“Goodbye,” I said.
“See you.”
I took my umbrella and went. At the gate I looked back for a moment and saw her at the door, glowing in the lights. I lifted my hand in a wave. The door closed. I ran to my car.
A couple of streets away I stopped and flung open the door just in time not to be sick in the footwell. I vomited up everything I’d eaten and drunk that day, and, it began to seem, everything I’d eaten and drunk all week, all my life. The rain had begun again, which was good, for it would wash the pool of sick away.
Back in my hotel room I gulped down three Valium, took a very hot shower, ordered some room service soup for dinner, got into bed. Turned on the telly, desperate for distraction, anything not to think or remember. Drank the soup, buttered and ate the roll that came with it, hardly tearing my eyes from the screen. News, something else – I concentrated on it as if it were a part I had to learn by tomorrow. Oh and goodie, Neighbours was on. Why had I never appreciated its excellence before? I would become a fan at once. And even better, Home and Away, Shakespearean in its scope and gift. Such acting! Some crime show followed. After that I set my phone alarm and booked a wake-up call just in case, watched another hour of telly then downed two sleeping pills. I’d done this before, hadn’t I: spent a wretched, wrenched-apart night killing time in a hotel room, doping myself up to escape my emotions.
Yes, in New York, the night Mum died. My beloved, wonderful mother, who had lied to me all her life. I could see no reason, now, not to gobble every pill I had. Except that I probably didn’t have enough to kill myself with and I’d end up a vegetable. Such a shame, people would say, what drove him to it? Such a waste.
Seventeen
I flew to Sydney, where after a couple of days Rick asked me what had happened, because I seemed different, and was frankly being a bit of a pain.
“How, different?”
“Not sure. Older. Harder. What’s happened? Is it still your mother? It took me ages to start to recover when my mum passed away.”
“Yes, it’s just that. You think you’re over it, no? – then back it comes.”
“I know exactly.” He hugged me very hard, and I damn near told him everything. He was my friend, one of my best friends, at times we’d been as close as the brothers we played on telly. But he’d known Mum, he’d adored her. I couldn’t. So I asked in what way was I being a pain, and he said, with puppydog eyes, that he knew I didn’t like his boyfriend, but he did, loved him in fact, so could I make an effort, just for the time I was here?
“I’ll try. It’s just that he’s a bit too… German.”
“Pausing only to admire the timing of that pause: actually, he’s Austrian.”
“So was Hitler.”
“Once,” he said, Rottweiler eyes now, “you would have made that funny.”
And so I would, somehow. I apologised, hugged him, and made such an effort that Herr Shickelgruber consented to a nice dinner at a posh restaurant, my treat, and marred only by a bunch of drunken women on a hen night spotting us, OMG, look, it’s Django and Jeff from Relative Causes and you know in that movie, OMFG how awesome is that, can we take your photo with us, gi’s your autograph. And so on, with Gerhard or Gunther or whatever his name is planning to invade Poland, and somehow it was all my fault.
“Well,” said Rick next day, “you didn’t have to sign that woman’s tits.”
“She asked me to.”
“It was going a bit far, and Gerhard doesn’t quite like that sort of thing.”
“Sorry. I said I was sorry.”
“Ye-es… Look, Jaques, why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? Something is, I can tell. Best if you told someone? And I’m your friend, and if you’re embarrassed after you’ve told me, well, take heart, you won’t see me again for yonks.” His grey eyes – almost the same shade as mine; that’s one reason we’d both been cast in Relative Causes, we had much the same colouring, we were credible as brothers – were kind, and I remembered all those years of friendship, years in which we’d been able to tell each other anything. He was only four years older than me, but it’d been enough, when we were young, for me to see him as the big brother, the smarter, wiser one.
