A Splash of Red

by Antonia Fraser

  But Chloe - that was different. Jemima was full of natural and cross curiosity about her wayward friend's inexplicable behaviour. If she gave full rein to it, she might ruin this whole promised day of earnest research, by mulling, pondering, even making a checking telephone call, when she, Jemima, was supposed to be incommunicado. Time to be gone. Wearing one of her favourite dresses, silk jersey in the beige she loved with its own little splashes of red and navy blue, practical enough for the British Library, elegant enough to give her spirits a lift, she picked up her notebook. It was a pretty Italianate thing which appeared to be covered in wallpaper whose unsuitability for serious research, like the delight of the flowing dress, she found both soothing and cheering.

  This time she remembered to use the second key to unlock the flat door. Tiger sidled towards her and rubbed himself against the high-heeled golden sandal which, on the principle of the notebook, Jemima had decided to wear to the British Library. Jemima shooed him away. 'Back for dinner. Enjoy your balcony, there's a good cat.' And she was still in fact addressing the cat when the door swung open, and she felt both her arms roughly seized. The keys were twisted from her grasp.

  'Didn't she get my visiting card?' said Kevin John Athlone. He was so close to her that Jemima could see the slight sweat on his cheeks. She noticed involuntarily that he had not shaved. 'Care for a visit?' He was flushed as well as sweating. 'Well, now she's getting a visit, whether she likes it or not. And you too, Miss Jemima Shore.'

  Pushing her back into the flat, he deftly relocked the door. From the wrong side of it, Tiger gave a long unhappy mew.

  4

  Irish accent

  'Where is she?'

  Jemima thought Kevin John Athlone had been drinking: drinking all night. His breath smelt sour with a nasty tang of acid in it, mingling with the smell of the sweat which beaded his cheeks and damped his bright blue towelling T-shirt. He wore light blue jeans which did not fit particularly well. They sagged on his hips; the broad leather belt which supported them had given up beneath the curve of his belly; the jeans look more rumpled than creased.

  He was still startlingly handsome. He ran rather than lumbered to search the remaining rooms of the flat; his movements were surprisingly light.

  'Where's she hiding?' he demanded, grasping both her arms firmly.

  The huge circular eyes which gazed into hers like those of a drugged but hostile animal being taken away to market, were of an astonishing blue. The bulging red veins visible in the white only set off their immaculate sky colour. His lashes so close to Jemima's own - for he still held her tight - that she could see them quivering as the sweat ran down the corners of his eyes, were as long as a woman's. His hair, although greasy and falling round his face, far too long for elegance, was dramatically dark and thick.

  Kevin John had always looked far more like a young Irish actor than a promising English painter. His father, not half such a handsome man, had in fact been quite well known on the Dublin stage; Jemima fancied that his mother too had been an actress. At this moment he resembled some actor flung out of the Abbey Theatre Company, or perhaps just a member of the company after a hard night.

  'Where is she, I said.' It was quite surprising to find that he spoke without a trace of an Irish accent. 'How the hell do I know?'

  By way of reply Kevin John simply twisted her arms sharply. Her bag and notebook dropped.

  'Find her then.' The stink of his breath was even more offensive than the pain. 'Jemima Shore, Investigator.' The sneer with which he pronounced her name infuriated her.

  'Let go of my arms, you drunken slob.' This time Kevin John let go of her arms and gave Jemima a wide swinging blow on the side of her face. The pain of it was so unexpected that tears came into her eyes. Her whole head felt dizzy. As Jemima reeled, he struck her again on the face but harder this time. She staggered. He hit her again and as she felt herself sinking he shouted something which sounded like 'harlot'. Or perhaps it was 'harder'.

  'It's no good,' she heard herself saying faintly. He seemed to go on hitting her. Then she toppled or sank onto the carpet.

  The next thing she knew Kevin John was kneeling over her. He appeared to be crying or perhaps it was merely the sweat pouring down his face. His breath still smelt terrible.

