I stayed awake as long as I could, given part of my body, and indeed my mind, was still entrenched in Long Island. But after my father and I had shared an early supper of a mushroom omelet and a frisée salad, expertly prepared by him, I made my excuses and escaped to bed. Before I went, however, I called my mother, chatted for a few minutes, and then handed the phone to my father. Then I went upstairs to take a bath and slipped into bed. But as sometimes happens when you are desperately in need of it, sleep wouldn’t come and after about an hour, I slipped downstairs to make myself a milky drink.
And to my amazement I could still hear my father talking in low urgent tones to my mother.
It was a little weird having him back in the house. I woke up the next morning and suddenly realized I wouldn’t have the place to myself like I used to. When I went down to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee, there he was, sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of bills laid out before him and his checkbook.
“I don’t think your mother’s paid a single bill since she took off for New York,” he said. “So unlike her.”
“Ed,” I said, sitting down beside him, “there’s something I want to ask you. Mum’s never said anything to me about the divorce, like how far along you are, who’s getting the house, stuff like that.”
“Nathalie, I already told you,” said my father, not looking up, the merest hint of steel in his voice, “it’s my house. I know your mother always behaved as if it belonged to both of us, or even just to her, but the deeds are in my name. The place in France is hers.”
“But when you took up with Josiane, Mum left you there and came back to live here.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” he said. “And as for the divorce, I never wanted one. She started proceedings.”
“And?”
“And,” my father repeated, “that’s where it stands. And. She met Philip Abernathy and got herself so distracted, everything seemed to grind to a halt. Again, ironic. But that’s your mother for you,” he said, scrawling his signature across a check in such a wild flourish that it seemed to me the end of “Bartholomew” landed on the table.
The phone rang and it was my agent, Genevieve, who never seemed to be able to wait until she got to her office to call me.
“So, you’ve arrived. Good. We need to meet. Flight okay?” She was as brisk as ever.
“Yes, thanks, Genny. How are you?”
“Busy as a busy busy bee and very happy to be so. When are you going to come and see me? I’ve got a new assignment for you.”
“You have?” This was exciting.
“I don’t know what’s been going on but no sooner does Shotgun Marriott say he doesn’t want to continue with his book than his ex-wife decides she wants to tell her story. And of course she wants you to do it with her. I’ve had her on the phone three times in the last two days. Wants to see you as soon as possible.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, stunned. “How does she know I’m here?”
“Your friend Cathleen Clark told her you were coming to London and suggested she call me to set up a time. So when can you come in and see me?”
I said I’d be there that afternoon and then I called Cath.
“I gather you’ve been telling all and sundry I’m back in town.”
“Yeah, so? I told Angie Marriott, where’s the harm in that? I already told you I knew her from AA and that she wanted to talk to you. I didn’t think you’d have a problem with that. Anyway don’t get your knickers in a twist about it, just come to dinner tomorrow night. Come around seven. I want you to see your godson in his bath before I put him to bed.”
My mind was in a turmoil as I set off a couple of hours later on a short walk around the neighborhood. I’d called an immigration lawyer to inquire whether there was any point applying for a long-term visa to America. The trouble was I just didn’t have a clue what the future held for me. If I was going to continue with the book about Shotgun, then I would need to go back indefinitely. But if I wound up working with Angie Marriott instead, then how long would I be staying here? I had absolutely no idea. Nor did I feel entirely comfortable with the idea of suddenly switching to Angie’s story. But no doubt Genevieve would make up my mind for me as she always did.
The hustle and bustle of Notting Hill, where I’d lived all my life, was quite a shock to the system after the idyllic beauty of my Long Island beach existence. Ugly housing projects rose cheek by jowl with elegant Georgian mansions and brightly colored Victorian terraced houses. Running through the center of the area like a cheerful, nonjudgmental artery was the Portobello Market where the hip and the affluent jostled for their fruit and veg with drug dealers, street kids, and Irish and West Indian immigrants who had lived there for forty years. Crime was rampant now and for the last ten years I had holed up in my parents’ house, terrified of what might be happening outside in the streets, and emerging only under cover of daylight.
And yet within hours of escaping to the relative safety of Long Island I had been catapulted into the midst of not one but two murder investigations. I could already hear Cath admonishing me—For God’s sake, Lee, get a grip! You’re paranoid, you really are!—but I was seriously beginning to believe that wherever I went I would encounter violence.
Later in the day on my way to Genevieve’s office in Covent Garden, I found myself thinking about what my father had said. I had absolutely no intention of getting married. As far as I knew Genevieve had never been married. Maybe she was another member of the Polar Bear Club. As I climbed the steep flight of stairs to her tiny office I wondered how she would react if I broke our unspoken rule that we didn’t discuss our personal lives. What if I asked her if she thought I should marry Tommy. But as I reached the top step, slightly out of breath, I was hit with the sudden realization that I was back where I had been a couple of years ago. I was no longer fretting about the fact that Tommy had decided he didn’t want to marry me. Now I seemed to be more interested in trying to decide whether I wanted to marry him. Or, more to the point, whether I wanted to get married at all.
