A Splash of Red (5 page)

'She's in England?' Jemima spoke with relief. It was after all August.

'Why no, Miss Shore, she's not in
England.'
For a moment the voice sounded just a little disappointed in Jemima, as though the daring act of telephoning must have slightly blunted her sensitivity. 'Isabelle has been in Paris for the Collections. I meant that she's not available to speak with anyone till noon. She's at L'Hotel, in conference with Princess Wagram, then she would be available to take your call, then
she
expects to lunch with—' a Japanese name followed. 'She plans to return on Sunday.'

'Of course,' cried Jemima hastily. Then with all her television warmth, 'I should so hate to bother Isabelle personally at such a critical moment. In fact I naturally did not expect to speak to her. It's just that I'm trying to contact Chloe Fontaine rather urgently. Something to do with the autumn series—'

'Chloe Fontaine?' The voice was suddenly raised several tones higher and much sharpened; its native South Kensington origin was audible. 'I hardly think that Isabelle would be able to help you with Miss Fontaine's address, Miss Shore.' Warmth had also fled, along with transatlantic softness.

As sweetly and as rapidly as possible, Jemima explained her mission. The result was surprising. Coldness in the voice gave way to genuine astonishment.

'A piece on the Camargue? Chloe Fontaine for
Taffeta,
Miss Shore?' The implication of the last remark was clear: have you, Jemima Shore, made the unforgiveable mistake of confusing
Taffeta
with
Vogue
or
Harpers & Queen,
or
Cosmopolitan,
or
Woman's Journal
or - beyond that the possibilities were too horrendous for one such as Laura Barrymore to contemplate. But Jemima knew that she had not made a mistake. She had an excellent memory for that kind of thing. She could hear Chloe's breathless voice: 'Good old
Taffeta
..
. commissioning me', and then:
'Taffeta
Schmaffeta, but at least it never lets you down . ..' What interested her was the implication in Laura Barrymore's rapidly rising tone that the very combination in itself of Chloe and
Taffeta
was unthinkable.

Jemima had to concede that a commission to Chloe Fontaine, involving both a handsome sum of money advanced and a subsequent rendezvous abroad with a leading photographer, was hardly likely to be quite unknown to Isabelle's personal assistant, one close enough to the editor to be her 'house-guest' while she was 'between apartments'. However, for the sake of the Stovers, she persevered. Laura Barrymore was adamant.

At the end of Jemima's enquiries, however, Laura clearly felt it necessary to round off the conversation in her warmer manner. 'I should just love to take this opportunity to tell you how I adored your last programme, Miss Shore,' she murmured. 'That twilight home. The old lady and the old gentleman, both knitting, it was his knitting which just reached out to me. Like a Dutch picture sprung to life.' Jemima remembered that particular phrase since it had occurred in the
Guardian
review, and the paper had also referred to the programme in the third leader. 'A Dutch picture sprung horribly to life, showing the despair masked by an outwardly harmonious composition.' That was how it had actually read.

Still, it might just be worth making some use of Miss Barrymore's enthusiasm.

'You've been so kind . . . hardly worth bothering Isabelle with all this
...
quite, quite, so busy at this time of year.' She took a breath. 'Just one thing
...
I was contemplating, y
ou know, an in-depth profile of
Isabelle, allied to the development of
Taffeta,
in my autumn series. You know, the serious side of fashion
...
people never quite realize
...
the part played in the British economy, why exports alone
...
social significance.' Jemima murmured on, and ended quite quickly: 'The only thing is that I was proposing to invite Chloe Fontaine to write the programme, so much her style in a way, and she brings her own elegance to these things. But if by any chance that would be unacceptable to Isabelle - this conversation is quite between ourselves, naturally.'

'Believe me,' said Laura Barrymore, 'Miss Fontaine would be
quite
unacceptable to Miss Mancini. There are some trusts which if betrayed—' She stopped, aware that she had abandoned the swanlike supremacy of the perfect friend and assistant. My God, thought Jemima, so Chloe had quarrelled with Isabelle - the fool, and then to suppose that
Taffeta
would give her a commission - no, wait a minute, had Chloe ever indeed really tackled
Taffeta
for work?

