Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  He took a step towards the glass wall, felt a second’s vertiginous fear of falling as he saw the deep, dark declivity of the auditorium open out beneath; then moved again, and saw across the gulf of the audience, infinitely distant, silent and gesticulating, the figure of Estella, the figure of his wife.

  He watched her lips move, her mouth open and close, and her throat pulse. He watched her tenderly as, beautiful in her young girl’s first-act white dress, she moved centre stage. He savoured her silence, then, with a slow reluctance, he put on the headphones. The music hit him in a wave; soaring up through the currents of the song came the sound of Estella’s voice.

  They had reached the fourth scene of the first act; he was hearing the duet between that cruel child, Estella, and poor, humiliated, confused, besotted Pip. Court had no liking for musicals, most of which he despised, and scant admiration for the composer of this one. He had advised Natasha against taking this part, and had had forebodings of failure for her when she did. None of those factors was relevant now.

  This particular song, one of the great hits of the show, was not even a song he liked. He could see that technically it was difficult, and that melodically it was intricate—it interwove major and minor keys in a haunting way—but he had always found its bittersweetness not to his taste. Even so, it left him defenceless. To his anger and incomprehension, the power of his wife’s song bypassed his mind and sent a shock to his heart, just as—no matter how he resisted—it always did.

  Again he felt that warning constriction in his chest; he heard himself make some strange wounded sound; he removed the headphones and fumbled his way out of the darkness of the box. He descended the stone staircases without seeing them, still hearing the voice of his wife, both on the Tannoy system and in his head. Halfway down the stairs, he took a wrong turn and found himself lost in that labyrinth of backstage passageways. He turned, leaned against a wall, retraced his steps, descended again, and found himself, at last, at the stage door. He ignored the man on duty there, who, on seeing him, rose with an exclamation of concern. Pushing his way through the doors, he fought to control his breathing and fought to control the anxiety which always made these paroxysms worse. Finding himself in that dimly lit alleyway, he blessed its darkness; he moved away from the door, away from prying eyes, and slumped back against a wall, now gasping for breath.

  It was a bad asthma attack and the pain was acute. He listened to the sirens of this city, to the incessant growl of automobiles pumping out their poisons, as he fumbled for the inhaler he always carried. He tilted his head back and depressed the plunger once, then again, sucking hard. At the third attempt the beta-adrenoceptor stimulants at last took effect. They soothed his breathing, if not his mind, and that fist which had been squeezing his lungs slackened its grip.

  He waited, breathing quietly and shallowly. Two women entered the stage door; one man came out. No-one took the least notice of him and perhaps no-one saw him; Court, who hated others to witness these attacks, was grateful for this.

  He watched the man, the unremarkable man, walk down the alleyway, turn into the street beyond and disappear. It came to him, in the clear but distanced way that ideas often did after an attack such as this, that the man could be Joseph King, who—as he had informed his wife—could be alive or dead. That man could be King, and so could any other man he encountered today, tomorrow, any day of the week.

  King could be driving his taxi-cab, or taking his order in a restaurant; King could be the man he sat next to in a screening-room, or met briefly at some movie festival. King might have worked for him, or with Natasha in the past—this last suspicion, that King was connected with the movie industry in some way, having deepened recently, for King’s knowledge of movies, he had come to see, was as deep and as intimate as his knowledge of Tomas Court’s wife.

  King was no-one, and could be almost anyone; indeed, when Court slept badly and had nightmares, as he often did, it was in Court’s own mirror that he often manifested himself. And King, who had administered his poison so well, pouring the substance into his ear drop by drop, was not a man who was easily killed off. Court thought of him as immortal and invisible; even if he were dead—and Court never felt he was—he lived on in the minds of those he persecuted. In this capacity lay his peculiar evil and his peculiar strength.

  Tall, short, dark, fair, old, young? After five years he still could answer none of these questions. He leaned back against the wall, waiting for his heart-rate to slow and his breathing to relax. When it had done so, he moved away from the protection of the wall and began to walk slowly up the alley. He stationed himself at the kerb in the street beyond, averting his eyes from the flash of his wife’s name on the theatre front. He watched the flow of traffic, waiting for the one cab with its light lit which would take him out of this cold foul city air and uptown to his son. Cab after cab, all occupied, and he could sense that although the pain was subduing, his disquiet was not.

