Riviera Blues

by Jack Batten

  “Old what’s-her-name’s father?”

  “Pamela’s.”

  Annie swung her legs out from under her and set her feet on the floor.

  “What did her dad want all of a sudden?” Annie asked. “Anything about patching up the family dynasty?”

  I shook my head. “He wanted a favour.” I told Annie about Swotty Whetherhill and Jamie Haddon and Monaco. I used sentences that I hoped came across as off-hand.

  “Gee, rich guys don’t mind presuming,” Annie said. “You’re gone years from his life, and he thinks he can crook his finger in your direction and you’ll snap to attention.”

  “Maybe I felt a little sorry for him. Maybe I felt a little intimidated by him. Maybe a little of both.”

  Annie smoothed the skirt of her dress over her thighs. “It wouldn’t do any harm,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Looking up this Jamie Haddon.”

  “You noticed the circumspection of my approach to the subject?” I said. “I thought you might be pissed off.”

  Annie shrugged. “Monaco could fit nicely into our program.” Annie’s shrug looked Gallic. Insouciant, yet assured.

  “You’re in charge of the itinerary, sweetie,” I said.

  “Monaco’s vulgarity quotient is awfully high. But there’s the Oceanographic Museum. Very Jacques Cousteau. And you’d get a kick out of the decor in the Casino. I’d estimate a half day’s worth of sights.”

  “Built around a lunch at Le Restaurant du Port?”

  “Well, you have to ask after the rude cousin somewhere.”

  I balanced the passport and the record jacket on the arm of my chair. “I’m not questioning your innate good nature, my love,” I said, “but why are you being so accommodating all of a sudden?”

  Annie curled back on the sofa. She gave me a smile. It may have had a trace of the sheepish in it.

  “Well, you’ve got this case to take care of,” she said. “And as a matter of fact, a potential job … more than potential … a sure thing … came my way this morning.”

  “In France?”

  “In Cannes.”

  “He doesn’t call it a case, by the way. Swotty doesn’t. Very adamant on that point.”

  “I love that part, the man’s name.”

  “You should have met his father,” I said. “The late Bubs Whetherhill.”

  “I always wondered about upper-class nicknames,” Annie said. “Do the parents dish them out at birth?”

  “Swotty got his at prep school. He’s really a John.”

  “What did you call him when you were his son-in-law?”

  “Sir.”

  “Oh, so that’s the way it was.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. “Tell me the other half of your news.”

  “The job is for the Sun,” Annie said. Eagerness was building in her voice. “And it is definitely big time. They’re accrediting me to the film festival.”

  Behind us Billie Holiday was singing “Easy to Love,” medium tempo and heartbreaking. Annie and I were trivializing Lady Day’s music, half-listening to it the way we were, treating it as a backdrop to conversation. I got up, and turned off the stereo.

  I said, “Doesn’t the Sun have a regular guy they send to Cannes?”

  “Bruce Kirkland, yes,” Annie said. “Bruce phoned me himself. This year they’ve decided they want somebody over there doing capsule reviews. Not for every day’s paper. I’m just to pick out movies I think are relevant to your average Sun reader and write short takes on them.”

  “Your average Sun reader?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Annie said.

  “Would he or she, this average Sun reader, be the person you see on the subway, lips moving, little bit of drool maybe?”

  “Such an obvious straight line.” Annie shook her head. “Why did I hand it to you?”

  I slid onto the sofa beside her.

  “So it isn’t the New York Times,” she said, “the Sun’s still a better paper than you think it is. Some sections are.”

  “Where does that leave Kirkland?” I was unwilling to debate the Sun’s journalistic merits.

  “Free to do the newsy stuff.”

  I put my arm around Annie’s shoulders. “How long were you intending to hold out on me about the job?” I said. Annie wasn’t ready to melt into my arms.

  “I was monkeying around for the right approach,” she said.

  “While I was tiptoeing into the Swotty Whetherhill errand.”

