Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Tom,’ he said, in what Katya felt was an odd, wild and highly agitated manner. ‘I have to see Tom.’

  ‘Well, you can’t. Not today.’ Katya was dressed in jeans and a workman’s donkey jacket; she turned up its collar against the rain and scowled. ‘Tom’s in Scotland—Edinburgh. He flew up this morning for some stupid debating thing.’

  ‘Scotland? Today? Christ.’

  Katya gave him a venomous look. ‘And he doesn’t get back until tomorrow night,’ she continued, setting off up the street. ‘So you’re out of luck. You should have phoned.’

  ‘Phoned? I’ve been phoning since nine o’clock this morning. I’ve phoned his house; I’ve phoned his college, your college…I damn near drove off the motorway calling on the mobile…Scotland? It’s term time, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Even so,’ Katya said, walking faster, ‘he doesn’t have lectures. He rejigged his tutorials. Things have changed, Rowland, since your day. This place isn’t the prison it used to be. Shit.’ She came to a sudden halt. ‘That bloody woman.’

  ‘What woman?’

  ‘Dr Stark. She just took an essay of mine apart.’

  ‘That’s her job.’ Rowland had caught up with her; he frowned along the street. ‘I didn’t realize she was your tutor. It wasn’t a good essay then?’

  ‘No, it was a fucking awful one.’ Katya glowered. ‘My mind wasn’t on it. My mind was on other things.’

  She looked at Rowland closely as she made this remark; he seemed to pay it little attention.

  ‘The Brontës,’ Katya said, in furious tones. ‘Wuthering Heights. The Tenant of Wildfell fucking Hall. Passion. Much that bloody Stark woman knows on that subject. Love—yawn bloody yawn.’

  ‘She must know something on the subject. Miriam Stark wrote an excellent book on the Brontës.’ Rowland continued to frown along the street. ‘She was researching it when I knew her. I went to the Brontë parsonage in Haworth with her once…’ He broke off and turned back to Katya. ‘Never mind that now. Is there somewhere I can reach Tom? Do you have a number for him? Damn, no. That’s no good. I need to see him…’ Rowland looked up and down the street in a distracted way, as if expecting Tom to materialize at any second.

  Katya gave him a withering look and strode off again.

  ‘I can give him a message if you like,’ she said, over her shoulder, ‘or you can leave him a note. I’m going over to his room now. It’s up to you.’

  ‘A note. Yes, a note. That’s an excellent idea…’ Rowland accelerated his pace, overtook her, and set off up the street, Katya finding it difficult to keep up with him.

  ‘Is that your car?’ she said, in an accusing tone, as they finally reached Tom’s house, having walked a considerable distance, in heavy rain, without a single word being spoken. Katya glared at the car in question, which was drawn up outside the front gate and parked in an impetuous way, one wheel on the pavement.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is—’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Katya, kicking the wheel. ‘I always wondered what you drove…’ She followed Rowland through the gate and caught up with him at the front door.

  ‘And strange as it may seem,’ she continued, in a poisonous tone, ‘it’s no good pushing and shoving at the door like that. You need a key. Luckily, I have one.’

  ‘Here,’ she said, as they entered Tom’s room, a room which seemed to have a peculiar effect on Rowland McGuire. He was staring at the cerise sofa, then at the bookshelves; Katya held out a notebook and a pen to him. The pen was a biro, an unremarkable biro; looking at it, Rowland appeared transfixed.

  ‘Christ,’ he said again, directing his remark to the bookshelves. He looked at the notebook. ‘What shall I say?’

  ‘That’s rather up to you, Rowland,’ said Katya, in an acid voice. She gave him a measuring look and slowly unbuttoned and removed the donkey jacket. She pulled off her combat cap and shook loose her long, damp, russet hair.

  ‘Tom—I need to talk to you,’ Rowland wrote. He paused, frowning, then added, ‘as soon as possible.’ He frowned again, then added, ‘I’ll call you next week.’

  ‘What’s the date?’ He looked up at Katya. ‘The date—what date is it today?’

