Cold Heart

by Lynda La Plante

  ‘Dream on!’ Rosie said, and there was sadness under the laugh that she hardly understood, as though she knew she was listening to a vision that could never become real.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d take Tiger for tonight, would you?’ Lorraine asked.

  ‘You mean would I call Jake and tell him you’re not coming back today?’ Rosie said, with a sigh. ‘I guess so. I don’t know why I do these things, Lorraine. It must be love.’

  ‘Thanks, Rosie – I’ll see you soon.’

  Sonja Nathan stood at her windows, looking out over the bay. So Vallance was in town, she thought: So what? She had the gun and nothing frightened her now: she would not be frightened to rid the world of a piece of vermin, and if he killed her, he would only have outrun her own desires by a couple of hours. She felt tranquil now, as though all things were running steadily towards their appointed conclusion, feeling her own movements acquire the languorous grace of a clock that is steadily running down.

  She saw the delivery van draw up outside, and a boy get out with a cardboard box in his arms. Arthur wouldn’t hear him in the studio, so she set off downstairs to let him in. ‘This is for you, Mrs Nathan,’ he said, handing her the form to sign. She glanced at the column marked ‘consignor’, and saw the letters LAPD printed in it. The police department, she thought. Some clerical officer had telephoned her about evidence gathered in connection with Harry’s death, which was now being returned to the family. ‘Thanks,’ she said, handing the form back. ‘Just put it here in the hall.’

  ‘Mrs Nathan isn’t home this evening.’ The words she had spoken to Vallance echoed in Lorraine’s head. The temptation to go back and see if she could get a look round the studio was irresistible.

  She strolled out into the street, and walked into a suitably arty-looking café, where the poster for the deer protection meeting was prominently displayed: it was at seven. That left her with the afternoon on her hands, and she walked down to the bookstore. She had originally intended to pick up some light reading, but something prompted her to ask the owner if he had anything on modern sculpture, in particular Sonja Nathan’s career.

  ‘You mean Sonja Sorenson,’ he said. ‘She works under her maiden name.’ He produced a book devoted to three contemporary sculptresses, offering a fairly full treatment of Sonja’s work, which Lorraine bought. She walked back to the hotel, flicking through it. Sonja had had two major shows since City of Angels, after she and Nathan had split up. The first was called In Perpetuity, and was a group of immensely tall structures, part-pillar, part-woman, part-tree, a cycle of strange modern caryatids in a soft, bright, reddish wood. The positions of all the figures were almost identical, but the art of the piece was in some subtlety of their overall lines and expressions: somehow one knew that the earlier figures were struggling to break free from the wood, the later ones yearning to blend back into it. Only one central figure was at rest, her face so simultaneously blank of meaning yet flooded with peace that Lorraine could not take her eyes from her: this had been Sonja’s most successful show: she had then produced nothing for some time. Her latest work was a similar group, entitled The Full but this time of male figures, at least eighteen or twenty, the first ten or twelve almost unchanging, but the latter ones dwindling in size and displaying a rapid degeneration into coarse, priapic, ape-like creatures. The piece was cruder and darker than its two predecessors, and you did not have to look far to see the narrative of Sonja’s marriage to Nathan: it was eloquent with pain and contempt and made Lorraine speculate about what Harry Nathan had been like to inspire such intensity of feeling in the people around him. She wondered too whether, looking at the two pieces together, she could trace Sonja’s attempts to liberate herself from her past and her marriage. Could she have been so tormented by him that she would contemplate killing him? Lorraine found herself wondering what Sonja’s latest work would reveal, and was now even more determined to go out to Sonja Nathan’s house.

  It was half past six when Lorraine walked down to Reception and decided that she would sit in a coffee shop with a view of the entrance to the town hall and make sure that both Sonja and Arthur went into the meeting before she set out for the Springs.

  People began to file in after about a quarter to seven. A few minutes later she saw the Blazer pull up and Arthur get out – alone. Lorraine almost groaned aloud with frustration.

