Back at her desk, she examined her unnecessary anxiety. She found causes for it in the deluge, in Becca’s visit to her father and his newly pregnant partner, in the monster helicopter. Isabel had simply missed her flight and would appear a little later. There was no lack of flights between London and New York.
She shed her jacket and bent to her drawings once more. The strip had been born some four years ago with four central characters whose everyday lives it chronicled with a wry glance at changing fads and fashions. There was burly Bella, an ageing activist, one time school teacher who ran a workshop on parenting at the 92nd Street Y. There was svelte socialite Clio, whose divorce had gone on almost as long as her marriage and at far greater expense. As her latest attorney, matter-of-fact Judith, kept pointing out to her, every month cost her a face-lift. Finally there was Bella’s niece, budding retro rock-star Jenny (aka Seraphita) and her energetic entourage, chic or louche, depending on the month.
Leo added cross-hatching and shading, inked in a menu of over-the-top coffees with skimmed or semi-skimmed or killing milk. When the phone rang, her leap for the receiver underlined what had really been on her mind.
‘Isabel,’ she boomed.
‘No, Leonora, it’s me. So she hasn’t arrived yet. I was just checking.’
Leo struggled to keep the instant reproach out of her voice. ‘She’ll be here soon, mom.’
‘You know how I worry.’
‘Yes. I can’t talk now. I’m waiting for a call.’
‘I was just wondering… Given this weather… It might be more sensible to postpone your travels. It…’
‘I’ll ring you tomorrow, mom. Bye.’ Leo cut her off.
Since her split with Jeff, Leo felt her mother’s attentions had grown to unmanageable proportions. Jeff, it had retrospectively occurred to her, had acted as a barricade against her mother’s latter-day wish to ensnare her in a closeness which had never existed between them. Not in childhood, when her mother had been too busy with her own life; and certainly not in adolescence. Her father had died when Leo was fourteen and her mother’s rapid re-marriage to a psychiatrist, had enraged Leo.
‘But you were once a patient of his. It’s unethical,’ she remembered shrieking.
‘That was years and years ago and only for three months, darling,’ her mother had replied with an air of placid self-contentment. ‘You’ll see. It’ll be nice for you.’
It hadn’t been. Uprooted from her English boarding school which had become the closest thing to home while her father and mother travelled South East Asia for various aid organisations, Leo, at the age of seventeen, was an utter stranger in the Manhattan which was her birth place. The Park Avenue apartment with its antiques and plush carpets and unopenable windows and muffled silence had all the attractions of a prison after the rambling grounds and noisy girls of her Cambridge school. Leo had left the newly-in-love couple as soon as she could, gone off to Harvard to study art history and never looked back.
It was there that she had met Jeff. They were married two weeks before Becca was born. Leo hadn’t yet reached her twenty-first birthday. Jeff had been twenty-six and just completing his PhD. She had dropped out of her course in order to look after the baby. A woman out of step with her time, perhaps, but they had been happy then. Very happy. And gradually she had taken up the drawing which had been her earliest love. She was good at it. The commissions for children’s books had come first of all. It was work that allowed her to follow Jeff, first to Amherst, then to New York, not to mention that wonderful sabbatical year in London when she had first encountered Isabel.
Leo found her hand reaching for the telephone. Without thinking, she punched out Isabel’s London number. She let it ring and ring. No answer. Not even a machine to leave messages on - which could only mean that Isabel was certainly on her way. Leo peered out the window, as if she could generate her friend from the murky darkness of a sodden Manhattan. The drone was back, a low vibration in the distance. With it came the shiver.
Food. That was what she needed. She raced into the kitchen and pulled a slab of mozzarella, some plum tomatoes, and a foccata from the fridge. She warmed the bread and made herself a sandwich, adding a garnish of fresh basil and pimento, for colour as much as taste. As she did so, a cockroach squeezed through the tiny crack at the far edge of the scrubbed counter and scuttled towards a crumb. She hit it hard with her shoe, cleared it away with controlled disgust.
