by Tanith Lee
Two tears fall like glass drops, one from each of her eyes. She blinks and the tears are gone.
“Sorry. I am not going to make a scene.”
“Well, why not,” he says, “you’re a well-known TV actor. We could charge, couldn’t we? Or put it down as expenses – a preview of some coming episode of 999 - 24/7.”
And she laughs.
Pretty laugh. Like Claudia’s.
“Let’s have another drink,” he says.
“Let’s. No, I shouldn’t. Oh, why not. Let’s. But as for 99 - I’m only in this one more bloody awful episode. And I thought doing a bit of filming in Corfu would be great - big eye-opener. I’ll be thrilled to get out. The only thing is all that’s on offer afterwards is some new reality thing. It’s called Control Freaks. Danny” (her agent) “says I’d be dumb not to do it, but do I really want some scumster in my flat exhorting me not to be so anal, while a pair of sweaty burks film it all?”
She has brightened, and over the next duet of drinks - Serena’s are Cherry-Fillers with white rum - they discuss more intently, if more constructively, what should be done. About the funeral (they should go), Angela (they should calm her or have her gently assassinated - curious, joking about death in the face of death - gallows humour, Nick thinks), their meeting again in future regularly (they must - it has been so long - why have they let that happen?), and general life reviews, rather humorously presented.
Nick asks himself if he is enjoying it, sitting with this nicely-dressed and attractive sister, being - familial. He thinks he may like it. Yet is unsure. The legacy perhaps of all that ‘long-ago’ they are now beginning to include in the conversation. Or which is beginning inevitably to include itself.
“You were such a lovely little kid,” she says suddenly. “And you know Laurence really loved you. It used to make me jealous. I used to follow him round - he was my big hero. And he was always off with some girl-friend, or at that school, or when he was at the house - whichever house we were in - he used to talk to you. I mean you were what? Three, four? He used to play these talking games with you. And he used to pick you up and swing you round in his arms. He used to take you for walks and show you rabbits and foxes and sheep. He never had with me. I don’t think he ever noticed me, really.” She sounds then sad again, not aggrieved. No vitriol. “He used to say to people, Nicolas is going to be the one. The hope of the Lewises. Look at him, isn’t he brilliant? When he grows up no woman’s going to look at me - I’d better make the most of it now. Yes. Laurence used to say that. He was about seventeen, and he’d been having girls for years. And he taught you to read. Do you remember?”
Nick sits there. He smiles, but now he is acting, far better than with Mrs Franks the feral Greek.
“No, I don’t remember that.”
“Well he did. You could read when you were three. Claudia thought you were a genius, but so did Laurie.”
“I don’t remember a grand tour of rabbits and sheep either.”
“No,” Serena says and sighs again. “I don’t remember much myself till I was five. Rotten isn’t it? What we’ve missed. Sort of infantile Alzheimer’s.”
“Yes.”
They sit, and he thinks she is now supposing he in turn will eulogise Laurence, ladling out his virtues. But all Nick can recall of his childhood interaction with his brother is jibes and sometimes punches and light stinging blows, engineered mental prat falls, and tricks - the forerunners of nastier tricks practiced more dedicatedly in Nick’s early teens. Although after the lie about Claudia’s ‘disappearance’, Laurence had found Nick mostly prepared.
“So why did he go off me?” he finds he asks her even so. Then wishes he had not.
But Serena says, “Oh, but that’s Laurence. He’s like,” - she frowns - “He was like, past, past, past post-death tense - like our glorious mummy in that. Oh yes,” she muses softly. “Claudia was just like that. Each of us was the favourite when we were what? - new, I suppose. Brand new. Laurie must have been the star, then I came on the scene. So then I was the star. Probably why he didn’t like me. But then there you were. And maybe Laurie didn’t care by then, or he was just Claudia’s rival for you. You were, after all, another bloody male. The superior gender.” She looks sulky, then dislodges the look from her face with a shake of her head and silken hair. “Sorry again, Nick. Christ, these old grudges stick around. I don’t mean to be a bitch. None of us could help it, being born, getting supplanted, taking sibling umbrage.”
