Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘No, Rowland, it’s not money; truly. What you were offering was more than generous.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem? Were you worrying about Max? I told you, Lindsay, Max wouldn’t be pleased at my stealing you. But he’d accept it. Max is a realist. In fact…’ He began to smile. ‘Why don’t we really annoy him? Persuade Pixie to come with you, to run the fashion side of things, but still reporting to you. We could do that. We could…’

  ‘Stop, Rowland. Please don’t. I’m so sorry, I hate myself for this. You’ve shown confidence in me and look how I’ve repaid you. I sat there at lunch, letting Tom and Colin and Katya criticize you, and I didn’t explain the real situation. You could have given me away if you’d wanted to, taken me to task—and you didn’t. Oh damn, damn…’

  She turned her face away to hide her distress. Rowland took her hand and turned her to him.

  ‘Forget about that,’ he said. ‘Lindsay, I don’t care what they said or thought. Listen to me, we’ve always worked well together. I know you could do this job. Won’t you at least think about it?’

  ‘Rowland, no. I have thought about it, and I’ve decided. I’ve signed the contract for this book. I’m committed…’

  ‘It isn’t that. I don’t believe you.’ He was watching her closely. ‘There’s some other problem. You don’t want to work with me, is that it?’

  Lindsay looked away. To accept this job would mean working with Rowland McGuire in the closest proximity; that would destroy all her peace of mind. The only way in which she was going to cure herself of Rowland was to see him less and to put distance between them. She was now even more certain of this.

  ‘Tell me,’ Rowland said, when she had not replied. ‘Look at me, Lindsay. Is it that you don’t want to work with me? Is that so bad a prospect? Why? I know I can be infuriating—you tell me often enough. But we understand one another now; we know one another so well—don’t you feel that?’

  ‘In certain ways, maybe. But—’

  ‘We make a good team. We spark ideas off one another. Even the fights are useful…’ A glint of amusement came into his eyes, then his expression became doubtful again, and his manner somewhat awkward. ‘I’d rather you said, Lindsay. I—well, I didn’t expect you to turn me down. I thought—I can only assume now…’

  ‘Rowland, don’t. You know I like working with you; I always did—and you taught me a great deal. I’ve told you that often enough…’

  ‘No, you haven’t actually.’

  ‘Then I’m telling you now. This decision has nothing to do with you personally, Rowland. Try to understand. I’ve spent twenty years, more, in an office. I’ve spent twenty years going to the collections, twenty years catching planes and chasing around the world. I’ve had enough, of fashion and of journalism; I don’t want deadlines to dictate the rest of my life. Rowland, I never had a choice before—Tom depended on me, my mother depended on me; we had to have my salary, come what may. But now I do have a choice. I can write this book; I want to write this book—and if it’s a success, maybe I could write others. I’m looking forward to it, Rowland. You wait…’ She smiled. ‘In a few months’ time, you won’t recognize me. I’ll have become an archive junkie, a library addict. I’ll be filling up all these notebooks with research…’

  It was, she thought, a seamless blend of truth and falsehood, and it was effective.

  ‘An archive junkie?’ Rowland also smiled. ‘I admit I can’t quite imagine that.’ He paused. ‘You promise me that this is what you truly want?’

  ‘Ah, what do women want?’ Lindsay made a face. ‘I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s what I want to do.’

  ‘I shall miss you, you know. The office won’t seem the same without you. Who’s going to cut me down to size if you aren’t there?’

  ‘You’ll find someone. You know you never listened anyway…’

  ‘You’re wrong. I did.’

  There was a silence. During it, Rowland suddenly seemed to realize that he was still holding her hand; he released it at once. Exhibiting an indecision that was not characteristic of him, he turned to the door, then back again.

  ‘Lindsay, I’ll have to go. I have a mountain of work to get through before tomorrow. The trouble with going away is that the workload doubles when you get back. I’d have liked…I have a bad week coming up, meetings back to back…When are you leaving for New York?’

