Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘It’s a foreign language, Rowland,’ she had said. ‘You’ll have to translate.’

  ‘On reaching the Three Sisters north face overhang,’ he read now, ‘a traverse is needed across the buttress to reach the flake where the wall meets the overhang. The flake is positive; there is a small crack for the right foot, but the left has to smear. Behind the flake, just room for a Number Three Friend, and this can be backed up by a Number Five Rock Placement in the offset crack in the roof. Note, this placement is marginal after rain. Only a dyno can get you to the one substantial hold under the roof, but the swing out on gripping is nasty: 35 metres drop…’

  Rowland read on, and as he did so, these words opened out the mountains to him; he saw, simultaneously, their immensity and the minute details of the cracks and crevices which made ascent possible. He considered that route and the sense of triumph he had felt on completing it. He considered, in particular, the use of a ‘dyno’, or dynamic movement, as referred to here. In essence, when effecting a dyno, a climber leaped—and although, to a watcher, that move might appear one of fluidity and acrobatic ease, it was dangerous. There was a moment, the tiniest of moments, when the climber moved through air, up and across the rock-face, springing towards the smallest projection or indentation in the rock, over which, or in which, his fingers could obtain enough purchase to support his body weight. The manoeuvre required nerve and physical strength; it required route knowledge and experience and a very precise degree of judgement. If mistimed, or ill-executed, the climber fell—in which case, his safety depended on the skill and care with which he had secured his protection ropes.

  Rowland considered this manoeuvre, and the crux of this route. Coming to a sudden decision, he picked up the telephone and again called Lindsay.

  This time, she answered almost immediately. Hearing her familiar voice, Rowland felt less sure of his reason for calling.

  ‘You’ve been engaged,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Lindsay, as she often did, sounded breathless and jittery. ‘I—someone from the States was calling me. I’m packing for New York. Why do I pack so badly, Rowland? There’s clothes all over the bed and the floor. I can’t decide what to take.’

  ‘Take that red dress,’ Rowland said, after a pause. ‘I like that.’

  ‘Really? It’s a bit…Are you sure? I suppose it would do for parties.’

  ‘Will you be going to many parties?’

  ‘I might. Yes, probably. But I’ve lost the knack for parties, Rowland.’

  ‘I suspect I never had it.’

  There was a silence, during which Rowland watched a red-dressed Lindsay move across some New York party space. In his mind’s eye, he saw her do this very clearly—and she was not unaccompanied.

  ‘I had a postcard from Katya,’ he said, with some difficulty, and with detectable awkwardness. ‘She wanted the details of some book I mentioned. I gather my friend Colin recovered.’ He paused. ‘I gather he did at least call you to apologize…’

  ‘Oh, yes, he did. That Sunday morning, after you left. He rang first thing—he is nice, Rowland. He sent me this bouquet of flowers; it was so beautiful. Roses and lilies and things. It was huge; it used up all my vases. I’m in my bedroom, and it looks like a bower…’

  Rowland frowned.

  ‘Also those clothes,’ Lindsay said, still breathlessly, ‘so it looks like a bower and a bomb site. Oh, I’ve just seen a rocket. They’re having a firework party next door. There’s this enormous bonfire. It’s like a war zone here, explosions, fire-crackers going off. Can you hear fireworks, Rowland?’

  Rowland listened. He realized that all evening, the other side of some barrier in his mind, he had been hearing muffled explosions, the whine as rockets took off.

  ‘Yes, I can. Just. The shutters are closed though and that blocks out the sound.’

  ‘I love those shutters. Is the fire lit?’

  ‘Of course. Otherwise I’d freeze. Lindsay—’

  ‘How nice.’ Lindsay gave a breathless sigh. ‘Are you working? Have you had a horrible week?’

  ‘Fairly horrible. It’s easing up. I should be working and I’m not; I couldn’t concentrate for some reason. I—I just rang to wish you a safe journey…’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll give your regards to Broadway, Rowland…’

  ‘I’d like that.’ He paused. ‘Give my regards to Colin as well. I haven’t set eyes on him since lunch in Oxford.’

