William Boyd
* * *
THE DREAMS OF BETHANY MELLMOTH
Contents
PART I
The Man Who Liked Kissing Women
The Road Not Taken
Camp K 101
Humiliation
Unsent Letters
The Things I Stole
The Diarists
PART II
The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth
PART III
The Vanishing Game: An Adventure …
Follow Penguin
By the same author
NOVELS
A Good Man in Africa
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
The New Confessions
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
Armadillo
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960
Any Human Heart
Restless
Ordinary Thunderstorms
Waiting for Sunrise
Solo
Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
On the Yankee Station
The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’
Fascination
The Dream Lover
PLAYS
School Ties
Six Parties
Longing
The Argument
NON-FICTION
Bamboo
For Susan
Part I
* * *
The Man Who Liked Kissing Women
Ludo Abernathy looked at himself in the mirror – objectively, analytically – and, by and large, liked what he saw.
‘You handsome devil,’ he said out loud, noting dispassionately that his hair – his full head of hair – was greying very fast for a forty-seven-year-old man. Should he take steps, he wondered? But men who dyed their hair were sad, he thought. Everyone noticed; it was impossible to hide, and even though he happily admitted to a degree of personal vanity he didn’t want anyone to see that he was vain. No, grow old gracefully was the maxim to adhere to. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he was ‘on the pull’ any more.
As he walked down the stairs to the ground floor of his large house in Kensington a tune came into his head, and with it a line from the song: ‘You have to hurt, to understand.’ Where was that from? And who sang it? And what did it mean, exactly? So many questions. Tina Turner. Yes. No. Country and Western? … James Taylor. No, it was a woman’s voice, that much he remembered. Probably from some shop or coffee bar he’d been in. Funny how craftily these songs insinuated themselves into the myriad of impressions that flashed constantly through your brain. ‘Ear-worms’, that was what they were called.
As he turned into the kitchen he almost collided with his wife, Irmgard. She was in tennis whites and rummaging through the bowl that contained their various keys.
‘Who’re you playing?’ he asked.
‘Beate.’
Beate, Beate … Yes, he’d kissed her – he remembered now. Thin, blonde, like most of the women he’d kissed.
‘Are you sure you should be playing tennis in your condition, darling?’ He patted the bump of her tummy. She was nearly five months pregnant. Pregnant with twins.
‘We just knock about.’
‘Knock up. Run about,’ he corrected her instinctively. Irmgard was Austrian and her English was almost perfect, grammatically. She still had quite a strong accent. ‘Are you lunching with Beate?’
‘Yes. I suspect so.’ She found the keys to her 4x4 and pecked him on the cheek. ‘See you later.’
‘Wiedersehen.’
As he drank his coffee he realized that the annoying ear-worm had returned on its incessant loop. ‘You have to hurt –’ He sang a few lines from ‘The Fool on the Hill’ in an attempt to disperse it and was distracted by the sight of his assistant, Arabella, going down the side stairway to the basement office. Ah, yes, work.
After Arkady Lemko and his wife left – Ludo assumed the young woman was his wife, but you should never assume with these types, he knew – he lifted the small Lucio Fontana off the viewing stool and took it back to the strongroom, wondering again, as he slid the painting back into its rack, why anyone in their right mind would spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a Lucio Fontana. Disloyal thought, he was aware, as Lucio Fontana had been very good to him over the last few years. In fact, you could argue that he owed his entire success as a dealer to Lucio Fontana. Those four he’d bought, right at the beginning, just after he’d married Irmgard – like winning the lottery. He had paid back Irmgard’s father, Heinz – old ‘57 Varieties’, as he referred to him – within six months. 57 Varieties had been very surprised: now he had no hold on his son-in-law. Ludo smiled. It had been good to look the gift horse in the mouth. Why should he worry if people wanted to hang Lucio Fontanas on their wall? Their money – their choice, however boringly predictable.
