“Lady Pemberton is at the ambassador’s residence now. She wasn’t available to call you as planned, ma’am. The ambassador felt it might be simpler if you joined her there, ma’am. I have a car here. He apologizes for your wait.”
Gini hesitated, and the man picked up on the hesitation at once. He handed her a plain white card on which was printed a number.
“If you’d like to call that number, ma’am. You can confirm the arrangements.”
“Thank you,” Gini said. “I need to get my things in any case.”
Gini hesitated again, then shut the door. She ran back into the sitting room and placed the call. It rang three times, then John Hawthorne answered it. He sounded calm, absolutely, as he always did.
“Gini?” he said. “I’m sorry about all this. I’ll just pass you over to Mary….”
Mary sounded anything but calm. She sounded exhausted, and flustered too. “Gini, I’m so terribly sorry, darling. There’s been a bit of a drama. No, I can’t talk. If you could just come straight over…what’s that, John?” There was a pause. “Oh, good, Gini, are you there? I gather John’s sent one of the—one of the security people, Frank. Yes, darling. What?”
“I don’t understand. Why do you need me there, Mary?”
“Darling, I can’t explain now. When I see you. Good—in about twenty minutes, then, half an hour.”
Gini hung up. She gathered her bag and her coat, kissed Dog, and walked out to the steps. It had stopped raining. Frank Romero was standing by the car. He was in the act of removing his dark overcoat, which he folded neatly and placed on the backseat. By the time she had descended the steps, he was on the sidewalk, at the ready, opening the rear passenger door. Gini looked at him intently, very intently. She could see that beneath the coat he had been wearing clothes that might have been sharp informal wear, or possibly a kind of uniform. Black shoes, dark gray pants with a knife-edge crease, and a double-breasted blazer in black. The blazer was fastened with a double row of brass buttons. She stumbled convincingly; Frank Romero put out an arm to steady her.
“Watch your step, ma’am. The sidewalk’s slippery.”
Gini leaned on his arm, wriggled her unhurt ankle, and grimaced. There were also brass buttons on the sleeves of his jacket, and she could see them clearly now. They were stamped with an interesting, a memorable device—a little garland of oak leaves. She straightened up and gave him a smile.
“I’m fine. It’s okay. I just twisted it a bit. I’ll sit in the front.”
She sat beside him, and waited until they’d traveled one street, two streets. “So tell me,” she said. “Have you worked for the ambassador long?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How long?”
He glanced toward her, then fixed his eyes on the road ahead. “Since he was appointed, ma’am.”
“I guess it must be a very interesting job….”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Damn and blast, Gini thought. She sat in silence, trying to decide the best approach. Frank Romero kept his eyes on the road ahead. It was rush hour, and the traffic was heavy. Near Hyde Park Corner, they came to a halt.
“Would you mind if I asked you a question, Frank?”
He gave her another quick, covert glance, then turned his impassive face back to the traffic. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to know. You security people—how do you train for work like this? You have police training, maybe, or a period in the military, or what?”
“In my case, ma’am”—he kept his eyes on the road ahead—“I had a period in the military. I’m a Vietnam vet.”
“How interesting. You have something in common with Ambassador Hawthorne, then. He was telling me about his time in Vietnam the other night.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
There was a long silence. Gini did not prompt. Eventually, as she had been silently hoping, her remark seemed to encourage him: He actually volunteered some information.
“I served under Ambassador Hawthorne, ma’am. Out in Nam. I was sergeant to his platoon.”
“Oh, I see,” Gini said. “Then your connection with the family goes back a long way.”
“Yes, ma’am. It does.”
He volunteered nothing more, and Gini knew better than to prompt further. She kept the conversation to innocuous topics from then on: the weather, London traffic. They reached Regent’s Park, and turned in at Hanover Gate. They passed the mosque on their left; on the right was the lodge entrance to Winfield House. They halted there briefly, then were waved on. Frank Romero parked the car outside the residence. He came around and politely held open her door. As Gini climbed out, she looked closely at the buttons on his jacket. Six on the front, three on each sleeve, none missing.
