Love and Death on Long Island (14 page)

There was nothing to be done for the instant but to pass on – I did not dare to show myself hanging about so on the street. I walked to the top of the hill just before it dipped again to enter the surrounding forest. It was that little summit, in fact, that seemed to demarcate the outer circumference of the town. By a stroke of great fortune for me, there was no habitation of any kind further out (unless one counted the odd isolated house in the hills), just hedgeless, uncultivated meadowland on one side, the forest on the other. From such a vantage point I would have a satisfactory view of every coming and going at no. 16 but it would be most unlikely if I were to be spotted in my turn; and were a car ever to approach me from either direction, then I would feign close interest, as might anyone out for a casual stroll, in some unusual roadside plant or shrub.

The vigil could well be long. Of all the humiliations I had heaped upon myself in the cause of my passion this, I knew, was quite the most ridiculous and grotesque, and risky – added to which, it might even prove to be ultimately fruitless. But I had come too far and was now
too close to satisfying my ambition to let myself be prejudiced by the mean-spirited polities of the common-sense cast of mind.

It was, in fact, a few minutes before three on that same day that it happened. The front door of no. 16 opened and Audrey appeared on the threshold. Even from my observation post I had no doubt at all that it was she. From where I spied upon her I saw that she wore slacks, a cape in a sombre tartan-like material, and was hatless. She turned the key in the lock and briskly walked over to the garage, at which point she disappeared from my view. After a moment the Porsche started to ease down the driveway, turned to the right, townwards, and drove off out of sight.

I immediately quitted my post and, half-walking, half at a run, set off in the same direction, down the hill towards Chesterfield. I slackened my pace only when passing in front of no. 16, for I couldn't countenance the risk of being observed moving at a speed unseemly for a man of my age and carriage. It was also my intention once more to run an eye over its façade. But nothing seemed to be stirring from within the house, which, when I reminded myself that Audrey had locked its front door behind her, was only what I ought to have expected.

On reaching the shopping precinct, I hunted in a fever this way and that, hunted like a dog that has been separated from its master, rushed from restaurant to bank, from bank to supermarket, in an ever more forlorn hope that the powder-blue Porsche would be sitting parked outside. I searched everywhere, thought even to explore a few of the other residential streets along the
outer perimeter in case she might be paying a visit to some local acquaintance, but in the end found myself cheated – the car was nowhere to be seen. Panting, quite unnerved, guessing that Audrey had most probably gone driving into East Hampton, I was forced to abandon my search for the day and wearily returned to the motel.

Later that evening, though, in a break with the routine that had now become almost second nature to me, I chose again to walk alone through Chesterfield's lamplit streets – all now entirely deserted, save for two half-empty restaurants – and found myself drawn on as though by chance to Jefferson Hill. I walked past no. 16. One of the three upstairs windows was illuminated; the garage door was closed.

It is likely that, in my haunted state of mind, I should not for too long have been capable of keeping up my vigil and been driven to some drastic and even irrevocable act of precipitation; but providence elected to favour my cause sooner than I could ever have hoped for. There was no trace of Ronnie himself in the house on Jefferson Hill. But three times after the incident I have described (two of these on a single day), while standing watch I had seen Audrey step outside, walk to the garage and drive away in the Porsche; and three times had I followed her in vain, red-faced and maddened with frustration. On the fourth occasion, however, arriving breathless and sweating in the centre of town, I all but stumbled upon the car in the parking space of a small supermarket a mere two doors away from Irving's diner.

This was the moment of truth. I could not turn back. The very idea of fumbling or declining to seize the
opportunity that now presented itself to me was unendurable. I had to go on.

I entered the supermarket. Near its entrance was a row of shopping chariots whose metal frames were neatly imbricated one within the next like staples in a stapling machine. I pulled one out for myself and, walking along the cool and colourful aisles, began to load it up with tins of processed vegetables, packets of breakfast cereals, stringy little netfuls of radishes and beet, indiscriminately and hardly paying attention to what I was about, my only care being to sight my quarry. There were few shoppers at that hour of day, most of them young mothers with their offspring straddling their chariots' little top-trays, and I did not have any difficulty catching up with Audrey.

