Pascal looked at her wordlessly. After a moment he reached across and took her hand. “Helen,” he began. “Why did you never tell me that? If we’d talked more, been more open with each other…”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference. We were never right for each other. I know that. You know that. There it is.”
Pascal removed his hand. They looked at each other. Helen gave a sad smile.
“You see? We both know it’s true. That’s a kind of progress, at least. You see”—she looked away—“I was hoping, Pascal, I have been hoping, that I could change. Learn actually to trust someone, perhaps. There’s another reason why I want to go back to England.”
There was silence. Pascal counted the seconds. He said, “I see. You’ve met someone else?”
“Yes, I have. He’s a good man. Very English, very reliable, very steady. Not as exciting as you were—but I don’t want excitement anymore. Not now. I want peace.”
“I can understand that.”
“You can?” She looked surprised. “The thing is, I wouldn’t rush into anything, I promise you. I’d be very sure this time before I committed myself.”
“He wants to marry you?”
“He says he does. I met him today, it’s him I was meeting. We talked about it then. I told him he’d have to be patient. And he will be…” A tiny flurry of emotion passed across her face. “He’s a kind man, Pascal. I think you’d like him. He’d be good to Marianne. He has children too, he’s a widower. He wouldn’t try to replace you—nothing like that. He’s sensitive and kind and a little bit dull, and it would ease the money situation for you, and…Pascal. I’m only thirty-one. I have to have a life.”
“I know that.” Pascal stared down at the white table in front of him. He tried to tell himself that he had known this was inevitable.
“Do you mean that?”
Pascal looked up. He frowned. “Yes, I do, oddly enough.” He hesitated. “Since I last saw you I’ve had time to think. So much bitterness—I never wanted it to be like that. It shouldn’t be like that, for Marianne’s sake.”
“Ours too.” She looked at him closely. “And we did like each other once. Almost loved each other. For a time. You were good to me after the miscarriage. Under all the pain and the bitterness I felt, I did know that. And tonight, when I came back, when I saw your face…” She broke off. “I do know how much you love Marianne, Pascal. And I hope you know I love her too.” She bent her head and began to cry a little. Then she wiped her eyes, and straightened. “I could talk to the lawyers,” she said in a stiff way. “I’d be prepared to do that. When I’m in England we could alter the custody arrangement to make it easier for you….”
Pascal hesitated. He looked at the table. He moved his teacup forward, then back. “If I were living in England,” he began slowly. “If I made England my base, would you object to that?”
“England?” She looked astonished, then frowned. “No, I suppose I wouldn’t object. I don’t want you next door, or in the next village, obviously.”
“You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, I know.” She paused. “Well, I suppose it might work out. Marianne would be pleased. You never know….” She gave him a dry look. “We might even end up friends, Pascal. Stranger things have happened. I must say I’m surprised though. England? You? Whatever draws you to England?”
“Oh, the past. The future,” Pascal hesitated, his face suddenly anxious. “May I use your phone?” he asked.
Gini returned to her apartment at ten. There was a pile of mail on her mat. She stood in the center of her living room, holding it. Outside, footsteps passed, then a car. She tried to tell herself that this was her home. But it did not feel like her home; it did not feel safe.
When Pascal telephoned to explain he could not return, he had tried to persuade her to stay at Mary’s that night. She had refused, and when she did so, had felt a rebellious anger in herself. She would not be driven out of her own space by a break-in, by the fear of what she had seen in Venice the previous night. Let them send their sick parcels, and their sick audiotapes. Pascal had phoned back twice at Mary’s to try to dissuade her, but she refused to back down. “I will not be made a fugitive,” she had said. And that was fine when Mary was nearby, just through in the kitchen, clattering plates. It was less fine now that she was alone, and it was night.