  I squeezed Annie’s shoulder. She turned her head toward me. Our faces were six inches apart.

  “You’re not upset?” she said.

  “It’s a great career chance.”

  “Or disappointed? This will mean me seeing a couple of films a day. Hanging out some with the movie people.”

  I shrugged. “Exposure in a daily,” I said. “Who knows where it’ll lead.” My shrug was pure Canadian. The French would spot me for a tourist every time.

  “I know this is putting a crimp in our original plans,” Annie said, “but we’ve got the first week clear for ourselves. And the hotel room in Cannes is for the two of us, the same with the movie passes. I told Bruce you had to be part of the package or forget it.”

  “I’ll supply the common man’s touch. Very useful at the Sun.”

  Annie closed the gap between our faces. We kissed lightly on the lips. The kiss lingered until I had to detach my hand from around Annie’s shoulder. The hand had gone to sleep. I stood up and shook it.

  “You think the sun’s over the yardarm?” I asked her.

  “Probably over Hawaii by now.”

  Outside the window, the street lights had come on. I looked at my watch. Not quite seven. For late April, it had been a murky day and close to the freezing mark.

  “White wine, please,” Annie said. She had Premiere open again. “It says here Marcello Mastroianni’s in a film that’s set for competition at Cannes. Lucky you, your very favourite actor.”

  I went into the kitchen. I poured Annie a glass from an open bottle of Orvieto. The Wyborowa was in the freezer. I put three ice cubes in a glass that I’d got for buying two tanks of gas at a Texaco station. I filled the rest of it with vodka. The glass was imitation crystal and spectacularly ugly. I bet a Pole wouldn’t sully his Wyborowa with ice cubes. Probably wouldn’t drink it out of a Texaco glass either. There was a tin of unsalted nuts on the counter. I managed to open the tin without cutting myself and dumped the nuts into a cereal bowl. I got the wine, the vodka, and the nuts in delicate balance in two hands. The telephone rang.

  “You mind getting that?” I called to Annie.

  I have two phones, one in the kitchen, the other in the bedroom. Annie came into the kitchen. I passed her at the door and put down the glasses and the bowl on the pine table behind the sofa. I could hear Annie talking on the phone, not words, just tones. She wasn’t long.

  “Is old what’s-her-name’s mother still living?” Annie asked me.

  “Pamela’s?” I said. “As far as I know.”

  “In that case, she’ll probably be the next member of the family wanting to bend your ear.”

  “Pamela’s on the phone? Right now?”

  Annie pointed a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the kitchen phone. “It’s a woman, and she wants to speak to you, and when I asked ‘Who may I say is calling?’, she said ‘old what’s-her-name’.”

  “She did not.”

  “You’re right,” Annie said. “She said ‘Pamela Cartwright’.” I lifted my glass from the table, and swallowed an inch of vodka.

  “Well, now,” I said. “I wonder what she wants.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Pamela wanted me to come to tea at four o’clock the next afternoon, Thursday.

  “Well, sure, that’d be just
fine, you bet,” I said on the phone. I sounded like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

  “Until tomorrow then,” Pamela said, crisp and categorical.

  “I clocked that at a forty-second call,” Annie said in the living room. “You and Pamela aren’t much for trips down memory lane.”

  I swallowed another inch of vodka. My hand shook slightly.

  “She invited me to tea tomorrow.”

  “That’s wild.”

  “The tea?”

  “No, that’s quaint,” Annie said. “Her asking to see you, that’s wild.”

  “Tea might be a euphemism for scotch whisky.”

  “What’s she after, any hints?” Annie was sitting up on her knees on the sofa. “More about this Haddon bounder? Or deeper matters? I put my money on deeper.”

  “The only reason Pamela would call me is if she wants something very special,” I said. “Special to her.”

  “Not your body, I trust.”

  “The implication when we got divorced was she’d had her fill of it.”

  I made myself another vodka on the rocks. I finished it while Annie drank half her wine. Annie was an absent-minded drinker. Then we walked down to Queen Street and ate chicken and shrimp at the Rivoli while Annie pumped me about Pamela.

