Wildtrack

by Bernard Cornwell

  "I thought we might as well finish it," I said meekly. I'd planned to go this very afternoon, but, true to the promise I'd made to Micky Harding, I would stay.

  "And how is your mother?" Angela asked tartly.

  "She's a tough old bird," I said vaguely, and feeling somewhat ashamed at being taxed with the lie I'd recorded on the answering machine.

  "Your mother sounded quite well when I spoke to her. She was rather surprised at first, but she did eventually say you were in Dallas, though not actually in the house right at that moment." Angela's voice was scathing. "I said I'd phone back, but she said I shouldn't bother."

  "Mother's like that. Especially when she's dying."

  "You are a bastard, Nick Sandman. You are a bastard."

  I felt immune to her insults because I was no longer in her power. I had Micky's newspaper behind me. I turned to watch rainwater trickling down the window. The clouds were almost touching the opposite hillside, which meant the moors would be fogged in. I prayed that Jill-Beth would come to England soon so that I could get the charade of entrapment done, and free myself of all these spoilt, obsessed and selfish people.

  A sob startled me. I turned and, to my astonishment, I saw that Angela was crying. She stood at the far end of the long window and the tears were pouring down her face and her thin shoulders were shuddering. I stared, appalled and embarrassed, and she saw me looking at her and twisted angrily away. "All I want to do," she said in between sobs, "is make a decent film. A good film."

  "You use funny methods to do it," I said bitterly.

  "But it's like swimming in treacle!" She ignored my words. "Everything I do, you hate. Everything I try, you oppose. Matthew hates me, the film crew hate me, you hate me!"

  "That's not true."

  She turned like a striking snake. "Medusa?" She waited for a response, but there was nothing I could say. She sniffed, then wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket. "Can't you see what a good film it could be, Nick? Can't you, for one moment, just think of that?"

  "Good enough to blackmail me? No supplies till I do what you want? If I won't do everything you want, just as you want it, you threaten to steal my boat!"

  "For God's sake! If I don't force you, you'd do nothing!" She wailed it at me. She was still crying; her face twisted out of its beauty by her sobs. "You're like a mule! The bloody film crew spend more time reading the Union regulations than they do filming, Matthew's frightened of them, you're so bloody casual, but I'm committed, Nick! I've taken the company's money, their time, their crew, and I don't even know whether I'm going to be able to finish the film! I don't know where you are half the time! And if I do find you, and want to talk to you, you look at me as if I'm dirt!" It was as if a great chain had snapped inside her. She hated to be seen thus, and she tried to shake the demeaning misery away, but she could not stop her sobs. She found her handbag, took out a packet of cigarettes, but only succeeded in fumbling them across the carpet. She cursed, picked one up, and lit it. "I swore I'd give up bloody cigarettes," she said, "but how can I with bastards like you around? And Tony."

  "What's wrong with Bannister?"

  "He's frightened of you! That's what's wrong with him. He won't tell you what's expected of you, so I have to do it. Always me! He's so Goddamned bloody lazy and you're so Goddamned bloody obstructive, and I'm so bloody tired!" She shook with great racking sobs. "I'm so bloody tired."

  I limped towards her. "Is it such a good film?"

  "Yes." She wailed the word. "God damn you, you bloody man, but it is! It's even an honest film, though you're so full of shit that you won't see it!"

  "God damn me." I trod on her spilt cigarettes. "But I didn't know." I put my hands on her shoulders, turned her, and held her against me. She did not resist. I took the burning cigarette from her fingers and flicked it into the swimming pool. "I'm sorry," I said.

  "I'm sorry, too." She sobbed the words into my dirty sweater. "Hell," she said, "I didn't want this to happen." But she did not pull away from me.

  "I did," I said. From the very first I'd wanted it to happen, and now, on a rainy afternoon, and to confuse everything, it did.

  It rained all afternoon, all evening. For all I knew or noticed, all night too.

  We talked.