She locked and bolted both front and back doors. She checked that all the windows were securely fastened. She drew the curtains and the blinds, moving swiftly from room to room, still in her overcoat She lit the fire, switched on every lamp, tossed the pile of letters onto her desk, removed her overcoat, looked around her, and at once felt better. It might be foolish, but with the curtains drawn, she felt more secure; at least she knew she could not be watched.
Napoleon was sitting on the sofa, observing these activities. When she crossed to him, he turned away his topaz eyes and flicked his tail. Cats could speak, Gini thought, in their way, and every line of Napoleon’s body indicated reproach.
He did not like to be left; with her neighbor Mrs. Henshaw absent too, he clearly felt doubly abandoned. Gini stroked him and kissed his marmalade ears, but Napoleon refused to be mollified. He gave her a cold feline stare. Then, as if other priorities had just occurred to him, he leapt to the floor and made his way to the kitchen at a dignified pace.
He had ignored the food she had left for him, but Gini, who had anticipated this, had brought an offering from Mary’s. A little poached salmon, Napoleon’s favorite dish. The instant he smelled it, he licked his lips. By the time he had eaten it, exited through the cat flap to the yard beyond, explored the dank and malodorous trash cans in the lane beyond that, and returned, his humor was restored. He followed Gini back into the living room and leaped up onto her lap.
Gini yawned and stretched. She would just go through her mail, she decided—it was sure to be bills—and then go to sleep early. In the morning she intended to go to the News offices first thing: There was work to do, leads to follow, and there were certain questions she was eager—very eager—to ask Nicholas Jenkins. Such as who else knew they were assigned to this story, because, quite obviously, he had lied and someone did.
She began to leaf through the letters. Circulars. Bills. There were a couple of invitations, a couple of postcards; the first, from that unmemorable man friend now in Australia she read quickly, then tossed to one side. The second…she stared at the second. Who had sent her this?
On the front of it was a reproduction of a painting in London’s National Gallery, by Uccello. It showed, quaintly and with charm, a mounted St. George slaying a dragon. Close by stood the maiden he was saving. She stood at the mouth of a cave, waiting calmly for the dragon’s death. Fifteenth century, Florentine school. It was a famous painting, and one Gini knew well. The perspective and proportions were naive: St. George and the dragon were large, the lady small. Gini turned the postcard over; the message was brief and neatly written:
Do you remember those three books I leant you? Could you let me have them back when you’re next in Oxford? Need them for revision—ugh! Thanks for the pasta the other week. You make a great bolognese—the best! See you soon. Don’t work too hard. Take care.
Lots of love,
Jacob.
Gini stared at the card. She knew no one named Jacob, she knew no one studying at Oxford; she had borrowed no books from anybody recently, and it was at least a year since she had served anyone—it had been Lindsay in any case—spaghetti with bolognese sauce.
She turned the card this way and that. An Italian painting though it was not identified as such on the card; three books. Could it be? Was this McMullen’s way of contacting her? She looked at her other mail—the bills, the brochures. They showed no signs of being tampered with, but then, they wouldn’t, of course. If he had wanted to contact her, what could be more apparently innocuous than an open postcard, a postcard with a cheery, inconsequential message from some friend, little different from that other p
ostcard from Australia.
She looked at the card more closely, and then realized: of course—Jacob. And her mind slid back to her hated English boarding school, to the Latin lessons, to the history lessons. The Latin form of the name James was Jacobus. It had been used by English kings, James I, James II—Jacobus rex.
It was cunning, she thought—too cunning. If this was some form of coded message, it was not one she understood. Which sentences carried hidden meanings, and which were there purely for decoration? She seemed to be being pointed toward Oxford, that was simple enough, and back yet again to those three books left out on McMullen’s desk. But what did “revision” mean? Were the references to Italian food important, or unimportant?
