Lovers and Liars Trilogy

  Star ignored the question; he gave a sweet, wolfish smile. “You know the place? See you tonight, then.”

  He did not wait for any reply from his client. Mitchell’s gaze was now glazed, his eyes closing again. Star watched him for a few moments more, coolly and dispassionately, the way a scientist might watch the result of laboratory tests on mice or rats. Then he gave his thin dog a caress and turned.

  Mitchell, coming to his senses a short while afterward, searched the clearing, then checked the track. Star’s capacity to materialize and dematerialize alarmed him. Mitchell felt a bit twitchy, a bit paranoid; no more than a minute or two had passed—Star had to be in sight.

  He stared down the straight track to the road below. Shadows and shapes moved in his brain; the track undulated like a switchback, it had a life of its own. Mitchell watched it snake and coil. Slowly he began to understand: the track was deserted; the road was deserted. Star should have been visible, but was not; the air had assimilated him. Star was gone.

  Charlotte, a wonderful cook, always provided magnificent teas. Faced with an array of little sandwiches, with toast and honey, with gingerbread and Danny’s iced cakes, Lindsay always vowed to show restraint—and never did. Guiltily aware that Tom had rarely if ever been provided with such a tea as this, and that his custom on returning home from school was to graze on chocolate bars or potato chips, reminding herself that each of Danny’s delicious little cakes contained five hundred calories at least, but feeling that she had to make up for Gini, who scarcely touched the food, Lindsay consumed an inordinate quantity. To please Danny, who was watching her with the solemnity of a three-star Michelin chef, she compounded her own felony by eating two of his cakes—the one made in her honor, with an “L” in silver balls on the top, and also the one with a “G,” destined for Gini, which Gini had quietly refused. Lindsay was peeved at her for this. It was then she noticed that of the cakes remaining, one was iced with the initial “D” for Daddy, and was clearly intended for Max, and the other bore the initial “R.” No one in this household had a name beginning with that letter.

  “Who’s this one for, Danny?” Lindsay asked.

  To her surprise, Danny instantly blushed a deep and fiery red. He looked at the floor, then he looked at his mother. He looked at his three older brothers, as if desperate for their help, but Alex, Ben, and Colin were leaning over the fire, making toast.

  “Maybe it’s a ‘B,’” Lindsay said. “‘B’ for Ben, is that it, Danny? How silly of me—I can’t see too well from here.”

  “It’s an ‘R,’” Danny said on a sudden fierce note. “It is an ‘R.’ It doesn’t look like a ‘B’ at all. It’s an ‘R’ for—”

  “For Ripper!” Charlotte cried quickly, hauling herself to her feet and pouring tea. “You know, Lindsay. Ripper, the Jack Russell. Jack the Ripper—one of Max’s ghastly jokes. The one who ate your slippers the last time you came. The one who eats everything in sight.”

  Lindsay looked down at the dog in question, who, for once, was quiet, lying snoring at her feet. She wondered why he was the only one of four dogs to be awarded this treat, and why—if that were the case—it had not already been given to him. To her certain knowledge, this tiny and malevolent animal had already consumed three shortbread cookies, the braid from a cushion, one piece of Lego, and four pieces of toast. She was about to remark on this, then thought better of it. Danny, darting small, surreptitious glances at his mother, was still round-eyed with some inexplicable distress.

  Still, small children could be like that, Lindsay thought, sinking back in her chair. Perhaps it was some specific ritual Danny had. Perhaps Ripper received his cake when, and only when, his master returned from London—which would be soon, she realized, glancing at her watch. Heavens, it was past five-thirty; they’d been sitting there for ages; Max ought to arrive at about six o’clock.

  The rich food and the warmth of the wood fire were making her sleepy. She settled still deeper in her chair. How she loved this house, she thought, and this room. How unlike London, how nice this was!

  Across from her, Charlotte and Gini sat side by side on a huge battered sofa. The older boys, bored with toastmaking, were departing upstairs to play; Danny had picked up a picture book. Charlotte was persevering with Gini. She was coaxing her beyond monosyllables, and had begun to succeed, it seemed, in persuading Gini to talk.

