by Stella Duffy
“But he’s your business partner, isn’t he? I thought from what Marc said, that the two of you had a good relationship now?”
Luke poured himself another glass, “We do. And I don’t want your nosiness fucking it up. Now off you go, I’ll see you tomorrow. If I’m really lucky. Maybe I’ll be in a better mood then, happier to part with my darkest treasures.”
Luke waved her away and Saz walked from the room feeling uncertain and not a little uncomfortable. Clearly he’d used up all his pleasantries on Carrie and she’d been left with the nasty side that Marc had spoken of.
Downstairs in the main bar the music was still throbbing through the assembled bodies and it took Saz quite a while to prise Carrie and the brunette apart, but she managed to get Carrie’s keys eventually. And to throw a compassionate smile towards the tall blonde sitting alone at the end of the table, mournfully watching Carrie monopolize her friend. Saz left the building, glad to be in the quiet of a bird-call street, trying to work out what she’d just experienced.
When she rolled back to Carrie’s place at four-thirty in the already warm morning, soft light was prettifying Camberwell Green into something slightly closer to Camberwick Green, Windy Miller passed out beneath a blanket of Evening Standards. Saz collapsed with extreme gratitude onto the sofa. Sleep came easy and smiling. Until Carrie stumbled home an hour later, finger on the doorbell three minutes longer than was necessary and little brunette in doe-eyed tow.
TWENTY
Eventually Saz gave up trying to ignore Carrie and her new friend and slipped out the front door of the flat. Two hours later she was in her own kitchen, freshly showered and ready to go to work. Or as ready as her scratchy-eyed, no-sleep body could be.
It was fairly easy to get the full name of Gerald Freeman’s unofficial companion in the early years of the ’70s. The narcissistic nature of the print media meant those who ought to have been carefully guarding their precious archives easily swallowed the idea of a PhD thesis on the evolution of the gossip column and welcomed her into their offices. Saz sifted through about eighty old magazines and a similar collection of newspapers, the smug coyness of the Jennifer’s Diary entries matching euphemism for euphemism with the more tight-lipped broadsheet references. What all the “close friend”, “charming assistant” and “delightful companion” references boiled down to was the rather more basic Private Eye observation that it was clear the esteemed Gerald Freeman – businessman, entrepreneur, industrialist, good party man – was getting his end away with Sukie Planchet, a little bit of a girl from somewhere north of Sunderland, residing at the time in the wilds of Notting Hill, long before the area attained its faux-trash ambience so popular with the trust-fund babies.
With a few photos and the full name it was an easy step along the electoral register for Saz to locate the one Sukie Planchet resident in London. She had assumed there couldn’t be more than two or three in the whole country, if that, but it was always better to start in London. The chances were that anyone who’d experienced an enjoyable few years in the big city wasn’t likely to return to the North East the minute the ’70s globally cooled from summer of love into winter of discontent. Saz figured if she drew a blank in London then her next step would logically be the Home Counties, that nursing home for all former party goers, where reformed groovers slip quietly into a dark night of their own gin-and-tonic devising. Fortunately Saz’s tube pass mentality wasn’t stretched beyond breaking point: Sukie Planchet had taken the opportunity of growing up to relocate across London, Central Line direct. Ladbroke Grove to Bethnal Green in twelve easy stops.
Saz chose a direct doorstepping approach this time. Partly because she just couldn’t be bothered lying for a second time that day, but also because the electoral roll information had thrown her a little. From what she’d read both of the “companion” in the old newspapers and from Sukie’s own love letters to Sir Gerald she had expected the young raver to grow into a happy little middle-class housewife with a couple of perfect children at private schools and a nice cottage in Norfolk for sunny weekends, maybe a place in France if the husband was doing really well. In the few thoughts she gave to the possibilities, the most she had imagined was that Sukie might have used the novel clothing style she’d exhibited in the old photos to become an artist or designer of some sort. Or, if she really had enjoyed the mistress life, Saz thought she might even be interviewing a copycat Cynthia Payne in furthest Norwood. She hadn’t expected to be making a visit to a Peabody Housing Trust estate, to see a single woman, no children named on the council tax roll, who listed her occupation as “Religious Educator – Unemployed”. Saz figured if the worst came to the worst she could always claim the Lord had sent her.
