The Heartbreaker

by Susan Howatch

  “Take a seat—unless you want to come upstairs and watch me dress.”

  “How much does that cost?” she says nastily.

  “It’s free as air, Gorgeous! I don’t charge women!”

  “Gavin, watch my lips. The name’s Carta—C-A-R-T-A. It’s not Pussycat, it’s not Gorgeous, it’s not—”

  “Got it, Wonder-Babe. Hang in there while I sharpen up.”

  As she looks for something to throw at me I take the stairs two at a time to the floor above. The flat’s a duplex and above the living-space there are two bedrooms, one for business, the other for storing a whole range of items relating to my work. In the bathroom I now go through the hygiene routine: mouth-wash, teeth-clean, shower. Then it’s dressing-up time: fresh underwear, a clean shirt and my brand-new Armani suit—oh, and I stuff my feet into socks plus D&G shoes. Then I comb, fluff and tweak my hair to make sure my very, very slightly receding hairline’s concealed. After that comes the clear-up: I cram my discarded jeans into a sports bag which contains my exercise gear plus the clothes I arrived in this morning, and yes, I’m ready to go, the final seconds of the allotted ten minutes are melting away, and it’s exit time. Creaming downstairs I glance in the mirror by the front door to check that I’m looking like a million quid, and then I breeze into the living-room area where the blonde’s looking very upmarket in my black leather swivel chair.

  “Bingo!” I exclaim, flashing her my best smile (since it’s not the moment to flash anything else). “Ready?”

  Ms. Shaggable tries to look cool, but I know she’s melting quite a space for herself in her personal version of Antarctica. It’s the combination of me and the Armani suit—the babes go down like ninepins every time.

  Can’t wait to get to that empty flat in Mayfair . . .

  CHAPTER THREE

  Carta

  [We] know more about sexuality today. We may be no better at controlling or humanising it, but we do understand how fragile and complex it is, and how mysteriously prone to disorder and disease . . . In spite of the claims made by sexual utopians in the 1960s sex is never value-free, never without its human and emotional consequences.

  Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death

  RICHARD HOLLOWAY

  I

  I want to describe Gavin as he was when we were setting out—setting out, that is, not just to Richard’s flat in Mayfair but on our journey through an extraordinary phase of our lives.

  When I first saw him he was wearing no clothes except for a pair of tight black designer jeans which were dragged low on the hips and left more than half unzipped. I kept my eye on the zip for too long because I knew instinctively it was safer to stare at that inanimate object than at the muscles of his chest or the body hair tapering down into the crotch. Or maybe I was just in shock after discovering the gender of Richard’s lover.

  He was tall and slim, perfectly proportioned, effortlessly conveying the impression of physical fitness. His dark hair, cut in a conventional style, was unoiled, unspiked, unpermed and unstreaked. His blue eyes were set wide apart in a flawlessly symmetrical face, and below his prominent cheekbones his mouth was a sensual line above a fine-drawn but unfeminine jaw.

  I took note of all these details. I took note of all my mindless but unstoppable physical reactions. Then I dumped my emotions on ice in order to play the lawyer and emerge from the scene with dignity.

  But when I saw him again the next day I found I could no longer pretend to myself that a detached approach was easy in the face of such a hyped-up sex appeal. I had to confront the truth in order to have a hope of mastering it, and the truth was that I thought he was devastatingly good-looking, devastatingly attractive, devastatingly sexy—he was all devastation, but in the most aesthetically pleasing way imaginable. I was reminded of films I had seen of American tornados, twisting across the landscape in a thrilling whirl of grace but leaving a trail of smashed homes and broken lives in their wake.

  When he went upstairs to change I sank down weak-kneed onto the living-room’s one and only chair.

  On his return he paused to admire himself in the mirror by the front door, and I saw the narcissism which oozes from so many handsome men, particularly the ones who have a problem relating normally to other people. Why bother to trawl for a relationship when you can adore this stunning reflection in the mirror? I was sure then that he was gay even though he was busy trying to convince me he was straight.

