by Primula Bond
‘That’s all it took.’
‘The old Levi charm. We both have it, you know. Just different shades.’ Pierre unnerves me yet again with his smile. ‘You’ll soon be in a dilemma, wondering which one of us to pick!’
The sour taste of uncertainty taints me. Gustav has thrust me into this scenario, but he’s also made me strong enough to withstand whatever history throws at us. And if Gustav has the urge to confess and make this right, then surely, somewhere behind that surly exterior, so does his baby brother?
I pick a nut out of the bowl, toss it neatly between my teeth. ‘There will be no dilemma. I’ll always be on his side. So grow up, and talk to him. Otherwise this will eat you up.’
Polly stretches, all white fur and blue eyes, like a Siamese cat.
‘Message received, Fräulein Rottweiler. He has you well trained, I can see.’ Pierre cocks his fingers in a duelling-pistol gesture and narrows his eyes as if taking aim. Then he sits back, pulls Polly roughly over his knee. ‘My big brother is a lucky man. Even if he is a cradle-snatcher.’
I realise another difference between Gustav and Pierre. While Gustav is like an Easter Island statue, shadows and sunlight alternating over his hewn features, sometimes changing his stance and aspect but always rooted, Pierre is a shape-shifter. A series of masks, different voices, different gestures.
‘You have a wonderful knack of putting your finger on it! Hmm, that sounded a bit naughty, didn’t it?’ he murmurs quietly so that I have to lean closer across the table. ‘But you know what? It’s not eating me up so much. Facing Gustav in London was a huge hurdle, but it wasn’t as horrific as I thought it would be. And I’m no longer that scandalised spoilt brat, either. There’s not much that would shock me now. Who knows? I may have seen and done far worse since then!’
I gape at him, fumbling for a reply. Now he’s testing me in a different way. He’s moved from taunting to teasing. Before I can think of a suitable retort he starts running his hands up Polly’s slender thighs again, right in front of me, right there on Gustav’s sofa.
Polly’s long white legs are bare despite the season. Thick snow covers the streets outside and buries any carelessly parked vehicles. Sub-zero temperatures have New Yorkers swathed in long coats and fur hats, pushing their way aggressively along treacherous sidewalks, no matter who else is trying to get a foothold. Everyone is glued to their mobile phones even when waiting to cross busy intersections or refusing to make way for oncoming walkers.
‘Making you horny, eh? Don’t you wish my brother was here running those clever hands of his over you to calm you down?’
They both chuckle. Polly’s pale-blue eyes, as he gropes her, don’t shine with embarrassment but are glassy with a wild kind of triumph. She’s always enjoyed a drink, but she’s more out of control than I’ve ever seen her. Maybe she’s just crazy, in the true sense of the word, about this guy.
‘You bet. He won’t know what’s hit him when he gets home.’ I smile coolly. I stand to replenish the now melted ice in the bucket, aware of a hot stickiness between my legs. I try not to stare where Pierre’s fingers are wandering, but a gremlin inside is imagining him fingering me.
‘Gustav has you exactly where he wants you.’ Pierre sits back, pulling Polly hard against his groin. Above us the clock is saying five to midnight.
‘Wrong way round. He’s where I want him.’
Pierre nods, the surliness finally lifting into straightforward youthful amusement. He lays his hands on Polly’s legs and pulls her thighs open. She starts to grind against him. As I retreat to the kitchen for more ice I see her trying to keep a straight face. I can tell she is counting the minutes till she gets him into bed. I’ve never seen her so distracted. So giddy about a guy.
In the kitchen I lean against the massive fridge. Feel the cool flank of it hum and buzz quietly against my spine. This whole evening has been bizarre. Of all the men in all the world Polly ends up with Pierre Levi. I didn’t expect to spend my New Year’s Eve playing gooseberry with my cousin and Gustav’s bellicose doppelgänger, but although he’s tricky and difficult to work out I think I’ve laid some friendly ground. I hope Gustav will be pleased. But I’ve had enough now. I want to be with Gustav again, playing with him as he lies back in the bubbling Jacuzzi, taking him in my hands and then riding him like a cowgirl.