She didn’t need to bother. In a reverse Jehovah’s Witness action, Saz knocked on the door and Sukie answered it almost immediately, heavy gilt-embossed bible open in one thin hand and Jesus holding tight to the other. “I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re here, I have no money to buy what you’re selling, but what I have to offer you is prized above rubies. Please, come in.”
Saz suppressed an involuntary shudder, a combination of an innate fear of evangelism and her even greater concern that if this was the way Sukie always answered her door, she was damn lucky she was still around to open it. Then she followed Sukie inside.
Prototype wildchild, social climbing blasphemer, drunken adulterer – and now clean living, headscarfed ambassador for Christ in one easy water-walking jump. Sukie had thought she was happy, persuaded herself the free love years of easy living were worthwhile, and then one morning she’d woken up and seen the error of her ways. It was that simple. The good Lord picked her up, dusted her down and sent her on His way with a gentle “Go and sin no more”. The basic whore-to-nun conversion which Sukie was delighted to tell Saz all about. At length. With liberal biblical quotations thrown in for backup, though rather more of the raining-down brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah kind, than the wishy-washy liberalism of loving your brother as yourself. Sukie obviously found the pre-Jesus testament a little more appropriate to her message.
After the third parable designed to press home exactly the same point, Saz was almost prepared to give the Jesus thing a go if it would only shut Sukie up long enough to allow her to get a question out. Only so many ways to say the same thing and Jesus’s buddies appeared to have come up with all of them. Basically be good, be very, very good, do not pass temptation, get out of limbo free, go directly to heaven. The camel’s hump/needle’s eye concept was not exactly new to Saz, her big sister having passed through a thankfully brief born-again phase when they were in their teens, just around the time Saz could really have done with an understanding sibling to discuss her own rebirth as might-be dyke. Cassie’s redemption lasted as long as her virginity. Then she left home, engaged in an intense battle with the Prince of Darkness, discovered the joys of lust – it took Gary about two hours and cost him four pints of snakebite – and Cassie’s shining faith was put away with the rest of her childish things.
Saz took less than five minutes to realize that while Sukie was one of God’s very own children and therefore quite capable of conducting a three way conversation – Saz, Sukie and Jesus – she wasn’t, unfortunately, totally nuts. If she was going to get any information at all out of the tiny but very forceful woman in front of her, it either had to be via terribly clever subterfuge and brilliant questioning, thereby uncovering the past in tiny glimmering increments of truth, or she would need to opt for blatant honesty and hope for the best. Saz was exhausted, hanging out for a proper night’s sleep, and not feeling especially clever.
She opted for brevity and truth. “I’ve come to talk about Sir Gerald Freeman.”
Used to deceit as by far the best way to coax unwilling candour, Saz was more than a little taken aback when Sukie sat right down beside her on the sofa, her tiny frame barely registering on the uneven old cushions, grabbed Saz’s hand and hissed into her face, spitting just a little as she did so, “Bad man. V
ery bad man. Let’s just pray for him, shall we?”
And the torrent began again. Sukie held both of Saz’s hands so tight in her own that Saz wondered her rings weren’t fused together with the force. The older woman closed her red-rimmed eyes and began the litany of Sir Gerald’s evils. “For the fornication and filth he forced upon me and so many others, dear Jesus, we ask your forgiveness—”
There was a pause, growing into an uncomfortable silence until Sukie squeezed Saz’s hands even tighter and Saz realized she was supposed to offer a response. She dredged up long forgotten years of tedious R.E. classes and muttered an embarrassed, “Forgive us, oh Lord.” Then stuttered out an “Amen” just in case that was necessary too.
Sukie turned her fierce gaze on Saz, nodded and continued. Saz was relieved when Sukie shut her disconcertingly pale blue eyes, the better to commune with her Lord.
