The Sweet Caress (10 page)

That settled, they started their search and finally decided to go for a black convertible 1928 Mercedes Benz tourer that a New York dealer was selling. It was big, Luke called it a mountain of a car, but it had great style and was built for serious long-distance travel. Jessica thought it would be perfect for a long ramble through the length and breadth of China, when Luke could take a six-month sabbatical. The car had a romantic history, according to the details that the dealer sent them. Its former owners included a Balkan king who had given it to his mistress, a male movie star who had been presented with it by his leading lady who was desperately in love with him, a Texas oil man, and an English lord who had been given it by his bride on their wedding day. It was from him that the New York dealer had bought it.

The decision made, there was but one thing more to do,
and that was view it. Luke drove Jessica to the station twenty-five miles from Newbampton, where she could catch a train to New York.

‘I wish I was going with you, Jessica, but it’s just not possible for me to cancel my patients’ appointments.’

‘Not to worry, darling. If I like it and it’s all the brochure and the salesman claim it is, I’ll drive it back with one of the showroom’s salesmen and be home before dark. Then we can look at it together and decide whether or not to purchase it.’

‘And if you don’t like it or only half like it?’ asked Luke.

‘I somehow don’t think that’s going to happen. But if I have any doubts I’ll call you from the showroom and we can discuss it. If you don’t hear from me, then you’ll know I’m on the road and driving home.’

At the railway station they stood together on the platform holding hands. More than one head turned to look at the handsome couple as they gazed into each other’s eyes. The love that shimmered between them brought a moment of beauty to the drab station.

‘For all the days of my life, I’ll remember the way you look right now at this very moment: beautiful, sensuous, full of life and dreams just waiting to be fulfilled. The longer I know you, the more I treasure love and life,’ Luke said as he gathered her in his arms and they heard the screech of the train’s whistle, saw it in the distance coming down the track towards them.

‘My handsome, sentimental husband, light of our life, master of our souls. I adore you. See you in time for dinner,’ she told him, and they parted, she to hurry down the platform alongside the still moving carriages.

The train stopped only briefly and Jessica vanished into the carriage only seconds before it rolled on. There was no time to wave goodbye.

New York was bright and sunny. As soon as she arrived,
Jessica called the 57th Street car showroom and made an appointment to see the car at three that afternoon. She hoped to leave Manhattan in it no later than three thirty, and beat the traffic. She was assured that Mr Tucket the salesman would be ready to leave with her. She lunched alone in the Oak Room at the Plaza and decided to take a walk through Central Park before going to the showroom. It had been four years since she had been in New York. The city still buzzed with excitement. Pierre used to say that it was as if the city had been sprayed with adrenaline.

Jessica was momentarily taken aback. She had not thought of Pierre in years, of any of her past life. She walked on, unnerved that he should intrude on her even in one small thought.

Her distraction cost her dearly. She did not notice that she was being followed by two youths on skateboards. One zipped sharply past her and swung round to block her path. The other pushed up against her, jumped off the skateboard and hit her with it on the side of her head as she swung round to confront him. She struggled with him as he grabbed her handbag. He hit her again, hard, and pulled the rings off her fingers. Her last thought as the pain closed in on her was of her husband. ‘Luke,’ she cried out and then lost consciousness.

NEW YORK, LONDON,
JUAN-LES-PINS
1995–1996

Chapter 6

A voice kept shouting, ‘Can you hear me? Tell me your name. Do you know what day this is, where you are? Come on now, open your eyes. Do you know who you are?’

Her lips were dry. She licked them. Someone was rubbing her hand. She felt unwell, disorientated. She tried to open her eyes but it required just too much effort, and still the shouting kept on.

‘For god’s sake, I’m not deaf and of course I know my name,’ she snapped, and drifted off again into a half-conscious state.

Someone slapped her gently and continuously on the hand until at last she opened her eyes. She was taken aback to see two white-coated men and several nurses hovering over her, drips and wires connecting her to machines. An oxygen mask covered half her face.

‘Do try and tell us your name,’ shouted one of the doctors.

‘I can hear you, I can hear you. There’s no need to shout!’ she murmured testily.

‘Try to stay awake, don’t drift away again,’ said the other doctor in a normal voice.

She tried to remove the mask but a nurse gently stopped her. She felt bruised and in more shock than pain, frightened because she had no idea where she was or how she came to be there. A second nurse stroked her hair, adjusted a bandage on the side of her head and the mist clouding her brain seemed to lift a little.

‘That’s better. Your name. Can you tell us your name?’

‘Candia Van Buren,’ she answered.

‘Good,’ said the doctor.

‘What’s your date of birth?’ asked the second doctor.

Candia thought that was rather a silly question but she understood that they were testing her reactions, examining the state of her mind. She gave her date of birth and everyone round the bed seemed relieved.

‘How do you feel?’ asked the doctor.

‘Very odd,’ she answered.

‘Well, I’m not surprised. You took a terrific bash on the head – two, in fact.’

‘Who bashed me?’ Candia asked in a weak voice.

