Never Mind Miss Fox Page 9

  Back in the hotel he wondered what he would do. It was too late to telephone home, but too early to cut his losses and go to bed. His room had been swept clean of wet towels, discarded food and detritus—to make a new impression he would have to repeat the solitary pantomime he had conducted earlier. He stood in the center of the room and drank a cold beer from the fridge, wondering if perhaps he would go to bed after all. Neither Martha nor Justin need ever know.

  The ring of the telephone gave him a fright. It was Belinda. “These people are paranoid,” she said. “Clive, can you run round to Lynton’s suite at the Arcturus and fetch a bundle of stuff out of his safe? He doesn’t trust a courier. It’s only a matter of showing your face, picking it up and coming straight back.”

  “Of course,” said Clive, untwisting the telephone cord with his free hand. Something to do! An errand. He swelled with self-importance.

  “If you meet him, don’t say anything—you’ll make him nervous. Shake his hand and call him ‘sir’ if you get the chance. I know it’s ludicrous but this is the sort of thing they care about. When you get back I’ll put the documents into the safe.”

  Clive threw back his shoulders, walked nine blocks to the Arcturus and bowled up to reception feeling necessary and important. Placing both hands on the chest-high marble surface of the desk, he spoke to a manicured girl in a headset who looked straight through him until he had finished speaking and then said, “Go on up,” and pointed to a lift, in the corner of the lobby, which served the penthouse suite alone. Once inside Clive checked his teeth in the mirror as red numbers flicked to twenty on a little dark screen.

  After only a few seconds the doors opened—slowly; gingerly—to reveal not the usual hotel arrangement of landing, fire extinguisher and rubbish bin but instead a fully furnished room in which the elevator seemed to be both incongruous and incidental. Each marble-topped surface gleamed a different shade of mottled pink. Across the largest table a Prince tennis racquet was wrapped in a matte black sheath and it seemed to point and stare at Clive until he quavered on the carpet. The lift doors remained open a moment, as if they too were encouraging him to return to the lobby where he belonged, and then with a sigh of resignation they slid together. Clive was left alone. He felt as if he had made the villain’s entrance—from beneath the stage—and that his appearance would be met by jeers and catcalls.

  The air and the carpet seemed both to be thicker up here, and Clive plowed from one room to the next with the shuffling steps of a polar explorer. It was quiet, but for the distant sound of a television. He waded toward the noise through a kitchen, a scullery and a dining room—each more of a gap than a destination—and came to a halt in the chilled atmosphere of a gym, where CNN boomed at a cluster of petrified equipment.

  Clive cursed himself and the machines before trailing a sorry path back to the lift. From the table the Prince racquet mocked him and he stood before it for a moment, penitent, before setting out again in a different direction. He traced another sound—the hysterical babble of a sports commentary—across a plush, puffed sitting room in which a shining black piano made a glossy puddle on the white carpet. Hurrying now—he must have been in this labyrinth for a thousand years—he approached an open doorway.

  Before he could check his progress Clive had arrived in a bedroom. A roaring television hung on the wall and three huge men were perched on stools, looking up. Behind them stood an enormous bed and at its center lay a quill-shaped man—narrow-shouldered and neat—with socked feet crossed and a celestial spread of pillows behind his head.

  Knowing he had come too far, Clive teetered on the brink. Beyond the bed—beyond the window—lay the sparkling city, black and white at night. He imagined leaping out of this chamber and into the Milky Way.

  The three spectators continued to stare at the screen with parted lips, as if about to receive communion, but the man on the bed stopped murmuring into the telephone and turned his head to stare at Clive.

  This was Belinda’s client, Lynton, recognizable from the profile Clive had read in the Financial Times (“Gentleman—Yachtsman—Millionaire”) but also from his uniform—white sports socks and crisp white T-shirt; tracksuit trousers shaded the same expensive charcoal as his hair—which was standard leisurewear for billionaires and looked as if it had been bought at Saks today and delivered to the door of the bedroom in a fluttering nest of tissue. In a suit, Clive—like the seated thugs—could be identified as staff.

