elevator, blind to the airplane, blind to the customs formalities in London. It was with a sense of surprise that he found himself, sometime later, in his own house. Disconcerted, he looked around his living room, a room that had always given him pleasure: for the first time it seemed to him cold, alien, and bare.

  For two weeks after that he functioned on automatic, certain a summons from Gini must come. He anticipated, and feared, the mail each morning; he tensed at each telephone call. In February, late one Friday afternoon, the telegram finally arrived. It consisted of a one-word negative, followed by her name. He knew why she had been so terse—had he himself not even suggested it?—but the brevity of the message and its finality caused him great pain.

  He sat for a long while, holding the scrap of paper, watching the future he had unconsciously been planning for those past two weeks shrivel before his gaze. Then, angry at himself, he called an airline and made a reservation on that evening’s last flight to Scotland. Packing his climbing equipment later, catching a cab out to the airport, he felt almost calm. He knew the cure for this, he told himself; he had taught himself how to live without love before.

  He climbed in the Cairngorms that weekend, in ideal weather and dangerous snow conditions, and he climbed alone. Once or twice, tempted, he took unjustifiable risks; he felt a defiant and bitter amusement when nothing untoward occurred.

  He returned to London, to his house with its view of Hawksmoor’s spire. He worked—this, too, had proved effective in the past—twice as hard. With the assistance of his DEA contact, Sandra Lucas, he knew that he would be able to tie up the last loose ends of his Amsterdam drug story: the Dutch chemist and his American partner were about to be raided; they would not be making the fortune they had so blithely anticipated; they would not be pushing White Doves much longer.

  “It’s tonight,” Sandra Lucas said one morning in March, calling from a safe phone in Amsterdam.

  “And then?” Rowland replied.

  “And then they both go down, Rowland. We have Mina Landis’s evidence. We have the toxicology reports on Cassandra Morley. Manslaughter is the best they can hope for, even in Holland. They’ll both go down—and for a very long time.” There was a silence. She gave a sigh. “I know it’s not enough, Rowland. It’s never enough. But the American has shifted quite a lot of heroin in his time. He’ll certainly talk. He may give us some links in that chain…” An awkwardness came into her voice. “I wanted to ask you something—this crusade of yours…”

  “It isn’t a crusade. It’s news.”

  “—Are you still doing it for Esther?”

  Rowland did not reply.

  “Okay. If you won’t answer that, then just tell me this—you still think of her?”

  “Sometimes. Not so much recently.”

  “Good. I’m glad.” Her voice became brisker. “She’d never have wanted this, you know. She was a realist. She’d have wanted you to let her go.”

  Was that what the dead required of the living—to be forgotten, to be relegated? Rowland doubted it. Nevertheless, the comment affected him, and perhaps chimed with feelings
of his own. At the end of March he finally decided, late at night, and alone in his house, that it was now time to acknowledge that he had changed, that he had already begun the process of letting the past go.

  He gathered together all the reminders of Esther that he had kept so carefully all these years. They were few: some letters she had written him when she, or he, had been working away; letters friends had written to him after her death; photographs taken by him, of her, in the Washington apartment they had shared, and finally, photographs of them together, taken by Esther’s lawyer brother, on one of their visits to New Orleans. Quietly, Rowland reread the letters for the last time, then consigned them to the fire in his living room. He watched them blaze up, then slowly added the photographs one by one. He looked for a long time at the last of these pictures, himself and Esther, caught in a shaft of sunlight, walking along hand in hand. The street, he thought, was Canal; it was midafternoon; Esther was laughing; she had just been presented by Rowland with a flower, and she had tucked it into her hair. The flower was white, a white carnation: its crisp curled petals bloomed against the blackness of her skin. Rowland hesitated, then consigned this photograph, too, to the fire. He had intended to complete this ritual with one last item—Gini’s brief and negative telegram.

  He picked it up from the table where it lay in readiness, leaned toward the flames—and then found he no longer had the will to burn it. He folded it up again and replaced it in his wallet. It was a small weakness, he told himself; in no way did it alter his determination to put her out of his mind.