  'Oh, sweet Jesus,' he was saying. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' Now he was crying in earnest. He sat down beside Jemima on the thick carpet, put his enormous handsome head on his arms and started to blubber. Jemima heard words like: 'I love her, I love her,' mingled with apologies, louder cries, and confused insults, of which 'effing whore' and 'tail-wagging bitch' were about the mildest. At any rate the words 'whore' and 'bitch' were prominent amongst them. Dizzily, Jemima wasn't quite sure whether he meant Chloe or herself.

  After a bit Kevin John stopped crying, raised his head and stared at her: 'I'm drunk.'

  Jemima said nothing.

  'Could you be a sweetheart and make me some coffee? I must talk to you.' Jemima rose unsteadily from the floor and held onto the edge of the sofa. She was glad she had not hit her head on the edge of one of Chloe's smart little glass tables as she fell. All the same she wondered what her face looked like as she walked, still unsteadily, her head aching, into the kitchen. She looked out of the window which was at the back of the building. The kitchen had a small modern fire escape attached to it; the door was merely bolted. Chloe had shown her the key, while recommending her not to use it, except in emergency. But Jemima decided that even if the situation demanded escape, she felt far too dizzy.

  She peered into the kitchen mirror (there were mirrors everywhere in Chloe's flat). Although there was a large red mark on one side of her face, as though she had slept on it, otherwise it did not look too bad. But the sting and the ache were fierce.

  Jemima made some coffee, the one thing she always boasted of being able to do automatically, even half-conscious. Under the circumstances, that was fortunate.

  When she came back into the living room, Kevin John was sitting on the sofa. He did not look at her as she placed the mug of coffee beside him. Jemima went and sat in the big white chair near the window, as far away as possible from the sofa; the roar of the traffic below and the occasional sharp little tooting reached her from far away, as though from some remote shore.

  'Don't worry, I'm not going to hit you again.' He gulped the freshly made coffee as if it were spirits - he seemed indifferent to its heat. 'Have you got a cigarette?'

  'I don't smoke. You can look around.'

  'She never has any cigarettes.' But he heaved up his body and started to prowl about the room, disarranging the huge downy cushions as though packets might be disgorged. Then he vanished into the bedroom. The keys of the flat were lying on the table. Jemima wondered rather hazily whether she should grab them and run down and out into the square. She was still contemplating the move when Kevin John returned, smoking a black cigarette. The new harsh smell made Jemima feel nauseous.

  'These yours?' He held out a box of Black Sobranies, and a lighter.

  'I told you I didn't smoke.'

  'They're not hers. The' He added a crude description of Chloe.

  Jemima remained silent. She was fairly sure such conspicuous cigarettes had not been visible in the bedroom the night before since her own distaste for cigarettes, above all in a bedroom - even unsmoked - would have caused her to remove them. He must have routed them out from some drawer, exacerbating his own hurt; still it was pointlessly provocative to say so.

  'Look at this.' The lighter was dumped down in front of her. It was a pretty little object, striped black and white enamel, with an opaque reddish-brown jewel - a beryl or a piece of agate - set in its head. 'Recognize it?'

  'No.' But even as she spoke, a memory stirred; she felt she had seen the lighter or something very like it before. For one thing it was the kind of personal detail Jemima noticed automatically about people whether she was interviewing them or not, a professional habit of observation. Placing the precise person was more difficult
because during the last month, both setting up programmes for the autumn series and clearing the decks for her own holiday, Jemima had spoken to, eaten and drunk with an inordinate number of different people, types jumbled together.

  It was also possible that she had marked down the lighter at Megalithic House. Cy Fredericks, her boss at MTV, had a fine taste in gold accoutrements, and was fond of throwing any new little bejewelled toy at her as a joke at the expense of what he supposed to be her Puritan streak: 'Fancy it, Jem? Gems for Jem? Yours if that programme wins the prize at Amsterdam.' The last time Cy Fredericks indulged his taste for that particular pleasantry, he had been referring to The Unvisited.

  But the lighter was, she had to admit, in rather too good taste for Cy. It was really very attractive, with a feeling of modern Faberge about it. Where had she seen it? Never mind, it would come back to her.