  The laid-back pose was not convincing: Clive could tell that Lynton held in reserve the chilled athleticism of a leopard on a branch. With a flick of his tail, it was plain, he could be up and on you with his pointed teeth in the back of your neck. When he spoke—putting his hand over the receiver—it was in a tone of polite but lethal interest: “And who the hell are you?”

  The three men—perched in a row like circus sea lions—turned their gaze from the screen, twitched at Clive and opened their mouths to bark.

  Clive began, “I’m—”

  But then—“Clive?”

  It was a voice he knew, and he turned to face it. The city flickered beneath the window and the crowd bellowed from the television, but here in the room—half-dressed, half-dry, and halfway through hooking diamond earrings in her ears—stood Eliot Fox.

  On the morning after Aiden’s funeral, Clive had seen an otter. He had left Martha asleep in the cottage and gone for a run: into the woods behind the house, over the hill and along a track which took him down to a river. He had stopped to tie his lace beside a still, brimming pool, where branches hung their fingertips over the water and a lick of vapor skimmed away in a careless arabesque.

  Straightening up, he had paused to look and taken in the perfect, balanced harmony of the moment. The water lay before him, its surface undisturbed: one chord would draw the ballerina from the wings to tiptoe a shy, tilted path towards center stage.

  Clive had felt like an intruder. The previous day’s wake had been long, liquid and emotional; a tight, sticky residue of alcohol—whisky and champagne—still hung about him like a drift of tiny flies. He had held his hot breath rather than cloud the air.

  As he stood motionless a smooth, drenched head had emerged from the water in front of him. Streaked in brown and tan, it was as clean and washed as a handful of stones on the riverbed.

  Otter.

  It had not seen him but had swum, frowned into the depths, turned about, dipped and ducked. A swirl—a loosely written circle on the surface—and it had gone. Clive had waited—hoping—and it had come again, slipping through the water like a knife through silk. It was light and strong; serious and laughing; thinking and instinctive—all these things were bound together and buttoned inside its tawny coat.

  Clive had been astonished and had felt—with a flash of something near joy—as if his sins had been forgiven and that this sight was the proof: here was a blessing, swimming before him. He had thought of himself—what I did—and then of Eliot—what I did to Eliot. She had swum into his mind’s eye—he had kept her out for so long, why today?—and he had wanted to weep, to fall to his knees, to grind dirt from the path into his eyes.

  Why think of her? Because there was something of Eliot in that creature—rare, purposeful, tender, humorous—that worked as it played, and played as it worked. He had remembered Eliot’s hands at the piano: swim, soar, dip, soothe, search. The privacy of that work which was play to her. He had begged out loud, “Oh, please—,” and the otter had heard him, looked and vanished.

  Clive had finished the sentence in his head: Oh, please let me begin again.

  Back at the cottage he had picked his way upstairs to the bedroom through the mess of empty bottles and glasses left by the funeral party. He had found Martha still sleeping, her face a slide of makeup pressed into the pillow and her black dress dropped on the floor. Clive had woken her up and asked her to marry him.

  But this was the living, breathing Eliot, here in this room. Not a forgiving spirit but a towering, fearsome person, stan
ding before him with the might to judge him still. Clive knew at once he had not been right to forgive himself that morning, standing beside the river. Here stood the girl who had written in her felt-tip pen, I hate your guts and I hope you rot in hell. Whether she hated him still was for her to decide for herself.

  He had thought of her since that morning—of course he had—but only for as long as it took to spell her name out in his head: El-i-ot. At its closing consonant he repackaged the word and put it away.

  He had not forgotten—he had neither forgotten nor remembered—until Martha, pregnant and explosive, had announced the name she wanted to give their daughter: Eliza. E-l-i. Clive had felt the clutch of the ghost at his arm and he had bent down to the floor—tying his shoelace, hiding his face, buying some time—before straightening up to reply. But what could he say? No, not that name…

  “Why not?” Martha would have demanded. “It was my mother’s name, Clive. Why not?”

