“Does he love anybody else?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
She was examining a piece of paper. “Is this Mr. Osnard’s correct home address? Torre del Mar? Punta Paitilla?”
Click.
“Yes,” Marta said.
The conversation was over but Marta didn’t realise this at first because Louisa went on clicking the lighter and smiling at the flame. And there were quite a few clicks and smiles before it occurred to Marta that Louisa was drunk in the way Marta’s brother used to get drunk when life became too much for him. Not singing drunk or wobbly drunk, but crystal-headed, perfect-vision drunk. Drunk with all the knowledge she had been drinking to get rid of. And stark naked inside her wrapper.
21
It was one-twenty on the same morning when Osnard’s front doorbell rang. For the last hour he had been in a state of advanced sobriety. At first, still raging from his defeat, he had revelled in violent methods of ridding himself of his hated guest: hurl him off the balcony to crash through the roof of the Club Unión a dozen floors below, ruining everybody’s evening; drown him in the shower; put cleaning fluid in his whisky—“Eh, well, Andrew, if you insist, but only the merest finger, if you please”—suck of the teeth as he expires. His fury was not confined to Luxmore:
Maltby! My ambassador and golfing partner, Christ’s sake! Queen’s own bloody representative, faded flower o’ the British bloody Diplomatic Service, and gyps me like a pro!
Stormont! Soul o’ probity, one o’ life’s born losers, last o’ the white men, Maltby’s faithful poodle with the stomachache, egging his master on with nods and grunts while My Lord Bishop Luxmore gives them both his blessing!
Was it conspiracy or cock-up? Osnard asked himself, over and over again. Was Maltby tipping a wink when he spoke of “share and share alike” and “can’t hang on to the whole game”? Maltby, that smirking pedant, putting his fingers in the till? Bastard wouldn’t know how. Forget it. And Osnard to a degree did indeed forget it. His natural pragmatism reasserted itself, he abandoned vengeful thoughts and applied himself instead to saving what remained of his great enterprise. The ship is holed but not sunk, he told himself. I’m still BUCHAN’s paymaster. Maltby’s right.
“Care for something different, sir, or prefer to stay with the malt?” “Andrew, please. I beseech you. Scottie, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll try,” Osnard promised and, stepping through the open French doors, poured him another industrial-sized shot of malt whisky from the sideboard in the dining room and returned with it to the balcony. Jet lag, whisky and insomnia were finally taking their toll of Luxmore, he decided, clinically examining his master’s semi-recumbent figure in the deck chair before him. So was the humidity—the flannel shirt soaked through, tracks of sweat streaming down the beard. So was his terror at being stuck out here in enemy territory with no wife to look after him—the haunted eyes flinching with every sudden clatter of footsteps or police siren or ribald shout that zigzagged up at them through the gimcrack canyons of Punta Paitilla. The sky was clear as water and strewn with brittle stars. A poacher’s moon etched a light-path between the anchored shipping in the mouth of the Canal, but no breeze came off the sea. It seldom did.
“You asked me whether there was anything Head Office might do to make life a bit easier for the station, sir,” Osnard reminded Luxmore diffidently.
“Did I, Andrew? Well, I’m damned.” Luxmore sat up with a jolt. “Fire ahead, Andrew, fire ahead. Though I’m pleased to see you’ve already done yourself pretty well out here,” he added, not entirely pleasantly, with an erratic swing of the arm that took in both the view and the grand apartment. “Don’t think I’m criticising you, mind. I drink to you. To your grit. Your acumen. Your youth. Qualities we all admire. Good health!” Slurp. “You’ve a great career ahead of you, Andrew. Easier times than we had in my day, I may add. A softer bed. You know how much this costs at home now? Lucky if you see change out of a twenty-pound note.”
“It’s about this safe house I mentioned, sir,” Osnard reminded him, in the manner of an anxious heir at his dying father’s bedside. “Time we weaned ourselves away from pushbuttons and three-hour hotels. Thought maybe one o’ those conversions in the Old City would give us greater operational scope.”
