Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  It showed a still from that movie which had now become so famous it was part of the collective consciousness, imprinted on the minds of almost everyone, whether they had seen the actual movie or not. This image, reproduced on a million T-shirts, had first been seen by Lindsay some eighteen months before in New York; it had been blown up 30 feet high, and had been fronting the façade of a movie theatre on Madison. A marriage of beauty and menace, she had thought then; she had found it disturbing, and still did.

  It was a cunningly lit, rear-view shot of Natasha Lawrence, still Tomas Court’s wife when the movie was shot, but divorced from him shortly after its premiere. She was barebacked, and was framed by a suggestion of a white curtain to her left, and by a blank white wall in front and to the right of her. Lawrence’s singularly beautiful face could not be seen; her dark hair was cropped as short as a boy’s; her right arm was lifted and pressed against the wall; her left arm was pressed against her side; a shaft of light slanted against the curve of her spine, below which the picture was cropped.

  This image might have been, and in some senses was, an Ingres-like tribute to the beauty and allure of a woman’s back, though Lawrence was thinner than any of Ingres’s Odalisques. The eye was drawn by the exquisite pallor of the skin, by the arch of the slender neck, by the line of the spine; it suggested the skeletal, while celebrating the voluptuousness of flesh. Then, gradually, the eye was drawn by what appeared, at a casual glance, to be some small birthmark or blemish, a small dark patch high on the left scapula. On closer examination, this dark area proved to be neither a blemish, nor a tattoo—most people’s second assumption—but a spider, an actual spider, a real spider, of modest dimensions, with delicate legs and black skin. Discovering this, women had been known to shriek and shrink back; Lindsay herself, who could deal with spiders, had felt a certain revulsion. A Freudian revulsion, Tom had later annoyingly claimed; a revulsion Court no doubt intended, Rowland McGuire had remarked, since Court was the most manipulative of directors—and the most manipulative of men, or so it was said.

  Looking at this image now, Lindsay felt she saw elements in it which she had missed before; the image, and the very violent sequence from which it was taken—a sequence she had never watched in its entirety, because she always covered her eyes—seemed to her to have a riddling multiplicity of meanings: it could be read both ways, she felt; from the right and from the left.

  She was about to pass on towards the stairs, which she could now see at the end of this corridor, and which she hoped, if her navigation were accurate, might lead down to the garden below, when a small accident occurred. Stepping back, eyes still on that poster for Dead Heat, she collided with a woman, and—apologizing—swung around. The woman, equally startled it seemed, almost dropped the four laden plates she was balancing, and gave a small cry of alarm.

  ‘Whoops,’ she said, in a strong Australian or New Zealand accent, as a solitary olive bounced off the plates, rolled along the corridor, and came to rest in front of some bookshelves by the stairs.

  Lindsay, guiltily aware that she might now be trespassing, looked the woman up and down. She was tall and gaunt, with a large nose, rabbity teeth, small, round, granny glasses, and an arresting head of long, thick, near-white hair. Despite the hair colour, she was, Lindsay realized, around forty years old, no more. She was wearing what might have been a uniform: a neat black dress with white collar and cuffs, but no apron. Was she a waitress? Lindsay looked at the woman, and then at the plates she was somewhat furtively carrying.

  ‘Goodies,’ said the woman, following the direction of Lindsay’s glance.

  The woman appeared to have raided the sumptuous buffet table Lindsay had glimpsed earlier, through the crowds. Heaped on the plates were cheeses and grapes; there was a large wedge of some spectacular gilded pastry pie, some of the wrens’ eggs, a glistening pyramid of caviar. There might have been some lobster—Lindsay thought she glimpsed a claw—and on the largest of the plates was a cornucopia arrangement of little tarts and cakes and miniaturized meringues, spun-sugar confections, marzipan amuse-gueules and tiny black chocolate petits fours. Balanced on top of them was a marzipan apple, tinted pink and green, with a clove for a stem; a pretty conceit. This, to Lindsay’s surprise, the gaunt woman suddenly passed to her.

  ‘Delicious, yeah?’ It was delicious. ‘Mrs Sabatier is really pleased with these caterers. She says they’re a find.’