So I told him. Told him the lot, from finding Marian’s letter and manuscript in the New York hotel room, to finding her draft email and those Belinda letters, to meeting Marian, to seeing that film. It took quite a while to unload the whole story, but he listened patiently, asking the right sorts of questions at the right sorts of times. When I’d finished he thought it over, smoking one of those little brown cigarillos he’d taken to lately, and finally he said,
“It all sounds most unlikely. I think you’ve jumped to a conclusion, grabbed the wrong end of the stick. Remember, I knew Christina, I was very fond of her, and I cannot imagine her having been the sort of girl you describe. Besides, she had family; well, at least that cousin, Mr Herne, Quentin. I’m sure you’ve got it wrong, Jaques.”
“Let me show you the film.” Marian had sent me a link, and I’d downloaded it. I hadn’t watched it again, and now, showing Rick, I wanted to be wrong, to laugh at myself. Mostly, though, I watched his intent face, waiting for the moment when he would cry, “My God, you’re right! But Holmes, this is amazing!”
But he didn’t. He sat back, thinking, frowning, then said, “I can see a certain resemblance –”
“A certain resemblance! Fucksake, look. Look at it again. I know she looks a bit different from Mum – her nose, for instance – but it’s not just her face but her gestures, her expressions, her –”
“I know what you mean, and when I said 'a certain resemblance’ I was including all that sort of thing. This girl, this Belinda – Christ, what a name – does look a bit like you and Mr Herne, but I still think you’re mistaken.”
“But what I told you – Adrian, he has to be the link, he must’ve got her away somehow and –”
“Possibly. But this girl was adopted, so you’ve no idea what family she might’ve had, blood family I mean. Jesus, I sound like that arse Spencer at Princess Di’s funeral: blood family. She could’ve had all sorts of relations in England. Your mother could’ve been a cousin.”
“Unlikely. Too much of a coincidence. What, Adrian just happened to marry someone related to 'Belinda’?”
“What if she told him she was adopted, perhaps said she’d heard her mother was English, wanted to trace her family – might he not have tried to look up people called Herne? Would he have?”
I thought that over. “He might have. Dad said he was kind, generous, when it suited him. But Herne isn’t that uncommon a name, he wouldn’t have scoured England just to please his cousin’s pen-friend on the other side of the world.”
“But he was rich, wasn’t he? He could’ve got private detectives onto it. And say he came across a nice girl, Christina in fact…”
“Then what happened to 'Belinda’?”
“You know, you pronounce those quotation marks perfectly. Well, perhaps that cop was right and the mother killed her. Or she killed herself. I would’ve, in her shoes. Jaques, think – think about your mother, then think of this girl you’ve described: half educated, from what sounds like a peasant background –”
" 'Look here upon this picture, and on this.’ Everyone says Belinda was very intelligent. She was well-read. Well-dressed, once she was allowed to be.” But I could hear my certainty wavering in the face of his rationality. As he said, he’d known Mum.
“And how,” he went on, “could a little Australian girl have passed herself off as English, as she presumably had to from the start if your story’s true? In fact how did she adapt to being Adrian’s wife, in his sort of life, I mean, with his sort of family, and then Jon’s?”
“Perhaps I got my acting talent from her.”
“Perhaps. But I’m not convinced. As I said, I admit a certain resemblance. I think it’s possible Belinda was somehow related to your mother. Why don’t you try finding out?”
“How, pray
?”
“Oh dear, it’s bad enough for sarcasm, is it? Well, you could ask your father.”
“No. He couldn’t have known – if I’m right, I mean. It’s not his sort of thing.”
“You prefer to think your mother lied to him too? Lied by omission, I mean, and kept it up for thirty years? Oh well, if not your father, what about Quentin Herne? He’d probably know the family history, he might know of someone having an illegitimate child back in the forties. Or you could hire private investigators. Or – isn’t all this sort of stuff online these days? Family records and so on? Look it up. Because I really am sure your rather romantic story is wrong, Jaques. I think you’re still badly affected by your mother’s death, and rather too ready to imagine things. Perhaps it’s even a kind of residual guilt or resentment against her for dying.”
Oh that’s right, he’d been in therapy for a while, back when he was agonising about coming out; his had not been the type of family to sympathise or accept. Perhaps he was subtly suggesting I needed the same sort of help. When I asked him he pursed his lips, shrugged, and said it couldn’t hurt.
