Prim was sitting on the smaller of the two sofas, with her back to me as I came into the big room. I put the tray on the coffee table, ‘Dig in,’ I said, glancing at her. She looked back at me with narrowed eyes. Her mouth was a slit. I had never seen her face like that before, never in my life. Then I saw the envelope on the floor; A4 brown manila, with ‘Prim’, printed on the outside in big, bold letters.
She was leaning forward slightly, obscuring the papers on her lap. Then she seized them and thrust them at me, furiously. I took them from her.
They were photographs; of me, and of Susie Gantry. The first had a matt finish, and I guessed it had been taken by a digital camera then run off from a computer through a colour printer. It showed the two of us, in Roser Dos; Susie was holding my left hand to her lips, kissing it lightly. The second had been processed conventionally. It had been taken with a telephoto lens at Barcelona Airport, a perfect candid shot of our last goodbye kiss.
‘You weren’t kidding, were you?’ Prim hissed. ‘I asked you what you and she had done, and you told me you’d shagged each other senseless. You weren’t kidding, were you, you fucking horrible bastard?’
I thought, as I stood there looking at the prints, of many things; of Susie and me, of Prim and me in the good times, of the sneaky bastard who had taken the things and was going to pay for them in broken bones, and, most urgently, of how I could cool the situation.
‘Come on, they’re not what they seem. They’re just innocent gestures between good friends,’ was certainly an option. But all that it would have bought me was whatever time it took for Prim to confront Susie.
So I confessed. ‘No, I wasn’t. Things happened.’
I told her how it had all come about, after Susie’s near-calamity on the stairs. ‘She was frightened,’ I said. ‘She thought she’d been sleepwalking. So did I at that point; it was only afterwards that I realised what had really happened, that someone had broken in and thrown her down there.
‘So I stayed with her, till she settled down. I fell asleep and. . Like I said, things happened.’
‘Rubbish,’ Prim snarled. ‘Even if that far-fetched crap is true, which I doubt, it’s quite obvious to me what happened; the conniving little bitch thought you’d chuck her out if she just came on to you, so she staged a sham at the foot of the stairs.’
‘No!’ I protested. ‘When she went to bed she was too drunk to come on to anyone. I just dumped her on the bed and left her there. She didn’t stage anything. She had bruising on her arms where she’d been picked up and carried; not by me either, I promise you.’
‘Your promises are worth shit. These things that happened. . just the once, was it?’
‘No. It might have been, but things changed.’
‘Sure, things changed. You found that she was a good fuck, that’s what changed. Or did good old Oz feel sorry for her, and think that good old Prim wouldn’t mind her borrowing your services for the weekend?’
It was time to reach up my sleeve and produce my card. ‘There is no good old Oz,’ I shot back at her. ‘There never was, any more than there’s a good old Prim. We’re just a couple of yuppies with false glossy fronts.
‘You’ve lied to me since we’ve been here, Primavera. You gave me your version of your affair with Fortunato, but it wasn’t bloody true, was it?’
I saw the blood rush to her cheeks. ‘Who told you that? Susie?’
‘Susie thought that you’d told me. She went out of her way not to shop you, my dear. It doesn’t matter how I found out, you told me the opposite of the truth, didn’t you? You wanted to have the copper’s kid; it was Fortunato who wouldn’t hear of it. He did a runner back to his wife and set the abortion up without even asking you. What do you suppose he’d have done if you’d refused to go through with it?’
‘How could I,’ she exclaimed, ‘in those circumstances?’
‘The same way that many other women do. It would have been called a love child, I guess, and you’d have been called a single parent. Look around, you’ll see plenty of them.
‘But sure, your body, your decision, your right. So why did you lie to me? Know what I think? I reckon that when I turned up, just after it had happened, and when I found myself suddenly single again, you saw me as an easy option. But you were afraid that if I knew the truth, any part of it, I might have walked away.’
She started to yell something back at me, but I stopped her.
‘Does that sound conceited? Sorry, but tell me that I’ve got it wrong.’
She answered me with silence.
