Faces of Fear (11 page)

“Do you think it's possible for two people to be exactly alike?” asked Gerry.

“Of course not. There will always be differences. Even one person isn't exactly alike to all of the different people who know them.”

Under the table, Chloe dropped off her shoe and began to massage the side of Gerry's calf with her stockinged foot. It was so gentle and so familiar that he could almost believe that she was doing it absent-mindedly, but all the same he felt his penis stiffen, and he knew that he wanted her very much.

He didn't care whether it was impossible that she looked so much like Marianne. It just seemed to him that Marianne had been trying to get back to him, in one form or another, ever since her death. Why should
he deny her any longer – especially when he wanted her so much. Blurred pictures of the orchard flickered through his mind; and the waiter's squeaking shoes became the squeaking of a yellow waterproof on a rumpled bed.

After their meal, they sat in the hotel lounge and finished their wine. The clock by the fireplace sonorously struck twelve.

“I'd better go,” said Gerry. “At midnight, I turn into a langoustine.”

“Don't tell me you forgot your money?”

He had already half-risen from his chair. He sat down again, and took hold of her hand. “Listen, don't get me wrong. I think you're fabulous. I want to make love to you. But before we get into anything serious, I have to be sure about the way I feel.”

“Who said anything about anything serious? This is commerce.”

Her words sounded cold but she said them with such a teasing smile that Gerry gave in. He took out his billfold and said, “How about 7,500F?”

She took the money and tucked it into the front of her dress. “Come on,” she said, and led the way to the elevator.

Her room was high-ceilinged, very warm, lit only by a bedside lamp with a dim pink shade. She drew back the bedcover as if she were unveiling a painting. Then she turned to him and kissed him again. Her tongue licked and teased at his lips, and then deeply penetrated his mouth. All the time she kept her eyes open, staring at him unblinkingly. Her eyes were as grey as thunderstorms, and ball-bearings, and empty country roads.

She unbuttoned her long black woollen dress, and as it fell to the floor it exhaled female warmth and Chanel
No.5. Underneath she wore a lacy black bra and a black lace thong, and black hold-up stockings with lace-edged tops. She took off her bra, and her breasts were just like Marianne's, full and rounded and pale as milk. He touched her nipples with his fingertips, and she kissed him again, her head uptilted, eager for the taste of his mouth.

He stripped off his clothes. His penis stood up at an acute angle and cast a shadow on the wallpaper. She kissed him and laughed and said, “Look,” so that he could see her stroking it in silhouette. She rubbed the shaft slowly up and down, so slowly that it was almost frustrating.

“Now … you've paid for me, you can take me,” she whispered. She turned and lay face-down on the bed, her breasts pressed against the sheet. She raised her bottom and reached behind her with both hands to part the cheeks of her bottom, although she was still wearing her thong.

Gerry, naked, mounted the bed behind her. He pulled the thong aside, so that her vulva was exposed. It was already moist, and slightly gaping. The curves of her inner lips were pink and wavelike.

He took hold of his penis in his fist, and buried it inside her, as deep as he could, until he was pressing her into the bed. With one hand she reached between his legs and began to stroke his scrotum with his fingernails, very lightly at first, but then harder and harder, until she was digging her nails into his skin and forcibly tugging it. His thighs quaked, and he felt as if his whole soul was concentrated between his legs.

At the instant he climaxed, Chloe deliberately pulled him out of her, and rolled over, so that his semen sprayed all over her leg. She held him and scratched him and nuzzled him and bit him, thrashing from side to side on
the bedcover, until he felt that he was being attacked by wild animals.

Afterward, she lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He rested on one elbow and watched her, tracing a pattern on her bare stomach with his fingertip, occasionally sliding it down far enough to entwine it with her pubic hair.

“Where did you first make love to your Marianne? Tell me.”

“An apple orchard, near Clecy.”

Chloe smiled at him. “Did you know that whenever they brought apples anywhere near to Duchesne, the secretary to Francois I, blood poured from his nose?”

