Lovers and Liars Trilogy (117 page)

Lindsay was sitting in the kitchen when she heard the spurt of gravel as the Land Rover turned into Max’s drive.

She had been reading a story to Colin and Danny. In pajamas and robes, they were now curled slumberously on either side of her, fighting sleep. Max was in his study telephoning; Charlotte was upstairs supervising Alex and Ben’s bath. Lindsay closed the book. It was eight o’clock. Rowland and Gini had been gone several hours.

“Bed, you two,” she said. “You’re both half asleep. No, no arguments. Off you go.”

Danny gave her a wet smack of a kiss; he and Colin left obediently, hand in hand. Lindsay rose and paced the room. Ten minutes passed. What on earth were Gini and Rowland doing? Were they sitting talking in the dark?

Max had said, over tea, his manner very casual, that he was just wondering if Lindsay might be persuaded to give Rowland a lift back to London the next day. He himself, he said, had decided to return a little later than usual, on Monday morning, by train. If Gini was going to work on the Cassandra Morley story, she would want to stay on a day or two, to interview Cassandra’s and Mina’s friends. Max then began to discuss train timetables. Lindsay, thinking his manner was shifty and evasive, quickly realized the reason: Max thought this proposal would not please Rowland McGuire.

“Why can’t he take the train with you?” she asked.

“He just can’t, that’s all. I—he doesn’t like trains.”

“Why on earth not?”

“He’s—funny about them,” Max said, polishing his eyeglasses.

“He’s funny about a lot of things, if you ask me.”

“Come on, Lindsay. You can stand his company for a couple of hours, surely?”

“Oh, very well,” Lindsay said. “I’ve got something to tell him anyway.”

“You have?” Max looked interested.

“Yes. He gave me that file to look at, you remember? The one on Lazare? I’ve finished going through it, and I noticed something strange. I—”

“Damn. The phone’s ringing. It’ll be the news desk. Or Landis. Tell me later, Lindsay.”

Max disappeared. He had reappeared, several times, while Lindsay was reading to his sons, but had shown no inclination to question her further. Lindsay, nursing her discovery, was disappointed. Max was not interested in anything she had to say, she thought glumly. Rowland probably would not be interested either. She beat a tattoo on the kitchen table. Twenty minutes after hearing the Land Rover, she heard footsteps on the terrace at last.

Rowland and Gini entered on a blast of cold night air. Lindsay looked at them circumspectly. Rowland was helping Gini off with her coat; he made some remark Lindsay could not catch, and Gini smiled.

“Did you see Mitchell?” Lindsay began, determined not to be invisible.

“What?” Rowland was now removing his own overcoat. “Oh, yes, we did. And very useful it proved. Where’s Max?”

“So what do you think, Rowland?” Gini was saying. “One day here? One day should do it. Then I could go on to Amsterdam.”

“One day should certainly be enough. I doubt the school friends will have much to contribute—but they might. They could have heard about Star—it’s possible that either Cassandra or Mina had met him before.”

He stopped. Max had just entered the room, waving a piece of paper. Insofar as Max could ever look excited, he looked excited now.

“Breakthrough,” he said. “They’ve found the car. The police just called.”

“The BMW? Where?”

“Somewhere interesting.” Max’s glance intersected with Rowland’s. “In Paris, would you believe?”

“Paris? They’re sure?”

“It’s confirmed. It had been abandoned in the Pantin district, close to the
periphérique.
A humble
policier
found it around three hours ago.”

Max broke off; a telephone had begun ringing. Hearing Charlotte answer it upstairs, he turned back to Rowland.

“Yes, Paris,” he continued. “And given your previous information, Rowland, that’s an interesting choice of destination, wouldn’t you say?”

Lindsay, resigned to invisibility again, had been watching Rowland. He was slow to reply. The reason, she realized, was that his attention was on Gini. She was standing very still, her hands frozen in the act of removing her green scarf. She was listening to the murmur of Charlotte’s voice in the distance; her eyes were unnaturally bright, her face was tense and pale. She began to move as she heard Charlotte’s footsteps above. She was already running toward Max’s office as Charlotte shouted down the stairs: “Gini,” she called. “Quickly—he’s been trying to get through for hours. The line’s awful, but you can just hear him. Gini, quickly—it’s Pascal.”