“But doing a bit of research first, even just asking people, might be a good start.”
“Perhaps,” I said, thinking of someone who knew exactly how to research all this sort of thing but whom I couldn’t ask, couldn’t tell.
“And also,” he said rather firmly, “I don’t quite like the circumstances in which you believe you have discovered all this stuff.”
“Circumstances?”
“Jaques, I mean that you are still very much affected by your mother’s death, then you find yourself getting involved in, well, something that sounds rather odd, and all of a sudden you think you’re in love, and you never fall in love at first sight, so perhaps this woman… well, look at what’s in it for her! If there’s any truth to this story then she’ll always be the one who solved an old mystery, she’ll make a fortune out of her book and all the publicity. Probably nothing can ever be proved but she can make a good story out of it anyway. At the very least she can tell everyone how she got you into bed within five minutes of meeting you. Don’t tell me that won’t be all over the media, along with the story about your mother.”
“She’s not like that. Just –” I stopped myself just in time: he was saying all this because he had ended up the subject of a very tacky media exposé, back before he came out to his family. He’d been thoroughly stitched-up by a rent-boy paid by one of the nastiest tabloids. It was in the aftermath of that, that he’d met Himmler, sorry, Gerhard, who’d whisked him away to the other side of the world, into what seemed like real love, and trust, and safety. So I changed what I’d almost said to “I mean, she’s serious, an academic. I’m sure she’d like to solve a mystery but… it’s not what you think. She is not.”
“I hope not,” he said doubtfully, “but I don’t quite like the sound of it. I think you should be very careful. Go home, and perhaps talk to Mr Herne; I’m sure he could explain it all away, if there is anything to explain. For your own good, Jaques. And, have you thought of this? If there’s any truth to this story, then we know who killed Belinda Tate, don’t we.”
“What the fuck?”
“Marian Elder did. From what you’ve said, it seems your mother got her letter about this business and was so frightened and confused she ran straight out into New York’s traffic and was killed. The researcher killed her subject.”
He patted me gently on the shoulder and, obviously eager to change the subject, asked if I felt like a swim. Starring in a popular, syndicated telly series, plus his other work, had made Rick very well off, and Gerhard didn’t seem short of a schilling. They had a massive 1920s house in one of Sydney’s most expensive suburbs, and recently they’d installed an indoor, heated swimming pool. I think I would have been content with the ocean only metres away (sharks, though), but then I’m not much of a swimmer. I can swim, of course, just as I can skate, fence, dance, sing, play the piano and speak three languages and a lot of other things, but it’s not top of my list of fun things, and I do laps at my gym only to keep fit. So I’d shaken my head when asked to join my hosts in the pool – until tonight. After that conversation with Rick I needed exercise and silence, to stop myself thinking and to ensure I slept. Rick favoured swimming in the nude but Gerhard disapproved, which was fine with me; male genitalia aren’t something I much want to see. Anyway, I borrowed some trunks and dived in and set about doing as many laps as I could. I wanted to go beyond my usual limit, to tire myself out, which proved easily done. When at last I climbed out, the other two were sitting on loungers at the side, drinking red wine and toweling each other dry. Idly I noted that Rick had acquired a lot more tattoos, something I thought he’d given up doing since the time he got what he was assured was a Thai message of peace and love but which translated into, more or less, ’I am a gullible round-eyes’. Where that one had been was now a heart with a Gothic-font R and G inside it. I saw Gerhard kissing this, and I saw Rick looking straight over his bent head at me, and I said goodnight and went to bed.
