“Very wise.”
“You think so? Perhaps. It’s fine until it goes wrong. When that happens, a man just picks himself up, gets on with his life—I speak from the sidelines here, of course…”
“That’s certainly what people say.”
“Whereas a woman—oh, no. Terminal angst. And when they’ve been lied to, of course, lied to for over three years, promised marriage, the whole bit, and then that turns out not to be in the cards, because, guess what, the bastard’s already married, with a very rich wife he can’t leave, and three beautiful, vulnerable little kids—and when the woman concerned, she’s had no inkling of this, and she’s been lied to and lied to, and it turns out he’s been boasting about her so all his friends know, know, I mean, these really intimate details…”
Markov stopped. That surely had to be enough. McGuire was now looking concerned. He felt pleased with himself. The lie indirect. Perhaps it needed one final tiny gloss.
“And of course,” he went on, “when the woman still loves the man concerned—then it’s worse. It makes me really angry, as a matter of fact.” He shot Rowland a quick glance. “I don’t like to see a good woman wasted. I mean, the way I look at it—from the sidelines, all right—Lindsay’s got everything going for her. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She’s kind. She’s generous. She’s good. She’s a great mother—and she ought to make some man a great wife.”
“I’m sure she will. In due course.”
“Maybe. I have my doubts. Because there’s a few problems. One of them being—as far as Lindsay’s concerned—other men don’t exist.”
Rowland, as Markov had hoped, looked faintly encouraged by this. “That’s why,” Markov went on, pressing home this advantage, “I approached you. I mean, I had reservations at first. Mr. Lothario, right? The last thing Lindsay needs right now is some other guy taking advantage of the state she’s in, making some cheap pass—”
“If that’s a warning,” Rowland said with edge, “I can assure you it’s unnecessary. It’s not my practice to take advantage of women. Particularly unhappy women. Despite what you may have heard.”
“My opinion too. Now that I’ve met you, that is.” Markov flashed a smile. “Besides, it’s just for a few weeks. Escort duties. At most a shoulder to cry on. Someone to give her reassurance and advice.”
This was met with further silence. They walked on, descending the final slope and approaching the entrance to Max’s orchard. McGuire paused at the gate, frowning again. Apple blossoms drifted from the trees, and lay like confetti at their feet.
“Look,” he said in an abrupt way. “If Lindsay truly needs that kind of help, then I’d be glad to provide it. Of course I’d be delighted to take her out for a meal, take her to the theater. I told you—I like Lindsay. But advice? Reassurance? A shoulder to cry on? I’m not sure I’m the best candidate. I always try to avoid getting involved in other people’s personal problems. Particularly those of women. I’ve found—”
“Yes?”
“—I’ve found I just end up making them worse. I’m not sure why that is.”
“I can’t imagine,” Markov said with the smallest of glances at Rowland’s magnificent physique.
“But if Lindsay just needs an escort occasionally, someone to listen, of course I’d do that…”
“And it is only for a few weeks,” Markov put in. “You’ll be my understudy. Then, when I get back from Tangier…” There was a slight pause.
“Or,” Rowland said evenly, “the remote part of the African bush…”
“Right. Right. Up the Zambezi someplace…”
Markov, feeling triumphant—this was not so very difficult after all—threw open the orchard gate.
“It just seems slightly odd that no one mentioned this to me before,” Rowland said in a thoughtful way. “And no one did. Not Max. Not Charlotte.”
“Did Max even know?” Markov cried on a rhetorical note. “Did Charlotte know? My impression is not. Lindsay’s secretive. She doesn’t open her heart to many people. Virtually no one in fact.”
“—And then, Lindsay herself gave me a rather different impression. This would have been back in January. She very kindly cooked dinner for me then, at my house. And I could have sworn she mentioned—”
“Other men?” Markov cut in fast. “A succession of other men? Oh, she does that. It’s a cover-up, of course. I can’t believe that took you in. You can’t be that slow, surely?”
“Maybe it’s that insensitivity of mine,” McGuire said politely with a half-smile. “It blinded me, I suppose. How stupid of me. Well, well, well.”
He followed Markov into the garden. Markov decided silence was now the best response. He was sweating with the effort of those fast final lies, and something in McGuire’s tone confused him. The man’s self-possession faintly irritated him, and also faintly alarmed him.
“Look,” he said as they approached the house. “Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut? Maybe this is a bad idea of mine. But I mean, how many single men are there to ask…”
“Very few. We’re a vanishing breed.”
“I can’t ask Max. He hasn’t the time. He’s got a wife. Kids. It had to be someone Lindsay knows, and trusts.”
“Not at all.” McGuire laid one large strong hand briefly on Markov’s shoulder. He gave him a warm smile. “It will be an honor to be your understudy.”
“You won’t say anything to Lindsay? I mean, if she knew I’d spoken to you, she’d have cardiac arrest…”
“You can rely on me,” Rowland replied. “I shall perform my role to the very best of my abilities. Until you come back, that is.”
