Eighty Days Amber (26 page)

I accepted her invitation, and we shared a bottle of wine and a plate of bread and olives at the Anglesea Arms on Wingate Road near the studio but soon grew tired of the loud guffawing from nearby tables filled with Sloaney types and Yummy Mummies.

When she excused herself to go to the ladies’ I could not help but admire the way that the fabric of her black jeans clung to her arse, which I was sure she was swaying for my benefit. She wore her denims as tight as Viggo did, but she managed to get out of them a great deal more gracefully as I discovered when I took her back to Viggo’s bed that night.

Lauralynn was an enthusiastic and generous lover and a good conversationalist. She was familiar with New York and interested in my life there, my dancing and the other places that I had visited. Before I knew it I had told her my story from beginning to end, leaving out only the more intimate details of my relationship with Chey which I relished as if they were precious nuggets, like his gifts made of amber that I always kept nearby.

There was something inherently dangerous and sexy about Lauralynn, her confidence, her unflinching stare, the cruel twist of her mouth when she brought me slowly, excruciatingly to climax. I thought she could have moonlighted as an assassin when she wasn’t playing cello. We all have our secrets. The thought of her dressed as a Hollywood-style contract killer, sheathed head to toe in a skin-tight femme-fatale-style catsuit had interrupted my memories of Chey and I turned onto my side to face her, moved my hand to her sex, hot and wet once more, before gently trailing my fingers up to the silver rings that pierced both of her nipples ensuring that they remained permanently erect.

We were stretched out in Viggo’s bed rather than the
guest room because his was by far the largest, and when I had explained our unusual relationship to her, Lauralynn had laughed loudly and throatily and suggested that we surprise him by wrapping ourselves up in his covers like a present. Making love in his bed without him added a clandestine thrill to the proceedings, even though I knew for certain that Viggo did not care a jot who I brought home or where I bedded them.

As it turned out, Viggo stayed out all night with his record company execs and by the time he was home again Lauralynn had gone with a loose promise to call me sometime. She called sooner than either of us expected.

‘Luba?’

‘Yes?’ I replied. She had only been gone for a couple of hours so I presumed that she must have left something behind. It was too early even for the most keen of suitors to call back for the sake of romance.

‘I have a bit of a favour to ask you.’

‘Go on . . .’

When Lauralynn explained that she was required to leave her accommodation as she had just discovered that her writer-companion’s long-lost love was moving back into his house in Hampstead and I realised that she was also a friend of Summer and Dominik’s, the situation seemed too serendipitous to ignore. Besides, Viggo was so often away and I was tired of knocking around the vast mansion alone most of the time.

She was back with all of her things packed into boxes later that afternoon.

Lauralynn settled in as if she had never lived anywhere else and within just a few months life reverted into a gentle, if
unexciting, routine. Viggo was now spending most of his days, and often nights, in the recording studio across town where work on the new album continued in earnest. Somehow I couldn’t get excited about the project. Lauralynn was more enthusiastic about the whole thing, helping on some of the backing tracks, playing her cello or orchestrating string parts. They were both musicians, after all, and their affinity kept on growing.

I’d so quickly become a third wheel.

In bed, as much as I appreciated Lauralynn’s vigour and imagination, we had quickly established we had too many similarities and that there wasn’t much of a submissive bone in me. It went against my nature. When Viggo joined us, however, she was soon unpeeling secret layers of his sexuality like an onion skin, much to his and my surprise.

It made me happy, but wasn’t any help.

I had a bad case of the blues and began to question what I now wanted out of life, conscious of all the mistakes I had made so far. Viggo seemed genuinely fond of Lauralynn; they had discovered they had so much in common, the music, the quietly perverse playfulness. Summer had found Dominik again and I imagined them in his house, just a mile or so up the hill, fucking away like rabbits in perfect bliss and harmony. And there I was: a dancer who no longer danced.

A voice inside me was telling me it was time to turn a new leaf, but I had no direction to follow, no idea as to what I should, or could, do next. All I did know was that there were so many things I did
not
wish to do. Ever again.