  ‘Colin?’

  ‘Well, Katya mentioned that he was about to go off to New York. I’m sure he’ll look you up there…’

  ‘Oh, he said something about that. He’s having meetings with the evil genius, I think, and he’s going to be staying somewhere odd—I remember, with some American aunt. Some batty ancient aunt.’

  ‘That’ll be his Great-Aunt Emily. She is ancient, but not batty; quite the reverse.’

  ‘Well, I don’t expect I will see him, Rowland. Or the aunt. I’ll be rushing about…’

  ‘Lindsay—’

  ‘Going into ecstasies about dresses and hats. I’m quoting you now, Rowland. You said that once, years ago, before I taught you to understand fashion…’

  ‘Lindsay—’

  ‘I was so angry with you when you said that. It’s taken me nearly three years to admit that all your criticisms were right…Oh heavens, did you hear that? The most enormous explosion; like Semtex. I’m sorry, I’m talking too much. Why do I do that?’

  ‘Because,’ Rowland said, in a measured way, ‘because you’re a woman, Lindsay. Because you think that if you talk fast enough and long enough, I won’t hear what you’re actually saying. And it does make it difficult. It’s like decoding something; it’s like listening to Morse.’

  ‘What nonsense. I always say what I think…’

  ‘Do you?’ Rowland gave a sigh. ‘In my opinion, Lindsay, you say what you truly think even less often than I do, and I virtually never say what I think.’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ Lindsay replied, with spirit. ‘I can tell what you’re thinking, whatever you say. Women can do that; it’s our great strength.’

  ‘Oh really? Then tell me what I’m thinking now.’

  ‘That’s not fair. I can’t see you.’

  ‘You mean you have to see me? So much for female intuition, Lindsay. I’m not impressed.’

  ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You sound…dry. You’re smiling, Rowland, in that dry, infuriating way you do. You’re thinking—are you smiling like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You see! I knew I was right. And I know what you’re thinking too. You’re thinking Lindsay talks nonsense; she’s a complete airhead.’

  ‘Wrong. A million miles out.’

  ‘You’re thinking about work.’

  ‘Wrong again.’

  ‘Damn, these fireworks must be putting me off. Colin; I think you’re thinking about Colin, about that very drunken lunch.’

  ‘Wrong yet again. You may be thinking about Colin; I’m not.’

  ‘There’s no need to sound so irritable, and I definitely know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking, why doesn’t this damn woman get off the phone? She’s a pest.’

  ‘Utterly wrong. I can give you my word—I’ve never thought that in my life, not once.’

  Rowland spoke with great firmness. There was a silence, then, in answer, a sharp intake of breath; a strange moaning sound came down the line; this was followed by Lindsay, explaining she was moaning in despair. She still had so much packing to do; it was late; she had to be out at the airport at dawn. Rowland interrupted these excuses.

  ‘Where are you staying in New York?’ he said.

  ‘The Pierre. I’m staying at the Pierre.’

  ‘Maybe I should call you at the Pierre sometime. You could tell me what I was thinking. We could see if your intuition improves. Then—’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then you could call me—when you get back. You could call me when you get back from the airport, after you
’ve closed the door, before you’ve removed your coat. Is that agreed?’

  ‘All right. Agreed.’

  There was a silence; a long silence. Lindsay made a coughing sound, then cleared her throat.

  ‘Why?’ she croaked.

  Rowland considered. He thought of a call made to Yorkshire, which he had missed. He thought of Colin’s remarks to him when describing that call. He hesitated. ‘I shall have missed you, Lindsay,’ he replied quietly, ‘and it’s always good to hear your voice.’

  Had she said goodbye? Lindsay, replacing the receiver, was not at all sure. Possibly; she could not recall, because the room was suddenly bright and the whole conversation was whirling about in her head. Its words would not lie still, nor assemble themselves in the correct order. The room was fizzing with words, and the undersides of words, and the spaces between words. The words were protean—they might have meant that, and they might have meant this.

