Little White Lies (12 page)

They zigzagged their way in fits and starts down the road that was now thronging with running men and women until they reached
Avenue de la Présidence
. It was almost empty. The driver put his foot down and they went sailing across the intersection with
Avenue de Gaulle
and straight up the boulevard that led to the palace. The car screeched to a halt in front of the main entrance and the bodyguard leapt out. He was in a state of high excitement. He opened the door for her and then ran towards the rear of the palace, his firm, high buttocks pumping furiously as he went.

‘
Madame?
’ Ophélia, the cook and housekeeper, was standing in the hallway, surprised to see her back so soon. ‘
Est-ce-que ça va
,
Madame? Tout va bien?
’

‘Yes, yes,’ Anouschka said breathlessly, aware that her hair was dishevelled and her face bright red and sweaty. ‘There was some trouble . . . in town.’

‘Trouble,
madame
?’

Anouschka nodded. ‘Yes, I’m not sure what was going on . . . there was a crowd . . . and some gunshots. I don’t know what—’ She stopped herself just in time. How many times had Sylvan warned her against saying too much in front of the servants? ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she concluded.

Ophélia looked at her but said nothing. As Anouschka turned to go, she saw someone standing in the doorway to the kitchens, just to the left of the stairway. She saw Ophélia make a quick, concealed gesture with her hand but the gesture was so swift and so fleeting it was hard to tell what it was. A dismissal? Warning? She didn’t know. She suddenly felt rather overwhelmed. Where was Sylvan? It was nearly eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. He was normally downstairs in his study with half a dozen ministers and officials. The driveway was usually full of the dark green Peugeot 504 cars that every government official seemed to use. Today it was empty.

She climbed the stairs wearily to their room and closed the door. She switched on the rattling air-conditioner and kicked off her shoes. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands. They were shaking. She saw very clearly again the faces of people in the crowd. A young man who turned his head to see where the shouts were coming from and whose face almost collided with her own. The details flashed before her eyes. Yellowish-brown skin, pocked by tiny raised pimples and straggling whorls of tight black hair. Near the mouth there was a tiny puckered strip of light pink, a scar, perhaps. She wasn’t aware of even seeing it at the time. The pregnant woman whom the driver had nearly knocked down in his haste to get away. The pinkish wet inside of her mouth as it opened on a scream, row upon row of beautifully even teeth. A hand flattened against the window as the car tried to move through the crowd. The pale imprint of the palm, lines etched clearly in darker brown and, turning slightly as the hand moved away, the clear line where the velvety blackness of the outer hand met the salmon pink of the palm. A watch; a frayed cuff-sleeve; the flash of earrings and someone’s headdress, which had slipped. Everything, every little detail, came flooding back. She let herself slide off the bed until she was sitting on the ground. Her head felt heavy and her heart was thumping fast. Nothing had actually happened. They’d got away, driven home. But something might happen, no? If not now, then one day. Soon.

SYLVAN

Like many things he read about himself, it wasn’t quite true. He had not been his father’s favourite son. There were even some who whispered he wasn’t his father’s son at all, not that he paid them any attention. He folded the newspaper carefully and put it aside. In all likelihood, it was his stepmother who had started the damned rumours in any case. Even now, so many years later, she could not accept that a young French actress,
une femme blanche
, had supplanted her in her people’s affections. The woman who was now – and who had been for the past nine years –
La Première Dame
.

Across the room, staring at herself in closed, dreamy self-absorption,
la Première Dame
herself sat, mid-point in her preparations for a state dinner. A visiting delegation from his ‘old friends’, the French. That was the line the journalist had used.
Ses anciens amis
, the statement somehow managing to be both benign and sinister in the same breath. He looked down at his bare feet after their hour-long pedicure. It was in Paris that he’d acquired the taste for such small luxuries. Pedicures, massages, bespoke tailoring. Nothing in the world like the attention money could buy. Nowadays his suits and shirts came directly from Dege & Skinner in London and a local girl came in once a week to attend to his hands and feet.