“Do you want another?”
“Drink? Perhaps. Or will you let me buy you dinner?”
Nick thinks again of the women he meets. He hesitates, then finds he says, once more almost inadvertently, “I remember Claudia often wasn’t there.”
“Yes. God. There was one time when you were only about two, not even that, and she went off to do some useless thing somewhere, reviving an old theatre or something, only it all flopped. And then she came back for a few months and then went straight off somewhere again. Was it Sweden? She wasn’t filming, because she’d stopped doing that. It must have been some other play. And she didn’t come back again then until the New Year. She said she had flu, went to bed for about a month, and she was awful to all of us. Even to you. And you were two years old, not even that. And Laurence went in and shouted at her - she was lying in bed all pale and ill and I was scared. But he shouted - you know how disapproving you can be when you’re a child. He was only fourteen. But Claudia started to cry and someone went up - Dad, was it? Only he was never there half the time either, maybe it was one of those housekeepers, and Laurence came slamming down in a flaming temper and he said to me She shouldn’t have had any of us if she can’t fucking like us. Oh God,” Serena says. “Please Nick, let’s go and eat. Let’s get out of here. If that twat of a builder over there says at the end of the day one more time I am going to go over and break my glass on the bar and cut his throat.”
“Well, that might make him a bit quieter.”
But they get up and walk over the river and up the bright night streets to Sarastro.
Among the eccentric exotic glamour of the gilt swags and rich multi-colours and artefacts, they eat well and drink too much good wine, and the evening ceases to be a difficult wake. It becomes a sort of carousel. And they revolve then at a pleasing pace to opera music, glancing now at this or that, past, present future - without haste or loss, as slowly and encouragingly they are circled through it over and again, until the singing and spinning have to stop.
The ultimate climax comes with no warning, when Serena has covered the bill, and they are again out in the black, frigid air. Here they hug each other, and then kiss each other decorously on the lips, like sweet children in a panto. Then:
“You can always crash at my place, it’s only ten minutes away,” says Serena. “I think I said, shitty X-lover has departed and can’t cause any more trouble. The spare bed, I’m told, is delicious. And I make the best coffee on earth.”
“Thanks. I’m not so far from home. And I really have to see someone early tomorrow.” He means Pond’s recommended locksmith.
But Serena, tipsy and pretty, sparkles into giggles. “Oh then I won’t keep you. Is she one of your specials?”
Nick looks at her. “My specials? What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know. Your - how shall I say - what do you say? Clientele?”
With all the things they have talked about, slips, slides, plummets, rescues, his guts had not lurched as now they do. Nick is queasy, and for a moment feels himself also redden. “What are you talking about, Serena?”
And her face goes stark and she claps one of her hands to her mouth. Histrionically?
“Christ - Nicky - Oh - but I thought you knew we - knew, Laurence and I. We’ve known for years.”
“Knew, know what?”
“That you - what you do. The escort thing. Is that the right word?” She bristles abruptly. “Sorry, but why are you all uptight and embarrassed about it, if you choose to do it. I mean surely yo
u never needed to? Claudia hardly left you short of cash…”
He turns from her. He takes long strides, which propel him rapidly away down the lumpy slope of the streets towards the Strand. He hears her calling him, twice, and the light clatter of her high heels as she runs to catch him. And then she curses him, shouts it after him. “Fuck you then you stupid little up-your-own-arse prick!” And somebody else on the street laughs at this performance, but she is used to an audience. And Nick is gone. Oh yes, gone far off, falling through roads toward the river where he should have taken flight from her before.