  I told her that, in a marriage that had lasted five years and change, Pamela had been bright, sexy, caustic, profane when angry, and no more self-absorbed than any other young woman who’d inherited several millions of dollars from her grandfather. Marrying middle-class me represented Pamela’s one departure from the normal course of moneyed life. I was never sure whether it was true love or an act of rebellion.

  This was territory Annie and I had covered a dozen times before. Annie brought it up every few months, like a kid asking for a favourite bedtime story. Never got bored with it, even if she kept up the running joke of calling Pamela old what’s-her-name. And now that Annie had spoken to the woman herself, her fascination had increased.

  “She’s got one of those great throaty voices,” Annie said. “Or was that just the phone?”

  I said it wasn’t the phone.

  We had two espressos each and went back to my place. I played Billie Holiday again. Annie and I sat on the sofa and listened. The lights were out. Lady Day sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” I held Annie in my arms. We didn’t talk.

  In the morning, after Annie had left the apartment on movie duties, I got busy on the passport drill. Went downtown and had photos taken. Buttonholed a lawyer I’d known for more than two years to sign in the spaces where a doctor or lawyer or minister guarantees I am who I say I am. Crang. Criminal lawyer. Green eyes and all. And took everything to the passport office in the government building near the corner of Dundas and Yonge.

  The lineup lasted an hour. I read a copy of the Sun somebody had left behind. It had a fat sports section. Too bad Annie’s specialty wasn’t baseball. Or violent homicides that involved motorcycle gangs or distraught spouses.

  When I got my turn at the front of the line, a sunny East Asian woman said I could pick up my passport in four days, any time after nine a.m. Monday. A near thing, I told her. Annie and I were to leave on an Air Canada flight Monday night.

  At home, I made a meatloaf sandwich. The meatloaf was from Ian downstairs. He’s a wizard cook, and offloads on me whatever he and Alex and their dog don’t consume. The dog’s name is Genet.

  I considered a visit to my office. And rejected it. I run a one-man practice out of a second-floor space on the north side of Queen near Spadina. I’ve been a tenant there for twenty years. In recent weeks, I had let things wind down in anticipation of my sojourn in France.

  Two o’clock. Two more hours until tea with Pamela. I puttered. Smoothed out the duvet and patted the pillows on the bed. Took out the clothes I would pack for the trip. Tied up all the magazines that were a month old in a bundle for the recycle pickup. The New Yorker. Downbeat. Saturday Night.

  “Damn,” I said.

  The puttering wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do: take my mind off the Pamela appointment. I felt apprehensive. I felt damp in the armpits. I went into the bathroom and stood under the shower for five minutes. That took care of the armpits. The apprehension remained intact.

  Pamela had occupied a significant chunk of my life; she was a woman I’d fallen in love with, a woman who had ditched me. And the ditching, in my opinion, was for a lousy reason. Because I wouldn’t go out and play. When Pamela flew to Gstaad for the skiing, Manhattan for the shows, Lyford Cay for the sun, I stayed home. I had clients and trials. Pamela decided the arrangement wasn’t working and asked for a divorce. Not so much asked as ordered one up, the same way she used to have catered lunches for eight whipped over from Paul’s Fine Foods in the Village. She sent down to the Supreme Court of Ontario for one divorce, and had it delivered for a Friday before she jetted to London for the shopping. I felt bitter for a couple of months. I phoned Pamela’s new condo in Granite Place and told her that skiing, shows, and the sun were no substitute for me. More accurately, I told it to her answering service. Pamela wasn’t home. She never returned my call.

  And now, ten years later, I said I’d have tea at her house. Was I nuts? Possibly. Curious? Slightly. Apprehensive? Definitely.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pamela lived on Ardwold Gate. I drove over in my white Volks Beetle convertible with the dent in the passenger side. Ardwold Gate is a cul-de-sac that curls behind Casa Loma at the top of the steep hill on Spadina Road. The houses on the street are a jumble of architectural styles, most of them ersatz. Georgian. Spanish. Edwardian. They have nothing in common except price, a couple of million per house. It takes big money to get ersatz just right.