  Natasha had claimed, closing her bedroom door to him some months before their separation and divorce, that it was he himself who gave King power by believing, or half-believing, by dwelling on all the lies King wrote or said. She further claimed that his obsession with King had not only poisoned their marriage and permeated his work, but was slowly but surely eating away at his health. ‘That man will be the death of you,’ she had once said.

  Court did not view his concern with King as an obsession, and if it were, that was excusable—presumably he was allowed to be obsessed with a man who knew his wife’s and son’s movements so precisely, and constantly issued threats? But he did acknowledge some truth in her remarks: he admitted that, for several years now, it had been King’s actions or communications that brought on the worst of his asthma attacks.

  The cure, then, ought to be to forget King, to put out of his mind all those whispering suggestions King wrote, or said—a process that should become easier if King had been silenced and was actually dead. Yet Tomas Court was not sure he wanted to be cured; there was a part of him, and a vibrant part, that clung to King, even as he watched him destroy his marriage and endanger his health. He now missed King’s communications; sometimes, at night, when he lay on his bed, listening to replays of King’s past calls, he found himself frustrated at the five months of silence. What he wanted was a new message, another revelation, an up-date.

  He needed that dark side, he thought, as a cab finally pulled in at the kerb. He needed to listen to the unspeakable. He wondered, in a distanced way, as the cab eased forward into grid-locked traffic, whether he ought to explain that to his wife. Not necessary, he decided; such ambivalences lay at the very heart of his marriage, as he had been reminded when assaulted by the power of his wife’s singing, tonight.

  ‘So this is the Conrad,’ Colin Lascelles said to Lindsay, coming to a halt beneath a huge encrusted entrance portico. ‘Now do you see what I mean? It is powerful, don’t you think?’

  ‘I certainly do see what you mean. Dear God, Colin…’ Lindsay looked up at the portico, which towered over them both. The architect of the Conrad, as Colin had just been telling her over dinner, had been a strange man; the twin Conrad brothers, both financiers, who had commissioned him to design the building, had been equally strange, and—if Colin’s account was accurate—the building had a strange chequered past. It boasted several ghosts, the most fearsome and vengeful of which was said to be Anne Conrad, unmarried sister to the twins, who in 1915, or thereabouts, had leaped to her death from one of the windows of the apartment she shared with her brothers. Stepping back to examine the Conrad’s façade, Lindsay wondered which window this was.

  Anne Conrad’s manifestations were infrequent but ill-omened, Colin had said. Further details had not been forthcoming; Lindsay had intended to prompt Colin, but now she saw this building, she changed her mind. She was too suggestible: if Colin described these hauntings, she might imagine herself into an encounter with the dead woman, who had been young, beautiful—and deranged, or so people said, Colin
had added, by way of an afterthought.

  She must have passed the building dozens of times, Lindsay thought, yet she had never paused to look at it. Now she did, and at night too, she realized just how magnificent and grim it was. This was how she had always imagined the House of Usher might look. She glanced across, over her shoulder, to the great tract of darkness at the heart of Manhattan that was Central Park, then looked back more closely at the Conrad building’s huge entrance mouth.

  A cluster of liver-coloured Corinthian columns flanked its approach steps, giving it the air of a sombre classical temple. These columns supported a vast dark carved pediment; even Lindsay’s untrained eye could see, however, that the proportions here were infelicitous, for the pediment was oversized, so that the pillars seemed oppressed by its weight. They looked squat, and their appearance was not enhanced by the surface treatment of their massive stone plinths. ‘Vermiculation’, according to Colin, was the correct term for this doubtful form of decoration; to Lindsay’s eyes, the plinths looked as if their stone had been eaten away by millions of blind, hungry worms—or maggots, perhaps.

