Heartbreaker (51 page)

I

Gavin survived his stabbing. In my relief I thought his troubles would now be over, but I was wrong. His physical recovery might have been under way but mentally, emotionally and spiritually he was still crippled, and the next stage of his journey towards healing was in many ways even more hair-raising than those final days of his old life. Why didn’t I realise this would be so? Because, as usual, I was too spiritually stupid to see the situation in all its dimensions. And also because at the time of the stabbing I was so euphoric at the thought of Mrs. Mayfield finally being brought to justice . . .

II

Mrs. Mayfield was at first not to be found, but the police arrested Asherton on the night Gavin was stabbed, and they searched his house before all the evidence of his criminal activities could be destroyed. I made sure of that; I told the police exactly what Gavin had said to me before he passed out.

As for Gavin himself, he remained in intensive care for several hours after the stabbing, and apart from the police only Nicholas, pushing his special status as a clergyman, was allowed to see him. But on the following afternoon the ban on visitors was lifted and Nicholas suggested to me that we go together to the hospital after work. By that time I was incapable of working anyway. Quite apart from the fact that I was beside myself in case Gavin had a relapse and died, I was also in a frenzy about Mrs. Mayfield. The police had searched both her Lambeth house and the Pimlico house that belonged to her close friend, but to my horror she once again appeared to have vanished without trace.

On reaching the ward we learned that Gavin was only allowed one visitor at a time, and Nicholas, who had seen Gavin that morning, suggested that I should be the one who went in first. I had bought a small bunch of flowers, nothing overpowering, but as soon as I entered the room I realised they would be almost invisible beside the enormous cluster of chrysanthemums which were glowering in a corner. This lavish display had obviously been organised by the mysterious Susanne, Mrs. Mayfield’s secretary, whom Gavin was now claiming as a friend. I had not yet met this female. Lewis had collected her in his car on the previous evening and she was now staying at the Rectory, but when I had arrived at my office that morning I was told she had already departed for the hospital. I was now braced to meet her, but a nurse informed us that “Gavin’s girlfriend” had gone down to the cafeteria to get some food.

I was unsure what the word “girlfriend” meant in this situation, and I found it strange he had never mentioned her. I had questioned Nicholas but he had been vague. However, Alice had been more forthcoming, and when she had told me Susanne liked cats and seemed a little shy, I had at once pictured a mousey little fluffette with a crush which Gavin had been able to manipulate to his own advantage.

“In you go, Carta,” Nicholas was saying as we reached the small sideward where Gavin was recuperating. “Remember, don’t press him for information—he’ll have had enough of that from the police.”

In I went. Immediately Gavin, ashen-faced and hooked up to various lines, opened his eyes and drawled: “So what kept you?”

We laughed, but then I found I had nothing to say. A shaft of emotion converted me into the dumbest of dumb blondes, and the next moment I saw that he too could find no words to express his feelings. The mask of the debonair hero slipped and I saw only his fragility. There were shadows like bruises below his eyes.

He stretched out his hand and I clasped it as I set aside my flowers and sat down on the bedside chair. “In the end,” he said after a while, “yours were the only phone numbers I remembered—and you wouldn’t have given them to me, would you, if I hadn’t done the fundraising . . . Yeah, it’s all been part of the journey, hasn’t it, that journey you mentioned when I didn’t want to listen. Look, I’m sorry I just treated you as shag-meat in the beginning, I didn’t realise you were a gift—a life-saving gift, as it turns out—”

“You were a gift too, Gavin, identifying Mrs. Delamere as Mrs. Mayfield.”

“Mrs. Mayfield!” he said with scorn, but I noticed how he looked away as if fearful he might betray the complexity of his emotions. “Hey, did they nick her yet?”

“Not yet, no.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you about her, but I loved her and I thought she loved me.”

“I understand,” I said, but I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine him loving Mrs. Mayfield, and to distract myself I asked: “Why did you never mention Susanne?”

“We hated each other till last weekend. I hated her because unconsciously I was jealous—she’d got out of prostitution and I hadn’t. And she hated me because unconsciously I reminded her of the way she used to be.”

