Lovers and Liars Trilogy (13 page)

She thought back, trying to recall every small detail of those two occasions on which she had encountered Hawthorne herself. The second, the previous year at Mary’s party, told her nothing beyond the fact that Hawthorne was now an accomplished, experienced politician. But the previous occasion—what about that?

She could remember it vividly. The meeting had taken place at the house Mary then lived in, in Kent. It was the end of the Easter holidays, and Gini was due back at her boarding school that afternoon. A friend from school had been staying, and the two of them were taking the train back together.

John Hawthorne was due to arrive for a brief visit that afternoon, and both she and her friend had been excited by that. Gini might never have met Hawthorne, but she knew of him from Mary’s stories; she had seen photographs of him—and had showed them to her friend. They had both been thirteen at the time, and had agreed, with much giggling, that this young, handsome, and then unmarried American was, as her friend put it, a
dish.

“How old is he?” said Gini’s friend, whose name was Rosie.

“Too old for us. He’s thirty something.”

“Great. I like older men.”

“Don’t be a moron. He won’t ever notice we’re there. Two stupid schoolgirls…”

Rosie had given her a sideways look.

“Oh, I don’t know. You look older. You look pretty good. I wish I had long blond hair. Still—you wait. When I’m introduced, I’m going to give him my
look.
Then I’m going to lick my lips.”

They both gurgled with laughter.

“Lick your lips? Why?”

“I read it in this magazine. You have to look them right in the eye when you do it. It drives men
wild,
totally crazy with lust, the magazine said.”

“Okay. I dare you.”

And, of course, that was all bravado and silliness. The actual meeting had been nothing like that. John Hawthorne was late arriving. She and Rosie grew bored with waiting. They went into the garden and played tennis on Mary’s old, cracked court. It was a very hot, sunny day, and Gini said she’d go back to the house for some lemonade. She ran across the terrace, in through the French doors at the back of the house, carrying a pink cardigan which she threw down onto a chair, and paused in the doorway, out of breath, to refasten one of the buttons on her short white tennis dress. She started across the cool of the room, and then stopped dead.

He was there. John Hawthorne was actually there. He was alone in the room—Mary must have gone to fetch tea—and he was standing, looking at her, a slight smile on his face.

He was, at that point, quite simply the most handsome man she had ever seen in her young life. Much more handsome than he appeared in photographs. Photographs might convey the color of his hair, his tan, the extraordinary sharp blue of his eyes, but they could not convey his vitality, his force. He could only have been American: He radiated a peculiarly American fitness and health. Gini stared at him, and then to her fury, started to blush. It was a habit she was trying to overcome. She had thought she had almost succeeded, but now she could feel the color sweep up from the scoop neckline of her dress, to her neck, to her face. If only he would stop staring, she thought to herself. It was that intent stare, now unsmiling, though still amused, considering, which was making her blush. At which point, when with a thirteen-year-old’s passion she was telling herself it would be better to die, right then, he held out his hand to her and spoke.

“And you must be Genevieve,” he said. “Nice to meet you, at last, Genevieve.”

He shook her hand. He looked her up and down: the scuffed tennis shoes worn with no socks; her long legs, her old mended tennis dress; her hair, tousled and damp from her exertions on the court, blond tendrils clinging to her forehead. To her total astonishment, he lifted his hand, and with one finger he pushed one of these damp curls back. He looked so deeply into her eyes that Gini told herself she was going to faint. Then he stepped back and laughed.

“Well, it was obviously some game of tennis. Did you win?”

At that moment Mary returned with the tea tray and started in on train time tables. Gini fled back to the garden, and Rosie, who was lying on the grass, flat on her back.

“Oh, my God.” Rosie sat up. “He’s
there,
isn’t he? I can tell from your face. Why didn’t you call me, you pig. What’s he like?”

“
Devastating
,” said Gini—it was that year’s word.

“What did he do?”

“Shook hands. Then he lifted this little bit of hair off my face….”

“No! Were you looking like a beetroot then? You look like one now. Quick, let’s go back….”