But Luxmore was transmitting, not receiving. “The way those stuffed shirts backed you up this evening, Andrew. My God, it’s not often you see respect like that lavished on a younger man. There’s a medal in here somewhere for you when this is over. A certain little lady across the river may feel obliged to show her appreciation.”
A lull while he gazed in perplexity at the bay and seemed to confuse it with the Thames.
“Andrew!”—abruptly as he woke.
“Sir?”
“That fellow Stormont.”
“What about him?”
“Came a cropper in Madrid. Some woman he took up with,
social tart. Married her, if I remember rightly. Beware of him.”
“I will.”
“And her, Andrew.”
“I will.”
“Do you have a woman here?”—peering round facetiously, under the sofa, at the curtains, acting bright. “No hot-arsed Latin lovely tucked away at all? Don’t answer that. Good health again. Keep her to yourself. Wise fellow.”
“I’ve been a bit too busy, actually, sir,” Osnard confessed with a rueful smile. But he refused to give up. He had a notion he was printing things into Luxmore’s subliminal memory for later. “Only in my view, you see, in a perfect world we should be shooting for two safe houses. One for the network, which would obviously be my sole responsibility—Cayman Islands holding company’s the best answer—and another house—available on an extremely limited, need-to-know basis and more representational in style—to service the Abraxas team, and eventually—provided always we can do it without creating interconsciousness, which at this stage I rather doubt—the students. And I think probably I should be handling that one too—as far as the purchase and cover details go—even if Ambass and Stormont have sole use at the end of the day. I don’t think they have our expertise, frankly. It’s a risk we just don’t need to take. I’d love your view on this. Not now, necessarily. Later.”
A long-delayed suck of the teeth told Osnard that his regional director was still with him, if only just. Reaching out, Osnard removed the empty glass from Luxmore’s hand and set it on the ceramic table.
“So what do you think, sir? An apartment like this one for the opposition—fashionable, anonymous, handy for the financial community, nobody has to step out of his element—and a second house in the Old City, to be run in tandem?” He had been thinking for some time of getting a foot on the ladder of Panama’s booming property market. “Basically, in the Old City you get what you pay for. It’s location and location and location. A decent conversion at the moment—good duplex, architect designed— sets you back give or take fifty grand. Top o’ the range, you get a twelve-room mansion, bit o’ garden, rear access, sea view—offer them half a mil and they’ll cut your arm off. Couple o’ years from now, you’ve doubled your money, long as nobody does anything dramatic with the old Club Unión building that Torrijos turned into an Other Ranks Club out o’ spite because the club wouldn’t have him as a member. Better get an update before we plunge. I can arrange that.”
“Andrew!”
“Right here.”
Suck of the teeth. Eyes close, then sharply reopen.
“Eh, tell me something, Andrew.”
“If I can, Scottie.”
Luxmore cranked his bearded head round until he was facing his subordinate. “That prim Sassenach virgin with large attachments and come-hither eyes who graced our little gathering this evening—”
“Yes, sir?”
“Is she what in my young day we called a cock-teaser, by any chance? Because it seemed to me that if ever I saw a young woman who needed the undivided attention of a seven-foot-tall?
??Andrew! For the love of God! Who the devil’s that at this hour of the night?”
Luxmore’s prescription for Fran was never revealed in its entirety. The ring of the front doorbell became a peal, then a blast. Like a scared rodent, Luxmore and his beard retreated to the furthest corner of the armchair.
The trainers had not been mistaken when they praised Osnard’s aptitude in the black arts. A few measures of malt whisky in no way impaired his reactions and the prospect of being disagreeable to Fran sharpened them. If she had come to kiss and make up, she had picked the wrong man and a worse moment. Which he now proposed to tell her in words of one Anglo-Saxon syllable. And she could take her foot off his bloody bell while she was about it.
Gratuitously instructing Luxmore to remain where he was, Osnard sidled across the dining room to the hall, closing doors along his way, and squinted through the fish-eye of his front door. The lens was coated with condensation. With a handkerchief from his pocket he wiped it clear on his own side, and made out one misty eye, its sex ambivalent, squinting back at him, while the blast of the doorbell continued like a fire alarm. Then the eye pulled away and he recognised instead Louisa Pendel, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and precious little else, standing on one leg while she took her shoe off as a prelude to beating down the door with it.
