The Other Rebecca
Page 2
The only time they lost their self-consciousness was when someone asked a direct question, the kind of question that requires five or ten minutes to answer fully. The important person would lean back, take in a breath and then hold forth, punctuating his long sentences with his forefinger and smiling at his own neat ironies. The listener would nod repeatedly, his eyes never wandering. Sometimes he would ask another question, then nod his way through another long response. Sometimes the speaker would graciously cede the stage by asking the listener a question, at which point one or the other would gesture at an empty stretch of terrace wall, where they would retire to continue their discussion.
These were the men. Only one of the women – a pretty but anxious-looking creature with a fixed pout and a blue straw hat – seemed able to address them as peers. The other women were clearly wives, almost all in their eager-to-please early fifties, and better at circulating. But even they had trouble keeping conversations going when they tried crossing over to the other camp. The novelist’s sons and their hangers-on killed their every attempt at an opening with monosyllabic answers and repellently brilliant smiles. They were passing around a joint in the usual, unnecessarily surreptitious fashion. Occasionally, they would glance in the direction of the village, the conical hill half a mile away that seemed to merge, in this light, with the steep terraces of olive trees and citrus groves behind it. I imagined they were looking for a missing guest.
In due course he appeared, just as the setting sun was slipping from the windows of the village, just as the terraces began to darken and the cliffs above them turned from pink and gold back into grey. He was tall and lean with unruly light-brown hair. I guessed from his slow gait that he was keen to delay his arrival for as long as possible. He was smoking a cigarette. A few hundred yards away from the villa, he sat down on a boulder at the side of the road to finish it. He sucked in on it so hard it looked as if he were trying to inhale the view.
The sea remained where it was, a thousand feet or more below, but fortitude came suddenly and before the end of the cigarette. He threw it in the road, stamped it out and proceeded briskly towards the villa.
Big embraces with the hostess, who was fussing with the barbecue. Lots of ‘lovely’s and ‘marvellous’es floated through the failing light, and ‘how long’s – how long was he staying? How long had it been since their last meeting? How long had Himself been ‘this bad’? A shrug of the shoulders in answer to this last question, followed by an explanation I couldn’t hear. As hostess and guest glanced up at the window, I had my first good look at his face. It was long, with fine features given substance by a strong chin. The large eyes hinted at thoughtfulness and kindness; the hand that brushed the hair back spoke of a lifetime of being indulged; the mouth, despite the half-smile, of a day survived on nerves, of desperation barely suppressed.
I had seen this man before.
No, more than that. I knew him. It was the surprise of recognition, I think, that made me forget who I was and where I was and what I was meant to be doing. Now, when he moved onto the terrace to greet the other guests, I was no longer content with the challenge of the restricted view. The stage had become too interesting, my questions too urgent, the unheard conversations withheld too many clues. Both groups, I noticed, converged on him. He was the long-awaited missing link. They waited their turn for a chance to speak. Now it was a very important visitor, now it was a local hanger-on, now it was the sulky woman in the blue straw hat. She took him by the arm and chided him in a way that I ought to have seen was proprietorial. He responded with annoyance, and looked over her hand to greet the novelist’s eldest son, who passed him the joint. He took a few drags from it and then tried to pass it back – overhand, not underhand as the others had been doing. The son said something like, ‘No, I have more, you have the rest of this one, you look like you need it.’
At this point, our new arrival noticed the hostess struggling with a plate of barbecued chicken. He rushed across the terrace and under the grape arbour. ‘Here,’ he said in a loud and, even to my untrained ears, confidently upper-class English voice. ‘Let me take that for you.’
‘Not until you’ve put that thing out,’ the hostess replied. ‘Goodness, Max, you ought to know better! Under the circumstances, particularly! Do what you like elsewhere, but I’m not having anyone smoking tobacco here.’
‘This is not tobacco,’ he said. ‘It’s marijuana.’