  ‘It’s the twenty-fifth. Wednesday, the twenty-fifth.’ Katya gave him an unpitying stare. ‘You’ll find there’s a date window on your watch, actually. I can see it from here.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Thanksgiving tomorrow. Hell,’ said Rowland. He added the date to the note, frowned again and added, ‘Kind regards, Rowland’ and made for the door.

  Katya panicked. ‘I can make you a cup of coffee if you like,’ she said, in an ungracious tone.

  ‘No time,’ Rowland replied. ‘Thank you, but no time—I have to get back to London. I have a plane to catch…’

  Katya listened to his footsteps descending the staircase. It was at this window, just a few weeks before, that she had watched him arrive in Colin Lascelles’s astonishing Aston Martin. It was then, she thought, that she had first sensed the tremors; it was beside these very bookshelves, as Rowland McGuire examined that Anne Brontë novel, that everything right in her life had begun to go wrong.

  She strode up and down the room, clasping to her chest one of Tom’s discarded sweaters. She found she was angry, confused and close to tears: Tossing the sweater down, she crossed to her work table and picked up the chapters of her novel, printed out early that morning, after Tom had left.

  She had not wanted him to see what she had written, and now, rereading it, she saw why. She began to see the nakedness and duplicities of her own fictions. Snatching up the pages, she tore them into halves, then quarters, then eighths. Overwhelmed with guilt and misery, she threw this confetti on the floor. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she said aloud, filled with rage against Rowland McGuire and herself, and furious at discovering that her novel was not about alienation, as she had supposed, but about love—a feeble topic, a woman’s topic, after all.

  She picked up one of the Brontë novels that had been the subject of her essay, and scowled at it. She flicked the pages, and then, her eye caught by a particular sentence, began reading. She carried the book across to the cerise sofa and curled up with it there.

  What had she missed? What, exactly, had she missed? She began reading, mindful of Dr Stark’s corrective scorn; to her surprise, the craving she now felt for Rowland McGuire diminished somewhat as she began to concentrate. Perhaps the exercising, of her intellect would effect a cure, she thought, hoping that might be the case, for the craving was unlike any she had experienced before, and its nagging, obsessional vitality was something she had come to fear.

  To her relief, this prose kept Rowland at bay for a while; despite the passion she had sneered at in her tutorial—or, possibly, because of it—she was still reading two hours later, completely absorbed. Three hours later, stirred by what she had read, she felt a need to confess. Picking up pen and paper, she began writing to Tom.

  ‘It’s going to snow—there’s a storm threatening,’ Colin remarked as the limousine which had collected them at Kennedy turned out of the airport precincts. Beside him, Tomas Court, who had not spoken to him once on the flight from Montana, gave a sigh.

  ‘It’ll hold off. It’s hours away yet,’ he replied. He gave Colin a shrewd glance. ‘What time are you meeting your friend?’

  ‘Around one o’clock. One-thirty. At the Plaza.’

  Colin craned his neck to look at the clouds bunched over the western horizon; they were edged with a jaundiced light. With difficulty, he prevented himself from consulting his watch which he had been checking at five-minute intervals throughout their flight.

  ‘Relax.’ Court gave a half smile. ‘I won’t make you late for your appointment. I guess you’re pretty anxious to be on time…’

  ‘Does it show that badly?’ Colin asked.

  ‘I recognize the symptoms,’ Court replied, his manner kind enough, but faintly bored. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Lindsay,’ Colin said, his heart lif
ting as it always did when he pronounced, heard, thought of, or saw this name.

  ‘We’ll drop you at the Conrad,’ Court continued. ‘You find those pictures and notes, bring them down to TriBeCa…It won’t take us long to go through them. Half an hour at most, then you’ll be a free man.’

  His tone, Colin felt, was slightly mocking. He considered arguing, then rejected the idea. The photographs concerned, in which Tomas Court had previously evinced little interest, showed the moorland landscape around their chosen Wildfell Hall. They were now lying in their file in Colin’s room at the Conrad; overnight, Tomas Court had decided that he had to re-examine them urgently. Colin, not pleased by this decision, which indeed threatened to delay him, was wary of protest. He now felt a growing respect, even affection, for Court, but he retained a keen sense of the man’s perversity. If he demurred now, Court was more than capable of keeping him working throughout the afternoon.