  His conscious mind, of course; that determination did not prevent her returning to him at night, in his dreams. It was from one such dream, tranquil and resonant with the illusory promises of dreams, that Max roused him, at three o’clock one morning, to announce that Charlotte had just given birth to their first daughter. In April, Rowland received an invitation to the christening of this child, to be held the following month.

  May; Rowland accepted. He was touched by the request, and touched by Max’s obvious joy and pride. “We’d like you to be the godfather,” Max said in his office one day over a sandwich lunch. “Charlotte insists. You predicted it would be a girl, after all.”

  “Delighted. An honor.” Rowland smiled.

  “Charlotte’s asking Tom to be the other godfather…”

  “A very good choice. I like Tom.”

  “Godmothers—we’re not sure yet. One of Charlotte’s sisters, probably…” Max gave Rowland a small sidelong glance. “And then we thought, Lindsay perhaps…”

  Rowland merely nodded. His attention rarely left work for long these days, as Max had noted, and now it had already returned to the story on Max’s desk, which they would run the next day.

  Written by Gini, and faxed in by her directly to Max, it detailed the raid made that week on the Amsterdam drug manufacturing outfit, and the subsequent arrest of the Dutch chemist and the American pusher behind it. The story seemed of greater interest to Rowland than the details of Max’s daughter’s christening and the identity of her godmothers.

  Noting this, Max sighed and, as soon as Rowland had left his office, telephoned his wife, who—an obstinate romantic—still cherished hopes on Lindsay’s behalf.

  Charlotte questioned Max for a while, with vivacity. Max, who felt he knew Rowland better than his wife did, and who knew he was in a better position to judge Rowland’s present state of mind, heard her out patiently. He then began the gentle process of making Charlotte face facts. Finally opting for a racing analogy, he informed her that the odds against Lindsay were—at very best—one hundred to one.

  “Darling, listen to reason,” he said. “I promise you, I know. Lindsay is a total long shot.”

  Charlotte made dismissive noises. It was not unknown, she reminded him, for total long shots to romp home.

  Lindsay, who gambled rarely and always incautiously, might have agreed with her. She had spent the past months trying to subdue such instincts, but did not always succeed. She was not assisted by the fact that the months since Paris had given her time to consider, and time to make certain observations of her own.

  She observed that Gini, to whom she spoke regularly on the telephone, had remained with Pascal in France. She observed that Gini’s voice lifted with optimism and delight as she discussed, first, the success of the operation on Pascal’s fractured arm, and then his slow but gradual progress since. She observed that neither Gini nor Pascal seemed eager to return to London, and were planning to remain in Paris until late May at least. She observed that Rowland McGuire now worked longer hours than anyone else in the Correspondent building, even longer than Max. She observed—with Pixie’s assistance—that McGuire had become curiously impervious to the seductions of seductive women: his latest research assistant—or so Pixie claimed—a young woman so flagrantly nubile, Lindsay had hated her on sight, was rumored to have flung herself at McGuire shamelessly; she had been firmly and impolitely repulsed.

  In her better moments, Lindsay could disregard such observations. In her weaker ones, unfortunately, Markov seemed to contrive to pop up. He had appointed himself love’s agent provocateur. “How’s it going, Lindy, my love?” he caroled down the telephone from that location in Hyderabad. “Any progress?” he demanded from somewhere in the Mojave Desert. “What is this?” he shrieked from a mobile outside an abandoned Australian silver mine, where he was photographing ball gowns. “Are you a woman, Lindy? What’s your heart pumping, darling—water, or blood? Get to it. I fly back tomorrow. I’m taking you to dinner. And believe me, I shall expect action. I shall expect a full report.”

  “Well?” he said the next night in a wildly fashionable restaurant. “Fill me in, sweetheart. Full intercourse—or are we still at the tiresome courtship stage?”

  He adjusted the brim of his hat, sighed, and lit a cigarette.