'Particularly from a writer who had been such a very close friend. Isabelle had been so
good
to her.' Laura Barrymore was continuing as if her indignation would not quite let her stop, despite her better judgement. 'And a writer of Chloe Fontaine's stature. Her previous stature, perhaps I should say. Why did she need to draw on her friends' private lives? Surely her own provides quite enough
...
It was so terribly
disloyal.
And then the letters - Isabelle felt she had been nurturing a viper.'

My God, thought Jemima again, the novel; the libel which Chloe had dismissed as petty but which worried Valentine Brighton. Chloe's new book must in some way have impinged upon - if that was the right word - the Mancini sensibilities. Disloyalty. No wonder the ultra-loyal Laura Barrymore, the faithful assistant, had frozen at the very notion of Isabelle commissioning Chloe.

'I am of course Chloe Fontaine's house guest,' Jemima put in as diplomatically as possible at the end of this tirade. The reminder had the desired effect. Laura hesitated.

'You're actually in her flat? Her new flat? I hadn't quite appreciated—'

'Exactly.'

For a moment the honey returned. 'In that case, Miss Shore, it occurrs to me that it might be helpful if I came by, maybe I could talk with you on the subject of Isabelle and Miss Fontaine, put you in the picture—'

'No, no!' cried Jemima hastily. 'Really, it's of no consequence.' She had absolutely no wish to be further embroiled in Isabelle Mancini's row with Chloe. The solution to what she was rapidly beginning to rate as the Chloe Mystery, certainly did not lie in the files of
Taffeta
magazine.

Jemima must now put that mystery away from her thoughts. Easy now to sign off her brief relationship with the Stovers. Clearly Chloe was in some enigmatic way in control of her own destiny. She had lied to Jemima about the Camargue, or at any rate misled her. Undoubtedly for the same strange reason she had also misled her parents. In fact, Jemima reflected wryly at the end of her long-drawn-out telephone call to Isabelle's flat, if anyone had succeeded in disappearing in London without trace, it was Chloe Fontaine rather than Jemima Shore. But that was no longer her concern. It was time to gather a notebook and depart for the British Library.

When she telephoned Mr Stover and told him that
Taffeta
had no trace of Chloe's whereabouts, and he must use his own judgement whether to summon the police, Jemima made it clear from her tone that she thought the step unnecessary. Mr Stover too sounded heavier and almost resigned.

'The wife always said I was too fierce to her on the phone', was his first comment. 'Thank you, Miss Shore, we'll look out for you on television in the autumn. If she does phone you—' He stopped. 'Mrs Stover, she does worry, in spite of everything, she can't help it. But she's led her own life for too long, Dollie, we don't really know her any more. That's what I tell her mother. Now if we'd had one of our own—'

It seemed an appropriate moment for Jemima to bid them a polite goodbye. She did not expect to hear of or from the Stovers again; she retained a tiny flicker of interest in what would happen to that old, unvisited couple, that worrying old woman, that old man who felt now that he had been too fierce and driven off the golden bird who was their only link with youth. Concentrated study would soon extinguish even that flicker.

But Chloe - that was different. Jemima was full of natural and cross curiosity about her wayward friend's inexplicable behaviour. If she gave full rein to it, she might ruin this whole promised day of earnest research, by mulling, pondering, even making a checking telephone call, when she, Jemima, was supposed to be incommunicado. Time to be gone. Wearing one of her favourite dresses, silk jersey in the beige she loved with its own little splashes of red and navy blue, practical enough for the British Library, elegant enough to give her spirits a lift, she picked up her notebook. It was a pretty Italianate thing which appeared to be covered in wallpaper whose unsuitability for serious research, like the delight of the flowing dress, she found both soothing and cheering.

This time she remembered to use the second key to unlock the flat door. Tiger sidled towards her and rubbed himself against the high-heeled golden sandal which, on the principle of the notebook, Jemima had decided to wear to the British Library. Jemima shooed him away. 'Back for dinner. Enjoy your balcony, there's a good cat.' And she was still in fact addressing the cat when the door swung open, and she felt both her arms roughly seized. The keys were twisted from her grasp.