Markov sighed. This, of course, was not the scenario he intended. But there was nothing more he could do. From now on it was up to Lindsay. Allowing Rowland to precede him into the house, Markov looked up at the brilliant sky and the whirling blossoms. His lips moved. He could on occasion be superstitious, even pagan: since it was now in their laps, he was offering up a little prayer to the gods.
Pascal had been dreaming about loss. These dreams had first begun in the early years, when he first covered wars. They had recurred, in various forms, ever since. Sometimes the dreams were replays of actual events he had witnessed but thought forgotten. He would see a tiny child crouched over the dead body of a parent, or a mother prostrate over the grave of her soldier son, and waking, he would recall the exact place where he had witnessed that incident—in Mozambique, or Bosnia, or Afghanistan. His unconscious mind had selected one random image out of millions, and he would think, on waking—why that particular grief?
At other times, and this made him more uneasy, the dream of searching and losing was a vague, shadowy thing. It would lead him through some remembered war zone, into the streets near his home; frantic, he would be searching for his daughter one moment, for Gini the next, and sometimes for a phantom presence that he would suspect, on waking, was himself. The search was always accompanied by acute anxiety and mounting fear. He woke, always, startled, dry-mouthed, and drenched in sweat.
Nearly twenty years of wars: he had learned how to deal with such nightmares. So, this morning, he applied the learned techniques. He waited quietly, until the pounding of his heart slowed. He concentrated on the details of his immediate environment, this bed, this room. Sometimes he might begin on a silent recital, a multiplication table, the list of his appointments for that day.
This morning the dream lingered longer than was usual. It clung with a cobwebby tenacity to the corners of his mind. He began to recite silently some lines of poetry taught to him by his father. Still the dream clung, leaving him with a paralyzing sense of misery. He persevered, and slowly the room began to reassert itself. The details of the dream shimmered, surged back, and then were gone. He had remembered that he was back in London again, that he was with Gini, that his arm was mended now and his fingers once again deft and strong. He sat up, listening, touching the sheets beside him, which felt cool. He could hear the sound of Gini’s movements below, the
quietness of footsteps, the opening and closing of a door.
He felt an immediate, bounteous, and immeasurable relief: his first instinct was to call out to her, but he waited, then lay back and closed his eyes. For a few moments he wanted to listen to this relief, to the sound of hope, because it had not been easy to achieve, and there had been moments, those past weeks in Paris, when he had feared it would never return.
While he remained in the hospital, spending night after long night alone, he had believed that they could remake their life together, and reaffirm their love, because this was what they both passionately desired. Their difficulties could be surmounted. It was, he had told himself then, a question of determination, of will.
Released from the hospital finally, and reunited with Gini in that borrowed apartment belonging to friends, he had embarked—in a way he knew was very characteristic of him—on a program of reconciliation. At first he trusted in words. They would talk their way around every obstacle and past every evasion. Every one of those difficult topics: his work, her work, the nature of fidelity, the possibility of a child. He would resist the jealousy he still felt; they would both resist indulging in accusation; they would talk themselves back to truth, and they would become not less, but more than before.
Almost at once, however, they both sensed these conversations were leading them astray. However much they fought it, their words took on a dry, therapeutic tone, as if they were discussing the marital problems of two strangers. The more clinically truthful their language, the more strained these conversations became: Pascal felt they spoke across a chasm—and it was a chasm good intentions could not bridge.
What they needed, Pascal felt, was some fiercer link. They did not need some careful, engineered construct, but some invisible power that could arc between them. But to search for this power, to coax it back to flickering life, made them both fearful. Once upon a time, as they were both bitterly aware, this electricity had simply been there. Words had not been needed then to galvanize them; the current of communication had flowed from the simplest glance, or touch.
Now, even the touching was tentative. It could be unsure, or ill timed, or fumbled, or overassertive; all its former immediacies seemed to have been lost. For weeks Pascal felt watched. True intimacy was impossible, for he felt that a third person shared these rooms with them; his presence intruded into their conversations and interrupted their attempts at making love. Pascal tried to exorcise this man, then, realizing Gini was also attempting to do the same, felt the jealousy come surging back. Did she compare kisses? Had he touched her there, and in this way—and when he did so, if he did so, what had been her response?
He longed to know, and loathed himself for this. He would permit himself to ask no such vulgar questions, and he would not allude to his feelings, he was too proud to do that. He knew they affected what he came to think of as his performance—and how he loathed that term, though it was apt—and he could see the pained efforts Gini made to reassure him. The loving embraces, the strokings, the soothing words, her apparent fear that he no longer desired her—how he hated all that. She kissed him now as if she doubted her right to do so. Pascal, wanting her desperately but fearful of failure and comparison, would jerk away from her touch. This was torture to him. Pascal, an absolutist, hated all lies; until then he had never understood just how much the body could lie. He had assumed, naively, that untruth and evasion required speech.
It was six weeks before he could bring himself to make love to her. When he finally did, it was after a violent argument, during the course of which they had both drunk too much wine, perhaps because they had both begun to believe that antagonism might succeed where care and patience had failed. A short-circuit device; fucking her, Pascal thought—we both intended to incite precisely this.