  Not about Bosnia—Charlotte was too intelligent to risk that subject—but first about neutral things, then Gini and Pascal’s apartment—Charlotte longed to see it, begged Gini to describe it—and then, finally, Pascal himself.

  “I miss him,” Charlotte said with her customary warmth. “Do you remember that dinner we all had to celebrate your joining the paper? In that tiny French restaurant Pascal found? I still dream about the food—it was just so good. When he gets back we must all go there again. And I want you to bring him here, of course. Would he be bored in the country? No, I don’t think he would.”

  “No. He’s never bored. He—I’m sure he’d like that very much. And he likes the country. He grew up in the country. In a village in Provence.”

  “Provence? I never realized that. I think of him as so—high-powered, I suppose. International. Always catching planes, speeding off to the next job, taking those extraordinary photographs. They’ve broken my heart, some of his photographs. It must cost him so much to do that, year after year—and yet, when you meet him—I expected him to be somber, haunted by what he’s seen. Yet he seems so”—Charlotte frowned as she sought the right word—“so filled with energy and ideas. And so happy too. But then, I first met him with you. And everyone’s happy when they’re that much in love.”

  It was a compliment, and an overture, Lindsay thought, listening. She watched as painful color washed into Gini’s cheeks. For an instant, gratitude and reassurance flooded her face, then she tensed and looked away, as if afraid that Charlotte, having made her overture, would follow it with questions.

  Charlotte, who could be subtle, did not do so immediately. She talked on for a while, and Lindsay felt her thoughts begin to drift. She closed her eyes. Charlotte, living in the country, had met Pascal on only a few occasions, and knew him less well than Lindsay. She knew none of the background to this romance, was not aware, as Lindsay was, of the strange circumstances of Pascal’s original meeting with Gini. Charlotte had not witnessed, as Lindsay had, the force of Gini’s reaction when they met again after years apart. It might be difficult to imagine now, while Gini was such a ghost of her former self, but Gini was a passionate woman, and Pascal—as Charlotte had been attempting to convey—was a passionate man. Passion alarmed Lindsay, and occasionally embarrassed her; she shrank from its manifestations, and she shrank from the word. Yet a passion that went far deeper than the electrically obvious sexual attraction between them could be felt whenever Pascal and Gini were together. It sparked across a room; it charged the air around a dinner table—and it had, on occasion, made Lindsay deeply envious. Pascal Lamartine had a beautiful, fiercely expressive face: to watch him watching Gini, to observe his unwavering loyalty, and concern, his constant attunement to her, and hers to him, had been, for Lindsay, a painful experience. She was honest: she knew she was witnessing something she herself had never felt, or inspired.

  The most passionate love Lindsay had ever felt was reserved for her son; his welfare, well-being, and future happiness were her dominant concerns—and in some ways she was glad of this. Such love was unalterable; passion between a man and a woman, different in nature, and combustible, was less sure.

  “So, tell me, Gini,” she heard as she drifted on the edge of somnolence. “How do you manage—can you call him?”

  “Yes. And he tries to call me every day. Sometimes the lines are bad. And we write, of course.”

  “Often?”

  “Oh—every day if we can. Pascal writes wonderful letters. I can hear his voice when I read them. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, they get through very fast. Sometimes they take weeks to arrive. I
haven’t heard from him this week, but that will mean he’s been somewhere remote. He’s not always in Sarajevo. He constantly moves around.”

  Lindsay, listening more closely now, paid silent tribute to Charlotte, who had prized this much information from Gini—more specific information than she herself had obtained in two months. She hoped that Gini was telling the truth, and was deluding neither Charlotte nor herself. But Lindsay was no longer sure that this communication did continue as reliably as Gini claimed. Since Christmas, watching the deterioration in Gini, she had begun to believe that some quarrel, perhaps a final quarrel, had taken place in Bosnia, and that the affair, originally begun in a war zone, had now ended in one, as suddenly concluded as it had suddenly begun. Nothing else, she was beginning to believe, could account for Gini’s continuing unhappiness, and her continuing unshakable reserve. It would be very characteristic of Gini to refuse to admit it, should the affair be over. Gini rarely took people into her confidence, and by nature she was proud.

