He splashed handful after handful of cold water onto his skin. He dried his face. He put his lenses in his eyes and reached for his shaving gear. He tried to ignore both his nausea and his headache by concentrating on lathering his face.
Vague noise came from somewhere downstairs—a sound not unlike monastic singing—but it was deeply muffled. Eve would have told Mrs. Maguire to keep her daily din to a minimum. “Mr. Stone wasn’t well last night,” she would have said before leaving the house at her usual pre-dawn time. “He needs his sleep. I don’t want him disturbed.” And Mrs. Maguire would have obeyed, which was what everyone did when Eve Bowen gave one of her implicit orders.
“There’s no point in your confronting Dennis,” she’d said to him. “This is something I have to handle alone.”
“As Charlie’s father for the last six years, I think I have something to say to this bastard.”
“Resurrecting the past isn’t going to help, Alex.”
It was another implicit order. Stay away from Luxford. Keep your distance from that part of my life.
Alex wasn’t the sort of man who kept his distance from anything. He hadn’t got to where he was as a businessman from hanging back and letting others plan the strategies and fight the battles. After spending the night of Charlie’s disappearance lying in bed with his eyes on the ceiling and his mind leaping from one plan to another that he knew would result in her safe return, he’d gone cooperatively to work yesterday for Eve’s peace of mind, in order to keep up the pretence of normalcy that she seemed so intent upon maintaining. But at nine in the evening he’d finally had enough. He decided he wasn’t going to spend another useless day without putting at least one of his plans into action. He phoned Eve’s office and insisted that her unctuous assistant get a message to her at the House of Commons. “Do it now,” he’d told Woodward when the assistant had begun with a string of excuses all designed to put him off. “Pronto. Emergency. Got it?” She’d finally phoned back at half past ten, and he could tell from her voice that she believed Luxford had relented and Charlie was returned.
“Nothing new,” he’d said in answer to her low, intense, “Alex. What’s happened?”
She’d said with an alteration in tone, “Then why are you phoning?” which, along with the drink, set him off.
“Because our daughter’s missing,” he said with deliberate courtesy. “Because I’ve just spent the entire day in a bloody charade of business as usual. Because I haven’t talked to you since this morning and I’d like to know what the hell is going on. Is that all right with you, Eve?”
He could picture her casting a glance over her shoulder, because her low voice lowered another degree. “Alex, I’m returning your call from the Commons. Do you understand what that means?”
“Patronise your colleagues. Don’t try it with me.”
“Believe me, this isn’t the time or the place—”
“You might have phoned me yourself, by the way. At any time during this goddamned day. Which would have taken care of the delicate problem of having to return my call from the House of Fucking Commons. Where, of course, anyone might listen in. That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it, Eve?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“I can’t go into it right now.”
“Shall I come there, then? You can always give me an update about Charlie’s disappearance with a lobby journalist listening in. That would make for good press, wouldn’t it? But, hell, I forgot. Press is just what you don’t want. Right?”
“Don’t do this to me, Alex. I know you’re upset, and you have good reason—”
“Thank you very much.”
“—but you’ve got to see that the only way to handle this is—”
“Eve Bowen’s way. So tell me, how far do you intend to let Luxford push you?”
“I met with him. He knows my position.”
Alex’s fingers closed round the telephone cord. Would it were Luxford’s neck. “You met with him when?”
“This afternoon.”
“And?”
“He doesn’t intend to return her. At the moment. But he’s going to have to return her eventually because I’ve made it clear that I won’t play his game. All right, Alex? Have I told you enough?”
She wanted to get off the phone. It was obvious she wanted to return to the Commons. To a debate, a vote, or another opportunity to prove how superbly she could crush an opponent’s cobblers between her teeth.
“I want to talk to this bastard.”
“That’ll do no good. Stay out of this, Alex. Promise me you’ll stay out of it. Please.”
“I’m not going through another day like today. All this business-as-usual bullshit. With Charlie out there somewhere…I’m not doing it.”