Wearing a none too clean pair of jeans and a zippered black leather jerkin, she was strolling in a loose, slantwise fashion dead ahead of me. Every so often she would draw up at one of the shelves, take down a tin of something or other, turn it over in her hands – from her neck, I remarked, hung a pair of horn-rimmed glasses which she would prop on her nose when inspecting a label – and either replace it or drop it into her chariot. Then walked on, I just a few steps behind her.

We continued thus for several minutes more, Audrey moving at her own easy, loitering pace, I watchfully keeping my distance, waiting only for the chance to make my play yet also wondering whether, if such a chance were to arise, I would have the nerve to take advantage of it. And, almost at once, it did arise. For, when Audrey turned a corner, I momentarily lost sight of her; and then, following after, I saw that she had just
left her chariot unattended in the centre of the aisle and paused to bend over a long, low deep-freeze cabinet.

I braced myself for what I knew to be the impending moment, the now unstayable moment, of crisis and climax; I watched her as she lifted out of the freezer a cellophane-wrapped chicken and seemed to weigh it in her two hands; then, as though gone utterly mad, I grasped the cross-handle of my own chariot and sent it recklessly careening towards hers.

The two vehicles janglingly collided. Audrey, still holding the chicken in her hand, turned, startled, to see me standing there. But I, too, feigning to notice only now what had occurred, contrived on the instant to turn around from the shelves of dairy products to which I had just to all outward intents and purposes been directing my attention.

As I darted forward to extricate the two entangled chariot handles, I could not have been more profuse in apologies, more unmistakably British equally in manner and accent; and Audrey, whom the little incident had initially irritated – that it was so was visible enough on her features – now relaxed and let herself be charmed.

Doubtless, I said, blushing inwardly at my own mendacity, I had made an awkward movement which caused me to back off into my trolley. It was unforgivable of me to be so clumsy and – but (I gazed intently into her face) surely she and I had met before? Audrey stiffened at this, which she patently suspected of being an improper overture, and all the more reprehensible in that it had been made by so improbable a masher. She gave a curt shake of the head and prepared to turn away. But although such a slight would once have chilled me to the
marrow, and still made my heart painfully contract, I was by now a past master in the crafts of deception and felt myself to be impregnable. Why no, no, no, of course not, I went on, at first haltingly then with greater self-confidence, indeed, we had never met, it was quite simply that I recognised her from a photograph I had recently been shown. A photograph? So it was that I ‘explained' my error – and even though I had been tirelessly rehearsing it in my motel room, the explanation was something of a
tour de force
all the same.

I had, I explained, a godchild, a delightful eleven-year-old girl whom I enjoyed spoiling with birthday and Christmas gifts and invitations to the cinema and to tea at the Ritz. In London, naturally. Now this young darling – her name, by the way, was Alice – had one very favourite actor whose photographs she would obsessively clip out of fan magazines and whose films she had seen many times over. Yes, a now smiling and visibly relieved Audrey had already guessed the name of my godchild's hero. I went on. A few days before leaving London – I had travelled as far as Long Island to complete my new novel untempted by the capital's pleasures and distractions – I was a writer, yes – I had found little Alice quite woebegone. The poor thing had just learned that her idol was not for very much longer to be the ‘eligible bachelor-about-town' she worshipped from afar, and she had shown her godfather that snapshot of Ronnie and Audrey together that had blighted her childish dreams.

My tale, amusing, also rather sad in its way, and well told, enchanted Audrey and convinced her of the blame-lessness of my purpose in engaging her in conversation.
Embarrassed at having harboured such an unmerited suspicion, she cordially accepted my proffered hand and introduced herself. We went on strolling side by side, chatting congenially if still a little hesitantly, each of us in turn removing an item from off the shelves – indeed, so generously on my own part that when we reached the checking-out counter I discovered that I had encumbered myself with a chariot-load of groceries nearly as bountiful as hers.