  Let him try, Colin thought; he had every intention, should that situation arise, of proving to Prospero that he had a will of his own. Meanwhile, it was simpler to humour his whim, produce the required pictures, which would almost certainly turn out to be irrelevant, agree with everything Court said, and then make his escape from TriBeCa to the joys that lay in wait for him uptown.

  Court, meanwhile, had relapsed into a moody silence. Colin patted the breast pocket of his jacket, where Lindsay’s letter and fax to him lay folded against his heart. Not for the first time that morning, he blessed the fact that he and the uncommunicative Court were travelling alone. Thalia Ng had left that morning to spend Thanksgiving with her widowed mother in Florida; Mario Schwartz had left to join his family in what he called Hicksville, Idaho; the rest of the production team had dispersed to various parts of America, leaving Colin to travel with the person least likely to interrupt his reveries. With relief, touching that precious letter, Colin began to rehearse its phrases in his mind.

  There had been a ‘but’ in Lindsay’s fax, a ‘but’ that drew Colin’s eyes every time he reread it; there were fewer ‘buts’ in the letter, however, and this gave Colin heart.

  He was almost certain that he could hear a new note in these sentences, as if Lindsay, writing to him from her hotel room, had begun to hear the same music that haunted him; Colin’s mind dwelt on that music and its melodies. His hopes rose as they approached Manhattan; this city contained Lindsay and very shortly she would be on her way to meet him at the Plaza. Find the photographs, he told himself, deliver them to Court’s loft, make his escape. He dived out of the limousine in great haste as it pulled up in front of the Conrad, and entered that building blindly, praying that he would be eloquent, not tongue-tied, when he took Lindsay in his arms.

  In the limousine, Tomas Court continued his journey south to TriBeCa; he watched the streets of Manhattan as they drove, and felt a familiar despondency settle upon him. He felt a brief, passing longing for the pure air, and the spaciousness, the great spaciousness, of Montana; then, remembering the interviews he had had with the police there, and the subsequent sleepless nights, he passed his hand across his face and closed his eyes.

  On reaching TriBeCa he dismissed his driver, shouldering his bag himself, and stepped into the grim confines of the elevator. As its doors closed, he tensed; he had heard a sound, a small unidentifiable sound, perhaps the scrape of a shoe against concrete, and it had come from a landing above. The air in the elevator was faintly perfumed: the residue of a woman’s scent clung to the air, and when he reached his floor and stepped out, he saw that a woman was there before him. She was in the act of tapping at his door; hearing the elevator, she started, then swung around.

  She gave a low exclamation, then blushed, then took a step backwards; Court saw that she was carrying a small package—a package with his name on it written in large capitals—and that she was clutching this package to her breast, somewhat defensively. Court gave her a wary look, hesitated, then moved forward. He did not recognize her, but he recognized her type instantly: an out-of-work actress, he thought, with irritation—either that or, possibly, some fan.

  He came to a halt beside her and looked her up and down. He saw that she had a pretty if unmemorable face; her eyes, of an unusual yellowish hazel, were large and set too close together; they were fringed with short lashes to which thick black mascara had been clumsily applied. These eyes—their expression awed, excited, and half fearful—were now fixed on his own.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, his manner cold. ‘You’re delivering something? That package is for me?’

  ‘It is.’ She made no attempt to hand it over. ‘I didn’t expect—I mean, I hoped I might meet you, obviously, but I thought I’d probably have to leave it with someone. A maid, maybe…’

  ‘I don’t have a maid.’

  ‘I wanted—if you could just spare me ten minutes of your time…’

  ‘I don’t have ten minutes to spare. I don’t have five minutes to spare.’ He looked at her narrowly. ‘You’re not a messenger, are you? You’re not from some courier company? Maybe you’d like to explain just how you got this address?’

  ‘I got it from a friend.’ She passed her tongue across her lips, then, frowning slightly, lowered her eyes. ‘He worked on your last movie with you—and he took a whole lot of persuading.’ She paused, indicating the package. ‘It’s just a videotape. I wanted—’ She hesitated, then glanced up at him again. ‘Can’t I come in? If you won’t give me five minutes, how about four? Three? Two and a half?’

