Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘It’s possible, Angelica. I think that. For what it’s worth, the police also think that way, and so does the agency.’

  ‘That bastard. That son of a bitch bastard.’ The blood rushed into Angelica’s face. ‘So we just have to go on waiting—that’s his idea? Waiting, the way we always did? That’s what we have to live with? Jumping every time the phone rings, having traps on the line, checking the mail, checking the locks…’ She drew in her breath, pressing her hand against her chest. ‘That’s what we have to do—go on living with the bodyguards, looking over our shoulders every minute of every live-long day, waiting for that bastard to resurrect?’

  ‘It would amuse him to play Lazarus.’ Court turned away to disguise his unease. ‘So, yes, I’m afraid that’s exactly what we have to do. We go on being careful; we go on being vigilant—for as long as it takes.’

  He moved away, feeling suddenly exhausted. He looked around this pale dull room where his wife had chosen to live for the past year; his longing for her presence intensified. He began to wish that he had never had this conversation, necessary though it was. He began to wish that he was alone, and that of all the words Angelica could have used, she had not used the word ‘resurrect’. That word made him deeply uneasy.

  Angelica made a strange and ugly sound—a harsh, rasping intake of breath. Turning to look at her, he saw that she was trembling; the force of her animosity came off her like heat.

  ‘I’m going to fix him, and this time I’m going to fix him good. There’s something I have to do—it won’t take long. I’ll be back…’

  She hastened from the room. Court looked at his watch. It was past eleven. Should he leave now, or stay? His wife would have only just left the theatre. She would be on her way to have dinner with Jules McKechnie, possibly alone, possibly with others; it might be hours before she came back.

  He began to move about the room in an irresolute way, trying to find in it some trace of the woman he knew and loved. Its neutrality and its tastefulness appalled him. The room was white on cream on beige—a thousand permutations of colourlessness. Natasha had hung some of her own paintings, he saw—and his wife’s taste in paintings was not his.

  Since the divorce, she had begun to collect eighteenth-and nineteenth-century watercolours; the vaguer and washier they were, the more she liked them. Court stared at what might have been a seascape—a wash of indigo, a wash of yellow-white, some inky hieroglyphs that might have been trees, or birds, or ships.

  On the opposite wall, she had hung some of her own artist mother’s oils—paintings he had always refused to give house room. Natasha’s mother, now dead, had been a flower-child of the Sixties, and like many children of that particular decade, never grew up. Her amateurish paintings, large and violently coloured, were all depictions of monstrous flowers, close up. Their stamens, sepals and pistils had a moistly sexual insistence; Natasha said they were powerful and reminded her of the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. To Court, who loathed O’Keeffe’s work too, but could see its strengths, this proved how curiously blind his wife could be. She could see so much sometimes, yet she could also be, or affect to be, myopic. ‘I will get her back. I will take her back,’ he said to the throaty flower in front of him, and he began to see ways in which that might be done, if he was careful, if he scripted them correctly.

  It was unbearable to remain in this room any longer, he found; its quiescence and opacity oppressed him. He could still hear his own voice, explaining uncertainties to Angelica, and the air here was filled with uncertainty, ambivalence and doubt. Also, he could now smell burning, a peculiarly unpleasant burning smell too, like hair singed. He could hear, faintly, the sound of rustling and crackling.

  He could not bear the jealous hours of waiting, he decided. He would prefer not to know how late it was when his wife returned; he would prefer not to stay here and speculate as to her activities. He went out into the corridor and paused by the entrance to the small bedsitting room which was Angelica’s. Here, the smell of burning was stronger; he could glimpse, through the open door, the cluster of crucifixes and saints’ pictures and religious knickknackery with which Angelica adorned every space in which she lived.

  ‘I cursed him,’ she said, appearing in the doorway from nowhere, and startling Court. ‘I cursed him—and this time I cursed him real good. I got through. I could feel it; I could feel him, like some fish wriggling on a hook…’

  ‘Yes, well you’ve cursed him plenty of times before,’ Court said coldly, ‘and without conspicuous success.’

