Sextet

by Sally Beauman

  ‘Would you like me to read to you, Jonathan, or shall I tell you a story?’ Maria said, as Natasha’s footsteps retreated into the distance. A door closed. Maria, plump, bespectacled and familiar, switched on the night-light. Jonathan found her comforting—not as comforting as his parents or Angelica, but comforting nonetheless.

  Maria’s speciality was fairy stories, of which she had a vast repertoire. In the past, she had told him the story of Hansel and Gretel, and the Babes in the Wood; of Red Riding Hood, of Rapunzel, Cinderella, and a Sleeping Beauty cursed in her cradle by a wicked godmother who was also, Maria said, a witch.

  Maria’s witch performances were convincing, and Jonathan had enjoyed them at the Carlyle, in company with Angelica. He felt less sure he would enjoy them here. He was discovering that the Conrad was never quiet; there was always some alarming sound, some creaking or inexplicable slithering, just as he was about to fall asleep.

  ‘We could look at my new animal book,’ he said, a little uncertainly. ‘Daddy gave it to me for Thanksgiving.’ He paused. ‘Daddy’s downstairs now, with Mommy. He may come here to live with us, I think.’

  ‘Well now, wouldn’t that be cosy,’ Maria said.

  She plumped up his pillows, smoothed back his hair, picked up the book and made herself comfortable on the duvet next to him. ‘My oh my,’ she said, flicking the pages with great rapidity, ‘will you look at that.’

  Jonathan looked at her curiously. Maria did not seem very interested in the pictures, although she had removed her glasses—the better to see them, she said. Jonathan had never seen her without thick and unflattering lenses and now he did, he found her eyes odd. They were set too close together and they had a yellowish glint. He thought Maria’s eyes had always been brown—dark brown; he said this.

  ‘Brown, blue, green…’ Maria shut the book. ‘Contact lenses. All the colours of the rainbow. You can buy eyes in a store, these days. Any colour you like. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘I guess so…’

  ‘Fat, thin, dark, fair, pale, tanned…’ Maria laughed. ‘These days it’s easy. A woman can be anyone she wants. Magic, Mr Sharp Eyes.’ She gave Jonathan’s arm a sharp pinch.

  Jonathan did not like the way she said that, and the pinch hurt. He gave her a doubtful look. It would not have surprised him if Maria were capable of magic; he thought of her turning up at the Carlyle to give his mother her pre-theatre massage, with all her little bottles of special oils. These oils were magic, she had told him once, and when he had told his mother, she had smiled. ‘Well, magic in a way, maybe,’ she had said. ‘They smell nice, and they make me relax.’

  He sniffed. Maria smelled faintly of her own oils now, he thought, and he could recognize some of them, all the herby scents, lavender and rosemary; beneath them, though, and not quite masked by them, was another, less pleasant odour, that might have been blood or sweat. Maria smelt nervy, twitchy; he laid his hand on her dark sleeve.

  ‘Are your special oils magic, Maria? Do you make them up yourself?’

  ‘I surely do. Mix, mix, mix.’

  ‘What do you put in them?’

  ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog. Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails—that’s what little boys are made of. Sugar and spice and all things nice…’ She made a coughing sound. ‘I had a little boy once. You know what happened to him? He was growing away in my tummy—you know babies do that?’

  She turned a yellowish eye towards him; Jonathan gave her a scornful look. ‘Of course I know that. It’s in all my books. Human babies stay there for nine months. With small animals, it’s much shorter, and with big ones, like elephants, it’s…’

  ‘Well my little boy didn’t stay there nine months, Mr Smart-Ass.’ She pinched him again. ‘My little boy was in there three months.’ She prodded her stomach. ‘He just had time to grow all his fingers and toes and his ears and eyes—and then you know what? Some doctor came along and sucked him out, scraped him out, hoovered him out. Then they put him in a bucket, because he was just so much mush. Red mush. And I wanted to hold him, but they said I couldn’t do that…’

  Jonathan had frozen still as a mouse. Something was badly wrong with Maria tonight; it was not just the horrible things she was saying, it was the way in which she said them. She kept opening and closing her mouth like a fish, and gasping for breath; her mouth was an ugly, jagged shape. She had now started to cry, but she did not cry as his mother did, quietly, making no sound, the tears coursing down her cheeks; Maria cried noisily, with her face all twisted up. Jonathan did not really want to touch her, but he knelt up in bed and put his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘Maria, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.’ He put his hands over his ears, and tried not to think about red mush and a bucket.