Lemko and his young woman had studied the painting – cobalt blue with four diagonal razor slashes – as if looking for a meaning.
‘Is a good one?’ Lemko had asked.
‘Very good,’ Ludo had said. ‘Nineteen fifty-nine, you know.’ Adding a date always worked wonders.
Lemko nodded, sagely, as if he’d known the date all the time, and spoke some words in Russian to his companion.
‘I give you seven fifty.’
‘Seven seven five. It’s nineteen fifty-nine, after all.’
He had sent them through to Arabella to sort out the tax and transfer details.
A good day’s work, Ludo thought, to clear a six-figure profit in half an hour. He locked the strongroom and sauntered back into the front office.
‘That all for today?’
‘No,’ Arabella said, consulting the appointment diary. ‘You’ve got a … a Riley Spacks at four.’
‘I’m going to pop out for a coffee,’ he said, thinking, not for the first time, that he hadn’t kissed Arabella, yet. She was pretty in a sulky sort of way. Still, not a good idea to kiss the help, he supposed – a bit too close to home.
‘Oh, yes, your son called.’
‘Which son?’
‘Xan.’
His eldest, twenty, from his first marriage.
‘He wants to stay the night next week,’ Arabella continued. ‘And can he bring a friend?’
‘I’ll get back to him.’
Ludo sighed. Irmgard didn’t like his children: not Xan, not Rory. She didn’t like them on principle, she had told him, because they were the children of his previous wives. Tiresome.
He pulled on a coat and strolled up to Kensington High Street, heading for Coffee O’Clock. He wondered if Sinead would be there.
Ludo kissed Sinead gently, his eyes closed, and pushed tentatively at her teeth with his tongue. Her tongue flickered back and Ludo registered the brief lurch in his gut and sensed his erection burgeoning satisfyingly. Now Sinead had a hand round the back of his head and grunted softly as she thrust her tongue deep into his mouth. Ludo sucked at her bottom lip and felt Sinead’s other hand going for his groin. He broke off. Sinead was aroused, he could see. She reached for him.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.
‘I get off at six.’ Awf. He loved her Irish accent. ‘I know a place,’ she said. ‘I’ve a friend with a flat in Fulham.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. Beginning to realize he’d made a mistake. This was the third time he and Sinead had kissed. He should have stopped at two, as he usually did.
They were standing in a small storeroom near the Coffee O’Clock lavatories. Jute bags of coffee beans slumped on shelves. Shrink-wrapped stacks of milk cartons were piled against a wall.
Sinead strai
ghtened her clothes, frowned, touched the corners of her mouth with finger and thumb.
‘What’s the game, Ludo?’
He liked that. Game/Ludo. Did she realize?
‘I’m a married man,’ he said. ‘My wife’s pregnant.’
‘So why do you come round here and kiss me?’
‘Because I like kissing you.’
‘You’d like fucking me better.’
‘That would be a betrayal.’
She laughed.
‘Come on. What’s a kiss like that, then, if not a “betrayal”?’ She made the air-quotes with her fingers. She was a small, haunchy woman, in her thirties, he guessed, with dark, bruised eyes and dense auburn hair, cut short. She wasn’t married – she didn’t wear a wedding ring, anyway.
‘Everybody kisses,’ he said. ‘It’s not a betrayal.’
Ludo sat in his sombre, silent office, thinking, staring at the two lit, glowing Howard Hodgkins on the wall, waiting for this Riley Spacks to turn up. Thinking about Sinead. She had tried to slap him but he caught her hand, just in time. Three kisses, big mistake. He wouldn’t be going back to Coffee O’Clock for a while. Damn.
Arabella knocked on the door and showed a girl into the room. A second glance told him that she wasn’t a girl. She was a woman, a woman as small as a girl. Five feet tall, a little more. She wasn’t wearing heels. One of those petite waif-women, girl-women. A third glance made him estimate her age as early thirties. She had long dirty-blonde hair. She held out her hand. He shook it – firm grip, brief hold.