How did they know? He had never thought they knew. He had never known they knew, nor had they - either of them, these alien things - ever intimated that they did. Till now. But the pitfall has always been waiting, the trap when the ground gives way. The trick. It has been for that, then, tonight. All lies to lure him, and he, the fucking sucker, has been taken in. They know. How? How do they? How do they know? It has never mattered. He is not ashamed of it. But it was not for them to have, to play with and feast on. It was something separate. How do they know? They know. They know. Serena, and Laurence too, even if he is dead and rotten and half eaten and soon to be in the stenchful ground. Know. Know. Known. Know.
In Crown Street off Leicester Square, the Exchange is showing a French film from the ’70’s, La Maison Drages de Mars.
Nick takes a seat near the back. The cinema is virtually empty and feels too hot, then cold. It is close to midnight.
He tries to watch the film. His French is sketchy, and the subtitles seem too complicated and come and go too quickly. He thinks he saw the movie in his teens, replayed somewhere or other, but then thinks he has confused it with another one.
He cannot follow the drama. One of the girls is beautiful. He watches her, not trying to grasp what she says or is doing. When she hurls a shoe out of a window he laughs, but none of the other three patrons do; presumably it was not meant to be funny.
Against the music and the noises of the film, his own inner soundtrack is playing, replaying (as this film has done, does). Nick cannot switch the internal sound off and so listens to that instead of anything else.
Most of it is a monologue delivered by Pond’s voice. It begins with the previous evening, when Pond had said, I have an odd apprehension, Mr Lewis, you don’t know how your brother died. Am I correct?
No, Nick had not known. No one, not even the TV or radio he had caught, had informed him. He had found it confusing that Laurence’s body, found in Richmond Park, and subjected to an autopsy inevitably, had not then occasioned police investigations.
Then, and now, Pond had told - and here in the cinema tells over and over again, why.
For Laurence had died of natural causes. He had suffered an aneurysm. There had not been, as sometimes there never is, any warning - or certainly none so intrusive he had ever heeded it. Just like Claudia before him, he must have been one moment alive and ostensibly well. The next smitten and dying. Dead. (She just turned, and frowned as if the sun was in her eyes, only it wasn’t… and then she just fell down.)
Laurence has died aged some ten years younger than Claudia, that is the main difference. He had had less time.
And yet…
The cause.
Nick believes Laurence killed Claudia with his harsh spoken judgement on her, her fading beauty, her human descent into old age and concomitant useless undesirability as an actor. Even as a woman. God knew what he had actually said. But it had been enough. Enough to wake the physical demon waiting inside her that next rose up and cut her down. Left alone this might not have happened to her for years, might never have happened at all.
But Laurence’s death - what had prompted that?
“Regarding this nasty little poisoned pen letter the young woman has sent you, Mr Lewis. It looks to me very practiced, very well thought out. The very style of it, like a business evaluation, the false helpfulness, her choice of areas to criticise - particularly those a man of your age and type might take great care over. That you are a professional she has also utilised very carefully. Hers is not, shall I say, the letter of an amateur. I do very decidedly believe she has done this before, possibly on many occasions, just like that girl my wife knew, with her comments stuck up in school lavatories - and always cutting the cloth to fit the target.
“And that being so, sir, I’m inclined to think she is also prepared to deliver something similar verbally. For example, if the chance of sending a letter or email is a non-starter for some reason. I suspect her degree of impatience to strike the blow may also dictate whether she writes - or even telephones. Also how urgently she wishes to witness the effect. In which case her chosen victim must still be present. Obviously to do that would be much more risky. She has more than one address, as we know. She can do her worst at one remove – email, phone, letter - then abscond to some location her former lover knows nothing of. But supposing, as may well happen, the gentleman she physically confronts turns violent. Again, any woman who regularly sends such letters, or speaks their sentiments aloud to the men in question, is off her chump, anyway. To her, the risk is doubtless far outweighed by the enjoyment, which may be sexual.