  Just as he walked up to the doors of the hall, Lorraine saw a couple approach him – a tall, heavy, blowsy-looking blonde woman and Raymond Vallance. They stopped and exchanged a few words with Arthur, who seemed barely inclined to give them the time of day, then continued to walk towards the hotel.

  Was it Lorraine’s imagination, or had Vallance suddenly quickened his own and his companion’s pace? Was he now rushing back to the hotel to dump his companion and get out to the Springs? Lorraine decided she wasn’t taking any chances. She flagged down a passing cab.

  Sonja Nathan’s house was in darkness, but all the lights were on in the studio on the far side of the garden. Approaching the studio, Lorraine stepped out of the shafts of light streaming from the windows and walked up in shadow to look inside. There were various packing materials on the floor, and it was clear that whatever work Sonja Nathan had completed was now gone. The interior was almost bare except for a row of cupboards built along one wall and a long wooden table, at which Sonja sat, staring into space, a handgun lying in front of her.

  Jesus, Lorraine thought, what was the woman doing? Waiting for Vallance seemed the most likely explanation, the man who had blighted her marriage and had, if Lorraine’s suspicions were correct, killed the man she had loved. The minutes passed and Sonja did not move a muscle. Something in her unnatural rigidity made Lorraine suddenly certain that Sonja Nathan intended to kill herself.

  She moved noiselessly along the wall, pressed her back against the wood next to the door frame and extended her arm to its full length to rap on the door.

  ‘Mrs Nathan,’ she called, ‘it’s Lorraine Page.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Mrs Nathan?’ she called again. ‘Can I come in for just a moment?’

  Silence.

  ‘Can I speak to you please? It’s important,’ she tried again, and was rewarded with the sound of the woman getting up and coming to the door. Lorraine heard a bolt being drawn, then the handle turned slowly and the door opened.

  ‘I’m working, Mrs Page,’ Sonja Nathan said. She looked deathly.

  ‘I’m sorry. I saw Arthur on his own in town and I wondered if you were all right,’ she said. It was more or less the truth, and the frank expression of concern seemed to touch Sonja.

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ she said. Her eyes were turned towards Lorraine, but seemed not to see her.

  ‘Can I come in for a minute?’ Lorraine asked again.

  ‘All right,’ Sonja said. ‘Just for a minute. There really are things I have to do.’

  She stepped back from the door and Lorraine followed her inside. She had not bothered to conceal the gun, which lay untouched on the table.

  ‘You see,’ she said, her manner lightening, as though some oppressive third presence had left the room as soon as Lorraine had walked into it, ‘if Mr Vallance comes calling, he’ll find us well prepared. I’ve already seen a good deal of him today, as it happens.’

  Lorraine raised an eyebrow quizzically. ‘Did he come out here?’

  ‘No. I received a package today from the LAPD. Videotapes of Harry’s. Have you seen them?’

  Lorraine nodded.

  ‘Well, Vallance got what was coming to him. He fed all that in Harry and got bitten himself. If he walks through that door I ought to just shoot him cold,’ Sonja said casually, crossing to one of the long cupboards. ‘He’s a destroyer.’ She took out a bottle of vodka and an antique stemmed glass. She poured herself a drink.

  ‘What were you working on?’ Lorraine asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing. What I’m always working on,’ Sonja said, knocking back half of the vodka.r />
  Lorraine sensed that she had been about to say something else, but had stopped herself. ‘Well, that can’t be true,’ she said. ‘You’ve produced a well-regarded body of work, haven’t you?’

  ‘A well-regarded body of work,’ Sonja repeated, almost mimicking Lorraine. ‘Much fucking good it does me.’ She drained the rest of the glass. ‘People don’t live on “regard”. Or on the past.’ She was silent for a moment, then began to speak again, her manner now almost academically impersonal. ‘What’s the point of the past, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lorraine said, ‘I often wonder.’

  Well, I can tell you,’ Sonja went on, bitter again. ‘It’s to flavour the present. In some people’s lives the memory of the past is constantly present, like a sweetness, but for others it’s like a poison or a mould. No matter how far you think you’ve got away from something, it’s still always there – in every word you speak, everything you are. Every piece of work you do.’ She gestured around her at the empty room.