  ‘Maria, shall I get Mommy?’

  ‘No, don’t do that.’ She stopped crying as suddenly as she had started; she smiled instead. ‘I’m OK. It’s just I miss him sometimes, my little boy. He’d be five years old today. You could have played with him, like a little brother—you’d have liked that. Now lie down. I’m going to tuck you up.’

  Jonathan wanted to argue, but found he was too afraid. He climbed back beneath the covers and lay very straight.

  ‘Now you go to sleep, you hear me?’ She leaned over him very close, so her yellowish eyes had a squinty look, and he could smell something sour and pepperminty on her breath.

  ‘I will, I will,’ Jonathan said. He tried not to think about peeing, because he found he wanted to pee, urgently and badly, but he was afraid to tell Maria this. He made a small wriggling movement, then lay still. Maria took his hand in hers; one by one, so it hurt a little, but not too much, she started bending his fingers back.

  ‘And I want you to stay nice and quiet. No calling out when I’m watching TV. I’m going to watch TV now, and I don’t want my programme interrupted. You know what I’ll do if you start playing me up?’

  Jonathan shook his head.

  ‘I’ll open that closet door in the hall. And I’ll let the bogeyman out. His name’s Joseph, and I’ll send him in to deal with you. You won’t like that. You know what he does to naughty boys, little know-alls like you?’ She gave him a long, still, yellowish look. Leaning over, she yanked the bed-covers off. ‘He eats them up. He eats their fingers and their toes and their ears, all the bits that stick out—they’re his favourite bits. Then he bites off their little wee-wees, so there’s a big hole, and he sucks and sucks, and all their insides come out, all their heart and lungs and liver and lights, and he swallows them up like soup. Slurp slurp.’ She laughed. ‘Sleep tight, precious,’ she added, and switched out the light.

  Jonathan lay there in the dark, too afraid to move. He wanted to pee very badly now. He told himself there was no such thing as the bogeyman, and there was nothing in the hall closet except sheets. Then he found he could hear footsteps dragging along the corridor; he could hear the TV and he could hear footsteps…He peered into the dark, clutching at his bear, and the dark moved like eyes. He made a small whimpering sound, and the warm urine came gushing out in a flood. It felt comforting at first, but then it began to feel cold; he listened and listened, but the footsteps seemed to have stopped.

  He wondered if Maria was really watching TV, the way she said. If she was, she would have her back to the door and her back to the corridor. He thought if he was very very quiet, and avoided the floorboards that squeaked, he could creep past her and she would never know. Then he could run downstairs to Mommy and Daddy, and they’d be angry with Maria and she’d never come back.

  Very slowly, he inched the bedcovers aside. Clasping his bear, he crept to the door and looked out. He could hear the TV again, but the door to that room was closed. He inched past it, pressing himself against the wall. His pyjama bottoms were wet and clingy, and he felt cold and shivery; he inched a little bit more and a little bit more: past the sitting-room, past the bathrooms; he could see the light was on in his mother’s bedroom, and the light was spilling out through t
he open door into the corridor ahead.

  He crept towards the patch of light and then stopped, too afraid to go on and too afraid to go back. Maria was in his mother’s room, where she had no right to be. He could hear her muttering and talking to herself; she was doing something to his mother’s bed; he could hear some horrible ripping, grunting sounds. He could just see Maria’s upraised arm and something bright and sharp in her hand, then she bent and grunted and disappeared round the edge of the door.

