Birth Marks

  I looked at him for a moment. That touch of red around the eyes had spread. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Well, how would Keats know, anyway? He never stuck around long enough to find out. I kept my fingers crossed behind my back and told him a lie, which was whiter than most. ‘No. I’m not working for her any more. I’m working for myself. That’s why I’m here.’

  He took a swig from an already empty glass. ‘Yeah, guilt. It’s a killer, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is that what you brought me here to say?’

  ‘I didn’t know about the baby, you know,’ he said, as if I had disagreed with him. ‘She didn’t tell me.’

  ‘So, she didn’t tell you. I thought you said you weren’t that close.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway,’ he said thickly. ‘I mean by the time we talked, you and I, she was already dead, that’s what the police said.’

  ‘Not quite. She died some time between four and six thirty. We met just after five.’

  He looked up at me and scowled, but said nothing. The waitress arrived, all black fishnet and mini-mini-skirt. He ordered two more drinks. I decided not to rush him. I’m normally quite a good judge of alcoholics, working out the habituals from the anxiety one-offs. Regulars, for instance, never order by the glass; it’s a waste of too much time and money. Which meant Scott was on a binge, the old drowning-the-sorrows routine. Guilt, yeah, it’s a killer. Except she’d been dead for over a month now. How come he was still crying? Either he was more bi-sexual than he had let on and was facing a paternity crisis or the rest of life was kicking him around too.

  ‘So, how’s the show?’

  He looked at me. ‘Minus a grey cat.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I never did like the music anyway. Case of the emperor’s new clothes if you ask me.’

  ‘What about your friend?’

  ‘My friend? Oh, he found another friend. Happens all the time.’

  ‘So what do you do now?’

  He shrugged. ‘This and that. Auditions, classes, that kind of thing.’

  ‘But not Cherubim?’

  He grinned, but there wasn’t much humour in it. ‘How right you are. Not Cherubim.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said quietly.

  ‘No, you’re not. Neither am I really. Fucking awful place. All those little boys and girls walking on tiptoe to please their mummies and daddies.’

  The waitress sped by the table, depositing two glasses as she went. The wine slopped over on to the cloth. He watched the stain grow. Then he shook his head. ‘Shit. I would have told you, you know, I mean if you hadn’t been working for her. Parents. Jesus, they think they own you. Only they call it love rather than possession. And everything’s fine until you do something they don’t want you to, or, God forbid, become someone they don’t want you to be. Then it’s them or you. Simple as that. So she wasn’t Marie Rambert. So what? I just thought she deserved the chance to get away. If that was what she needed. Maybe that’s why she got pregnant, eh? Cocking a snook at the old dear.’

  ‘Who was the father?’

  ‘I said already—she didn’t tell me about the baby.’ And you could tell he hadn’t liked the question.

  ‘OK. So let’s try something else. What about her debts?’

  ‘I told you, she needed some money.’

  ‘Not some money, Scott, a lot of money. What did she spend it on, apart from clothes?’ He shrugged. ‘Eight thousand quid at last count, which amounts to seriously more than the odd spending spree. What was she on?’

  The laugh was more like a guffaw. ‘Anyone ever told you that you sound like a social worker?’

  ‘Yeah, all the time. So, d’you wanna talk or just sit here and drink? And if I were you I’d watch that frown. You’re going to get wrinkles if you’re not careful.’

  He sighed. ‘A lot of it was above board. Medical bills, physios, that kind of thing. But if you want to believe the rumours, she probably would have been doing some stuff when she was with Left Feet First. Coke, maybe a little speed. But she was clean by the time she got to Cherubim. Contrary to what you guys read in the tabloids there are a number of drugs that you can stop taking. It’s just you can’t pay back the money they cost.’

  Boy, I must be looking my age. Either that or this was just his form of revenge. ‘And she couldn’t?’

  ‘We didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘So what did you talk about, Scott? Or did you just invite me here because you’ve run out of late-night drinking companions?’