  Court looked at her more closely. He looked at her dark hair, which she wore loose on her shoulders, at her clothes, which were cheap but pressed and clean, and at her figure, the curves of which drew his eye. What she was offering was not a videotape, he suspected; beneath the coat she wore, which she had left open, was a dark blouse of some imitation silk material. The top button of this blouse, intentionally or unintentionally, was unfastened; he could just see the cleft between her breasts. He noted that she had small, well-manicured, pretty hands.

  ‘Two minutes,’ he said and opened the door.

  ‘You’re an actress, aren’t you?’ he said, once the door was closed. He looked around the unnaturally tidy space of his loft: Thalia and Colin had made a thorough job of their cleansing operation, he saw. Without those piles of cardboard boxes, the room looked unfamiliar and faintly alien. He turned back to the woman with a sense of boredom, wondering how she would script her overtures, whether she would echo the words of her numerous predecessors, or whether she might surprise him by being original. He did not expect originality from women in this situation, nor was he going to receive it, he thought, as with an odd, defiant, half-obstinate glance in his direction, she set her package down delicately on his work table, and then began to unbutton her blouse.

  ‘Sure, I’ve been an actress.’ She gave another small frown. ‘In a few crummy movies, blink and you miss me—that kind of thing. I’ve done a few TV shows. That’s what’s on the tape—kind of a composite: my best scenes, my best roles. The kind where I actually got to speak some dialogue…’ She paused, an expression of faint mockery passing across her face. ‘I’ve done other things besides acting, obviously. I mean, I’ve held down a whole lot of demanding positions. I’ve been a model, I worked in a gas station one time. Let’s see…what else? Waited on tables, of course. But that was way back, when I was a student at UCLA…’

  Court looked at her steadily; he could hear a certain anger in her voice, and for an instant saw it flash in her yellowish eyes. Liking the anger, he changed his mind.

  ‘Look,’ he said, less coldly, ‘do your blouse up. You’ve been misinformed, I think. I don’t audition this way.’

  ‘Don’t you? That’s not what I heard. I asked around. I take an interest in you—I have done for years.’ She hesitated, eyeing him, clasping her blouse across her breasts. ‘I really admire your movies—I wanted to tell you that. I’ve watched them a thousand times. I think you’re a really great director…’

  Court turned away with a ge
sture of irritation. Her voice, with its faint hint of southern California, was beginning to grate on him. He liked neither her voice, nor her sentiments, and the momentary sympathy he had felt for her ebbed away.

  ‘Some people like my movies; some people loathe them, and either way, I’m indifferent,’ he said. ‘Also, I’m allergic to compliments—particularly fulsome ones. Do your blouse up. I’m expecting a colleague here any minute…’

  Her response surprised him: he was used to obedience when he used that kind of tone. The girl seemed scarcely to have heard him and she ignored the contempt in his voice. She continued to look at him as he spoke, that small perplexed frown still creasing her brows. Then, with a sigh, and another yellowish glance in his direction, she began to move slowly around the room, her manner unhurried, as if she were here alone and waiting for someone to return.

  She moved across to the tall windows, then back to the work table; in a desultory way, she removed her coat, then brushed her hand across a pile of scripts, picked up a book, examined it, then set it down. She moved with a grace that interested Court; her silence and her apparent absorption in her activities began to affect him. He wondered whether she had realized that he was likelier to respond to silence, and its ambiguities, far more than words.

  As she moved around the room, he began to track her with his eyes as he might have done with a camera; he found the chemistry of the room was altering, thickening and becoming charged. She had his attention now and he found he was interested in what she might do next: spoil the effect by speaking? Move towards the door and leave? She did move towards the door, and at this Court felt a sharp and immediate pulse of excitement; for the first time in almost three years he was remembering how much such encounters could fuel him, and how reliably, if briefly, they drove all thoughts of his wife from his mind.

  He took a step towards the woman and regarded her levelly. He watched the light slide across the planes of her face; he watched a new concentration enter her eyes.