Lovers and Liars Trilogy (5 page)

The five-million-franc house lay ahead of him now, just up the street. It was what Helen called an “executive” house. It had seven bedrooms, all expensively furnished, and five of them unused. It had seven bathrooms, a kitchen like an operating theater, a four-car garage, and a view of desolate immaculate turf. It was a house that could have been built in any expensive suburb in the world. Pascal had seen others just like it, equally vulgar, in Brussels, London, Bonn, Detroit. Its bricks were an aggressive scarlet. He had loathed it on sight.

That morning there was a change in the routine. Normally, by tacit agreement, Pascal and Helen never met. At the end of a visitation weekend, Pascal would pull up outside the house. Helen, watching from the picture windows, would rush to the doorway and hold out her arms. Marianne would run inside, the door would close, and Pascal would drive off.

This morning was to be different, it seemed. Helen was waiting in the driveway, looking thin, elegant, and irritable. She kissed Marianne in a perfunctory way, and the child ran inside. Pascal wound down the window of his car.

In English, Helen said: “You’re late.”

“I know. I’m sorry. The traffic was bad.”

She raised her eyebrows in a small arc of reproachful disbelief. “Really? Well, it hardly matters. I have nothing else to do except wait around, as I’m sure you know. Could you come in for a moment? I’d like us to talk.”

“I can’t. I have an appointment in Paris in twenty minutes and I have to catch the flight to London at noon.”

“When don’t you have a flight to catch?” She turned away, faint color rising in her cheeks. “Nothing changes, it seems. Well, if you can’t spare me ten minutes of your time, I’ll do it through the lawyers. Slower, and more expensive, of course—but it’s your choice.”

At the word
lawyers,
Pascal switched off the engine. He climbed out, slammed the car door, and strode ahead of her into the house. In the kitchen he picked up the telephone and started dialing. He observed the cafetière filled with fresh coffee, the plate of pastries on the white marble kitchen worktop, the two white cups and saucers, the two plates.

Helen came into the kitchen and closed the door, a tiny smile of triumph on her lips. She frowned when she saw him at the telephone. “Who are you calling?”

“The magazine. I told you. I have an appointment. I’m now going to be late.”

She ignored this. While Pascal completed the call, she filled the two cups with coffee and carried them over to the table by the window. She placed a porcelain pitcher of milk and a porcelain sugar bowl in the center of its white, empty expanse.

“Do sit down,” she said as Pascal replaced the telephone. “Try not to glower. I shall keep this brief.”

Pascal eyed the coffee, the two waiting cups, this evidence of his ex-wife’s assumption that no matter how reluctant, he would eventually toe the line. He shrugged and sat down. “If you would be brief, I’d be grateful.” His tone was polite. “It’s important I catch this flight.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” She smiled. “It always was. When I look back on our marriage—something I try to do as little as possible, I might add—you know what I find the single most significant fact?
You were never there.
Whenever I or Marianne might have needed you, where were you? At an airport. In the middle of a war zone. In some flea-bitten hotel in the back of beyond, where the switchboard didn’t work. And if the switchboard
did
work”—she picked up a pastry and bit into it delicately—“you were never in your room. Odd, that.”

Pascal looked away. Keeping his voice level, he said: “That’s all ancient history. We’ve agreed not to go over it again. You knew when you married me—”

“When I married you I knew nothing at all.” Her voice became bitter. She composed herself almost at once. “However, as you say—ancient history. So I’ll come to the point. I want us to be civilized about this. You should know, I’ve sold the house.”

There was a silence. Pascal looked at her carefully. His stomach lurched. “This house?”

“Well, of course this house. It is the only one I have. And I find…I find it doesn’t suit.”

“Doesn’t
suit!
You chose it. It cost five million francs. You’ve lived in it less than three years and you find it doesn’t
suit
?”

“I have
endured
this house for three years.” Her color had risen. “And you will please keep your voice down. I don’t want Marianne to hear, or the nanny, come to that. I don’t want any more resignations. Marianne needs continuity, and these girls don’t like scenes.”

“Scenes?
Scenes?
” Pascal stood up. “Considering the wages I pay her, she could stand the odd scene, I’d think.”