  I got another scowl, then he sat back in his chair and said, ‘I don’t know for sure, but I think she might have gone to Paris.’

  ‘To Paris?’ And I must say, it’s good he mentioned it, because I never would have guessed.

  ‘It was a long time ago, right? So I only remember bits of it. I think it must have been a month or so after she arrived—which would make it some time in February—she saw this ad in one of the papers. And before you ask me, I don’t know which paper and I can’t remember the date. All I know is what she told me. It was for some job in France. I don’t even know what it was doing, exactly, except that it was a temporary post with very good money. Well, she was pissed off with Cherubim, pissed off with not earning enough, pissed off with everything really. I think she thought maybe if she went away, did something different, cleared her debts, got Miss Patrick and her bleeding obligations off her back for a while…Anyway, she told me she’d applied for it. And then a week or so later she got an interview. I know because it meant going to Paris and I covered for her, her classes I mean. When she got back she didn’t say much about it. Just told me it had been some kind of personal assistant business job and that she hadn’t got it. I asked her a few more questions but she shrugged them off. I figured she was just disappointed. Then a couple of weeks later she went off again without telling me, just called in sick one morning. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but then the same thing happened a bit later. And I knew it was Paris this time, because I saw the ticket in her handbag. I suppose I wondered then if it might be a guy. I even made some joke about how expensive it was, joining the highfliers’ club, and maybe she should just invite him back to her place. But she didn’t find it very funny and when I pushed a bit further she clammed up on me. I guess I was a bit surprised. I mean we were quite tight in our own way. I suppose we had some things in common, like we both should have been doing better but couldn’t get the expectations off our back. Anyway I figured she just didn’t like talking about her love life and I let it ride. Then some time at the end of April I caught the flu. I was off for a week. She never called round or even checked me out. When I got back she had gone. She left me a note wishing me love and luck, but no forwarding address.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘And you think she went to Paris?’

  ‘I dunno. All I know is that she was doing a lot of commuting around the time she got pregnant and that Paris was the place she was going. Maybe when he found out he offered to look after her and she accepted.’

  ‘So how come she didn’t tell you?’

  He made a face. ‘Could be she didn’t think I’d appreciate the maternal instinct. Or perhaps she thought it would spoil her image. Carrie liked to see herself as more independent than she really was.’

  I gave it some thought. Paris? Why not? Except what about the six months of postcards she kept sending to Miss Patrick, all franked ‘London’? One thing at a time. I looked at him. He was drawing on the tablecloth with his fork, etching spellbound lines in unconscious homage to Hitchcock. I took it as a sign. ‘And that’s it? I mean you didn’t hear from her again?’

  He shook his head. But he still didn’t look at me.

  ‘And how much of all this did you tell the police?’

  He kept making ski runs in the snow. ‘They asked for facts, not opinions. So I told them. I didn’t know where she’d gone. They weren’t that interested anyway. They’d already made up their minds. Suicide
passed off as accidental death to keep the old bat happy. Either way, she was just one poor fucker less to claim the dole. She was her own witness, they didn’t need anyone else.’

  ‘And if they had asked the right questions? Is there anything else you could have told them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you’re sure she didn’t get in touch with you again?’

  ‘No, I mean yes, of course I’m sure. Shit.’ He slammed the fork down on the cloth and you could see he was suddenly very angry with himself. I let him stew in it for a bit. He finished off the rest of the glass and looked around for the waitress, but she was busy with someone more glamorous. He turned to me. ‘Anyway, it was your job to find her. You’re the one who blew it.’

  ‘Oh yes. And when was that, Scott? At what exact point did I blow it? In the café outside Cherubim on Friday afternoon? Or maybe in the dressing-room with you on Saturday? What was it I should have asked you then that would have got me the information I needed?’

  He shook his head in a fury and made as if he was getting up to go, but thirty seconds later he was still there. Behind that gorgeous façade something was crumbling, eaten away by the acid of guilt. I just hung on to the other end of the line. He brought himself in eventually.