When they had first moved into the apartment, which still contained bits of the prior occupants furniture, cockroaches had swarmed at them from beneath an old mattress, an army of slippery shielded warriors. Despite fumigators, they had done battle with the redoubtable creatures for years, until Leo had begun to think of them as elemental companions, as constant and inevitable as the dreams unleashed by night.
She capped the arrangement on the tray with a glass of Chardonnay and took it over to the sofa. Eating was something she had to remind herself to do these days. With Becca gone, there seemed little point in cooking unless friends were coming over, and of late that had become rarer and rarer. Once she had loved the whole lavish business, had thought of her kitchen as an alchemical chamber. Chicken remains would become slowly simmering stock, bubbling with carrots, a stick of parsley, fragrant herbs, a dash of paprika. Eggs would be transformed into towering soufflés, tangy with lemon or pungent with gruyère and a whiff of coriander. Fish would be filleted, moulded into strange blossoms with grape and cucumber centres.
Now the hours slipped by with no need for the punctuation of food. Her mother kept telling her she had grown too thin. But then, she had never been very big.
Reaching for the zapper, Leo flopped down on the sofa and channel hopped. Somewhere there must be news. Instead she found an old Paul Newman movie and let it play while she ate. When she had finished, she lay back into the cushions and watched the screen. Gradually its images blended with those of her own creation. Though she was certain she was awake, she saw Isabel coming into the room. Isabel, at last. But Isabel as she had been when they had first met all those years ago.
It was Thanksgiving, a blustery November night and despite the thick curtains in the Nottinghill house where she and Jeff had been invited to party, they could hear the wind wailing through the windows. There were some thirty guests, maybe more, seated at an assortment of tables in the candle-lit room. Above an ornate fireplace hung a bleached canvas from which the shadowy outlines of a woman’s face emerged. It was a mysterious face, haughty, etched with sadness and Leo’s eyes kept returning to it as if the woman in the canvas wanted to meet her gaze. From the distance of her table, she couldn’t quite make out how the artist had achieved this particular effect, at once hard-edged and ghostly.
When the tables had been moved away and their host had enjoined them all to dance, she had approached the canvas, drawn to it far more than to the events in the room. A voice from behind had startled her, ‘Gorgeous, isn’t she? Intriguing, too. I wonder what she does in everyday life.’
Leo had turned to see a long-legged woman sheathed in a glistening emerald dress. Above the pronounced dip of décolletage rose a marble white neck and a face which mingled curves and angles to striking effect. Curling, deep set eyes looked into hers. Leo had found herself taking a step backwards, in awe perhaps, as a forthright hand plunged towards her.
‘Hello there. I’m Isabel Morgan and I’m not a Brit.’ The grin was disarming.
‘Neither am I.’
‘I know. I know all about you. Well some, in any case. I’ve been talking to your bloke. That’s why I came over to meet you.’ The woman called Isabel Morgan had winked whether in complicity or something else, Leo hadn’t been certain.
But it had led Leo to say, ‘And what do you do in everyday life?’
Isabel’s laugh had been throaty. ‘Not a proper question when in England, and certainly not so soon. But I’ll tell you in any case. I work at the Consumer’s Association. On the research side. Though maybe not for much longer.�
�� And then, before she could elaborate, she had been whisked away by a plump, beaming man in garishly blue spectacles over whom she towered by a proud head.
Later Leo had seen her dancing with Jeff who was so obviously smitten that for a moment she had suffered an unmistakable pang of jealousy, though she was also lost in admiration of the woman’s unsettling beauty. She had rarely seen beauty carried with such ease and innocence.
As they were making ready to leave, Isabel was suddenly at her side, placing an intimate hand on her arm.
‘Let’s have lunch. I’ll ring you. And by the way, I’ve found out about the woman in the canvas. An American ambassador’s wife. Dead now. Beirut, I think. Oh dear.’
