“It’s contagious,” Sable said. “Are you going to let your roots grow out?”
“These are my roots! And incidentally, this is my ass, too! All sixty pounds of it!”
“Poor Mike,” Beth said again. “He loves you so much.”
“You do love love, don’t you, Bethie? How is it you’re writing those bloodcurdling books? You should be writing all your cockeyed ideas about love.”
“I’m passive-aggressive,” she said. “That’s what they told me in my support group. It’s the only way I can express my anger. By murdering people in my books.”
Sable threw back her head and guffawed. Barb looked at her earnestly. “Seriously?”
“Uh-huh. The only problem is, what’s going to happen to my writing when I’m cured? Think I’ll be unable to write the ruthless killer?”
Elly had wandered out of the room and when she came back, she was holding a small stack of papers. She handed them to Sable. “Read this,” she instructed. Sable began to glance over the first page. “Read it to all of us,” Eleanor said.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.”
“But it says ‘Chapter Twenty-One.’ What’s this from?”
“Just read it to us. Then if you have any questions, I’ll answer them.”
Sable began.
“Chapter Twenty-One
Clare pushed open the shutters to let the sun flood the second-story room of the little Donnelly inn. There came a groan of protest from behind her as the bright light scorched Brandt’s eyes. She ignored him and leaned out the window. Ireland was possessed of a vivid emerald green to be seen nowhere else on the planet. A scent of grass, flowers, ponds and reeds filled her breast. Also in the air was the faint acrid odor of gunpowder and death.
The little village of Donnelly had the appearance of a Renaissance resting place—the aura of peace, tranquillity and security. Yet thirty miles away in Belfast four children and two women had perished in another terrorist bombing. It was rumored that Great Britain was sending more soldiers. The demonstrations would escalate, the shooting and bombing would tear through the city and rip open the flesh of innocents. Belfast was fast becoming a city of no windows. Brandt had taken a picture of a boy, no older than eight, aiming a rifle at him as he focused the lens. This sort of thing took her breath away.
‘Come with me to London,’ he said from the bed.
‘I can’t this time,’ she answered, not turning toward him. She drank in the green, perhaps never to see it again. The most beautiful land on the planet, torn asunder for years by political unrest, hate and prejudice, poverty and murder. Clare often wondered if it was that small dash of her own Irish blood that caused her such sentimentality toward this land, these people. She did not feel the same deeply personal pangs for the land and people of Bangladesh or Cambodia. In Ireland, it grabbed her heart and squeezed; her fear was palpable and her grief piercing. And of course Brandt was always at the center of it, in the midst of the violence, waiting for that special shot. The perfect light—that was his gift. It was not the way he aimed the camera, but the instinct he had for being there at the most opportune moment.
‘I’ve got to go to London, love. I can’t possibly avoid it. Go with me.’
She turned from the window. ‘Don’t you mean, Go as well?’
He shrugged. He seemed to fill the bed. His head and shoulders rested against the pillows and he lay tangled in the brightly white, sun-dried sheets, one long leg bristling with blond hair sticking out. ‘However you term it, I must go to London and so I would like it if I could see you while I’m there. Because I want you madly. Because of how you look in one of my shirts. Because I’m dead in love with you, I want you in London.’ A fleece of golden hair covered his chest; the crop of curling blond hair on his head was growing thinner, but he still looked younger than forty-seven.
‘I read a piece about you in Newsweek,’ she said. ‘Did you see it?’
‘Aye. It was a piece, all right.’
‘They call you something of a womanizer. I think it was meant as a compliment.’
‘I wonder how they get off. It’s not at all true. I’m a one-woman man.’
‘Now that’s pushing it, don’t you think?’
‘Oh love, come here. I can’t bear it when you’re out of my reach.’
‘Not until you explain the article…and the womanizing,’ she said playfully.
‘I’m an unconscionable flirt, that’s true. I do tend to take advantage of women who think I’m grand…but hell, I never lead them on. I don’t lead them far, and I never sleep with them. I like the attention is all.’ He reached a hand toward her. In a second, she knew, she would let him draw her back to the bed.