  ‘All right. So she rang me,’ he said at last, his eyes on the tablecloth. ‘Before she died. It was on the Friday, in the morning. She said she was sorry to get in touch so suddenly, but she needed a place to stay, that night or over the weekend.’ He paused, then closed his eyes up tight. ‘I offered her my flat.’

  ‘And,’ I said at last when it was clear he wasn’t going to.

  ‘She never turned up.’

  So he’d known all the time. Even that Friday afternoon in the café. I saw again the look on their faces when I mentioned her name. And I felt the kick with which Scott had silenced little Miss Motor Mouth.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because she made me promise not to,’ he said with a blast of fury and pain that caused eyes to flicker. ‘She said it was absolutely vital that no one knew where she was. And that if anyone got in touch looking for her, I was to tell them I hadn’t seen her since May.’

  ‘You mean she knew somebody would come looking?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think so. When you turned up that afternoon I was sure you were the one she’d been talking about.’

  But how could it have been me? She didn’t even know I existed. In which case who else could she have been worried about? The father of the child? The same guy who called her flat that evening at 10.00 p.m.? Despite the crushing irony of it all I was beginning to feel better.

  ‘And what did you arrange with her? Were you going to meet her or what?’

  ‘No. She said she didn’t know when she’d arrive. I told her I was working and that if it was the afternoon or evening I’d leave the keys at the stage door for her.’

  No wonder he’d been so desperate to get me away from the entrance that Saturday after the matinée. She could have turned up at any time. Except she didn’t.

  ‘And she didn’t say anything about where she was or where she’d been?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And no mention of the baby?’

  He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger this time.

  ‘How did she sound?’

  He didn’t need to think about it. ‘Anxious. A bit freaked out.’

  Even though I could cheerfully have strangled him ten minutes before now I felt sorry for him. ‘Listen, Scott. It wasn’t your fault. You did what you could. If she’d really needed you she would have got in touch again. In the end people who commit suicide make their own decisions.’

  He shook his head and almost smiled. ‘Carolyn didn’t commit suicide.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s what I think.’ He paused and I counted the empty glasses in front of him again. Seven including the one he had almost finished. It didn’t seem to have affected his powers of thought up until now.

  ‘What else do you think?’

  ‘I think that in the end it was nothing to do with us. Me, you, her. Any of us. I think it was the old bitch that pushed her into the river. With her stupid ambitions and pressures and fairy stories. All the parental expectation. That’s what killed her.’ And he grinned. ‘Better than the butler, eh?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  All the way home I had this image of her, standing by the river in the dark with so much weight on her shoulders that she had no need for stones in her pockets: Miss Patrick’s expectations, her debts and someone else’s baby. Which had proved the heaviest? The eight-month-old foetus? Except that was something else that didn’t make sense. If Carolyn couldn’t hack it with a baby then why had she left it so long to find out? It’s not as if she didn’t have any option. She was exactly the kind of girl a generation of feminists had worn out their shoe leather for, marching their way to abortion amendments and the right to choose. If she didn’t want her career stopped by one renegade sperm there were places she could have gone, people who could have helped her. She may have been a country girl, but she wasn’t a bumpkin. She had partied and played. She knew the score. Which meant either she had ideological objections to abortion (did the animal rights poster on her noticeboard automatically make her a member of LIFE?) or she started out wanting it but changed her mind. Or something had changed it for her.

  I was so busy trying to feel what she might have felt that it kept me awake when I should have been asleep. It would have been easier if I could have gone straight from the restaurant to Colindale newspaper library. Searching out one particular newspaper ad from a dozen possible daily and Sunday papers over a period of two or three weeks is not the sexiest part of the job, but it keeps the mind occupied. As it was I got home just past 1 a.m., shattered and with an acute case of insomnia. I dutifully went through the old routine: the milky drink lying in the hot bath with a little night music. It relaxed me, but it didn’t put me to sleep. In homage to Carolyn I resorted to drugs.

