“Anyone like me? You just met me,” said Edgar, leaving the platter to the expert. “How can you be sure that Saddler and I are so damned different?”
“Well, look at you,” said Nicola. “Feet planted apart. Arms lifted at your sides, quick-draw. Hips thrown forward. Shoulders hunched, head down, jaw thrust. That’s the same boxing stance you assumed on my front porch. As if someone’s about to slug you.”
Edgar tried to straighten gradually; he’d not snap to attention because some dame made fun of his posture. “Saddler’s Napoleonic, while I’m a whipped puppy?” he snapped—having intended to keep his tone humorous, but Edgar wasn’t really amused.
“I didn’t mean you were cowering,” she clarified politely, “but hostile.”
“You’re the one who said you hated me.”
“You stand as if you expect me to hate you.”
“Saddler expected everyone to fall in love?”
“They did,” said Nicola.
“Win Pyre sure didn’t,” Edgar countered, picking up the platter and heading for the living room.
“Ever gone deep-sea fishing?” asked Nicola after him. “Some catches swim to the gunwale. Others thrash and run out the line. Win may have been a fighter, but he was still hooked.” Reaching the foyer, she stopped.
“Listen, how about a drink? I’ve got a fire on.”
“I can’t stay.”
“Why not?”
Nicola glanced beside the door, as if searching for a white lie left behind by a previous guest like an umbrella. Apparently she didn’t find one. “Because Henry no longer trusts me.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. Distrust has become Henry’s weapon of choice. He uses it quite indiscriminately.” Nicola still hadn’t moved toward the living room, though Edgar bet she knew where the fireplace was.
“Please stick around a few minutes,” he pleaded in earnest. “This place is cavernous, and I’ve got nobody to talk to.”
She melted, and handed him her cape with a killer smile. “Well, Henry’s already so suspicious that a few minutes can’t make him any more so.”
Heading for the living room, Edgar began to wriggle surreptitiously from the robe.
“Don’t take that off on my account,” said Nicola. “I think you need it.” She added hastily, “To keep warm, I mean.”
Edgar led her to the flagging fire. Once Nicola pokered the logs, they burst to flame. She had that touch. After sliding the tray of eats onto the seaman’s trunk, Edgar switched off the lamp and fetched drinks, refusing to panic that having arisen only two hours before he was effectively boozing in the morning. Instead he was suffused with joy. Bourbon for breakfast and a beautiful woman at his beck! Overlooking for the moment that this long-legged apparition had only materialized to haunt the home of another man, he decided to keep on the dressing gown. In this light he could almost forget that she was married. Barrington would.
“Where you from originally?” asked Edgar, delivering her brandy. Quietly, he slipped the Remy and Noah’s Mill bottles from the crook of his arm; refills that required getting up were asking for It’s really time I . . .
“I was born in Zambia, where my parents have a farm. University in Edinburgh, design. I did an au pair stint in Rhode Island—but the kids resented that I monopolized their toys, and the parents got frustrated that I wouldn’t stop playing to come in for dinner. They hadn’t planned on hiring a fourth child, so that didn’t last. A spot of teaching and odd jobs in London; then I met Henry.”
Edgar invited Nicola to have a seat on the ottoman, backless but buttressed on both ends and parallel to the fireplace. Edgar settled on the opposite end, rejecting the obvious alternative: a high-backed wingchair in emerald velveteen, with scrolled mahogany arms. True, the plush green armchair was too remote from his guest, wouldn’t allow for the chance grazing of knees, and was positioned in such proximity to the fire as to seem piggy. But perplexingly, he avoided it because it didn’t seem like his chair. As if the seat were taken, and were its tenant to return to find Edgar parked in it, embarrassment might ensue.
“I can’t compete with that,” said Edgar, toasting. “Born in Wilmington; Columbia No-I-Didn’t-Get-into-Harvard undergrad, Boston University No-I-Didn’t-Get-into-Harvard Law School; Wall Street until I lost my mind. I’d give my eyeteeth to have been born in Zambia.”