And I had terrible dreams, nightmares, weird, confusing stuff, a jumble of Marian and Mum and God knows what, and Gerhard dressed as a cowboy carving that tattoo of Rick’s into my stomach while a woman wept because I was late for church and I didn’t know why it was important. I woke up sharply, jerked up on the bed, sweating although the room was cool, and part of the dream made sense because the church bells were my phone’s alarm ringing. Before I came away Orlando, who desperately wanted a mobile of his own, re-set all the ring tones on mine to prove he could manage. Actually he somehow removed all my carefully customised ring tones and reverted to the default ones, but I’d not had the heart to tell him, and I hadn’t bothered while on holiday to re-set them. So now the alarm was honking and blaring away, doing its job by annoying me so much that I leapt out of bed to stop it. For a moment, that nightmare still clinging to me, I couldn’t remember why I’d set the thing – but of course I had to be up early today, to go home, I had an early flight booked. Gerhard and Rick had offered to drive me to the airport but to their obvious relief I’d opted to take a cab. Early though it was, Rick got up to ensure that I had breakfast, and as I ate and he sleepily drank coffee he reminisced about the years when filming meant being up way too early, thank goodness those days were over, eh. “You miss it, don’t you,” I said, and he winced as if I’d slapped him.
“I’m happy with my life now. I wouldn’t go back.” He glanced around. “Oh but God yes I miss it often. But Gerhard wouldn’t live anywhere else, so…”
“No work here?”
“Nothing tempting so far. Anyway… Jaques, you will be all right, won’t you? You know what I mean.”
“Of course I shall. Thanks for setting me straight.”
Eighteen
But I didn’t go home. It was time to grow up, man up, grow a pair, face up to things, other clichés. So at the airport I cancelled my flight to England, went to the domestic terminal and took the first flight to Adelaide. Nonsense, of course, that Marian was responsible for Mum’s death, but… Did I have a duty to my mother’s privacy, or to the truth? A lot of people had been affected by the disappearance of 'Belinda’; it wasn’t quite a private issue. And Marian – a sensible, intelligent researcher, sympathetic – I’d fallen for her, but perhaps Rick was right. If I’d met her in different circumstances… And all we meant to each other was a bit of casual sex. No, more than that. Or was it? Anyway, I’d decided at least to talk to her, tell her what I thought I’d found out, and hope that she’d laugh it to scorn and produce proof that I was so very wrong. If she didn’t… I hoped I was ready for that.
In Adelaide, as soon as I’d done some light unpacking, I rang Marian. So much for psyching myself up: my call went to voice mail and when I rang her landline I got the answering machine. Both messages were uninformative. Unable to think of anything to say, I hung up.
But later I tried again, and this time she answered her mobile.
“It’s me,” I said, ungrammatically stating the obvious.
“Yes, I saw your name. What is it?” Did she sound wary, or angry, or simply indifferent? Tired, perhaps, and fed up.
“I didn’t go home. I’m back in Adelaide.”
“Ah.”
“There’s something I have to tell you. About Belinda. About that film you showed me.”
There was a brief silence, then she said, “I think I may know what it is.”
“Do you?”
More silence, neither of us wanting to be the first to say it in case the other didn’t know. Then, with a sigh, she said, “You tell me first.”
“I am almost sure she was my mother.”
“Ah.” A pause, then: “I think so too. I’m sorry, Jaques.”
“So am I. Can we meet?”
“I think we’d better. When?”
“When suits you?”
“Now?”
“Thank you. But I can’t go to that house again, your house, sorry, but –”
“I understand. I’ll come to you. Tell me where.”
Her 'now’ stretched into over an hour, and I’d plenty of time to wonder what the hell I was doing before the reception desk rang to say a Dr Elder was asking for me, should they send her up? I said yes. I was breathing too fast when she knocked on the door. I paused, breathed out, long and slow, in ditto, then opened the door.
“Hi.”
“Hello.”
We stared at each other in a slightly embarrassed way, then I asked her to come in, sit down, would she like a drink. She said yes. Then I had to try to remember where the fridge was, to ask what she wanted, then how to add soda water to whisky. With those tasks out of the way I sat at the far end of the sofa. She looked different – her hair was much straighter, and she was dressed rather formally, in business clothes, and was wearing more makeup than I remembered. It made her look older, and quite unlike the girl with whom I’d made love with such abandon. I wondered which was natural, the curly or the straight hair. Her brother’s hair was sort of curly, but not like hers had been. And which behaviour was the more natural to her?
Missing Christina Page 20