Lovers and Liars Trilogy (182 page)

Lascelles probably imagined, he thought, listening to him, that he had been hired for his professional abilities, which were considerable; and indeed, those abilities had weighed with Court, obviously so. Before even speaking to Lascelles, he had viewed every major movie on which he had worked and talked to numerous directors who knew him. He had acquainted himself with every detail of Lascelles’s background: his family, his privileged schooling and his training.

He had known that Lascelles was the heir to a large estate in England, and had been since the death of his elder brother. He further discovered that at the age of eight, and on the death of his American mother, he had inherited a fortune from her family, the Lancaster clan. That fortune had been held in trust for him, but from the age of twenty-one Lascelles had been a very rich man, one who need never have worked again. He
had
worked, however, and worked hard. That fact interested Court, whose own background was poor.

Court, meeting Colin Lascelles for the first time, had discovered that he resolutely avoided all mention of this background; he let not one single detail slip regarding his parentage, his wealth, his privileged schooling, or his celebrated home, Shute Court, where his family had lived for over 400 years. Court found that he liked this somewhat innocent and engaging man. He could see that Lascelles was trying to perfect the classless argot of the international movie world, and that he was not altogether succeeding. He noticed—such details always interested him—that Lascelles had the English gift of appearing elegant and shabby at once. He noticed too that the camouflage of the clothes was imperfect: Lascelles might be wearing jeans and a shirt with fraying cuffs, but the discreet watch half hidden by those cuffs was a Patek Philipe, and the shoes were handmade.

‘I first saw her at the Qantas check-in,’ Lascelles had been saying. ‘I wasn’t in very good shape. I had a hangover. It was the anniversary of—well, of my brother’s death, actually. I managed to get my seat changed, so I could sit next to her, then I saw she was wearing a wedding ring, so I never said a word. I just sat there and looked at her for twelve thousand miles…’ He had paused. ‘So when I read your script…I can understand that
hope
. I think everyone secretly believes that one day they’ll meet the—well, the right person. Only no-one ever admits it these days…’

And then, right then, Tomas Court had decided to hire him—not, ultimately, for his professional abilities, considerable though these were, but because he saw that this troubled, inarticulate Englishman might understand obsession. The discovery had surprised Court, who believed all Englishmen to be cold-blooded, particularly Englishmen of Lascelles’s class.

Court looked across at his wife, whom he had been carefully ignoring. ‘Checking the fire-escape situation,’ he heard Lascelles say now. Again, he placed his hand over the mouthpiece. He flicked the faxed pages of the
Times
article, written by some woman journalist called Genevieve Hunter, of whom he had never heard.

‘
Why
did you pass this? You scarcely read it, Natasha.’ His wife, back to the door, looked at him uncertainly.

‘It’s only short, Tomas. It’s fine. I was careful; I had to be. She’d been talking to someone and she mentioned the Conrad building.’

‘She doesn’t mention it here.’ He gave a gesture of annoyance. ‘And it wouldn’t have mattered if she had, since you’re not going to live there.’

‘You may have decided that, Tomas; I haven’t. And I’m not going to have that argument again.’

‘Fine. Drop the subject.’

‘I was alarmed when she mentioned the Conrad, Tomas—obviously. People will gossip. Word gets out. And I have to be so careful…’ She hesitated. Her voice, which had sharpened a moment before and taken on that tense obstinate note he most disliked, now softened and became conciliatory.

‘Anyway, Tomas, you’d have been proud of me. I told her I’d bought a house in the Hollywood hills. I made up all this rigmarole about it on the spur of the moment—and she bought it. She mentions that plan, and I knew she would. Journalists always love it when they think they’ve prised some new information out of you.’ She gave a half smile. ‘So you see, I can lie quite well, Tomas, when I have to…’

That reply did not appear to please her husband, whom she could never think of as her ex-husband. He scanned the pages, then tossed them aside.

‘Maybe. You lie better when I’m scripting you.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes, but you’re right, the article’s fine. She didn’t get close; a million miles wide. Look.’ He flicked the video controls again. ‘Here’s your Wildfell Hall.’

His wife, and Court knew he would never be able to think of her as his ex-wife, moved slowly forwards a few paces and looked at the screen. She examined the stern, gabled façade, the moorland, then the track, the cliffs, and the horseshoe-shaped beach below.

