Do Not Disturb

by Tilly Bagshawe

  Karis wasn’t the only guilty party, however. As the years passed, familiarity with his wife seemed to breed contempt in Devon. He made no attempt to feign interest in her life and was little better with his children, focusing instead on work and the numerous social committees that earned him his reputation as a pillar of the community in both Boston and East Hampton. Though he pretended to find these extracurricular commitments a burden, secretly Devon would rather die than lose the social prestige they brought him. Nevertheless, they were contributors to the disintegration of his marriage—or at least, the disintegration of every part of it that had once brought him joy. Even so, neither he nor Karis had ever seriously contemplated divorce. They both had too much to lose for that.

  “Lola!” Karis was really starting to lose her temper now. It was bad enough that Devon had spent the last four weeks coming up with one excuse after another to keep them in East Hampton. Not just bad, but odd. Normally he was the first to want to get back to Boston. And now Lola was doing all she could to ensure they missed the plane, all because she had a bee in her bonnet about going back to St. Mary’s.

  “Jeez, Mom. I’m coming!” came the exasperated cry from upstairs. Standing in the middle of her bedroom, surrounded by a sea of open suitcases stuffed beyond bursting with clothes, paintbrushes, magazines, and all the other detritus from a long teenage summer, Lola Carter was in an even worse mood than her mother. Dressed head to toe in black—going back to St. Mary’s felt like her own funeral, so why not?—she looked every inch the archetypal sullen teen: skirt so short you could see her underwear when she bent down, ripped pantyhose, thick black Suzi Quatro eye makeup, and a silver skull-and-crossbones pendant the size of a fist swinging ominously against her chest. But not even the Morticia Addams getup could conceal her striking beauty. With her thick, russet-red hair that flowed down her back like a river of molten copper, her long, slender legs, and peaches-and-cream complexion, Lola looked like a taller, more willowy version of Lindsay Lohan. She’d been approached by scouts for model agencies more times than she could count. But (to her mother’s private relief) the last thing Lola Carter was interested in was modeling. Her dream, what she longed for more than anything, was to be a fashion designer. And she’d do it too, one day. Whether her fucking father liked it or not.

  “Whoa.” Nicholas, her elder brother and the bane of Lola’s existence, stuck his head around the door. Like his sister, he was a great-looking kid, all dark hair and smoldering blue-gray eyes. Unlike her, he was also a card-carrying asshole.

  Taking one look at Lola’s nowhere-near-packed luggage and the chaos strewn around her Gothic-themed bedroom, he smiled nastily.

  “You are so dead when Mom sees this. The flight leaves in, like, two hours.”

  “So?” said Lola, sitting down on the largest of her four bags in a hopeless attempt to get it to close. “I’ll miss the flight, then. Big whoop. It’s not like I actually care about going back.”

  “You know they’re gonna send you back to St. Mary’s whatever you do, right?” said Nicholas, idly picking up a comb from his sister’s dressing table and running it through his thick black hair. “It’s not like anywhere else will have you. And Dad’ll drop dead before he lets you drop out.”

  This, unfortunately, was true. Having been expelled from every other decent private school in Boston, St. Mary’s Academy for Girls had been Devon and Karis’s last hope for their wayward daughter. A generous donation to the new science building had helped the nuns to see past Lola’s “authority issues.” It had also ensured that they steered her away from the art programs she was desperate to enroll in, toward the more academic subjects that her father had his heart set on. As far as Devon was concerned, Lola’s future was a place at Harvard Law and that was that. He didn’t want to hear any more bullshit about goddamn fashion school.

  “Don’t you have some place to be?” Lola asked her brother wearily. “Like downstairs blowing smoke up Mom’s ass?”

  “Very funny,” he sneered, “but no.” There were few things Nicholas enjoyed more than watching his little sister fuck up. Sometimes his job as her self-appointed tormentor was just too easy. “Unlike you, I don’t have to go to college. I’ve already made a success of my life.”

