Gifted and Talented (26 page)

As she went to sleep, Diana felt a further disquiet; Richard, of course, had taken Sara to the hospital. But it was surely out of the question that her divorce would be discussed. Even Sara would draw the line at vindictive gossip while in A & E with her son. And Milo’s wound was so slight they were probably finished now anyway and on their way back. Then Sara would see the suitcase, get in the car, return to London.

All the same, Diana felt, she must get to Richard as soon as possible.

‘Of course, you know,’ Sara said, turning to Richard brightly as they sat in A & E awaiting the attentions of a doctor, ‘that Diana’s quite notorious.’

Richard had been watching Milo critically as he lounged on the seat beside him, muttering violent imprecations at his computer game. It seemed to him that the boy was perfectly healthy. As the last few surprising words of Sara’s sentence now sunk in, he turned to her in amazement. ‘
Notorious
?’ Had he heard right?

But Sara was beaming at him, and nodding. In the hospital strip lights, her teeth were almost painfully white. ‘Oh, yes! I mean, I hate to say this, but strictly
entre nous
, that’s why she had to leave London.’ She drew breath to launch into the tale. ‘She and her husband—’

‘Husband?’ Richard jumped in, shocked.

Sara seized on it. ‘Didn’t you know she was married?’

He shook his head, gripped by a sudden misery. Of course, Diana had not said she was available, not in so many words. He had just assumed she was and, as a scientist, he should know how dangerous assumptions could be.

‘Divorced now though,’ Sara added. She was playing Richard like a cat would a mouse, or a fisherman a hooked fish, and enjoying the sensation thoroughly.

‘Oh.’ Richard’s despair now changed to a rush of relief.

‘Absolute crooks, both of them,’ Sara went on with relish, noting with triumph how Richard’s face fell again. For such a clever man, he was amazingly easy to read.

‘Crooks?’

‘Con men. Fraudsters. Borrowed like mad things, lived like lords and then declared themselves bankrupt when the bills came in,’ Sara announced with all the moral outrage of someone who had married for money and never worked in her entire life.

Richard stared. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Well, believe it,’ Sara said brutally. ‘There are details online, if you want to look at them. I bet she never said anything to you about it, did she? And you’ve been out a couple of times, I’m guessing.’

‘No, but . . .’ Richard began, before stopping and wondering what the ‘but’ was. They had indeed been out a couple of times and Diana had said very little about herself. At the time, he had thought this delightfully restrained.

‘Well then,’ Sara said, with an air of satisfaction, as if this concluded everything.

Richard passed a hand across his eyes. He was tired. This was all very unpleasant and confusing. ‘She just didn’t seem that sort of person,’ he said, eventually, his tone almost pleading.

He could not believe that Diana was a cheat and a liar. Still less that Sara, who was actually staying with Diana, was saying things like this about her. ‘Aren’t you her friend?’ he began, uncertainly.

‘Absolutely!’ Sara replied with disarming swiftness. ‘And it’s as Diana’s friend that I’m telling you.’

He stared back into her popping eyes, wondering if he’d missed something somehow.

‘Because she cheats about more than just money.’ Sara was shaking her head sorrowfully, so strands of highlighted hair hung fetchingly over her face. ‘Now that she’s divorced, she’s looking for a new man. But not just any man. She’s very conniving. She wants you.’

‘She does?’ Her insinuating tone could not stop the flood of pleasure he felt.

‘Yes,’ Sara snapped. ‘But only because you’re a professor and have a high-status job.’

This winded Richard completely. As, in vain, he sought a reply, his eye caught Milo, sitting next to his mother. It was not, Richard felt, a suitable conversation for a boy of that age to be listening to, especially as it concerned his former neighbour. On the other hand, he was obviously not listening. He seemed deep in some cyber conflict, his face contorted in an expression of violent hatred. ‘Die, losers,’ he was muttering under his breath.

‘Diana’s desperate for status,’ Sara purred, leaning confidentially forwards – so confidentially that, without even wanting to, he could see how her low-buttoned shirt revealed the divide at the top of her breasts. ‘She’s used to a lavish lifestyle. She used to have everything and now she’s just a gardener.’