  Because it reminds me of that girl we used to know…

  Here she stood: that girl. He stood in front of her, turned to stone.

  Eliot laughed. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost!” and hearing the chime of her voice Clive thought, Perhaps it is going to be all right.

  “Who is this guy?” asked Lynton. “Friend of yours?”

  “I know him.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned to Clive. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came for a document.”

  “You’re the guy? The barrister? From London?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Small world,” Lynton said. His voice was chalky with distrust.

  “You’ll never guess how I know him,” Eliot said. “It’s such a funny story—” She was watching Clive who swallowed and cringed in terror like a thieving, cornered dog.

  “Oh yeah?” queried Lynton.

  Eliot waited a moment with half a smile on her lips and then she said, “Never mind. I’ll tell you another time.”

  Clive wanted to dive through the glass and into the hooting metropolis but instead he licked his lips and tried to speak. “I had no idea—” he began.

  But Lynton spoke too. “How did you—?”

  Eliot interrupted them: “Let’s have a drink,” she said. “Since you’re here.”

  She pulled a dress from the closet and slipped it on over her underwear, right there in the room. Clive and Lynton watched her but the other men did not even turn their heads. Then Lynton glanced—cat-quick—at Clive and caught him staring.

  “Come on,” Eliot beckoned Clive. He followed her into the next-door room which contained the piano and, he noticed now, a bar. The men stayed where they were. “Lynton’s team is playing,” Eliot explained. “He wouldn’t move if you set him on fire.”

  Behind the bar, Eliot pulled open a fridge door. Bottles of champagne were arranged in neat rows and she lifted one out, stripped the foil from the neck of the bottle and twisted out the cork. She paid as little attention to the task as if she had been snapping open a can of Coke or squeezing a carton of milk.

  Clive watched her, waiting for a cue. She was very thin under the black, clinging stretch of her dress. He noted the sharp prongs of her shoulders, elbows and pelvis; the mark of each rib as she turned to pluck two glasses from a high shelf. Her face by contrast seemed unstructured—as pale, featureless and distant as a winter moon. Her hair was short and bleached to white; even her lips and eyes seemed to have been washed of their color. Most vivid were the glittering diamonds which swung to and fro below each ear.

  Eliot did not ask him what he wanted, but pushed a glass of champagne towards him. She unwrapped a pack of cigarettes that was lying on the bar, and lit one. She did not come and sit next to him but stayed standing where she was.

  He thought she might not say anything, and so he spoke. “You don’t seem surprised,” he said.

  She exhaled a gust of smoke. “I’m not. People always crop up again, in life. Didn’t you imagine this would happen? I did.”

  She had become sophisticated: Clive saw it in her dead-eyed look; he heard it in the flat tone of her voice. Nothing would be extraordinary; nothing would surprise her. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I did.” He had imagined a chance meeting, but never a conversation—and certainly not this. He was unmoored. “How are you?” he asked.

  “Me? Great. Good. Brilliant, actually.”

  “How long have you…”

  “Been with Lynton? For a bit.” She seemed to have smoked the whole cigarette already, and ground out the stub. She stared at the packet, scratching the back of one hand with the nails of the other. Clive could tell she wanted another one. He was thinking, She can’t be more than twenty-one.

  “So you’re a barrister,” she said. “You said you were going to be. How clever of you”—she gave a flat, mocking laugh—“to have realized your ambition.” In a gesture that seemed to signify both defiance and surrender she took another cigarette and lit it before refilling both their glasses.

  “I’m only a junior,” apologized Clive. “Not much more than an assistant, really.”

  “Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself, Clive,” she said in a voice that fell like salt. “And what else? Wife? Baby?”

  “Yes.” Why did he not want to admit it? “Both.”