“That was uncalled for. And uncouth.” Helen also rose. She had flushed scarlet. “I try to talk to you, in a reasonable manner, for five minutes…And this happens.”

She was shaking, Pascal saw. He looked at her for a long, slow moment. His former wife was virtually unchanged from the day he’d first met her, outside the UNESCO offices in Paris, where she worked as a translator. She had loved Paris then, or claimed to. A slender girl with sleek dark hair and a nervous, intense thin face, she had been wearing a dark coat, a scarlet scarf: He could still see her, standing on the sidewalk the day he met her. Their affair had been brief and fraught. They argued continually. Yet after the marriage there had been contentment as well as incompatibility, surely? The birth of Marianne, for instance. He said, surprising them both: “I loved you once.”

“Thanks for the past tense.”

She turned away. Pascal looked at her narrow back, at the strain in her shoulders. He had not meant to be cruel. The remark had sprung of its own accord to his lips. Then and now: The woman he had once loved stood three feet in front of him and yet did not exist.

“I’m sorry.” He started on a clumsy apology, then stopped. “You’re right. It’s better if we keep all this—”

“Businesslike?” She swung around with a scornful look. “I do
so
agree. That was exactly my point. So. I’ve sold the house. Shall we take it from there?”

Pascal stared at her. The announcement had taken him by surprise, and now he sensed that pain was about to be inflicted. His previous remark had probably insured the pain would be lingering. Helen’s face became set; her gaze slid away from his face.

“I’ve decided to return to England. Daddy’s promised to help find me a place. Somewhere in Surrey, we thought. Not too far from home. With the slump in the market over there, Daddy thinks we can pick up a bargain. Something really nice. Somewhere with a paddock, so Marianne can have a pony of her own. She’s mad about horses, did she tell you that?”

Pascal stared at his wife. There was perceptible triumph at the back of her eyes. He said, “You can’t do that.”

“Oh, but I can. Daddy’s talked to the lawyers. I’ve talked to the lawyers. We were married in England, Marianne was born in England…”

“You insisted on that…”

“She has dual nationality. I have custody. Daddy’s man says I have virtual carte blanche. I can take her anywhere I like.”

“You agreed!” Pascal could hardly speak. “You signed an agreement to bring her up here. You wanted to facilitate access, you
said
that. To me. To her grandmother…”

“Your mother’s dead.”

“You signed an agreement. You gave me your
word
!”

“Agreements can be renegotiated. I’m renegotiating now. The lawyers say you can object, but it will be expensive, and you’ll lose in the end. If it goes to a hearing, they’ll bring up the work you do now—the
nature
of your work. They’ll point out that you’re never around anyway, whereas I am—day in, day out.”

“I’m
always
here,” he burst out. “When I’m allowed to see her, I’m here. One evening a week. One weekend in four. In three years I’ve never missed one of those appointments, not one.”

“In fact,” she pressed on, her voice riding over the top of his, “the lawyers say your access might well be reduced. It would have to take place in England, certainly. Maybe France for a few weeks in the summer, but—”

“Why are you doing this?”

The question angered her. “Why?
Why?
Because I hate this country and I always did. I want to be back in my own country. I want to see my parents and my friends. I want to work again—”

“You can work here. Translators can work anywhere. You always said that.”

“I want to work
there!
I want to be with people I know, people I grew up with…”

“
I want. I want
…” He stepped back from her. “That’s all we have to consider, is it? What about Marianne? What about what she wants?”

“Marianne thinks it’s a lovely idea. A house in the country, ponies…”

“You’ve already discussed it? Jesus Christ.”

“Yes, I have. And if you must know, I asked her not to mention it to you, not just yet, not until we’d had a chance to discuss it.”

“Discuss it? You call this discussing it?” He could feel the anger rising in him uncontrollably now, and he could see an answering delight in his wife’s face. She relished her powers of provocation, he had always known that. He moved toward the door. If he stayed another five minutes in this terrible room, he knew he might hit Helen—perfect evidence in a court of law. She had never been able to accuse him of violence. Perhaps this, he thought, was her attempt to rectify that.