The little golden locket he gave me for Christmas taps at my clavicle as I take deep breaths. I touch its smooth oval shape, trace the tiny bumps made by the trim of seed pearls for comfort. It’s already my talisman. The underside is engraved with an ‘S’ and is permanently heated by my skin.
‘For the urchin who had no jewellery to her name when I met her, a second piece for her collection,’ he murmured on Christmas morning as I took it out of its velvet box. ‘Made by the same French craftsman. You’ll see the tiny silver clasp that closes this has the same design as your bracelet.’
‘So you could tether me by the neck as well as by the wrists. Then I’d never be able to escape.’ We both shivered at the promise of kinkiness. How well I knew how to light his fire. Any minute now he’d be prowling round the apartment, choosing the place where he would next attach the silver chain.
I turned the locket and something weighted inside tipped and rattled. ‘It looks like an heirloom.’
‘I don’t have any of those left, thanks to Pierre. So it’s brand new. Yours and only yours.’ He threaded the chain round my throat. ‘And when people see it resting on your beautiful breast they will know that you are mine, and only mine.’
‘Monsieur Gustav you are really spoiling me!’ His fingers tickled my neck, my hair, as I sensed rather than heard the tiny click-lock of attachment. The chain was just too short for me to lift the locket over my head, even if I had wanted to. ‘But what’s that tapping inside?’
‘My darling, another priceless symbol locked away, which you have yet to earn.’
I giggled and twisted myself quickly so that I was straddling his lap where he sat beneath the Christmas tree. I ran my tongue suggestively over my lips before biting his ear lobe, hard. ‘Show me how to earn it, then, lover. Tie me and take me.’
A tinny ringtone from the other room pierces my reverie and the sudden quiet space between music tracks. Pierre answers his phone and Polly makes some high-pitched complaint.
I curse under my breath and wrench open the huge fridge.
Now it’s my mobile phone as well clamouring for attention. I clutch a bag of ice and a new bottle of champagne and charge back out of the kitchen. Pierre has apparently finished his call and to my surprise he has risen from the sofa and is over by the windowsill, watching my phone singing and dancing with skittish energy on the ledge.
Pierre glances at the caller name and presses the decline button on my mobile, looking at me with an odd expression on his face. ‘Big brother’s too late. We’re outta here.’
‘I’ll check my own phone, thanks!’ I thump the ice bucket and the bottle down on the table. ‘Let me call him back. You have to give him a chance, Pierre.’
‘He could be calling from Switzerland! Who knows when he’ll arrive! He gave me ten minutes back in London, and now he can’t even be here on time. Oh, you’ve tried your best, girl. You’re a real Trojan. Everything Polly has told me about you is true. But Gustav? He doesn’t deserve you.’
Polly tugs at her skirt and sits on the edge of the seat. ‘Pierre? What’s got into you? You were perfectly chilled all evening. Something happened? Who was that calling you just now?’
He doesn’t reply, but rudely starts texting. I pick up my mobile, but my fingers are trembling too much to press the recall button.
‘Everything is Gustav’s fault according to you. You’ll never meet him halfway, will you? Just remember you were way out of order five years ago, too!’ I stammer the words, trying to work out what has shifted in the air. What has changed. ‘He has said how sorry he is that you had to witness him whipping his ex-wife. He has told you he only ever wanted to keep you safe, a
nd he’s even admitted that he failed in that one simple task. But Margot wasn’t innocent. She wasn’t even unwilling. She was a professional dominatrix who punished people for money. It was all part of life’s game to her, and you were the next prize.’
Pierre sends the text, taps the phone on his smiling mouth. ‘And what a prize, eh? The young blood, snatched from the older brother.’
I lean back against the window. ‘Don’t you think you should at least apologise for that instead of crowing over it? Fucking his wife and running off with her?’
‘If he hated her so much surely I was doing him a favour!’
My face heats up, throwing me off balance. ‘If you won’t back down, either of you, then let’s hope focusing on the future will work. A light flicked on inside Gustav when you walked back into his life. Don’t snuff it out.’