T
HE CHURCH BELLS WOKE
Mina. They made their way into the dream she was having. At first, still inside the dream, she thought they were cowbells, and she was high in the mountains somewhere. Then they became sleigh bells, and she was flying across the snow under a fur rug, with Star by her side. Then the dream began to slip away, and she understood they were church bells, somewhere outside this Paris room. She stirred, opened her eyes, and began to remember. She remembered the room, the mattress on which she was lying, and the clean patchwork quilt that covered her, a quilt covered with navy-blue stars and scarlet hexagons.

She sat up, rubbed her eyes, then smiled: Star had said he was going out, that was it, and she should rest: well, now he had returned.

He was sitting opposite her on a small wooden chair, and he was watching her wake.

“What time is it, Star?”

“Time for the second Mass. Eight o’clock.”

“Mass? You mean it’s
Sunday
?”

“It’s Sunday. You were exhausted. It was a long drive. We had to find this place. You’ve been sleeping for hours and hours. You want some breakfast? There’s a café I know near here.”

“I am hungry. Maybe the pink jewel made me extra sleepy. I would like breakfast.”

“There’s a bathroom on the landing. You can use that. Look—I bought you a present while I was out. It’s a scarf. A blue scarf. It matches your eyes.”

He magicked the scarf out of his pocket; he magicked it into his hand. Mina saw that it was silk, and a most beautiful color, the color of a kingfisher’s wing. She gave a small cry of delight. Star rose and put it gently in her hand.

“Cover your hair with it,” he said. “Just for now. We have to be careful, Mina. Even here.”

Mina looked at him hesitantly.

“I will be able to call them soon, won’t I, Star? I don’t want them to worry. My mother—Star, if it’s Sunday now—she’ll just be frantic. I have to tell her I’m safe. It’s all right—I won’t say where we are…”

“Sure you can call them.” He smiled, and the room lit with his smile. “If you hadn’t been sleeping—you can call them from the café. It has a phone booth. Come on, little Mina.” He took her hands in his. “This is an adventure, remember? Our adventure. Later this morning—” He broke off, and Mina saw his face change.

“Later this morning, what?” she said, watching his eyes alter and darken.

“Later this morning I have an appointment, that’s all. I have to go out to the airport. Charles de Gaulle. While we’re there—you can decide. There’s hundreds of flights to London. One every hour—more. If you want, I’ll put you straight on a plane. You can be back home this afternoon.”

“I could?” Mina looked at him uncertainly. “Star, I don’t have any money for airfare. I don’t have any money at all. I gave all the money I had to Cassandra.”

“No problem.” He gave another of his conjuror’s movements, and there was money, fistfuls of it, in his hands.

“Francs, dollars, pounds—more than enough for a flight to England. Just say the word, Mina, and we can both leave. We can go anyplace in the world.”

“I couldn’t let you pay my fare.” Mina frowned. “I’d have to pay you back, Star.”

“Let’s not fight about it. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get out to the airport and you won’t want to go. Hurry up—it’s a fine day. We can sit in the café and watch the sun shine on Paris. Paris is one of the four most beautiful cities in the world.”

He made this pronouncement very seriously. Mina was impressed.

“Which are the other three?” she asked.

“Venice, New Orleans, and Hong Kong. One day I’ll take you to them. Maybe.”

“You know all those places?” Mina said, but he turned away as if suddenly bored.

“Sure,” he replied. “I’ve been around.”

Mina could tell she was dismissed. She was learning about Star, and one thing she’d learned was that his moods changed very suddenly. One moment he gave her this fierce attention, so it felt as if his blue-black eyes read her mind like a printout; the next moment, something happened: he blanked off, and his face closed.

She went out onto the landing, found the bathroom, washed, and combed her hair. It was a primitive bathroom, but then, this house was old. They were right at the top of it, on the attic floor, and the house itself was at the summit of a hill. Opening the window, she could see a dazzling roofscape, domes and slates and chimneys and spires. Star said this was a friend’s pad; he said they were in the student quarter, he said they were on the Left Bank, which was the best part of Paris, and they were near the Sorbonne.