Puzzled, she retrieved the piece of paper she had found in McMullen’s apartment. She looked at the numbers, she considered the three books, she looked back at the postcard. It still made no sense. One of the books had been The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Oxford again—and Milton twice, if she included the paperback found in Venice. Milton and Oxford, a Carson McCullers novel. Perhaps the first set of numbers were page references, she thought, and the second referred to words on those pages. If so, she was thwarted; to check, she needed those editions, those books. Surely it had to be simpler than that? She sat there for an hour, and she could feel her brain starting to lock.
At midnight she gave up. She left all the lights on in the living room—it felt safer—and went to bed.
Even then, she could not sleep. She lay in the semidarkness, light drifting through the doorway, Napoleon curled up on her feet She stared at the ceiling, and the details of this story went around and around in her mind. She saw those brass buttons on Frank Romero’s jacket, then Lise Hawthorne’s anguished white face. She went back to that first conversation with Nicholas Jenkins, and remembered a phrase he had used then.
The patterns of obsessive behavior, he had said. It was not a comforting phrase, Gini thought. She had interviewed some people in the past who might be described as obsessives, and she thought of them now. The man serving a life sentence in Broadmoor Prison for the Criminally Insane, for instance, who had lived alone with his dog in a North London flat, and who always photographed himself embracing his victims’ bodies before he dismembered and disposed of them.
He had had his rules: All his boy victims were under twenty, all were white; they had to have dark hair, and he picked them up in the same bar, always on a Saturday night.
The woman who believed an eminent surgeon was passionately in love with her, when the man had encountered her on only two occasions, at a conference, but had unwisely replied to one of the woman’s letters, explaining he was devoted to his children and his wife. That woman, too, had been an obsessive, and had approached Gini herself. She thought Gini should tell the world that this distinguished man was, in reality, a liar and a cheat. She had showed Gini, with cold indignation, the love letters the surgeon had written her: They were in her own handwriting. Gini had half pitied the woman, but the surgeon feared her. On one occasion she had broken into his home and slashed his suits to ribbons with a knife.
So, yes, Gini had some experience of the patterns of obsessive behavior—and it was not the kind that induced peaceful sleep. Obsession unraveled reason and blurred the edges of life. To talk to an obsessive was to step into the mirror and watch truth reverse. Every person she had ever encountered who fitted this category shared one characteristic. For the most part, the madness did not show. Until you knew the truth, these people were ordinary, no more alarming than the next person in the supermarket, or the bus. They lied with quiet conviction because they were truly convinced their lies and their inversions were the truth.
So, had Lise Hawthorne been lying that evening? Gini could not tell. Had Hawthorne himself, the previous Saturday, been acting and disguising his true self? Again she did not know. But there was one factor besides Pascal’s arguments, besides the mounting evidence, that counted against Hawthorne, and it was this: Famous and powerful men often seemed to court danger and the destruction of their careers. Every week newspaper stories gave evidence of this. She and Pascal had discussed it in a café in Venice. These days such instincts provided Pascal with much of his work. How else could you explain the long succession of eminent men who risked a career they’d spent a lifetime building, for a night with a call girl, an affair with a gabby actress who ran straight from the bed to the tabloids? How else could you explain a man who prosecuted corruption in public life, then cheated on his taxes, or accepted a kickback?
She had asked this question, and Pascal had sighed. “Because they enjoy the risk,” he said. “They crave the danger, they must. Perhaps they can value their achievements only when they know that one word in the wrong quarter, and everything’s lost. Maybe they simply get bored with the safety of success.” He paused. “They seek self-destruction, Gini. I think it’s that”
It was a viable theory, Gini thought. It explained the phenomenon as well, and as little, as anything else. It might explain Hawthorne—perhaps.
She closed her eyes. The house was quiet It was well past midnight now. She felt herself begin to drift at last toward sleep.
It was two in the morning when she woke. She sat up and listened. Something had awakened her and her cat. Napoleon lifted his head. He turned his green eyes in the direction of the bedroom window. Gini tensed. From the yard beyond, she heard the wood of the fence creak. A twig snapped outside. She sat rigid: She could hear footsteps now. Slowly and stealthily they approached her window, then stopped. They moved toward the rear kitchen door. There was a rustling sound, a small rattle, then silence.