  'Where is she, Miss Jezebel Fontaine, the bitch of Bloomsbury, the fuck of Fulham, the harlot of the Brighthelmet Press, the curs' delight—' And Kevin John proceeded to embark upon a string of imprecations in which terms of Biblical denunciation and suggestions of animal congress were mingled. His language had always been appalling - if colourfully so - but what had seemed rather amusingly vivid in the jolly young painter Chloe had run off with, was now merely the gratuitous thrusting of his untrammelled anger on the world.

  At the same time, despite his outburst, it was clear that Kevin John was rapidly becoming less drunk. But the expression on his face being no less threatening and his wild round blue eyes still dilating, Jemima had no confidence that temporary sobriety would prevent him beating her up again if he was so minded. It had been a bad mistake not to run while she had the opportunity.

  'I tell you again I haven't the slightest idea!' Jemima almost shouted the words. Despair, brought on not only by an aching head but also by a sense of the ludicrous unfairness of his question, to say nothing of his behaviour, made her abandon caution. She proceeded to tell Kevin John, furiously but succinctly, exactly what had happened since Chloe tripped so lightly out of her own flat the previous night, allegedly en route for the Camargue, leaving Jemima as her house-sitter for a month. How the Stovers had telephoned, expecting a visit; as a result of which call, Jemima had investigated the Camargue expedition and found it to be a fabrication; how there was therefore no record of Chloe's present whereabouts.

  Jemima left nothing out of the story except for Laura Barrymore's strictures on Chloe's new novel.

  She ended: 'All this and your calls too!' She wanted to say your 'filthy calls' but thought it impolitic.

  'It was the picture she liked. It was the only thing of mine she took from the Fulham house. She sent the rest of my work down to Cornwall in a van. I found the card in the pocket of my jeans.' He spoke more flatly. 'I suppose I kept it for the Aiglon number. When I come to London, I generally try to wrench some of his ill-gotten gains -gotten at my expense - out of Creeping Croesus or his side-kick Pansy Potter. Dropping the card in was the only way I knew how to reach Chloe.'

  'I meant the telephone calls.' An immense weariness was overcoming Jemima. She wished Kevin John would go away, find Chloe or not as fate - Chloe's fate - would have it, and leave her to crawl back into the white bedroom, shutter out the dry blazing Bloomsbury sunlight and sleep.

  'How could I call her? She wouldn't give me her number. I only got the address in the first place by charming the pants off that new woman in Fulham. Little Chloe, sweet little Miss Delilah, paws-in-the-air have-me-any-time-you-want, God rot her for the lying scheming Dutch-doll-faced bitch she is, had been oh, oh, so sure that she didn't want anyone to have her address. "One's public, Mrs Ramsbotham, how they haunt one, don't they? One is never alone. An artist needs peace He gave quite an accurate parody of Chloe's breathless little voice, even if the words were ridiculous, and caressed his untidy black head with exactly the same delicate air as Chloe was apt to pat her own, as though too much pressure might bruise it.

  'An Irish accent.'

  Kevin John gave her his angry red-blue stare.

  'Those telephone calls; obscene telephone calls. You had an Irish accent. He had an Irish accent. Not very pronounced but it was there.'

  'Look, Miss Jemima Shore, Investigator' - he took perverse pleasure in reciting her public title and every time he used it his anger increased - 'I don't know what half-arsed Judas you're talking about or what calls either. Christ, I could use a drink. No cigarettes, no drink.' A black Sobranie was in his fingers as he spoke; he had been chain-smoking them. The packet was half full; he didn't seem to notice.

  'There's some white wine in the fridge.'

  'Oh, I bet there's some lovely chilled vino bianco in the fridge . . . And I'll pour it in long green glasses just for us two.' Once again the imitation of Chloe was at least recognizable. 'Well, I don't want any of Chloe's delicately scented ladies' piss. I want a whisky.'

  'Find it. If you can. I've no idea if there's any whisky here or not.' Jemima confined her own drinking strictly to wine.

