Snowstorms in a Hot Climate

by Sarah Dunant

  “From now on the story is your history too. I told you the truth about the plane. I wasn’t due to fly British Airways at all. I arrived at Heathrow—a little late, I admit—to find myself a victim of an overzealous booking computer. It didn’t matter to me which airline I flew. Not then, at least. I even walked behind you into the departure lounge. You don’t remember that, do you? I was struck by your hair. The extraordinary color of it. A corn harvest. I remember wondering if you might be an example of the ‘buxom English wench.’ Aaah, I seem fated to upset you. Elly warned me you were sensitive about your appearance. Should I call the waiter for the telephone? How come you’re so clever and so stupid, Marla? Even about yourself? Whoever told you you were ugly? Don’t spit at me. I thought then, and I think now, that you are an immensely striking woman. I did not set out to be your enemy. Remember that. That was entirely your decision. Like it or not, that is what I think of you. But we will not mention it again.

  “So, coincidence brings us together, and we travel across the Atlantic on the same plane. We walk through the same terminal together, and here at last you catch me in my first lie. Mea culpa, Marla, mea maxima culpa. Yes, I did see Elly on the other side of the barrier, and yes, I did watch the two of you meet. There was no danger of my being spotted. You only had eyes for each other. I knew then that you must be Marla. And I knew also, of course, that I was not expected on that plane. So I decided on a little detour before arriving home. And where did I go? I can hear the question clicking away in that admirable brain of yours. Well, you already know, don’t you? Who was my ally in all of this? Which other poor dumb female did I exploit? Yes. I went to Indigo.

  “Poor Indigo … Tangier!—you should have been ashamed of yourself. She had to find a map to check the continent. The spirit is willing, but the brain is weak. And, since she has introduced herself into the story, I might as well answer your questions about her. What do you need to know? That I met her while Elly was away, and that we ‘paddled palms’ together. I was, of course, everything she’d ever dreamt of, everything she thought New York could give her—a patron for her art. But you overestimated her, Marla. She was what she appeared. No more, no less. When Elly came back, I told her what had happened and I told Indigo it was over. But it seemed cruel just to slam the door in her face. So I suggested a little work at the store.

  “Ah, I see you don’t believe me. Well, in this case you’re right. Well caught. But it’s only a ten percent lie. Indigo needed the job, and she was good at it. Even Elly agreed. But yes, she was more than just a salesgirl. She was also a way of watching Elly. Just in case. I told her nothing. Or nothing of the truth anyway. I suggested marital difficulties and the need to know for sure. She was very good. Watched and reported and never demanded payment. So, it was to her apartment that I went that night. And it was on my instructions that she had a gas leak the next morning. Remember? The leak that meant Elly had to go to the store, leaving you and me alone in the apartment, giving us a chance to meet and see if you remembered me. Or at least that was the plan. Unfortunately, something went wrong. I got a phone call from the English connection. They needed to talk, urgently. I left you sleeping, which meant there could be no intimate meeting between us. Instead we would face each other publicly.

  “And so to that evening. I wonder if your memories are as vivid as mine. From the moment I saw you, sitting at the cocktail bar, I knew you had come to do me damage. I don’t think you know just how honest a person you are, Marla. How the truth shines out through that marble skin of yours. I almost didn’t even bother asking you for your silence. It seemed so impossible that you’d give it. So you’ll understand why, when you agreed, I—I of the suspicious nature—had to assume a degree of dissembling, to assume that you would not necessarily keep your word. You will, I think, be able to imagine my distress when, on that very night, Elly informed me that you were going to California. I must admit, I almost told her then. All of it, the whole thing. She seemed so obviously innocent. How could she do something so potentially incriminating? But I said nothing. How many times have there been in this whole affair when someone had the chance to stop it? Huh, Marla? How many times did you almost tell the truth? It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?

  “So, you and Elly went behind enemy lines. Meanwhile, back home I got on with the job in hand. The trial run was set up. I wonder how much you need to know. The circus was hardly an original idea. In the past the international music business had been the goose that laid the golden egg: world tours with customs clearance winging half tons of hash stashed in cavernous speaker cabinets around the globe. It seems incredible now that the authorities took so long to bust it. But in principle it was a sound idea: legitimate groups who moved around the world carrying significant amounts of luggage with them. The Klondyke Circus Klan may have begun as ‘alternative’ entertainment, but they had broken into the international circuit and were even respectable enough to warrant sponsors. They also took a lot of equipment with them, and I had a contact backstage. They were the perfect guinea pig: coming from South America, booked in through Shannon for the Dublin Theatre Festival.

  “I kept the scale of the thing modest. I was more interested in seeing how the connections held together. The juggling balls were a gift from heaven. As Elly was so eager to describe (you will understand now my consternation at her interest that day in San Francisco), the Klondykes specialized in spectacular finales, juggling symphonies where the whole company joined in. They carried a very large stock of balls. The perfect cargo. Substitute two or three dozen, get them into Shannon and across to the mainland through a Customs more interested in guns than in drugs, and you were home and dry. It was all arranged. All that was needed was for a couple of dozen balls to be made in Dublin and substituted when they arrived. I would be in London to talk expansion and profits. Nothing could go wrong. And if it did, I was nowhere to be found. If they were planning to set me up, then something had to change. It did.