  Angela told me about her childhood in the Midlands, about her Baptist minister father and oh-so-respectable mother, and about the redbrick university where she had marched to abolish nuclear weapons and save the whales and legalise marijuana. "It was all very normal," she said wistfully.

  "Did your father think so?"

  "He was all for saving the whales." She smiled. "Poor Daddy."

  "Poor?"

  "He'd have liked me to have been a Sunday School teacher. Married by now, of course, with two children."

  Instead she had met a glib and older man who claimed to run a summer radio station for English tourists in the Mediterranean. She'd abandoned university in her last year, and flown south, only to find that the radio station had gone bankrupt. "He didn't want me for that, anyway."

  "What did he want you for?"

  She rolled her head to look at me. "What do you think?"

  "Your retiring and gentle nature?"

  She blew smoke at the ceiling. "He always said it was my legs."

  "They're excellent legs."

  She lifted one off the bed and examined it critically. "They're not bad."

  "They'll do," I said.

  So then she had used the letterheaded stationery of the defunct radio station to land herself a job with a real radio station in Australia. "It was cheeky, really," she said, "because I didn't know the first thing about radio. I got away with it, though."

  "Legs again?"

  She nodded. "Legs again. God knows what would have happened if I'd been ugly." She thought about that for a time, then frowned. "I've always resented the looks, in a way. I mean, you're never sure whether they want you for your looks or abilities. Do you know what I mean?"

  "It's a problem I have all the time," I said, and she laughed, but I was thinking that her passionate drive to make a good film must have been part of her answer to that question. She desperately wanted to prove that her abilities could match those of a clever and ugly person.

  Not that Angela had ever been coy about using her good looks. She'd moved from the radio station to its parent TV company, and it was there that she had met Anthony Bannister who had been filming in Australia. He had promised her a job on his programme if she should ever return to England. "So I came back."

  "Just for him?"

  She shrugged. "I wanted to work in English television. I wanted to come home."

  "And Bannister was the price?"

  She looked at me. "I like him, Nick. Truly."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know." She stubbed out the cigarette then rolled on to my left arm. I held her against me and she crooked her left leg over mine. "He's like me, in some ways."

  "He's got good legs?" I asked in astonishment.

  "He's so vulnerable. He's very good at his job, but he doesn't have any confidence outside of it. Have you noticed that? So he wears his success like a mask."

  "He's weak," I said.

  "It's easy for you to say that. You're strong."

  "You should see me in telephone boxes. There's nothing but a blur, then I reappear with my underpants outside my trousers."

  She laughed softly. "Tony doesn't think anyone likes him. That's why he tries to be nice to everyone. People think he's so successful and confident, but all the time he's frightened and he'll always agree with what any opinionated person says because he thinks that will make them like him. That's what makes him good on the telly, I think. He draws people out, you see. And he's very good-looking." She added the last in a rather defensive voice.

  "He's spreading round the waist," I said idly.

  "He won't exercise. He's always buying the equipment, but he never uses it."

  "Was he married when you met?"

  She nodd
ed, but said nothing more.

  We lay quietly for a while, listening to the rain. I pulled a strand of her long hair across my chest. "Will you marry him?" I asked.

  "If he wants me to, yes."

  "Will he?"

  "I think so." She fingered the scar on my shoulder. She had very long thin fingers. "He'd prefer someone like Melissa, someone with social acceptance, but he may settle for me. I'm efficient, you see, which is good for his career. I think he's frightened he might lose me to a rival programme."

  "Do you love him?"

  She appeared to think about it, then shook her head.

  "Then why marry him?"

  "Because..." She fell silent again.

  "Why?" I insisted.

  "Because he can be good company." She spoke very slowly, like a child rehearsing a difficult lesson. "Because he's very successful. Because I can give him confidence when he meets people who he thinks despise him. He thinks you despise him."

  "Maybe that's because he's despicable?"

  She pulled a hair out of my chest in punishment. "He's not despicable. He's insecure and he's only confident when the television cameras are pointing at him."

  "You'll have a wonderful marriage," I said sourly, "with the bloody cameras following you around."

  "And perhaps I can change him," she said. "He'd like to be more like you."