They went back. Rosie was impressed. She was so impressed she forgot to give him the
look,
or lick her lips. Like Gini, she stared at the floor and went red. They talked over this major, this significant event the whole way back to school. In the dormitory at night they boasted about the meeting shamelessly. They cut out pictures of John Hawthorne from
Time,
and pinned them up next to their beds. The infatuation was heady, intense. It lasted about two months, perhaps three, and then—in the ways of things—they gradually forgot this young American god, and the infatuation wore off.

So, yes, Gini could remember that meeting well, and she had no intention of describing the details of her own foolishness to anyone, least of all Pascal. Looking back at it now, she could see it for the unremarkable thing it was. Her own emotions at the time had magnified it. Once she analyzed what had happened, she could see that Hawthorne probably guessed what was going on and was amused.

He had been, in the half-hour before she and Rosie finally left, polite, considerate, urbane—and utterly on the other side of that barrier between the young and the grown-up. Mary had probably shared his amusement—Gini could recall their exchanging wry looks as she and Rosie stammered their way through blushing, inarticulate replies to Hawthorne’s questions about their school and the subjects they had been studying.

Gini sighed, and stood up. She pushed this unhelpful memory to one side and gathered up the press clippings. What she needed now was more direct testimony, she decided: an update on the Hawthornes, as seen by someone who knew them well.

It was eight-thirty. There was still time that evening. She dialed her stepmother’s number, hoping that for once Mary would be in. Mary was fighting a tough battle against the loneliness and grief of her widowhood. She saw friends, and went out, as often as she could.

Mary answered on the third ring. On hearing Gini’s voice, she gave a laugh of delight.

“Oh, it’s
you,
darling. How lovely. What? No—absolutely nothing. Sitting curled up on the sofa, watching that new American soap—the one that’s so bad it’s good…. I’d love to see you, darling. I’ll make us some sandwiches…. What? Half a pizza?
Again?
Gini, when will you learn? Wonderful, darling. Come at once….”

“I suspect,” Mary said, ushering Gini into the large untidy room that had once been her artist grandfather’s studio, “I
suspect
that the third wife is going to murder the second wife because they’ve both been having a
huge
affair with the husband’s son by his
first
wife….”

She moved across to the television, where the credits for the soap opera were now rolling. She switched it off.

“On the other hand,” she went on, “it could be that the son’s the real villain. He could be setting up wife number three, because although he’s been having this mad affair with her, he’s actually gay and loathes all women….”

“It sounds complicated, Mary.”

“Terribly.” Mary gave her a smile of pure delight. “Complicated tosh—just the kind I like. In the end it will all resolve itself, it always does. Then I’ll know who was really bad, and who was really good. I like to keep that clear. None of this modern muddying of the waters…Now, what will you have to drink?”

“Coffee would be fine.”

“You drink too much coffee. You eat too many take-away meals. It’s good to have a chance to feed you once in a while. You sit by the fire, and I’ll just finish making those sandwiches. Then we can sin. There’s a chocolate mousse.”

Gini smiled. She knew better than to argue, she knew better than to bother Mary in her kitchen. She sat down by the huge fire, as commanded, and looked around the familiar room with pleasure. Just to be here, as always, brought a sense of contentment, of safety. At Mary’s she could always relax.

Gini could not remember her own mother, who had died when Gini was little more than a baby. She could—just—remember the succession of nannies and friends who had been roped in by her father to look after her when she was a small child. It was not a period she liked to recall. But she could remember, with great clarity, the advent of Mary in her life.

Gini had been five, and one day Sam had arrived home with this impulsive, untidy, plain-spoken young Englishwoman. It had been a whirlwind romance—and this, he announced to Gini, was his new wife. Gini had liked Mary then; she had come to love her rapidly, for Sam was always away and it was the first time any one person had stayed long enough to
be
loved. She had loved, and trusted, Mary ever since.

Five years after that marriage, Mary finally decided that Sam’s infidelities, his long absences abroad, and his increasingly heavy drinking could not be tolerated any longer. She had made this clear to Sam, without rancor, and they had duly—and quite amiably under the circumstances—divorced. Gini had spent the next year in Washington; of that year, her father was abroad for nine months. A new succession of friends and nannies was left to manage—and when Mary discovered this, she had told Sam in her clear, firm way that this would not do.