  She began to roam about the room making odd, inarticulate sounds. She clasped and unclasped her hands and stared unseeingly at the chaos around her. Dresses and blouses, trousers, skirts and snaking tights; sentences that led in one direction and then doubled back. She prayed hard and silently not to hope, because hoping was the most painful emotion of all and the one she was most determined to cure. She pinched herself and read herself more of the usual silent lectures, because she knew she had been here before, in this stupid demented state, and she had learned, again and again, just how deluded it was.

  Affection was not love, and she had to learn to distinguish the two in Rowland’s voice. It was pathetic, pathetic, that a man’s voice could produce this effect. Had she been twenty, there might have been some excuse, but she was not twenty, and something was badly wrong with her. Somewhere and somehow the past decades had never happened and she had failed to grow up.

  No—she could not accept that. If to outgrow love was to grow up, then she would have none of it; she would be content to remain foolish and immature until the date of her death. So no, she would not denounce or renounce the need or the desire, but she would cure herself of imagining a response where it did not exist. She must stop her own emotions spilling over, so that the words she could not say overflowed into his, and her imagination rewrote Rowland’s scripts. On the other hand—and here she felt again an irrepressible delight—Rowland had liked her red dress; he had said, with great firmness, that he liked, no, that it was good to hear her voice. He did intend to call her in America; he wanted her to call him, the instant, the very instant, she got back. And this request, Lindsay found, had a soaring resonance; its wings beat about her heart and her head. Such a glorious night, this, she thought, dancing across to the window and gazing out. There was a moon, a full, high, powerful, pregnant moon, and instead of stars, which the lights of London blocked out, there was the lovely artifice of rocket star-trails, showering gold on wintry gardens, and exploding over the shine of slate roofs.

  She had been talking to Gini in Washington, earlier, when Rowland had been trying to reach her. Now, watching these streaking stars and listening to these thunderclaps, it was clear to her that she must, at once, call her friend back.

  No sooner thought than done. She dialled Gini’s number and spoke with a sparkling precision; she rearranged all the plans they had made less than an hour earlier, and, having done so, hung up and began to repack. Such a transformation: now, she found, the clothes folded themselves into suitcases and lay obligingly flat, shoes tucked themselves cunningly in corners; instead of bulging and protesting and refusing to shut, as the cases usually did, they closed with ease—one touch of the fingers and the locks snapped shut. One last case remained. Inside it, Lindsay prepared a nest of tissue-paper; she danced across to the closet, and on this nest, interleaved with more tissue, she folded her newly beloved red dress.

  In Washington, meanwhile, in her dead father’s house, Gini had replaced the telephone receiver, and—looking at her husband and half-sleeping baby son—was shaking her head.

  ‘That was Lindsay again, and she sounded completely mad,’ she said.

  ‘Lindsay? But you’d only just spoken to her.’

  ‘I know, and she sounded fine then. Now, I couldn’t make out half of what she was saying. It’s Bonfire Night in England; I could hear fireworks in the background. She was scrambling up all her sentences and she was out of breath; she sounded as if she’d just run a marathon…no, panic-stricken. She sounded panic-stricken, as if she’d just been attacked.’

  Her husband smiled. He moved across to the windows and looked out at the quiet, charming, brick-paved Georgetown street. He adjusted Lucien’s weight in his arms so he was more secure and kissed his brow.

  ‘Oh, you know Lindsay,’ he said carelessly, ‘she often sounds as if she’s run halfway up the Empire State building. Lucien’s sleepy—I’m going to take him out in a minute. What did she want anyway?’

  ‘She wanted to cancel her Thanksgiving visit here, I think. Half an hour earlier, we had everything planned. Now she says she may have to rush straight back to London…’

  ‘How odd. Did she say why?’

  ‘No, not really. Some garbled excuse.’ She gave a small frown and glanced at Pascal. ‘I think there’s some man at the back of it. She’s been quite strange for months…’

  ‘Well, I hope there is,’ Pascal replied. ‘I like Lindsay; she deserves to be happy…’

  ‘A man doesn’t necessarily provide happiness, you know,’ Gini said, a little sharply, turning away. ‘Lindsay’s lived alone for years. She’s perfectly happy as she is.’