“Fine. Don’t. But don’t go near Luxford.”
“Why?” He couldn’t keep himself from asking the question. It was, after all, at the root of everything. “You want him alone? All for yourself? Like Blackpool, Eve?”
“That’s a disgusting remark. I’m ending this conversation. We can talk again when you’re sober. In the morning.”
And she’d hung up the phone. And he’d drunk the vodka. He’d drunk it until the kitchen floor had begun to tilt. Then he’d staggered up the stairs and fallen crosswise and fully clothed upon the bed. Sometime during the night she must have removed his trousers, shirt, and shoes because he was wearing only his boxer shorts and his socks when he crawled out of the bed.
He downed six aspirin and made his way back to the bedroom. He dressed slowly, waiting for the aspirin to have some effect against the thunder within his skull. He’d forfeited his morning’s conversation with Eve, but it was just as well. In his present condition he would have been no match for her. He had to admit that she’d shown an uncharacteristic mercy in leaving him to sleep the binge off instead of awakening him and forcing him to engage in the conversation he’d been so insistent upon having with her. She would have ground him to powder in three or four sentences without employing a quarter of her brain power. He wondered what it indicated about Eve—and about the state of their marriage—that she’d chosen to leave without a demonstration of suzerainty. Then he wondered why he was wondering about the state of their marriage at all, when he’d never wondered about it before. But he knew the answer to that piece of speculation and, despite his attempt to remove the answer from his mind, when he went downstairs to the kitchen, he saw it lying on the table.
Mrs. Maguire was not in sight, but her copy of The Source lay where she had left it.
Bloody odd, Alex thought. Mrs. Maguire had been bringing that piece of shit to their house every day for as long as he could remember. But until Wednesday night, when Eve had deliberately brought the papers to his attention, he hadn’t once looked at any of them. Oh, he’d glanced at a story here and there when he had occasion to wrap coffee grounds in the paper. He’d wondered derisively about how many brain cells Mrs. Maguire numbed out when she read it each day. But that was the extent of it.
Now the tabloid seemed to have a magnetic power over him. Ignoring his body’s demand for hot coffee, he went instead to the table and stared down at the paper.
It’s a Living, I’n’t It? emblazoned the front page, running parallel to a photograph of a teenage boy in purple leather. The boy was in the act of strolling down a brick path from a terraced house, and he smirked at the camera as if he’d known in advance the headline that would accompany his picture. He was identified as Daffy Dukane, and the tabloid was labelling him the rent boy who had been caught in an automobile with Sinclair Larnsey, East Norfolk’s MP. The caption to the photograph suggested that Daffy Dukane’s circumstances—educationally disadvantaged, chronically unemployed, and statistically one of the unemployable—had forced him into sharing his favours on a regular basis as a means of survival. The reader willing to turn to page four would find an editorial excoriating the Government that had brought scores of sixteen
-year-old boys to this pass. It’s Come to This was the editorial’s headline. But when Alex saw that it had been written by someone called Rodney Aronson and not Dennis Luxford, he passed it by. Because it was Dennis Luxford he wanted to know about. For reasons that went deeper than Luxford’s politics.
How had she put it: They’d fucked every night, every morning as well. And not because the sod had seduced her but because she’d wanted it, she’d wanted him. They’d gone at it like monkeys, and who Luxford was and what he stood for hadn’t meant a thing to her in light of what she wanted from him.
Alex flipped through the pages of the tabloid, looking. He didn’t admit to himself what he was looking for, but he looked all the same. He went through the paper from front to back, and when he’d seen it all, he riffled through the rattan holder and pulled out every other copy of The Source that Mrs. Maguire had brought into the house.