  ‘I expect I shouldn’t be here,’ Lindsay said, extracting the clove, and, for want of anywhere else, putting it in her pocket. ‘I hope this isn’t out of bounds…’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘It’s just—I used to be good at parties, but I seem to have lost the knack.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’ The woman smiled, showing even more rabbity teeth. ‘It’s pandemonium back there.’

  ‘It is rather.’ The woman had begun to move off, and Lindsay trotted after her. ‘I was just wondering—I wanted to see the garden…’

  ‘The garden?’ The woman came to a halt.

  ‘Would Mrs Sabatier mind? I could see it from above. It looked so beautiful. There’s all these marvellous statues, a goddess, a nymph…’

  The woman hesitated, then shrugged.

  ‘I guess it’s all right. Mrs Sabatier’s gone to bed anyway. She avoids these parties of hers like the plague. And you are?’

  ‘My name’s Lindsay Drummond. I work at the Correspondent…’ The woman looked her up and down.

  ‘Right. Mrs Sabatier probably wouldn’t mind. It’s those stairs over there. If you get stopped, if anyone objects, just say Pat gave you the OK…’

  ‘Pat?’

  ‘That’s me. Really.’ She made an encouraging gesture. ‘It’s fine. The doors are open. You don’t need a key.’

  As she made this remark, Pat was moving off rapidly again. With Lindsay at her heels, she approached a wall of bookshelves at the head of the stairs. Without further speech, she opened an invisible door in these bookshelves and disappeared. What a cunning piece of trompe l’oeil, Lindsay thought, pausing to examine it; why, even the hinges were well-nigh undetectable. She examined the false book spines, amused; then she began to descend the stairs. There, at a turn on a lower landing, she ran into Markov and Jippy at last. They turned back with her and accompanied her to the garden below, where, Markov claimed, they had been lurking for some while.

  ‘Smart move, huh?’ he said. ‘It was purgatory up there. Wall to wall jerks. No sign of Tomas Court. We saw you skulking at the window. We waved…’

  Lindsay was not listening. She was looking around her, entranced. A secret garden, she thought, invisible from the street, invisible from any other building except the one she had just left. Mist drifted across the symmetry of the hedges and settled above the still surface of the pool. It was as quiet as any country garden; she could hear, just, the tidal slap against stone of the river beyond; from above, like the murmur of bees, came muted sounds from the party; no traffic was audible and no roads were visible; across on the far bank of the river, she could just see the outline of some industrial building, bulking as large as a cathedral in the dark. Markov and Jippy had taken her arms; now, Lindsay disengaged herself. She wandered away, touching the stone goddess’s crumbling hem, then the base of her ardent god’s pedestal. She reached up and touched the nereid’s sightless eyes.

  ‘Look, Markov, Jippy,’ she said. ‘Isn’t she lovely? In daylight, I’m sure she’s meant to be blind, but the moon gives her eyes. She’s looking across the river…What time is it, Markov?’

  ‘Nearly midnight. Around midnight, Lindsay…’

  Lindsay had moved off again. She trailed her hand dreamily over the crisp crests of the topiary hedges and made her way along a path, the river flowing ahead of her, and Markov and Jippy somewhere behind her in the shadows. Perhaps Jippy brought me here for the garden, Lindsay thought; perhaps it was Jippy’s companionship that made her feel truly at peace for the first time that evening, for Jippy’s presence always calmed
.

  She stepped through a gap in the hedges and approached a wooden balustrade. She leaned over it, wisps of mist drifting, then clearing, and looked down at the flow of the tide. The river was smooth and dark, a liquid looking-glass; reflected in it, bending gently then reassembling as the currents moved beneath, she could see the moon, lights like orbs, and an Ophelia-woman, pale and poised on the tide, who looked up at her, half drowned, from some water world beneath.

  In the distance, a church clock chimed, then another, then a third. The last minute of the last hour of the last day of deadline month. Lindsay thought of Rowland McGuire, who had felt close, very close, the instant she came out here. She would summon him up, Lindsay decided, before, as she had resolved she would, she said her final and irrevocable goodbye.