‘Then I’m even more appalled. When will you grow up? Honestly! Bringing contraband to a party!’
‘It’s not illegal, Lydia. Surely even you know that? People smoke it in the cafés.’
‘They do not!’
‘They do. The only reason you haven’t noticed is that you don’t know the smell.’
‘Yes, I can, young man. It smells bad. Put it out.’
‘Find me an ashtray, then.’
‘I don’t have any ashtrays,’ she said petulantly. ‘Throw it over the wall.’
‘I’m not going to throw it over the wall, Lydia. What a menace you are! I’m surprised you haven’t burned the whole place down. I’ll give it to someone else, how about that? I’ll make sure you don’t see anything compromising.’
‘That shouldn’t be difficult,’ said the hostess. ‘Lots of hypocrites to choose from here! I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re ready.’
‘This won’t take long.’
The conversation ended. I waited for him to appear again at the far end of the terrace. When he did not, I moved to the window on the other side of the bed and leaned out, and as I did so, my patient took advantage of my inattention and clamped his hand around my thigh.
Once again, I prised his fingers loose. No sooner had I succeeded than he grabbed hold of my arm. Then he grabbed my thigh again with his free hand. When I shouted at him to let me go, he let out a Hammer horror howl, and then let go of my thigh to lunge for my arm. He tried to haul me onto the bed. I threw my weight in the opposite direction, with the result that we both rolled to the floor.
I landed on my side. He hit the floor head first, and then went limp. My legs were pinned underneath his torso. After I had freed myself, I tried first to pull him back up on the bed, and then, when that proved impossible, to sit him up – but no sooner had I done that than he keeled over on his head again. Fearing that he was dead or dying, I rushed down to the kitchen to get help.
Here, under the harsh fluorescent light, I found the hostess cutting up red peppers. ‘So you think he’s dead, do you?’ she said. ‘Weren’t you able to get a pulse?’
‘I didn’t look for one.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know how,’ I said. ‘I’m not a nurse.’
‘You’re not a nurse? Then what the hell are you doing with my husband?’
‘I’m not quite sure.’
‘And what is that supposed to mean?’
‘That I was sent over here by Mrs Van Hopper without having been given very much information, and then sent upstairs without much more, and then left stranded there. Since you ask.’
‘If you’re complaining about my not having fed you, you’re being childish and unreasonable. No one else here has eaten yet either. This is Spain, my dear. People eat late’.
‘I’m not talking about food. I’m talking about your possibly dead husband. I apologise if my timing is wrong. If you prefer, I’ll just go back upstairs and try to settle him into a spare casket.’
I heard a snort of laughter behind me. I turned around. It was Max.
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Goodness.’ It was as if he recognised me. ‘I never…’ His voice trailed off. ‘Yes,’ he said, trying to look stern. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, where were we?’
‘Oh, you’re a big help,’ the hostess said to him.
He paused, then gave us both a long, affable and puzzlingly inappropriate smile – a ploy he still uses, I’ve noticed, with restless underlings when they challenge his authority. In a soft, measured voice, he said, ‘I suggest we a
ll go upstairs.’
He led the way. Arriving at the old man’s side, he kneeled down and took his pulse. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s not dead. Dead drunk, maybe, but not dead.’
‘He can’t be drunk,’ Lydia protested. ‘He hasn’t—’
She stopped when Max lifted the ruffle to reveal a dozen or so empty wine and vodka bottles and an unopened carton of Camel cigarettes.
‘Oh!’ said Lydia. ‘Oh, dear!’
‘It doesn’t really matter what he does to himself at this stage, so stop fretting,’ Max said. ‘Grab hold of his feet.’ He turned to me. ‘And you take the right arm. That’s it,’ he said, as we hauled the poet back onto the bed. ‘Now all we have to do is get someone up here who knows what he’s like. And let Not the Night Nurse here go home.’
‘I also think you ought to apologise to her,’ Max told Lydia as I lamely gathered up my things.