Pierre chuckles. ‘It’s you who has flicked his switch, I reckon.’
My grip on the windowsill tightens. My mobile starts vibrating. I don’t recall putting it on silent. I grab the phone, but the voicemail has clicked in.
‘We all want this resolved. But something’s not right. You hinted at something back in London? “One more tiny fact”, you said.’
I wait for Gustav’s voice on the phone, have a fierce longing to hear him speaking, but there’s only a kind of creaking and whirring as if he’s walking round with me in his pocket. ‘Is there more?’
Pierre Levi is so close that I notice his glowing black eyes don’t have the unique crackle of gold round the iris that Gustav has. I can see the pulse above his collar, notice for the first time a curious white bumpy scar winding up round his ear. The dark shadow of beard is coming through on the slightly thicker chin and cheeks.
He’s the rough, uncut chip off the fine, faceted block of his brother.
‘Very observant, Miss Folkes. Not that he picked up on it. Yes. There’s more. Gustav asked me if I wanted blood. Remember?’ Pierre starts to unbutton his shirt. ‘This bloody enough, do you think?’
Polly and I gape at each other. ‘Pierre, don’t do this,’ she mumbles, trying to stand. Her thin legs buckle under her and she falls back into the sofa.
‘I know you can’t bear the sight of me naked, Polly, but your cousin has to know what her boyfriend did to me.’ Pierre undoes the final button, pulls his shirt open. ‘I warned Gustav that Margot had the final word the night I left. And as he’s not here to explain it, I’ll just go ahead and throw my final grenade into the proceedings.’
He yanks his shirt off, tosses it at Polly and spreads his arms out like a martyr.
There, distorting his chest, carving ridges in his upper arms, slicing across his back, is a cobwebbing network of burns, puckering the red, raw, shiny skin. Polly crumples the shirt against her mouth.
I keep my eyes on Pierre’s, reading the curious mixture of accusation and appeal burning there. I refuse to stare at the welts and grafts. I’m trying to find words that will comfort, spreading my fingers towards his scarred, burnt torso.
‘This is how Gustav Levi protects his loved ones. This is the “tiny fact” that Margot told me when she saw me naked for the first time. How easy do you think it was to leave Baker Street after hearing – I’ll phrase it in that gorgeous Germanic accent of hers – “Gustav Levi sets fire to your house, and then he lets you burn.”’
We all stand there rigid, breathless. The silver hands on the clock join as if in prayer to mark midnight, and that is when Gustav opens the huge white door to the apartment with such force that it crashes back against the wall.
I swivel desperately round to stop him crying out in hearty greeting. I wonder what he sees, what terrible story this web of scars tells him. Somehow I fear that I’ve cocked up, that somehow I’m to blame for this unpeeling of yet another onion layer.
‘What’s going on?
Gustav clutches the back of the third sofa, the one where he always sits. The one with the best view over Central Park. The one I call the shagging seat, because – no. I can’t think about the two of us entwined there. Not right now.
‘I’m showing her what you did when I was a baby, Gustav. You started the fire in our house and you let us all burn. You were smoking in your room, and you dropped the cigarette carelessly and climbed out through the window to meet some girl. You kept this tiny fact from me all my life, too gutless to confess. So Gustav is the one who betrayed me, Serena. Not the other way round.’ Pierre’s use of my name for the first time is almost as shocking as the ruined state of his flesh. ‘He’s the one who disfigured me. Who robbed me of my parents. He’s the reason I still have nightmares.’
Gustav has to speak now. If he doesn’t speak within the next ten seconds, I’ll never trust him again. I take one stumbling step towards him. I can’t stand to hear Pierre’s voice any more. Gustav forces his gaze from his brother’s body and holds up one hand like a traffic policeman, shaking his head over and over again. When he focuses on me, the white-hot blankness in his eyes shades itself in. The deep blackness returns. The jagged lines of his face arrange themselves not into softness but at least into some kind of order.
‘Lies, lies, Serena. Polly. Listen to me. It’s all lies. I’ve never smoked a single cigarette in my life.’ He turns back to his brother. ‘Why here, Pierre? Why now?’