His mind drifted back to the article. In spite of himself he was impressed. It was cleverly done, subversive rather than inflammatory, written in the flowery, somewhat overwrought language that the journalist, Kweku Ameyaw, liked to use. He knew Ameyaw. They’d actually been students together in Paris at the same time, though their social circles had never really overlapped. An intense man, given to protests and demonstrations and Trotskyite sentiment. Sylvan remembered him well. He’d returned to Lomé long before Sylvan. He sighed. It was high time someone paid Ameyaw a visit. He pulled the soft flesh of his lower lip into his mouth, biting gently. Whom should he send? Attipoe? Gbédéma? He scratched his elbow. Of the two, Gbédéma was certainly the more brutal. Still, brutality had its uses, he mused. There were some, including his so-called friends, the French, who thought he was too soft. Too friendly. That his marriage, and the trappings of luxury it had provided him with, had weakened him. It seemed not everyone was as thrilled with his movie-star wife as the Togolese public.

He let go of his lip with a soft ‘phut’ and sighed deeply again. Yes, he would send Gbédéma to pick Kweku Ameyaw up. Rough him up and scare him a little. Not enough to make him leave – no, that would be counter-productive. He didn’t want the subversive little shit writing about him from the safety of Barbès. He wanted him close, nearby, here where he could keep an eye – and a thumb, if necessary – on him. Make him toe the line. The last thing he wanted was to give free rein to every journalist with a typewriter and access to liberal French editors with axes to grind. It was ironic. Those very editors with whom he and Anouschka had once danced and dined were now only too ready to give voice to those weaselly little agitators like Ameyaw. He found it almost laughable. The editor of
Le Figaro
– Didier Cohn – he
knew
him. Hadn’t they spent many a winter evening in the same Pigalle bars, drinking from the same bottle, even slept with the same girls? For him to turn around and print the kind of mealy-mouthed rubbish about ‘press freedoms’ and ‘unpopular economic reforms’, not to mention all that nonsense about the glass factory at Agouenyive that had provoked the bloody demonstration in the first place . . . unforgivable. A betrayal, really.

He yawned, his attention distracted by Anouschka, who had risen from her
toilette
. She was wearing a loose silk robe and a pair of high heels. She put one high-heeled sandal down carefully in front of the other as she crossed the room, like she used to in the old days when he’d sat in the front row of those warehouses and hotel lobbies and train stations that they’d converted into catwalks or whatever they called them, packed with beautiful women and their gay, flamboyant male counterparts. He’d sat amongst them drinking the free champagne, making small talk, watching with the rest of them as those absurdly slender, elongated creatures from another world strutted up and down, stopping in front of him, hands balanced jauntily on that piece of bone that could hardly be called a hip before turning and swaying, swaying as they sauntered back and forth. He felt the strong stirring of desire within him, deep inside his belly. He looked down at himself, watching with detached fascination as his penis thickened, tenting his shorts. His suit lay draped over the chair by the window. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly eight o’clock. The dinner was due to begin in half an hour. Anouschka took for ever to get ready. If he approached her now they would surely be late. She would be hot and sweaty and her hair would require ‘fixing’. The thought did nothing to dampen his sudden ardour. He got up purposefully, his cock now fully erect and throbbing dully. They would be late. So what? The French would wait. They would all wait. Wasn’t he
le
fucking
Président
? He laughed suddenly, delightedly, at his own wit.

ANOUSCHKA

The sour, metallic taste in her mouth was a dead giveaway. That and her swollen breasts. She put her hands on her abdomen and drew a deep, shaky breath. It had been six weeks since the night Sylvan had practically forced himself on her just before the all-important dinner with the French ministers and members of his cabinet. Yes, that was the night she’d conceived. It had to be. She’d been so angry with him that she hadn’t allowed him near her since. She’d had to take a hasty shower, re-dry her hair and then the bloody electricity went out and it took them half an hour to find the damn garden boy with the key for the generator . . . all in all, by the time she’d managed to make herself presentable again, she was over an hour late. She was furious. The dinner had gone badly. Everyone except Sylvan, of course, was in a foul mood. He left shortly afterwards on one of those interminable, pointless multi-country trips around the region. Niger and Chad. Did she want to accompany him?
Hell
, no. She felt her stomach turn again. Well, if she really
was
pregnant and she managed to hold on to the baby, it would mean leaving Lomé for the next few months. She hadn’t been back to France since Christmas and she was desperate to go.