  ‘On Thursday. I’m staying on after the collections to do some fashion shoots. Then—Max has been generous about notice, and I’m owed that holiday time—I’ll come back after Thanksgiving, maybe. I thought of going down to Washington DC for a few days to…’

  Lindsay stopped abruptly. She feared that Rowland might query Washington as a destination, in which case she would have to say her friend Gini’s name and watch him feign indifference. To her surprise and relief, he did not.

  ‘Washington? I have to go over there sometime too—we’re having negotiations with the Post. Except, no, it’s not likely our visits would coincide. Damn! Thursday? Perhaps—Look, I’ll call you later this evening, shall I do that?’

  ‘I’m going out this evening, Rowland,’ Lindsay replied untruthfully, staring hard at the floor. The reply checked Rowland, whose air of agitation and indecision increased.

  ‘Yes, well, I’ll talk to you before you leave for America. We could—you might like dinner one night…’

  ‘I don’t think that will be possible. I’m rushing about this week, and…I’ll see you when I come back, Rowland.’

  Steeling herself, Lindsay reached up on tiptoe and briefly kissed his cheek.

  ‘Thank you for everything,’ she said, in a steadier voice. ‘You sorted me out, yesterday, and last night. You’re a very good father confessor, Rowland. I feel much better now. A bit hung-over, of course…’

  ‘Sleep. Get some sleep…’ Rowland replied. ‘Promise me now…’

  ‘I promise,’ Lindsay replied meekly, and with this assurance, Rowland finally left.

  Lindsay watched the door close. Everything and nothing, she said to herself. She found she was trembling with the effort of deception; the unspoken and the unspeakable rose up in a wash of regret. She returned to her sitting-room and looked around her blindly. She had done what she had promised herself she would do, and now Rowland’s absence emptied the room of all content.

  She touched the cushion he had leaned against the previous night; she touched the sofa-arm where his hand had rested. She tried to remember the strange calm and peace she had felt as he talked to her in those pre-dawn hours; it had been the first, and presumably the last time that he had let her into his life.

  Remembering his words, she took out the pale jade tear-drop ear-rings she had removed the previous day and weighed them in her hand. Her friend Gini had given her these ear-rings, and it was her friend Gini, she knew, to whom Rowland had referred the previous night.

  Nothing might have come of it, as he had said, but Rowland had been in love with Gini, and she had possibly returned that love. They had had an affair, briefly, in Paris, some three years before, after which Gini had returned to her lover, the war photographer Pascal Lamartine. Reunited, they had married and had a son. None of the participants had ever discussed these events, but she had been their mute witness. Possibly Rowland still retained a lingering regard for Gini; perhaps he did not. She would never have countenanced asking him, and she knew he would have given her no answers if she had.

  She looked down at the ear-rings, a gift from a friend younger than herself, and beautiful in a way Lindsay knew she could never be. Not for the first time in her life, she protested silently at the unfairness of beauty, an accident which could make the best of men blind, then she thrust the ear-rings in a drawer, out of sight.

  It was much later, and only when the church bells began ringing, first one set, then another, a series of answering chimes, summoning a city of non-worshippers to worship, that she remembered it was Sunday, worst day of the week yet again. The endlessness of that particula
r day weighed in upon her; but Lindsay had learned resilience, and she took comfort in the knowledge that she had executed the first part of her plans. She took greater comfort from the fact that, next Sunday, she would not be here in this empty apartment, but in a different city, one she had always loved—New York.

  Bright lights, a heavy schedule, no time to think; she was sitting contemplating the advantages of that city when she remembered Jippy’s curious parting words. ‘York,’ he had said, and of course ‘York’ might indicate a city in America, every bit as much as Yorkshire.

  At precisely this moment, her telephone rang; it rang twice, in swift succession. The first call, from some mumbling person claiming to work for Lulu Sabatier, she allowed her machine to field. The second, from an apparently sober and chastened Colin Lascelles, she answered herself.