Since he could not cope, Gini would go to England to live. She would attend Mary’s old school. She would live with Mary, who then, years prior to her second marriage, lived alone in reduced financial circumstances, in the country, in Kent. Sam was supposed to visit regularly, and did—for the first year. Then his good intentions slipped away; the excuses began. Mary would nag and cajole and argue, and Sam would say: “Sure, sure. Give me a break, will you? I’ll visit on my way back.”

Then he would take off, to the Middle East, or the Far East, or Afghanistan, or wherever, and sometimes he would remember to visit, and sometimes he would forget.

But Mary, always, was there. When Gini thought of her now, she felt none of the muddle and pain associated with her love for her father: Her feelings for Mary were simple and calm; they had remained so throughout the period of Mary’s second marriage, which occurred when Gini was seventeen, and they remained unaltered now, though intensified, at this time of Mary’s widowhood. For Mary she felt love, and also an absolute trust. On only one occasion in her past life had she ever kept anything from Mary: She had never told Mary what had happened to her that summer when, caught up in the confusion and striving of adolescence, she had run off to Beirut.

My one secret, Gini thought now, looking around her. She felt a little anxiety at that, but it swiftly passed. This room calmed her, even lulled her. Mary had the gift of imparting happiness, and this room was very like Mary herself.

It was attached to the side of Mary’s tall, rambling Kensington house; it was where Mary now opted to spend most of her time. It was here that she held her frequent and famous parties, with their catholic mix of guests. It was here that Mary devoured her favorite crime novels, or worked on the watercolors she liked to call her “daubs.”

The room was spacious, generous, shabby, and without pretension. It spoke of Mary’s past, of her strong affection for family and friends. Mary’s greatest quality was her loyalty, Gini thought: Warmly and undeviatingly loyal to her living friends, she was equally loyal and loving toward the dead.

The room was filled with mementos from Mary’s childhood and with her grandfather’s huge Victorian oils, her diplomat father’s books. Somehow they had been crammed in beside the magpie spoils of Mary’s own life—the Italian ceramics, the Moroccan rugs, the little rickety brass tables brought back from the Far East. Mary was an inveterate traveler with a keen eye for a bargain. “What I cannot resist,” she would sometimes wail, “is junk.” So, here, cheek by jowl with inherited Chippendale, was a terrible vase, picked up in some bazaar; here, too, was a fat pink china cat of unparalleled ugliness bought by Gini for Mary’s birthday—a long-ago birthday in Washington, D.C., when Mary and Sam were still married, and Gini, already devoted to her new English stepmother, was aged six.

Here, too, was more evidence that, for Mary, love and affection were of far greater importance than taste: a ghastly and vulgar piece of Steuben glass presented by Sam to compensate for one of his “flings,” as he called them. Here, more happily, was all the impedimenta of Mary’s second marriage: bits of fishing rods and reels, a mounted stag’s head with the date on which Sir Richard shot it engraved on a plaque beneath. Here were Richard’s books, Richard’s pipes, his chess set, all the objects he and Mary had acquired abroad on his various diplomatic postings. “Don’t they make you sad?” Gini had asked a few months after his death, and Mary had been astonished by the question.

“Sad? Of course not, darling. How could they? They bring him back.”

Gini sighed, feeling guilty. She had not done enough to help Mary through her first year of widowhood, she felt sometimes. She saw Mary as often as she could, when work did not take her away from London, but on occasion she felt that she failed Mary, nonetheless. It was as if Mary needed some comfort Gini herself could not give, as if her own ability to show love were constrained, even with Mary, to whom she had been so close for most of her life. Sometimes Gini would ask herself when she had first become wary of showing emotion. Was it since Beirut, or in Beirut, that she had become guarded—or did the damage begin much further back?

From the small kitchen beyond the studio came the rattle of plates. Impetuously, suddenly angry with herself, Gini rose to her feet. She went out to the kitchen, put her arms around Mary, and gave her a kiss. Mary returned her hug, then laughed.