  “A success? Really? How do you figure that?” said Lola scathingly. “So far, steamingpileofBS.com, or whatever it is you call it, hasn’t earned you a red cent. Aw, shit!” With one last almighty tug, the zipper on her case finally pulled shut, only for the straining fabric to rip open immediately afterward like a burst artery.

  “My God, Lola, how many times do I have to spell it out for you?” said Nicholas, annoyed. He didn’t appreciate having his business acumen questioned, especially not by his little sister. “That’s the new business model. It doesn’t matter whether or not Enigma turns a profit in its first few years. This is the Internet. It’s all about volume.”

  As founder and CEO of an inventions website he’d christened Enigma, Nicholas Carter saw himself as the next Steve Jobs. The fact that at almost twenty he still lived at home and that his playboy lifestyle was funded 100 percent by his besotted mother did nothing to dampen his self-belief. Or insufferable arrogance, depending on how you looked at it. “Speaking of volume…” Pushing the bedroom door open a little wider, he made a great show of cupping his hand to his ear. Devon was thundering up the stairs like a bull elephant on the charge. Seconds later he burst into the room, so mad they could practically see the steam coming out of his ears.

  “What is your problem?” he yelled at his daughter. “You knew what time we had to leave today.”

  “Yeah,” Lola shot back. “And you knew how much stuff I had to pack. What’s the big deal, anyway? You guys go, and I’ll catch the first flight out in the morning. I am almost seventeen you know, Dad. I am capable.”

  “Capable?” Her father gave a short, derisive laugh. “Do you think I was born yesterday? You’ve already missed two weeks of this semester. You aren’t missing another one.”

  And whose fault was that? thought Lola bitterly. You’ve been the one refusing to leave East Hampton on pain of death for, like, a month.

  “You’re getting on that flight, young lady,” said Devon, “with or without your clothes, if I have to drag you on myself. You have two minutes. Two! And I don’t know what you’re looking so damned smug about.” He turned on Nicholas, who had been smirking quietly in the corner, enjoying the show, but who now looked distinctly put out to be included in his father’s fury. “You should be downstairs helping your mother.”

  Elbowing past his son before he had a chance to defend himself, Devon stormed into his own bedroom and slammed the door.

  He shouldn’t be yelling at Nick. If anyone ought to be downstairs helping to load the car, it was him. And he shouldn’t be hiding out in here, either. But he was so goddamn stressed right now, if he didn’t take a time-out he was in serious danger of hitting somebody.

  Devon didn’t think he’d felt this bad, or this helpless, since he was a little boy and his mother had packed him off to summer camp despite his pleadings to be allowed to stay at home. He remembered pressing his face to the window of the train as it pulled away, his tears making two grimy rivers down the glass as he watched the platform and his mother’s face slip into the distance and out of sight.

  It was exactly the way he felt now, leaving Honor.

  He was being ridiculous, of course. What the hell was he, sixteen? He’d only known the girl for a month or so, and their affair could still be counted in days. Plus he had work in Boston, commitments, a life. A big life, as it happened. So why did going back there make him feel like someone had punched through his rib cage and ripped his heart out whole?

  “I’ll be in Boston myself in a month,” Honor had reassured him last night, after their poignant good-bye lovemaking session. “We can hook up again then.”

  Devon had taken her out on his boat for the afternoon, ostensibly for a business meeting, so they could be assured of priv
acy. So far their rendezvous had all taken place at Palmers, in Honor’s private suite of rooms on the top floor. But he couldn’t help feeling nervous there, and he wanted today to be perfect.

  “Hook up?” He looked at her, aghast. “God, Honor, is that all this is to you? Just sex?”

  Wriggling out from under the white linen sheet, she sat up, pushing her spiky fringe out of her eyes. “Of course not,” she said, horrified. “You know it’s not. Don’t twist what I say.”