In any case Genevieve was all business when I walked in. She waved at me and smiled but didn’t get up to embrace me. Just as well because the differential in our height meant that her face always landed in my chest and I was left pecking the air above the top of her head. She always sat firmly behind her desk and I suspected it was because then you couldn’t see the way her body spread out below the waist, giving her the look of someone wearing a crinoline.
“One way or another you’ve got a book to do,” she said, getting straight to the point, “whether it’s for the husband or the wife.”
“Or for myself,” I said. “Shotgun doesn’t want to go ahead. My plan is to write my own book even if it’s an unauthorized version.”
“Hmmm.” Genevieve didn’t seem too keen on that idea. “Won’t sell as well. You know what I think you should do? Put the whole project on the back burner for a while till they convict someone for those murders. You can’t really do anything until you have the whole story, can you? Just assemble your notes and prepare what you might write should you have to write it.”
“What about Angie Marriott?”
“Shotgun’s is the story that will sell but Bettina always did say that the wife was the key and if she could get her to talk, she’d have Shotgun over a barrel.”
Genevieve lumbered to her feet and tottered over to a cupboard where she kept a kettle. I looked down at her minuscule strappy sandals with their three-inch heels and wondered how on earth they supported her.
“I’m on the fruits of the forest infusion,” she said, “it goes with my outfit, but you can have a coffee if you’d prefer. Nothing? Anyway, Angie Marriott; I think you should at least go and see her. Whichever book you wind up doing, it’s surely going to be a big plus to have access to her.”
She was right. It was just there was a part of me that didn’t relish discussing Shotgun with her. For some curious reason I felt a kind of weird loyalty to him. But I
was also aware that such hesitation was about as unprofessional as you could get. After all, I was going to be putting everything in a book for the whole world to read eventually. I reminded myself that Bettina would have been around there like a shot and held out my hand for Angie’s number.
“I’ll call her,” I said.
“And you might as well have Bettina’s file. She lodged a whole lot of stuff with me for safekeeping. She dug up such a lot of dirt on people that she became a little paranoid, if you must know. She always thought people would be after her tapes and the names of her sources so she’d send me these sealed packages to store for her. But there’s one marked ‘Shotgun Marriott’ so I think you might want to take a look at what’s inside, don’t you? It’s not like she’s going to be needing it anymore.”
I carried it home wondering how long Genevieve had been planning to sit on it. When I walked into the house my father was on the phone. “I need to call someone,” I mouthed at him. “I won’t be long,” he mouthed back and after a second or two I realized he was talking to my mother again. As I went upstairs I heard him say: “Vanessa, I’ve always wanted to live in America.”
News to me.
“Nathalie,” I heard him shout a few minutes later, “I’m off the phone and your mother sends her love. Sorry she didn’t have time to speak to you but she was just rushing out.”
Nothing changes, I thought as I dialed the number Genevieve had given me.
“Hello?” The sound of Angie Marriott’s throaty mid-Atlantic drawl took me straight back to our meeting at the Old Stone Market.
“It’s Lee Bartholomew,” I said. “I’m in London and my agent said you wanted to get together.”
“I certainly do,” she said.
“I understand you want to do a book now?” I said.
“I’m certainly thinking about it,” she said. “It’s taken me an awfully long time to come to this decision but I feel I have no other option. I have to tell my side of the story and I’m ready to tell the world what really happened that night.”
“What really happened,” I repeated.
“How my husband killed that girl. I was there. I saw it all and I’m going to talk. Come and have a drink tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything.”
CHAPTER 17
THE FOLLOWING EVENING CATH OPENED THE DOOR to me in her bra and knickers.
I was shaken at the sight of her in a state of undress—I could have been anybody—and my face must have registered my disapproval because she laughed.
“Oh, come on, don’t look like that. Relax, Lee. I took a look through the peephole before I opened the door, saw you standing there.”
I bristled. Relax, Lee. Cath never missed an opportunity to have a go at me but that was part and parcel of our friendship.
“Anyway, come in, come in. I don’t want to be caught standing here in me undies if one of the neighbors comes by. I strip down whenever Marcus has his bath because I always get soaked. By the time he’s finished there’s always more water outside the bath than in. You might think about doing the same.”
“I’ll just stand in the corner and watch,” I said.
“Oh, come on, Lee. You’ve got to get into the spirit of the thing. Sometimes I even climb in with him. Think of it as practice for when you have your own. You and Tommy made any plans in that direction yet?”
Oh, great, jump right in and put me on the spot, why don’t you, Cath? I was about to tell you of my doubts about my future with Tommy and ask your advice but, oh no, you have to go right past the finish line and start talking about kids.
“I told him, Lee. Once I’d persuaded him to get up off his butt and go to America and be with you, I said to him, what she wants is a baby, Tommy. And he’d be a terrific dad, you know he would. Hasn’t he been on about settling down and having kids all these years he’s been with you? So now he’s got the chance, what does he do but run a mile in the opposite direction. Men! Typical!”
“Hold on a sec, what do you mean you persuaded him to go to America to be with me? Didn’t he want to?”
“Of course he wanted to, stupid. Just like he wants to marry you more than anything else in the world. He just doesn’t know it. He needs telling, that’s all.”