He could see the hotel room. He could see its orange curtains and its bland, pseudo-oak institutional furniture. He could see the maddening clutter Eve always generated wherever she went: briefcase, paperwork, magazines, cosmetics, shoes on the floor, hair dryer on the chest of drawers, damp towels left in sodden heaps. He could see a room service trolley with the remains of a meal spread across it. In a stream of light left burning in the bathroom, he could see the bed and its crumpled sheets. He could even see her because he knew—had years and years of knowing—that her knees would be lifted, her legs would be locked round his torso, her hands would be in his hair or on his back, and she would take her pleasure so amazingly quick with a cry of delight saying darling, no, stop, it’s too much…and that was all he could see.
In disgust, he swept the stack of tabloids to the floor. This is about Charlie, he told himself, and he tried to drive that information into his head. This is not about Eve. This is not about ten years ago when I did not know her, when I was ignorant of her entire existence, when her actions and her relationships were no concern of mine, when who and what she was…But that was the issue, wasn’t it? Who and what his wife had once been, who and what she now was.
Alex went for coffee. He stood at the sink and drank it black and bitter. It was a suitable, if only momentary, distraction from his torturous thoughts. But once he’d downed it, scalding the roof of his mouth and his throat, he was brought back to her.
Did he know her? he wondered. Was it even possible to know her? She was, after all, a politician. She was used to the chameleon requirements of her career.
He considered that career and its implications. She had joined the Marylebone Conservative Association, which is where they had met. She had worked for the party at his own side. She had proved herself so thoroughly and so often that in a break with tradition the constituency committee had asked her to put her name on the candidates’ list, she had not volunteered to do so herself. And he’d sat in on her interview before her selection as Marylebone’s Conservative candidate. He’d heard her passionate advocacy of the party ideals. He himself had shared her strong views about the value of family, about the incalculable importance of small businesses, about the deleterious aspects of government assistance, but he could never have expressed his views as she did. She seemed to know what the constituency committee would ask her before they even decided themselves. She spoke of the need to take their nighttime streets back and make them safe. She outlined her plans for increasing the party’s majority in Marylebone. She delineated all the ways in which she had determined she could support the Prime Minister. She had something provocative to say about the care of battered wives, about sex education in the schools, about abortion, about prison terms, about the care of the elderly and the infirm, about taxing and spending and innovative campaigning. She was quick and clever and she impressed the committee with her command of facts. Alex knew this had been no difficulty for her, which is why he wondered: Did she mean what she said? Was she real, as well?
And he wondered which fact bothered him more: the fact that Eve might not be who she claimed to be or the fact that she might have brushed aside who she was in order to have a fuck with someone who stood for everything she opposed.
Because that was the truth about Luxford. He wouldn’t have been editing the paper he was editing if he stood for anything else. His politics were a given. What remained to be discovered was the physical nature of the man himself. Because surely to discover his physical nature was to understand. And to understand was essential if they were ever to get to the bottom of—
Right. Alex grinned sardonically. He congratulated himself for his complete decomposition. In less than thirty-six hours he’d managed to metamorphose from rational human being to pissing twit. What had started out as soul-scoring desperation to find his daughter and to spare her in any way had disintegrated to a Neanderthal need to find and obliterate his sexual partner’s previous mate. No lies now about seeing Luxford in order to understand. Alex wanted to see him in order to make bruising contact with his flesh. And not for Charlie. Not because of what he was doing to Charlie. But because of Eve.
Alex realized that he had never asked his wife to identify Charlie’s father because he had never really wanted to know. Knowledge demanded reaction to knowledge. And reaction to that particular knowledge was what he had wished to avoid.
“Shit,” he whispered. He leaned into the sink, his hands on the draining boards on either side of it. Perhaps, like his wife, he should have gone to work today. At least there were motions to be gone through at work. Here there was nothing except his thoughts. And they were maddening.
He had to get out. He had to do something.
He poured another mug of coffee and drank it down. He found that his head had stopped pounding and the nausea was beginning to fade. He became aware of the monastic chanting that he’d heard upon waking, and he moved towards its location, which seemed to be the sitting room.
Mrs. Maguire was on her plump knees in front of the coffee table, where she’d set up a cross and some statues and candles. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved silently. Every ten seconds precisely, she slid another bead of her rosary through her fingers, and as she did so, tears leaked from beneath her sooty lashes. They dripped off her round cheeks and onto her pullover, where two splodges of damp on her ample breasts told him how long she had been weeping.