‘Don’t you remember what happened?’

‘No. Not a thing.’

‘You were mugged in Central Park eight hours ago. You are concussed and have two badly bruised fingers, presumably received when they pulled the rings off your fingers. Oh, and they got your handbag. You remember nothing of this?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But your name is Candia Van Buren.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where you live?’

‘I live at the Carlisle when I’m in New York. I have a house in London and a flat in Hong Kong.’

‘Do you remember walking through the park? My name, by the way, is Dr Twining and I’m one of the consulting neurologists here at Mount Sinai Hospital.’

‘No. I don’t remember what day this is either. I think you asked me that before. I don’t even remember why I’m in New York.’

‘Is there somewhere we can call to check your identity?’

‘The Chase Manhattan Bank, Mr David Rockefeller or the bank manager who tends my account, number 49828768.’

‘Good. Well, I think that’s enough for now. I’ll come back later. In the meantime, is there someone you want me to call?’

‘No. I don’t think so. Not for the moment.’ She felt incredibly weary.

The nurses hovered after the doctors left the intensive care ward where Jessica had been taken on her arrival at the hospital. She was given a drink and made more comfortable and they asked her to try and rest.

Candia felt too shattered to do other than what the nurses asked. Her mind seemed empty, she had trouble assembling her thoughts. She felt an inexplicable despair and she wanted to cry. She felt somehow lost, unable to keep her emotions together. At least she had been able to remember her bank account number, which was encouraging, and David, who was a friend, would identify her. Why hadn’t she called for Pierre to come to her side? Or Yves for that matter? The moment she questioned it, the answer came to her. Of course, she was finished with Pierre and Yves. She had left them in Hong Kong. But when was that and what was she doing in New York? She could remember nothing except looking back at Pierre’s house as she fled from him, that Pierre and Yves had deceived her.

But what was she doing in New York? The question haunted her. Then things got terribly confused in her mind. She simply could not string anything together to make any sense. There were huge gaps. Everything seemed to slip from her mind and she spiralled downwards into a void.

Time passed in a haze. She had no sense of how long she had been lying in the hospital bed watching and listening to the comings and goings of the intensive care nurses and doctors. She felt as if she was in a cinema watching the beginnings of a melodrama and expected to see one of the old-time greats, Betty Davis or Joan Crawford, lying in the next bed. She even raised herself from her pillows to check the person in the bed next to her. It was not an old movie queen, but a male cardiac patient. She rang the buzzer. In seconds, a nurse appeared.

‘I want to get out of this bed! I’m just bruised and
battered. I don’t belong in intensive care, surely.’

‘No, you don’t, not now anyway. We’re making a room ready for you now. You’ll be moved soon,’ said the nurse firmly but kindly.

‘I want to go home.’

‘Not today, maybe in a few days. I don’t think you understand, you’ve had a tremendous shock, your whole body shut down for a few hours. You need care. We will monitor your progress and if all is well, maybe in a few days you can go home.’

The despair that had been lurking in Candia’s mind now took possession of her. She felt overwhelmed by it and burst into tears. The nurse tried to comfort her, to find out what was so very wrong.

It was some time before she was able to bring her patient sufficiently under control for Candia to ask, ‘Please, I need to see Dr Twining, something terrible is happening to me.’

The nurse did not question Candia’s request. She rang for help. Another nurse arrived and was instructed to get the duty doctor in if Dr Twining could not be found. The first nurse stayed with Candia, doing her best to keep her calm, and urged her to try and tell her what was wrong, that maybe she could help until the doctor arrived.

‘I can’t seem to put the pieces together. The last thing I remember is leaving a friend’s house in Hong Kong. But when was that? Yesterday, a month, a year ago? What day is it?’

‘Tuesday,’ answered the nurse.

‘I can’t even figure out what month it is,’ Candia told the nurse.

Dr Twining approached her bed. The nurse took him aside and Candia listened to the whispered conversation but she could not make sense of what they were saying. She kept drifting back to Pierre Lavall and her departure from his house high up on the hill overlooking Hong Kong. He had been essential to her life for so many years. She had
loved him more than life itself, or so she had thought. She could remember how she had allowed him to enslave her in the name of sex and love until she realised that much as she had wanted to match him in his depravity, she could not. She could only vaguely remember plotting and planning escape routes so she might vanish from his life without a trace, for she knew he would never let her go voluntarily. He considered her his chattel to do with as he pleased. He had told her he intended to keep her to the death, that he would track her down if she ever left him. But her escape plans were now no more than jumbled ideas, they made no sense to her. What had happened to her after she left his house? Where did she go? What did she do?

A chair was brought for the doctor. He sat down and took Candia’s wrist in his hand, his fingers found her pulse and she began to cry again. Two cups of tea were brought, one for the doctor and one for Candia. Dr Twining motioned to the nurse and Candia’s bed was cranked up so that she could comfortably drink her tea.

‘Do you feel well enough for us to have a talk?’ asked Dr Twining.

‘I feel more frightened than unwell,’ answered Candia.

‘Frightened of what?’