Gini stifled a cry. Carefully and quietly, she pushed the bedcovers aside and stood up. She listened. The footsteps were retreating now. She heard their muffled progress across the yard; there was another creak from the fence. She clenched her hands to stop them trembling. Had he gone, or was he selecting an alternative route?
In bare feet, making no sound, she pressed herself against the wall, and edged toward the lights of the living room. The curtains there were drawn well across. No one could see in, surely no one could see in? She listened. She heard the creak of the iron gate opening at the top of the area steps. She tensed. She crept silently to the front door and pressed her ear against it. The footsteps were descending the area steps.
They came down slowly, then paused. She heard them move toward the window. She braced herself for the sound of breaking glass, or the catch being forced.
It did not come. There was a shuffling sound, then the footsteps approached the door where she stood. And stopped.
Whoever was there was as close to the door as she was. Two inches of flimsy wood separated them. Through the panels she could hear his breathing: a quiet inhalation and exhalation of breath.
Her limbs felt leaden with fear. She thought: I should have switched off the lights, and now it’s too late. She thought: I must decide, now, what to do when he comes in. Her mind worked with a slow clarity; it was like watching a sixty-mile-an-hour car crash slowly approach. She told herself: I must move, so I’m behind the door when it opens. She took one step, then another. The lights in the apartment flickered, and went out.
She gave a low moan of terror. The darkness was thick, she could see nothing. She backed away from the door, and collided with a table behind her. A vase crashed to the floor and smashed. Outside, someone moved. The footsteps hesitated, then moved off. They remounted the steps, crossed the sidewalk above in the direction of the square’s central gardens. The footsteps were rapid now. They faded into the distance. The silence was intense.
She was flooded with relief. It coursed through her like blood. She inched forward, and broken glass cut her foot. Carefully, feeling for glass, she fumbled her way across the room. There was a flashlight in her desk. She could see nothing. She felt space, then the handle of a desk drawer. She opened the drawer and felt around its contents. A leather glove brushed her hand. She felt the cold metal of the handcuffs. She scra
bbled frantically at the back of the drawer: She could not bear this absence of light. She was crouching down, feeling in the drawer, when the telephone rang next to her face. The sound was sudden and loud; she started, and almost knocked the instrument to the floor.
Who would call now, at this hour? She fumbled in the dark for the receiver, and as she did so, relief flooded her body again. Pascal. She was sure it was Pascal. Her hand closed on the receiver and she eagerly snatched it up.
A man’s voice, but not Pascal’s, began to speak.
“Gini,” he said. “Gini, is it you?”
Her skin went cold. The voice was low, unrecognizable, and thick.
“Gini. I know it’s you. I got you out of bed. Listen, Gini, it’s late—and it’s time for us to talk. …”
“Who is this?” Gini said. “What do you want?”
The man continued speaking, right across her question. The voice was whispery, the line poor. “Are you wearing your nightdress, Gini? I think you are. The white one, with the blue ribbon at the neck? I like it. It’s pretty. The material’s thin. …”
“Listen, whoever you are,” Gini began. She heard the fear in her own voice. She was wearing a white nightgown; its ribbon was blue. It was made of fine thin cotton voile.
“Stand still,” said the voice, riding over her words again.
“That’s right. Now I can see your breasts through the cotton. You have beautiful breasts, Gini. You know what they do to me? They make me hard…. All the blood goes straight to my cock, Gini. It’s stiff.”
Gini’s hand had closed over the flashlight. She drew it out and switched it on. Light made her feel stronger. She held the receiver at arm’s length and heard the voice whisper on. She brought the receiver closer.
“Listen, you creep,” she said distinctly. “Do us both a favor. Go screw yourself, okay?”