‘It makes it worse if you’re kind.’
‘I’m not being kind, I’m telling you the truth. And it was the first time.’
‘That’s true.’ Colin’s demeanour brightened. He found he did not need the cigarette; in fact, he decided, he would never need one again. He abandoned it and took Lindsay in his arms. Her eyes dazzled him. Don’t even think about saying it, said that voice in his mind.
‘I expect it’s me.’ Lindsay sighed. ‘I expect I was a disappointment.’
‘You’re mad.’
‘I have stretch marks on my stomach; I expect they put you off. Tom’s nearly twenty and I still have stretch marks.’
‘Where?’
‘There, and there, and there.’
Lindsay indicated some faint silvery lines. Colin began to kiss them. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘I love your stretch marks. I love every single one of them…’ Be very, very careful, said the voice in his mind.
‘I expect my rhythms weren’t very good,’ Lindsay went on in a doleful voice. ‘I told you I was out of practice. You went into this amazing sort of tango sequence and I was still doing the waltz.’
‘Oh, God, God. I wasn’t giving you the right signals…’
‘Oh God. I wasn’t picking them up…’
There was a small silence. Colin stopped kissing the stretch marks and looked up. Lindsay smiled; he smiled. His diabolic eyebrows rose in two quizzical peaks. Lindsay kissed them. She kissed his marvellous hair. That now familiar warmth and amusement returned to Colin’s eyes.
‘You’re teasing me,’ he said. ‘You’re sending me up.’
‘I most certainly am.’
‘I love you when you do that,’ Colin said. At which point the admonitory presence in his mind washed its hands of him and gave up in disgust.
Dalliance ensued. During the dalliance, Colin suggested that in view of Lindsay’s comments on making love for the first time with a new partner, a second experiment might be wise. Lindsay agreed. After this, they slept in each other’s arms very peacefully for a while; on waking, they discovered that Colin did not have to work that day, and Lindsay, who had been going to begin her Chanel research, could put it off with no problems at all.
They lay side by side, talking quietly and companionably. Lindsay, feeling at peace, realized that she was happier than she had been in a long, long while, and Colin experienced an absence of anxiety so unusual he decided it must be bliss. He told her of the long, strange and painful night he had spent, and she listened with a care and concern that belied the criticisms of Rowland McGuire. ‘I’m proud of you. You slew the dragon,’ she said, when Colin recounted his battle with that tape-recording machine, and Colin, who had not thought of it like that, felt comforted and hoped this was true.
‘So I didn’t sleep at all last night,’ he explained, some while later. ‘I had no sleep and then I walked about a thousand blocks in the rain. All I could think about was seeing you. I had to see you, and now I see why.’
He bent across and kissed her hair, then her mouth, which opened with an already sweet familiarity under his.
‘Considering you hadn’t slept and I’d been so miserable,’ Lindsay said, ‘it’s astonishing the progress we’ve made, don’t you think?’
‘I do. One millimetre, that time?’
‘Less. Half a millimetre at most. Very close indeed.’
‘I thought so. We’re beginning to know each other. I think, next time…’
‘Mmm. So do I.’ She stretched. ‘What shall we do now? It’s afternoon. Colin, you must be longing to sleep properly…’
‘I’m not. I feel astonishingly awake. We could order up some food from room service. Some champagne.’
‘Oh, let’s. And have it in bed?’
‘Of course.’
‘We could watch some stupid movie on television…’
‘We could. I love watching television in the day; it always feels debauched. So we could watch a movie, or talk, or I could just lie here and look at your eyes…’
‘You could tell me all about this lovely house you’ve found…’
‘I’ll do better than that. I’ll take you there, after Thanksgiving. We could go back to England on the same flight. I’ll have a little gap before filming starts. I could drive you down there. We could stay at an inn and sit by a fire, and I could make love to you all night…’
Lindsay sat up. ‘Colin, did you know this was going to happen?’
‘No, not today. I hoped—well, in due course. You know.’