“By the standards of your new colleagues, Zambia is one of the most pedestrian parts of East Africa to hail from. It’s not very bloody. But then, I find the aggro they relish tedious myself. For the life of me I can’t get excited about the SOB. The hacks like to think it’s so complicated. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t see the immigration issue as having more than one side?”
“Possibly. But as far as I can see, Barban immigration has nothing to do with blowing up airplanes. Which is awful, full stop. Roland calls me simplistic.”
“Are you?” Come to think of it, there was something simple about Nicola. She’d run until she tired and eat until no longer hungry. She’d take concepts like good and evil at face value, and if she said she had a headache, she had a headache. Edgar wasn’t sure if this made Nicola especially wonderful, or everyone else he knew especially fucked up.
“If considering terrorism wrong and ugly is simpleminded, I suppose I am. In fact, since I can’t see two sides to it, the issue doesn’t even engage me. Barrington thought terrorism was fun,” she added forlornly. “He’d get into a particular ecstatic, hyperactive humor, and that’s how I’d know there’d been another gory Amtrak derailment without having to tune into the World Service.”
“Speaking of the Big B, I can set your mind at rest on the tower. No bodies.”
“Pity,” she said flippantly. “Mystery unsolved.”
“He wasn’t, I don’t know, an IV drug-user, was he?” Edgar asked idly.
Nicola leaned forward and fixed Edgar with a disrobing stare. “Did you find something?”
“Not really,” Edgar backed off. “Just curious.” As if playing a rivalrous game of Clue, Edgar felt compelled to hoard the stationery, metal pipe, and rubber glove discoveries to himself.
Whatever secrets Nicola discerned in Edgar’s face, they mustn’t have amounted to much, and she sank back. “Drugs? He’d try anything once. For all I know, Barrington has shot up lemon meringue pie. He wasn’t what you’d call health-conscious. But I don’t think any substance ever took. Barrington’s interest in chemistry was social. He loved dropping some new catalyst into a gathering to see what precipitated. He wasn’t interested in the colors of his soul. He didn’t need to be. Other people told him repeatedly what he was like.”
“What do you think happened to him?” asked Edgar.
Nicola swirled her cognac, gazing into the snifter as if the Remy’s long legs would sidle off in a telling direction. “He could be sulking. For that matter, he might still be holed up in Cinziero. Looking on, chuckling while the press corps gets overwrought. He’s one of those attend-your-own-funeral types. If he has simply gone to ground, I may bear some of the blame.”
“Why would Saddler sulk on your account?” Edgar noted tactfully, “I got the impression you were fond of him.”
Nicola arched her eyebrows. “Oh, did you? I told you that Barrington treated the whole world like his own backyard. But he still wasn’t satisfied. So I wasn’t enough, either. Whatever else you hear, Barrington was a very greedy man. And childish.”
In Edgar’s experience, these were both qualities that women found universally irresistible. “You sound pissed off.”
“I have reason to be.” She mashed a half-eaten mushroom whatnot as if stubbing out a cigarette. “He ruined my marriage.”
“You and Henry are still together, aren’t you?”
“We still live in the same house.” Nicola flounced back on the cushion and buried herself in hair. “Oh, who am I kidding? No one ruined my marriage but me. I just don’t understand how it happened. Have you ever had a relations
hip that sang? Where you’re like deliciously incestuous brother and sister? When every day is such an outrageous frolic that it feels illegal, and any minute you expect to be arrested?”
“If you put it that way,” said Edgar glumly, “no.”
“Well, that’s what it used to be like, and now we talk.”
“How terrible.”
“I mean have regular conversations! With badly chosen words that we have to say we didn’t mean, and then we have to find another word and see if that works better. It’s Neanderthal. Like going back to hitting your clothes on a rock when you used to use a washer. God, these days Henry and I have to tell each other how we feel.”
“All couples wax and wane,” Edgar supplied lamely.