‘Yes,’ she said, on a slow exhalation of breath. ‘Yes. Except—the house isn’t that close to the sea in the novel.’

‘We’re not filming the novel; we’re filming
my
script from the novel. I need the sea; it’s better that way.’

‘Maybe so. Maybe so.’

She retreated again a few paces and stood looking at him quietly, her long pale hands clasped at the waist of the grey dress she was wearing.

Quiet as a nun, her husband thought, and with a sense of anger realized that it was a double quotation, from a poem by Milton in the first place, from the taped telephone calls of their persecutor in the second. He thought: the
Collected Works of Milton
; the
Collected Works of Joseph King
. Did the use of such quotations mean that King, who had a flat Midwestern accent, a somewhat mordant sense of humour, and an undoubted gift for language, was an educated man?

King could be lyrical, also crude. The police might choose to categorize him as yet another weirdo, as wacko, as some sleazeball or screwball; Court did not agree. King was subtle and certainly intelligent; his phrases stuck in the mind. In one recorded call, he had described, for instance, this grey dress Natasha was wearing. Natasha, who had been protected from some of King’s calls, was not aware of that fact, but King had described the dress, its soft cashmere, the way her body shaped the material, very well.

Something small, fiery and malevolent began to stir deep in the recesses of Court’s mind. In his ear, Colin Lascelles had continued to speak all this while. He was explaining that they needed to discuss weather cover, and that he would be arriving in New York the next day, in the morning; he had switched to an earlier plane.

‘Come to TriBeCa,’ Court said. ‘I have a loft in TriBeCa. You’ve got that address? Come there.’

Lascelles agreed and reverted to the question of security. Court’s requirements, he said, had astonished the various hotel managements. They had emphasized that Yorkshire was not like New York or Los Angeles, and that the crime rate was low. Why, so secure did their guests feel, even their American guests, that they often did not bother to lock their doors…

‘You’ve tied your hair back.’ Court covered the mouthpiece once more. ‘I hate it that way. Undo it…’

‘Now? Tomas—’

‘Undo it. I’ve been away a month. It’s not much to ask.’ He could see, almost smell, her reluctance. She hesitated, glanced towards the door, then lifted her arms. Her long hair was tied back with a black grosgrain ribbon. Slowly, she untied it and began to wind it around her hand. Blood mounted in her neck, then suffused her face. She lowered her eyes.

‘Tomas—Jonathan will be back soon. They’ll all be back…’

‘This new bodyguard—how old is he?’

‘Tex? I don’t know—young. Twenty-five, twenty-six. He’s been protecting some oil billionaire. The agency said—’

‘Good-looking?’

‘Tomas, what does that matter? He does his job—’

‘Is he good-looking?’

‘I guess so. He’s tall, blond. A country boy. He has a fiancée, Tomas, back home in some little town near Fort Worth. You’ll like him—’

‘Maybe.’

‘Tomas, please—can’t you get off the phone? I wanted to talk to you…’

‘What about?’

He looked at her steadily; Lascelles’s words, punctuated by those explosions, now blurred. He waited, knowing the answer, feeling amid the stirrings of an irrational anger, the stirring of a familiar desire.

‘About that newspaper clipping you sent me. That man they found in Glacier Park. About what the police told you, and the detective agency. You said…You said they had checks to complete, and—I have to know—is he really dead, Tomas? Was it Joseph King they found?’

‘New locks,’ Colin Lascelles said, into Court’s ear, ‘and an adjoining room for the bodyguard. Now—’

Behind his words came the soft thud of another explosion; some atavistic British festival, Court thought; the burning of a traitor in effigy. He sniffed; the air in the hotel suite, purified, humidified, smelt acrid.

‘We’ll discuss it tomorrow,’ Court said. ‘I have to go now.’

He replaced the receiver and looked long and hard at his wife.

The thick, long, dark weight of her hair had now fallen forward; one strand, coiled like a question mark, rested against the roundness of her left breast. Beneath that breast, invisible to all but a lover, his wife had a small mole, a velvety aberration of the skin which he cherished. In his movies, he had always rendered this alluring defect invisible. He hid it religiously with makeup, with lighting, with camera angles, for it was
his
mole, part of his secret knowledge of her. That mole, in some detail, and with relish, King had described. He looked at his wife levelly; King’s knowledge, of which his wife remained ignorant, could have only one possible explanation. Yet that explanation was impossible, since his wife recognized neither King’s voice, nor his writing—or so she had told Court many, many times.