  Sweat ran down into his eyes; he opened his mouth to cry out, but he only made a little sound, some dry squeaking sort of sound. Maria was panting now and groaning, and that made him more afraid. He had heard noises like that before, a long time before, coming from his mother’s room, and when he had gone to help her, there were his parents, naked in bed. His mother’s head was tilted back over its edge, her hair rippling down like water, and his father was on top of her, gripping her wrists, moving to her cries, rising and falling, rising and falling, his face sharp and gleaming, rhythmic as an axe.

  ‘Daddy?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Daddy are you there?’ The door instantly swung back. His father was not there, and when he saw what Maria had done to his mother’s room, he started to cry. He slid down the wall in a little pool of misery and fear, not daring to look up.

  ‘Just in time, just in time,’ said Maria, crouching down beside him. She jerked his head up. ‘Now we can really have some fun, precious,’ and she showed him the knife.

  ‘Are you worrying about the time for some reason, Natasha?’ Tomas Court said, catching his wife in the act of easing back her sleeve and checking her watch.

  ‘No, no,’ Natasha replied, ‘I’m listening, Tomas. It’s just—I thought I heard something. I was wondering if Angelica had come back early…’

  That possibility did not please her husband. His face tight with annoyance, he crossed the room and went out into the corridor. His wife folded her hands on her lap. It was ten-thirty; Angelica was not due back for another hour and a half. She looked at the briefcase on the table, and the mass of papers inside it which her husband had been about to take out. She knew the subject of Joseph King could be put off no longer, and the effect, as she had predicted to Juliet McKechnie, was to heighten her nervousness.

  The slightest sound now made her tense. For the past thirty minutes, in a hopeless way, she had been trying to think of some pretext to leave the room, go upstairs, and check that Jonathan was safe. She knew this was unnecessary; Maria knew about his nightmares; if any problems arose which she could not cope with, Maria would summon her. All the same, she longed to be in the same room as her son, to see with her own eyes that he was at peace and soundly asleep.

  It angered her that she could not bring herself to leave the room and risk her husband’s certain irritation if she did. She knew she was still subject to the tyranny of her husband’s moods, but she also knew that if she risked angering him, he would stay even longer. He might pick a fight with her again, as he had done the previous night, and if angry, or desperate, he might then attempt to make love to her. He had been very close to doing so yesterday, but Angelica’s presence in the apartment had, finally, inhibited him. The knowledge that her guardian was not there to protect her tonight, made Natasha excited and fearful. If Tomas began to touch her, or to kiss her, she might begin to want him again. What would the consequences then be? Then she would be admitting Tomas, and all the chaos he brought with him, back into her life.

  ‘This precious apartment building of yours is infested with rats, d’you know that?’ he said, returning to the room and picking up the briefcase. ‘If you stand in the hall, you can hear them scratching around. What’s behind that wall? Heating ducts? You should talk to the super—’

  ‘I don’t think it’s rats, Tomas,’ she said, in a quiet voice. ‘There’s some service area for the elevator behind there. It opens through into the elevator shaft. It’s just machinery noises, cables, draughts…I’ll mention it to Giancarlo though, just in case.’

  ‘Fine. Then let’s continue. You need to hear this.’ In a weary way, he drew out a sheaf of papers. ‘Most of this came through yesterday and today from the investigation agency. If I’d waited for the police to make those checks it would have been six months before we got the results. As it is, once the agency had something solid to go on, they made progress.’ He paused, looking at her as she sat huddled at one end of the white sofa. ‘I once knew Joseph King, Natasha, and so did you. Do you want to see a picture of how King looked then, when we first met?’

  He tossed a photograph towards her. In silence, Natasha examined it. The picture, in black and white, showed a group of people eating lunch around a table; the setting appeared to be a movie location. She examined the picture, recognizing no-one in it.

  ‘The third from the left. Fair hair.’

  Natasha swallowed nervously. ‘But that’s a woman, Tomas,’ she said.

  ‘A woman. Precisely.’ He crossed to the sofa and sat down next to her. Natasha, looking at his white set face, realized that he was exhausted; she could hear now that his breathing was stressed. Quietly, she held out her hand to him and he took it in his own.