  She would mention the possibility to Charlotte later, Lindsay thought; Charlotte might be able to elicit the truth before this weekend was over. Or not. Gini had just turned the conversation back to more neutral topics, she noted. She was now prompting Charlotte to talk about her family, this village, the Cotswolds, her questions as forced as those of some nervous stranger at a cocktail party.

  Poor Gini: she was trying so hard. Lindsay glanced again at her own watch, caught Charlotte doing exactly the same thing in a furtive manner, and roused herself at once. Coming to Charlotte’s aid, and giving Gini the opportunity to be silent, which she obviously sought, Lindsay began to chatter away. She discussed, in quick succession, the traffic they had endured on the trip down, the inadvertent detour they had made through the hell of Oxford’s one-way streets, the excellence of Charlotte’s baking, and then—finding the subject suddenly popped into her head—Rowland McGuire, the character of Rowland McGuire, and the many defects of Rowland McGuire.

  She warmed to her theme. She said several times that it would be very pleasant indeed to spend an entire two days away from Rowland McGuire, in a place where she never need hear his name mentioned—and then she stopped.

  Just as she was remembering—too late—that the wretched McGuire was presumably a friend of Charlotte’s as well as Max’s, in which case her remarks were doubly untactful, Gini said in a dry voice: “If you want to forget him, Lindsay, why mention him? No one else did. You harped on him the whole way down in the car.”

  “I did not!”

  “I’ve never even met the man, and I already know more than I need. I could describe his appearance, the sound of his voice—”

  “Yes. Well.” Charlotte was rearranging cushions energetically. “Lindsay doesn’t know Rowland very well. I do. And he’s—” She hesitated oddly. “He’s very nice. Not devious at all.”

  Lindsay was about to expostulate—“nice,” in Charlotte’s book, was high praise, though in Lindsay’s view Charlotte’s benevolent nature awarded the term too often and too easily. She opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again. A car had just passed, on the road beyond, and Lindsay saw that Charlotte, having heard it, had instantly tensed. How odd, Lindsay thought, and then it struck her that Charlotte, always so serene, was on edge. Anxiety about Max on the highway, Lindsay thought. Rising, and moving to the windows, she looked out.

  It was dark outside, and the moon was already rising. Lindsay pressed her face to the glass. Behind her, Charlotte was fussing with the tea things, and wondering whether, when he arrived, Max would want tea or a stiff drink.

  Lindsay looked out at the garden and tried to construct familiar patterns from the shift of moonlight and shadow. She could feel an early evening sadness, an inexplicable and vague regret, creeping in on her. There was the yew hedge, she told herself, and that pale blur was an urn, and that was the curve of the drive that divided, one arm leading around to the front of the house, and a second leading to the stables and garages at the back. There was the drive, and there—suddenly—were lights. She glimpsed the familiar outline of Max’s car as he paused where the driveway forked.

  “Max is home,” she began, and then frowned. “And I think he’s brought someone with him, Charlotte. Were you expecting that? I’m sure I saw someone in the passenger seat.”

  “Oh?” Charlotte had risen to her feet. She was looking about her in apparent consternation.

  “Whoever could that be?” she said.

  “Rowland! I don’t believe it! What a lovely surprise!” Charlotte swung around as Rowland and Max entered, and embraced McGuire with fervor. It did not escape Rowland’s notice—or, he thought, Lindsay’s—that Charlotte was crimson in the face: clearly, she was privy to this “surprise.” Rowland, in response to a fierce nudge from Max, hung back. Lindsay was standing by the window, hands tightly clenched. On the sofa next to her, and directly facing Rowland, was a woman who had to be Genevieve Hunter. As he entered, she raised a pair of clear gray eyes to look at him. That inspection, acute, he would have said, but without interest, disconcerted him. As Max began speaking, she looked away toward the fire. Firelight moved against her hair. Her hands, long-fingered and ringless, were folded in her lap.