  BONFIRE NIGHT

  VII

  ‘REMEMBER, REMEMBER, THE FIFTH of November—Gunpowder, treason and plot…’

  Rowland, locking his car doors, turned, was about to walk on, then stopped. The speaker, he saw, was a young Bengali boy, aged about ten. He and another older Bengali boy had stationed themselves outside the Hawksmoor church opposite Rowland’s Spitalfields house. Between the boys, propped up against the railings of the churchyard, was a guy, a well-made guy. It was stuffed with newspaper and shredded computer printouts, some of which were escaping from ankles, fat waist and throat. On its feet was a pair of women’s Indian slippers; on its head was a turban; the ensemble was completed by a torn, very English tweed jacket and a tattered Nike track suit. In the dim street lighting, the guy’s face mask grinned at him; from some distance away, a rocket fizzed into the dark sky and exploded in a burst of golden stars, high up.

  It was years since he had seen a guy, Rowland realized. When he was a boy, when he first came to London to live, these straw men, these hollow men, had been commonplace in the weeks leading up to Bonfire Night; children stationed them outside tube stations, on street corners, outside firework shops. He paused, looking at the malevolent mask, and with a rush, his childhood came back. He remembered the gorgeousness and gaudiness of the fireworks themselves, the black aromatic powder that leaked from them; he thought of the solemn ceremony every year, his mother and himself, wrapped up in coats, alone in a neglected North London back garden, positioning rockets in milk bottles, lining up magic on a garden wall: Vesuvius, Krakatoa. Light the blue touch-paper, stand well back.

  He looked at the two boys, who were shivering with cold. This area in the East End of London, always a refugee area, lived in over the centuries by French Huguenots, then Jewish immigrants, was now predominantly Bengali. Rowland wondered if these two boys knew the history of Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot, and if so whether it could have any meaning to them: it had little meaning to him. He put his hand into his coat’s breast pocket, and the two boys looked at him expectantly.

  ‘The going rate used to be a penny,’ Rowland said, with a smile. ‘I imagine it’s gone up…’

  The boys exchanged glances; they looked, in a pointed way, at the upturned hat next to the guy on the pavement. It contained a collection of ten and twenty pence coins; prominently displayed, in the centre, was a one pound coin and a fifty pence piece.

  ‘Inflation, innit?’ said the older boy, giving Rowland an impertinent look.

  Rowland withdrew his hand from his pocket and took out his wallet. The boys tensed. Rowland dropped a five pound note into the hat, complimented them on the excellence of the guy, and then, ashamed at his own sentimentality, walked away fast. Whoops of jubilation and derision greeted this generous evidence of his own gullibility; glancing back over his shoulder as he reached his house, Rowland saw that the two boys had decided, perhaps on the strength of his contribution, to pack it in; they were departing, dragging the grinning corpse of the guy up the street.

  Rowland let himself into the cold and the silence of his early-eighteenth-century house. It did not possess central heating, and modern heating systems might have damaged the panelling, in any case. Rowland had never minded its familiar winter chill, and its calm, its silence, he had always loved. Taking pity on it, buying and rescuing it some fourteen years before, when it had been in a state of ruinous neglect, he had found he wanted to change it as little as possible. The creeping dangers which threatened its structures and its beauties, the damp, the dry rot, the leaking roof and decaying timbers, had been cured. Standing alone in the unfurnished first-floor sitting-room when all this work was finally complete, he had closed the shutters to the tall windows, and for the first time lit a fire. It caught instantly and burned well; its flames burnished the panelled walls and danced upon the bindings of his books. With the crackling of flames and the creaks of old timbers adjusting to heat, Rowland had had an acute sense of his home’s past: he had thought of the French Protestant refugees who had been the first occupants here over 250 years before, several of whom lay buried in the sombre city churchyard beyond, and he had felt that, like them, he was not truly the owner of this house, but its tenant or custodian. It would outlast him, as it had outlasted them. In a new millennium, others would stand here, as he did, and perhaps sense, as he did now, past joys and past griefs, some of which he would no doubt have contributed himself.