  Rowland McGuire, this week, was away. Taking his first vacation in a year from the newspaper he edited, he was climbing with friends on the Isle of Skye, or possibly—for his plans were subject to change—he had moved on to join another old friend from his Oxford days, a man who, as far as Lindsay could gather, was associated with the film industry in some way. This man had wanted Rowland to join him in Yorkshire, where he was engaged on some hush-hush project of an undisclosed kind, which—for unspecified reasons—required unspecified assistance from Rowland McGuire.

  Scotland; Yorkshire. Lindsay closed her eyes, spinning together these inconclusive strands in her mind. Behind her somewhere, Markov was talking about nothing as usual, and Jippy was walking up and down in a somewhat anxious way. She concentrated: Yorkshire, she felt sure and, since her imagination was on such occasions busy, detailed and compliant, Rowland rose up before her with a visionary speed.

  There he was, in some remote place—Rowland liked remote places, and liked to be alone in them. Lindsay discovered he had spent the day on some Brontë-esque moor. She could see its crags and its heathers; she could hear a lapwing’s cry. She could watch Rowland stride across these wuthering heights: this she did for a while, and very dark, handsome and desirable he looked. Then Lindsay settled him down in an inn by a blazing log fire, an inn delightfully unencumbered by the friend or other inconvenient occupants. Rowland, she found, was reading—well, he usually was. Yes, he was definitely reading, and he was wearing the green sweater Lindsay had given him the previous Christmas, a sweater which was almost exactly the same green as his eyes. She could not quite see the title of his book, a pity that, but she could read Rowland’s mind. He was thinking about her; he had just decided that before he turned in, he would give Lindsay a quick call.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Markov said, on a plaintive note, ‘but is it suddenly arctic out here? Jippy, can you feel the wind getting up? It’s Siberian. Brrr…Like my legs are icy, my nose is icy, my hands…’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Markov, shut up,’ Lindsay cried, and concentrated again.

  It might have been pleasant had Rowland begun that telephone call with some momentous word—‘darling’, for instance, would have done very nicely indeed. Lindsay’s imagination, however, had its dry, its legalistic side; it was a stickler for accuracy. Rowland, therefore, did not use this, or any other inflammatory term; he simply addressed her, as he always did, by name.

  And then—she could hear his voice distinctly—he told her in a friendly, fraternal way what he had been up to this past week. He enquired as to her own recent activities and announced he’d be returning to London soon. He recommended a book for Tom’s Oxford history course. He passed on his best wishes to Tom; then, with less obvious warmth, but a politeness characteristic of him, he sent his regards to Lindsay’s difficult mother, whom he disliked, not unreasonably, and to her mother’s new husband, disliked by both Lindsay and Rowland, who disparaged him with enjoyment and accord.

  These formalities over, he said, as he often did, that it was good to hear her voice, hoped she was well and looked forward to seeing her again soon.

  Lindsay disconnected. It was a conversation of a kind she had had with Rowland a hundred times: amusing, polite, concerned, dispassionate, brotherly; these conversations broke her heart. Rowland, of course, did not know that, at least Lindsay was hopeful he did not, for she kept her own feelings well concealed, and had done so now for a long time—almost three years.

  Lindsay opened her eyes; the moment felt auspicious. She looked down at her own wavering Ophelia-woman reflection, and wished Rowland a long goodbye. She said her farewell, her final farewell, to the other Rowland, the Rowland she wanted but could not have, the Rowland that inhabited a future that was never going to happen. Let him go, oh let him go, she said to herself, and then, since she wished him nothing but well, she added a rider: that Rowland might find a woman who would bring him the happiness he deserved, and that he would do so yesterday, tomorrow, at once, very soon.

  This was a spell, as Lindsay was aware. She could sense its power in the air, but it was important, indeed vital, that effective spells be correctly wound up. Accordingly, she touched wood three times; she crossed and uncrossed her fingers three times, but these actions seemed insufficiently solemn—she felt, obscurely, that some offering or sacrifice needed to be made. And so, hoping neither Markov nor Jippy could see her actions, she opened her small evening bag. Inside it, folded small, was a note written by Rowland McGuire. It was not a long note, nor were its contents—they concerned work—of any great significance, but it was the only specimen of Rowland’s handwriting she possessed, and she had been carrying it around like a talisman for nearly three years. A small square of paper: ‘Dear Lindsay,’ this note began. If she read it, she knew she would weaken, so she did not read it—anyway, she knew its four-line contents by heart. Leaning over the balustrade, she let this charmed piece of paper fall. It eddied towards her, then away; some current of air caught it, and it settled on the water like a pale moth; she watched it be carried away by the tide.