From some distant corner of the past I remembered Nicholas—or was it Lewis?—saying to me: “We hate and fear in others the faults we unconsciously hate and fear in ourselves.” Enlightenment overpowered me. I think I even gasped.

“What’s the matter?” said Gavin at once.

“I’ve had a revelation. About Eric.”

“Oh him! You know, you could do better for yourself, you really could—you should marry someone truly amazing, like Nicholas.”

I got a grip on my cosmic thoughts. “Nicholas?” I yelped. “A clerical workaholic long on charisma but short on spare time? No, thanks!”

Nicholas chose that moment to look into the room. “The nurse says keep it brief, Carta.”

“I’m out of here.” I gave Gavin’s hand another squeeze. “Take care of yourself. I’ll be back,” I said, and blowing him a kiss I slipped away into the corridor.

III

I was still waiting for Nicholas to finish his visit when I heard the clack-slap of high-heeled boots ploughing purposefully down the corridor, and the next moment a tall, tarty-looking piece had planted herself in front of me. “You Carta Graham?”

“Uh—”

“You the one who dragged Gavin into all that fundraising crap and nearly got him killed?”

“I—”

“Well, great! He needed a wake-up call to get him out of the Life. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” I said, silently cursing Alice for making me expect a shy little fluffette, and added in my politest voice: “You must be Susanne.”

IV

She had pouty orange lips, black eyes and also black hair which was twisted and skewered into a topknot. Her surgically deformed figure consisted of enormous breasts, a tiny waist, androgynous hips and very long legs. Wearing black tights, a short mauve skirt and a silver-spangled sweater under a fake-fur jacket, she was flaunting junk jewellery so copious that she clinked in time to the clacking of her high-heeled boots.

Hiding my horror as best I could I said in a heroic effort to be sociable: “Any enemy of Elizabeth’s is a friend of mine!”

“Fuck Elizabeth,” said Susanne. “It’s that pinhead in there we gotta talk about. You shagged him?”

I realised honey-voiced diplomacy was a waste of time. “Never.”

“Just checking. Seen the mums?”

“Excuse me?”

“The chrysanthemums! In his room!”

“Oh yes, very nice—”

“I brought them earlier. I’ve been here all day. In fact I’m going to be around in his life more and more from now on. Got it?”

“Yep. Great. Good luck.”

“You don’t mind?”

“He’s all yours.”

Susanne still looked suspicious. “You do realise he’s got a thing about you? Says that no matter who he shags in future you’ll always be his Beatrice.”

“Who?”

“Some cow in a book. The hero’s lost in a dark wood and remembers this Beatrice who represents things.” She looked me up and down as if I’d missed a trick. “I’m surprised you don’t know about the book,” she said severely, “seeing as how you’ve been educated.”

“Well, I—”

“I’m getting educated right now, as it happens. Computers today, law tomorrow. Got to have a career because Gavin’s not the career type, he just likes opera and boats.”

“Maybe later when he’s recovered—”

“Nah. But I don’t mind. Career-crazed men are usually swine— which is why I think you were smart to hook up with a bloke who just writes stories. Going to marry him?”

“Well—”

“Everyone says marriage is going out of fashion but as far as I can see people keep doing it.”

“True, but I think a lot of people are justifiably nervous about making a long-term commitment in view of the fact that—”

“
Nervous?
God, how wimpish can you get? Can’t those people recognise happiness even when it stands up on its hind legs and kicks them in the teeth? Fuck all the fear-of-commitment rubbish, this is real life, for God’s sake, it’s not a bloody rehearsal! Well—” She turned away. “—I’d better go and see what that pinhead’s dreamed up next. Glad to have met you, I’m sure, and I suppose we’ll meet again once Gav’s with me at the Rectory, but if you so much as think of shagging him you’re dead, know what I mean, and don’t think I’m not serious because I am.”

“I assure you—” I began, but yet again I was not allowed to complete a sentence.

She turned her back on me and clip-clopped away.

V

“Nicholas,” I said crossly as we left the hospital, “why on earth didn’t you warn me about Susanne? She’s frightful! And how could Alice possibly have described her as shy?”

