The Debutante (26 page)

By the way, Gloria is in the pig. Pinky has been in an alcoholic coma for the past three days. Dickey Fellowes finally located him under a table at 106 with a chorus boy from Drury Lane. I suppose you could say he’s overjoyed.

Yours,

B xxx

Cate turned over in bed, trying to hide from the searing bright sunlight that filled the bedroom. Rachel’s curtains were ancient, bleached Liberty prints, circa 1976; unlined and useless in the summertime. Groping for the alarm clock on the bedside table, Cate blinked at the time. It was after nine already. Rachel had gone early that morning, off to the country for a few days on another valuation job. Cate was alone in the house, alone in London. Rolling over onto her back, she shut her eyes again, longing for sleep to tug her back into oblivion. But it didn’t. Consciousness, unwelcome as the blinding sunshine, left her wide awake.

Her first thought was of Jack, the revelations about his wife and their argument.

She understood his anger.

But her situation was different.

Wasn’t it?

She shifted onto her side.

Was it?

Concentrating, she forced herself to think back. She’d known right from the start of the affair not to ask questions, that it would spoil the effect. Now that seemed absurd; irresponsible. But at the time she’d convinced herself that there was something more authentic about taking him only at face value. The world they inhabited together was an after-hours, night-time existence, separated from the harsh reality of day. He sent a car round to pick her up and take her home. Of course, there was a part of her that had known all the while what that meant. But she had
never asked outright, instead deliberately choosing to occupy a smoky, grey moral area, where nothing was real if you didn’t say it out loud.

The truth was that very quickly the balance shifted out of control. She didn’t just want him; she needed him.

Whole undiscovered parts of herself came to the surface. All the rage she’d bottled for years seeped out into her sexuality, sharpening her, making her bold, demanding. It turned out that she had an appetite for intensity, for taunting, teasing interchanges; for graphic, even occasionally violent sex. And in his beautiful apartment, dimly lit, where the champagne and whiskey flowed freely, any inhibitions dissolved after a drink or two, melting like the ice in the bottom of the glass. It had been a relief, if she were honest, a liberation. In this new persona, everything was clear, uncensored, animal. No polite interchange of courtesies; no faltering attempts at conversation; no groping at half-intimated subtexts, trying to interpret what might have been said and what exactly it meant if it wasn’t.

This was not the clean, icy blonde that she presented to most of the world. Not the girl who painted fat, pink-cheeked cherubs with golden curls on Ava Rottling’s wall. No, for him there was a private view into the deepest, most unrestrained parts of her character.

When he began to pay her bills, it appeared to be only a natural extension of the one-upmanship that defined their time together; twisting, turning power plays of dominance and dependence that were merely foreplay. She
affected nonchalance, as if it were her due. And when he offered her a credit card with her name on it, she hardly deigned to register it at all.

‘Here,’ he said, passing it across the table during their favourite post-coital Chinese.

They were sitting in a well-worn, red velvet booth, tucked into a far corner. The table was strewn with the remains of spare ribs, sweet-and-sour prawns, sizzling black beef and mountains of oily Singapore noodles. The bill had been brought long ago and sat, untouched, on its little black plastic tray. It was nearing midnight. They were the only customers left. The front door was locked. The kitchen staff were playing cards and drinking beer at another table; laughing and swearing in Chinese.

But they lingered.

In a hurry to meet. Reluctant to go. Only their conversation was cool and aloof.

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you trying to buy me?’ she asked, cracking open a fortune cookie.

‘Do I have to?’ he countered.

‘No,’ she smiled. ‘For you, it’s all free.’

She unravelled the message inside. ‘Beware false friends,’ it said. Crumpling it into a ball, she tossed it into the ashtray. ‘I don’t know why you bothered.’

‘I like to know you’re taken care of.’

‘I’ll never use it.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Whatever.’

But she did use it.

A few weeks after he’d given it to her, she found herself walking past Christian Dior, when a filmy chiffon shift dress in pale graphite caught her eye. That night, it too lay in a crumpled heap on his floor.

Twisting, turning, pushing, pulling, their relationship was a continuous tug of war.

That was love … wasn’t it? Her intentions weren’t like Julia’s; she was innocent. Stupid, perhaps, very confused, but ultimately innocent of the same ruthless transgressions that had torn Jack’s world apart. Wasn’t she?

A telephone was ringing, interrupting her thoughts. Tossing off the covers, she headed into Rachel’s room where there was an extension on the bedside table.

‘Hello?’

‘Miss Albion?’ The voice was unfamiliar.

She hesitated. ‘How may I help?’

‘My name is Cyril Longmore.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m ringing from the archives department of Tiffany’s in Bond Street.’

‘Oh yes!’ Her shoulders relaxed. She’d written hoping for information about the bracelet. ‘Thank you for getting back to me.’

‘My pleasure. I wonder if you’d like to come in, Miss Albion, and have a chat. It’s taken some digging, but I think I may have some information for you.’

‘Certainly.’

‘Half three?’ he suggested.

‘I’ll see you then.’

She hung up and, standing, stretched her arms high. What could he have found? Suddenly her legs felt unsteady; her head dizzy. A wave of unexpected nausea hit.

Stumbling down the hallway to the bathroom, she only just made it in time to throw up in the toilet.

Crouched on the bathroom floor, sweating and shaking, she rested her head on the cool ceramic of the bath, waiting for the sickness to subside. How many times had she started the day like this when she was in New York? The excesses of the night before brought horrific hangovers, leaving her unable to function until early afternoon or sometimes not till the next day.

But she hadn’t touched a drop last night. Not in weeks. Was it food poisoning? A virus?

Or …

It couldn’t be.

It couldn’t possibly be.