  “I knew it!” she exclaimed. “Don’t tell me: you married Martha?” She laughed even more when she saw from his face that she had guessed right. “How did you manage that? Did you get her pregnant too?”

  Clive was shocked, and he hated her—that bitter voice would spoil everything it spoke of. He thought of home, of Eliza’s face and the puff of her breath as she slept. “We’ve got a daughter,” he admitted, reluctant.

  “How sweet,” mocked Eliot, taking a glug at her drink. “And what about Martha’s ambition? I can’t picture her as a housewife.”

  Clive flushed. “She’s fine,” he said. He waited a moment for the hot wash to ebb from his face and neck. Then he asked, “What about you? What are you doing?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. “Doing? I’m…” She looked around the room, as if for inspiration. “I like music,” she said, eyes lighting on the piano.

  “You always did.” Clive’s voice seemed to leap at the positive—at last he had been thrown a ball he could return. “Do you remember, you played the piano in the hotel lobby in France?”

  She smiled and said, “Did I? What a little brat I must have been. Well: now I’ve got my own piano in my own apartment. How about that?”

  “Where?” asked Clive.

  She looked at him. “What do you mean, ‘where’? Here—right here in this room.”

  “Oh, I thought you meant—” But he could not continue. I thought you meant you had your own apartment; your own home. Anywhere but here.

  There was another pause and then Eliot asked, “How’s Tom?”

  Clive did not want to tell her anything more, but his head hurt and he felt weakened by this awful torture. He might not want to speak, but he could not keep himself from talking. “He’s fine,” he replied. “He’s going to be a doctor, if you can believe it.”

  “Yes, I can,” said Eliot. She had expected this too; she seemed to know everything. Clive quickly drank his champagne, blinking as he tipped the glass back. He noticed that in the ceiling above the bar little sparkling lights had been set so that there was something to look at when you drank.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Eliot said next.

  “Tonight?” Clive repeated, stupid and confused. “Nothing. I mean…no, nothing. Why? What time is it?”

  “I’ve no idea. Does it matter? We’re going to something,” she said, frowning, “but I’m not sure what. Some ‘do,’ probably. Why don’t you come?”

  “I can’t…” But in fact, he could; he could not think of a reason why not. “Well, I could I suppose. But it’s a bit weird, isn’t it? I mean, Lynton’s my client.”

  “Oh, d
on’t worry about that. Lynton’s adorable—”

  Clive doubted this.

  “—and in any case, you said yourself—you’re only the assistant. It’s not like you’re a big silk who’s going to get up and represent him in court.”

  The way she put this point—which he himself had made—unnerved Clive still further. He was afraid.

  “Come on,” went on Eliot, “will you? For me?” She turned the lit end of her cigarette around in the ashtray. She looked down at it and then up at Clive from under her lashes. “I’m so fucking lonely, Clive.” The words were a surprise—and she said them so quickly—he wondered whether he had heard her right.

  “OK,” he said. “Yes.” Guilt would make him do anything she asked, he realized, for eternity. He feared her; he was paralyzed; he could not run away. He would stand quite still and wait for the plunge of her knife between his ribs.

  Eliot smiled her half-smile and said, “I’ll be back in a sec.”

  In those days, if—when—Eliza woke in the night she cried with a loud, snagging, persistence that—although there was nothing wrong—did not stop. She did not have to be upset, hungry or uncomfortable. She might not even be awake. She might just cry, on and on.

  Martha and Clive had different ideas about what to do. He would get up; she would not. “If you leave her,” Martha would say, “she’ll stop.” But they never knew because they never did: Clive was always there, and Eliza was always nestled to sleep on his shoulder.

  On that night—for the first time in Eliza’s life—there was no Clive.

  “What will you do?” he had asked, before he had left for the airport.

  “Don’t you trust me?” Martha had replied. To herself she had said, I will not give in.

  When she woke up she lay in the dark and listened to those lonely, miserable sobs in the neighboring room: