Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  Shrewton led James back to his own suite and began patiently to telephone London, calling his own office, his home and James’s office with news of their delayed return. Cars were organized and the rest of the party were sent home, knowing nothing of what had taken place. By the end of the afternoon half a dozen men in white overalls arrived with a stretcher, an ambulance and a hacksaw, and removed the body of the girl under the doctor’s direction.

  The two men spent a sombre evening together. James, still numb with shock, was moved to a room connected to his companion’s suite and fell into a deep sleep just after nine o’clock. In the morning the ambassador’s car called for them, and they had a meeting at the Embassy with an unsmiling civil servant, who regretted, at length but without much sincerity, that such a crime could have been committed against a foreigner on French soil.

  By the following afternoon they were on their way to the airport. ‘Eddie, you saved me. You don’t know what kind of mess …’

  ‘I can guess. I don’t want you to tell me. And don’t thank me, I was in as much trouble as you were and anything I did was for myself as much as you. From what I hear, you haven’t got much more to lose, but I’m not quite in the same position.’ The man was so lacking in humour that when he did make an attempt at levity it passed almost unnoticed. James fell silent in the corner of the car and forced himself to look at the grey streets. Whenever he shut his eyes the ghastly sight of the girl’s lacerated flesh seemed to be projected into his mind. He could not banish the image.

  The doctor had been wrong. The tracery of cuts was not an indication of an Arab ritual murder. The sliced skin had fallen into a pattern which James had recognized instantly, a pattern which he had seen every day of his life; the Bourton coat of arms had been carved into the woman’s body. For the next few months James was overpowered by the certainty that a vengeful destiny was pursuing him. The girl he had thoughtlessly abandoned seventeen years ago had transformed herself into a pitiless Nemesis. The deepest terror of his subconscious, the female destroyer seeking to consume him, had become flesh. His years of carefree, forgetful pleasure were at an end and the final reckoning was inescapable. James had no doubt at all that Ayeshah had procured the girl’s murder, that she had tried to frame him and would then perhaps have offered to procure his liberty in exchange for her children. He had escaped her only by the good fortune of Eddie Shrewton’s concern, but he was still in danger.

  Two days after his return to England the French papers reported that the mutilated body of a prostitute had been found on waste ground on the outskirts of Paris. This was such a common occurrence that it merited only a few lines in Le Monde. The rumours began immediately, however, and they were accurate, specific and aimed at James. An English milord had been involved in the prostitute’s murder; she had been killed at a debauched private party attended by a dozen prominent Englishmen at the end of the Longchamp weekend, and he had carved his armorial bearings on her body. Coming so soon after the Profumo scandal, the stories confirmed the long-established European conception of a degenerate British aristocracy, and the Continental newspapers took them up with enthusiasm.

  Then a photograph appeared, a blurred but recognizable shot of a dishevelled James brandishing a thousand-franc note under the dancing girl’s bare stomach. Clippings from the scandal-sheets began to arrive in the mail at James’s office, and he ordered his secretary not to open his letters. He tried to telephone Eddie Shrewton, but could not get through; the secretary was embarrassed, but had clearly been told to block James’s calls.

  James lived every day on the edge of panic. His heart beat irregularly, shuddering in painful palpitations which left him breathless. He felt constantly cold and tired, but sweaty flushes would strike him without warning. He lost weight and his complexion grew waxy and bloated. He tried to drink to blot out his anxiety, but his tolerance for alcohol vanished and he began to black out whenever he drank to excess.

  In November, two officers of the City Police Fraud Squad asked him for a meeting. Their manner was diffident and professionally neutral. They were pursuing investigations at the request of Interpol into an alleged violation of the Algerian exchange control regulations. James felt crushed by the heavy yoke of destiny.