‘Do you want him dead?’ he said, his tone cold.

‘Tomas, please.’ She gave a helpless gesture of the hands. ‘How can you ask that? You know I do. I prayed he’d die; and if that’s wicked, I don’t care.’

‘Their enquiries are inconclusive.’ He kept his eyes on her. ‘They need more time…’

‘Why?
Why
?’ The colour had now ebbed from her face, and her skin was ashen.

‘They just do, that’s all. It’s complicated.’ He paused, and for a second he could hear King’s voice, mocking, knowledgeable. Just a fragment from one of the many, many tapes of his calls; the words used were effective—Court could feel the kick and pulse of them in his groin.

Still looking levelly at his wife, he held out his hand to her. She began on excuses at once: there wasn’t time, it was too soon, Jonathan would be returning, she would have to leave for the theatre, she needed to talk, just talk…

Court scarcely heard her words behind some crackle and hiss in his mind, a sound that could have come from a defective tape, or from a fire.

‘Come here,’ he said, in the tone which always guaranteed she would obey him. Still she hung back, and he flexed his fingers. He listened to the thud in his blood, the bang of his heart.

‘It’s been a
month
,’ he said. ‘A
month
. Trust me. Come here.’

‘O
N THE BEACH,’ TOMAS
Court said.

‘But…’ said Colin Lascelles.

‘But…’ said Mario Schwartz, Court’s first assistant director.

Mario and Colin glanced at each other; both were keeping count and so far Colin was winning. He was averaging twenty ‘buts’ an hour; Mario, limping behind, was averaging fifteen.

‘Fucking
hell
…’ said the neat, grey-haired, bespectacled woman who was sitting next to Court and recording these proceedings in microscopic script. Her name was Thalia Ng; she was one of Court’s oldest associates, a woman resembling some mouse of a librarian. One week into his protracted meetings with Tomas Court, Colin was still adjusting to her habitual mode of speech—it clashed with her woolly cardigans.

‘On the
beach
,’ Court repeated, ignoring these interruptions. ‘When Gilbert Markham sees Helen for the first time, he has to see her on the beach.’

‘Why?’ said Thalia Ng.

‘Because I say so,’ Court replied, with charm.

‘Personally,’ Thalia Ng replied, in cosy tones, ‘I think Gilbert Markham is a prick, and Helen is one tight-assed bitch.
Personally
, I don’t give a flying fuck
where
they meet, but…’

The eyes of Mario and Colin locked; Thalia Ng’s score was ten and rising.

‘They don’t
meet
,’ Tomas Court fixed her with a cool glance. ‘I said he
sees
her. She’s down by the sea; he’s up on the cliffs. He
watches
her. She’s only just arrived in the neighbourhood and he doesn’t yet know who she is. In case you haven’t noticed, Thalia, there’s a lot of voyeurism in this book…’

‘Sure, and there’s a whole lot more in your script. And OK, I can live with that, but you’ve now changed your mind four times.
Four times
, Tomas. First, they’re meeting on the moors, and I think, Oh shit, been here before—it’s 1939, it’s Sam Goldwyn’s
Wuthering Heights
. I mean,
please
, it’s Merle fucking Oberon and…’

‘Larry fucking Olivier,’ Court interjected politely. ‘Precisely, Thalia.’

‘Then,’ Thalia Ng continued. ‘
Then
, like major rethink, they meet in Gilbert Markham’s house, the same way they do in the novel—big
yawn
. Then—I’m on idea number three now, Tomas, I’m keeping track of this horse shit—then, it’s night, and Helen’s inside Wildfell Hall, and this jerk Markham is creeping around in the garden, trying to get a first look at her, and I’m thinking:
Rear Window
?
Peeping Tom
, perhaps? Now it’s moved
again
. She’s on the fucking
beach
. That beach is giving me problems, Tomas. That beach is saying
French Lieutenant
’
s Woman
, a colostomy bag of a movie. So perhaps you’d tell me, before you comprehensively gang-bang the schedules yet again, are you
serious
! Are you
sure
about this?’