At four this morning she was pacing, beginning to sink into a familiar panicked, frantic thinking. What will I do if this time he is too close to the action? This could be the time she’d have to find her own way out of some country he photographed, alone, terrified, grief-stricken. Jake Friedman of the Associated Press, or some other crony of theirs, would find her in the Donnelly inn, tap reluctantly on her door and say, ‘Clare, love, sorry, but it’s awful news…in some random cross fire…’
Then his face appeared at seven in the morning, his beard coarse and stubbly, his eyes dancing as though strung out on some caffeine high. She tried to pretend she hadn’t worried while he sat in some dangerous Belfast flat through the night, waiting for a good shot, hoping for perfect light. ‘It was dawn when the women and their children came onto the streets, some trying to go about their lives and some cautiously looking for dead. Their faces are blank, the children are armed! God, Clare, it’s a nightmare they’re living!’ His passion stored on the film in his camera, he grabbed her up in his arms and spent the rest on her, like a victorious warrior returning from battle to his woman.
She let him draw her to the bed. ‘Will you come?’ he asked.
‘If you touch me in the right places,’ she replied, smiling.
He pinched her butt. ‘To London!’
‘Not this time, Brandt. I’m going to go home.’
‘I don’t like the way you say that. It sounds suspicious to me. Is this because of some piece in that American rag of yours? About women?’
She laughed at him. ‘No, no. I know you don’t sleep with other women. Well, I assume you don’t…you spend too much time writing, calling and seducing me. If you do sleep with them, you don’t give them much attention beyond that.’
‘Then why are you sad? You hide it not at all,’ he said, pronouncing it “at-tall” in his clipped, Aussie accent that had tidied up to near British over the years, nary a trace of his American roots left. ‘Is it just that you’re tired? I know something’s wrong.’
‘I did rather well, considering. If you had asked me three years ago how long I’d be content to follow this romantic figure around the worst places on the globe, I never would have guessed three years. David’s playing soccer now, did I tell you? He’s brilliant at it. He has a temper, though. It’s hormones—he’s eleven. His feet grow a size every month and he doesn’t know what to do with his arms and legs unless he’s on the soccer field. And Sarah, I noticed, is starting to blossom into a young woman. She’s too young for that, I think…but she’s becoming physically mature. She’s so graceful, so beautiful. She won’t need braces on her teeth.’
‘What are you saying?’ he asked, frowning.
‘I have to go home to my children, Brandt. I’m away from them too much.’
‘You won’t give us up. After all we’ve been to each other, I can’t believe you would.’
‘No, I won’t,’ she said. ‘But I think you will.’
He sat up in the bed, angry. ‘Damn it, Clare! If you’d just give me—’
‘Have you ever thought about what I’d do if something happened to you while we’re on the road like this? Can you see a picture of me slinking away…shamed…not even acknowledged as the woman who’s loved you through every bloody war, famine and fl
ood for the last three years? Who will they say I am when they study the pictures of the mourners? What about the day Newsweek prints my name in conjunction with yours? How many lives will be disrupted by that?’
‘I’ve told you, it wouldn’t disrupt much. It would be a very slight ripple in the steady lives of—’
‘Oh, crap! If Beatrice is so fucking understanding, why don’t you explain to her that you can’t keep up the pretense anymore. Make San Francisco your base. See your children when you’re in London, as you do now, but for God’s sake don’t ask me to leave my own children and hide out in little rooms all over the world just so we can be together. Brandt, it’s time for you to make up your mind. Six months ago you said—’
‘I explained the problem then. I wasn’t putting you off. Beatrice’s father passed on and there was a dither over it—an estate to settle and the children home. Marc goes to university in the fall and Diedre begins her final year at Cordell. The time will be better then. Bear with me, darling. Barring death or disease, I’ll have it done then. I swear!’