  I rolled a joint and lay on the bed. Old hippies never die they simply go up in a puff of smoke. I could see Frank shaking his head in disgust. What the hell? It’s healthier than booze and anyway, how can you uphold the law if you don’t know what it feels like to break it? After a while I began to let go. I got up to switch off the light and caught sight of a naked woman in the full-length mirror. I turned to face her to make sure she was me. Yep, there she was, Hannah Wolfe, instantly recognizable from the spiky brown hair and boyish face. Gamine, that’s what the French call it, except I’d probably be disqualified by the size of my tits. Had the left one really grown larger or was it just a trick of the dope? No problem with the stomach, though, that was definitely mine, a gentle hillock about the size of your average Chinese take-away. And they were my legs too. Not exactly the kind to sell swimsuits but pretty good for walking, sitting and even the occasional sprint. Now we were all gathered together and concentrating I thought about feeling my breasts for malignant lumps but couldn’t be bothered. Do men do this, I wondered? Give themselves the quick once over, like cleaning the car and then checking the petrol and the oil? What do you do if you discover you need a respray? If women were cars, what would I be? A Fiat Uno with the road manners of an Audi. Ideas above my station. Kate would be, what, a Sirocco, Mrs Patrick a well kept Bentley, and Carolyn Hamilton…? Well, I suppose Carolyn would have started out as a sleek saloon and grown into a Volvo estate.

  I tried to imagine what it must be like, blowing up slowly like a ripe melon. When does it start to feel like a baby and not an acute case of indigestion? And when do you start loving it enough to accept the havoc it’s wreaking on your body? Especially Carolyn. It must be a particularly weird journey for her, a dancer, someone trained in the ways of malnutrition and boy-like body lines, to have to watch their female curves expand and fill until they become the earth mother with another set of feet practising point work on the inside of their stoma
ch. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she’d welcomed it, had been tempted by the power of change, a chance to get away from failed ambitions and parental expectations. She might even have been enthralled by the prospect of her own tiny Markova pirouetting around her feet. Why not? What did dancers have ahead of them but old age and aching limbs? Or private eyes for that matter. What would I do when I was sixty, with no one to invite me to Sunday lunch or feed my canary when I went off for my annual fortnight in the geriatrics Club Meditérrané? Put like that it sounded pretty dismal. But then I was stoned and we all know how paranoia stalks those who smoke alone. Just as well Miss Patrick didn’t indulge. The picture of her sitting amid her china and sepia prints, out of her skull on dope, did a lot to restore my sense of humour. I fell asleep to images of Paris filled with pregnant women, old dancers and fish that looked like Tab Hunter. I took it as an omen.

  Colindale newspaper library is a long way from anywhere, except Colindale. The chairs are uncomfortable, the staff are even more bored than you are and the cheese sandwiches from the café down the road taste like they’ve been made of old copies of the Sunday Express. It does, however, have some things going for it, most particularly its newspapers. I had, of course, no guarantee that tracking down the Paris job would answer anything, particularly since Carolyn’s postcards had all been postmarked London. But she had obviously been to France, more than once if Eyelashes was to be believed, and since it was the only lead I had I really didn’t have much option. I had a hunch I’d find what I was looking for in the London Evening Standard, but hunches come in varying forms of strength, and this one was a little too pasty to risk. In the end it was just slog. A morning and into the afternoon. There were a number of candidates, but when I found it I knew it was the one. First in the Guardian on Friday 4 February, then in the Evening Standard 7 February through to the 11th.

  A very particular young woman wanted for a special job. Are you between twenty and thirty? Are you healthy, attractive, intelligent with a love of life and a caring personality? Do you have time to spare and would you like to earn exceptional money living in France for a while? If so, apply in writing, sending CV and recent photograph to: POTENTIAL AGENCY 123 Jubilee Avenue SW1. 071 335 4311.