The act had not been the reunion he had planned; it had been angry, unsatisfactory, and brief. Afterward, Gini wept—and for the first time in his life he turned away from those tears with a cold repugnance he had never expected to possess.
“You did this,” he said to her. “It was you who brought us to this.” He slammed out, and walked furiously and mindlessly through the dark Paris streets.
The next day, a reconciliation; both were contrite. Then more arguments, and reconciliations again. Pascal began to grow desperate: this cycle was only too familiar to him. He could not believe that with a woman he so loved, he was experiencing again the remorseless downward spiral of disaffection he had been through with his ex-wife.
Perhaps, he thought, as the ugly month of February became March, perhaps if he could only act love better, he would be released, and would be able to express the love he knew was there, locked somewhere inside himself. It had sprung to his lips unaided facing Star in Madame Duval’s apartment; looking at death fifteen feet away, it had been impossible to disguise: it had simply been there, and he had sensed in Gini its unhesitating and immediate response.
If the love could well up then, why not now? What was wrong? And he then began to believe that conscious action and careful speech would achieve nothing. They needed some near divine intervention for which he had no apposite term. Willpower was no use to them; love could not be willed. With fear, he began to believe that love was as mysterious as the welling-up of water in the desert: in essence, it was a gift.
If so, the gift proved elusive. He redoubled his efforts, as she did. Their mutual politeness pained them both. In long discussions late into the night, they planned new kinds of futures together: these visions—civilized, caring, egalitarian—convinced neither of them very much, he felt. He promised that he would either abandon war coverage altogether or restrict such work to a few months every year. She countered that this was unacceptable; she would not allow him to give up this work, this vocation, for her sake. Pascal listened to her arguments, remembered the comments of his ex-wife, and made his own private resolves: this mistake he could at least avoid again. Others also: one day he found the contraceptive pills she had begun taking again the previous month, and threw them away. They quarreled violently over this—and yet that action, that quarrel, proved a turning point. Pascal made love to her that night, and for weeks afterward, with a new and fixed determination: this act he intended to have consequences: Conception. Then, and only then, would she be repossessed.
This determination, they both found, altered the tenor of a familiar act. Pascal abandoned endearments and gentleness. He could sense some resistance in her, and so he set about fucking her into submission, then out the other side of submission. When this had finally been achieved, he knew that they were alone at last, and that he had found a route back.
For such a change, of course, you could not set a precise time or date, but some change they had both recognized: it was there when they fell asleep exhausted, and there again in the morning when they woke. It grew, day by day, after that; it came stealing back to them, not through the medium of words at first, but through glance and through touch. He had sensed a new calm, a cessation of striving, then the ghost of an old contentment, and finally, one evening, just there, unsummoned, an assured peace.
He rose now, suddenly eager to be with her, and quickly pulled on some clothes. He went barefoot down the stairs, and in the room below paused. He could sense something in the air of this room, some alteration in it, the eddyings of some unseen force.
He moved forward slowly and silently and looked into the kitchen beyond. Gini had not heard his footsteps; she was concentrating on some task with an eagerness that touched him to the heart. On the blue tray in front of her she was arranging a plate, a cup and saucer, and a glass. The glass was a champagne glass. Pascal frowned. He watched her take a flower from a vase on the windowsill, and cut its stem, and then arrange the flower on the tray. Its exact placing seemed to preoccupy her. She laid it first on the plate, then on the blue napkin, and finally next to the glass. She was wearing a nightdress, surmounted by one of his sweaters that was several sizes too large for her. The garments gave her the unstudie
d grace of a young girl; her head was bent over her arrangement; her hair, longer now, almost reaching to her shoulders, was tousled from sleep.
He felt suddenly the most profound love for her. It washed through his body with astonishing force; he felt it settle like an ache about the heart. The emotion was of such suddenness and intensity that for an instant he felt blinded, as if, newly emerged from some dark underworld, he stared directly at the sun. He lifted his hand involuntarily, as if to shield his eyes—and that small movement caught her attention. She looked up and gave a small cry of surprise.
He half knew already, he later thought. He stood looking at her for a few more moments in silence. Her face looked soft, a little sleepy, as if she had just recently awakened from more pleasant dreams than his own. Her lovely eyes—he had startled her—had widened. She made one quick gesture, as if she would have hidden the tray if she could; then her expression changed.
Watching her face, he began to know. He felt the knowledge, and the elation that came with it, begin to pulse along his veins. Her face had an almost secretive look, a very female look that was simultaneously triumphant and afraid. He felt such tenderness for her then that he could not speak; he took her hand, then drew her quietly into his arms.
He held her very close, and they stood for some time in this way, without speaking, their bodies interlocked. Gini could feel the beating of his heart; she listened to what she had so nearly lost, and what she had regained. Women, possibly, doubt less than men. That morning, she found all her doubts and prevarications had flooded away.
Her body spoke, and in accents of such joy that she had no desire to listen to any last cautious whisperings in the mind. She had silenced those whispers in any case, she believed; silenced them weeks before. Now her own grip on contentment was sure—and if Pascal’s was, or had been, more tenuous, she would cure him. That cure was now within her gift; she felt its power.