  “You and Elly had been in California for four days when I got the call. Klondyke had come through Shannon, no problem. But the man in Dublin paid to substitute the balls hadn’t. His work wasn’t good enough. My contact insisted it would be spotted. Since I was going to London anyway, would I take another set with me? It stank right from the beginning. Either J.T. had lost his touch or they hadn’t let him in on the details. On the other hand, if I had suspected nothing, then there would be nothing to suspect. Mistakes do sometimes happen, even in the best-run deals. I made it clear how much I deplored the inefficiency but agreed to do it. They were offering to deliver the cargo to New York. I told them I would pick it up in person. That way I got a chance to see the three of you together. And to talk to Elly. Now I knew how and where the setup was to take place. If she was in any way involved, then so would she. She would, at the very least, know what to avoid. And top of the list would be a trip to London with me.

  “Looking back, I guess I was prepared for everything but what happened. She threw me, right from the moment we met. You had done one hell of a job, Marla. I always meant to congratulate you on it. Elly was glowing, charged with a confidence and energy I hadn’t seen in her for ages. She was fabulous that night. So much so that I began to mourn what I had lost. And what you had won. It was over. Simple as that. Except was it? You see, if she really knew nothing about my future, then her timing was one hell of a coincidence. And there had, you will agree, been altogether too many coincidences by now. So I decided to try out the English trip anyway. Just to see what kind of look came into her eyes.

  “She hadn’t known. I would bet my life on it. Sure, she had a talent for dissembling. But not to that degree. She knew nothing. I swear it. In fact, she was so innocent she almost came with me. Maybe you don’t know that. And you probably don’t want to hear it, but it’s true. In fact, if it hadn’t been for your trip to Paris, I think she would have given in and joined me. Your trip to Paris … now that interested me, Marla. What was your motive? You knew about London. You could
have let her come home that way. Were you so frightened that I would charm her back? Or maybe there was another reason. Maybe you knew something about London that I didn’t. Impossible. You and J.T. as confidantes? It didn’t fit. Surely this time I was just being paranoid.

  “I discarded the possibility. Until you arrived. And Marla, you were a giveaway. Try as you might, you could not disguise your triumph. Success was oozing out of you. Pleasure at my failure. But there was still no proof. It might still have been just coincidence. Then, early next morning, I got a phone call. A little Santa Cruz bird had seen J.T. in the company of a certain large blond woman. He had left her for a couple of hours in a bar in the middle of the night. Don’t look so surprised, Marla. Watching is part of the game. All kinds of people are paid to do it. Now, what was I to make of that? On the one hand, your rounded English vowels told me that you and J.T. had spoken less than a dozen words to each other. On the other, I had this story of a night spent in each other’s company. You’ll forgive me if I assumed the affair was platonic. In which case, what else could you and J.T. possibly have in common—except perhaps Elly’s welfare?

  “I could still have been wrong. There was one way to find out. Elly was so anxious about my father’s ‘illness’ that she even shed her own tears. Of course she’d go in my place. She knew enough about the business to know there are some arrangements that can’t be changed. I told her there was no danger, and she believed me. I even packed her suitcases for her. I told her nothing. I couldn’t. Anything I said would have led back to you, and I wanted to watch you for myself. Through Indigo’s eyes.

  “Your visit to the pay phone told me everything I needed to know. I knew you very well by then. You may not have wanted us to be friends, Marla, but you couldn’t stop me worming my way inside your brain and bugging your thoughts. I knew you would call J.T., and I knew what he would tell you. I also knew that you would save her. My only concern was that, in order to do so, you might be tempted to tell her the whole story, then and there. But I banked on the fact that you would want her out of America first, away from my clutches. You had proved good at keeping secrets. I was sure this one could be kept for one more day.

  “The rest you know. Or rather you think you know. Because there is one thing left to say, although you are not going to want to hear it. Because in all of this rotten little tale there is only one thing you did wrong, one miscalculation that you made all the way through, right to the bitter end. What happened when you told her, Marla? How much did she hate me then? Oh yes, she was angry. I had lied to and deceived her—believe me, she made that plain when I saw her. But she did see me. It was important enough for her to come and meet me face-to-face. She owed me that much. Why? Didn’t you ask yourself that question? Well, the answer is, Marla, that she loved me. And that despite all the shit, there was still something left between us. Something that had to be sorted out. And that’s what you can’t stand, isn’t it? You never could. Right from the beginning you could not accept that there had been something between her and me which was as powerful as the relationship between the two of you. It hurt so much that you simply refused to acknowledge it. That refusal blinded your judgment all along. And that refusal meant that in the end she had to come to me to find out the whole truth.