Above the whimsical smile, Isabel’s eyes were suddenly wide in visible grief. Her arms stretched towards Leo, but she was tugged backwards, drawn by an invisible force and propelled through a gaping door which cracked shut with a bang.
Leo started awake. She was perspiring, her mind a jumble. Isabel. The noise. A noise unlike the blare of the television. She leapt up. Outside, on the roof terrace, the tub containing her azalea had blown over. Shards of pottery lay strewn amidst wet earth. Struggling to right it, Leo had a sudden swift certainty that something was terribly wrong. Wrong with Isabel. She had only had that kind of searing intuition once before in her life.
2
Four days later Leo was bound for London aboard a morning flight. Her grey wool suit was businesslike and impeccably neat, her auburn hair brushed to a soft sheen. Only the blue shadows beneath her eyes betrayed her state. She leaned back into her seat and tried to relax. Beneath a bank of white-grey cloud, the sea she loved was invisible. Crew and passengers might as well have been. They bore as little reality as cardboard cut-outs in a children’s picture book. In front of her lay the volume she had blindly picked out at the airport shop, but she could make no sense of what her eyes skimmed.
She had spent the last days in an anxiety which bordered on panic and sometimes toppled over into it. Isabel had neither appeared nor made any sign. Leo had made a frenzied series of phone-calls trying to track her down. Conversations with London friends they had in common and a flurry of acquaintances had yielded nothing. No one seemed to have spoken to Isabel in some weeks or had any but the vaguest notion that she was travelling to New York. Since Isabel no longer had an office job, there was no office to ring to see if she had been checking in or out regularly.
Leo tried to remember the name of Isabel’s current editor and failed. Perhaps she had never known it. Isabel was always secretive about work-in-progress. Indeed Leo had no clear idea what her friend had been working on over the past months. When they had met in London for a brief few days just before Christmas, Becca had been with her, and between shopping and excursions to galleries and theatres, there had been little time for intimate talk. It was one of the things Leo had been looking forward to about their planned journey south. Now instead of the warmth of that conversation, there was only the arctic chill of absence and the realization of how easy it was to disappear when one lived alone.
The New York police Leo had finally resorted to calling had been of little help. She could still hear the contempt in the tones of the officer she had spoken to.
‘Look lady, we’ve got enough on our hands without having to go in search of someone who isn’t even an American citizen. Someone who’s changed her mind about a visit here. OK.’
When she had delivered her strips, Leo had gone to talk to the news editor at her paper. Letting her concern show, she had asked him whether he could possibly at least find out for her whether Isabel Morgan had arrived in the US. Her last round of calls to the airlines who flew the London-New York route had met with a blanket refusal to check passenger lists. Even the mother or step-mother card hadn’t worked.
‘Leave it with me,’ the news editor had said. ‘I’ll put someone on it.’
She had been about to ask him how and when, but his phone was ringing and he was already ushering her out of his paper-strewn office with a wave of a stubby-fingered hand and mouthing, ‘this afternoon’, as a voice barked down the other end of the line.
Leo waited by her phone, forcing herself not to check her e-mail every ten minutes and keep the line engaged. At three o’clock, the promised information had come. To the best of any computer’s knowledge, no one by the name of Isabel Morgan had landed at Kennedy Airport. Or Newark, for that matter.
Within the next hour, Leo had spoken to Becca to tell her she was going to London and, because of course he had once more answered the phone, to Jeff.
‘I see,’ he had said with a note of disapproval. ‘But you know Isabel’s never been very reliable.’
‘What do you mean?’ Leo had been unable to keep the leap of anger out of her voice.
‘Oh nothing. It’s none of my business.’
‘She’s always been reliable with me.’
‘That’s fine then,’ he had added maddeningly. ‘But don’t worry too much. Here’s Becca.’