  ‘Are you talking about Harry?’

  ‘Of course,’ Sonja said, pouring herself another drink. ‘All I ever do is talk about Harry.’ She paused again. ‘I can’t seem to stop. I loved him, you know. Perhaps I didn’t realize how much.’

  ‘Until he died?’ Lorraine said gently.

  ‘Until he died.’ Sonja fell silent. ‘Something in me died too.’ She looked up at Lorraine, her strange eyes bright and still, and Lorraine felt again the presence of something behind them, as though death itself were looking out.

  The atmosphere was unbearable, and Lorraine felt she had to talk, to make some connection with the other woman. ‘That’s how I started drinking. Someone I loved died.’

  ‘Your husband?’ Sonja asked.

  ‘No,’ Lorraine said. ‘He was my partner at work. I used to be a cop.’ She felt a strange intimacy with Sonja, so that it didn’t matter what she said. Lorraine began to talk about her own life, remembering her police training and how she had been taught to talk people back from the edge, to make them feel connected. She found that she wanted to tell it all, wanted someone to understand. She could not stop herself, as though a dam had been breached. But then, mid-flow, her voice suddenly tailed off. ‘God knows why I’m telling you all this.’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ Sonja said, taking another slug of vodka with a smile. ‘Why don’t you just spit it all out? You tell me your ghost stories, and then I’ll tell you mine.’ Life seemed to flow back into her with the current of sympathy, and she swung her feet up on the table with a lop-sided smile. ‘We’ve got a while.’

  A while till when? Lorraine was sure that it was no coincidence that Sonja Nathan had been ready to blow her brains out the day before she would become the legal owner of all of Harry Nathan’s property. Did she want to show she didn’t care about money – or was it something she felt she had no right to accept? She smiled to see how Sonja’s problems were distracting her from her own.

  Lorraine could feel the past surging up inside her again, and she had to get up and walk around. Sonja said nothing, and it was because she didn’t speak, either to encourage or discourage anything, that Lorraine’s pent-up emotions were able to find release. ‘Drinking became my life – I refused point-blank to believe I had a problem, but I was on a downward slope.’

  Lorraine put her hands over her face and started to weep. Sonja sat motionless. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s got into me.’

  ‘Same thing that’s got into me,’ Sonja said simply, swinging her legs down. She walked over to Lorraine and touched her shoulder lightly. Lorraine knew that the touch had been something Sonja felt she ought to do rather than an instinctive response: she was not a caring woman. ‘Except my drug is my work. Was my work. I won’t do any more now.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ Lorraine said, wiping her eyes. ‘All artists get blocked from time to time.’

  ‘Art!’ Sonja said. ‘It’s all just fucking pain and damage. Harry damaged me. I didn’t know how much.’

  Until he died, Lorraine mentally filled in.

  ‘He made me like himself – dirty, commercial, tacky,’ she went on, describing a mirror image of the process Vallance had attributed to her, and Lorraine wondered what she was talking about: no one could call her own austere and disturbing work commercial, but it was clear that Sonja’s standards were not those of other people. ‘He made me feel things, do things, I never wanted to feel or do, filled me up with bitterness and hate. I did my best to . . . exorcize them. But I didn’t succeed. They possessed me, diminished me.’ She was talking slowly and deliberately. ‘They caused me to lose my work. Which he gave me too. Which is myself.’

  What the hell did she mean? She was raving, everything she said was a riddle.

  ‘But you said you were working here tonight?’ Lorraine said.

  ‘On myself,’ Sonja said, and the peculiar resonance was back in her voice.

  ‘With a gun?’ Lorraine asked.

  ‘Smoothest tool of all,’ Sonja said, still not looking at Lorraine, and a smile spread across her face, as though she was looking at an unseen watcher. Then she turned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I sound like Raymond Vallance. I think about death a lot. Liquor makes me maudlin. But you can stop babysitting now.’ She poured herself more vodka and gave Lorraine a meaningful look. ‘I’ll never die drunk – in case people say I didn’t have the guts to do it sober.’