She leaned her forehead against the marginally cooler surface of the mirror and took a few deep, shuddering breaths. Four pregnancies in ten years, all of them over before they’d properly begun. Sylvan didn’t know; no one knew. Did she actually
want
a child? Aside from the obvious danger a baby would pose to her figure, the prospect was daunting. Feeding, washing, cleaning, spending hours with it dangling a set of plastic baubles above a cot, all that ridiculous-sounding baby-talk that she heard others make – could she, Anouschka Malaquais-Betancourt, actually
do
that? She’d never been the maternal type. If the truth were told, the miscarriages she’d suffered had actually been a relief. And yet . . . there were worse places to have a child than Lomé, she mused, flushing the toilet on the thin trail of vomit that was surely the evidence of a pregnancy. There were servants galore. Housekeepers, cooks, nannies, drivers, gardeners, an endless supply of other children. Anyone and everyone to make the day-to-day running of the household and the bringing up of a child as trouble-free as possible.

Except, of course, it was anything
but
trouble-free. Supervising the damn staff was a full-time job, nowhere more so than Lomé. She thought of the two young girls whose job it was to keep their Parisian apartment clean and tidy and nearly wept. Here she had to remind everyone not once, not twice, but
every single day
. Clean this, wipe that, dust here, sweep there. One of the girls, that sullen girl whose name she could never remember, just looked at her with the cow-faced, mutinous expression that was impossible to read . . . and then continued to do what she’d always done – almost nothing – despite her screaming instructions to the contrary. There were days when, exhausted by the effort of arguing with them, she retreated to the bedroom, switched on the air-conditioner (if the electricity was on) and lay down on the bed, stunned into sleep by defeat. In some ways, despite her position as
la Première Dame,
they had the upper hand. Who cared if the dressing table hadn’t been dusted?
She
did. Who cared if there were no fresh flowers to greet guests in the huge marble lobby?
She
did. The head cook in the palace was a Moslem and therefore didn’t drink. Pointless, therefore, expecting him to judge the merits of one wine over another. In the battle to apply her own exacting standards to a wayward, reluctant household, she’d lost. Sylvan didn’t understand her despair. He didn’t want to be bothered with tales of how no one listened to her, how difficult it was, how sulky and uncooperative the staff were.
Just get it done
. He had a whole country to run. She’d been given a house. Surely she could manage
that
?

Seen from that perspective, then, a child might be both blessing and curse. It would get her out of the place for at least six months, probably more. She’d be cosseted and looked after, fussed over by her mother – well, perhaps that was stretching things a little far – but she’d see all her old friends again, and François . . . she began to brighten up. A baby would mean an excuse to stay in Paris a little longer. A chance to see her friends. A
change
. Some new outfits, a new hairstyle, new shoes, a complete makeover. She’d be back in the papers again, back in the public eye. She hurried into the bedroom and fished a notebook out of her bag. By the time she’d finished making a long list of all the things having a baby might mean, her bad mood had all but disappeared. She took a long, leisurely bath, did her hair and dressed for dinner. The foreign minister and his wife were invited; she made sure to look her best. Sylvan was delighted with her; she’d been walking around with that grumpy expression for
weeks
, he whispered, as they walked together towards the dining room. Tonight she looked beautiful, just like she used to.

Towards the end of dinner, with just the two of them left sitting at the long table, she broke the news to him. He was happy; how could he not be? Finally, the news he’d been waiting almost a decade for. Yes, of course she should go back to Paris. The sooner the better. It was all settled. No bad thing, either, he murmured as they walked upstairs together, for the child to be born in France.
One never knows
. She kept her fingers crossed as he undressed her, tenderly laying his head against her abdomen.
Finally
, after nine years . . . a child? His obvious delight delighted her. A good thing she hadn’t mentioned the pregnancies that had been – and gone – before, she thought to herself as she stroked his head. Sylvan, for all his obvious strengths, was a surprisingly sentimental man.