  She gave an involuntary shiver. She began to see that Hillyard White’s heart had not been in the rigours of classicism in any case. There might be a suggestion of a Greekish temple, but the whole façade was a monstrous and heterogeneous sprouting of embellishments. This detail had been plundered from the French, this from the Venetians, this from the Egyptians, that from the Spanish; a smorgasbord of past centuries and architectural styles had been gobbled up and spewed forth.

  ‘Dear God, what’s that?’ she said, realizing that even the pillars were not unadorned, and that from some clustering stone vines mounting the wall behind them, a dark face was peering out.

  ‘A gargoyle of sorts.’ Leaning across, Colin patted its ugly head with affection. ‘I shouldn’t look too closely, Lindsay—some of the detailing is quite nasty.’

  ‘What’s that in his mouth? Oh—’ Lindsay frowned; from one angle the gargoyle was biting the head off a snake; from another angle it was possibly not a snake, and the gargoyle was otherwise employed.

  ‘In we go,’ Colin said, somewhat hurriedly, taking her arm.

  He drew her into a foyer (Citizen Kane, Lindsay thought) and greeted first a doorman, then a porter. It took Lindsay some while even to see the porter, who was dwarfed by the altar that served as his desk. They approached a wall of linenfold panelling, and Lindsay realized that although she knew how she had entered this cathedral—the entrance maw was somewhere at the other end of this nave, several miles back—she could see no other way out of it.

  ‘Full of tricks, this building,’ said Colin, delighted at this. ‘I did warn you. Not easy to find your way around unless you know it. Even Hillyard White’s plans are deceptive—which is one of the reasons why it’s so secure, of course.’

  He glanced around at the porter, then smiled at Lindsay.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it gets worse, or better, depending on your point of view. Are you of a nervous disposition?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Hold my hand.’ He nodded at the porter. ‘We’ll go up by the main stairs, Giancarlo.’

  There was a low buzzing sound, and the linenfold in front of them opened up. They walked through into an inner hall, the panelling closing behind them with a hiss.

  ‘There is an elevator,’ Colin said, ‘but I thought you wouldn’t mind walking up. Emily’s only on the second floor, and I didn’t want you to miss this.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ Lindsay said.

  She walked forward a few paces, across a cold paved floor. She looked at the wide blood-red-carpeted oak staircase rising in front of her, which was lit at intervals by statues of blackamoors holding lamps aloft. It rose before her, then twisted back, and was cantilevered, storey by storey, so she found she was looking at the undersides of the stairs as they mounted up and up to a huge domed space which settled over the stairwell like a lid. She was in the gut of the building, she realized, and all the apartments must lead off this vast central digestive tract. The dome was at least ten storeys above her head, each floor was galleried, and an army could have marched up the stairs ten abreast, yet the effect was claustrophobic. The space was hushed, warm and curiously expectant, as if the stairs, blackamoors and shadowy galleries were waiting to see what these two new arrivals might do next.

  ‘What do you think? Monstrous, isn’t it?’ Colin was looking around him with affection and pride. ‘Sublimely monstrous. I never get over it.’

  The fat coils of the radiator next to Lindsay emitted a digestive gurgle, then a faint, satisfied hiss. She shivered again.

  ‘Hitchcock would have killed for that staircase,’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t he just?’ Colin sighed. ‘Embarrassing, those blackamoors. There was a move to get rid of them, a few years back. Emily nipped that in the bud very quickly…’

  ‘She likes them? Colin—she can’t possibly like them.’

  ‘I’m afraid she does. She’s not exactly politically correct.’ He hesitated. ‘The thing is, she was right, from a purist point of view; they are original. And Emily’s lived in this building all her life. In fact, she was born here. In fact…’

  Lindsay, who was growing less keen on this visit to Aunt Emily by the second, sensed that Colin, too, might be having second thoughts. His manner, confident a moment before, was now becoming doubtful. She was beginning to recognize the symptoms of Colin’s insecurities, she thought.