‘I didn’t see it coming at all. Not until just before you kissed me.’ She gave a small frown. ‘At least, I don’t think I did.’ She hesitated. ‘Colin, what I said to you before…’
‘Not the best timing.’
‘I know, I talk too much, and always at the wrong moment. I was nervous…’ She paused. ‘Colin, it can be a very bad idea to go to bed with someone you like. I learned that years ago. A friend becomes a lover; you lose the lover; you lose the friend. I wouldn’t want that to happen to us.’
‘It won’t happen to us.’
‘Can we promise each other that? We agree now: no regrets ever, or complications? Just something that happened to make us both very, very happy at the time?’
She held out her hand to him. Colin bent over her palm, so she could not see his expression and kissed it.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s a deal.’
Colin finally left the Pierre at around ten-thirty that night. The third experiment had fulfilled their predictions, and as they both agreed, the fourth was a conclusive triumph. Colin walked along anonymous hotel corridors, missed the elevators, circled the Pierre several times, and eventually found himself in the lobby. He walked through it, cloaked in joy. He bumped into a tall thin young woman with very short blond hair, unseasonably dressed in a crop-top, pedal pushers and ballerina slippers. Some while after she had greeted him, he realized that this was Lindsay’s assistant, Pixie, who when last seen two days previously had had shoulder-length black hair.
He examined her, smiling. ‘Got it,’ he said finally. ‘Jean Seberg, in Breathless?’
‘Spot on.’ Pixie looked at him closely and raised one eyebrow. ‘You look happy,’ she said.
‘Pixie, I am happy. I am extraordinarily happy. Isn’t it the most wonderful world?’
Pixie looked at his dishevelled hair, dishevelled clothes and radiant expression. Aware that she had become invisible to him, she raised the other eyebrow, smiled, and kindly showed him to the exit door. Colin left the hotel and soon afterwards discovered he was back at the Conrad, though he had no recollection of any period of transit between the two. Emily, seeing at once that he was in no condition to understand the English language, kept her news to the minimum, despite the fact that she had been longing to impart it for most of the day.
‘She’s in,’ she said. ‘Natasha Lawrence is in. She has been admitted to the Conrad, God help us all. I voted against, and those four darned male simpletons voted for. This we will discuss further tomorrow, Colin. Meanwhile, Thalia with an unpronounceable surname called. You are to fly out tomorrow afternoon to Montana, and continue your work with that peculiar director man there. Perhaps more importantly, and certainly more urgently, your friend Rowland McGuire has called.’ She paused. ‘He first called at ten-thirty this morning, and spoke to Frobisher in a somewhat heated way. He has called on the hour, every hour since, and if I am not mistaken, that will be him calling now. So take this call in your room, Colin, which you will find at the end of the corridor. And collect your wits, because I’ve already spoken to him, and he does not sound in the most tractable of moods.’
Colin did as he was bade. He found his own room. He found the telephone.
‘Hello, Rowland,’ he said. ‘What a wonderful world.’
‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain just what the fuck you think you’re doing?’ Rowland said, in tones of great politeness. ‘I’m now at home. It’s four o’clock in the morn
ing. In front of me is a postcard from you which I received four days ago. It reads as follows: ‘New York glorious. Lindsay adorable. O brave new world. Love, Colin.’ The style didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t altogether surprised by the content, but now I’m confused. If Lindsay is so adorable, would you like to explain why you’ve been lying to her? You can thank me for not giving you away this morning, while you’re about it. Shute Farm? Owned by someone your father knows? Available at a miraculously low rent?’
‘All true,’ said Colin, gazing out of the windows at the moon.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘Not on alcohol, no.’