  As he finally tore himself away from the mirror I noted he was wearing a beautiful suit, light grey, which shimmered over his long limbs as if the designer had merely waved a magic wand to convert the sketch on the drawing board into a tailor’s dream. His close-fitting pale blue shirt, uncluttered by a tie, was the perfect shade to match the unusual grey, and the effect was immensely stylish: modern and sophisticated without being bizarre or louche. I was aware of the nerve-ends tingling in my stomach as the lethal sexual attraction kicked in.

  “Ready?” he said, looking straight at me, and as he looked he widened his eyes so that they seemed even brighter and bluer than they already were.

  “Sure,” I said at once, managing to sound quite unfazed, but I was wishing that Richard had never kept photos of Gavin in his flat and that I had never committed myself to a scheme to retrieve them.

  Outside the building Gavin said: “No need for a cab. My car’s only a couple of minutes away.”

  “Where’s your parking slot?”

  “The Data-Press Building.”

  “I bet that costs you plenty!”

  “I screw for it four times a year.”

  Knowing he wanted me to be disapproving I said in my most neutral voice: “I suppose you screw for the flat too.”

  “No, I own it,” he said without hesitation, and although I was sceptical his car suggested he really did earn big money. It was not an Aston Martin or a Lotus but it was still an impressive boy-toy; I found myself looking at a Jaguar XJ-S Le Mans V12, dark blue with cream upholstery, and I was unable to resist asking how much it cost.

  “It was a gift,” he said carelessly, “but they retail for around forty thousand. You got wheels?”

  “A Porsche.”

  “Sweetie, you need to update! No one drives a flash krautmobile any more except for Eastenders trying to be Essex men!”

  “Bit of a snob, aren’t you?”

  “Bloody right I am—I’m a Surrey man! Don’t you know anything about being brought up in a middle-class ghetto?”

  “Why should I?” I retorted. “I was born in a Glasgow slum and lived in a low-income suburb of Newcastle before I got to Oxford and re-invented myself. Why are you banging on about how classy you are? Am I supposed to be impressed?”

  “No, intrigued. Panting to know more.”

  “What intrigues me, as a tax lawyer, is how much the Revenue sees of your earnings! Do you have a bent accountant?”

  “No need, love,” he said, switching to a south London accent so abruptly that I wondered if the talk about Surrey had been a fantasy. “I’m a law-abiding leisure-worker and everything I do’s legal. My manager takes care of the tax shit.”

  “You mean your pimp?”

  “I mean the woman I live with. What would I want with a pimp? Pimps are for chicks, not blokes—and particularly not for blokes like me who’ve got a top section of the leisure market creamed off.” His accent kept veering back towards the Home Counties to make me realise it was the south London accent which was faked. Or was it? He seemed to be experimenting with different personalities to see which one cut the most ice.

  As we drove out of the City into the West End he demanded abruptly: “You been to Richard’s flat?”

  “Yes, a couple of times when Moira was up in town. Why?”

  “Just wondered. I’ve never seen the Mayfair place but I’ve been to his home at Compton Beeches—he took me there once after we’d been sailing.” He was trying out yet another identity. This one was nonflamboyant, casual, not unpleasant. The Home Counties accent was still there b
ut it had been flattened and modernised, and deciding I might be able to do business with this personality I asked idly: “Did he ever take you out on the town during the week?”

  “I don’t do escort work, I told you that, and I don’t do evenings. He had a lunch-time slot on Wednesday and a double-slot on the Friday late-shift.” As if regretting how bleak this sounded he added quickly: “But I never minded his appointments. I really did like him.”

  I thought: you ploughed him under. It took me an enormous effort to sustain the conversation by saying: “What was it about him that you liked?”

  I had expected some facile answer but to my surprise he gave me a weird spiel, shocking in its old-fashioned ideology, about how Richard had “lived out his own truth” as a closet gay despite his “handicap.”