‘I should have flown at you as soon as I heard the words but Margot stopped me.’
‘Because it was a cheap shot,’ says Gustav, deadly quiet. ‘How could any of that possibly be true?’
Pierre takes the shirt from where it has fallen over Polly’s legs, and holds it in front of him. I have the weirdest snapshot in my mind of him wearing a hospital gown, sitting on a narrow iron bed.
‘She got me out of that house before she told me the full story, said I should save it for when it would hit you the hardest. How was I to know when that day would come? But it did, thanks to Serena. Thanks to that business card.’
Gustav’s eyes are narrow slits of concentration, as if Pierre is speaking in tongues and he is simultaneously trying to translate. ‘Ah, yes. There it is. The single knell of truth. That’s exactly Margot’s modus operandi. Plotting her chess moves, right down to the best time and place to accuse me of – what exactly are we saying here? Murder?’
As the word stabs through the air Pierre eases one sleeve back over his sore, scarred arm. I see now why he pushed Polly off so viciously the other day when she slapped it. What on earth can he say?
‘I’ll give you manslaughter. Would that be more accurate? You’re looking me in the eye and denying it? You’d swear it? Because it all seems perfectly believable to me.’
‘And perfectly preposterous to anyone else. It’s not murder, and it’s not manslaughter, purely a monumental accident which was not caused by me!’ Gustav turns in a tight circle, looking up at the ceiling as he pulls in every ounce of control. ‘I should be incandescent right now, but do you know? I look at you, and I can’t possibly be angry.’ Gustav speaks so slowly and quietly it’s as if he’s using his last breath. ‘You’ve been walking around all that time thinking I’m a monster because of Margot. Yet again this comes down to her. I’m finding that so hard to bear. Look at me, P. Look at me very hard, and listen.’
Pierre reluctantly raises his eyes. He is still scowling. The anger isn’t gone, but it’s melting like wax into sullen defeat.
‘Just make this all go away, G.’
Gustav keeps his eyes on his brother, makes a move towards him, then walks across to where I am still standing. His hand comes to rest just beside mine on the window ledge.
When he starts to speak again his voice is forced, as if he’s using his last breath. Like Othello, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘You wanted to cause a sensation just now. That’s your prerogative, but you should have waited.’
Pierre’s hands pause as he buttons his shirt.
‘What difference would waiting around for you make? Miraculously absolve you? Cure these scars after twenty years? Put out the fire?’
‘I meant stripping off like this, using your injuries as a shock tactic.’ Gustav is choosing his words as carefully as if he is selecting surgical instruments. ‘It’s a stunt. Not even your own idea. It’s got Margot written all over it. But she’s excelled herself this time, using your disfigurement to torment me.’
‘I’m no puppet, Gustav. This was my idea. But I’m tired. You’re tired. Either admit it or tell me it’s not true, make me and these girls believe you. Then maybe we have a chance.’
They stare at each other for a moment. Gustav nods. ‘I swear on your life and my dead parents’ memory that I did not start that fire.’
Another tripwire, another challenge overcome, and Gustav grows more impressive in my eyes, not less. With a few careful words he has defused the last bomb.
‘So everything you told me then, when I was having nightmares, when you used to put that special cream on my skin in the middle of the night, that was the true story?’
Gustav lifts his hands and runs them through his hair in that achingly familiar gesture. Then he does something I’ve never seen before. Crosses his fingers and lays them up against his heart.
‘They were my parents too,’ he says.
Pierre copies the gesture. ‘That’s exactly what I hoped you’d say.’
His shirt is buttoned up now, but the sight of his poor burnt skin is seared onto my mind. All that damage going on beneath that cocky exterior. For the first time I feel a genuine, spearing anguish for this scarred young man. For both these lost brothers.
There’s an intense hush in the air.
‘I should have been more understanding when you first showed me. I was useless,’ Polly pipes up, dragging herself into an upright position and tugging at her skirt. ‘That’s why you won’t let me into the shower with you, isn’t it? You always wear something, a shirt, or–’ Her white face is streaked with an uneven pink. ‘We always do it in the dark.’