‘It’s so easy for you to consider her feelings, to go back to her again and again. I can’t imagine it’s only her wealth because you’re wealthy, too. Is she beautiful, Brandt? Kind? Sensitive?’
‘Yes, yes, she’s all those things and more, but that’s not what this is about. You’re the woman I love! Clare, haven’t you listened to me? She was a mere girl of twenty when I met her and married her and was reluctantly approved by her stricken family. She was a rich, spoiled girl, accustomed to having her way and I was what she wanted then. The poor thing realized in less than two years that she’d made a dreadful mistake, but Marc was on the way by then and she’d already hurt and shocked her family enough. She’s had to become mighty wise and resilient to get through the years as well as she has. At long last we’ve at least become friends.
‘Beatrice is more concerned with her social circle, her reputation and her family than she is with me. She’s happier when I’m away than when I’m in London or at her country estate, scratching my neck under the starch of those bloody tux collars. We haven’t slept in the same bedroom in fifteen years. She’s asked only two things of me. She wanted children that she might have company in her old age, knowing only too well, I suppose, that she wouldn’t have me. And she asked discretion, so she wouldn’t be publicly humiliated by my antics.
‘She’s done a fine job with Marc and Diedre, so fine that they hardly expect any more of me than she does. And I love them, the both of them. They adore me in return, though they shouldn’t—I’m more a visiting cousin than doting father to either of them. I admire the woman, Clare. I respect her. I don’t shrink from the talk of ending the marriage—I’m quite sure she’s expecting it. But I couldn’t do it while she was burying her father.’
She was quiet for a moment. Then, ‘The woman sounds like a fucking saint.’
‘You are evil and crass,’ he said, but a smile grew slowly on his lips.
‘Well, she does! I wouldn’t leave a wife like that! Why should you?’
His green eyes bore into her and grew dark. ‘Because I taste you in my sleep.’ His hand went under the shirt she wore—his shirt. She wore it while he was away shooting, so she could smell him the whole while. The coil inside of her began to tighten and her skin became hot. He set her flesh afire. Brandt had some chemical advantage with her that no other man had. It was not the danger, nor the long absences. Could not be. She’d had other dangerous, absent men. It was something not of this world, but definitely of the flesh. No man had ever kept her sexual attention for so long, through so much, only to leave her craving more of him.
In her heart she wondered whether she was that equal match for Brandt. He said she was. ‘No other woman, at no time in my life, can do for me, to me, what you can do….’ But she drew herself as worldly, a woman wise to the words and seductions of the sexual male. That meant, should she learn he had lied, she would be disappointed but not surprised.
Rolling with him against the soft, sweet, hay-filled mattress in the little Irish inn in the countryside of Donnelly, thinking once more once more once more, she felt the tears burn her eyes just as his thrusts caused her body to convulse and spasm in joy. Living without this in her life would be terrible. Giving this up, though her travels had become perilous and fraught with tension and fear, would be a great sacrifice.
‘Tell me you love me,’ he begged. ‘Please.’
‘I love you more than I thought possible,’ she said, kissing his lips. But he’d seen the glistening eyes. He could sense what was ahead. ‘But I’m going home to my children.’
‘Clare….’
‘It’s July,’ she said. ‘Hot as hell itself in California in July….’
‘Clare, don’t….’
‘In the fall, when the children go to school, you’ll speak to Beatrice. Call me then. Call to say the papers are filed and the legal ties soon to be severed. Tell me that if some biographer snaps a picture of me sucking your ear, it’s okay, that it won’t cause Marc to become suicidal or Diedre to run away out of pure hatred of her father. It will be a legitimate affair. Come and meet my children. I wouldn’t see you before September or October anyway.’
‘You’re talking of leaving me!’
‘I’m speaking of going home! Where I have a life, a family!’
‘What will change your mind and make you come with me to London?’
‘Nothing, Brandt! Go to London! Your family is there! They’re expecting you!’