“I have come to the conclusion, Mr Lewis, that Kitty, if so she is called, offered your brother, on that Monday morning, and in words, face to face, a dose of poison on a scale adjacent to what she has sent to you on paper through the post. Although again, she will have cut the cloth to fit him. He was in his forties, an awkward age for some men. She may have put this to good use. He was getting too old, losing his stamina and figure, hadn’t got her off, she had pretended but really, it would be kinder to tell him, so he could – I doubt she suggested try to improve, no, for him it would be too late for that – simply leave younger women - all women - alone, so as not to disappoint them and make a fool of himself. I won’t go on. You and I, sir, can easily furnish a whole speech to cover what she may have said. But as that is where her main talent lies - even we might not match her.
“I have to tell you now, since I saw your brother leave the flats after his weekend with her, that he did not seem a happy man. He was very red in the face, a red that did not fade during the ten minutes I observed him. Never a good sign in anyone above forty. He seemed angry, and upset, and flustered. He dropped his car keys. Then he had problems starting the car, but the morning wasn’t so cold. When he drove out he drove faster than one would expect him to. As if to get away. I can also add his car, when it was found at Richmond, had a mark on the nearside front bumper. Perhaps a small driving accident due to loss of concentration.
“We recall too he left the young woman much earlier than I had noted his leaving either of the other two women he spent weekends with. His wife had also told me he was, on such occasions, never home before late afternoon, and often not until eleven or twelve at night.
“This also is supposition, but it isn’t illogical. I believe your brother drove to the Park at random, being in an emotional state. Then he parked there and got out for some fresh air since he was extremely discomposed and had begun to feel unwell. The spot he chose is out of the way, one of the highest points of the park and partly outside it, largely unfrequented even by day. His body was found in woods above the rather obscure car park in which he left the Volvo. The vehicle, by the way, wasn’t vandalised. Perhaps surprisingly. Apart from that little scratch, of course. And Mr Lewis himself, though someone had taken any cash he had on him, still had his driver’s licence and credit cards, even his expensive overcoat, though damaged, inevitably. The worst thieves had been animals, foxes and so on, but one doesn’t grudge those poor beggars.”
Nick had said nothing until then. Then he did put a question, and on the soundtrack that plays now inside his head - as the beautiful French girl stares into her lover’s face -Nick hears his own voice interrupt the Pond Monologue.
“Was the piece of ivory still in his coat pocket?”
“Ah, the ivory you mentioned before. What was it like, Mr Lewis, if I may
ask? Your brother, I think you said, thought it a piece from an old board game?”
“Or pretended he did. I thought he knew I was lying. I found it in that drawer from Number 14, I’m sure I did - in with the books and notepads. It was very small, squarish, yellow-whitish. Probably plastic. I don’t know, wouldn’t know the difference. I told Laurence he shouldn’t touch it, it was cursed, some black guy had told me it was, and someone I was with took it off him and then found out her mother had just died. So I relieved her of it and brought it to the flat. Absurd and idiotic. I don’t know why I said it.”
“Most of us say things sometimes we don’t know why we did. But there generally is a reason buried somewhere.”
“Yes.”
“As I recall, there was nothing unusual found with Mr Lewis’s body, nor in his car or bags. But then, something so small, perhaps nobody thought it worth mentioning.”
The French girl slaps the face of her lover. She calls him a green pig. A drum beats.
Pond is saying, (having said) “One further point I feel I might put to you. Why this Kitty first contacted you, sir. I believe your brother may have spoken about you to her.”
“He wouldn’t,” Nick says again on the inner soundtrack. “He had no interest in me.”
Pond did not, does not react. He only says, “Sometimes we do mention people we scarcely ever think of even. It’s like what we were speaking of before. Those things we say but have no idea why we did so. I think he may have mentioned you. Or else, perhaps, prior to their weekend, she looked at some personality bio of your brother, and saw you mentioned there. You’ve had some stories published after all.”
“Very few.”
“Enough your name can be found, by anyone meaning to find you out.” Presumably Pond had also been one such. “And then too, sir, as you yourself pointed out to me, your telephone number and address are in the London directory. There for all to find.”
“Along with a hundred other N. Lewises.”