‘Oh, stop being such a bore!’ she said.
I followed them down the stairs. Two of the sons were waiting in the kitchen. ‘What’s wrong?’ one of them asked, to which Lydia replied, ‘Pas devant la bonne,’ to which Max said, ‘Come, come now, let’s not get our knickers in a twist, the days are gone when you could reasonably expect a nurse not to know French.’
‘But she’s not a nurse, and she’s American,’ Lydia protested.
I took advantage of their turned heads and slipped out of the house.
The road was dark. I made my way towards the point haltingly, picking out the hard shoulder with my torch. I was just rounding the first bend when Max drew up alongside me in a white Panda. ‘Get in. I’ll drive you home.’
‘Is this your car?’ I asked after I had told him where to go.
‘Why are you so sure it isn’t?’ he asked.
‘I saw you arrive on foot.’
‘If you know it’s not my car, why are you asking?’
‘You could have been returning from a walk,’ I said. ‘If you were a house guest.’
‘Which I’m not.’
‘So this is another house guest’s car.’
He said, ‘Presumably.’
‘But you’re not sure.’
‘No.’
‘And you didn’t stop to ask.’
‘I hadn’t the time,’ he said. He took a drag from his cigarette. ‘I promise to thank the owner when I get back.’
We had arrived at the double hairpin bend that led down to the point. Max negotiated it without hesitation or caution. ‘He’s attacked people before, you know,’ he told me. ‘That’s why the real night nurse left. He probably needs locking up. I can see why Lydia is reluctant to take that step, but she can’t keep sacrificing innocent virgins to him. She really can’t. It’s just not on. I’m going to tell her. In fact, I’m going to tell her tonight.’
‘But not until you’ve thanked her house guest for the Panda.’
‘No. Not until I’ve made myself known as a thief.’
The road was dark, but he drove as if from memory. He pulled to a sharp stop outside the cliffside stone house people called Schlomo’s Tower. ‘Come in for a drink,’ he said.
‘Is this where you’re staying?’
‘No, but I know where the key is, and I’ll bet there’s some wine in there, and if you’ll join me, I’ll promise to ring Schlomo as soon as I get back to London and confess.’
He was right. There was a bottle of Franja Roja under the sink. He brought it outside with two glasses, a corkscrew, an ashtray and a candle. ‘That’s more like it,’ he said as he lit it with his butane lighter. Taking a drag from his cigarette, he added, ‘I can’t bear parties.’
He stretched himself out on the terrace wall, seemingly oblivious to the five-hundred-foot drop.
‘So tell me. You’re not a relation, by some ghastly chance? If you are, now’s the time to tell me.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I said.
‘No one’s ever remarked on the resemblance before?’ He gave me a long, curious look. ‘No one? Look into my eyes again. Straight into my eyes, like you did before. No, I’m sorry. It’s gone. It must have been the light. Sometimes I read too much into things. Never mind. Let’s talk about something more interesting. What are you doing in Deia?’
‘What would you say if you had to guess?’
‘I’d guess that you’re here … to finish off a book of exquisite short stories. Each one a gem intended to stand on its own, but also to reflect and refract the brilliance of the others.’
‘How did you know?’
‘That they were exquisite?’
‘No. That I had written short stories.’
‘Well, it was just a case of narrowing things down. You had to have some sort of pretext, I knew that much. You could have been a musician, I suppose. But you didn’t have the Look.’
‘My clothes are too conventional, you mean?’
‘Well, just slightly. Not that the Look is anything to aspire to.’
‘And?’
‘And you could have been an artist, but you didn’t have the Gaze. There was also the matter of your sharp tongue, which suggested to me that your poison was the pen. And as for short stories – well, you wouldn’t be a lady’s companion or whatever you are if you had lots of novels under your belt, and you don’t have that anointed look first novelists have before publication. Neither do you have the tragic look they have just afterwards. And you’re young and American, and Americans who want to be taken seriously tend to concentrate on the short story, and when they aspire to greater things they are prone to make their short stories “interconnect”.’