  Only his daughters had the ability to mitigate his distress and when he collected them from school at the end of the winter term it was with a wave of relief. The mere sight of them running eagerly towards him, their young faces full of pure emotion, their limbs innocently graceful, warmed his heart. He hugged them, wrapped in their heavy winter clothes, and felt restored. He soon noticed how in a few weeks they had both moved so much closer to womanhood. Monty already had a bosom of mature proportions, and Cathy’s demure beauty had lost its girlishness. James told himself that even in loving his daughters he had lived in a fool’s paradise; before long other men would take possession of them, leaving him bereft of love completely.

  For Christmas he bought them each a string of pearls, perfect, creamy jewels as flawless as their clear young complexions. He wanted to give his girls jewellery now to be sure of being the first man to pay that tribute to their maturing femininity. A resigned, defeated peace replaced his earlier distress and he found emotional sanctuary in the family festival at Bourton, tainted as it was by his mother’s dominating presence and the waspish coldness of his wife. Guilt, like a vampire, had sucked him dry of every emotion except love for his daughters.

  In May the Fraud Squad visited him again, accompanied by a French detective. Now they had traced the bank account he had opened in a false name, and although James wearily denied any knowledge of it, or of the gold allegedly smuggled out of Algeria in the carpets he had imported, all four men knew that the case was proved and that a prosecution would follow in a few weeks.

  He brought the girls to London at half-term, and heaped them with presents on the pretext that they needed summer clothes. ‘Your father must love you very much,’ the saleswoman at Fortnum and Mason remarked as she folded two slim evening purses of black patent leather in sheets of crackling tissue. ‘There’s not many men would take such an interest in what their daughters wear.’

  ‘I suppose he does,’ Cathy replied, wondering if she dared ask for some new shoes. She was used to people remarking on the rapport between her father and herself, but never understood why. Her father’s love was like the air she breathed, invisible all around her. She would not appreciate how vital it was until she had to live without it.

  He took them back to school, kissed them and said goodbye, resolving that it would be for the last time. His own life was ruined, but he could still save theirs. He could save them from his own selfish stupidity and from Ayeshah’s mad desire to possess them.

  He flew to Paris and met the Princess once more at her apartment. This time there was no delay before the double doors opened and she appeared. A cold, echoing calm, like the icy silence of the high Alps, had settled on James and he felt nothing as she approached him. He was at an emotional altitude above fear. Nothing could now distress him.

  She wore a white Chanel suit trimmed with gold braid which, for the first time that James could recall, gave a slight impression of vulgarity to her appearance. Her eyes glittered under their heavy lids.

  ‘You have delayed much too long,’ she said to him at once. ‘You should have come to me last year, then I could have done something. Now things have gone too far.’

  ‘Yes, they have. You’ve finished me, you can congratulate yourself.’

  The secrets which they shared were so grave that the atmosphere between them became almost intimate. Ayeshah was disconcerted; she had not expected this feeling of a bond with the man she hated. James, his sensibilities blunted by trauma, felt nothing.

  ‘Last time I was here you invited me on a false pretext.’ He had difficulty focusing his eyes and he looked at her as if he were not seeing her. ‘Now I must apologize, because I am here under false pretences. I have nothing to discuss with you. I‘m not asking you for anyt
hing. I have come only to tell you that you will never get the children. Never.’

  ‘Are you going to keep me away from them when you are in jail?’ Complacently, she crossed her legs and reached to the silver cigarette box on a side table.

  ‘If you had any notion of love, you would have gone to them long ago. But I don’t think you do.’ He screwed up his eyes as if looking at a bright light, the deep wrinkles spreading across his face. ‘“Queen of Darkness” is the right name for you. You don’t understand love. You can go to your children, and you can stand before them as their mother, but they’ll never love you. I’ve made sure of that.’ With deliberate absence of chivalry, he allowed her to light her own cigarette.