‘As it happens, I found out about it by accident, on Friday night. You must have been mad to think that I wouldn’t, eventually. Then I got a bit shifty, and I found out about Steve bloody Miller. You know what that led to; you’ve seen the damage.’
‘And that excuses you, does it?’ she shouted. She was on her feet now, in my face.
‘I’m not making excuses. I was angry, Susie was here and at the time I fancied her as much as she fancied me. That’s it.
‘But you know what? I’m still fucking angry, not about what you did then, but the fact that you can’t even be honest with me now. You lied to me last night, even, when I asked you if Miller was the end of it. How do you think I felt in that bloody restaurant when a waiter came to our table, and I had to look at him knowing that he’d fucked my wife?’
Prim gasped.
‘Don’t say anything,’ I said. ‘If I’d doubted it, the way he smirked at you and the way you chilled him out was enough to confirm it.
‘And how many more, eh? What about the lad from St Albans, and the racing driver from Sussex?’
‘Who’s been. .? Shirley.’
‘I let her think you’d told me. She assumed that you would have, and she said that it served me right. At the time, I’m sure it did, but the lies that have followed since we’ve been here, I didn’t deserve those, honey. When we married, I thought you were a princess, Cinder-bloody-ella, no less. I don’t mind you not being perfect, but I do mind you conning me into thinking that you were.’
I stopped and took a deep breath. ‘Right. Now you let me have it.’
She shook her head. ‘No. You really don’t want me to do that.’
‘Sure I do,’ I said bitterly, ‘go on.’
‘If you insist. When you left me and went back to marry your ac/dc childhood sweetheart I thought you were the lowest of the low. I felt defiled, especially when I found out that you’d been with her and then come back and been with me. So I reacted by behaving like the slut you’d made me feel. I had Miller, I had Fredo, the waiter, I had those other two and a few more that Shirley never knew about.
‘Then Ramon came along, and for a while he was different. I fell in love with him and he moved in with me. Yes, I did think I was Cinderella. When I became pregnant by him, I’d never been happier. Yes, it was a real fairy tale, sure enough.
‘He was so delighted that he left me, just like that. When he told me I was having an abortion and that he’d fixed it, I felt like topping myself.
‘I didn’t though; I got rid of it, as he demanded.
‘Afterwards, I might have gone back to being a slag, but I was too bruised even for that. Not long afterwards, I saw an ad on telly for some silly wrestling circus; and there you were, right in the middle of it. All of a sudden it came to me that I didn’t hate you after all. I had been very, very angry, and very, very hurt, but somehow, Ramon had put that into perspective. So I bought a ticket and I went to your show in Barcelona, and like you just said. . things happened.
‘Yes, I kept my mouth shut about my life in between times. And yes, if it gives you any satisfaction, you nailed the reason, right on the head.’
Prim grabbed the prints back from me and crushed them in her hand, waving them in the air. ‘But now, you bastard, you’ve done it again. You’ve been with her and you’ve come back to me and I feel defiled all over again. Did you even bother to wash it this time?’
She hit me, punched me i
n the chest, once, twice, three times, over and over again, not hurtful blows, more gestures of frustration and anger. ‘Why couldn’t you have been good old Oz, after all?’ she moaned. ‘Not the horrible shit you are.’
I shrugged. ‘Because, as I told you before, I never was. I was just another crafty little bastard on the make, a horrible shit, if you like. Susie showed me that much.’ I held her arms and pinned them by her side, my temper cooled by the tears running down her cheeks.
‘So you know my secrets and I know yours. I slept with Susie, and before that with Jan, before I went back to her, even. And you were indeed the village bike, as you put it recently, and then you came back to me on the rebound from the nice police captain. Tell me, then: what do we do, now that we know we’re not Mr and Mrs Perfect?’
‘Are you going to leave me for Susie?’ she asked.
‘Of course not, you’re my wife. Are you going to leave me for Ramon?’
She shook her head, briefly and violently. ‘No,’ she muttered.
‘Even if that was possible?’
‘No. Not even if.’
I chanced a smile. ‘How about “One size fits all”? Him maybe?’