  But the problem was he didn’t know it, not really. He didn’t know anything with her. Looking at her smudged makeup and angular, jutting features, at once so aggressive and yet so vulnerable, he found himself fighting down the urge to pull her back on top of him and fuck her yet again until he was sure she loved him back. Karis was an attractive, desirable woman. But never, not even in the full flush of her youthful beauty, had his wife had the effect on him that Honor did.

  The girl was such a mess of contradictions. It had taken every ounce of his charm and negotiating skills to get her into bed in the first place. He’d had to lie through his teeth about the state of his marriage, insisting that he and Karis were “as good as separated” before she would so much as kiss him. Part of him was surprised that such an obviously intelligent, tough young woman would fall for a line like that—but she had, hook, line, and sinker, taking him at his word without any further probing. Beneath her carefully cultivated ball-breaker image—he’d seen the way that the staff at Palmers visibly quaked when Honor walked into the lobby—she was actually astonishingly naive and trusting, at least in romantic matters. She was also very inexperienced sexually. Their first night together was so dreadfully awkward that Devon started to wonder if he’d lost his touch or misread her attraction for him. But after a few days, something seemed to shift. Years of bottled-up loneliness and need and sexual frustration began pouring out of her like water breaking through a dam. All at once the clunked noses and fumbled gropings were replaced by a raw, unleashed sexual energy that utterly took his breath away. It was like making love to a generator.

  The problem was that the moment sex was over, Honor would pull away from him completely, slipping back into tough-little-rich-girl mode. This left him feeling baffled and, if he was honest, more than a little rejected. She possessed a very masculine ability to compartmentalize her emotions and switch off at will, which drove him insane with frustration and insecurity. On the flip side, as much as he hated it, it was that same combination of sexual neediness and emotional independence, even detachment, that had him hooked, running back to her again and again for more punishment like some masochistic junkie.

  “It’s not easy for me either, you know,” said Honor, mollifying his wounded pride a little, though not enough, as she scrambled back into her clothes. “You won’t be living here again until next summer. That’s a whole year away.”

  “Nine months,” said Devon. “We’ll be back in June. But you shouldn’t think of it like that. We both have to focus on the next time we’ll see each other.”

  “Exactly,” said Honor, “which is only a few weeks away, right? I’d make it sooner if I could, but you know I can’t leave Palmers right now. I’m just beginning to come to grips with the problems here.”

  “Fucking Palmers,” Devon grumbled, reluctantly getting out of bed himself and looking around the cabin for his underwear. Sometimes it felt like she was the one who was married, rather than him. Married to that damn hotel of hers.

  “Anyway,” she went on, ignoring him. “You were the one going on about East Hampton gossip and how dangerous it is, us seeing so much of each other here. You’ve got your reputation to think of, remember?”

  She couldn’t entirely keep the resentment out of her voice, although perversely Devon found this small hint of jealousy on her part more of a comfort than an annoyance.

  Besides, it was true. He had begun to feel nervous. Apart from a few reckless one-night stands years ago, he had never been unfaithful to Karis, and he was finding the uncharted waters of betrayal difficult to navigate. Though he’d only been seeing Honor for a couple of weeks, there was no doubt in his mind that the affair was more than just a summer fling, which made things a lot more problematic. Truth be told, he’d become a somewhat vocal advocate of family values as he’d gotten older, using his deacon-ship at church as a platform to air his views. The slightest whisper of his relationship with Honor would be catastrophic for his reputation, both here and in Boston. He might be feeling like a love-struck teenager, but he was old enough and wise enough to know that no one liked a hypocrite. And why should they? Right now he wasn’t even sure he liked himself.

  “Come here.” Grabbing Honor’s hand, he pulled her down onto his lap, burying his face in the hollow between her shoulder and neck and breathing in the scent of her. “I know it’s hard,” he whispered. “Believe me, I wish we could stay on this boat forever. Keep on sailing to where no one could find us. But we’re both adults, right? We both know life isn’t like that.”

  Standing with his back against his bedroom door now, listening to the kids fighting and Karis barking at the chauffeur outside, he realized just how trite his words must have sounded. “Life isn’t like that”? What the hell was he, a fucking fortune cookie?