‘I’ll tell her this week. I’ll tell them all. Come to London so that I can prove to you that I’m serious about this, about us. Please. We’ve hardly had any time together this trip. You can spare three or four more days for me…and I’ll prove to you that I’m not putting you last.’
She touched his cheek. ‘It’s my job to become hysterical. I’m the woman.’
‘Thoughts of not having you make me hysterical.’
‘Now listen to me, Brandt. Do whatever you please about your family…in your own good time for all I care. But know this. Someday, someone will notice that every time you’ve snapped a picture in some blighted spot, I’ve written an article about the women and children in that same troubled place. You can brush it off all you like, but it will be news. And Beatrice might be a real peach, but she would be good and pissed. Now go home to London. And do whatever you’re going to do, whenever you’re going to do it.’”
When Sable finished reading, she dropped the sheaf of papers into her lap. “Damn,” she whispered with a tone of reverence. “How much of this have you got?”
“All of it,” Elly said. “In bits and pieces. There are gaps and rough places and unfinished chapters. The biggest problem is that I have five thousand pages of it. Except for the end, as near as I can tell. I don’t have the end.”
“She used David’s and Sarah’s names,” Barbara Ann said.
“For the sake of speed, I assume. That could be easily changed. She didn’t use the real names of John Shelby’s actual family. I found a book she has, a biography of Shelby. And pictures by the score, letters by the dozens, notes, postcards.”
“Gabby was the most wonderful writer,” Beth said. “What do you think? Is it publishable?”
“Not quite. It needs a little cleaning up, but it doesn’t need changing. She worked on it on and off for so many years, some of it’s in tatters. But if I’m not mistaken, it’s the book they’ve always expected her to write. It’s the most adventurous love story I’ve ever read, or I’m a sentimental old fool.”
“Not if the rest of it stands up to this one chapter,” Sable said. “Is this what you’ve been working on?”
“I wanted to be sure I had enough of it to share with the rest of you. If it was too partial, we’d have to let it go, give it to Sarah and David in its original form and call it a day. But there’s enough of this novel to pull together, if there were four good heads to do it. Then, with their permission, I feel it should be sold.”
“If that’s what she wanted, why didn’t she even mention it?” Barbara asked.
“I’m not sure I can answer that,” Elly said. “Although she’d worked on it for years, she picked it up again only recently. She dates her originals. She’s had this current computer for five years now and the chapters from this novel have been worked on in the past year. The earlier work on this is less objective—she was still in love and in grief. She knew that and her marginal scribbles indicate she was objective about her lack of objectivity. I think it’s one of those special things that is worked on in secret until it’s completely ripe. She wouldn’t attempt to sell it based on a proposal or outline. She’d rather produce it suddenly, as if out of thin air, and blow their socks off with it. She was close, I think, to telling us about it.”
“A posthumous blockbuster?” Beth asked. “Publishers always want to know what’s next when they buy a book…and this is a loner.”
“Not exactly,” Sable argued. “Gabby wrote ten extremely good novels, but not very much was done with them.”
“That’s dead on,” Barbara Ann, the recent expert in her manuscripts, said. “Writers have been shaking their heads in confusion about that for years. She was good. Used bookstores can’t keep her books, people don’t trade them. Everything she published should have sold huge numbers, but they were always published conservatively. We always figured it was because she couldn’t stick with one ‘type’ of story long enough to build a category readership. That, and a not very unusual run of lousy luck.”
“If you look at her work as a whole,” Elly said, “it isn’t as though she was floundering around, looking for a home. She always should have done better than she did. The critics loved her work, but the publishers didn’t take notice. The readers loved her, but they published each title as though it was the first for her— modest print runs, no special advertising, nothing much done. If one single book of hers got the attention it deserved, the fifteen previous novels would be considered a find. Gabby never wrote as though she was just warming up. They just didn’t see in New York what the rest of us saw. They’re myopic, too busy looking for trends. Gabby’s work transcended trends. It wasn’t faddish. It was always solidly good. Versatile, creative—”