She gave a spluttering, laugh, snorted, then sniffed. ‘I’d rather drill holes in my feet,’ she said.
‘Look, I am sorry,’ I told her, ‘but I’m not going to throw myself on the ground before you and beg forgiveness. I can’t do that. I didn’t set out to even scores, but that’s how it stands. Call me a heartless bastard if you like.’
‘You’re a heartless bastard.’
‘Okay. I admit it. Do you want to go on?’
‘Do you?’
‘Sure, for better or worse. That’s what I said.’
Her mouth took on that tight look again. ‘From where I’m standing it’s still me who’s come off worse. Oz, I’m not saying I’m going to leave you, but I need some space to think about all this. I’m going to go down to Barcelona for a few days. . On my own,’ she said. ‘Fair enough?’
‘Eminently.’
‘What will you do while I’m away? Call Susie?’
‘No, I won’t do that. I’ll think about us as well, I’ll get on with learning that script and, in the spare time I have left, I’ll see if I can figure out who might have chucked Susie down those stairs.’
‘If you find him,’ she said, ‘tell him from me he did a rotten job.’
‘Hey!’
‘Don’t “hey” me, Oz. I promise you this. Whatever happens with us, Ms Gantry will be a poor little rich girl when I catch up with her.’
29
I booked Prim a suite for the next five days in the Husa Princesa in Barcelona, and loaded her cases into the Mercedes. She didn’t kiss me goodbye, and I didn’t wave her off either.
As soon as she had left, I changed into a tee-shirt and shorts and went into my makeshift gym, where I spent half an hour pressing weights and another twenty minutes knocking ten bells out of the heavy punchbag. When I was finished, I went upstairs to take my second shower of the morning. None of it did me any good. As I stood there in the shower turning the mixer colder and colder to stem the sweat that was pouring out of me, it came to me that I was alone, not like I had felt after the family had gone, but really alone, for the first time since just after Jan died.
I dressed again, but I gave no thought to getting down to the script or anything else. Before I did that there was something else I had to do; and for that there was something else I needed. I looked through my copy of the Catalan Society magazine, but that did me no good. I thought about phoning Shirley, but decided against that, because I didn’t want to get into a discussion with her just then.
In the end, I phoned Lionell. He gave me the information I was after and, to my relief, he didn’t ask any questions.
I found Steve Miller’s parents’ villa easily enough, in a narrow street in Riells de D’Alt, where most of the houses are holiday homes. The little Lotus was parked in the driveway, with its rag-top up.
There was no preamble, no discussion. I rang the bell, he opened the door and I hit him; in the middle of the forehead, not directly on his broken nose, but close enough to make him scream in agony as he fell to the floor.
I took the crumpled photos from my jacket pocket and tossed them down beside him. ‘Did you really think that you could get away with sending those to Prim?’ I barked at him.
He was dazed and his eyes were unfocused, but eventually his head began to clear and he picked up the prints. He gazed at them, blankly. ‘Don’t know anything about them,’ he protested, his voice thick.
‘Sure you do, Steve. You spotted Susie and me in that restaurant and you photographed us. I clocked you then, but I couldn’t catch you. Then you had the idea of hanging around the house to see if you could get some really incriminating stuff. We left for Barcelona, you followed us, and you took that other one at the airport.
‘Great, thinks you. I’ll slip copies of these to Prim and that bastard Blackstone will be really in it. Congratulations, mate, I am, but so are you. Oh, how deeply you are in the shit!’
Miller looked up at me. ‘I didn’t take these,’ he squealed. ‘They’ve got nothing to do with me.’
‘Of course they have. Prim only got back yesterday morning, but she was a couple of days early; nobody knew about it. But you saw us last night, sitting in the window of La Dolce Vita. You knew she was home.’
‘Oz, I swear on my mother’s grave …’
‘Your mother isn’t bloody dead!’
‘All right, I swear to you on the grave of somebody who is. My grandmother, I’ll swear on her grave, I didn’t take those photographs.’ I reckoned he had a deal more swearing to do, though, before I started to believe him.
‘When were they taken?’ he asked.