  ‘Her name then was Tina Costello,’ he continued. ‘She’s had a great many names since. That’s some of the crew on The Soloist. She worked in Make-up. Assistant to an assistant to an assistant. So when I say you knew her, I’m exaggerating. You’d have passed her, maybe said, “Good morning”—no more than that. She was aged twenty then, and studying at UCLA on some movie course. I hired her as a favour to the third assistant director, who said she was his cousin. I spoke to him today, at length. It turns out she wasn’t his cousin. He denies it, but he was screwing her, I expect.’ He paused, looking away. ‘I fired her—or someone fired her on my behalf, six weeks in. There’d been complaints from the Make-up department: time-keeping problems, general incompetence. I’ve never given her a second thought until she turned up yesterday at the door of my loft in TriBeCa.

  His wife bent her head over the photograph. From upstairs, in Emily Lancaster’s apartment, came the sound of voices; a chair scraped back.

  ‘Tomas,’ she began, ‘this isn’t possible. Those telephone calls weren’t made by a woman…’

  ‘No. She didn’t make them—but she scripted them, I’d guess. Someone else had to be recruited to make the calls—and I think I know who that was.’ He gave a sigh. ‘She has a brother, to whom, by all accounts, she’s very close—unnaturally close, you could say since according to several sources, he is also her lover. Let me tell you about the brother, and listen carefully. Both of them have a history of psychiatric problems, as you might expect. She’s worked all over the States. She worked, among other places, at that photographic lab in California—you remember? She’s been able to hold down a job; the brother has not. He likes to think of himself as an artist, a painter—or so that assistant director says. According to the agency, he’s done smalltime building work now and then: decorating, plumbing, wiring. He’s a jack of all trades, master of none, and his name actually is Joseph, oddly enough. Now listen to these dates, Natasha…

  ‘Last July, within one week of my trip to Glacier with Jonathan, and almost certainly just after that Australian tourist was killed there, the brother’s mental condition deteriorated. He was admitted to one of the psychiatric wards here in New York, in Bellevue. His sister took a room in the East Village, and she visited him in Bellevue twice a week. He finally came out, Natasha, exactly two weeks ago, on Thursday November twelfth. My loft was broken into in the early hours the next day—Friday the thirteenth. The calls began again the same day. The choice of date is characteristic, of course. It’s not too difficult to work out, is it, why we had nearly five months’ respite?’

  ‘But we had no letters either…’ She turned to him, her face shocked and white. ‘And here, there’s been nothing here for a week. Just that flurry of calls when the decorators were here…Nothing since. You saw her yesterday. You met her? Did you talk
to her for long? Did you recognize her?’

  ‘No, of course not. She looks totally different now. I wouldn’t have remembered her, in any case.’

  ‘And yesterday she told you that she’d worked for you in the past?’ Panic had come into his wife’s eyes and her hands had begun to tremble. Tomas—I don’t understand. No woman would do this. All those years; all the work she put into it. She’d have to be so obsessed to do that. Did she have a grudge against you because you fired her? Is that it?’

  ‘Who knows?’ He looked away. ‘She’s obsessed with my work. She isn’t sane. Her motives don’t interest me, I just want her and her brother found. I want them locked up, and I want them out of my life. That’s it.’

  ‘I can’t bear this.’ With a sudden despairing gesture, his wife rose and turned to face him. ‘You’re lying, Tomas. Why do you do that? I know you so well. I can tell when you’re lying—something happens to your eyes and your voice…’

  ‘Natasha, don’t pursue this. Let it be. It’s irrelevant now.’

  ‘Irrelevant? I don’t think so. You’d better tell me, Tomas. Which of them was it? The girl, or her brother? It could have been either, we both know that.’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘You slept with her? When we were making that movie? Then? But Jonathan was only a baby then. I thought—’

  ‘Then. At my apartment yesterday also. And sleeping wasn’t involved. Natasha…’

  ‘Ah, dear God, I’m still jealous.’ She turned away, covering her face. ‘I still can’t bear it, even now. In your apartment? Some woman who’d turned up out of nowhere? Some woman you didn’t even know?’