The list of Sir Gerald’s transgressions was seemingly endless, if a little tamer than Saz had been hoping for. There was sex, of course, more sex than she would have thought Sukie would be willing to admit to, but it seemed there was nothing the reformed zealot wouldn’t share with her Lord, not even the night she crept from the sleeping Sir Gerald’s bed directly to his best friend’s bunk while on holiday with the two of them in Ibiza. Quite how Sukie blamed this particular piece of devilment on Sir Gerald, out for the count on his daily diet of gin, whisky and a whole lot more gin, Saz wasn’t quite sure. Nor did she want to stop Sukie mid-flow and question her, thereby risking the chance of losing another important tale of the old man’s wickedness. Or even just the juicy gossip. If Saz was going to have her fingers crushed by a woman wearing a “Thank God for Jesus” T-shirt – revealed when the threadbare pale pink cardie was ripped off for the prayer session – then she might as well treat the experience like an aural tabloid. All the juice and none of the air brushing.
TWENTY-ONE
Half an hour later Sukie seemed to be winding up her prayer-fest. Saz had been treated to a litany of rage directed against Sir Gerald, his friends and pretty much anyone who’d come into contact with Sukie in her time as his mistress. Saz had taken most of it in, occasionally attempting an interruption that might draw Sukie round to the purpose of her visit, but inevitably being bludgeoned into submission by the vehemence of Sukie’s outpourings. The woman was small but frighteningly strong – vocally as well as physically. The period of the rant did at least give Saz an opportunity to examine the room: floor-to-ceiling postcards of every famous artwork ever to depict Christ or any number of pious martyrs, tripping cheerily off to their gruesome deaths. Clearly her hostess wasn’t taking a fundamentalist line as far as graven images were concerned.
Sukie quite obviously wanted to force Sir Gerald back into purgatory for a good few years yet, but after thirty-five minutes she seemed to have run out of steam. Even she couldn’t really have thought that being related by marriage to a former Chancellor of the Exchequer was that awful. She did, after all, have an extra large card of Saint Paul sitting in the arms of a plaster angel on the mantelpiece. While Sukie had dwelt largely on Sir Gerald’s own failings, she’d only touched on a couple of her own. She made a passing reference to “claiming that which was not strictly mine” and another to “the youthful abandonment of adult responsibilities”, though her own faults were only admitted where they were prompted by what she called Freeman’s “disgusting appetites”. She didn’t, however, mention his wife and son.
So before it was too late and the attempted conversion began in earnest, Saz whispered, “And what about the family, Sukie? What about Sir Gerald’s son. Did you know Patrick?”
The reaction was immediate. Sukie dropped her hands, grabbed her bible from the stool beside them and shoved a page under Saz’s nose. And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister, and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.
Saz looked at the page, looked back at Sukie, “Um …I don’t actually think Sir Gerald’s wife had a sister.”
Sukie sat down, exasperated, “No, you silly girl. It’s not meant to be taken literally.” Which was rich coming from the mouth of a woman who not half an hour before had been raining down excessively real eternal damnation on her ex-lover’s degenerate head. “Sir Gerald took the baby for himself, his wife wanted a child, he wanted a child, it didn’t happen. Not for the two of them. They were not blessed with progeny.”
“So he adopted a baby and brought it up as his own?”
“Like the foundling Moses.”
Saz was rapidly running out of biblical knowledge, but even she knew that Patrick hadn’t been simply found in a reed basket. And as a Peggy Lee fan she had her doubts about Moses too.
“Do you know any more about where the baby came from?”
“There was an arrangement.”
“Who with? Did he know the mother?”
Sukie was staring off into space, evidently lost somewhere in the late ’60s.
“Sukie?”
She shook herself and looked back to Saz, “I do apologize. I don’t – I mean I try not to remember … these things. Sometimes it’s better to leave them in the past.”
Saz hardly knew what to say given how much of Gerald Freeman’s past Sukie had just happily given away, “Yeah, but … with what you’ve already told me about Freeman … well …”
Sukie’s pale blue eyes suddenly seemed incredibly clear, “Why do you want to know about the child?”