I’d become lazy, always the last to rise, deliberately keeping my eyes closed and feigning sleep when either Viggo or Lauralynn slipped out of bed, secretly treasuring
the fact that the covers were now all mine and I could spread my limbs in all directions and doze on for a few more hours while they went about their affairs, or had sex in the nearby bathroom as I pretended to still be out for the count. More often than not, it was Viggo who was the loudest.

Only when the front door slammed shut and I knew I was alone in the mansion would I open my eyes properly and face the day, tiptoeing to the kitchen and having a glass of milk or a bite to eat, alongside the strong coffee Lauralynn always left behind. And the day would slowly pass by: a leisurely swim in Viggo’s underground creek, hours spent on one of the ample sofas in the games room reading. I generously availed myself of Viggo’s impressive first-edition collection and read and read. Always novels. If he knew my ungloved paws were handling the rare titles, no doubt he would have been annoyed, but books are there to be read, aren’t they? I’d found half a dozen CDs of Russian folklore melodies and dances in Viggo’s treasure-trove music collection and I would listen to them again and again, wallowing in Slavic melancholy until my own heart was singing along, humming the tunes, whispering the words and savouring their comfort.

On days like this, by mid afternoon I would feel the need for fresh air and would often slip on an old tracksuit I had inherited from Lauralynn and take a brisk walk down past the Royal Free Hospital and the parade of shops by the train station.

By this time of day, the approaches to the Heath were busy with nannies and prams and small pre-school children noisily running around and feeding the ducks while their distracted overseers gossiped in a variety of foreign languages. Joggers of all age would puff their way through the
narrow paths that led to the more private grounds of the Heath, past the ponds and the open-air swimming area that held no appeal for me, its waters no doubt as cold as a Ukrainian stream and unappetisingly murky. I would usually take a sudden turn to the left and enter a whole other world.

It was eerie how within the space of a few yards walking around this part of the Heath you could almost leave civilisation behind and find yourself in what felt like an immemorial wood, desolate and empty, undisturbed by the ages. Here were places to meditate, to feel at one with nature, although there was also a slight buzz in the pit of my stomach when I travelled through these more remote areas that was definitely sexual, as if there was a supernatural call to suddenly cast my clothes aside and run naked along the sparse vegetation, felled tree-trunks and dirt tracks, to open my legs wide and offer myself to the Great God Pan. It was irrational, I knew, and of course I never did so, but I felt certain that others had followed these tracks and experienced the same feeling as me. The real world felt a million miles away and even the sounds of twittering birds had been cut off. I could lose myself amongst these meandering paths and often did so but, today, I felt drawn elsewhere.

I trampled through the canopy of trees and made my way to the small hill where an old, wrought-iron bandstand stood. It had become one of my favourite places to go and I was always surprised that so few people came here. Emerging from the sheltered penumbra of the woods into the sudden brightness of the clearing was like landing on another planet. Bathed in sudden light, the glorious green of the grass was like an unspoiled canvas. A couple were sitting in the grass at the far end of the naturally created
arena, enjoying the late-autumn sun, but the bandstand was empty and I made my way towards it. The day before, I’d began reading a battered paperback copy of Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Crack Up
that I’d found in a jumble sale at the Hampstead Community Hall – I wouldn’t have dared take any of Viggo’s rare editions out of the house. Now I sat on the stone steps and opened the book at the page where I’d stopped reading when Viggo and Lauralynn had joined me in the bedroom the previous night, intent on including me in their sexual whims. I had only forty pages to go and a couple of hours before the light faded, I reckoned.

‘That’s one I’ve never read. Is it a novel or one of his short-story collections?’ a voice said behind me.

I froze, the words on the page blurring in front of my eyes. That voice. I turned and lifted my eyes in the direction of the speaker.

The sun was in my eyes so all I could see at first was a silhouette. A powerful wave of relief, fear, anger and apprehension washed over me like an unleashed tsunami of feelings.

Chey.

