Acts of Love (38 page)

Arianne had a sinking feeling the moment Mike said, ‘A million-dollar bet, his best friend put up the million.’ It was impossible to fathom. Or was it? Arianne hesitated long enough to compose herself, then asked, ‘Mike, what did Jason put up against the million? What was he going to give his best friend if he lost?’

Mike could see it in her eyes. She knew. She had somehow managed to figure it out. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you, I never meant you to know. I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to say any more. It was me. He gambled me. He’d have given me up to win the bet. It all makes sense now. He crashed into the side of a mountain and lost the wager. He never made contact with me because he’d given me away to Ahmad, his best friend. He bartered me for a million dollars. He was through with me – he sold me on as if I were a slave. Oh, am I dumb! God, have I been stupid!’

‘Arianne, you’ve got to put this out of your mind. It’s bad, it couldn’t be worse, the guy is warped. A rotter with a great cover. Forget him. You’ve got a great guy in Ben Johnson. Mark Jason off. You had the better side of him for a while, and then it went bad. That’s how you have to think about your marriage to Jason. Forget the details. They could just drive you crazy.’

‘Knowing hardly hurts. It shocks me more than pains me. I suppose that proves that I’m as finished with him as he is with me. I think I’d like to go home now.’

As they approached the house where Arianne was living Mike stopped her. ‘Look, I could bite my tongue for what I let slip back there in the restaurant, but now you know, you have to take into account that Jason’s got a dark side, darker than most of us. He’s always had a dark side, you just never saw it. Don’t reproach yourself for that.’

‘I don’t anymore.’

The following day Arianne returned to the hospice. She entered
the room and sensed immediately that Jason was in one of his blacker moods. She had bought some sweet cakes and fried doughnut-like pastries that she knew he liked. On her way in, she had ordered some tea from one of the sisters. Arianne had moved the table close to his bed, and arranged the pastries on a plate. She drew a chair up to it. Jason watched her every move and when the tea arrived he was charming to Sister Marie-Pierre. As soon as the sister was out of the door, he told Arianne, ‘I really hate it when you play the Good Samaritan.’

‘But you like the tea and cakes?’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘There is no pleasing you, Jason.’

‘At last you understand.’

Arianne had learned over the last few months when Jason was in need of his fix. He became jumpy, as nasty as he was charming, vicious and clever. She had learned to let it wash over her. She ignored his remark and poured the tea.

Jason thought she was looking especially sexy in her simple thin cotton dress with its round neck and great balloon sleeves tight at the wrist. ‘Go and lock the door,’ he told her.

‘Why?’

‘Just do as you’re told, go and lock the door.’

She locked the door. Returning to her chair, she sat down to drink her tea. Jason ate one of the doughnuts and smiled at her.

‘You’re really a good woman, Arianne. You’ve always been a good woman, that’s why it was so much fun corrupting you. That was the best time of our life, the best part of our marriage, the sex. You know what made you so good? There was always that little bit more to get out of you, the little bit that you held back. You could always be pushed further, further into depravity. That was the most exciting thing about your love. That and your loving me unconditionally. There were times I could have fucked you to death. Nearly did. That was what made you so dangerous. Interesting but dangerous. You would have drowned in orgasms for me. For Ahmad, almost. He and I, we never had that with any other woman, I’ll give you that.’ This was the first personal conversation he had had with Arianne since her arrival. He could see how uncomfortable it was for her. He didn’t care. ‘You haven’t changed.’

‘I have, you know. You just don’t want to see it.’

‘Well, if you have …’ And he did know that she had. There had been so many signs that he could hardly have missed. ‘You haven’t in one thing – you still know how to love.’

Arianne was surprised that he gave her that. She could not help wondering if she was after all reaching him. That was what she had been doing there: trying to give a sick man some love and attention. Compassion.

‘You never mention Ahmad, Jason, why?’

‘Indifference, even for old friends. Especially for old friends.’ He drank some tea and ate another cake. ‘Who did you find to replace me, Arianne?’

‘You were never replaced, Jason.’

‘That surprises me.’

‘I’m sure it does. Could you have been thinking it was Ahmad?’

Jason chose not to answer her. Instead he asked, ‘Did he get it off you, Arianne?’

‘Did who get what off me?’

He leaned forward, a nasty look in his eye. ‘Ben Johnson. That last vestige of love you held back from everyone but me. I bet he didn’t,’ and Jason began to laugh. ‘Jesus, you’re a bitch. You’re a man-killer. You always hold out. I grant you, you enslaved yourself to me and I loved it, till I got bored. Do you know when it went wrong? Is that what you’re doing here, come to find out when it went wrong? When it was over? That time in New York at the Plaza, remember?’