‘She seems,’ Richard weakly put in, ‘to rather enjoy it.’

Sara’s lips drew back in a mirthless laugh. ‘Ha! That’s a good one. She’s never done it before, you know. Hates getting her hands dirty. She actually hates plants,’ Sara added, in a moment of inspiration.

‘
Hates
them?’

‘Loathes them, absolutely. You should have seen her garden in London. Looked like a Californian desert. Hard core and cacti everywhere.’

She could see, to her annoyance, that he was having real difficulty believing this. She cast her mind back to the Branston website. There had been a small tab about the gardens, featuring an annoyingly flattering picture of Diana and an article in her typically breathless tone about some of her plans.

‘She especially hates delphiniums,’ Sara declared. To her joy, this had an immediate impact. He looked astonished.

‘Hates delphiniums?’ Richard repeated. He could picture Diana’s face as she spoke of her blue border. Had that all been an act? Really?

‘Loathes them.
Hates
gardening. But she wants you to think she’s a cheerful, outdoorsy type, all berry cheeks and bright eyes, getting back to nature and all that.’

He
had
thought that, Richard mused. That exactly.

‘She wants you to think she’s got simple tastes and is happy being poor,’ Sara went on, seeing with delight how every word was sinking in. Brain expert he may be, but she could play him like a piano. Well, perhaps not a piano. Sara couldn’t actually play an instrument. ‘So you’d never suspect she was a confidence trickster with millions of pounds of debt behind her.’

There was something illogical about all this, Richard was sure. But it was unfolding too fast and too confusingly.

Again, the breasts were practically in his face. ‘That was why,’ Sara told him brightly, ‘I was trying to come along to the dinner with you both. I was trying to help you! Save you!’

To Richard’s relief, the nurse now interrupted. The doctor was ready to see Milo. Still staring into his computer screen, he was led off. ‘Want to come, Mum?’ the nurse asked Sara.

She swept a bountiful, glittering hand upward in reply. ‘Be my guest. He’ll be fine on his own.’ Waste a valuable seduction opportunity escorting her son to a completely unnecessary examination? Not likely.

‘Won’t he want you there?’ Richard queried.

Sara turned on one of her dazzling beams. ‘Not at all. I’d just cramp his style, anyway. Milo’s bound to be there for ages, he’s so interested in science. He’ll be asking them all sorts of questions. I really think he’ll be a doctor one day, or perhaps he might go into your field.’ She batted her eyelashes violently. ‘He’s really interested in brains.’

‘He hides it well,’ remarked Richard.

Sensing she was losing ground, Sara took out her big weapon and prepared to use it. ‘Believe me,’ she added, ‘Di’s got you taped. She’s researched you on the internet. You should have heard her when she found out your wife was dead . . . that you were, tragically, a widower,’ Sara corrected herself swiftly as she saw Richard’s horrified face, and realised how much deeper and sharper her shot had gone home than she could ever have hoped. Nearly there. One final painful twist should do it.

She took a deep breath and summoned anguish into her eyes; thinking of Henrik’s mistress in her old house was one infallible method.

‘Diana said to me, “Sara, he’s a sitting duck. Got my name all over him. A world-renowned academic, Master of a college and, would you believe it, a widower!”’

Richard stared, speechless, at the floor. Such was the hurt and anger rising within him, the possibility Sara was lying never even crossed his mind.

Something touched his hand. He looked down at a brown, very thin hand, glittering with rings. ‘I just had to let you know,’ Sara sighed in a voice oozing with regret.

For a moment he was silent. Then, ‘I’m grateful to you,’ he said abruptly.

‘It’s nothing,’ Sara beamed enthusiastically. ‘I was happy to help – well, perhaps “happy” isn’t the word,’ she added hastily, assuming a suitably doleful expression.

She allowed a minute or two to elapse before approaching the open goal before her.