  “Neither,” Lindsay said. “Rumor has it, he’s now a monk.”

  Markov brightened. “That’s promising. Abstinence is bound to increase your chances. Especially in his case. Now, did you try drinks-after-work?”

  “Yes, I did. Will you give it a rest, Markov? He didn’t want a drink. He also didn’t want lunch, or dinner at my flat. He didn’t even bite on the movie idea—and I thought that was bound to work. Three hours of Eisenstein, plus Tom, so he’d feel safe. I was sure that would tempt him, but no.”

  “You’re not trying, Lindy. You have to be bolder. Act, or you’ll always regret it. Swallow your pride, darling. Stamp on your principles. Leap in where angels fear to tread.”

  Lindsay considered this. “How?” she said.

  Markov looked thoughtful. “Shared interests,” he announced at last. “Tell him you want to learn to climb. Buy one of those terrible anorak things. Stride across the hills with him. Clutch his manly arm occasionally. Carry his pitons—”

  “Give me a break, Markov. I’d look like hell in an anorak. I get vertigo on my front steps.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s think. Churches. You said he liked churches.”

  “I said he liked one church, Markov. It’s right across his street.”

  “Like one, like them all. Stop making difficulties. I feel this one, Lindy, I can see it panning out. A weekend in the country. Somewhere like Norfolk. Norfolk has very good churches. I went there once. You do a bit of preparation, obviously, before you go. Read some books. Then you talk about buttresses. You make sensitive comments about rood screens, sweetling.”

  “Rood screens? I can’t stand this. Pour me another drink.”

  “Okay. Let’s think.”

  Light came to Markov’s face. “That’s it. Books! I’ve hit on it. You said he reads. You said he reads all the time. Tolstoy. Updike. Proust. Heavy-brigade stuff—you mentioned that. Darling, it’s simple, I see it now. A poetry reading. Or, you borrow his Tolstoy, then say, ‘How about we go out to dinner, Rowland, and you talk me through Anna Karenina, War and Peace?’ Tutor into lover. No man can resist it, Lindy.”

  “Last week,” L
indsay said in a small voice with dignity, “I borrowed a novel from him. It was there on his desk. I knew he’d been reading it, and I thought… Anyway. I borrowed it. I took it back, two days later—and it was a long novel, Markov. I thought he’d be impressed I was so quick. I gave it back, and I made a speech. It was a good speech too, straight out of all the best cribs. It was astute. It was sensitive, Markov, so damn sensitive, I nearly wept—”

  “What novel?”

  “Never mind. It was French. During my speech he took three phone calls and sent four faxes. I was wearing a new dress too. I’d had my hair cut.”

  “Nada?”

  “Oh, he was kind. He did listen a bit…” Lindsay gave a shaky sigh. “The kindness hurt most of all, I think. I mean, he doesn’t dislike me, I can see that. But he’s not remotely interested. Whereas—I can’t sleep at night for thinking of him. I go over and over everything he says to me—just in case it might suggest he’d actually noticed me. I’m so damn inventive, it’s pathetic, Markov. He says, ‘Good morning, Lindsay’—and I think, maybe there’s a double meaning in that.”

  Markov removed his dark glasses. He looked at her small, tense, boyish frame, at her short, curly hair, and at her pale, wide-eyed face. She was about to cry, or perhaps laugh; he could not have said which.

  “—If I see him, it feels like spring. If I don’t, there’s no point to the day. I contrive all these meetings—anything just to spend three minutes in his office. I’m so ashamed, Markov. I know I’m making a fool of myself, a woman my age chasing a man like him. But it’s as if he’s locked in somewhere, and sometimes I think I might be able to give him a key. So it’s much worse than it was before. The harder I try—I think it’s because I can see he’s not happy, and I’d so like to—Oh, shit. I’m going to cry. I’m sorry about this. You see, the trouble is… Oh, hell. Now my mascara will run. I’ve had too much wine, I think.”

  Markov pressed her hand and made encouraging noises. After a moment, the brief tears stopped.