  ‘You’re so confident, Lord James Bourton. You think you can make the world and everything in it exactly how you want it to be, as if you were God. You think that if you can’t see me, I don’t exist, and that if you can’t understand me, I must be evil. And you think you can create your children exactly as you want them to be, as if they have no will, no characters of their own.’ She stood up and walked to the mantelpiece, blowing cigarette smoke sharply upwards. ‘In a sense you are right, of course. Whatever I am, that’s what you made me. It’s not I who have destroyed you. You’ve destroyed yourself.’

  ‘You’re still a peasant, aren’t you? Nothing’s your responsibility, nothing’s your fault, you’re just the innocent victim of it all.’ Anger was slowly penetrating James’s anaesthetized senses and he felt lightheaded with the force of the emotion. ‘I didn’t make you what you are. That was your choice. But I’ve made damn sure my daughters won’t follow you. They’ll be fine young women soon, and when they find out that you’re their mother – if they find out – they’ll have more contempt for you than I do.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Ayeshah was suddenly anxious. This was not how she had envisaged the final encounter with the man who had stolen her children. She had wanted to see his ineffable pride devastated, to watch him wallow in humiliation, to hear him beg her to save him from ruin; this half-insane state of defiance was something she had not imagined, and his words hurt her. ‘Anyway, how will you know? When I am together with my children, you will be in prison.’

  ‘That’s another thing you’re wrong about,’ he told her in a quiet voice. ‘I’ll be somewhere where you can’t reach me, when you meet – if you’re ever misguided enough to make yourself known to them. In a way I wish I could be there. You will lose them twice. I did you wrong in the beginning, I admit that. But you’ve betrayed yourself just as much as I betrayed you. That’s what they won’t accept.’ She stared at him angrily, unable to find the words to reply. James stood up, paused for an instant because he felt dizzy, then walked to the door. ‘I’ve said everything I have to say to you,’ he said, authority at last returning to his voice. ‘You’ve made too many mistakes. It’s too late to win your daughters’love now. It was all for nothing, Princess. You’ll realize that soon.’

  He strolled back to the Ritz feeling physically weak but mentally euphoric. The account was square now. There would be a scandal, of course, but not a big one – his brother and Eddie Shrewton between them would see to that. And then his fight with Ayeshah would be taken up by Cathy and Monty, his beloved daughters, in whom he had perfect confidence.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Monty tried not to sulk, but she felt as if Cathy had dragged her down from a sublime emotional peak, and she was full of resentment. She was full of passionate impatience for the solution to the mystery of her life, and could not bear to be forced to wait. The idea of her real mother, a new and important force in her life, filled her with deep joy and she was afraid that the delay, and the information which they were seeking, would somehow mar the perfect pleasure which lay ahead of her. When they returned to London she was rough with Paloma, and withdrew from Joe, who immediately flared into such uncharacteristic anger that she was startled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s Cathy, she’s the one who’s upset me, not you. Let’s do something, get out of here. I can’t stand being in her apartment when I feel like this.’ They took Paloma to the zoo, but it was windswept and bleak, the sight of the confined animals depressed them both and Paloma screamed with terror when one of the goats in the children’s enclosure tried to nibble her sleeve. They left and walked down to the rose garden in Regent’s Park, where the last of the season’s blooms hung limply from their stems.

  ‘Why are you angry?’ he asked her quietly, drawing her to a wooden bench where they sat down.

  ‘I don’t know. I feel that something’s been snatched away from me, something important. I think Cathy’s being selfish. I hate her when she’s being the almighty older sister who’s always right about everything. I suppose it’s the world she works in, but she’s so dominating sometimes, her way has to be the only way …’ Monty was aware that she sounded weak. ‘Oh, I don’t know. What’s the matter with me, Joe? I did very well without a mother for so long. Why am I so attracted to this woman I hardly know?’

  ‘What is it that draws you to her?’ Joe asked, putting his arm around her and running his fingers through the pile of her spotted fur coat.