“I was never on my guard against being attracted to someone else, because I simply wasn’t attracted to anyone else, ever. Henry knew I wasn’t. I knew Henry wasn’t. No one was on the lookout, don’t you see? That’s how it happened. I was unprotected because I thought I was impervious, and maybe that’s the hubris I’ve been punished for. Daring to think that all those tawdry ‘wandering eyes’ and ‘seven-year itches’ and ‘midlife crises’ in magazines didn’t apply to me. Still, how much safer could it get? We were a threesome. We did everything together! It seemed so innocent at first. And Henry adored Barrington.”
“But not anymore.”
“Of course he still does, that’s half the problem. When you adore someone and then you think they’ve betrayed you, it’s the fact that you continue to adore them that keeps the injury fresh. If Henry could dislike Barrington, he wouldn’t keep feeling the knife twist. I’m sorry, I must be trying your patience.”
“I don’t mind.” Edgar could listen to this woman describe how her marriage was “ruined” for hours.
“Then it’s all right if I mention your predecessor from time to time?” She shot a glance at the green wingchair. “All the hacks are such gossips; I feel as if I’ve been holding my breath. Then Barrington absconds, and I can hardly confide in Henry.”
Mention him? Wallasek onward, Edgar had heard nothing but wall-to-wall Saddler, and this broad took the prize. Edgar was of two minds about this familiar shoulder-to-cry-on role. Sometimes the jiltee patched things up with Mr. Right with the benefit of his excellent advice, and Edgar was left laundering hankies like a chump. The alternative brand of loneliheart dabbed her eyes, tilted her pretty cheeks a few degrees, and stuck her tongue down his throat.
“Better to talk about Saddler than around him,” Edgar allowed. “According to the photo upstairs, that’s a wide detour.”
“You will keep my confidences to yourself?” pleaded Nicola, placing a hand on his knee. “Barrington always said there are two types of people: the sort who dispense information, and the sort who collect it. Just like money: you’re a spender or a saver.”
“Which are you?” Who cares? Just don’t move that hand.
“By nature, prodigal. But I’ve had to become more calculating.” As if to demonstrate, she withdrew from Edgar’s knee.
“You’re terrible at it,” said Edgar. “Like, you’ve got no reason to trust me.”
“No, but you have that tight-lipped, retentive look, as if you tear out pages of the encyclopedia and stuff them in your mattress.”
“So Saddler and I do have something in common. No one would divide people into secret-tellers and secret-keepers and then pride himself on being one of the blabs.”
“True. He was lavish with money, but stingy with facts.”
“Everyone has been,” said Edgar, folding his arms. “About Saddler anyway. You want to talk about him, then how about some brass tacks? Like, why was a Brit working for an American newspaper?”
“Mmm, I think Barrington was always angling for advantage. There’s nothing special about being British in Britain, is there? While in America . . . Besides, he claimed he liked Americans. Because, he said, they’re so ‘obvious.’ ”
“Easy to manipulate,” Edgar translated. “Brothers or sisters?”
“One of each. It’s hard for them. They didn’t get it, whatever it is, the gene, the spell cast over the crib? Mark is hardworking and very nice.” The description was like a death sentence. “Lola is overweight and not very bright. She’s besotted with Barrington, and in his absence has taken to ringing me up. I feel sorry for them both, but Lola’s getting difficult. She wants to hire a detective, establish a search fund, run adverts in the Sun. There’s nothing wrong with either of them; they’re simply ordinary, and I think it must be a terrible cross to bear, having a brother who—” Nicola floundered—“takes up so much room.”
“Where’s Saddler from?”
“Some village in Yorkshire.” She frowned.
Edgar rapped the trunk. “The town, the town!” His urgency was jarring, but he’d had his fill of enigma after Angela. Nothing demystified like particulars, e.g., fact: you’ve been fucking Jamesie every other Thursday for the last two years. Magically, the fog lifts.