  He looked at Angelica’s flushed face; a vein stood out on her temple; her heavy body was giving off heat like an electric plate. He tried, as he had often done before, to tell himself that Angelica was an ugly, overweight, vindictive virgin of fifty-five, whose sole redeeming feature was her love for his son. She was without powers, he told himself, and he was the last person in the world to be impressed by the mumbo-jumbo of her semi-Catholic, semi-pagan prayers, curses and jinxes.

  He told himself this, but as before, it did not convince. She muttered a few more words, lapsing as she always did, from English to her native Sicilian, to a dialect filled with liquid threat, with razor-sharp sibilants, with saints’ names and obscenities intermixed.

  She was trembling; the light in the hallway was poor. Court, acknowledging his fear, backed away from her.

  ‘I fixed him,’ she said, turning her bright black eyes on Court. ‘He’s starting to die right now—but slow, from the inside out. I’m going to let him suffer awhile, and then I’m going to finish him off. I fixed him. I had him on-line. He tried to hide, but he couldn’t hide from me this time. I summoned him up.’

  The last phrase had a hissing sound to it. Court turned, and without speaking further, quickly left. He felt followed the instant the door closed, and he blamed Angelica and her dramatics for this. The sensation remained with him when he left the Carlyle; he could not shake it off. He decided to walk to the Conrad building, as he sometimes did at night, and it pursued him there. He stood outside the Conrad, on the north corner, looking up at the dark windows of the apartment his wife wanted—and he knew he was watched.

  He swung around, staring towards the shadows and shrubbery of the park; nothing moved; no-one spoke. He looked up at a thin and sickly moon, riding high above that many-eyed roof-line, and then, some time after midnight, hailed a cab and directed it back south.

  The sensation of being pursued remained. He could blame it on fatigue, on lack of food, on superstition, on the conversation with Angelica which still rippled through his mind—but he could still sense some watcher, some follower in his street; he could sense eyes as he stepped into the elevator.

  Instinct, recognition, the influence of some sixth sense—whatever the explanation for that sensation of unease, he saw how timely its warnings had been as soon as the elevator doors opened.

  He felt his body come alive with adrenalin shock; the door to his loft stood open, its locks smashed. He could see that in the room beyond vandalism had been at work. The lights were on; the floor was a sea of paper, and the perpetrator of this, whose identity he did not doubt for one second, was still present. He could hear that low, pedantic, murmuring, Midwestern voice, and it was murmuring an old message. ‘Under the left breast,’ he heard. ‘Under the left breast.’

  He hesitated, flexing his hands, summoning his strength; then, with the eagerness of one greeting an old friend, a familiar not seen in a long while, he moved forward and pushed the door back.

  X

  ‘BREEDING,’ COLIN’S GREAT-AUNT EMILY said, with an air of getting straight to the point. She leaned forward and tapped Lindsay on the knee. Lindsay, who had been day-dreaming, jumped.

  ‘She’s bred once—will she breed again?’ Emily asked, in a sharply interrogative manner, glancing towards Colin. For one confusing moment, Lindsay thought this particular question might refer to her.

  ‘Fecundity,’ Emily continued, turning back to Lindsay, and giving her a glare. ‘She
is unquestionably fertile. In my opinion, that is what’s giving them the heebie-jeebies—bunch of old women. But, darn it, do they have a point? I want to know what you think, Lindsay. Advise me, my dear.’

  Lindsay did not know what she thought. To give advice was a little difficult, as she did not have the least idea what Emily was talking about. She tried hard to think of some noncommittal reply. For at least the last ten minutes, she realized, Aunt Emily had been rattling away to Colin, and Lindsay had allowed her own attention to wander away.

  She had been looking at this room, which was large and packed with a glorious accumulation of stuff. Some of this stuff was superb and some was tat. She had been wondering why Emily chose to put a vase of green ostrich feathers on a Hepplewhite desk; whether the magnificent portrait above the fireplace was a Sargent; whether the two strikingly beautiful women depicted in it could be related to Emily, who was strikingly plain; and whether the grand piano in the corner was supporting fifty-five ancestral photographs in silver frames, or fifty-six.

