by Don Boyd
“So was he…”
He looked quizzically at her. Chit chat.
“The rumour mill has been working overtime. Robert rang to tell me that there had been some evidence of an accomplice in the staging of their macabre suicide. The police have been questioning him.”
“Robert called you. Suicide? Robert knows that it was a murder. He must do.”
Margot was trying to stay composed.
Xavier continued, volunteering information. “I had a call from a policeman investigating their death and at first he seemed to think that they had killed themselves in some sort of Romeo and Juliet style ritualistic game.”
He was so calm, so casual. Margot tried desperately to suppress her rage and disgust.
“They were clients of mine… As bonkers as they undoubtedly were, they were not about to kill themselves. Certainly not when I last saw them, which wasn’t so long ago.”
He moved his hand over to the bottle to refill her glass.
“No, thank you, Xavier”. She stood up to leave. “I must get back to Archie.”
“Ah, your husband, Archie!”
“Do you know Archie?” Margot feigned surprise.
“I met him; many years ago. In Scotland.”
“I wonder why he has never mentioned it to me.”
“It’s so long ago. We hardly ever meet. A different generation.”
“He was showing me around the cathedral this morning…” Margot had decided to take a risk.
“Really? Why?”
Xavier sat there while she found a pair of scissors in one of the drawers and cut the cord off her wrist. She placed it neatly on the table near her wine glass.
“St Eulalia!” Margot whispered.
And at that moment, they both knew each other’s secret. Someone was screaming in the distance. The frogs were silent. A cock crowed. Up until that moment, Margot had been in the special situation of knowing so much about this man’s life, while he was unaware of the extent of that knowledge, apart from the most superficial details. In the clumsy assumption that he might have been innocent, and in a moment of stupidity, she had accidentally played into his hands and ironically enough in doing so, he would unwittingly reveal his guilt to her, and confirm her worst suspicions; that Xavier, her new lover, had been involved in the deaths of Tilly and Paolo.
“Will you stay for another drink, Margot? Please! I want to tell you more about Archie.”
He sat there pathetically, as if all the sensual power he had manifested physically had suddenly drained from his body. Margot was almost drawn back to him. She shuddered.
“No, I must go.”
And she let herself out, hurriedly.
As she walked through the corridor that led to the main front door of the block, she heard a strange, prolonged, muffled cry of anguish from his apartment. She walked back a few paces, and listened. Xavier was crying and moaning, like a desperate, overgrown child. She hurried along the dark corridor and out into the balmy safety of the Plaça Santa Maria del Pi. She shivered. The church bells were peeling early morning matins. It was dawn. There was no breeze but the crisp blue sky and cool air felt like a cold shower on her skin. She stood enjoying the tiny ray of sunlight beginning to prod its way over the Tibidado. The square was empty except for what looked like an old-fashioned police car, sitting discreetly in the small side street next to the Church, a black sedan which hadn’t been there the previous afternoon. Margot hesitated, and then walked quickly away towards the narrow calle which led to her own beloved Plaça.
At that time in the morning, the narrower Calles of the Barri Gothic ooze the atmospheres of their sleazy histories. Pushers and prostitutes still ply their trade before their clients stumble out of the chic, and not so chic, hotels that have replaced the crowded tenements of its mediaeval past.
Margot felt like a woman with a terrible hangover, sheepishly trying to escape surreptitiously from a one-night stand in one of those hotels. A one-night stand that she regretted. She hurried past Elvira’s café which was opening up in time for the early morning stragglers.
“Damn it,” she thought.
Surely Elvira would have been closed today? But of course, Elvira wanted to serve at least a few of her regulars before closing up for the funeral. Margot tried to slip by.
“Margot!” called Elvira from the doorway.
“Oh Elvira! In one hour Elvira… Una ora per favore! I will come earlier!”