‘All true? Then your interpretation of truth must be very different from mine. Maybe you’d like to explain why you failed to tell Lindsay the exact truth: to wit—that house is owned by your father and entailed to you, as it will be entailed to your sons, or—failing that—your cousin’s sons. To all intents and purposes, Colin, you own it—along with Shute itself, God alone knows how many other tenant farms, cottages and houses, plus an obscene amount of Oxfordshire. I find it surprising that you neglected to mention these belongings of yours. Were you similarly reticent about the forty thousand acres in Scotland, and the umpteen million you inherited from the Lancaster clan? Colin, it was perfectly obvious that Lindsay knows none of this, and you, for some reason I cannot comprehend, are deceiving her and manoeuvring her into becoming your tenant at a knockdown rent. You’re doing this, what’s more, at a time in her life when she’s especially vulnerable to assistance of that kind. Now I know your schemes, Colin, and I’ve seen them blow up in everyone’s faces a thousand times. So I’m warning you, if you end up harming Lindsay, or hurting her in any way…’
‘I love her,’ Colin said, in a beatific voice, still staring at the moon. ‘I love her. I adore her. She’s the most wonderful woman ever born.’
This checked Rowland for rather less long than Colin had hoped.
‘Then this is worse than I thought,’ he said, in a brusque way. ‘You do not love her, Colin. You fall in love the way other people catch colds.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Colin, in a robust way. ‘I used to, I admit that, but I haven’t done that for at least eight years. I love her. I love her with all my heart. I worship the very ground on which she walks.’
‘Colin, you’ve known her less than two weeks.’
‘That has nothing to do with it,’ Colin replied, his wits returning, and a note of unmistakable conviction entering his voice. ‘You can love someone just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘You meet them, you know you’re going to love them, and the love starts to grow. And if you don’t know that, Rowland, you’re a great deal stupider than I thought.’
Rowland hesitated. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I concede that can happen. It doesn’t last.’
‘This is going to last. I’ve just left her now. I’ve been with her all day—and I’m so happy I can hardly speak. She’s loyal and good and candid and funny and warm…’
‘Colin, I wouldn’t argue with any of that. I know her too well; she’s also scatty, impetuous and naïve. She has a terrible temper, a nasty tongue and a marked inability to think. She is, without a doubt, one of the most impossible goddamned irritating women I’ve ever known…’
‘You see? You’re fond of her too!’ Colin proclaimed, on a note of triumph. ‘I can hear it in your voice. She’s a paragon. And you know the best thing of all, Rowland? She likes me. She can see my faults and she still likes me. She doesn’t know about the money or Shute—she likes me for myself. For the first time in my life I have no doubts about that—in fact, if she knew about the money, I’m afraid she might like me less. So I want her to know me, really know me, before she finds out. I want her to see Shute for the first time, and not know it’s mine, so she can just love it for itself, and then I want her to marry me. I’m going to marry her, Rowland, and if you come between her and me, I’ll fucking well kill you, because she is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Apart from you, she’s the one good thing, the one incontestably good thing that has happened to me since Edward died.’
There was a long silence then. In London, knowing Colin would never mention his brother unless he passionately meant what he said, Rowland bowed his head in his hands. In New York, Colin thought of Lindsay in his arms and felt blessed.
‘I’m going to marry her, Rowland, and I’m going to marry her within six months,’ he continued, in a quieter voice. ‘I’m going to ask her the very second I think she might accept, and I damn near asked her an hour ago—so you can draw your own conclusions from that.’
‘In that case,’ Rowland said, after a pained hesitation, ‘I shall say nothing to Lindsay about Shute. I hope you know you can rely on that. But I also hope you know what you’re doing, because Lindsay would be very easy indeed to hurt—’
‘As you should know,’ replied Colin, in a flash, ‘considering how you hurt her today. You reduced her to tears—’
‘I did what?’
‘You made her cry, and you’re not going to do it again. She was in an utterly miserable state—and I’m not surprised. You destroy every bit of confidence she has. She’s trying to make a new start in life, and what do you do? You roll in like a fucking Centurion tank, and you tell her she’s naïve and childish, and only a fool would have signed that book contract. Not everyone has your fucking unshakeable self-confidence, Rowland. Why don’t you think?’