  There was a small silence. Pascal looked at his wife thoughtfully; she had moved away to the dining-table which she had been using as a desk. It was piled with folders and files, most of them containing the paperwork attendant on her father’s death. This room, like most of the house, was in the process of being dismantled prior to its sale. There were faded patches of wall-paper where pictures had once hung and one wall was lined with packing-cases. He had never liked Gini’s father and he had found these necessary weeks in his former home difficult. This, he knew, was even more true for Gini, and he was prepared to make allowances because of that.

  ‘She might not wish to continue living alone,’ he said, in a mild way. ‘She might even wish to marry again, and marriage can bring happiness, don’t you think?’

  His wife coloured. ‘Of course. I didn’t mean that. It’s just—Lindsay has no judgement whatsoever where men are concerned…’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. Who is this unsuitable man she’s interested in?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Someone she works with, I think. Pascal, I don’t have time for this. I have to check through this stupid Natasha Lawrence article I’ve written and fax it off to her and I just know she’s going to start raising objections. I wish I’d never said I’d do it. I hate showbiz profiles; this is the last one I’ll ever do…’

  Her husband, watching her change the subject in this way, thought he knew the reason. He hesitated, wondering if he could bring himself to mention Rowland McGuire’s name, with all its attendant risks. He decided not to do so, although he now felt certain that McGuire was the unnamed man concerned, for he had heard jealousy in his wife’s voice—or possessiveness, perhaps.

  Could you be possessive about a man you no longer cared for? A man you had not seen in three years? He doubted it; but then his wife did not relinquish her hold on others easily, even after they had ceased to be part of her life. But there were reasons for that—her relationship with her father above all. It had not been easy for her, he thought, as she bent her fair head over her papers, to come here to her father’s house and discover the degree to which he had eradicated her from his life. So far, they had not found the least hint of her existence—not one photograph, none of the letters she had written him, none of the newspaper articles she had written and religiously sent to him. The thanklessness and cruelty of this angered Pascal; with the death of her father, he had believed that Gini might at last
break free of his influence. A sojourn here in this house had shown him that death made no difference; for many more years, he feared, his wife would be haunted by her father’s indifference and neglect.

  Moving across to her now, he drew her against him and kissed her pale hair.

  ‘Send the article off, darling,’ he said, ‘then come out with Lucien and me. It would do you good to walk, to get some fresh air. You’ve been working so hard: clearing up this place, writing a thousand letters to lawyers and banks. Come out with us—the sun’s shining; it’s a beautiful day…’

  ‘No, I won’t—I’d like to, Pascal, you know I would, but I need to check this through before I send it. There are some letters I have to write. If Lindsay isn’t coming for Thanksgiving, I suppose we could leave here a little sooner…’

  ‘We could.’ He hesitated. ‘And that might be a much better plan anyway, darling. It was never going to be easy, having her here—the place is in chaos. I know you were very set on it, but we can’t delay for ever. You’ll feel better once you’re out of this house. We could go to friends for Thanksgiving, then we could start work on our book…’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She moved away from him. ‘You go, Pascal; I’ll come with you tomorrow. But I must get on with this.’

  ‘Do you want me to read your piece before I go?’

  ‘No, I hate it. It’s adequate at best. I got nothing out of her. You know the only interesting fact in here?’ She gestured at the printout of her article. ‘It took fifty-five takes to shoot that spider sequence in Dead Heat—and Natasha Lawrence is terrified of spiders, or so she said. I thought that was revealing. That sequence is one of the vilest things I’ve ever seen on film. Why would that ex-husband of hers put her through that fifty-five times? He’s a sadist, I think.’

  ‘I doubt that.’ Pascal smiled. ‘That sequence is very complex from a technical point of view, Gini. There’s those mirrors; there’s that three hundred and sixty degree pan. I’ve seen it three times; I work with cameras and I still don’t know how he did it…’ He paused. ‘You’re sure you won’t come with us? No? Then we’ll see you in about an hour…’