‘I’m Riley Spacks,’ she said. She had a slight American accent, he thought, or one of those mid-Atlantic European accents that sound American, most of the time. She was tiny and slim but full-breasted, he noticed unreflectingly, as he drew out a chair for her and ordered coffee – double espresso – from Arabella. There was something slightly grubby about her, also, he thought, as he sat down behind his desk again, as if she could do with a good scrub. The idea excited him and he immediately speculated about kissing her. Where, how, when?
‘Riley …’ he said, wanting to concentrate on the real world. ‘I was expecting a gentleman. Apologies if I looked a bit blank.’
‘You did look a bit blank, actually.’
‘Well, “Riley” isn’t a female name.’
‘Any name can be a female name, surely? I know a woman called James. I know a woman called Morgan.’
‘Right. Point taken.’
She had wide restless eyes, always on the move, flicking here and there, checking things out. She seemed nervous, on edge. He would bet serious money she was a smoker.
‘Would you like a cigarette?’ he said. He opened a drawer where he kept a variety of packs for clients – Gauloises, Marlboro, Seven Stars, Dakota.
‘I don’t smoke,’ she said. ‘But, please, do smoke if you want. I’m not an anti-smoking fascist.’
‘I don’t smoke, either.’
She cocked her head and looked at him, strangely, as if seeing him properly for the first time.
‘What’s the …’ She paused. ‘We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot, here.’
She had a small fine nose, with perfectly arched nostrils. Her lips were pale, no lipstick.
‘What can I do for you, Ms Spacks?’
‘I have a Lucian Freud. I want to sell it.’
Ludo sat in a small pub called the Captain Bligh in Pimlico waiting for Ross Haverley-Grant. Ross was over half an hour late but Ludo didn’t care, happy to enjoy the pub-mood: the harmless inertia and mild melancholy. It was a London pub from central casting, Ludo decided. A heavily patterned carpet and moulded maroon Anaglypta walls hung with etchings of the Bounty and other ships of the line. Two ancient men sat in a booth nursing half-pints of beer; semi-audible muzak pulsed faintly from little speakers and, parked in the corners, silent flashing gaming machines bulked in a minatory way, Ludo thought. Try me, try me. It was mid-afternoon. The barman, in his grey-white shirt, was absorbed by his fingers, biting and picking dry skin from around his fingernails. Ross liked pubs, Ludo remembered, and the more rebarbative they were, the better. Ludo had suggested lunch at his club, but Ross was barred from most London clubs so they settled for a pub.
Ludo sipped his fizzy water. Irmgard was at the gynaecologist having an ultrasound. She had asked if he’d wanted to know the sex of the twins and he had said he didn’t mind either way. Untypically, that made her cry, briefly. Why? Hormones, or had he been unintentionally cruel? Maybe it would be good to know – good to have two girls to match the two boys. He thought about his life and his offspring: three decades, three marriages, three sets of children from three different women. If he carried on like this, and managed to live until he was eighty, say, he might end up the father of eight children, assuming there were no more twins … That’s why he had taken up kissing. Adultery had always been exciting, more than exciting – sometimes he felt that life was hardly worth living if he wasn’t having an affair of some kind – but, at the same time, painful and costly. Xan’s mother, Edith, hadn’t talked to him since their divorce. His marriage to her best friend, Jessica, had only lasted long enough to produce Rory. And by then he had met Irmgard and had decided to give up his philandering ways. Now he only kissed women and refused to have affairs. Life was less exciting, true, but a little boredom had its particular rewards –
Ross Haverley-Grant stuck his head round the door, saw Ludo and sidled in. He was Ludo’s age – they’d both worked at Mulholland-Melhuish and had met there as young trainee auctioneers. Ross was an old acquaintance rather than a friend, Ludo decided, then realized, with something of a pang, that all he had in life amongst the men he knew were old acquaintances.