  “Yes. Well. I was just leaving the office,” Max said. “And I ran into Rowland by chance. In the lobby. Then the idea came to me—on the spur of the moment. Why doesn’t Rowland join us, I thought? After all, he’s been working flat out. A weekend in the country, I thought. It could be just what Rowland needs. He could relax. He could…”

  Max’s explanation died away. Lindsay’s eyes were fixed on him with a basilisk stare. Her lips were pursed, and two bright flags of color had appeared in her cheeks.

  “How very providential,” she said. “How nice for everybody, Max.”

  “Yes. Indeed yes.” Max averted his eyes. “And luckily, Rowland had no plans for this weekend. Well, he did have, of course, much in demand and all that, but he was able to cancel them.”

  “And at such short notice too. I’d never realized how impulsive Rowland was. I’d have said he was a man who always planned things very carefully.”

  At this, Genevieve Hunter looked up. Rowland thought she might have sensed the tension in the room—it would not have been difficult, it was even subduing the dogs. If so, it did not appear to affect her. She glanced at Max, then at Rowland, then leaned back against the cushions. She had the look of people on airplanes, Rowland thought, the look you saw on people’s faces when they were listening to music on headphones, following the intricacies of some melody inaudible to anyone else. What music, what tune? he thought. Then, recollecting himself, and realizing that someone had to salvage this moment, he stepped forward and spoke.

  “Admit the truth, Max,” he began, and Max flinched. “There’s a woman at the back of this—and I made Max invite me because of her. Charlotte—I’ve missed you.” He kissed her cheek and put his arm around the place where her waist had formerly been. “I haven’t seen you in months, and I told Max I had to see you before the baby was born. You’re looking magnificent, has he told you that?”

  “Fat,” said Charlotte, rosy with pleasure and relief. “Don’t try to be gallant. I look mountainous.”

  “You look beautiful,” Rowland said, meaning it. “And what’s more, it’s definitely a girl this time. A daughter. A Miss Max.”

  “You’re sure?” Charlotte laughed. “How can you tell?”

  “Because you’re carrying the baby low. And according to my Irish grandmother, that’s always the sign of a girl.”

  “What nonsense, Rowland. You don’t even remember your Irish grandmother.”

  “Wait and see in two months.”

  Rowland released Charlotte and looked around the room. He spied Danny, lurking shyly behind a chair. Rowland, sure the three-year-old could be relied upon to create a diversion, held out his arms to him. With a whoop of pleasure Danny hurtled forward, clamped himself to Rowland’s knees, and then whooped again as Rowland hoisted him al
oft.

  After that, as he had hoped, it was easy. The dogs came back to life, and barked; Charlotte began to fuss with the tea things; Max had to recall, at length, the tiresome new-age caravansary that had delayed them approaching the village, and the boys—hearing Rowland’s and their father’s voices—had to race back downstairs, their motive part affection and part avarice, for Rowland, a great favorite with them, never arrived without bringing gifts.

  In the midst of this melee, Genevieve Hunter was introduced, and Rowland briefly took her cool, narrow hand. She made some English remark—afterward he remembered that—some conventional, meaningless English greeting, uttered in a low, American-accented voice.

  Rowland, who knew of her English schooling, her English stepmother, was thrown by the greeting nonetheless; he had been expecting—what? Greater force, perhaps; vivacity, he told himself afterward; possibly even wit, for her writing could be witty, and her writing style, sharply individual, was crisp.

  Instead, he was granted just one look from the long-lidded, cool gray eyes; one touch from that thin hand; he had the sensation that he was erased from her memory before her hand withdrew from his.

  He was, though he would not have admitted it, disappointed. Also faintly perturbed—for what reason he could not have said. Max, as shortly became evident, felt no such uncertainties. He was ebullient with glee, could not wait for an excuse to get Rowland to himself. Only twenty minutes after their arrival he was racing up the stairs, followed more slowly by Rowland.

  “Must wash, must change,” Max shouted back down the stairs, hauling Rowland into his dressing room. He shut the door.

  “Well?” he said with triumph. “What do you think? Our little plot worked. We pulled it off, didn’t we? Women are so easy to deceive.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. A couple of tricky moments, with Lindsay, as expected—but you took care of that. A masterstroke—I’ll admit it, Rowland, I could learn from you. You really were consummately cool. Never turned a hair. Great presence of mind…”