  She had also been wondering why Emily had reminded her of Miss Havisham, since she could now see that, beyond a tendency to pursue a private agenda in conversation, Emily did not resemble her in the least. This was no mad Dickensian bride, but a tall, lean woman, with a shock of white hair, bright, iris-blue eyes, and a good line in tweeds. She was wearing three pairs of spectacles on leather thongs about her neck, yet so far had used none of them; she was seated at one end of a gigantic sofa—Colin, looking nervous, was seated at the other end—and somewhere among the plenitude of its exquisite tapestry cushions there was at least one, possibly two, pug dogs. The lighting was subdued, which made the number of pugs difficult to confirm; they, or it, snuffled and snored constantly. Lindsay and Colin were drinking prudent mineral water; Aunt Emily was knocking back a serious bourbon on the rocks.

  Inattention, as Rowland McGuire had often remarked, was Lindsay’s besetting sin. She was always too busy examining the leaves of each tree in the forest to notice where the forest road led. With a woman like Emily, whose conversation was given to abrupt swerves, this tendency was disastrous. Emily was still waiting for a reply to her question, and Lindsay’s brain was in mid-skid. Breeding? Fertility? Lindsay eyed the pug, or pugs; it came to her that Emily was discussing the breeding of dogs, or, more specifically, bitches.

  ‘Pedigree very dubious indeed,’ Emily now said, rattling off again, to Lindsay’s relief. ‘Who sired her? No answer to that question, my dear. And then there’s the matter of her fame. She is excessively famous.’ Emily cocked a sharp eye at Lindsay. ‘What’s our reaction to that, my dear? Is famous bad or good?’

  Dogs could be famous, Lindsay thought—if they won Crufts, or something like that. Yes, she was almost sure she was on track. Emily was on the subject of dog-breeding, of pedigree, about which Lindsay, who liked only strays and mongrels, knew nothing and cared less. Still, old ladies had to be humoured. She gave Emily what she hoped was a smile of bright intelligence.

  ‘Tricky,’ she said.

  ‘And then there’s the money question.’ Emily’s face became grave, as did Lindsay’s two seconds later. ‘Too much money, my dear—and very recently acquired, or earned, which makes it rather worse.’ She paused, eyeing Lindsay. ‘Loot. The acquisition of loot. Always a delicate subject, that. Better not investigated sometimes. As I said to Henry Foxe, Henry, where d’you think this came from, darn it?’

  She thrust out a skinny hand and waggled a finger. On this arthritic digit was a very large diamond, Lindsay saw; it was one of the biggest rocks she had ever seen in her life.

  ‘And d’you know what Henry said? Tiffany’s.’ Emily gave a delighted snort of laughter. ‘I always admired Henry’s sense of humour; very droll. In fact, Lindsay, my dear, there was a time—Lord, back in 1932 this would have been, when Henry Foxe and I…’

  ‘More bourbon, Em?’ Colin rose quickly to his feet.

  ‘You are one sweet man,’ said Emily. ‘Don’t you agree, my dear? Colin, just wave the bottle over the top.’

  Colin poured an inch of bourbon into the glass. Emily declined ice and suggested he wave the bottle a bit more. Colin added another inch of bourbon, opened his mouth to speak, shut it again, and sat down with a defeated look. Lindsay eyed Emily; she gave no signs of being in the least intoxicated. Mad, Lindsay decided. Totally mad; barking; off the wall, and permanently out to lunch.

  There was method to this madness, she suspected, however. Emily had some objective in view, she felt, even if, for reasons of her own, she was approaching it by a peculiar and indirect route.

  ‘So, to summarize,’ Emily continued, ‘she’s bred once—which reminds me, my dear. You have a son, I think Colin said?’

  ‘Yes. Tom. He’s reading Modern History at Oxford now.’

  ‘Ah, Oxford. Brideshead. Delightful. I can’t believe it, my dear—you look so young.’

  ‘I married young,’ Lindsay said, with some firmness.

  ‘And divorced young, too, I hear. Quite right. If they’re no good, ship them out…Of course, I never risked marriage myself, not that I regret it now…So, let me see, your son must be eighteen, nineteen?’

  Lindsay sighed. She debated whether to claim Tom as a child prodigy who had gone up to Oxford aged fifteen, remembered Colin had met him, and decided against.

  ‘Twenty any minute now,’ she said.