  Life was what you made it. And right now Devon was in grave danger of making a serious mess of his.

  “Karis!” Opening the sash window, he stuck his head outside. Even in September the gardens looked beautiful, a riot of scented blossoms and color. The yew hedges had been clipped and shaped with military precision and the graveled driveway raked into a neatly furrowed semicircle, giving the place an air of peaceful, ordered calm. If only he could regulate his family life and feelings so effortlessly.

  “Oh, Devon, there you are.” Karis looked up at him, clearly irritated.

  “I thought you were going to help Mo with the cases. He’s almost finished now. Where’s Lola?”

  “She’s nowhere near ready,” he said. Then, making a decision on the spur of the moment, added: “Look, why don’t you go ahead with Nicholas? I’ll stay here, make sure Lola gets her act together, and we’ll fly out first thing in the morning.”

  Even behind her oversize Gucci shades he could see his wife’s fury building. Not that he blamed her for that. Lola’s behavior these past few weeks had been getting worse and worse. Today’s stunt with the packing was the last straw.

  “I thought we’d agreed,” she said wearily. “No more excuses. If she isn’t ready, she’ll have to come as she is.”

  “I know,” said Devon. “But there are things she needs for school, honey. Trust me, Karis, I’m not gonna give her an easy ride. But it doesn’t make sense for us all to have to wait around. What’s one more day?”

  In the end, too drained to fight about it anymore, Karis had given in. Ten minutes later the Daimler containing her, Nicholas, and a trunk full of Louis Vuitton pulled sedately out of the driveway. And Devon made a beeline back to his daughter’s room.

  The Led Zeppelin was deafening the moment he opened the door. Lola, nodding her head to the music, was sprawled across the bed, smoking a cigarette like she hadn’t a care in the world.

  “Looks like we’re both still here,” she drawled, flicking ash into a used coffee cup on the bedside table as he walked in. “Whatever happened to dragging me onto the plane yourself?”

  “You can cut out the lip,” said Devon firmly, unplugging the stereo from the wall despite Lola’s protests and pulling the cigarette out of her hand. “I’m going out, and I won’t be back till late. Either you finish your packing and clean up this pigsty”—he picked up the coffee cup, frowning at the cigarette butts bobbing around in it like flotsam on a muddy pond—“or I cut off your allowance till Christmas. Period.”

  “Whatever,” said Lola, although inside her defiance was waning. St. Mary’s was bad enough, but St. Mary’s without an allowance would be hell on earth. “Where are you going, anyway?”

  “None of your business,” s
aid Devon.

  It was hard to tell which of them felt more relief when he finally left the house a few minutes later, slamming the front door behind him and zooming off in his new BMW convertible. But one thing was for sure: wherever he was headed, he was in one hell of a hurry.

  Anton Tisch buttered another piece of toast, cutting it carefully into four pieces before offering one of them to the slavering Great Dane that sat obediently at his feet.

  “There you are, my Mitzi,” he cooed, bending his face so close to the dog’s that their noses were almost touching. “Who’s my good girl?”

  For the last six years, Mitzi had been Anton’s constant companion, traveling back and forth from London to Geneva and reigning supreme as the undisputed queen of both his homes and his heart. Most people found his doting affection for the huge, intimidating-looking animal incongruous, even creepy. This was a man, after all, who couldn’t seem to muster a shred of human sympathy for his own children, never mind business associates or social “friends,” whom he routinely discarded with all the dispassionate ruthlessness of an executioner. Yet with Mitzi he was as adoring and besotted as any lover.

  “The second mail delivery is here, Mr. Tisch.” A butler in full livery glided up to the table and set a neatly bound package down at his elbow. Anton made a point of keeping a full household staff in Mayfair—one must keep up appearances at all times—although in Geneva, where nobody cared how he’d made his fortune just as long as he had made it, he “made do” with only a cook, driver, and valet.