Feigning innocence and surprise, she had shouted without stopping, backing down the street into a half-run. Once back in her studio, she showered obsessively. Cold. Fresh. Temporarily cleansed. She went quickly to her desk and retrieved her rings from the secret compartment. They were an awkward fit, her fingers having swollen in the heat. She changed into a neat black suit, opened the shutters and, avoiding Elvira’s calle this time, hurried along a couple of blocks to sit at her favourite café in Las Ramblas. She was the only customer and her regular waiter, a Pakistani, hovered around the porn emporium where a clutch of transvestites was trading their stories of the night with him. She needed to think in as public a place as she could find. No associations. Anonymity. The area around this particular stand had a seedy liveliness, which she had always enjoyed. It made her feel safe and protected. It was also within yards of the gates of the largest and newest police station in Barcelona. The Mossos D’Esquadros headquarters. Carlos’s office.
She ordered a Coca Cola, accepting with a limp laugh the inevitable innuendo about her body. She then waited for her fix of sugar, watching the newsagents laying out their magazines and newspapers. As she took the tall glass of Coke from the silver tray, she moved away to a table with a view of the bay. Christopher Columbus was posing as majestically as ever. What was she going to tell Elvira she had been doing at six in the morning in the Barri Gotic, dressed in the same flimsy white dress she had worn on the eve of her wedding day, five years ago?
She rang Archie. His answering machine. Slightly needy.
“Darling, it’s me?… pick up, sweetheart… Archie?…” And then, in a rather quieter tone, “I just wondered. What are you doing after the funeral? Are you going to the wake because I have a new client to see then. Please ring me. I am on my cell. Are you still going to meet Tilly’s parents at the airport? I need to talk to you.”
There was still the faintest hint of desperation in her voice. Archie would pick that up and call her, she was sure of that.
How blind indeed. Archie…
Chapter Eighteen
Five years ago, almost to the day, the café where she was sitting in Las Ramblas had been the first staging post for Margot’s ‘hen night’, a peculiarly Western proto-feminist ritual which has begun to rival the stag night as embarrassing evidence of humanity’s innate bestial and moronic tendencies. Archie and Margot had few friends in common at the time – even in Chicago they had kept their social lives separate. His position as a senior Professor had made that necessary – relationships with students are always discouraged. And Margot relished some independence. Most of Archie’s friends were from his generation and many of them were rich and successful enough to be able to afford to fly to Barcelona. Apart from her parents who pitched up from La Jolla, of course, Margot’s invitation list was by contrast much younger and poorer. No old boyfriends, mainly her large clutch of good girlfriends. And so only a small and predominantly female group, those who could afford the fare to Europe, showed up. About half a dozen Californian friends, including two fellow Cheerleaders dressed to the nines, three of her room-mates from the University, her Chicago-based psychoanalyst and an interloping but much adored gay friend who said that he could join the throng dressed as Penelope Cruz. They were an eclectic and entertaining group, intoxicated by this God-given opportunity to indulge their wildest Mediterranean fantasies in the setting of Margot’s favourite Pedro Almodovar film, All About My Mother, filmed only a year or so previously in that city.
The dress code for the hen-night had been to dress ‘Almodovar�
� and all were asked to rent a car for the night. A set-piece of the evening was a carefully-planned restaging of the fabulous ‘prostitutes’ car circle’ scene in a field in the suburbs of Barcelona. Margot had bribed half a dozen of Las Ramblas’ finest studs to join the party – as many Xavier Bardem equivalents as she could find. And the girls were to be prostitutes for the night, silly but enormous fun. At five in the morning, Margot was carried head high into the first floor lobby of the Arts Hotel by gorgeous Catalan transvestites surrounded by her drunken friends who were now singing her favourite Doris Day song Que Sera, Sera. When she was finally placed ritualistically on her huge king-sized bed, in the hotel’s honeymoon suite on the top floor of the hotel, it was dawn. The girls tiptoed out giggling. She awoke a couple of hours later, surrounded by six gorgeous, naked men. All dead to the world.
Still dressed in her flimsy white dress, she wandered down the corridor to Archie’s smaller suite two doors away. She couldn’t resist sharing the moment. He followed her meekly back to the suite. It was empty! Her Almodovar fantasy had vanished. Undeterred, she led Archie into her bed, ordered a massive breakfast from room service and gently made love to him. He had been the only man she had ever wanted to be with.