The chanting came from a tape recorder, from which solemn male voices were intoning the words miserere nobis again and again. Alex knew no Latin, so he couldn’t translate. But the words sounded appropriate. They brought him back to himself.
He couldn’t do nothing. He could act and he would. This wasn’t about Eve. This wasn’t about Luxford. This wasn’t about what had happened between them or why. This was about Charlie, who couldn’t hope to understand the battle going on between her parents. And Charlie was someone he could do something about.
Dennis Luxford waited for a moment before honking the horn when Leo came out of the dentist’s surgery. His son stood in a blaze of late morning sunlight, his white-blond hair ruffling in the breeze. He looked left and right, perplexity creasing his forehead. He expected to see Fiona’s Mercedes, parked three buildings down from Mr. Wilcot’s surgery where she had dropped him an hour earlier. What he did not expect was to find that his father had decided upon a man-to-man lunch before returning Leo to his Highgate school.
“I’ll fetch him,” Luxford had told Fiona when she was about to leave the house to pick up their son and ferry him back to school. And when she’d looked doubtful, he’d gone on with, “You said he wanted to talk to me, darling. About Baverstock. Remember?”
“That was yesterday morning,” she replied. There was no reproach in her words. She wasn’t angry that he’d failed to rise in time to have that breakfast conversation with their son. Nor was she angry that he hadn’t returned till long past midnight last night. She had no idea he’d waited fruitlessly until after eleven for a message from Eve Bowen telling him to run the truth about Charlotte on the front page of the paper. As far as she was concerned, last ni
ght was all about his job’s making another necessary intrusion into their lives. She knew the odd hours his career frequently demanded of him, and she was merely offering him the facts, as she always did: Leo had spoken about talking to his father two days ago; he’d planned the conversation for yesterday morning; she couldn’t be certain that he still wanted to talk to his father today. She had good reason for this line of thought. Leo was as changeable as the English weather.
Luxford honked the horn. Leo spun in his direction. His hair swept outward—sun lighting its ends like a halo—and his face brightened with a smile. It was an enchanting smile, very like his mother’s, and whenever he saw it Luxford’s heart tightened at the exact same moment that his mind enjoined Leo to toughen up, smarten up, walk with his fists cocked, and think like a yob. Naturally, Luxford didn’t want his son actually to be a yob, but if he could just get him to think like one—even like one-tenth of one—his general manner of confronting life wouldn’t be so troubling.
Leo waved. He swung his rucksack up to his shoulder, gave a little skip, and headed happily in his father’s direction. His white shirt, Luxford noticed, was hanging outside his trousers and below his navy uniform pullover on one side. Luxford liked the look of this dishevelment. Lack of interest in neatness was completely out of character in Leo but definitely in character for the average boy.
Leo climbed into the Porsche. He said, “Daddy!” and quickly corrected himself to, “Dad. ’Lo. I was looking for Mummy. She said she’d be at the bakery. Over there.” He crooked a finger in that direction.
Luxford took the opportunity to sneak a look at Leo’s hands. They were perfectly clean, their nails clipped, no dirt beneath them. Luxford catalogued this information along with everything else that concerned him about his son. He felt impatient with it. Where was the dirt? the scabs? Where were the hangnails? the plasters? Damn it all, these were Fiona’s hands he was looking at, with long, tapering fingers and oval nails with perfect half moons at the cuticles. Had any of his own genetic material gone into the making of his son? Luxford wondered. Why should similarity of appearance translate to similarity of everything else as well? Leo was even going to inherit Fiona’s willowy height, not Luxford’s own more compact frame, and Luxford had spent many thoughtful hours considering what use Leo might make of his body. He wanted to think of his son as a distance runner, a hurdler, a high jumper, a long jumper, a pole vaulter. He did not want to think of his son as Leo thought of himself: a dancer.