In the doorway, he turned back. He said, “I’ll fight you over this. No matter how long it takes. No matter what it costs. I’ll fight you inch by inch.”

“Your choice.” She turned away with a shrug.

“Helen, think. Just think.” He risked one last appeal, made an awkward gesture of the hand to her. “I’m her father. Don’t you want me to see her? Are you trying to exclude me?”

“Exclude you? Of course not. If you agree to my proposals, the visitation arrangements can remain the same. One evening a week. One weekend a month.”

“An
evening?
In England? In
Surrey
? What am I supposed to do, travel three hours every week to spend two hours with my daughter, then travel three hours back?”

Helen smiled. With beautiful politeness, she said, “But you
love
air travel, Pascal. You spend half your life on planes. Why not spend a little more?”

In the seventh-floor executive offices at
Paris Jour,
senior editor Françoise Leduc spread Pascal’s photographs across her conference table. Monochrome prints to the left, color to the right: a damning tableau. Pascal, whom she had known for many years, whose career she had launched fifteen years before, stood watching her. Françoise, who had in her younger days been painfully in love with him, was puzzled by his manner. He had just presented her with a magazine sensation, a newsstand sellout, yet he showed little interest. His manner was abstracted and tense.

“You’re smoking too much, Pascal,” she said in the mothering tone she had adopted years before as the safest device to defuse the attraction she felt.

“I know. You’re right.”

He gave a half-shrug and extinguished this, his second cigarette in ten minutes. He moved toward the window and looked out at a wintry sky.

Françoise could see the tension in his back. She hesitated. They were good friends and colleagues now, she and Pascal, and Françoise valued that. It was a triumph she had earned by virtue of iron control. For five, six, seven years—maybe more—she had hidden her feelings for this man absolutely, never betraying them by the least gesture or inflection. No one had ever suspected, least of all Pascal himself. A handsome man, he was without vanity—a rare gift. Perhaps also a little lacking in imagination. Françoise smiled to herself. Pascal, always absorbed, dedicated to his work, had a priestlike quality. If he even noticed the reaction he provoked in women, he ignored it; but Françoise suspected he noticed nothing, was curiously blind to his own often dramatic effect.

Her sacrifice had been worth it. Françoise was a pragmatic woman. At fifty, she valued the long-term benefits of friendship to any short-term gains that might have accrued from an affair. She had hidden her feelings and her reward was Pascal’s trust.

She glanced down at his photographs, then looked back at Pascal, a slight frown of puzzlement on her face. She could still remember vividly the first time she had encountered him, an unknown twenty-year-old photographer newly returned from his first trip to Beirut, standing there in this same office, talking, gesturing, spilling photographs across her desk.

She had seen him as a favor to a mutual friend, and assigned him ten minutes in her packed schedule. The ten minutes had expanded to half an hour; the half-hour, after some last-minute cancellations, had expanded into lunch. When this extraordinary young man finally left her some four hours later, she sat in the restaurant, shaken: This was unprecedented. Why had she done this?

Because his photographs were exceptionally good? That was true, certainly, and she’d run the pictures over six pages the following week—so, yes, there were professional reasons. But there were other reasons too—powerful reasons, and not sexual ones either, for Françoise was too disciplined a professional for that.

The only explanation she could find at the time was something she had seen in his face: innocence, youth, passion, dedication. An unswerving conviction expressed in a whirl of sentences, confirmed by blazing eyes in a pale, intent face, that he was presenting Françoise with a gift beyond price—not just any photographs but documentation, evidence, truth.

He had been very young, very naive, very inexperienced, and very gifted. The combination cut Françoise to the quick. As he talked about Beirut, and the violence he had seen there, Françoise was forced to look at herself. She saw all the compromises, the adjustments she made in the day-to-day course of her work; she saw the creeping nature of her own professional cynicism. What had she said to her secretary before Pascal arrived?
How boring. It won’t take five minutes. Just some kid with more bomb pictures. Who gives a damn? The last thing we need is more sob stuff from Beirut….

Then the young man had burst into her office, waving a banner, crying out for a crusade, waging some personal war against injustice, lies, and deceit. Françoise had listened and been chastened. She might be the more worldly of the two, but this twenty-year-old made her feel cheap.