Nicola shot Edgar a chary eye. “I’m not sure. Oddly, his accent is all very Earl Grey. But he attended university at LSE, and a Yorkshire accent’s Midlands—hardly aristocratic. On the other hand, if the posh pronunciation is put on, I never heard it slip. And so many Eton types in England these days ape the working class that genteel pretensions have become almost refreshing. Barrington did mention his mother, a schizophrenic who walked around in nothing but men’s Y-fronts and raised chickens in the house. Or something—it was more hilarious than that. But I never trusted Barrington’s stories. They were too entertaining.”
“Was he a liar?”
“Which kind? I dare say his mother did walk around in men’s underdrawers, but maybe it wasn’t funny. You know how draining it can be when people talk about their families, their childhoods? I try to make the effort, because sometimes the dullest details are the most telling. But Barrington was never boring. That’s suspicious, isn’t it? And a little sad. He didn’t trust anyone enough to be dreary with them. I think that’s the biggest favor you can grant anyone, don’t you? Permission to be dull. I know Henry will sometimes say something so utterly uninteresting that I could faint. And that’s when you know you’re in love: the tedium isn’t unbearable, it’s lovely. Barrington never dared take that risk. I wonder what he thought might happen.”
“Bullshit.”
Nicola started. “Sorry?”
“Your partner’s a yawn, you’re not in love,” Edgar contradicted brutally. “Or not anymore.”
Nicola drew herself upright. “How can you—”
“I had a friend in prep school,” Edgar cut her off, rising to mess with the fire. “He fascinated me. I swiped one of his bank statements once just to find out his middle name. Mohr, with an H: Tobias Mohr Falconer. I used to doodle his initials in the margins of my physics notes, and even today TMF has a sound to it. I took a train from Delaware over Christmas break to find his house in Greenwich. Not to visit; just to cruise by and check it out. I knew Falconer’s hat size and he didn’t even wear one. I knew the exact hour he was born and how rare he liked his steak. Everything about him seemed so cool: his Hush Puppies, his father’s old Boy Scout knapsack. But Falconer could have come to class in a duck suit and that would have seemed cool, too.” Having managed nearly to smother the flames altogether, Edgar twisted to face her. “And Nicola, Toby Falconer never bored me, either.”
“So?” she asked dubiously.
“Saddler could have read you the obituaries from Lansing, Michigan, and you’d have been riveted!” Edgar exclaimed, waving the poker about. “This theory of yours that Saddler didn’t allow himself to be dull because he didn’t ‘trust’ people is nuts. You and his fan club set up the rules so that nothing Barrington Saddler said could be boring because Barrington Saddler said it. He sings ‘Three Blind Mice,’ isn’t that cute! He refuses to say anything at all? Oh dear, Barrington is brooding, what could be the matter? Saddler pukes? All the girls rush to help clean up and pat his face. Next day, it’s n
ot an embarrassing display, but the stuff of myth! Old Bear sure tied one on! Believe me, Nicola, I know about these people. If they live in some dung heap like Cinziero, suddenly Nowheresville, Barba, more than Paris or Tuscany, is ultrachic. If they ever fall in love, you expect headlines and suicides, and for the lucky princess, some kind of coronation—that is, before she’s assassinated.”
Nicola laughed. “Why does Barrington rankle you so?”
“Because I don’t understand it!” The poker hit the fireplace mosaic; a tile cracked. “I may not wear it on my sleeve, but I’m pretty motherfucking smart. My grades were good, I test high. I’m not witless; I can deliver punch lines. Women tell me I’m not bad-looking. I’m well-read; I keep up. Until recently, I even made money. But to my knowledge nobody has ever filched my bank statement to find out my middle name.”
“Which is?”
“Earl. But you won’t scribble EEK in your margins, and if I read the Lansing obits you’ll snore. I want to know how they do it, what’s the trick. Christ, why did you really come over here tonight? Not because you were smitten with me.”
“I was being hospitable,” she said, injured.
“Horseshit. You couldn’t stay away from this house. You had to come sniffing around Saddler’s digs for a whiff of the old bastard himself.” Restive, Edgar noshed down a pastry. “UCH!” Edgar groped for a napkin and spit it out.
“Oh dear,” said Nicola quietly.