  “Handicap!” I could hardly believe my ears.

  “His word, not mine! He said he had the right to choose what to call his orientation and the right to choose how to live his life!”

  But I thought of Moira and the children, impaled on that right to choose, and before I could stop myself I was saying: “There can be no rights without corresponding responsibilities. Did it never occur to him he could mess up other people’s lives as well as his own?”

  “Oh wow, Ms. Priggy, you’re so sexy when you take the moral high ground!”

  I ignored this rubbish. “You’ve got it wrong,” I said strongly. “Richard was the very opposite of a man who lived out his own truth. I also think he’d come to realise this but he was frantically trying to push the truth away with all this desperate talk about rights. He should have come out of the closet, and society’s to blame for the fact that he felt he couldn’t.”

  “Oh God, a bleeding-heart liberal!”

  “Well, of course I’m not surprised you’re a homophobe. You can’t acknowledge your real orientation so you despise gays while hamming it up as a straight!”

  Gavin just laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded in fury.

  “You, sweetie! You and your ignorance! Okay, ready for the learning curve? First of all, there’s no block of identical people who can be labelled ‘gay’ and explained according to a single set of rules. Gays are as diverse as us straights, and Richard was a wonderful example of an up-yours individualist who couldn’t stand the gay activists ordering him about.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “The next thing to take on board is that I’m not a homophobe. As I see it, there are shits and there are good guys, and each category has gay and straight people in it.”

  “Well, all right, but—”

  “And finally I think you should allow the gays to take some responsibility for their actions instead of blaming their rough deal on ‘society’— whatever that is. If you tell any mixed bunch of people that society’s at the root of their problems, you’ll always find some who’ll develop a poor-little-me victim culture and start whingeing—and I don’t know about you but I happen to find moaning minnies bloody unattractive. The great thing about Richard was that he was nobody’s victim, he never whinged—”

  “—and he went through hell because the strain of living a lie had become too damn much for him!”

  Gavin said abruptly in a cut-glass public-school accent: “The double-life was his choice and it was a choice he was entitled to make. If it turned out to be the wrong choice that’s tough, but I’d still defend his right to go to hell in any way he chose.”

  We drove on without speaking to Mayfair.

  II

  Richard’s flat was on the first floor of one of those elderly Mayfair houses built in pinkish-red stone. Gavin had trouble parking the car, but when we finally walked away up North Audley Street he said: “Can we have a truce, Frosty-Puss?”

  “Not unless you call me by my correct name.”

  “Okay, Catriona.”

  “Carta will do.”

  “You bet she will! I got lucky!”

  I stopped in the middle of the pavement and swung to face him. “Look,” I said exasperated, “what’s the point of all these heavy passes? You don’t need them to get your message across so why do you have to keep ramming it down my throat the whole time?”

  “I should be so lucky!”

  “Right. That’s it. I’m off.”

  “Hey, hey, hey—cool it! Don’t blame me for your very own Freudian slip!”

  “Okay, I’ll give you one last chance to shape up.” I felt like a mother struggling with a child determined to misbehave.

  Scrabbling in my bag I produced the keys, but when I rang the buzzer to make sure the flat was empty I was suddenly aware of an extreme reluctance to enter the building. Belatedly I asked myself what had happened to my common sense. Perhaps I had been too absorbed by Gavin’s proximity to have the obvious streetwise thoughts, but whatever the reason for my mental sluggishness I now realised I was about to give a sex-fixated scumbag the opportunity to assault me.

  I was still clutching the keys, still asking myself how I could have been such a fool, when Gavin said behind me: “You still worrying about me nicking things? Because you needn’t. I wouldn’t do anything which would have upset Richard. Promise.”

  With enormous relief I thought: he sees himself as Richard’s friend. He may come on strong but he won’t harm me. After all, I was Richard’s friend too.

  Giving him a brief smile I stepped forward to open the front door of the building.