Leo leaned back into her seat and sipped the mineral water that had made its way onto a table she didn’t recall opening. On the tiny screen in front of her, a map emerged out of a background bluer than any sea. An arrow charted their route, a clean arc defined by a broken line which grew solid with the passing miles. Numbers appeared, specifying altitude and temperature and the ever-diminishing distance between her and Isabel. She closed her eyes and made herself believe that. Strangely enough the memory of Jeff’s casual cynicism about her friend helped. If only Isabel’s absence could be explained by a simple change of mind.
Her thoughts strayed to Jeff. It was funny how all the things she had once overlooked in his character, found funny or even endearing now irritated her to the point of barely controlled frenzy. For example, his way of telling her not to worry, to relax, to let time make its own shapes. Initially this had seemed to be a way of caring for her, but it had become an entrenched form of bullying, so that she felt hounded by his injunction not to worry.
It was the same with her work. She had always appreciated his comments - his compliments as well as his criticism. But particularly since the strip had brought her a certain fame, the tone of the criticism seemed so sharp that it subverted everything else. He would laugh, say something was wonderful, that a certain line or insight was particularly apt and then destroy it all with a barb about how middle class it all was.
But then a wife’s rising star, as the cliché went, was rarely calculated to make a husband dance for joy.
Worse was Jeff’s habit of seemingly approving her friends and then finding something just a little bitchy or malicious to say about them. It was always this last which stayed in her mind, niggling away when she next saw them, so that she had to make a concerted effort to overcome his judgement. His comment about Isabel had been true to form. Yet Isabel had been his friend, too. In fact, in that first year in London she had quite squarely been a friend to the two of them.
‘Lasagna or chicken, ma’am?’ A cheerful voice broke into her reverie.
‘Chicken, I guess, please.’ Leo returned the wide, fixed smile and reached for the proffered tray. She edged the silver flap off the small plastic dish. A moist aroma of artificially spiced gravy attacked her nostrils. She fought back an attack of queasiness, quickly replaced the lid and crumbled a role instead, placing crumbs in her mouth one by one as if chewing were an insurmountable obstacle.
A break appeared in the cloud. Through it, she could almost see, certainly imagine, the indigo ocean with its foam crested waves. Her mood lifted slightly. She bit into a wedge of cheese.
That was what love was about, she reflected. Imagining Superman where there was merely Clark Kent. Seeing only the good, exaggerating it. Ignoring the rest. And she had been in love with Jeff, from that very first moment when he had helped her pick up the pile of books she had clumsily dropped in the library queue. He had been so handsome with that crop of dark curling hair and liquid eyes, like one of Caravaggio’s boys, so that
when he had fixed them on her and asked, ‘You’re from England?’ and listened intently to her faltering, ‘not quite,’ she had been altogether smitten.
It was important to remember that. To remember too, how blissfully happy they had been in the years after Becca’s birth, Jeff even gentler with the baby than she was, in awe of her. And the loving had been good, too, then. She mustn’t allow the certainty of those memories to evaporate. Or to be eroded by the events of recent years. If she did, she would turn into one of those embittered old women whose life story was a never ending plaint. Like one of her frizzled characters, with a vengeful slash for a mouth. Embittered and alone.
‘Not quite Michelin star, is it?’ the man in the aisle seat said to her, misinterpreting her expression as she put down her coffee cup.
‘No, not quite,’ Leo echoed, ‘but then that would just about cost us the price of the flight.’
He laughed engagingly. ‘Too true.’
She looked at him. He had a broad, slightly pock-marked face, with friendly, polished button eyes and a short bristle of brown hair above a furrowed brow. The accent was old-fashioned, older than him, though he was certainly younger than her. Oxbridge probably.
‘Are you flying on business? Pleasure?’
She shrugged. It wasn’t a question she could answer. ‘And you?’ she returned the courtesy half-heartedly.
‘Just coming back. Business, though it was pleasurable.’
‘Lucky you,’ she said with too much longing.
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