John Hawthorne had appeared on the steps. “Everything all right, Frank?”
“Yes, Mr. Ambassador.”
“I’ll be three minutes. Gini, come inside out of the cold.” He glanced up at the sky, then took her arm. “I’m so sorry about this.” He drew her up the steps and into a large hall. “A few alarms and excursions. Mary will explain. I have to leave you, I’m afraid. I’m late for a meeting at the Foreign Office as it is. Mary’s through here. Lise will be joining you shortly.”
He led her into the pinkish drawing room she had seen in the Hello! magazine photographs. The curtains were drawn, a fire was lit; above the fireplace was the rose period Picasso, to the right of it the pinkish Matisse. Mary rose to her feet from a chair near the fire. Gini could see at once that she looked both exhausted and distressed.
John Hawthorne, who appeared neither, stayed only a few minutes, then left.
As soon as the door closed on him, Mary held out her arms, then hugged Gini tight. Her kind and honest eyes met Gini’s; she gave a tired sigh.
“Gini, I’m so terribly sorry. I would have called if I could. But really…” She gave a helpless gesture. “It’s been pandemonium here, absolutely dreadful. My head’s splitting. They just brought me some tea—would you like some tea? I’d better explain before Lise comes down. Then with any luck we’ll be able to leave. I can’t stand much more of this. …”
Gini moved across to the fire and sat down opposite Mary. As Mary poured tea, she looked around this pinkish room. The table next to her was weighted down with photographs: official photographs, family photographs: a young John Hawthorne in army uniform; the Hawthornes with various past presidents and other heads of state; the Hawthornes en famille. Two beautiful blond-haired boys, a house she recognized as Hawthorne’s childhood home in upstate New York. Robert and Adam Hawthorne stood outside it with their grandfather, S. S. Hawthorne. He was seated in a wheelchair, John Hawthorne standing to his side: Lise was not in the picture.
She looked back at Mary, who was passing her a cup. Her hand trembled and the silver teaspoon rattled. To Gini’s astonishment, Mary leaned forward, opened a cigarette box on the table in front of her, and lit a cigarette. Meeting Gini’s eyes, she gave a wan smile.
“I know. I know. But after what I’ve been through, I need one, Gini. That or a damn stiff drink…”
“What on earth’s been going on, Mary? Why am I here? I don’t understand a thing.”
“I’ll come to you in a moment.” Mary sighed. “And don’t ask me how it all started, or exactly when, because I don’t know. All I know is that on Saturday at my party, I could see Lise was terribly tense. She said she was worried about John’s safety. I thought it seemed odd, to be so strung up, but by the time they left, she seemed fine. Well, you saw. Much better. Very animated—a little too animated, perhaps…Anyway, I thought no more about it. Then on Sunday evening—yesterday, that’s right—John telephoned me. I talked to him for hours. He was terribly upset.”
“About Lise, you mean?”
“Well, yes, but more than that.” Mary gave her a helpless look. “The thing is, John’s so loyal and he has this terrible stiff-necked pride. He’ll never admit he has problems. He bottles them up. And as for asking for help, even advice—well
, forget it. He hasn’t said a word to me, but obviously this has been building up for months. Anyway, never mind that. On Sunday, I could hear, he was close to the breaking point, and finally, finally, it all came out. Apparently Lise really isn’t well, Gini, and hasn’t been for ages. Since last summer at least. She’s seen doctor after doctor, but none of them seemed to be any help. Apparently, all day Sunday there’d been the most dreadful scenes, weeping, hysteria.”
“Why? What provoked that?”
Mary’s face became perplexed. She gave another sigh.