Mina took her new blue scarf, which was so fine, like a scrap of summer sky, and tied it carefully over her red hair. She fixed it the way the traveler women fixed theirs, gypsy fashion, so it fastened at the back and came low on her forehead, just above her brows. It looked pretty, and she smiled at her reflection. She had washed off that silly hawk transfer, but she’d left the last of the gold paint on her eyelids, and she was still wearing Cassandra’s old black clothes. A skirt that was long and loose, halfway down her calves; an Indian shirt Cassandra bought in a thrift shop; a heavy jacket, also black, with black embroidery, that Cassandra’s mother had brought back from somewhere abroad. She looked so different now, so much older—and she felt older, too, as if in one day and two nights she’d come of age and traveled around the world.

She could not wait to tell Cassandra what had happened, where she had been. She could imagine the scene at school; she could hear her own voice:
Yes, we left at midnight, we drove all through the night. When we came to Paris, it still wasn’t dawn. We stayed at a friend’s place. Star has friends everywhere, he told me. He’s always traveling, Cass. I could have stayed there with him. He asked me to stay. He said
—
if we wanted, we could go right around the world…
She checked herself. Star was calling to her. She thought of her mother then, and her father, and the doubts resurfaced. She felt jittery, a little anxious and afraid.

Star took her to the café he knew, and they sat in the window. She began to feel calmer as she watched Paris go past.

“You’ve never been here, then?” Star said, watching her. She was eating chocolate croissants and drinking café au lait. He reached across and flicked a tiny piece of pastry that was stuck to her chin.

“No. Never. I always wanted to come. We’ve been all over—but always these really dull places. Air-base towns. Germany was worst. I hated Germany. My mother did too. We were stuck right out in the middle of nowhere, this horrible little place, all closed in with pine forests. Daddy was off working all the time. Or playing golf. He’s a golf fanatic. He has an eight handicap, so I guess he’s good at it, but Mommy and I nearly went crazy. We had cabin fever. Mommy says that’s what it’s called—”

She stopped. She must remember not to gabble and gush, she told herself. She could see Star didn’t like it, because it made his face close. Maybe she was boring him. He looked away; he began to fidget and tapped his fingers on the table, and she could tell—something was getting to him, because normally Star was so still.

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said in an abrupt way, and rose. Mina watched him thread his way past the tables and disappear in the direction of the men’s room. She sat there trying to finish the croissant, trying to watch Paris, but the delight had gone from the streets outside and the croissant suddenly tasted stale.

He was away a long time, ten minutes or more. When he came back though, she could tell at once that his good mood was restored. He sat down opposite her, fastening his shirt cuffs. His hands smelled of soap. He smiled at her with the special smile that made her feel they both had all the time in the world.

“In Germany…” He leaned forward and touched her hand. “Was that when the quarrels started? You remember you told me in the car?”

“Maybe.” Mina frowned. “I was only thirteen when we left there. We were there three whole years. It could have been earlier, and I didn’t notice, or I pretended it wasn’t happening. We were in Hawaii before Germany, and that was better. I’m not sure. I guess—they must have been happy sometime. When I was small. They really loved each other when they got married. Mommy told me. She said Daddy just swept her right off her feet, and—”

She stopped, fighting sudden tears.

Star watched her with that still, intent gaze he had. Then he took her hand in his. He said: “Mina. Love comes and goes. You have to learn that.”

“It doesn’t stay?” She looked away. “In books it does. In movies.”

“It might stay.” He lit a cigarette, drew on it, and exhaled. Mina watched him through the smoke’s blue coils.

“Everyone wants it to stay, for sure. That makes people strive too hard. They get anxious and stressed out. What you should do is just wait. Let it come. Hope it lasts. Just a little bit of love is worth having. There’s a whole lot of hate in this world.”

Mina continued to watch him closely. She thought his answer sounded wise, though it was not quite the answer she had been hoping for.

“Star,” she asked, “if it happens, when it happens—how can you know?”

In answer, he gripped her wrist hard, so hard it hurt her, and jerked her forward in her chair so she was leaning right across the table, and he was leaning right across the table, and his beautiful face was just inches from her own. “Look me in the eyes,” he said. “Go on. Look. Look properly, Mina. Let yourself see…”

Mina looked into his eyes the way he told her. The iris was very dark, almost black, and flecked with blue. She could see herself in his eyes, a tiny Mina, and then she lost herself and saw only his gaze, so the room vanished and it was like looking down into the ocean. She watched waves move; she watched this slow, hypnotic, deepening sea, and she trembled a little, then sighed.