  ‘I didn’t like her when I met her as Madame Bernard,’ Monty told him. ‘I was grateful, of course, but she made my blood freeze, she was so sinister. I didn’t want to meet her when I knew her as Princess Ayeshah. Cathy had to persuade me. You know I hate those glittery, night-time people.’

  He nodded, the gusting autumn wind blowing a strand of his long black hair across his face. ‘I remember, you said you’d meet her for Cathy’s sake but you wouldn’t have crossed the street for her if anyone else had asked you.’

  Monty laughed. ‘Oh dear, did I really? But you’re right, what’s the difference now I know that she’s my mother? Maybe I’m being romantic, idealizing her in my mind already?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She knew he had once again talked her into seeing herself clearly, but just for once she wanted him to order her around. ‘You’re a man, you’re supposed to tell me what I think,’ she kidded him. ‘Anyway, stop hiding behind being a guru as usual. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re a wicked, immoral woman.’ His full lips curled in a smile and he ruffled her fur collar.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What are you doing wearing a coat like this? Don’t you know that the acrylic is a protected species?’

  ‘Why, that’s sentimental garbage, Mr Jones. The acrylic is a nasty, ratlike little animal, no better than vermin, and anyway, this one’s ranched.’ They laughed into the wind together and felt reunited.

  ‘You know what?’ Monty continued as they walked back through the light scattering of yellow early-autumn leaves on the pathway. ‘She isn’t real to me, even though I know her. I can’t imagine my real mother, or her being my real mother. It’s just too big for me to get my head around. But all the time, when I was a kid, I had this feeling that there was something missing in my life, like a lost piece of the puzzle. When I fell in love for the first time I felt complete, somehow, like I’d found the missing piece. Then when the love died, there was that great hole again.’

  ‘I know. I used to feel that way, too.’ Joe paused to fasten the studs on Paloma’s pink, quilted babysuit. ‘I never knew my mother, couldn’t remember anything about her, and I used to think if only I could find her I’d be OK, like the other kids. Then one day I just decided that was dumb, I didn’t want to be like the other kids …’

  ‘… and they weren’t the way you thought they were anyway,’ Monty finished, as they walked on. ‘I realized that when Cathy’s marriage broke up and she wasn’t my perfect sister any more, but just as weak as I was in her way. But now I’ve got that stupid feeling again, that maybe this time there is a missing piece after all and now I’ve finally found it. I just think my real mother is going to make everything I don’t like about myself OK, but when I think about who she really is and what she really is … Oh, Joe, why is
life so damn difficult?’

  Cathy ordered the man who was investigating the European press coverage of her father’s death to send whatever he had discovered to London immediately, and as an afterthought asked if he could get a copy of the marriage certificate of Prince Hussain Shahzdeh, The next day a courier delivered a bulky packet to her apartment, and she and Monty sat down at the round Georgian table, which was used for work more than entertaining and began to spread out the copies of long-forgotten newspaper articles. There had been no time to translate them, and as neither of them spoke German, Dutch or more than a few words of Italian they concentrated on the French stories.

  Cathy’s face was set as she read over and over again the accusation that her father had been found in bed with a dead call girl beside him. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said at once. ‘It’s a lie. Someone tried to frame him.’

  ‘There’s dozens of them, this must have gone on for months,’ Monty said in a small voice, stunned by the lurid implications of the rumours.

  ‘Now you see why I wanted to wait.’ Cathy pulled a large sheet of paper towards her. It was folded in half. As she opened it she saw the smudged but unmistakable picture of her father waving money against a woman’s half-naked body. She gasped, and Monty snatched the page from her and spread it out.

  ‘Jesus.’ She gulped with the shock of the image, violently repelled by it. Nevertheless, Monty forced herself to look, and to absorb every detail of her father’s face. He looked drunk and dishevelled, and there was something so redolent of habitual corruption in the gesture of the outstretched arm that the picture branded Monty’s mind. She suddenly connected her father with the men she had courted when she too had tried to sell herself, imagining him as another of those contemptible lechers whom she had despised so much.