“Well, I think John did—though he didn’t mean to, of course. You see, apparently, he’s been getting more and more worried as the weeks went by, for Lise obviously, but also for the boys. You know what children are like, they pick up every little thing. Lise was getting so het up about all this security business. She was making their lives impossible, fussing over them, weeping, then losing her temper with them for no reason at all. And then I think…” Mary paused. “Well, John would never tell me this directly, but I think it had caused problems with him as well. There had been quarrels, I suspect, and the younger boy, Adam, overheard one quarrel, I think. He’s been very difficult to handle. He’s so close to Lise, you see, so all her anxiety and tension spilled over onto him. He’s become very solitary, John says, and his schoolwork has fallen behind badly. His teachers are concerned. …”
She drew in a deep breath. “Anyway, to cut a long story short, John came to a decision. He decided that the best thing would be to send the boys back to the States for a few months, to stay with his brother, Prescott. Of course, Prescott has a whole tribe of children. John thought it would do the boys good, give them a break from all this anger and tension and anxiety. He thought it would do Lise good too—apparently she’d been having some wild fantasies that someone was going to kidnap the boys, that kind of thing. So John thought it would help her too. Then when this current security alert died down, and Lise was calmer again, the boys could come back.”
Mary stopped, her face troubled. Gini said nothing. This was one explanation, and a plausible one at that. There were others, of course.
“Anyway,” Mary continued. “John then did a very stupid thing in my opinion—and I told him so, straight out. It’s very typical of John, he makes a decision and that’s that. Instead of consulting Lise about all this, he just went right ahead and made the arrangements. He informed Lise yesterday morning. The boys were on a plane, with entourage obviously, last night.”
“Last night?” Gini stared. “You mean he just went ahead and did it?”
“Darling, I know! But he can be curiously blind like that. He thought it was all for the best, so he just assumed Lise would think so too. Even if he’d known she was going to oppose it, he’d still have acted the same way. Once John’s made what he thinks is the right decision, you can’t budge him. That’s that.”
“And Lise was distraught?”
Mary glanced over her shoulder. She lowered her voice.
“Darling, much more than that. All day yesterday there was the most ghastly scene. Screaming and weeping, I gather, and smashing things. By the time John called me last night, they’d had to get a doctor, they’d given her sedatives. He was absolutely desperate, darling, I felt so terribly sorry for him. I think he was close to tears—I could hear them in his voice. He was so worried as to what would happen today. So I said, if he needed me, I’d come over. And as you know, I did.”
She gave a little shiver. “Gini, I got here at ten in the morning. I’ve been here ever since. It’s gone on all day. John had to cancel a whole series of appointments. He wouldn’t leave her. He thought, if we both talked to her quietly, she would calm down, and she did at first. She’d been given some tranquilizers first thing in the morning. About eleven o’clock, they wore off. Then it started…Gini, I was so shocked. It was absolutely horrible. She accused John of the most terrible things. Ridiculous things—”
“What sort of things, Mary?”
“I’m not going to repeat them.” Mary blushed. “Mistresses, other women—you can imagine the kind of thing. I mean—it’s so absurd! John has never looked at another woman. He’s the most utterly loyal and faithful man. Then it was the children, how he was trying to take them away from her. Then…oh, lots of terrible mad things—he was having her watched, he was opening her letters. It went on and on and on. John was so incredibly kind and patient. I tried, but nothing anyone said made the least difference. John got them to send for the doctor again, but Lise wouldn’t see him, she said she’d kill herself if he set foot in her room. So in the end John sent him away. We went upstairs again and tried one more time—this must have been about three o’clock—and she calmed down for a while. She said she felt better, that she was going to take a nap. Then, quite suddenly, for no reason at all, it all began again. Only worse. John was trying to help her across the bedroom into bed, and she suddenly flew at him, and she attacked him, Gini. She started pulling his hair, ripping his clothes. It was so frightening, so completely horrible. He just stood there, trying to fend her off, with this terrible expression on his face. He looked dead, Gini, in utter despair. So…I stopped her.”
“You stopped her?”
“Yes, I did. She was hysterical. I slapped her face.”