  III

  When we reached the flat Gavin was at once fascinated by the contrast between Richard’s weird taste in modern art and Moira’s preference for conventional furnishings. I could remember Moira telling me which decorator she had used, but Richard had obviously hated the result and imposed his pictures on the place as if with a clenched fist.

  “He wanted to take me to exhibitions,” Gavin said, gazing at the nearest painting. “This makes me wish I’d gone.”

  “You mean you like that mess?”

  “It’s not a mess! The blue-green squares and the yellow triangles are arranged with mathematical precision, but mathematics is a language which doesn’t deal with emotions so the colours say everything the shapes leave unsaid. What you have here is the essence of rational, well-ordered Richard infused with all the colourful emotions he had to keep hidden.”

  Despite myself I was impressed by this smarty-pants exposition which suggested Mr. Gavin Blake was rather more than just a pretty face, but all I said was a sceptical: “How can you be sure?”

  “Lady, I’m not laying down the law, I’m just suggesting why the painting spoke to him . . . Oh my God, look at this bedroom! Moira’s run riot in here to compensate for losing the hall to modern art!”

  I was careful not to cross the bedroom threshold, but one glance from the doorway was enough to repel me. In the big pink flouncy room beyond, the decorator’s 1980s dream had become 1992’s nightmare; we were in recession now, not wallowing in conspicuous consumption, and all the coordinating fabrics which swathed the bed and windows seemed stifling.

  On the other side of the hall we found Richard’s study, designed by the decorator as if for a simple squire hankering for an old-fashioned country life, but Richard had fought back against all the red leather and mahogany by hanging more of his weird paintings.

  “This room has to be the one we want,” I said, and Gavin agreed, but the photos still proved difficult to locate. Gavin searched the desk and found nothing. He then checked the chest of drawers and moved the sofabed to make sure nothing was hidden beneath it, but only fluffballs from the thick carpet emerged. At that point I abandoned my role of supervisor and decided to search alongside him.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” I demanded. “How big are these pictures? Would they be in a folder or an album?”

  “Probably not an album—too difficult to hide. There are three sets of ten-by-eights, thirty-six photos in all, and each set was in a plain brown envelope when I handed it to him. I’d guess he kept them in those envelopes.”

  “Bu
t how sure are you that the photos are here and not at Compton Beeches?”

  “One hundred per cent. He told me he kept them here to use on the weekdays when we didn’t meet.”

  “Use?”

  “For masturbation.”

  I opened the door of the fitted closet. “So we’re looking for hard-core porn.”

  “You kidding? The first batch can be passed off as ‘art’ and sold openly in the pseuds’ corner of any mainstream bookshop. The second batch can be passed off as fun for the boys and stocked openly in any gay bookshop. And although the third batch contains pics only a sex shop would sell, I’m not photographed with anyone or anything so there’s no way the stuff would fall foul of the Act as it’s currently enforced.” And he added as easily as if we were talking about the weather: “My manager says why break the law when it’s possible to make so much money legally? That’s why I never do parties. One-to-one gay sex between consenting adults is okay. Parties aren’t. And I never get mixed up with serious S&M either because that’s often legally borderline, and anyway if I get smashed up I can’t work. Of course the odds are I wouldn’t get smashed up because I know how to fight, but some of these pervs can slip on the handcuffs even while you’re condom-stuffing, so you’ve got to be constantly on the alert.”

  “How exhausting it all sounds.” I suddenly noticed the bookcase behind the door. “Wait a moment,” I said suddenly. “Even if Richard’s kids were in a snooping mood, they wouldn’t look twice at Daddy’s sailing books, would they? Moira told me neither of them liked sailing.”

  “Richard told me that too.” Gavin was already stooping to pull out a large coffee-table book about the history of sailing at Cowes, and as I watched, a brown envelope slid from the pages to the floor.

  “Success!” I exclaimed with relief.

  “It’s only one batch,” he said, but when he grabbed the next book another envelope fell out. Reaching into the empty space created by the removal of both books he then pulled out the third batch which had been hidden behind them.