‘But, as you
are
grateful, could I ask you a favour? Obviously we can’t go back to Diana’s now. Not after those feral neighbours of hers practically
murdered
Milo.’ Sara widened her eyes and batted lashes solid with mascara. ‘Perhaps we could stay with
you
until he’s better?’

Isabel laid down her pen and rubbed her eyes. She glanced through her fingers at the stack of books she should be studying, all critical texts on Shakespeare. ‘Bird Imagery in
Hamlet
’ had been the unpromising essay title suggested to her by the aptly named Professor Finch, who was taking the group for the compulsory Shakespeare paper. Perhaps the unpromising subject had been meant as rebuke; Finch was, Isabel knew, surprised she hadn’t come up with an idea herself. ‘Is everything all right?’ he had asked her after the last session.

‘Fine!’ Isabel had said.

‘It’s just that you seem a little . . . distracted. Not as engaged as you have been.’

She could hardly tell him that she was engaged with something else instead. Something more fascinating even than Shakespeare.

She bent her head back over her books. Bird Imagery in
Hamlet
. ‘I am but mad north-north west, when the wind is southerly I can tell a hawk from a handsaw’ . . . ‘I am pigeon-livered and lack gall’ . . . ‘I should ’a fatted all the region kites with this slave’s offal’. The quotes came tumbling on each other; she had scarcely to think about them. The old magic was still there, Isabel thought with relief, reaching for her work pad and scribbling a few notes.

Well, that sort of magic, anyway. She knew now that it was not the only sort. Yesterday, it being unusually mild for November, she and Jasper had lounged by the river in the late autumn sunshine. They had been on a walk – her idea – but the day had been so lovely. Through the carved colleges they had gone, along the flashing river, in ravishing gardens where drops of water sparkled on the grass.

She had seen it all before, but never properly, or so it had felt. Nothing, for some reason, seemed to have been real before. They had wandered into chapel interiors; everything had seemed hyper-real, her sensitivity so highly strung, so super-alert that the bursts of colour from the stained glass windows had almost hurt her eyes. She had almost
felt
the soaring pillars explode into lacy fan-vaulting as they hit the carved roofs.

Jasper, it had to be said, seemed less keen than herself on Tudor architecture. But no doubt he was used to it; his family home, from what she could gather through her eager questions, was pretty old and of course St Alwine’s was a poem in stained glass and dreaming spires.

That, he claimed, was the reason he preferred the concrete corridors of Branston. But Isabel longed in secret for the cosy little room off Jasper’s sitting room. Being in Branston, they risked encountering Amber.

Even though Isabel herself rarely saw her and seemed no longer required to write things, Amber was still very much around. Jasper, at the end of his visits, liked to pop briefly in to her room – for a chat, for old times’ sake, as he said. Isabel, declining his invitations to go too, usually went off to the library. She did not want to appear neurotic and jealous, even if that was exactly how she felt.

In the library, Isabel sat and dreamed about Jasper. She was dimly aware of her coursework unravelling around her, but paid it no heed. She also chose not to worry about the supervisions she had missed, or that she was increasingly the recipient of irate notes from Professor Green. Once, Isabel knew, such notes would have filled her with dismay, but now she seemed oddly anaesthetised to them. Jasper, anyway, just laughed. ‘Green-eyed monster,’ he said. ‘Dried-up old bat like that. She’s jealous that you’re having a good time.’

Isabel could hardly believe, now, that literature had ever been so important to her. For what was it but a pale imitation of reality? There were two great themes in literature, love and death, and now she was living them both. Love when she was with Jasper. Death whenever she was without him; then the world stopped and became an icy waste – cold, monochrome and muffled until she saw him again. She was hardly eating, but she hardly noticed. She hardly noticed anything not directly concerned with Jasper.

He had hit her like a speeding train. She had been unpre-pared for the impact, for the all-absorbing nature of passion. Light-headed with love, dizzy with sex, she had flung off the cloak of her old, hard working, conscientious self. She had imagined it would be heavy, like a carapace, but it was as light as gossamer, leaving no trace. She now felt like someone altogether different.