  "Poor?"

  "He envies you. He wishes he'd been a soldier."

  "Good God." I lay in great contentment, my left hand stroking her naked back.

  "That's why he likes Fanny, I think," Angela said. "Fanny's tough."

  "That's true."

  "And if tough people respect him, Tony feels tough himself." She shrugged. "Perhaps, in time, and if enough people offer him acceptance, he will become strong?"

  It seemed a rum recipe to me. "You're strong," I said.

  "I don't cry very often," she said, "and I don't like it when I do." She lay silent for a few moments. Gulls were calling harshly on the river. "There's something else about Tony," she went on. "He doesn't have close friends. He'd like to have one really close friend. Not me, not any woman, just some man he could be totally honest with."

  "Friends are harder to find than lovers," I said.

  "Do you have friends, Nick?"

  "Yes." I thought about it for a second. "Lots."

  "He doesn't. Nor do I, really. So, yes, I'll marry him because it will make me feel safe."

  "Safe?"

  Angela raised her face and kissed my cheek. "Safe."

  "I don't understand."

  "I'm tired of being chased by men. Now, because people know that I belong to Tony, they don't try."

  "Belong?"

  "He's very possessive." She said it in a slightly apologetic tone, then lay staring at the ceiling for a moment. "He wants me to give up my job if we marry."

  "Would you?"

  "It wouldn't be fair to other people if I didn't, would it? I mean, they'd say I got all the best jobs because I was Tony's wife." I reflected that people must already be thinking that, wedding ring or no. She shrugged. "And I'd never have any more money worries, would I? And I'd get this house, and I could see you whenever you sailed Sycorax back to the wharf. That wouldn't be bad, would it?"

  It was a long way, I thought, from a semi-detached Baptist minister's house in the Midlands to a mansion above a Devon river. "It might not be bad," I said, "but would it be good?"

  "That's a romantic's question."

  "I'm a romantic. I'm in love with love."

  "More fool you." She wriggled herself into comfort against me as the wind slapped rain at the window. It was a north wind and I imagined the small yachts beating hard towards shelter through the bucking waves at the river's bar. Angela was still thinking of love and its dishonest shifts. "Tony isn't faithful to me, but I'm not to him any longer, am I?"

  "Would he be angry about this?"

  She nodded. "He'd be horribly angry. And hurt. He's unfaithful to me all the time, but he never thinks that it might hurt me." She shrugged. "He has a terrible pride. Terrible. That's why I think he might ask me to marry him."

  "Because he thinks you'll stay faithful to him?"

  "And because I'm decorative." She twisted her head to see if I thought her immodest.

  I kissed her forehead. "You're very decorative. The very first moment that I saw you, I thought how decorative you were. It was lust at first sight."

  "Was it?" She surprised me by sounding surprised.

  "Yes," I said gently. "It was."

  She smiled. "You were very gaunt and frightening. I remember being very defensive. I didn't think I was going to like you, and I was sure you were going to hate me."

  "I was just fancying you," I said, "but I was nervous of you. I thought television people would be much too clever and glamorous."

  "We are," she said with a smile, then went back to thinking about Bannister. "It's very important to Tony to have a beautiful wife. It's like his car or house, you see; something to impress other people with. And it helps in the business, too."

  "What happens if he wants to trade the wife in for a younger model?"

  "Alimony," she said too swiftly, "is a girl's best friend."

  We lay in silence for a long while. I heard an outboard on the river as someone made a dash through the rain towards the pub. Angela fell lightly asleep. Her mouth was just open and her breath stirred a wisp of her pale hair. I thought she looked very young and innocent as she lay in my arms. All the tense anger had leached out of her face in this afternoon; as if by coming to bed we had stopped fighting some foul gale and just let ourselves run before the wind. I kissed her warm skin, and the kiss woke her. She blinked at me, recognition came to her eyes, and a smile followed. She returned my kiss. "Tell me about you," she said.

  "I thought you were making a film about me. Don't you know everything already?"