“And you told him?”
“I did. I said ‘Tommy, this is your last chance. You don’t marry her now, she’s going to give up on you once and for all.’ Never mind he’s been the one been pestering you to get married for umpteen years and you’ve been the one running in the opposite direction. You’ve got to make them think they’re losing their control over you and then they try to assert it all over again, the nitwits. So he goes ‘Right, I’m on it’ and the next thing I know he’s running round showing me moody head shots for his passport photo. ‘Which is my best profile, Cath? I think the left, don’t you?’ I ruined it all by telling him he needed to be face-on for a passport photo. So has he put the cork back in the champagne bottle and repopped the question yet?”
“I was the one who popped it in the first place,” I said.
“Well, it’s his turn then. Now take off your top at least and come and help me try and wash Marcus’s filthy little feet.”
Watching her with Marcus—a scrappy little toddler with Cath’s carrot-colored hair—I saw how having a baby had softened her, just as being around Eliza seemed to take the edge off Franny Cook’s bravado.
“By the way,” she said, winking at me and squeezing the water from a sponge over Marcus’s head, causing him to squeal in glee and beg for more, “we’re trying for another.”
“What about your teaching?” I said and realized immediately it was the wrong thing to ask. But Cath had been obsessive about her work before she got pregnant.
“Well, I’m not going back, am I?” she said, smiling at me. “It’ll be a bit of a scrape making ends meet but Richie seems prepared to have a go. Having Marcus changed everything for us. That’s why I’m telling you, Lee. You and Tommy should get started. You’re going to be forty next birthday, if I’m not mistaken?”
I was about to start fretting about when I would be able to have a baby when the front door banged and Richie’s voice shouted up the stairs.
“I’m home! Max is just parking the car. He and Paula’ll be here in a jiff.”
I looked at Cath and she made an Oh dear! face.
“Sorry, should have told you straight away. I invited Max Austin to join us for dinner. Did I tell you about Paula?”
“No,” I said, feeling suddenly numb, “you did not.”
“His new girlfriend,” she said, winking again, “not that he ever had an old one.” She paused. “Except you, I suppose.”
“I was never his girlfriend,” I said. “There’s this bloke called Tommy Kennedy, remember? Been hanging round my neck for nine years like an overweight knapsack until he fell off of his own accord and now I can’t seem to straighten up without him.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in Max’s mind you were his potential girlfriend. He had the mother of all crushes on you. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?”
I hadn’t forgotten. Far from it. In fact I couldn’t understand why I was experiencing this sudden feeling of outrage that he had found someone new. I should be pleased for him. His wife—
by all accounts a colorful character and not just because her Jamaican skin had been café au lait—had been murdered. The ultimate irony for Det. Insp. Max Austin in charge of the arson/
murder investigation that had swept through the Notting Hill area barely two years ago. Until he fell for me, he had not looked at another woman for five years.
It was a case of unrequited love, I hasten to add. He was a moody piece of work, probably understandable under the circumstances, sometimes downright caustic and dismissive. Yet he was pretty interesting in the looks department, very much the type I went for—dark, deep-set brown eyes, straight nose. Brooding, tendency to give you mocking looks and then disarm you with a flash of wit or unexpected flattery. It was the unpredict
ability that I liked. You never knew where you stood so it woke you up, kept you on your toes.
Tommy, by contrast, was a big blond bear by whom I had always been able to set my clock—until it came to the most important thing of all, our wedding.
So why was I so irritated that Max Austin had found someone? Because I was complacent enough to still think of him as mine and I was no good at being competitive. I was already dreading holding my own with Paula because she had to be smart and challenging to keep him interested.
She wasn’t.
She was a silly little creature with a tinny high-pitched giggle and somehow that made it even worse. It brought out the snotty side of me and I could see Cath beginning to look very worried as we heaped taramasalata onto our pita bread and sipped our Soave.
Max Austin looked daggers at me when he walked into Cath’s living room and picked his way around a pile of building blocks, a giant stuffed panda, and a plastic crate of assorted toys that signified Marcus’s total rule of the apartment. If I hadn’t known him better I’d have been worried, but a glare from Max could easily mean Fuck! I’d forgotten how much I’m attracted to you and how much you mean to me. He did nothing to introduce Paula but it didn’t matter because she introduced herself and didn’t stop talking.
“You and Maxie know each other, do you? Funny, he’s never mentioned you but Cath and Richie, they talk about you nonstop. So what’s it like living in the Hamptons? Do you see movie stars all the time like they say? Have you been to any of those parties we read about? The girl who did my pedicure last week, she was working out in the Hamptons at one of those spas on the ocean last summer, said it was chockablock with celebrities. I keep saying to Maxie that he needs a holiday. Maybe we could come and stay?”
I was still trying to get my head round the “Maxie.” The amazing thing was he didn’t appear to mind. I had to admit she was engaging with her streaked blond hair tied back in a ponytail that seemed to bob with excitement as she chattered. She had wide apart gray eyes and a cute little turned-up nose covered in freckles. But the best thing about her was her smile, because I could tell it was genuine. She was a good-natured airhead and I was a miserable old has-been.
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