Even Jasper’s continuing inroads into her savings was something she hardly noticed. What did it matter if she paid for the coffees, the trips to the pub or student bar, or dinners out in restaurants (Jasper could not stand student food)? Or even the rather more considerable lump sums he was increasingly asking her to lend him? They were all tiny outlays compared to what she received in return: the company of the most wonderful man in the world. And Jasper endlessly assured her he would repay her when his allowance came through; the debts she was vaguely aware of piling up would be settled.

The end of yesterday’s walk had brought them to St Alwine’s. A shiny red sports car was parked outside the college gate. ‘Yours?’ Isabel breathed.

‘Like it?’ He was stifling a yawn.

‘It’s beautiful.’ Like, she thought, something from a Bond film. Apparently one of the porters had brought it round from the college garage. ‘They do valet parking?’ Isabel joked.

‘They do anything you tell them to,’ Jasper said, shortly. ‘If you slip them enough cash, that is.’

If, now, on the edge of Isabel’s mind hovered the question of what cash he was slipping them, exactly, and how he managed to pay for petrol given his apparent constant lack of means, she dismissed it immediately.

The car’s interior had ridged seats in toffee leather and tiny triangular chrome-framed windows with little levers you twisted to push them out. It had spoked silver wheels and a leather-padded steering wheel. Jasper leapt in in a practised fashion, stretching his long legs beneath the dashboard.

They growled around town. Isabel half-enjoyed, half-shrank from the feeling of being stared at by the passers-by. She also dreaded seeing Olly.

It was very cold and the air stung and numbed her exposed cheeks. Golden leaves – the last of the year – blew on to the stitched seats of the car. Through the near-bare branches of the trees, the sky was a brilliant, clear cold blue. It was a richly beautiful afternoon and yet there was something profoundly melancholy about it too, something that, for all her happiness, dragged heavily within her.

Autumn always affected her this way; Isabel was not sure why. Lately it had occurred to her it might be atavistic, to do with the time of year she was parted from her real mother. Mournful autumn, the season Persephone annually parted from her mother to join the dark lord of the underworld. Appropriate, in a way, although Lochalan made as unlikely an underworld as Mum did a Hades.

Jasper broke into her musings by announcing abruptly that he had to see someone. He had, she gathered, glancing at him half-driving, half-checking his Blackberry, just got an urgent message. Could he drop her here? He would see her later, for dinner.

She found herself bundled summarily out at the next set of traffic lights, at the point the road turned back into town over one of the ancient bridges. As Jasper roared off, she stared after him, wondering at the sudden rush, his farewell kiss still buzzing on her lips. Then she looked down at the thick paste of fallen leaves on the pavement. How had Shelley put it?

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes . . .

Something now made her look up. Staggering towards her across the pavement was a familiar-looking figure.

‘Amber?’ Isabel said, uncertainly. She looked so different. Walked so different. That old, confident stride – what had happened to it?

Amber did not appear to see her. Her eyes seemed unfocused and wild, her gait, as she stumbled from foot to foot, unsteady. Isabel stared in amazement. It wasn’t, of course, unusual to see Amber skimpily dressed, but even so, the denim miniskirt and black vest top she wore seemed wildly inadequate for a freezing day at the start of winter. A sudden wind had started up, sending Amber’s unbrushed blond hair swirling about her. On the hand clawing it back, a diamond flashed like a warning.

‘Amber?’ Isabel asked again. Was she ill? Up close, her face was sweaty and pale, her cheekbones more sharply prominent even than usual, her clear blue eyes dull and bloodshot, underlined by dark smudges. Perhaps because her face was thinner, her nose looked bulbous and misshapen.

Amber looked terrible. How the mighty had fallen – or were about to fall; Isabel caught the other’s cold, bare arm. Her heels skittered on the paving stones.

‘Are you OK? Can I help?’

Amber’s gaze slid over Isabel’s and away into the distance.

‘Shall I try and get Jasper?’ Isabel was alarmed enough to suggest. They were friends, after all. He probably should know; perhaps she should call him; he couldn’t be far away yet, after all.