  “And I told her. That afternoon when I picked her up from the train. We drove back here and walked along the beach, walked and talked for hours. Just like you and I now. I told her everything, exactly as I have told you. But the difference was that she believed me. Believed me enough for her to spend the night with me and for us to go out together this morning. To walk together to the falls. What did you think, Marla? That I dragged her screaming from the car and flung her over the edge to stop her from talking? What would be the point of that? And even you, I’m afraid, won’t be able to prove it. Alas, there are witnesses to our mutual goodwill. The waitress in the restaurant where we lunched in Ullapool, the girl at the reception desk, the couple we passed on our way across the bridge. All these people, if asked, would talk of a kind of togetherness between us, an ease. I don’t want to hurt you more than necessary, Marla. I am not saying that we were reconciled. We were not. There was no future for us. We were both aware of that. There had been too many lies and too much pain. She had been hurt almost beyond healing. Certainly it was over. But with sadness rather than violence.

  “And so we return to your original question. What happened this afternoon at the Measach Falls? There is more if you want to hear it. I could tell you for instance that we were talking about you as we crossed the bridge. About why it was you hadn’t told her, why you had been so eager to see me damned; eager enough to accept J.T.’s story without thinking to question it. You see, I was not the only one to have hurt her, Marla. She had expected more from you. I was only a lover, but you were a friend. You were sacrosanct, and your lies had damaged her. When we reached the end of the bridge, she fell silent and would not accept my comfort. I thought she needed to be alone. I left her there and started to walk back toward the car. But I remembered she had the keys. I retraced my steps, and that was when I saw her, by the edge of the gorge. There was something in the way she was standing that chilled me. I called out her name. She turned, and it was then that her foot seemed to slip. She lost her balance and fell sideways. It happened so quickly.

  “The next thing I remember is her hitting the railing, the post ripping out of the ground and her body going with it. That’s when she screamed. I ran to the edge. I even tried to climb down, but the ground was covered in thorns and thistles, and below was a sheer drop—I couldn’t even see the bottom. I lay there, hollering her name into the canyon, screeching till the echo hurt my ears. The two people we’d passed on the bridge must have heard my screams. They came running back. It was they who pulled me back from the edge and ran for help. I knew it was too late. We all did. No one could have survived that fall. No one. Not even Elly. Elly … the rest you know. That’s it. There’s nothing left to tell. You have it all, Marla. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth …”

  So help you God. The dining room of the Inverlochy Metropole had frozen in time. The tables were empty, and the candle had long since burned out. The silence after his words stretched back and forward into infinity. I could feel his eyes boring into my brain.

  “It’s your choice, Marla,” he said softly. “Am I really the villain of this piece, paranoid enough to kill twice to ensure silence? Or am I too one of the victims, despised, mistrusted, and framed by those who envied my success … envied me Elly. All I—”

  But I was not listening. I was looking at his arms resting on the tablecloth and noticing for the first time a crisscross of cuts and scratches which, like stigmata, seemed to have miraculously appeared during the telling of the story. There they were—Exhibit Number 3. Lenny’s arms as proof that he had tried to save her. Another vision appeared to me. Of her nails clutching at his flesh as they clung together on the edge before the final swift push sent her spinning down through the crack in the earth’s crust. The two images, angel and devil, blurred into one. I returned to the marks on his arms, which had begun to pulsate in front of my eyes. I saw maggots and squirming yellow grubs nosing their way out from the wounds, watched bulges of skin erupting into small volcanoes of pus. I dragged my eyes from the sight. The room rotated on its axis. Welcome to the void.

  “Marla.” His voice licked its way over my neck, making me shiver with its tenderness. “I know how hard this is for you. But we can’t bring her back. All we can do is to let her death make peace between us. I think she would have wanted that.”

  It was so overwhelmingly tempting, this prospect of forgiving and forgetting. The future ahead of me stretched bleak and empty, so utterly lonely that it seemed unbearable not to be able to share it.

  For what it is worth, I had believed Lenny. Just as I had believed J.T. All good stories deserve to be believed, and his had been a cracker, complex, compulsive, consistent, cajoling, filling in the silences that
other versions could not reach. So it must have sounded to Elly, and so she must have been charmed again. And yet. And yet … what is any good story but a kind of fiction? The spinnings of a fertile brain. How credible it sounds is not the point. The point is that in order to write history you have to choose. When all the source material has been uncovered, that is the historian’s job. And I had already made my choice. Although each of the stories may have fitted the facts, only one fitted my feelings. Lenny and I would always be separated by a gorge filled with the sound of rushing water and the corpse of a woman on the rocks. One woman or two, it hardly mattered, so long as one of them was Elly. After all the lies—whoever they belonged to—only the facts remained. Fallen or pushed—and there was, despite his innuendo, no other possible alternative—it made no difference. The line of her life had led through Lenny to death. There could be no forgetting or forgiving that.

  Now, at last, I could look at him. The face had recovered some of its former sleekness. The eyes were sharp again, and the skin had regained its color. This was a man flushed with the pleasure of performance.

  “You look sick with tiredness, Marla. Why don’t you go to bed? There’s no need to say anything. I just wanted you to listen, and for that I’m grateful. Everything else can wait till morning.”

  I opened my eyes into the sunshine of his smile. Brotherly love. He was, once again, invincible. Everything else could wait till morning. What else was there?

  “You’re right,” I said thickly. “I do need sleep. Good night, Lenny. I’ll see you tomorrow.”