It was at the counter that, having first carefully prepared the terrain, I started to speak of Ronnie himself, of
Tex-Mex
and
Skid Marks
(I couldn't bring myself to mention
Hotpants College II
), which I claimed to have seen when accompanying my godchild to the cinema. To be sure (I smoothly countered a mild protest on Audrey's part), these were films hardly destined for someone like myself. And yet I had been impressed, most impressed, by Ronnie's performances, I detected in them a physical presence and an emotional intensity that the somewhat impoverished material was not best designed to turn to account.

As a glowing Audrey nodded her head ever more vigorously, in agreement with opinions she herself had beyond a doubt voiced more than once, I passed on to the way in which Ronnie on film would appropriate the space around him, his nimble-footed yet slightly crab-wise gait, his timorous yet somehow defiant stance; I spoke of the youthful skittishness of the character he played in
Tex-Mex
and how it rendered for me the scene of his death all the more poignant; of his potential range and depth as a performer, which in my own view had as yet been underexploited. And if it would have struck a
wholly rational intelligence that there might be something suspect and not altogether plausible in an English writer in his late middle age holding such strong and well-informed opinions about a young, virtually unknown American actor – even a writer with, as I heard myself shamelessly claim, not a few important connections in the British film industry – Audrey was simply too dazed by my speech to let it be marred by scepticism.

We left the supermarket together, I laden with not merely my own bulging carrier bag but also with Audrey's, of which I had insisted on relieving her, and strolled across the empty car park to the powder-blue Porsche. If I failed now, I knew, it might be all up for me, for I could not tolerate the idea of renewing my surveillance of Jefferson Hill.

‘And – and where is Ronnie these days?' I enquired.

‘In L.A.,' was the reply. ‘He's due back day after tomorrow.'

‘Ah, indeed …' I said, the outwardly unruffled tone of my voice belied, if for no one but myself alone, by a wild flutter in my heart. ‘Then perhaps you'd convey the very best wishes of an admirer – or, should I say, two admirers. I refer to my godchild,' I added with an insipid smile.

Audrey nodded pleasantly and seemed on the point of taking her leave of me. I could not yet let her go. ‘Or perhaps,' I went on to suggest, ‘I might convey them in person.' I planned to stop at Chesterfield for a fortnight more at the least and would be delighted to meet her fiancé, who might find it in himself to soften little Alice's heartache by autographing a portrait photograph for her.
If Audrey were to give me a telephone number, I might ring in a couple of days and propose that they both lunch with me?

Audrey hesitated a while before answering. She was evidently tempted to have Ronnie meet a fan as articulate as I was yet made ill-at-ease by the notion of confiding his whereabouts to someone who was after all a complete stranger and possibly also troubled by the implication latent in my request that she and her fiancé were living together.

It would, she said at long last, be better if I were to give her my number, so that she and Ronnie might call me when convenient.

Since her telephone number was already in my possession, it wasn't the withholding of it in itself that left me somewhat restless and disgruntled. Rather, it was the absence on her part of wholehearted confidence in my sincerity – an affront at which my pride revolted even while my conscience told me it was well deserved; it was the horror on my part at the thought of being compelled to wait, for who knew how long, for an incoming call; and (although this was the least of my concerns) the fact that I would have to admit being lodged in a motel and hence also have to explain away the groceries I carried under my arm. But when I handed her the card that the proprietress of the motel had given me, in the event of my failing to remember the address, Audrey treated it to a quite brief and inattentive glance before putting it in her purse and appeared unaware of any inconsistency in the situation. Then we shook hands again and went our separate ways.

*

Waiting is not a passive activity. It consumes, it devours, it pitilessly spews out one's every hour, minute, second; it deters one from setting about the very meanest of quotidian chores; one comes to feel that the worst of the afterlife's eternal damnation must be the sheer eternity of it and not the damnation. I shall not keep the reader waiting as I was kept waiting by Ronnie.