  "I don't know whether you're in love with Jill-Beth Kirov."

  The suddenness of the question surprised me. In this new happiness I'd clean forgotten that I'd only just returned from America. "I'm not in love with her."

  "Truly?"

  "Truly."

  Angela propped herself up on an elbow. "Did you fall out of love with her in these last few days?"

  "I didn't..." I stopped. I had been about to say I had not met Jill-Beth, but I did not want to lie to Angela. Not now. Lies twist life out of true, and this afternoon I'd found something that I wanted to be very true.

  Angela was pleased with herself. "You'd be amazed how co-operative people are to television companies. Airlines aren't supposed to reveal who's on their passenger lists, but when you say you're from the telly and that it's terribly important to find Mr Sandman who's flown to the States without his script, they do help. And Dallas, Nick, is a very, very long way from Boston. Or it was the last time I was in America. Has it moved?"

  I smiled. "I thought I was being very clever."

  "Fooling you, Nick Sandman, is like taking candy off a very dumb baby." She rolled away from me, lit another cigarette, and came back to my side of the bed. She lay on her belly, propped herself on her elbows, and blew smoke at my face. "So?"

  I nodded. "I fell out of love with her in these last few days."

  "Did you go to bed with her?"

  "No."

  She looked pensive. "You would say that, wouldn't you? Being a gentleman."

  "Yes, I would. But I didn't."

  "I'm glad." She ducked her head and kissed me. "Will you be in love with me now?"

  "Probably."

  "Only probably?"

  I raised my head and kissed her. "Undoubtedly."

  "Silly Nick." She laid her head on my chest, and I felt the heat of the cigarette as she drew on it. "Did you fly to America to go to bed with her?"

  "No. Yes. She wanted to see me, but I wanted to go to bed with her."

  "Did you pay the air fare?"

  "No."

  Angela laughed. "It would have been an expensive no
n-fuck if you had. Did she want to see you about the St Pierre?"

  "Yes." I suddenly wondered if this was a clever Bannister trick to make me confess all. Angela must have instinctively felt my fear, for she lifted her face and looked into my eyes.

  "I didn't tell anyone where you were, Nick."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I want to finish the film." She drew on the cigarette. "Are they going to sabotage Wildtrack?" I didn't answer and she pulled away from me. "Did you meet Yassir Kassouli?"

  "Yes."

  "What did you think of him?"

  "Very impressive, very powerful, horribly rich, very obsessed, and quite possibly a touch mad."

  She smiled, then rolled over and sat up with her ankles crossed in front of her. She put an ashtray on the sheet and tapped her cigarette into it. Her naked body looked uncannily like Melissa's, very thin and pale and supple. If love was a thing of lust, then I was already lost. "Kassouli's always hated Tony," she said. "He hated him for taking his daughter away. He thought Nadeznha had married beneath herself. She married him on the rebound, I think. That's what Tony says, anyway."

  "Were they happy?"

  Angela shook her head. "Not especially. But not especially unhappy either. But Kassouli didn't help. He used to visit them all the time. Nothing was too good for his darling Nadeznha. He made them buy this house and insisted they put the pool in for him. He was always here, nagging her to go home."

  "Why didn't she?"

  "Nadeznha always did just what Nadeznha wanted." I heard the dislike in Angela's voice. "She quite liked queening it in England. Here she was the heiress married to the show star, while in America she'd just have been another little rich girl."

  "I heard she was rather a sweet girl," I said as innocently as I could.

  "Sweet?" Angela almost spat the word. "She was unbelievably selfish. She was a monster! I always thought Tony was terrified of her, though he denies it."

  I thought how Bannister clearly fell for very strong women. "She was a very good sailor," I defended the dead.

  "That's not necessarily a recommendation, is it?"

  I smiled, rolled off the bed, and walked to the window. I had been embarrassed at first because of the scars on my back, but Angela had laughed at the embarrassment. Now I stood and stared down at the river. The tide was rising, swirling to cover the mudflats and lift the moored tenders on the far bank. "Was Nadeznha going to leave him?" I asked.