‘There are huge gaps in my memory. I don’t remember anything that has happened to me since I left Hong Kong.’

‘When was that?’

‘On a Wednesday, yes, on a Wednesday in … in October, it was in October.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

Candia felt cheered by the doctor’s enthusiasm. ‘What’s the date today?’ she asked.

‘September the twenty-seventh, nineteen ninety-five,’ he answered.

‘That’s not possible!’

‘I assure you it is,’ replied the doctor.

Candia placed her hand to her forehead and closed her
eyes. She gathered her strength together, pulled it up from she knew not where, and held tight to her emotions, willing herself to work out what was happening to her. When she opened her eyes, there were tears in them but she forced herself to hold them back. She wanted control of herself, control of her life again.

She clenched her hands together and looking directly at Dr Twining she told him, ‘I walked away from a house on a hill in Hong Kong on October the fifth, nineteen ninety-one. That’s the last thing I remember.’

Late afternoon the following day, Candia, accompanied by her banker Ian Holeness, were driven, against Dr Twining’s recommendation, in a large and comfortable limousine to Kennedy Airport. There Ian Holeness handed Candia her passport and other items she had stored in a safe deposit box at the bank. He assured her that her account and all her investments had been kept safe during the last four years and that at no time had he released any of her assets to Pierre Lavall or her former partner the Baron Yves Marmont, both of whom had made inquiries about her at the bank. Then he bade her farewell.

During the Concorde flight from New York to London Candia tried to come to terms with the loss of four years of her life. They were simply not there to remember. She tried to put those lost years out of her mind and get herself settled back into the life she did know and had once been so happy in.

Before leaving New York she had called Dan Chin, her mother’s old houseboy who she felt certain would not have abandoned her Knightsbridge residence no matter how long she might have been away. The telephone had rung for a long time but when at last she had heard his soothing voice, she knew all would be well. He had asked for no explanations, merely said it was good to hear her voice again and to know she would soon be back in London.

The flight attendants kept a close eye on her and ensured she had everything she needed to make her journey comfortable. At the airport a car, organised by Dan Chin, was waiting for her and soon she was speeding into London. The sight of her house and Dan Chin waiting to greet her made her smile. She was home now and Dan would make her well again.

After a week of rest her body began to heal, even if her memory didn’t. The consultants came and went and declared that time, rest, picking up the pieces of her life and living it well would do much to help her memory return, not all at once but most probably in bits and pieces. Today, tomorrow, a month, a year, no one could predict when, but slowly and surely the lost years would be found.

This was not a happy diagnosis for Candia. As she put a life of sorts together, there was always that haunting feeling that she had lost something more precious than she had ever had. She didn’t dwell on the lost years and what they might have meant to her but without warning she would find herself drifting away from the present into a void. It was disconcerting, and to combat it she felt compelled to chase after happy times, to travel, to enjoy an erotic life of pleasure, though always at the back of her mind was the knowledge that she was running away from that void.

She did not, however, run away from Pierre or Yves. On the contrary, when the time was right, she was determined to contact them.

Slowly at first, Candia began to get to grips with her life. First she called Ian Holeness to thank him and the bank for all that they had done for her. Her next calls were to several antique collectors to explain that she was back from a long sabbatical and would soon be offering them some interesting pieces. They were as polite as always, delighted to hear from her and eager to see what artefacts she might have for them. It amazed her that her disappearance for four years meant so little to them.

She found it less easy to call her girl friends. She used to shop with them, lunch with them, party with them, but there was no real bond between them. Her obsessive love for Pierre, her addiction to sex and her forays into the very private world of depravity she shared with him inevitably excluded them. Her only real bond had been with Pierre. Nevertheless, she re-established contact with her girl friends and to her surprise and delight they opened their arms to her, genuinely pleased to hear from her again. They were riveted by the fact that she had been mugged in New York and appalled that the consequences meant she had lost four years of her life. They were a tremendous help in getting her back on her feet again.

On a cold and rainy morning, while she was sitting by the fire drinking hot chocolate, she decided it was time to call Pierre. Without further thought, she dialled his mobile number; it would reach him wherever he might be.

The sound of his voice! She was quite shocked to realise how much it still meant to her.

‘Hello?’ he said again, a hint of impatience in his voice.

‘Hello, Pierre, it’s Candia,’ she answered.

There was a long silence. Did he think she had risen from the dead? she wondered.

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

‘When you run away from someone you don’t call them, Pierre,’ she answered.

‘Then you’re no longer running away from me?’ he asked. That delicious French accent, the sexy voice, was as enchanting as ever.

‘It would seem not.’

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘London. Where are you?’

‘In Paris. I must see you. Will you come to me or shall I come to you?’

Was there a note of urgency in his voice? She thought there was. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

‘I’ll come to you. I can be there in time for dinner.’

‘I don’t want you to come here, Pierre.’

‘You do want to see me, don’t you?’

Here was the manipulative Pierre: the question with a veiled threat in it – ‘If you want to see me at all it had better be immediately and on my terms.’