'Didn't she get my visiting card?' said Kevin John Athlone. He was so close to her that Jemima could see the slight sweat on his cheeks. She noticed involuntarily that he had not shaved. 'Care for a visit?' He was flushed as well as sweating. 'Well, now she's getting a visit, whether she likes it or not. And you too, Miss Jemima Shore.'

Pushing her back into the flat, he deftly relocked the door. From the wrong side of it, Tiger gave a long unhappy mew.

4

Irish accent

'Where is she?'

Jemima thought Kevin John Athlone had been drinking: drinking all night. His breath smelt sour with a nasty tang of acid in it, mingling with the smell of the sweat which beaded his cheeks and damped his bright blue towelling
T
-shirt. He wore light blue jeans which did not fit particularly well. They sagged on his hips; the broad leather belt which supported them had given up beneath the curve of his belly; the jeans look more rumpled than creased.

He was still startlingly handsome. He ran rather than lumbered to search the remaining rooms of the flat; his movements were surprisingly light.

'Where's she hiding?' he demanded, grasping both her arms firmly.

The huge circular eyes which gazed into hers like those of a drugged but hostile animal being taken away to market, were of an astonishing blue. The bulging red veins visible in the white only set off their immaculate sky colour. His lashes so close to Jemima's own - for he still held her tight - that she could see them quivering as the sweat ran down the corners of his eyes, were as long as a woman's. His hair, although greasy and falling round his face, far too long for elegance, was dramatically dark and thick.

Kevin John had always looked far more like a young Irish actor than a promising English painter. His father, not half such a handsome man, had in fact been quite well known on the Dublin stage; Jemima fancied that his mother too had been an actress. At this moment he resembled some actor flung out of the Abbey Theatre Company, or perhaps just a member of the company after a hard night.

'Where is she, I said.' It was quite surprising to find that he spoke without a trace of an Irish accent. 'How the hell do I know?'

By way of reply Kevin John simply twisted her arms sharply. Her bag and notebook dropped.

'Find her then.' The stink of his breath was even more offensive than the pain. 'Jemima Shore, Investigator.' The sneer with which he pronounced her name infuriated her.

'Let go of my arms, you drunken slob.' This time Kevin John let go of her arms and gave Jemima a wide swinging blow on the side of her face. The pain of it was so unexpected that tears came into her eyes. Her whole head felt dizzy. As Jemima reeled, he struck her again on the face but harder this time. She staggered. He hit her again and as she felt herself sinking he shouted something which sounded like 'harlot'. Or perhaps it was 'harder'.

'It's no good,' she heard herself saying faintly. He seemed to go on hitting her. Then she toppled or sank onto the carpet.

The next thing she knew Kevin John was kneeling over her. He appeared to be crying or perhaps it was merely the sweat pouring down his face. His breath still smelt terrible.

'Oh, sweet Jesus,' he was saying. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' Now he was crying in earnest. He sat down beside Jemima on the thick carpet, put his enormous handsome head on his arms and started to blubber. Jemima heard words like: 'I love her, I love her,' mingled with apologies, louder cries, and confused insults, of which 'effing whore' and 'tail-wagging bitch' were about the mildest. At any rate the words 'whore' and 'bitch' were prominent amongst them. Dizzily, Jemima wasn't quite sure whether he meant Chloe or herself.

After a bit Kevin John stopped crying, raised his head and stared at her: 'I'm drunk.'

Jemima said nothing.

'Could you be a sweetheart and make me some coffee? I must talk to you.' Jemima rose unsteadily from the floor and held onto the edge of the sofa. She was glad she had not hit her head on the edge of one of Chloe's smart little glass tables as she fell. All the same she wondered what her face looked like as she walked, still unsteadily, her head aching, into the kitchen. She looked out of the window which was at the back of the building. The kitchen had a small modern fire escape attached to it; the door was merely bolted. Chloe had shown her the key, while recommending her not to use it, except in emergency. But Jemima decided that even if the situation demanded escape, she felt far too dizzy.