Desperately she tried to count back, fear rising. How many weeks had it been since her last period?

The restaurant was overlooking the harbour below. Seafood. They were having a late lunch. Perhaps not the slap-up one Rachel had proposed that morning, but fresh crab, soft sweet meat hidden beneath the brittle pink shell,
chips and beer. They were sitting right by the edge of the sheltered veranda; below them families with small children played on the beach, hunting for their own tiny crabs among the rocky enclaves of the shore. But they seemed far away, like something on a movie screen, removed from them by more than just distance.

Jack leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs.

Rachel lit another cigarette.

‘I think that place is haunted,’ she said, after a while.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘It has an odd energy. A kind of sadness.’

He snorted, took another swig of his beer. ‘You don’t think it’s just us?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘After all, a widow and a widower cancel each other out,’ she grinned wryly. ‘No, that house has something all its own going on.’

‘That’s what Cate thought too. She was convinced there was some sort of mystery about it.’

Rachel looked at him hard. ‘You like her, don’t you?’

He shrugged his shoulders, averted his eyes. ‘How did that come up?’

‘You do, don’t you?’

‘Jesus, Rachel!’ He struggled to frown, to look serious and uninterested, concentrating on his plate. ‘Where’s all this from?’

‘I don’t know.’ She turned, looked out again over the beach. ‘It just seems a shame, that’s all.’

‘What?’

‘Honestly!’ Her voice was sharp with frustration. ‘Do you both think I’m blind?’

He looked up. ‘What do you mean, both?’

‘When you left the other day without staying for dinner she mooned about like a teenager.’

He tried unsuccessfully to suppress a smile. ‘Really?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘See!’

‘Well, yes,’ he admitted slowly, ‘I do like her.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘I don’t trust her. And, I don’t trust myself.’

Rachel leaned her chin in the hollow of her hand. ‘It won’t happen again, Paul.’

‘What?’

‘I said, it won’t happen again.’

‘You called me Paul.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ She took another sip of beer. ‘Freudian slip.’

‘How do you know it won’t?’

‘Because you’re different. You’ve changed. And Katie’s not Julia. She’s different too.’

He wavered. Should he tell her? That Cate had been a mistress? Perhaps she already knew. ‘Maybe,’ he sighed, deciding to leave it. Instead he confided something else. ‘I went to see the grave. Last week. There was a bouquet of roses there. From him.’

‘Good God!’

‘That’s why I didn’t stay. I’d gone to, I don’t know, to put it behind me, once and for all. To make my peace with it. But they were there instead.’

‘How do you know they were from him?’

‘I knew. There was a card.’

Rachel turned her eyes once again to a child in a sun hat, teetering on the uneven rocks, clutching its mother’s hand with one chubby fist, a tiny net in the other. ‘I’m sorry, Paul.’

Jack didn’t bother to pull her up this time. He knew the tension that bound the two worlds, the seen and the unseen, sometimes bled into each other, especially at times like this.

He cracked open a crab leg instead, tearing at the soft white flesh. ‘Paul used to tell me that we forgive not because we have to, but because we have a choice.’ He popped the meat into his mouth. ‘I didn’t get it then and I still don’t.’ He looked up, smiled.

Rachel was staring at him, a strange expression on her face. ‘What did you just say?’

Jack thought perhaps he’d offended her. He tried to explain. ‘It’s just, he used to talk about it sometimes. I’d get drunk and bore him half to death after work in the pub about it. How I was sure Julia had betrayed me, that I couldn’t get beyond it. And he had some interesting thoughts on the whole thing.’

‘Like what?’ There was a quiet urgency in her voice; in the way she sat forward in her chair to listen.

‘Like … well …’ He was thrown by her sudden intensity. He tried to remember clearly. He could picture them, sitting at the far end of the bar in the pub round the
corner from the office, the Wig and Gown. He could see Paul clearly, sleeves rolled up, pushing his thick grey hair back from his face, his intelligent dark eyes, filled with patience, and the compassion in his voice, tempered by an ironic, almost cockney directness. How many hours had he sat with Jack, listening to his litany of fears and resentments; keeping him company while he wrestled with their unseen meaning, twisting them round like a Rubik’s cube he couldn’t quite work out? Concentrating, he tried to be faithful to that memory and to Paul’s words. ‘Like he’d say to me, “You have no reason to forgive. No one would blame you if you never forgave her again in your life. And of course I could tell you that you would feel better if you did, that you might live longer, not be so angry, feel better physically and so on. But I know right now you don’t care about that stuff.’” He smiled. ‘You know the way he talked.’

‘Yes.’ Her features were shadowed by some private memory. ‘Go on.’

‘His point was this. We forgive not because it’s easy or the right thing to do, but that the choice to forgive is in itself powerful. It’s an affirmation, a willingness to take life on life’s terms. And a privilege that no one can take from you. It’s one of the things that sets you apart from the rest of nature and connects you to the divine. Animals can’t forgive; they’re victims to what happens to them in life. They can’t make a conscious decision to accept something offensive to them, something adverse and unfair. They
can’t decide to integrate it into who they are and move beyond their aversion to it. See, he talked a lot about that too. He kept saying, “You have to swallow it whole, Jack. The more you try to hold it at arm’s length, to be rid of it, the more poisonous it becomes. And what you’re really holding at arm’s length is life—the realisation that this too is part of life. It’s much easier just to swallow it, like an oyster. It becomes part of you, and if you don’t resist it, it makes you stronger.’”

‘It becomes part of you,’ Rachel repeated quietly, to herself.

She turned her face away.

She thought she’d been alone in her guilt and regret. Paul could’ve walked away, certain that he was in the right. But in fact, the load was shared, carried between the two of them. He’d swallowed it. They, or rather the relationship, had digested it whole.