Louisa did not remember which particular straw had broken her camel’s back. Neither did she care. She had returned from squash to an empty house. The children were visiting with the Rudds and staying over. She rated Ramón one of the Great Unspeakables of Panama and detested letting them anywhere near him. It wasn’t that Ramón hated women, it was the way he hinted that he knew more about Harry than she did, and all of it bad. And the way that, just like Harry, he clammed up when she talked about the rice farm, although it was her money that had bought it.
But none of this accounted for how she felt when she came home from squash, or why she found herself weeping without a reason, when so often in the last ten years she had had a reason but refused to weep. So she supposed that what had happened to her was some kind of accumulation of despair, assisted by a large vodka on the rocks before her shower because she felt like it. Having showered, she examined herself naked, all six feet of her, in the bedroom mirror.
Objectively. Forgetting my height for a moment. Forgetting my beautiful sister, Emily, with her golden tresses and Playboy-centrefold ass and tits to kill for and list of conquests longer than the Panama City telephone directory. Would I or would I not, if I was a man, wish to sleep with this woman? She reckoned she might, but on what evidence? She only had Harry to go by.
She phrased her question differently. If I was Harry, would I still want to sleep with me after a dozen years of marriage? And the answer to that was: on recent evidence, not. Too tired. Too late. Too placatory. Too guilty about something. All right, he was always guilty. Guilt was his best thing. But these days he wore it like a placard: I am forfeit, I am untouchable, I am guilty, I don’t deserve you, good night.
Brushing away her tears with one hand and clutching her glass in the other, she continued to parade back and forth across the bedroom, studying herself, pushing herself out and in, and thinking how for Emily everything came too easily; whether she was playing tennis or riding a horse or swimming or washing up, she couldn’t make an ugly movement if she tried. Even as a woman, you practically had an orgasm watching her. Louisa tried writhing obscenely, the worst whore ever. A frost. Too knobbly. No flow. No hip movement. Too old. Always have been. Too tall. Fed up, she marched back to the kitchen and, still naked, determinedly poured herself another vodka, no ice this time.
And it was a real drink, not “maybe I could do with a drink,” because she had to open a new bottle and find a knife to cut round the seal before she could pour, which is not the sort of thing you do when, just casually, almost by accident, you pour yourself a little something to keep your spirits up while your husband’s out screwing his mistress.
“Fuck him,” she said aloud.
The bottle came from Harry’s new hospitality store.
Chargeable, he said.
“Chargeable, who to?” she had demanded.
“Tax,” he said.
“Harry, I do not wish my house to be used as a tax-free bar.”
Guilty smirk. Sorry, Lou. Way of the world. Didn’t mean to upset you. Won’t do it again. Creep, cringe.
“Fuck him,” she repeated, and felt the better for it.
And fuck Emily too, because without Emily to compete with I would never have taken the moral high road, never pretended to disapprove of everything, never kept my virginity so long it became a world record, just to show everyone how pure and serious I was by contrast with my fucking beautiful sister! I would never have fallen in love with every minister under the age of ninety who climbed into the pulpit in Balboa and told us to repent our sins and Emily’s specially, never have set myself up as pious Miss Perfect and the arbiter of everyone’s bad behaviour when all I really wanted was to be touched and admired and spoiled and fucked like all the other girls on the lot.
And fuck the rice farm too. My rice farm that Harry won’t take me to anymore because he’s put his bloody chiquilla in it: Here, darling, keep looking out of the window for me till I come back. Fuck you. Gulp of vodka. Another gulp. Then a great big gulp and feel it hit the parts that really count, oh boy. Thus fortified, she swept back to the bedroom to resume her gyrations with greater abandon—is this erotic?—go on, tell me!—is this?—all right, so get a load of this! But no one to tell her. No one to clap or laugh or get horny with her. No one to drink with her, cook for her, kiss her neck and talk her down. No Harry.