‘And I can tell that’s a word you dislike.’
‘Yes, but not as much as I hate “commit” when used as an intransitive verb when discussing the inertia of a bachelor who’s trying to put off marriage. So,’ he said, without missing a beat, ‘you’ve been slaving away on your short stories when Mrs Van Invalid or whatever her name is gives you the time—’
‘No, I’m through with my short stories. I’m on to my first novel.’
‘Even better. You’ve been struggling with the opening pages of your first novel whenever the old hag gives you five minutes of peace, and you’ve been here a month or two, and you’ve made friends with …’
Here he rattled off names of a number of people I knew by reputation only. No, I told him, I didn’t know Aline. She wasn’t here because she had a show in Copenhagen. So far she had sold five paintings. Her nephew, who claimed to be a sea captain, was staying in her house. I didn’t know Kelsey either, although I did know that she had just returned from Guatemala, nor her partner Bert, who talked too much about Wittgenstein. She had a house guest named Joe, who was meant to have been staying at the McAllisters’, except that it was being occupied without their permission at the moment by Aline’s husband’s discarded Spanish girlfriend. Max was amused by my ability to retain gossip about people I hadn’t met. Encouraged, I began to embroider in my usual way. Then, reckless with my unexpected success, I made my first mistake.
‘And what have you heard on the Deia jungle telegraph about me?’ he asked. He gave me that strange smile, the one that now tells me he’s upset.
I said that I had heard nothing.
‘Nothing?’ he echoed. Again, his expression didn’t fit. He looked right into my eyes, too long for comfort. I looked straight back. Exactly what I saw then I do not know, but it felt familiar, and it hurt.
‘I’ll tell you what I do know,’ I said, ‘although I can’t tell you how I know, just that I’m always right about these things. It’s that we have something in common.’
‘How interesting,’ he said, but he didn’t mean it. He glanced at his watch, stood up, stretched, and then, looking at the sky, not me, said, ‘It’s about time I got back.’
Chapter Three
Mrs Van Hopper’s house stood on the edge of a steep incline that slid into a cliff. The view was like an overblown postcard, too beautiful to believe and too far away to touch. But that next morning, I remem
ber, the air was so clear that for once the horizon looked close enough to trace with your finger. The dark-blue sea was smooth but you could see how it registered the course of every passing breeze. The cliffs along the two clawlike promontories that enclosed the cala looked newly chiselled. You could count the silvery leaves on the olive trees, the lemons nestling in the scattered citrus droves. You could taste the thyme.
‘Good Lord, another beautiful day,’ was my employer’s response as I wheeled her out on the terrace for her breakfast. ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can bear it. It’s too hard on the eyes. Makes you feel like it’s your job to be happy. Which I definitely am not this morning.’
She didn’t know how to take my account of the previous evening. On the one hand, she was furious at the skilful way they had managed to snub her while still availing themselves of her services, and therefore delighted to hear they had been put in their place by someone else. On the other hand, she could not but conclude that the Forbidden Villa would be closed to her for ever on account of my poor performance as a nurse. Normally, she would have chastised me for my ineptness (‘When you look after the elderly, my dear, you have to put up with such things’) but that left the puzzle of my deliverance. If a house guest – in other words, a member of the inner sanctum – had seen fit to rescue me, something must have been very wrong.
‘Who do you think he is?’ she asked her friend Marco when he arrived towards lunchtime. By now she had decided to turn the story into an intrigue, starring me as spy.
‘He sounds like a relation, if you ask me,’ said Marco importantly. He pretended to be thinking as he set up the chessboard. Like all the old-timers here, he felt obliged to appear in the know about the goings-on at the Forbidden Villa. He proposed a number of names that meant nothing to me.
‘I just don’t know,’ I said. ‘He never introduced himself. His manner was quite abrupt.’