  ‘Colin was charming at that age.’ Emily gave her a measuring look. ‘Wild, innocent, muddled. Ah, youth.’ She paused, eyeing Lindsay. ‘Of course, he’s still charming now. As I expect you find, my dear?’

  ‘Very,’ said Lindsay.

  The drift of Emily’s questions was now clear, she decided, hiding a smile. She looked at Colin, who appeared both agonized and mortified. She looked at Emily, who clearly suspected Lindsay of designs on her great-nephew. She considered saying plainly that if Colin had been wild, innocent and muddled at twenty, his character did not appear to have changed greatly in the succeeding two decades. She considered saying, even more plainly, that she was not trying to hook Colin, so his vigilant great-aunt could relax her guard.

  She rejected these possibilities: the second was ill-mannered; the first was hurtful—and she had no wish to hurt Colin, whose demeanour now indicated profound and desperate dejection. He shot Emily a pleading look.

  ‘You’re rambling about a bit, Em,’ he said. ‘I expect you feel tired. Maybe we should—’

  ‘Nonsense, I’m just waking up. Hitting form. Besides, I haven’t finished, and I want Lindsay’s views on this. Where was I? Ah yes, I was summarizing—the case for the prosecution, point by damning point! Breeding, pedigree, money…and fans, of course. The fans will almost certainly present problems, my dear, don’t you think?’

  Fans? Lindsay, now hopelessly lost, looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘And finally, my dear…’ Emily had been ticking off these points on her fingers. ‘Finally, we come to the single most important question of all. S-E-X, my dear—and also love, of course.’

  Love? Lindsay began to see that dogs could not possibly be the subject of discussion here. Colin, who had blushed painfully when the words ‘sex’ and ‘love’ were used, was now staring hard at the air, in the manner of a man who believed that, if he concentrated hard enough, he could teleport himself elsewhere.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite follow,’ Lindsay began.

  ‘My, dear, there is the ex-husband?’ Emily said, as if this made everything clear. ‘A most peculiar man—or so our spies report. Like you, my dear, if you’ll forgive my saying so, she has not loved wisely, and she has not chosen well. Will she choose more wisely second time around? Can we trust her to find a suitable mate, someone who will fit in? Alas, not necessarily. She will imagine she is in love, as women do, and her judgement will be impaired…’

  ‘What absolute rubbish, Em,’ Colin interrupted, five seconds before Lindsay. Showing signs of recovery, he gave his aunt a combative look. ‘You’re in no position to judge her fir
st marriage, and she’s far likelier to make the right choice second time around…’

  ‘I agree,’ said Lindsay. ‘Having one’s fingers burned improves the judgement no end.’

  ‘Do you think so? What a charming pair of optimists you are.’ Emily gave them a sprightly look. ‘I remain dubious. The next husband—do we know the nature of the beast? No. What about lovers? There are likely to be lovers. More problems there. I foresee disturbances! I can sense them in the air…’

  She gave a quick glance over her shoulder, then peered around the room as if disturbances might lurk here, among the crowded furniture, behind the thick folds of the curtains—or beyond the room perhaps, Lindsay thought; beyond it, in those shadowy galleries, in that womb of a staircase hall. A clock ticked softly; Emily appeared to be listening; from the plenitude of cushions came a low pugnacious growl. Lindsay, suddenly remembering the ghost of Anne Conrad, felt something cold slither along her spine.

  ‘Did you hear something, Colin?’ Emily, paling a little, cocked her head on one side.

  ‘No, nothing. It was probably just Frobisher in the corridor.’

  Colin rose, moved to the door, opened it and looked out. A cold draught issued into the room and wrapped itself around Lindsay’s ankles. She shivered. Colin closed the door.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Frobisher’s in her bedroom watching television—I can just hear it. You probably caught the sound of that, Em.’

  ‘Maybe. My hearing is acute at times.’ She hesitated. ‘This building is full of noises, and not always sweet ones. Occasionally, it expresses its opinions and its desires. It used to frighten me when I was a child…Did you hear anything, Lindsay?’

  ‘No, not exactly. But something—when your little dog growled. And my hands—my hands feel terribly cold.’

  ‘You didn’t see anything, I hope?’ The question was sharp.

  ‘No, no. Nothing at all.’