  This thought, that he was part of the house’s continuum, destined to become one of its spirits and whispers, had contented him then. Now, he found he was restless, less calmed by these four walls; for reasons he could not grasp, and was reluctant to examine, the silence and familiarity here now agitated him. He would sometimes have the sensation that the house was waiting for something to happen, that it resented being empty by day, and under-occupied by night. It possessed four bedrooms, only one of which was regularly used; the other three, occupied occasionally by friends passing through London, had a melancholy reproachful air; Rowland kept their doors closed, disliking this.

  That evening, his first free evening since returning from Yorkshire, he had brought work home with him, as he usually did. He lit the fire in the sitting-room and waited for the warmth to dispel the house ghosts. These ghosts, of past losses, approximations and ill-timings, of hopes that had once fired Rowland, but no longer did, were reluctant to depart. They lurked in the corners of the room; angry with them and with himself, he switched on all the lamps in an attempt at banishment. The lamplight was ineffective since, as Rowland knew perfectly well, these ghosts had their being in him; it was his blood they fed upon, and they emanated, grey and disconsolate, from himself.

  It had perhaps not been such a good idea, he thought wryly to himself, to have bought a refugee house; nor was it wise to indulge the kind of early evening melancholy hundreds of city-dwellers no doubt experienced. He was tired; he felt overworked and hungry—that was why, as soon as the front door closed, he now heard the whispers and reproaches of the dispossessed.

  Hunger, anyway, was easily assuaged. Rowland went downstairs to his kitchen—a kitchen Lindsay described as charming but primitive. In one of the old battered saucepans—he could remember Lindsay cooking him scrambled eggs in that saucepan, the first time she came here—he heated up some canned soup. He made himself a sandwich, and some minutes later, found he had eaten it.

  The food revived him. He returned upstairs to find the fire blazing, the room warm and the ghosts suppressed. He telephoned Lindsay, who was departing for New York early the next day, and found her number was engaged. In a desultory way, he began dealing with the backlog of mail, which had been reproaching him all week. A month before, he had sent a brief, formal letter of condolence to Gini, formerly Hunter, now Lamartine, on the death of her father. He had half-expected that a reply, no doubt equally formal, might be here, amidst this pile of buff envelopes; it was not, and he found he could accept this without disappointment; maybe he had begun to acquire indifference.

  He sifted through the bills, and found buried among them a postcard in writing he did not recognize, which proved to be from Tom’s girlfriend, Katya. She gave a lively account
of Colin Lascelles’s recovery on the cerise sofa; she requested the details of a book Rowland had recommended over lunch in Oxford, the title of which she had now forgotten, but which she felt was essential for her literature course. She sent love and best wishes, as did Tom, who was out, she wrote, playing in some university rugby match. The words ‘rugby match’ had been underlined in a scornful way; their inherent absurdity was emphasized by an exclamation mark.

  Rowland looked at this missive for some while. Much pursued by females, he had learned over the years to be wary of all communications from women, even those—especially those—that appeared innocent. He frowned. On a postcard, he wrote the name of the book, its author and publisher. He added, ‘Best wishes to you both’, signed and addressed it, then gathered it up with the rest of the mail to be posted.

  He looked at the work he had brought home with him, then, discovering it could wait, poured himself a whisky. He put more wood on the fire, and in a thoughtful way examined the black and white mountain photographs Lindsay had referred to, which he could remember her inspecting the first time she came here.

  The photographs, attached to a pin board, were the sparsely furnished room’s only personal element, apart from its many books. Beneath them were notes Rowland had made which detailed previous climbs of these particular peaks, routes used, weather conditions and so on. Little tongues of firelight moved across these notes, and he recalled Lindsay’s complaints about the jargon used here, with its terms—arêtes, corries—which she could not understand.