‘I made her cry?’ Rowland sounded both bewildered and shocked. ‘That’s the last thing on God’s earth I’d have wanted to do. I thought—we argue, Lindsay and I. We’re always having some fight. I lose my temper, she loses hers, and then the next day—’
‘Well, don’t lose your temper with her!’ Colin cried. ‘I love her. I won’t have you talking to her like that. I saw you do it in Oxford, and I wanted to punch you then. Lindsay’s right—anyone would think you were her father, the way you talk to her…’
Rowland, who had begun to speak, was brought up short.
‘Her father. I see. Were there any details of my private conversation with Lindsay that weren’t reported back?’
‘No, since you ask. She told me the whole miserable story from beginning to end. She tried to hide it, when I first arrived, but I knew there was something wrong, and then she just broke down. She started crying and she couldn’t stop. I put my arms around her, and—’ He broke off. ‘And, anyway, I calmed her down, eventually. I explained you didn’t really despise her. I told her how you’re always bawling me out. We agreed in the end that you were right rather too often, but you weren’t such a bad sort and we both quite liked you. None of which means that you shouldn’t be ashamed of yourself.’
‘I’m certainly ashamed to have made her cry. Perhaps you’d be good enough to tell her that,’ Rowland said curtly. ‘Meanwhile, if there’s anything worse than the thought of the two of you discussing my defects in that particular cosy, nauseating way, I don’t know what it is, so—’
‘Oh, we forgot about you after a bit,’ Colin said, in a cheerful, consoling tone. ‘We never mentioned you again, funnily enough…’
‘I’m hanging up, Colin.’
‘Wait, wait, wait. Rowland—just one question.’
‘What?’
‘Will you be my best man, Rowland?’
Rowland considered this question for what seemed to Colin an unnecessarily long time.
‘No,’ he said eventually, his tone altering. ‘No. I’m very fond of you, Colin, but I don’t think I will. Goodnight.’
TWO LETTERS AND FOUR FAXES
Chapter 12
THROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING WEEK, the telephone lines between Lindsay at the Pierre, and Colin, staying at Tomas Court’s ranch in Montana, were kept very busy. It was a week of correspondences, and in more than one sense, Lindsay was later to decide. During it, fax lines, the international mail, and in one case a courier service, were kept busy as well.
The first missive, its formality of tone perhaps expla
ined by the fact that it was the last of six drafts he had written, came in the form of a letter from Rowland McGuire.
My dear Lindsay,
It is early on Saturday morning, and I have been trying to find the right words in which to write to you since I spoke to Colin on the telephone, some hours ago now. The conversation with him left me profoundly shaken—I cannot tell you how much it distressed me to learn that I had caused you un-happiness, indeed had made you cry. My immediate instinct was to call you, but when we speak on the telephone, I always feel we are missing one another in some way; this leads to misunderstandings. So I am writing now because I want to apologize to you, and beyond that, make certain things unmistakably clear.
I have had several hours—and they’ve not been pleasant hours—in which to contemplate my own stupidity, arrogance and lack of insight. For those failings, and my inability to curb my temper, I seek your pardon—how stilted that sounds! Lindsay, I’m so sorry and so sad to have caused you pain.
The conversation with Colin has made me realize that I have to be very careful how I express myself. I am not finding it easy to write this, and I want to be sure I avoid ambiguities, so will you forgive me for any awkwardnesses here? Everything I say, however clumsily expressed, is written from the heart.
I don’t want to make excuses for myself, but I do want you to know that almost everything I said to you yesterday stemmed from my anxiety on your behalf. Lindsay, I look on you as a close and dear friend, for whom I feel an unwavering concern. I want you to find happiness and, yes, fulfilment in everything you do. That is why I question and argue as I do. I now realize just how badly I put my arguments yesterday. You were right to resent the way I spoke, but I would like you to understand that I don’t mean to interfere, or snipe from the sidelines. I just can’t bear to think that, as a result of all these recent changes and uprootings, you might experience difficulties, hardship, or unhappiness of any kind.
Colin has made me see how inept I am at conveying that concern to you. I’m grateful to him for that. Talking to him was a chastening experience; he made me see—well, many things for which I feel the deepest regret.