She peered into the kitchen mirror (there were mirrors everywhere in Chloe's flat). Although there was a large red mark on one side of her face, as though she had slept on it, otherwise it did not look too bad. But the sting and the ache were fierce.

Jemima made some coffee, the one thing she always boasted of being able to do automatically, even half-conscious. Under the circumstances, that was fortunate.

When she came back into the living room, Kevin John was sitting on the sofa. He did not look at her as she placed the mug of coffee beside him. Jemima went and sat in the big white chair near the window, as far away as possible from the sofa; the roar of the traffic below and the occasional sharp little tooting reached her from far away, as though from some remote shore.

'Don't worry, I'm not going to hit you again.' He gulped the freshly made coffee as if it were spirits - he seemed indifferent to its heat. 'Have you got a cigarette?'

'I don't smoke. You can look around.'

'She never has any cigarettes.' But he heaved up his body and started to prowl about the room, disarranging the huge downy cushions as though packets might be disgorged. Then he vanished into the bedroom. The keys of the flat were lying on the table. Jemima wondered rather hazily whether she should grab them and run down and out into the square. She was still contemplating the move when Kevin John returned, smoking a black cigarette. The new harsh smell made Jemima feel nauseous.

'These yours?' He held out a box of Black Sobranies, and a lighter.

'I told you I didn't smoke.'

'They're not hers. The ' He added a crude description of Chloe.

Jemima remained silent. She was fairly sure such conspicuous cigarettes had not been visible in the bedroom the night before since her own distaste for cigarettes, above all in a bedroom - even unsmoked - would have caused her to remove them. He must have routed them out from some drawer, exacerbating his own hurt; still it was pointlessly provocative to say so.

'Look at this.' The lighter was dumped down in front of her. It was a pretty little object, striped black and white enamel, with an opaque reddish-brown jewel - a beryl or a piece of agate - set in its head. 'Recognize it?'

'No.' But even as she spoke, a memory stirred; she felt she had seen the lighter or something very like it before. For one thing it was the kind of personal detail Jemima noticed automatically about people whether she was interviewing them or not, a professional habit of observation. Placing the precise person was more difficult because during the last month, both setting up programmes for the autumn series and clearing the decks for her own holiday, Jemima had spoken to, eaten and drunk with an inordinate number of different people, types jumbled together.

It was also possible that she had marked down the lighter at Megalithic House. Cy Fredericks, her boss at MTV, had a fine taste in gold accoutrements, and was fond of throwing any new little bejewelled toy at her as a joke at the expense of what he supposed to be her Puritan streak: 'Fancy it, Jem? Gems for Jem? Yours if that programme wins the prize at Amsterdam.' The last time Cy Fredericks indulged his taste for that particular pleasantry, he had been referring to
The Unvi
sited.

But the lighter was, she had to admit, in rather too good taste for Cy. It was really very attractive, with a feeling of modern Faberge about it. Where
had
she seen it? Never mind, it would come back to her.

'Where is she, Miss Jezebel Fontaine, the bitch of Bloomsbury, the fuck of Fulham, the harlot of the Brighthelmet Press, the curs' delight—' And Kevin John proceeded to embark upon a string of imprecations in which terms of Biblical denunciation and suggestions of animal congress were mingled. His language had always been appalling - if colourfully so - but what had seemed rather amusingly vivid in the jolly young painter Chloe had run off with, was now merely the gratuitous thrusting of his untrammelled anger on the world.

At the same time, despite his outburst, it was clear that Kevin John was rapidly becoming less drunk. But the expression on his face being no less threatening and his wild round blue eyes still dilating, Jemima had no confidence that temporary sobriety would prevent him beating her up again if he was so minded. It had been a bad mistake not to run while she had the opportunity.

'I tell you again I haven't the slightest idea!' Jemima almost shouted the words. Despair, brought on not only by an aching head but also by a sense of the ludicrous unfairness of his question, to say nothing of his behaviour, made her abandon caution. She proceeded to tell Kevin John, furiously but succinctly, exactly what had happened since Chloe tripped so lightly out of her own flat the previous night, allegedly en route for the Camargue, leaving Jemima as her house-sitter for a month. How the Stovers had telephoned, expecting a visit; as a result of which call, Jemima had investigated the Camargue expedition and found it to be a fabrication; how there was therefore no record of Chloe's present whereabouts.