“No, I didn't know that. But blood didn't pour from
my
nose.”

“Just from your heart?”

He nodded. He still felt grief for Marianne, but it was difficult to grieve quite so sorely while another Marianne was lying next to him: a woman of the same erotic appetites, a woman of the same game-playing flirtatiousness, a woman who would do anything to please him.

They made love twice more before dawn. The third time, Chloe insisted that he tie her wrists and ankles with silk scarves, and cover her eyes with a blindfold. As the first grey light began to fill the room, he knelt between her thighs, his fingers deep inside her, while she gasped, and gasped, and called out his name.

Just before he fell asleep, he heard her watch ticking on the nightstand, and he was sure that when she breathed out she whispered, “
Pity me
.”

When he dressed he found that his money was back in his billfold. He took it out and went to the bathroom
where she was standing in front of the mirror brushing her teeth.

“What's this?” he asked her.

Her reflection grinned at him. “You didn't think that I was really a prostitute, did you? I want to be a great cellist.”

“Marry me,” he told her.

“
Marry
you? You don't even know me. I might be the worst cellist in the world.”

“I don't have to know you. I feel like we were fated to meet each other, that's all. I mean, did you ever make love with any other man before?”

“That's none of your business.”

“But did you?”

She brushed past him, naked. He caught her arm. They stared intensely into each other's eyes. He could smell the peppermint of her toothpaste, as well as the smell of sex.

“Marry me,” he repeated.

“Why should I? Because I remind you so much of your Marianne?”

“Because you've allowed me to forget her.”

She didn't say yes and she didn't say no. But she kissed her own fingertip, and placed it on his lips, and he knew that what she had done was both a seal and a sign, and that one day soon they
would
be married.

She took him to meet her parents, in a large grey house just outside the village of Ossuaire, on the flat water-meadows that led to Mont St-Michel. Gerry parked in the curving shingled driveway, and climbed out. It was always windy here, so close to the sea, and the grey house fluttered with pale wisteria. In the distance, the 200-foot peak of Mont St-Michel stood dark in a sun-dazzling sea, but
somehow the heart seemed to have gone out of it. It had withstood the English in the Hundred Years' War and the Huguenots in the religious wars, but it had fallen, in the end, to tourists.

Her father was waiting for them in the dim, uncarpeted sitting-room, his back to the light. He wore a grey suit and a grey silk necktie, and a grey cat sat on his lap, its eyes squeezed shut in self-satisfaction. Gerry approached him and held out his hand. The old man kept on stroking the cat, and made no attempt to take it. “Chloe tells me that you wish to marry her,” he said, in the dryest of voices.

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“Well … she is old enough to make up her own mind, I suppose.”

Gerry found it difficult to see his face. “You don't sound very enthusiastic, sir, if you don't mind my saying so.”

“Why should I mind your saying so? I'm not.”

“Sir – I love Chloe with all my heart. Nobody could take care of her the way that I'm going to take care of her.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

Gerry looked toward Chloe, perplexed. Chloe was rearranging sweet peas in a large glass vase. She said nothing, but smiled to herself.

“Won't you give us your blessing, then?” asked Gerry.

“I'll pray for you.”

Just then, Chloe's mother came in from the garden, carrying a basket full of lettuce and chives.

“It's so windy out there today,” she complained. She set down her basket, and took off her veiled gardening-hat, and it was then that Gerry saw that she looked almost exactly like Marianne's mother – the woman in the black woollen dress to whom she had introduced him at the
Moulin du Vey. He stared at her, and then he stared at Chloe. He felt as if the day were folding in on itself, like origami.

Chloe came across and possessively took hold of his arm. “Maman, this is my husband-to-be.”

Her mother stared back at Gerry with undisguised dislike. “So, it has come to this, has it?”

Gerry said, “I'm sorry … I'm not too sure what this is all about. All I want to do is to marry Chloe and make her as happy as I can.”