  The gesture made her sad, but she also felt immeasurably lighter, she found. She floated back up the path, arm in arm with Markov and Jippy, Markov grumbling about the cold and Jippy’s quiet gaze resting on the flagstones ahead. It was at this point in the evening, perhaps a little belatedly, that Lindsay, glancing at Jippy, wondered if he might have been influencing her once more. It was Jippy, after all, who had suggested Markov procure her the invitation to this party; it was at Jippy’s urging that she had kept that invitation, and she began to suspect now that it was Jippy’s influence that had weighed with her when she finally decided to come. It was odd, was it not, she thought, that he and Markov had been in the garden all evening, as if they had been waiting for her there. With Jippy, mainly because his presence was so silent and unobtrusive, it was always easy to forget he was there; it was only after her meetings with him were over that Lindsay sometimes suspected he had influenced her in some shadowy way, with some invisible sleight of hand.

  Now, drifting back through the garden to the stairs, she had, most strongly, the sensation that Jippy had possibly been guiding her, and that he was certainly guiding her now. This was superstition on her part, she told herself; Jippy did not do anything to which she could have pointed in evidence—at least not for a little while. Even so, the impression grew; it was imprecise and hazy, yet it was strong. Jippy’s grip on her arm was light; he guided her back along that white corridor, Markov forging ahead of them both now, and he guided her back through the tides of that party crowd. Lindsay could sense both that he wished to speak and was as yet unable to do so, and that he had a destination in view for her; looking at his pale, set face, she felt sure this destination was close, perhaps just the other side of those entrance doors.

  Their passage through the party was not the easiest of odysseys. Caught up in the swirling currents, they were buffeted towards that lipstick-red couch with its limpet men and siren girls; negotiating that, they were accosted, several times, by various ancient mariners wishing to tell various tales. Jippy guided them past these hazards; he paused briefly as paleface and ponytail hove into view, lamenting the latest
news, which was that treacherous Lulu Sabatier had organized simultaneous Hallowe’en parties in New York and Los Angeles to celebrate Diablo, and that—ultimate treachery!—Tomas Court was now rumoured to be at one or the other of these.

  ‘But which, my friend, which?’ the ponytail cried.

  ‘I don’t know,’ paleface responded. ‘I don’t fucking well know.’

  ‘If I find Lulu, my friend, I won’t be responsible for my actions…’

  ‘I’ll fucking well kill her,’ cried paleface, diving into some murky confluence by the doors.

  Jippy gave a small gentle smile at this and touched Lindsay’s arm. The crowds parted like the Red Sea before Moses, and she and Jippy surged through. Outside, in the peace and darkness of the streets, Jippy and Markov escorted Lindsay back to her car. They walked, footsteps echoing, along narrow cobbled roads, with the dark walls, the rusting winches and traps of abandoned warehouse machinery, rising up on either side. Just audible on the breeze came the slithering sound of river water against mud; Lindsay could sense that Jippy still wished to speak and was still struggling to voice words.

  Nearly half a mile from Lulu’s loft-palace, they finally found Lindsay’s little car, parked outside a ruinous, boarded-up church, with one of its wheels—Lindsay was impetuous at parking—on the pavement. From the deserted streets, from nowhere, the taxi Markov had been demanding of the air some seconds earlier, now appeared. No-one was too surprised by this phenomenon; such things tended to happen when Jippy was around.

  ‘Greece, tomorrow.’ Markov kissed Lindsay. ‘Blue skies, sun, pagan temples, divine hotels. Enjoy Oxford. Enjoy New York. See you when we get back, my dearest. We leave at dawn!’

  He then began to argue with the taxi driver—he always argued with taxi drivers on principle—about the route he should take to Markov’s London apartment, which, like the other bolt-holes Markov maintained around the world, was enviably situated, utterly practical, and very small.