‘Don’t, stop. I don’t want to remember.’

‘Afraid?’ he asked, a snigger in his voice.

‘If I wasn’t afraid then, I certainly am not now. Listen, Jason, if it was over for you that night, believe me that that sort of life I lived with you is over for me now. Those erotic games, those men. What were thrilling sexual games then are unthinkable obscenities to me now. I did them for love, damned right. But that’s the past and dead. Why are you suddenly thinking about it now? So you were finished with me way back then. Bored and pretending, was that what you were? There’s Jason at his best, always making capital out of his leftovers. You gambled me away.’

He began to laugh. When the laughter died, he told her, ‘You’ve changed. I don’t think I like you this way. I liked you better when you kept your mouth shut. I had complete control over you.’

‘Well, you don’t now.’

‘I know, that’s why you’re boring. But you bring good cakes.’

‘Why did you make me lock the door?’

‘I wanted to see your tits again. For a brief moment I wanted to know once more how they felt. But the moment passed and I lost interest. You can unlock the door.’

‘I’m leaving Tangier.’

‘Without your divorce?’

‘Yes, unless of course you can find some crooked way of getting one for me without revealing that you’re not dead but very much alive.’

‘I’ll think about it. Put off leaving.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ve got no place to go anyway. You like Tangier. You give good cake.’

‘I don’t think so.’

The following morning, after several months of living in Tangier, Arianne left. She made a trip to Fez. It was a week before she returned to the hospice. She found Jason charming, if anything, over-excited at seeing her. She watched him talking to Mike, and listened to him giving a perceptive dissertation on Napoleon. How handsome he looked; the old charisma seemed to shine. But it was dulled for her. In the months that she had stayed with him he had got the last vestige of her that he had always wanted.

Mike was leaving. Jason and the young detective shook hands. ‘Come here, you young stud,’ ordered Jason. He reached his arms out and the two men hugged each other.

‘See you when I get back,’ Mike told him. He said goodbye to Arianne, then he left.

Jason dozed off. Arianne sat looking at him. She lost track of time. Her mind was for the first time in a long while quite empty of any thought of Jason. When he awoke, Jason was quite sombre.

‘You’re leaving me.’

‘How can you tell? I’ve been leaving every day since I arrived months ago.’

‘But today is different, you’re really leaving me. You’re dressed in the same outfit you wore when you arrived, looking very smart and chic. You came to say goodbye that first time. I think it was “Hello, give me a divorce, and goodbye”, but you couldn’t do it.’

‘Well, I can do it now. Do I get my divorce?’

‘Yes. You’ve earned it. You’re five minutes away, ten at most, from freedom. If you come back in fifteen minutes the papers will be here.’

‘Jason.’

‘No, we don’t want to talk now. You come back in fifteen minutes.’

Arianne did as she was told. She was smiling, looking beautiful and very happy when she walked from his room down the corridor, the same corridor she had walked a hundred times since the day she had found the hospice. She all but skipped down the flight of stairs to the inner courtyard and leaned against a pillar. Happy, so very happy it was over. She somehow felt she had escaped near-death, had come out of some dark and lonely place. She felt reborn, and able at last to think about Ben. He had waited, he could do nothing else. She had to believe that. There was so much to live together for.

Arianne looked at her watch. Five minutes, ten minutes away from freedom. Her airplane ticket was in her handbag, the last flight to Paris. Mike would drive her. She would never see Jason again. He had come through for her, and just when she had given up. She felt joyful. They were living in different worlds now, Jason and she. He was as happy as he would ever be in his. Now so would she be in hers. What more could she ask? She could always remember they had done their best for each other, all that they were capable of doing.

She looked at her watch again. A few minutes. Just enough time to walk that corridor and enter that room for the last time. Had he done it, what he had promised? Could he do it? Of course, he could do anything he wanted to. How clever he could be.

Arianne walked from the courtyard through the cloister and took the first few stairs of the spiral stone staircase. She felt
suddenly and inexplicably strange, a hollowness in her stomach, a dryness in her mouth. She began running up the last few stairs to burst into the long hall. She stopped and tried to calm herself, took several deep breaths, while looking up at the vaulted ceiling. It stared back at her. Arianne braced herself and took several steps down the hall. Soon she was walking faster, then faster. She was whispering, ‘Of course he can’t do it. There will be no papers. But he promised me freedom.’