“Ah – I’m a friend of Patrick’s.”
“Girlfriend?”
“No. He’s married.”
“Like father like son,” Sukie intoned fatalistically.
“Not in this case. We’re just good friends.” Saz didn’t see this as an ideal moment to come out and continued with the purpose of her visit. “When Sir Gerald died—”
“It was all over the papers.”
“Yes, well, Patrick went through his father’s things and found out some stuff about his adoption. Things he hadn’t known before.”
Sukie shook her head, “The sins of the fathers …”
Saz was rapidly losing patience. “Exactly. And so now he wants to know who that father is, who his birth parents are.”
“I’m not sure what this has got to do with me.”
“You knew Sir Gerald.”
“But he’s dead now. Raking through the past? I don’t know. Gerald will have to deal with his own misdeeds. It’s not up to us. I have sins of my own to bear with. Vengeance is mine …”
“Saith the Lord. I know. But surely you can understand, Patrick wants to know about his father.”
Saz realized what she’d said and scratched the old burn scars on her half-numb fingers in irritation. She could see the way Sukie’s mind worked, and cut her off before she could start again. “Obviously I mean his temporal father. Here. In body. He just wants to know the truth. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Sukie suddenly looked very tired, her afternoon’s rant had obviously taken it out of her, “Yes, dear, of course. The truth. It’s something your generation seems to be very interested in, isn’t it? Digging up all the long-forgotten secrets. I’m sorry to have to tell you there’s very little I know. While I was Gerald Freeman’s harlot I was kept well away from the family, from the good ones.”
“But you must have talked to him about them sometimes?”
“Occasionally, yes. And not with a great deal of charity, to my shame. I did know about the boy, I knew he wasn’t Gerald’s, as you said – the boy was adopted. It was a big secret, of course. Gerald didn’t want anyone to know.”
“Did you ever meet him, Patrick? As a child?”
“Just the once, when he was in town for the day with his father. Pleasant enough little boy.”
“And why did Sir Gerald tell you about him? Can you remember?”
Sukie smiled and Saz suddenly saw a flash of the young woman she had been before time washed her out.
“We used to call it pillow talk. He could be quite
lovely sometimes, you know. Very open and loving. Not that it ever lasted for long. Gerald told me they’d adopted Patrick early, when he was a very tiny baby, I think. Richard Leyton had a hand in it.”
“The solicitor?”
“Yes. Never very fond of me, that one. Always on at Gerald to get rid of me. Spoilt his image.” She clutched her bible closer to her, a hot water bottle against the cold memories, all hint of her fleeting smile gone. “I wasn’t exactly top drawer stuff. Richard Leyton thought Gerald could do better – even in a mistress.”
The venom in Sukie’s voice seemed a little more than was merited merely by an acquaintance who had disapproved of her thirty years ago. Saz wondered if perhaps Sukie had known Leyton better than she was letting on. But Sukie would not be drawn on further questions. “I hardly ever saw the man, dear. All I can tell you is that whenever I did, he made me feel very uncomfortable indeed.”
Sukie didn’t have much more to tell. The adopted baby, the solicitor, the wife’s complicit silence, all these Saz had guessed at, though it was useful to have them confirmed. Particularly Richard Leyton’s involvement. “Gerald did love the boy, I’m sure of that. But he wanted the child to be his own. Really his own. I expect that’s why they wanted it to stay such a secret, that if they didn’t talk about the adoption openly, it might become the truth, he’d be theirs. But these things aren’t always as easy as we might hope. Gerald minded, I think. Much as he loved Patrick, he minded the child wasn’t really his. Couldn’t ever seem to forget. People can be funny like that, you know.”
At the door Saz leant back from the noise and heat of the busy road, gave Sukie her card and asked her to call if anything else occurred to her.
“I do hope not, dear. I don’t like to think too much about my dark days.”
“Just in case.” Sukie shook her head and Saz figured it was unlikely she’d hear from her again. “Well, thanks anyway. I appreciate your help.”