Breasts not bad for forty, all the same. Better than Jo-Ann’s when she bares all. Not as good as Emily’s, but whose are? Here’s to them. Here’s to my tits. Tits, stand up, you’re being toasted. She sat down abruptly on the bed, chin in hands, watching the phone ring on Harry’s side.
“Go fuck yourself,” she advised it.
And to make her point more strongly, she lifted the receiver an inch, yelled “Go fuck yourself,” and put it down again.
But with kids, you always pick up in the end.
“Yeah? So who is it?” she yells, when it rings again.
It is Naomi, Panama’s minister of misinformation, preparing to share some choice piece of scandal with her. Good. This conversation has been outstanding for too long already.
“Naomi, I am pleased to hear you because I have been meaning to write to you and now you have saved me a stamp. Naomi, I want you out of my fucking life. No, no, listen to me, Naomi. Naomi, if you happen to be passing through the Vasco Nuñez de Balboa Park and see my husband lying on his back enjoying oral intercourse with Barnum’s baby elephant, I would be grateful if you would tell your twenty best friends and never tell me. Because I don’t want to hear your fucking voice again till the Canal freezes over. Good night, Naomi.”
Tumbler in hand, Louisa puts on a red wrapper that Harry recently brought home for her—three big buttons and cleavage according to your mood—fetches a chisel and hammer from the garage and crosses the courtyard to Harry’s den, which these days he keeps locked. Great sky. She hasn’t seen a beautiful sky for weeks. Stars we used to tell our children about. That’s Orion’s belt with the dagger, Mark. And those are your Seven Sisters, Hannah, the ones you always dream of having. The new moon, pretty as a foal.
This is where he writes to her, she thought as she approached the door to his kingdom. To my darling chiquilla, care of my wife’s rice farm. Through the misted window of her bathroom Louisa has watched him for hours on end, silhouetted at his desk, head tilted to one side and tongue out while he writes his love letters though writing never came naturally to Harry; it is one of the things that Arthur Braithwaite, greatest living saint since Laurent, neglected in his foster child’s education.
The door is locked, as she has anticipated, but it presents no problem. The door, when you really beat on it with a good heavy hammer, taking the ham
mer back as far as it will go, then smashing it down on Emily’s head, which was what Louisa dreamed of doing all through her adolescence, is a piece of shit, like most things in the world.
Having smashed the door, Louisa homed on her husband’s desk and smashed open the top drawer with the hammer and chisel— three good heaves before she realised the drawer wasn’t locked in the first place. She ransacked the contents. Bills. Architect’s drawings for the Sportsman’s Corner. Nobody’s lucky first time. Not me anyway. She tried the second drawer. Locked, but surrenders at the first assault. The contents immediately more uplifting. Unfinished essays on the Canal. Learned journals, press cuttings, notes in Harry’s flowery tailor’s hand summarising the above.
Who is she? Who the fuck is he doing it all for? Harry, I am speaking to you. Listen to me, please. Who is this woman whom you have installed at my rice farm without my consent and whom you need to impress with your nonexistent erudition? Who owns this dreamy, cowlike smile you have these days—I am chosen, I am blessed, I walk on water. Or the tears—oh shit, Harry, who owns those bloodcurdling tears that form in your eyes and never fall?
Rage and frustration welling in her again, she smashed open another drawer and froze. Holy shit! Money! Serious, real money! A whole drawer crammed full of fucking money. Hundreds, fifties, twenties. Lying loose in the drawer like old parking tickets. A thousand. Two, three thousand. He’s been robbing banks. Who for?
For his woman? She does it for money? For his woman, to take her out to meals without it going through the housekeeping account? To keep her in the style she isn’t accustomed to, at my rice farm, bought with my legacy? Louisa tried shouting his name several times, first to ask him politely, then to order him because he wouldn’t answer, then to curse him because he wasn’t there.
“Fuck you, Harry Pendel! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! Wherever you are. You’re a fucking cheat!”
It was fuck everything from now on. It was her father’s language when he’d had a skinful, and Louisa felt a daughter’s pride that, having had a skinful herself or getting that way, she swore like her fucking father.