In contrast to Margot’s modest clutch of guests, Archie had characteristically invited everyone he had ever met to their wedding ceremony and reception, which he had set up to take place in the gardens of the then newly-built Arts Hotel near the Olympic village. The raised garden terrace at The Arts has some very simple beautiful wood sculptures, in sharp contrast to the giant bronze, magnificently garish steel, lattice fish, created by the American architect Frank Gehry, which separates the hotel complex from the sea. Archie had been determined to make Margot feel at home in Europe and chose this hotel very specifically. Its tall steel structure sits majestically at the end of the bay that the Barcelona Olympic committee had transformed artificially in 1992 by blasting a sandy beach, which now has one of the finest modern esplanades in Europe. Its architecture and interior design deliberately cock a snoop at the modernista influences of Antoni Gaudi and Lluís Domenech Montaner, whose artistic spirits pervade most of the other grand luxury hotels in the city.
“Modern California meets the Med, and I don’t mean mediaeval!” is how Archie joked by way of apology for his choice. He had been amused at the thought of all his more stuffy academic friends mingling amongst its predominantly chic international clientele. “Let’s sweep them into the twenty-first century!”
Margot began to piece together the elements in her marriage since her wedding which might give her some clue as to how to deal with her betrayal of the one person who deserved her unconditional loyalty. She was also trying that most impossible of psychiatric exercises, the agonising process of objective self-analysis. But what she most wanted, was to find a way to escape the mess she was in. Perhaps, in the absence of Marie-Christine’s sorely-missed wisdom, she needed to talk to someone reliable, who could understand the extremes of her behaviour. One of her clients, perhaps? She decided to use the wedding and its guest list as her starting point because many of her new friendships had started then, and they were the conduits to most of her clients and the backbone of their social life. Archie’s eclectic group of wedding guests had introduced Margot to a new milieu – that most bizarre and rarefied of all ex-patriot communities, the British in Barcelona at the end of the Blair era. Most of her clients came from this peculiar mixture of bankers, carpetbaggers, academics, playboys and playgirls. They ranged in age from the teenagers like Tilly to the over-sexed, eighty-two year old sculptor who had been married five times and was thinking of marrying once more, a girl sixty years his junior. Surely, amongst this very neurotic hybrid collection of eccentrics and misfits, she would find a soulmate who might offer her the advice she so badly needed. The intimacy of all her professional relationships, especially when they were in analysis, had allowed her the privilege of trust. A trust that was, in her case, mutual. Their secrets were her secrets. Perhaps her secrets could be theirs, too? In the absence of Marie-Christine, she desperately needed someone to turn to. Hideously unprofessional of course, but an indication of her isolation. She knew their secrets, perhaps one of them could share hers?
The second Coca Cola arrived. Lemon and ice. A massive white cruise ship was sailing silently out of the port. If only…
Rather desperately, she played along with the game, and began to sift through the vast database in her mind which had been the willing receptacle for so many of the weird and wonderful problems of her clients. On the surface, all of them in some strange way possessed some of the necessary qualifications as confidantes, and if they had been friends, might have been candidates to help her deal with the situation with Xavier. They all had a deep love and respect for Margot, along with a crucial understanding of her need for secrecy.
Her first client had been Anthony. He was very poor, and had been Margot’s conduit to the transvestites of Las Ramblas and as such was a guest at the wedding in his own right. He had quite specifically modelled himself in life on the character Eusebio in All About My Mother, so Margot’s fantastical scenario for the hen-night had been a form of reality for him.
Anthony?
When he had arrived in the city as a teenager, he had fallen for an older trans-sexual woman he had met in the Mercado over a café solo. She had a light moustache and was overweight but dressed and acted like an Italian movie star. He loved Italian movies of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren and the sublime Monica Vitti. He renamed her Monica. For a time they lived clandestinely in a tiny apartment overlooking the beach on the Barceloneta. She earned her living at that time cooking paella in a small restaurant nearby. He worked in a bar in the Universitat. But soon they were in debt and to escape they eloped to Brazil. Within weeks he began to earn his living as a rent-boy and they lived a strange but happy life within Rio’s narcotic sub-culture. But everything turned sour when she was murdered in a tragic case of jealousy and mistaken identity. Devastated, he had no alternative but to return to Barcelona, knowing that he could ply his new trade on the streets of La Raval where he began to accumulate a small band of friends. One of those friends was Robert, who had tried to pick him up in a late night bar.