“She was shy when she arrived at the Rectory last night. Or perhaps ‘overwhelmed’ would be a better word to use.”

Realising that a traumatised Susanne might have acted out of character, I said no more on that score but merely commented: “The sooner Gavin ditches her the better.”

Nicholas looked politely interested. I knew that look. It meant he had a devastating reply to make but had decided now was not the time to offer it.

“Okay!” I exclaimed, feeling crosser than ever. “Okay, okay, okay! I’m jealous of her because she’s got him and I haven’t—but this is ridiculous because (a) I hate jealous people and (b) I don’t want him anyway and (c) I’m much too sensible to be so irrational, and the fact that I’m being so irrational makes me
absolutely furious
!”

“Well done!” said Nicholas amused. “Keep going!”

“I only want to add that despite all this I’m not totally fruity-loops. I’m still capable of deciding—in a rational manner quite unconnected with jealousy—that Susanne’s not nearly good enough for Gavin!”

“Fair enough, but look at it this way, Carta: even when Gavin’s physically recovered, he’s going to need all the support he can get when he grapples with the reality of his new life, and Susanne’s presence could well be crucial.”

I saw I could not argue with this, but I was still cross enough to ask: “What are the Healing Centre’s trustees going to say when you tell them two ex-tarts are sharing the attic flat of your Rectory?”

“Should anyone complain,” said Nicholas, very steely, “I shall tell them that I’m not the bedroom police, monitoring my guests on CCTV, and that there’s no reason why the Christian tradition of hospitality shouldn’t be extended to two former prostitutes who want to lead a better life.”

After a pause I said: “Right.”

“And besides,” said Nicholas, moving in for the kill, “although marriage is the ideal for couples, I’m not about to turn my back on two people who have a valuable one-to-one relationship. As you well know.”

At that point I did ask myself why the thought of an unmarried couple should now be arousing such strong feelings in me, but unfortunately the answer seemed only too obvious: the stress of my relationship with Eric had to be twanging some very discordant strings in my unconscious mind.

I felt mortified.

VI

The news I had been longing for came twenty-four hours later. Lewis rang me at home.

“They’ve got her,” he said.

The whole world paused on its axis, tilted, then began to revolve at an entirely different angle.

My voice said: “Where—when—how—”

“It was just as Gavin suspected. She waited until the police had searched her friend’s Pimlico house and then she hid in the basement flat where Susanne had been living. The police made a second raid early this morning.”

Hot tears burnt my eyes and scorched my cheeks.

“Carta, are you all right? Would you like me to come over?”

But I just wanted to be alone to digest the fact that my unfinished business was finally finishing. It was as if the year 1990—
my
1990—was ending twenty-three months late, and I was set free to move forward into the future. I said to Kim, whom I still thought of so often: “You can rest in peace now,” and the moment the words reverberated in my mind the peace enfolded me so tightly that I could no longer cry.

I thought about Kim then with great clarity. It had been a rotten marriage but for a brief time we had been happy. He had been a damaged man, but he had had a good side as well as a bad side, and I had loved that good side before the bad side, nurtured by Mrs. Mayfield, had destroyed him. He was part of my past, an important part of my past, but he no longer had to exist in my present as an unavenged ghost nagging for retribution and making sure I was unable to make a full commitment to anyone else. Now I no longer had to look at an unmarried couple and feel subconscious guilt and shame about my inability to cut myself loose from someone so corrupt. With the “good” Kim avenged, the “bad” Kim would be free to wither away, and suddenly I caught a glimpse of him existing as a benign pattern in my mind, a catalyst in a dynamic process which in 1990 had led me to St. Benet’s and revolutionised my life.

I stayed with my memories for a long time but at last I felt strong enough to call Eric in Norway. I had been unable to talk to him about Gavin’s stabbing, and in fact it was several days since our last conversation, but I was sure I could talk to him now.

And I did talk. I talked and I wept and I got in a muddle and I apologised and I repeated myself and I thought in despair how very unlike a cool rational lawyer I was being, but in the end none of that mattered; in the end all he said was:

“I’m coming home.”