Mary gave a tiny unhappy shake of the head. “And oddly, it seemed to do the trick. After that she became much calmer. She kept talking very fast, but at least she wasn’t screaming and weeping anymore. That’s when I said I had to get back, because you were waiting for me. And that’s when she started on a new tack. How John never let her have any friends, how he kept her away from all her friends, how she’d wanted to talk to you the other night, but he’d prevented her…I don’t know, Gini. It was just more nonsense. Then she asked to see you. She kept saying it. I want to see Gini, now. I want to talk to Gini. So, I stayed with her, and John sent the car over. It just seemed the easiest thing to do. She’s supposed to be coming down in a minute. If she does, she’ll probably have forgotten she even mentioned your name. Then, with luck, as I said, we can go. There’s a nurse here now. John says he shouldn’t be much more than an hour at the Foreign Office, then he’ll come straight back. I feel sorry for him, Gini, but frankly, I’ve had enough.”
Gini said nothing. She drank her tea, and put the cup back on the tray. She looked around this elegant room. The house was silent; it was now just past six o’clock. Pascal intended to catch the five o’clock flight, Paris time; there was an hour’s time difference in the winter months. That meant he would be reaching Heathrow Airport at around seven P.M. London time. Allow an hour from the airport into London. Around eight P.M. he would be arriving at Mary’s house. She did not want to miss him, but she could see that the meeting with Lise might not be as cursory as Mary seemed to expect. There were many reasons she could think of, pressing reasons, why Lise might want to speak to her. …But not here, surely? She looked at the room: Would you wire a drawing room for sound? In your own home? Four days ago, she would have dismissed that thought as absurd, as paranoid; not now.
At that moment the door opened, and Lise entered. She was dressed from head to foot in exquisite pale beige cashmere: over a cashmere dress she was wearing a cashmere coat. She looked radiant.
She crossed the room and kissed Gini warmly on both cheeks. Mary stared at her in astonishment.
“Come on, Mary, Gini…” She looked from one to the other. “We’re going out.”
“Out?” Mary rose to her feet. “Lise, that’s not a good idea, you know.”
“It’s a very good idea. I’m sorry, Mary, for all I put you through, but I realize now, I was just being stupid and neurotic. I think I had a bad reaction to whatever that quack of a doctor gave me yesterday. Well, it has worn off, and I feel absolutely fine now. I’ve had a bath, a little sleep. I feel like a new person. I’ve told them to bring the car around. We’ll go out. I thought I’d buy you both dinner. My treat, Mary, my way of thanking you for being so sweet.”
“No, Lise.” Mary spoke firmly. “I promised John you’d rest. He’ll be home soon.”
“Nonsense. He won’t be back before eight at the earliest. I know! If you won’t come to dinner, will you let me take you out for a drink? Please say yes. I’ve been cooped up all weekend. I need a change of air. There’s this marvelous new place, not far from you, Mary. A friend of a friend runs it. They serve those delicious tapas things—just for an hour. Okay?”
Mary gave a sigh, and turned away. Lise looked at Gini intently. Silently, she mouthed the words: Say yes.
“I think that’s a good idea, Mary,” Gini said quickly. “Just for an hour. It might do Lise good. …”
Lise smiled and began to move toward the door. Mary gave Gini an exhausted look.
“Come on, Mary,” Gini said in a low voice. “It could do her good. You never know. She seems fine now. They’ll drive her there, then drive her back.”
Mary gave her a puzzled glance, then shrugged. “On your head be it,” she said.
The Kensington wine bar Lise had selected proved to be only two blocks from Mary’s house. It was chic, fashionable, and packed. They were driven there by a uniformed driver, with the security man from Mary’s party, Malone, in the other front seat.
He did not speak once. When they arrived outside the bar, he climbed from the car and went in first. He was inside five minutes, and Lise began to show signs of irritation.
“Oh, heavens,” she said. “How they do fuss. I wish he’d hurry up.”
Malone’s time, it seemed, had not been wasted. When they entered the crowded wine bar, a table had been made available for them, close to the fire exit, Gini noted. Malone hovered for a few seconds, then disappeared. Lise gave a sigh.
“Thank God. He’ll wait outside, and check I’m still here every ten minutes. You can set your watch by them.”