I had taken him on knowing that he wouldn’t be able to pay me anything, but his profile was fascinating and I felt that he would give me some psychological keys into the minds of a subculture I had never experienced. I told him this and he seemed happy about it. He certainly provided that in spades and what was at first an unlikely fit has become a very special friendship.
But Margot felt sure there was something Anthony had been hiding from her. No trust.
Asif?
Asif was, by contrast, my first wealthy client. A successful author, oozing with louche charm and slightly self-manufactured charisma, in his youth he had been a very beautiful man to look at but as time and fame took their toll, he had been spoiled by the indulgent lunches during his time as a copywriter at a famous American advertising agency. Half Indian, a Sikh, his problem centred on his appalling need to cheat on every woman he had an affair with. He had chosen me as his mother confessor principally because he had wanted to fuck me, as he put it so poetically (and as he declared to me after a couple of sessions). Undeterred by my brutal rejection (“Don’t be silly, Asif!”), he began to trust me slowly and finally revealed what he believed to be the nature of his problem: his rather desperate Pakistani father was a bitter man. Feeling that he had been a failure in his life, he became disproportionately jealous of everybody who seemed to be thriving and then when that jealousy became directed towards his son, Asif, by way of psychological self-protection, increased the pretext for this obsessive paternal jealousy by achieving at a level his father had only ever dreamt about. His international success as an author, his strong, mainly white, middle class collegiate of friends and his stupendous success with white women drove his father to a form of alcoholic madnesss, and he resorted to tak
ing out his frustrations on Asif ’s poor, very English mother. This led to a painful conflagration which ended in a terrible public fisticuffs between father and son, worthy of Sohrab and Rustum, the Persian pair who fought to the death in the Assyrian desert to settle a war between rival potentates. Asif allowed me to unpick the clear-cut Freudian aspects of his psyche but spent large amounts of our time trying to seduce me. As the rejection became more pronounced, so his friendship deepened and his sessions now are as much a meeting of minds as they are therapeutic. But he wouldn’t be able to handle my sexual passions for another man, especially as I used to tell him that my first and foremost sexual loyalty was reserved for Archie.
And then there was Robert; of course, Robert might have been the obvious first port of call because he was not really a client in the strictest sense and had introduced Xavier. Knows him.
The idea is preposterous. Robert would be the last person I could ever confide anything to, especially under these circumstances. He is a British journalist – this puts him into a special category as far as trust is concerned. From top to bottom they are quite simply the most unreliable confidantes in the world. It is an inbred phenomenon.
But queens in love with transvestites and self-important novelists are equally unreliable… This is all so, so silly; desperate… However intimate I may have been with any of these people, I am there to help them. I cannot reverse that situation.
Realistically, Margot knew that as a collegiate, her clients were not a good pool of confidantes in any way at all. In fact, they were disastrously inappropriate from a professional point of view, and unacceptable options personally. As much as she would have liked the process to be mutual and a two-way exchange, the harsh reality was that all of them were in some way or another self-obsessed and did not have the capacity to exercise that evenly suspended attention which would be so necessary for her. She managed a wry smile at the thought. The rest of her list read like the wish-list for an unimaginable daytime reality television show. Eusebio, the seventy-year-old sculptor, a serial adulterer of monumental proportions; Kim, the recovering alcoholic in love with his sister; Leslie, the obese kleptomaniac; Suzie, the bulimic heiress bent on suicide; Donald, the impoverished film director with a myriad of masochistic obsessions; Russell, a classical cellist with a long grey beard who was a reformed child molester training for the priesthood; Lydia, the fetishist international lawyer who liked to be dominated and humiliated; Simon, a married ex-BBC executive prone to curb crawling, serial masturbation and threesomes with his wife dressed in military uniform; Gottfried, a very young and very fat merchant banker whose father was embezzling his clients; Hilary, the married owner of a Barcelona ‘English as a foreign language’ school, in love with a Roman Catholic bishop who had fathered two of her children; and then there was Tilly, with Paolo! Oddly enough, Tilly would have been the only candidate amongst this bizarre bag crammed full of deranged frogs who would begin to understand what she was going through. She smiled wryly at the mysterious metaphor her mind had conjured. Xavier’s frogs!