  'It's too early. It's much too early for whisky. Quite the Delilah yourself, aren't you? Do you want to make me drunk at this hour in the morning? Want to control me? Bring me down? Well, I can tell you this, Miss Jemima Shore, Investigator, no one brings me down.' He glared at her. 'So what was that about the telephone?'

  Jemima told him about the two calls. It seemed the safer topic of the two. She still wasn't convinced that he hadn't made them himself. She might have imposed an Irish accent because her abiding mental image of Kevin John Athlone was as being Irish - and rough. If he had been drunk enough, he might easily have made the calls and forgotten the next morning.

  'But I didn't know her number. How could I do such a terrible thing?' he remarked at the end in an injured voice. His long eyelashes fluttered slightly; there was something mechanically boyish about his manner, something wheedling about his tone. Jemima glimpsed with no particular favour the handsome and indulged young man Kevin John had once been. She still didn't know whether to believe his assurance or not.

  Suddenly he leant forward and to her absolute surprise and horror planted a kiss full on her lips. The stubble on his chin grazed her skin and she wriggled backwards in her chair without being able to speak or do more than mutely struggle. His mouth was enormous; it was as if a gigantic fish were trying to gobble her up.

  'You're a darling, aren't you? A real sweetheart. You'll forgive me, won't you, sweetheart, because I'm going to say sorry so nicely to you. I'm going to be so utterly, utterly charming and pleasing—'

  For a moment Jemima thought he meant - no, surely even he—

  'I'm going to have a shower and a shave - I'm sure that' - he paused and then said in his naughty-boyish voice - 'that lady has a razor somewhere about. Then I'm going out and I shall buy you the biggest bunch of flowers in the whole of London, this bitch of a city, which frightens the daylights out of your poor honest artist even on a fine summer's morn.'

  'I don't want any flowers.' Her voice was low. 'I have no idea where Chloe is and now will you please go away and leave me alone.'

  'Oh, you'll never be quite alone here, sweetheart. Never quite without me. I'm a match for you, darling. Look - there's my picture looking down on you. A great wonderful splash of red for you. Still, if you really don't want me further, I'll leave you. Maybe my old pal Dixie is still in London; I have an idea we were drinking somewhere together last night. I couldn't get an answer from Creeping Croesus.' He passed his hand over his head as if the recollection pained him. 'He'll give me a razor and a bath. And then I'll buy you the flowers. Splashes and splashes of them. All red. Cheer up this whited sepulchre of hers.' Jemima hated red flowers.

  'You really have no need to apologize further,' she said coldly. 'You were drunk.'

  'Ah, sweetheart, the flowers won't be an apology. They're to woo you, to please you, and then with your matchless wits, Miss Jemima Shore, Investigator, you'll find Miss Chloe Fontaine for me. I know you will.'

  'Please go aw
ay. Unlock the door and go away—' And then to her further surprise he did. He unlocked the door, deposited the keys carefully on the table, and left. She noticed once again the lightness with which his shambling body could move. Kevin John did not, however, shut the door behind him and she lacked the energy to get up. She heard his footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs, loud, thumping all the way to the front door. It was a long way down. The street door was opened. She did not hear it shut.

  Jemima regained her energy and walked unsteadily to the balcony. She looked over. Amidst the desultory passers-by on the pavement of the huge Bloomsbury square below, Kevin John in his bright blue shirt was easy to pick out. He wove through the traffic and disappeared in the direction of the British Museum. It was not much more than twelve hours since she had looked for Chloe in the same square and missed her.

  He was definitely gone. She was alone. Except for— 'Tiger!' she cried aloud. 'Tiger!' Oh no! Tiger, last heard mewing with outrage when Kevin John had precipitately pushed her inside the door and relocked it, leaving the cat either by design or mistake on the wrong side of it. She had no clear memory of hearing any further mews, but then the ensuing scene had been sufficiently violent to drown the plaints of an excluded cat. Tiger was certainly nowhere to be seen or heard now. He had not chosen to return by the balcony window. She wondered whether a cat would ascend the scaffolding of Adelaide Square all the way from the street. She must go downstairs and look for him. Perhaps he had vanished into the darkened basement area, the last lap of the long staircase.