I tried to control my nerves. Keep my cool.

It was a moment I’d visualised happening for months. Dreamed about, fantasised about, but never thought it would ever come true. Not like this, not here. In these circumstances.

‘How did you find me here?’ I cried out, probably too loud. ‘How . . .? Have you been following me?’

‘I have,’ he confessed. His eyes clouded as he looked down at me.

The relief that he was here, that he was alive and well, subsided and anger surged through my veins. ‘You bastard.’

Chey stayed silent.

‘Since when? How long have you known where I was and haven’t come to find me?’ I continued.

‘I’ve been tracking you since you left Viggo Franck’s house,’ he said.

‘And how long have you known that I was in London?’

‘There was a photograph in a magazine – you and him at some function, I think. That’s how I knew where you were. I know you’ve started a new life, you’re happy, but I had to come.’

He looked the same as ever, handsome in his own feral way, although there was a tiredness about him, his posture uncertain. He wore a pair of dark-blue jeans, a tight white T-shirt, and a brown leather jacket hung over his shoulder. His boots were scuffed.

My composure was slowly returning as I simmered down.

As I refused to stand up, he sat himself down at my side and took the book out of my hands, setting it down on the stone step.

‘Talk to me,’ he said.

‘Shouldn’t you be the one to do the talking?’ I answered back.

The couple in the grass from earlier had now gone and we were the only ones in the clearing. A final cloud obscured the sun as the shades of the day grew darker.

‘The moment I found out where you were, I had no choice,’ Chey said.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘So you’ve abandoned dancing, have you?’ He changed the subject.

‘Dancing abandoned me,’ I told him.

I looked into his eyes and was overcome by his soulfulness.

My resentment was shrinking by the second. But my mind was awash with questions. His disappearances, the gun, the gifts, Lev, it was all too much. I needed answers.

‘Why?’ I asked him.

He opened his mouth and I moved my fingers to his lips to momentarily silence him.

‘The truth, Chey. I just want the truth. Please tell me no lies.’

The all too brief contact with the hard softness of those lips electrified me, memories of the way he kissed and held me once upon a time rushing back to the surface like past scars I had clumsily managed to conceal but whose imprint had marked my DNA.

Sensing my reaction, he brought a hand to my cheek, brushed away a stray strand of hair.

‘It’s a long story . . .’ he began.

‘I have all the time in the world.’

He was a rare amber dealer, he informed me, and it was not just a front. It was a small business he had inherited from his grandfather and the uncommon diversity of the resin and its use as jewellery or even as medicine or as an ingredient in perfumes had seduced him when he was still a teenager. When we were briefly together, he had once lectured me about the history of amber, its properties and its colourful history, but this time the story he related was another one.

For geological reasons, much of the best amber originated in the Baltic States and was a significant export. One day, his warehouse had been raided by the authorities who
had inside information that a particular shipment he had brought in had been used to smuggle a sizeable quantity of heroin from Kaliningrad, where the Russian mafia was particularly active. The crates in which the amber stones he had legitimately acquired and even packed himself at source had, it appeared, been manipulated before the shipment had taken place and replaced by double-bottomed wooden crates in which thousands of heroin sachets had been hidden and then covered by the actual amber.

Under interrogation, Chey had been unable to prove his innocence. He had arranged not just the original packing but also the paperwork, which did present some irregularities as he had been somewhat elastic about the actual quantities he was importing in order to avoid a surfeit of duties on arrival. Naturally, this didn’t make his case any easier. Whether the FDA agents supervising the case believed him or not, he was in a spot.

He was made the proverbial offer that he couldn’t refuse and agreed to work with the Federal agents and continue his imports of amber and inveigle himself into the organisation that he was now aware was mafia-connected. He would work as an unofficial double agent.

This had been going on for several years when he had met me and was the reason for his frequent absences, his often dubious acquaintances and manners and the fact he kept the gun in his apartment, if only as a precaution should his role be uncovered. He’d had to live two separate lives and there was no way he could have revealed this to me without putting me in danger.