Ross was very bald with a patchy ginger beard, he was wearing an ochre-green, orange-checked tweed suit and a blue shirt with no tie. Ludo sampled the material of the lapel between fingers and thumb.
‘Never brown in town, Ross.’
‘Don’t be such a snob. I’ll have a large gin and tonic, if you please.’
Ludo fetched him his drink and sat down, taking the photograph of the Freud out of his pocket and passing it across the table.
‘Twelve inches by twelve inches,’ he said.
‘Late forties?’
‘Nineteen fifty, apparently.’
‘Is it “good”?’
‘I’m seeing it tomorrow. I’ll know instantly.’
‘Very nice,’ Ross said, and sipped his drink. ‘Very nice indeed.’
‘Know anyone?’
‘I can think of half a dozen. Maybe more.’
Ludo allowed himself to relax and feel some pleasure.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘Two million. Two and a half, possibly.’ Ross smiled broadly through his ginger beard. ‘I’d want ten per cent.’
‘Five.’
‘Dream on.’
‘Nice seeing you as always, Ross,’ Ludo said, standing up. ‘Take care. Give me a call one day.’
Ross grabbed his sleeve.
‘All right, all right. Mean bastard.’ He smiled. ‘Where’d you get it? Lucky mean bastard.’
‘The less you know the safer you are.’
The taxi headed north and soon they were in Hampstead. Ludo thought that Riley Spacks seemed a little nervous. She was wearing a grey trench coat buttoned to the neck and her long hair was wound up under a wide black beret. She looked like a French film star, he thought. They talked safely about nothing – the weather, London’s traffic, jet-lag cures – Riley had flown in from Bali, she told him. Then she turned and looked at him squarely.
‘I read somewhere,’ she said, ‘I can’t remember where – but this writer said that the art world was more corrupt than the Mafia.’
Ludo took this in and thought about his own skulduggeries over the years – and all the massive fraud and deceit he had witnessed and heard about.
‘That’s probably putting it mildly,’ he said.
She laughed, a low growling i
nstinctive laugh. She was genuinely amused. Ludo knew then that he had to kiss her.
‘Why do you ask?’ he said.
‘It was a test. Kind of a test.’
‘And did I pass?’
‘With flying colours.’
The taxi pulled up in a crescent not far from the High Street, outside a Victorian brick villa, divided into flats. There were half a dozen assorted bell-pushes by the front door. Riley rang a bell several times and eventually the door buzzed open. They went into a dark hall with a table full of unopened mail and free magazines scattered over the floor. Dead houseplants lined the one windowsill. They tramped downstairs to the basement and Riley banged on the door, loudly, shouting, ‘Lily, Lily – it’s me! Lily, open the door.’
Ludo heard a key in the lock and the door opened to reveal a tiny ancient lady with thin dyed-black hair, wearing a sequinned evening dress and heavy make-up. She had a cigarette in one hand. She and Riley hugged strongly for a long time.
‘Darling, this is Ludo Abernathy – he’s come to look at the painting. Remember, I told you. Mr Abernathy, this is Lily Daubeny.’
Ludo shook her hand. Light, almost weightless, like something made out of paper. He smiled his welcoming, friendly smile.
‘How do you do,’ he said.
‘How dee-do-dee,’ she said in reply and gave a mad, bronchial chuckle.
They followed her into the ramshackle flat, furniture everywhere, as if it was being stored, photographs, books stacked, piles of yellowing newspapers and an overriding odour of carpet deodorant that failed to hide the tang of cat urine.
‘I used to have cats,’ Lily Daubeny said. ‘But I got rid of them all.’
‘Liar,’ Riley said.
Tea was offered and declined. Whisky was offered and accepted.
Riley went in search of the bottle. Ludo looked at the pictures on the walls. Nothing financially interesting, he thought. A big Mark Gertler, an awful Duncan Grant, a lot of Josef Herman. He spotted an Alan Reynolds and a couple of Keith Vaughans. Post-war English. Cultured, intelligent good taste – but nothing his clients would want.