  ‘I’m just wondering,’ she began, ‘isn’t it a bit late, this visit, Colin? We stayed longer in the restaurant than we meant to do, and…She’s eighty-five years old, after all…’

  ‘Oh, that’s not the problem. Emily’s a nightbird; she keeps very strange hours. She nods off during the day, though she denies that, of course, and sometimes it’s hard to know when she is asleep. She’ll be in her chair, I’ll tiptoe about, and then suddenly she’ll speak and make me jump like hell…So this is early evening for Emily. Around midnight, she gets very lively indeed…’

  Lindsay was now sure she recognized the symptoms of nerves, which included loquaciousness.

  ‘But there is a problem,’ she said. ‘Come on, Colin, what is it?’

  ‘Well, she’s a bit deaf…’

  ‘And?’

  Colin considered. ‘She can be a bit odd,’ he said finally.

  Lindsay wondered whether he might mean senile. Dotty? Eccentric? Slightly demented? Ninety-five per cent crazed? Since Colin was given both to overstatement and understatement, his remarks could be difficult to interpret. He was now looking both anxious again and downcast. Lindsay took his arm. ‘Well, I’m very glad you’re with me,’ she said. ‘With you here, I feel safe.’

  Immediately she had said this, it struck her that she truly meant it; Colin’s presence, for reasons she could not exactly define, was reassuring. Her compliment, or perhaps the fact that she took his arm, seemed to allay his anxieties; his confidence returned at once.

  ‘Not very odd,’ he amplified, leading her towards the staircase, ‘just odd occasionally. A bit of a tease, you might say. You may find it helps if you remember that

  Lindsay braced herself for this teasing great-aunt. The stairs were not really Psycho material, she decided—more Gone With the Wind, more Tara. Hello, Scarlett and Rhett, she thought, as they began to climb them, dreamily imagining herself as a feisty O’Hara, and Rowland McGuire as an improvement on Clark Gable. Hello, Polanski, and hello Repulsion, she thought, as they turned into a long, galleried corridor, where hands thrust from walls holding lamps. Colin rang the doorbell to Emily’s apartment and Lindsay waited for Dracula’s servant to answer it. Instead, Mrs Danvers opened the door, and led them into a very large and daunting drawing-room with a du Maurier whisk of her skirts.

  An old, a very old, very wrinkled, and very imperious woman held out her hand; introductions were made. Lindsay looked at Aunt Emily narrowly; Well, hello Miss Havisham, she thought.

  ‘I want a
word with you. You’re late,’ Angelica said, as Tomas Court entered the quiet living-room of his wife’s Carlyle suite. Court moved past her without greeting her or looking at her, but his manner was often curt, even rude, and Angelica was used to this.

  ‘I’ve been talking to the bodyguard…’ he said.

  ‘Which bodyguard?’

  ‘The one here.’ Court’s manner was irritable. ‘John. Jack—whatever his name is.’

  ‘Jack.’ Angelica gave him a dismissive glance. ‘That’s why you’re over an hour late? You’ve been talking to the bodyguard for an hour? Jonathan’s been waiting up for you…’

  ‘I was delayed. I got held up.’

  ‘He won’t go to sleep until he’s seen you.’ She paused; Court had not looked at her once and had now turned his back. She sighed. ‘Maria stayed on to sit with him. He’s showing her his new animal books. He wanted to show them to you. There’s one on big cats…’

  ‘Maria?’ Court said.

  Angelica sighed again. ‘You’ve met her. You met her the other week. The one who comes to give Natasha her massage before the show sometimes. The aromatherapist. Dark hair, glasses. Jonathan likes her; she’s a nice girl…’

  ‘Well get rid of her. There’s enough women in and out of this apartment as it is…’

  Angelica, used to this complaint, did not reply. She left the room, and in the distance, Court heard the sound of women’s voices. The aromatherapist, the voice coach, the two secretaries, the Yoga expert who taught Natasha relaxation techniques, the personal trainer, also female; Natasha’s days seemed to him spent amidst a retinue of female helpers and supporters, and he loathed the way in which they treated her with a reverent concern, tending the hive, tending their queen, cosseting and protecting, grooming, feeding and honing. He found it unhealthy; Natasha had always had a tendency to surround herself with priestesses, and since their divorce, the tendency had worsened; he had often told her this.