Jemima left nothing out of the story except for Laura Barrymore's strictures on Chloe's new novel.

She ended: 'All this and your calls too!' She wanted to say your 'filthy calls' but thought it impolitic.

'It was the picture she liked. It was the only thing of mine she took from the Fulham house. She sent the rest of my work down to Cornwall in a van. I found the card in the pocket of my jeans.' He spoke more flatly. 'I suppose I kept it for the Aiglon number. When I come to London, I generally try to wrench some of his ill-gotten gains -gotten at my expense - out of Creeping Croesus or his side-kick Pansy Potter. Dropping the card in was the only way I knew how to reach Chloe.'

'I meant the telephone calls.' An immense weariness was overcoming Jemima. She wished Kevin John would go away, find Chloe or not as fate - Chloe's fate - would have it, and leave her to crawl back into the white bedroom, shutter out the dry blazing Bloomsbury sunlight and sleep.

'How could I call her? She wouldn't give me her number. I only got the address in the first place by charming the pants off that new woman in Fulham. Little Chloe, sweet little Miss Delilah, paws-in-the-air have-me-any-time-you-want, God rot her for the lying scheming Dutch-doll-faced bitch she is, had been oh, oh, so sure that she didn't want anyone to have her address. "One's public, Mrs Ramsbotham, how they haunt one, don't they? One is never alone. An artist needs peace He gave quite an accurate parody of Chloe's breathless little voice, even if the words were ridiculous, and caressed his untidy black head with exactly the same delicate air as Chloe was apt to pat her own, as though too much pressure might bruise it.

'An Irish accent.'

Kevin John gave her his angry red-blue stare.

'Those telephone calls; obscene telephone calls. You had an Irish accent.
He
had an Irish accent. Not very pronounced but it was there.'

'Look, Miss Jemima Shore, Investigator' - he took perverse pleasure in reci
ting her public title and every
time he used it his anger increased - 'I don't know what half-arsed Judas you're talking about or what calls either. Christ, I could use a drink. No cigarettes, no drink.' A black Sobranie was in his fingers as he spoke; he had been chain-smoking them. The packet was half full; he didn't seem to notice.

'There's some white wine in the fridge.'

'Oh, I bet there's some lovely chilled
vino bianco
in the fridge . . . And I'll pour it in long green glasses just for us two.' Once again the imitation of Chloe was at least recognizable. 'Well, I don't want any of Chloe's delicately scented ladies' piss. I want a whisky.'

'Find it. If you can. I've no idea if there's any whisky here or not.' Jemima confined her own drinking strictly to wine.

'It's too early. It's much too early for whisky. Quite the Delilah yourself, aren't you? Do you want to make me drunk at this hour in the morning? Want to control me? Bring me down? Well, I can tell you this, Miss Jemima Shore, Investigator, no one brings me down.' He glared at her. 'So what was that about the telephone?'

Jemima told him about the two calls. It seemed the safer topic of the two. She still wasn't convinced that he hadn't made them himself. She might have imposed an Irish accent because her abiding mental image of Kevin John Athlone was as being Irish - and rough. If he had been drunk enough, he might easily have made the calls and forgotten the next morning.

'But I didn't know her number. How could I do such a terrible thing?' he remarked at the end in an injured voice. His long eyelashes fluttered slightly; there was something mechanically boyish about his manner, something wheedling about his tone. Jemima glimpsed with no particular favour the handsome and indulged young man Kevin John had once been. She still didn't know whether to believe his assurance or not.

Suddenly he leant forward and to her absolute surprise and horror planted a kiss full on her lips. The stubble on his chin grazed her skin and she wriggled backwards in her chair without being able to speak or do more than mutely struggle. His mouth was enormous; it was as if a gigantic fish were trying to gobble her up.

'You're a darling, aren't you? A real sweetheart. You'll forgive me, won't you, sweetheart, because I'm going to say sorry so nicely to you. I'm going to be so utterly, utterly charming and pleasing—'