  The Cartwright place was built of heavy grey stone and filled a double lot. I gave the polished brass knocker on the front door a solid thump. A hefty woman in her fifties opened the door almost immediately. She had on a severe black dress and spoke with a Hungarian accent. She verified that I was Mr. Crang and ushered me into the living room.

  It was a room that had chic stamped all over it. Walls painted terra cotta. Furniture covered in pale grey fabric. Oils and watercolours by Canadians who worked in contemporary realism. I looked out through the French doors. There was a tennis court at the back. It had a red clay surface. Not many of them left in the city.

  “How have you been?”

  Pamela spoke from the living-room entrance behind me.

  I turned around. “Since when?” I asked. “The whole last ten years?”

  “You’re looking well.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Pamela had blond hair cut short and flipped to the right. She had eyes that looked out through a brown mist, a slightly stuck-out upper lip, and a figure that was slender all the way down. She was wearing a white silk blouse and cream-coloured trousers with many pleats in front. There were three or four thin gold bracelets on her left wrist and a thick gold wedding band on the appropriate finger. I would wager the blond hair still didn’t need much help from a bottle.

  “Please have a seat.” A small wave of Pamela’s hand told me I was to sit in one of the wing chairs. She sat on a sofa opposite me. In between us, there was a marble-topped coffee table with a bowl coloured a deep inky blue on it.

  “Thank you for coming,” Pamela said.

  “Glad to oblige.”

  “I hope it didn’t interfere with your work schedule.” Pamela was perched on the edge of the sofa, her legs crossed at the ankles. “I know how important your practice is to you.”

  “You going to keep on like we’re diplomats exchanging bows or are you going to get down to why I’ve been summoned?”

  “Shut up, Crang,” Pamela said. “This isn’t particularly easy, and I want to get through it my own way.”

  There was a cigarette box on the coffee table near the inky-blue bowl. Pa
mela reached over and lifted off the top. The box was light green. It looked like wood to me, studded with pieces of white glass. Pamela put the lid on the table. It made a sharp clink against the marble. The box wasn’t wood. It was some kind of metal, and I was probably wrong about the white pieces too. They were probably antique ivory.

  “Do you mind?” Pamela asked. She was lighting her cigarette from a lighter that matched the box.

  “I didn’t before,” I said. For sensuous smoking, Pamela was in a class with Simone Signoret in Room at the Top.

  “I want to talk to you about Jamie Haddon.”

  “I already got my marching orders on him from the top guy.”

  “There are some facts about this mysterious trip of Jamie’s to Monaco that Daddy doesn’t know. And will never know, as far as that goes.”

  “You’re going to tell me, and it doesn’t leave this room.”

  “Goodness,” Pamela said, “aren’t we a very clever criminal lawyer.”

  When Pamela and I were married, I used to let her sarcasm fly by. No call to change old habits.

  “What’s the mystery about Jamie’s trip to Monaco?” I asked.

  “To start with,” Pamela said, “I’m not paying for it.”

  I gave Pamela my uncomprehending look. “Did I miss a step?”

  “For the past year, I’ve paid for practically everything Jamie has. Everything that’s any good. His suits, the apartment, rental on the Jag he’s so fond of …”

  “Why did you —?” I started to ask. And stopped. I recognized the step I’d missed.

  “I was having an affair with Jamie,” Pamela said. “Am having an affair with Jamie. At least I think I still am.”

  “You’re cheating? Oh, my. On Archie?”

  “Why the shock?” Pamela blew smoke out both nostrils in matching streams. “I cheated on you, for heaven’s sake.”

  “This conversation isn’t turning out to be a ton of fun.”

  “If it makes you any less scandalized, Jamie has been the only time I’ve betrayed Archie.”