‘You know damn well.’
‘Tell me.’
‘The Roser Dos shot was taken on Saturday night, the other one, yesterday morning.’
A huge smile of relief crossed his broken face. ‘Then I couldn’t have done it. I was on the golf course yesterday, with Frank, Gerrie and Maggie. We played a foursome at the Torremirona Country Club, up past Figueras. Ask them; they’ll tell you I couldn’t have been in Barcelona.’
Still I didn’t buy it; I suppose I wanted him to be the one, I wanted to punish someone and he was the easiest to fit in the frame.
‘So someone else took the second shot. So what? You got a pal to tail us and take it.’
He stared up at me. There was a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg above his left eye. ‘Oz,’ he said, in a sad voice that I just couldn’t doubt, ‘I don’t have any pals.’
I helped him up, the poor hopeless sod, sat him on his parents’ couch, stepped into the open-plan kitchen and made us two mugs of coffee. It turned out to be a foul own brand instant, but I didn’t care. Steve didn’t either; he was still slightly stunned, from my big righthander.
‘I’m sorry I shot my mouth off on Saturday, Oz,’ he mumbled. ‘Not very gentlemanly, was it? Not very clever either. My father’s told me often enough that I’d get myself really done over some day.’
I was relieved to find that the new model Oz Blackstone still had a conscience, of sorts. ‘It’s you who’s due the apology, mate,’ I told him. ‘Not just from me either. Prim owes you one as well; she worked you over worse than I did.’
He looked at me. ‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘Truth is, I guessed that when she agreed to come to Madrid with me, your leaving had a lot to do with it. Still, I hope you won’t thump me again if I say that one doesn’t look a gift horse, and all that. Good for any chap’s morale, when he lands a lovely like her, whatever the story.’
I tried to think back to a time when I had morale; it was difficult. Success doesn’t mean anything unless you feel it inside yourself. There was I, my name on billboards all over the States, and soon to be all over Europe too, and inside I felt like shit.
‘I’ll push my luck a bit further, shall I?’ Steve went on. He must have
guessed that I was no longer dangerous by that time. ‘What possessed you to take a chance like that? I mean, old boy, be sure your sins will find you out, and all that.’
‘They sure will,’ I agreed. ‘As to what possessed me. . apart from the obvious. . that I have to figure out. There’s only ever really been one woman for me, Steve, and I even messed her about too. Now she’s dead, and I can’t tell her I’m sorry.
‘As for Prim, she and I got back together and got married because each of us thought that the other was a safe port in a storm. For different reasons, both of us were wrong.’
‘I take it that she’s gone, because of those photos, and that’s why you came knocking my door down.’
‘Yeah, she’s gone, and I don’t know whether she’s coming back.’
I’ve never been one for self-pity; I’m like my dad in that respect. I don’t wallow in it, I turn it into anger.
‘I do know one thing, though,’ I said, sincerely. ‘I am going to find the bastard who took those pictures, and when I do. .
‘Sure, it’s my own fault, I’ve been caught at the naughties. But I don’t care about that; when I find whoever it was shopped me, I’ll fucking well kill him. . Or at least, by the time I’m finished he’ll wish I had.’
‘Will that make you feel better?’ Steve asked me.
‘No,’ I answered, ‘but it’ll make him feel worse than I do, and that’s important to me.’
I left him there, the poor, battered Proton salesman, and headed back home. I stopped for petrol on the way, and was just leaving the gasolinera when my mobile phone sounded. I pulled into the car park of the furniture store across the road and answered the call. I found myself hoping that it was Prim, telling me that she had turned the Mercedes around and was coming back, but it wasn’t. It was my Other Woman.
‘Hi,’ said Susie cheerily. ‘I’m in the office, and I’ve just dictated a letter to you, inviting you to become a director of the Gantry Group. Today’s a no-lunch day, so I thought I’d give you a call and see how you’re doing on your own.’
‘Not very well,’ I answered. ‘Not very fucking well at all.’ I told her about Prim’s early return and about what had happened that morning. When I was finished, she was silent for what seemed like quite a while.
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