Chloe's mother picked up her basket of lettuces and walked past him toward the kitchen. At the doorway, she paused. “You will never make anyone happy, Chloe least of all.”

“Take no notice,” Chloe smiled, and kissed Gerry's cheek. “Mother doesn't approve of anybody.”

They were married in September at the hotel de ville in Beauvoir. Chloe seemed to have hundreds of relatives, stocky matrons in black suits with hair like scouring-pads, and thin uncles in camphorated pinstripes who chainsmoked and talked racing. A reception was held at the large grey house at Ossuaire, with roast hams and galantines and pickled herring. The sun shone, but it rained, and the wind blew the rain against the garden in golden curtains.

Gerry found Chloe sitting upstairs in her old room. He sat down on the bed next to her and kissed her.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “You're looking pale.”

“I'm fine. A little queasy, that's all.”

“Do you know how much I love you?” he breathed, very close to her ear.

She nodded, and smiled. “That's why I'm here. That's why I married you.”

She paused for a moment, and then she said, “That's why I'm having your child.”

“You're not—?”

“Pregnant, yes. The doctor confirmed it yesterday.”

“You're kidding me! Why didn't you tell me as soon as you knew?”

“Perhaps you would have changed your mind. Perhaps you wouldn't have married me.”

“Are you crazy? I'm over the moon!”

“Really?”

“Of course really. I've just married the most beautiful woman in the world and the most beautiful woman in the world has just told me that she's carrying my child. Hey, come on downstairs, we have to tell everybody. We have to break open some more champagne!”

She clasped his hand. “No, Gerry, don't tell everybody. Not on our wedding day. Wait till we come back from Nice.”

He kissed her, and she kissed him back. Before he knew it, she had pushed him back onto the bed and straddled him, hitching up her cream linen skirt to reveal cream stockings with lacy suspenders.

“Chloe—” he protested, but she almost suffocated him with kisses. At the same time, she reached down and yanked open the zipper of his formal black pants.

“Chloe, supposing somebody—” he panted, but there was no stopping her now, even if he'd wanted to stop her. She twisted her skirt up around her waist, and he saw then that she wasn't wearing any panties.

She grasped his crimson-headed penis and nestled it up between her legs. Then, with a long sigh, she sat down on it, so that it slid right up inside her.

“You're pregnant,” he gasped. “What about the baby?”

“Don't worry.” She smiled, as she lifted herself up, and then eased herself down again. “There's plenty of room for both of you.”

He had never in his life felt so ridiculously happy. His secretary Alexis renamed him “Gerry the Merry” and Carl thought he was on Prozac; but his only stimulus was Chloe, and their new life together, and the prospect of having a child. They flew to Nice for two weeks on honeymoon, and when they came back he started to look for apartments around Caen.

In the second week of October he found a huge newly-decorated apartment overlooking a park on the south-west side of the city. He called Chloe from the realtor's office, while the realtor beamed at him from across the room and shuffled his papers in approval. Gitanes smoke drifted across the room.

Chloe's father answered. “She has just left.”

“Is she going to be long? I have some good news, that's all.”

“I don't know. She said perhaps two hours. She went to the village.”

“All right, then. I'll see you later.”

“Very well.” Chloe's father was no longer gratutitously rude to him, but he never missed an opportunity to make it plain that he disliked and mistrusted him. Chloe's mother rarely spoke to him at all.

Gerry drove back toward Mont St-Michel in an odd, unsettled mood. The sun had been shining all day but now the sky had turned thundery. By the time he reached the water-meadows, the clouds behind the monastery were inky-black, and lightning was flickering in the distance.

The road curved ahead of him, between the nodding trees and the windblown bushes. Just past Beavour, he was overtaken by a large silver Citroën, driving so fast that it slewed from one side of the road to the other. He heard its tires howl as it slewed around the bend just in front of him.

Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
For some reason, he felt compelled to accelerate, and to catch up with it, even to overtake it, as if—

As if wherever it was going, he ought to get there first.