  ‘I used to think that,’ Lorraine said, ‘that I should have died. My husband left me too, you know.’ She knew somehow that, despite what Sonja had just said, she had to keep talking.

  ‘Did you get divorced?’ Sonja asked.

  ‘Yes, I did, and he got custody of the children. Rightly so – I wasn’t capable of looking after myself, never mind the kids.’ She lit a cigarette, no longer feeling like weeping, no longer feeling anything except the awful, cold guilt that she would carry to her grave.

  ‘Everyone who loves has a right to be loved, Lorraine,’ Sonja said. ‘Whatever happened in your past can’t change that.’

  The sigh was long and deep, and Sonja noticed that Lorraine’s hand was shaking as she flicked the ash from her cigarette. ‘You want to bet?’

  ‘Try me,’ Sonja said softly.

  ‘OK. I was on duty, a few months after my partner had died. I had been drinking heavily. We’d been called out to what they thought was going to be a drug bust to act as backup because they said the kids were tooled up. There were four kids and they split up and ran. One ran past my patrol car, so I got out, chased him and cornered him in an alley. I gave him three warnings to stop or I would shoot. He didn’t stop, and I fired all six rounds. I couldn’t stop squeezing the trigger, even when he went down.’

  She let the smoke drift from her pursed lips, then turned to look at Sonja. ‘He wasn’t armed. It was a Walkman he had in his hand, and he had earphones in so he couldn’t hear me. He was just a kid, and I killed him because I was drunk. If I’d been sober I would have fired a body shot.’

  ‘That’s hard to live with,’ Sonja said quietly. She seemed to be watching Lorraine with particular intensity.

  Lorraine stiffened as she heard a sound outside. ‘Do you hear something?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Sonja said evenly as she picked up the gun and cocked it. God, Lorraine thought, gooseflesh breaking out all over her body: she had meant what she had said about Vallance. Now they could both hear someone’s footsteps right outside the door, which still stood an inch ajar. Sonja turned round slowly, noiselessly, until the gun was aimed chest high at the door panels. After a moment they heard a knock.

  ‘Who is it?’ Sonja said. Her voice was sweet and pure as a bell, as though a longed-for visitor had finally called, and Lorraine saw the beatific calm of the central figure of her wood of women appear on her face.

  ‘It’s me, Sonja,’ a voice called. A man stepped into view. Arthur.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said in surprise, finding himself looking down the barrel
of a gun. ‘What the hell’s going on here?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Arthur,’ Sonja said, lowering the gun. ‘I’m afraid Mrs Page got me rattled. Apparently Raymond’s been in town making threats.’

  ‘Not to me he hasn’t,’ Arthur said. ‘I saw him a couple of hours ago and he was sweetness and light. We’re all old friends now.’

  Lorraine saw him scan the room as he spoke, and although his voice did not alter, she knew that he knew exactly why Sonja was holding the gun.

  ‘I thought you were lying down,’ he said. ‘I was worried about you.’

  ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said, and Lorraine saw the flicker of pain in Arthur’s eyes at the lack of interest in her voice. He loved her, Lorraine could see. ‘I’ll go and lie down now.’ She walked out into the night.

  ‘Can we offer you a nightcap, Mrs Page?’ Arthur asked as they followed Sonja out of the building. ‘I guess Sonja’s lucky you showed up, if Vallance is roaming around out there.’ She knew what he meant: if she hadn’t showed up Sonja would have been dead.

  ‘No, no, thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll just call a cab.’

  They walked out into the darkness. Lorraine could feel the urgency with which Arthur moved to catch up Sonja, to try to take her hand, knowing that he felt the same instinct she herself had experienced earlier to try to hold on to the woman. But Sonja slid away, graceful and aloof, and walked on alone.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHEN LORRAINE woke next morning, she was surprised to see that it was already almost nine. She had lain awake for some time after she had got back to the hotel, half expecting some call from either Arthur or Sonja, but apparently nothing had happened. She dressed and called the airline to book herself a flight to LA. All they could offer her at such short notice was a seat on an early-evening departure, so she decided to spend the afternoon in New York. She packed the few things she had brought with her and set off downstairs.