But the other girl’s unfocused eyes had narrowed and an expression of the utmost contempt came into them. The slack mouth twisted bitterly. ‘Jasper? Are you
joking
?’

She had been wise, Isabel realised, to give her neighbour a wide berth. Amber was taking their relationship badly. Very badly. Violent fury was finding an outlet in alcohol; because the other girl was drunk, definitely. Deliriously, crazily inebriated.

All the same, she had to help her. She was not sure how, exactly. Branston was some distance away.

‘Go ’way,’ Amber was muttering, wresting herself free and teetering off at an angle. ‘Don’t wan’ your help.’

‘Careful,’ Isabel gasped, moving to catch her again just in time. ‘Look, can I call someone else, then? Some other friend?’

‘Friends!’ Amber spat, rolling her head from side to side and turning the whites of her eyes in a horribly bovine manner. ‘I don’t have any fucking friends.’

‘Of course you have friends,’ Isabel exclaimed. Had not hundreds of people come to Amber’s room in the time she had lived next door?

‘What do you know?’ Amber snarled, her pupils boring suddenly, startlingly, into Isabel’s. ‘’S none of your bloody business.’

‘But . . .’

‘Leave me alone, you swotty Scottish witch.’

Amber twisted away with a violent lunge. Isabel watched the skinny frame stumble and clatter off down the street. Should she pursue her? But she was sure to be violently repulsed.

The aggressive self-pity seemed further proof that Amber had been hitting the bottle. Could it really be because of her and Jasper? Isabel wondered, rather awed. She searched herself for a tiny gleam of triumph; given Amber’s past treatment of her, it would not be unnatural. But she felt only that it had been both frightening and pitiable to see her in such a state. Amber would have one hell of a hangover.

Amber had disappeared now, round the corner. Should she go after her? But Amber really
did
have hundreds of friends. Whatever she said. Any one of them would help her if she needed it.

Later, in a candlelit corner of a riverside gastro-pub, Isabel described the scene to Jasper. His attention, she could not help noticing, seemed more on the rib-eye steak with hand-cut chips and the half-bottle of burgundy she had paid for. Isabel, clutching her tap water and disingenuously insisting she was not hungry, hoped he could not hear her stomach rumble.

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Jasper said lightly, dabbing a forkful of steak in a dollop of mustard and flashing her a mildly exasperated smile. ‘She’ll be fine. She’s a survivor, Amber. Tougher than she looks.’

‘But I’ve never seen her like that.’ The memory of Amber’s rickety progress down the wintry street endured. She had not seemed tough then. Isabel had never thought of Amber as vulnerable before, but now the thought would not leave her – and neither would the feeling that there was some sort of mystery about it all.

Jasper stabbed a chip. ‘I have. Lots. Especially recently.’

‘Really?’ This was unexpected. Had Jasper not always assured her, after his visits, that Amber was fine?

‘Pissed as a fart sometimes. She just likes her champagne, that’s all. And
of course
she’s got friends. Hundreds of them. Millions!’ he declared, raising his glass to emphasise his merry overstatement.

‘She has, hasn’t she?’ Isabel said, relieved. She paused, frowning again, wondering how to introduce the sticky topic. Jasper’s own breezy tone seemed the best bet. ‘She didn’t seem to want to see
you
though. Have you had a row?’

Jasper rolled his eyes with an irritation that sent a flash of fear through Isabel. ‘You know Amber,’ he said. ‘Touchy. Falls in and out with people all the time. I might have upset her, but I can’t remember. Don’t worry about her.’ He reached to playfully tweak a lock of her hair. But there was nothing playful about his tone of voice.

Isabel stared worriedly at the floor. This seemed to irritate her companion.

‘Look,’ he said, laying down his knife and fork with a weary air, ‘actually, last time I saw her, I might have told her to lay off the booze a bit.’

‘You did?’ Relief flashed through Isabel. ‘So you were being a concerned friend, and she took it badly?’