She began to run as fast as she could. She pushed past a sister in black robes and white wimple, who stumbled, pitching an enamel tray and its contents on the stone floor, but then caught herself and started running after Arianne. Brother François was coming out of another room having heard the quiet of the corridor shattered by clatter and running feet. He followed them. Arianne burst into Jason’s room. She screamed, ‘No! God, no!’ and fell across his body, weeping. He looked handsome, at peace with the world. His arm hung limp, the needle still embedded in it, the syringe dangling from it.

They buried Jason Honey in Tangier. At his graveside were Mike Chambers, Arianne and Brother François. Arianne left the city the same night.

Epilogue

It was the end of the polo season, when Arianne returned to England and to Number 12, Three Kings Yard. The day she returned, she called Artemis and invited herself to lunch.

She stepped from the train on to the Chipping Wynchwood station platform. The station-master greeted her as if she had been gone for only a few days. The taxi driver chattered on about the weather, about not having seen her for so long. They went through the Chessington Park gates and up the winding drive towards the house. Everything looked perfect, clipped and green and fresh, the house a fairy castle, a children’s dream-house. A wonder. Arianne, until her return, had hardly realised how much she loved it. Chessington Park, Chessington House – a safe haven from the real world.

It was a glorious day, warm, the sun bright in the sky. Beryl Quilty appeared as if from nowhere. She greeted Arianne briefly with a smile and reprimanded the driver. He had sped far too fast up the drive. Arianne laughed. It was really nice to be back and to know nothing had changed: not Chessington Park, nor Chessington House, nothing: neither time nor life had changed them. Reassuringly, Beryl Quilty was still on her beat.

Arianne rang the bell and entered the building. She crossed the glorious hall, and on entering Artemis’s flat found Artemis at the piano playing Chopin amid the leaping and barking dogs. She leaned on the concert grand and smiled at her mother.

‘How very nice you look, Arianne,’ Artemis, visibly pleased, told her daughter.

‘Mother, would you know where I can find Ben Johnson?’

‘He’s playing polo at Cirencester. I suggest after lunch would be a perfect time. It’s cup day. A nice surprise for him if you appeared there.’

‘Do you think so, Artemis?’

‘Oh yes. Most acceptable. I’ll ask Anson to join us for lunch. Then we can get him to drive us to Cirencester polo field in his Nazimobile.’

Lunch was delicious, a great success, with Artemis at her most charming and flirtatious with Anson, and Arianne entertaining them with a travelogue of her many months on the road: India, Pakistan, her trek across the Himalayas. The beauty of China and Japan. Those months that it had taken to put time and distance between herself and the tragedy that had been Jason. Artemis, in full control, like some benevolent general, ordered their departure from the table to the polo field. Her timing was impeccable: they arrived for the last chukka.

He looked so handsome, rode so well, played like a champion. It had been more than a year, and yet, seeing him again, time vanished and she felt as if they had hardly been parted at all. They watched the ponies leave the field and line up, waiting for the presentations. The riders dismounted to stand next to their ponies. She recognised Jaime talking and laughing with Ben. She had always believed it would be all right for her and Ben, but seeing their friend Jaime gave that extra tinge of certainty.

The silver cups and salvers were carried out to the field and placed on a green-baize-covered table that had preceded the trophies. Arianne, Anson and Artemis walked slowly round the edge of the crowd, seeking a better view of the event. An announcement came through a loudspeaker: ‘Player of the Year … Ben Johnson.’ Applause.

Arianne watched the Duke pick up the cup, and walk towards the line of ponies, their riders now standing at attention next to them.

‘Thanks, Artemis.’ Arianne kissed her mother on the cheek and left her standing with Anson. With her head held high, Arianne strode on to the field. She quickened her steps as she approached the Duke. Tapping him on the shoulder she asked, ‘Do you mind, Your Grace?’ With a dazzling smile, she removed the cup from his hands.

Arianne walked swiftly away from the Duke to Ben. She placed the silver trophy in his hands and said, ‘We could drink champagne from it together at Le Manoir. I’ve made a reservation. What do you think?’

Ben closed his eyes. He took a deep breath; a slow, emotionally charged, tremulous sigh escaped him as he opened them again and a smile of exquisite delight appeared on his handsome face. Handing the trophy over to Jaime, he enfolded Arianne in his arms and told her, ‘I think it’s about time.’ Then he kissed her deeply and with great passion, for all to see, many to envy.