Honourable Schoolboy (42 page)

‘So that’s how you spend the whisky profits.’

He held out his open palm and she dropped the keys into it so that he could unlock the door for her. Still in dumb show he gave her the orchids to hold. Behind the black Peak a full moon, not yet risen, glowed like a forest fire. She climbed in, he handed her the keys and this time he felt the contact of her hand and remembered Happy Valley again, and Ko’s kiss as they drove away.

‘Mind if I ride on the back?’ he asked.

She laughed and pushed open the passenger door for him. ‘Where are you going with those gorgeous orchids anyway?’

She started the engine, but Jerry gently switched it off again. She stared at him in surprise.

‘Sport,’ he said quietly. ‘I cannot tell a lie. I’m a viper in your nest, and before you drive me anywhere, you’d better fasten your seat belt and hear the grisly truth.’

He had chosen this moment carefully because he didn’t want her to feel threatened. She was in the driving seat of her own car, under the lighted awning of her own apartment block, within sixty feet of Lawrence the porter, and he was playing the humble sinner in order to increase her sense of security.

‘Our chance reunion was not entire chance. That’s point one. Point two, not to put too fine an edge on it, my paper told me to run you to earth and besiege you with many searching questions regarding your late chum Ricardo.’

She was still watching him, still waiting. On the point of her chin she had two small parallel scars like claws, quite deep. He wondered who had made them, and what with.

‘But Ricardo’s dead,’ she said, much too early.

‘Sure,’ said Jerry consolingly. ‘No question. However the comic is in possession of what they’re pleased to call a hot tip that he’s alive after all and it’s my job to humour them.’

‘But that’s absolutely absurd!’

‘Agreed. Totally. They’re out of their minds. The consolation prize is two dozen well-thumbed orchids and the best dinner in town.’

Turning away from him she gazed through the windscreen, her face in the full glare of the overhead lamp, and Jerry wondered what it must be like to inhabit such a beautiful body, living up to it twenty-four hours a day. Her grey eyes opened a little wider and he had a shrewd suspicion that he was supposed to notice the tears brimming and the way her hands grasped the steering wheel for support.

‘Forgive me,’ she murmured. ‘It’s just - when you love a man - give everything up for him - and he dies - then one evening, out of the blue -’

‘Sure,’ said Jerry. ‘I’m sorry.’

She started the engine, ‘Why should you be sorry? If he’s alive, that’s bonus. If he’s dead, nothing’s changed. We’re on a pound to nothing.’ She laughed. ‘Ric always said he was indestructible.’

It’s like stealing from a blind beggar, he thought. She shouldn’t be let loose.

She drove well but stiffly and he guessed - because she inspired guesswork - that she had only recently passed her test and, that the car was her prize for doing so. It was the calmest night in the world. As they sank into the city, the harbour lay like a perfect mirror at the centre of the jewel box. They talked places. Jerry suggested the Peninsula but she shook her head.

‘Okay. Let’s go get a drink first,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s blow the walls out!’

To his surprise she reached across and gave his hand a squeeze. Then he remembered Craw. She did that to everyone, he had said.

She was off the leash for a night: he had that overwhelming sensation. He remembered taking Cat, his daughter, out from school when she was young, and how they had to do lots of different things in order to make the afternoon longer. At a dark disco on Kowloonside they drank Remy Martin with ice and soda. He guessed it was Ko’s drink and she had picked up the habit to keep him company. It was early and there were maybe a dozen people, no more. The music was loud and they had to yell to hear each other, but she didn’t mention Ricardo. She preferred the music and listening with her head back. Sometimes, she held his hand, and once put her head on his shoulder, and once she blew him a distracted kiss and drifted on to the floor to perform a slow, solitary dance, eyes closed, slightly smiling. The men ignored their own girls and undressed her with their eyes, and the Chinese waiters brought fresh ashtrays every three minutes so that they could look down her dress. After two drinks and half an hour she announced a passion for the Duke and the big-band sound, so they raced back to the Island to a place Jerry knew where a live Filipino band gave a fair rendering of Ellington. Cat Anderson was the best thing since sliced bread, she said. Had he heard Armstrong and Ellington together. Weren’t they just the greatest? More Remy Martin while she sang ‘Mood Indigo’ to him.

‘Did Ricardo dance?’ Jerry asked.

‘Did he dance?’ she replied softly, as she tapped her foot and lightly clicked her fingers to the rhythm.

‘Thought Ricardo had a limp,’ Jerry objected.

‘That never stopped him,’ she said, still absorbed by the music. ‘I’ll never go back to him, you understand. Never. That chapter’s closed. And how.’

‘How’d he pick it up?’

‘Dancing?’

‘The limp.’

With her finger curled round an imaginary trigger she fired a shot into the air.

‘It was either the war or an angry husband,’ she said. He made her repeat it, her lips close to his ear.

She knew a new Japanese restaurant where they served fabulous Kobe beef.

‘Tell me how you got those scars,’ he asked as they were driving there. He touched his own chin. ‘The left and the right. What did it?’

‘Oh hunting innocent foxes,’ she said with a light smile. ‘My dear papa was horse mad. He still is, I’m afraid.’

‘Where does he live?’

‘Daddy? Oh the usual tumble-down schloss in Shropshire. Miles too big but they won’t move. No staff, no money, ice cold three-quarters of the year. Mummy can’t even boil an egg.’

He was still reeling when she remembered a bar where they gave heavenly curry canapés, so they drove around until they found it and she kissed the barman. There was no music but for some reason he heard himself telling her all about the orphan, till he came to the reasons for their break-up, which he deliberately fogged over.

‘Ah, but Jerry darling,’ she said sagely. ‘With twenty-five years between you and her, what else can you expect?’

And with nineteen years and a Chinese wife between you and Drake Ko what the hell can you expect? he thought, with some annoyance.

They left - more kisses for the barman - and Jerry was not so intoxicated by her company, nor by the brandy-sodas, to miss the point that she made a phone call, allegedly to cancel her date, that the call took a long time, and that when she returned from it she looked rather solemn. In the car again, he caught her eye and thought he read a shadow of mistrust.

‘Jerry?’

‘Yes?’

She shook her head, laughed, ran her palm along his face, then kissed him. ‘It’s fun,’ she said.

He guessed she was wondering whether, if she had really sold him that keg of unbranded whisky, she would so thoroughly have forgotten him. He guessed she was also wondering whether, in order to sell him the keg, she had thrown in any fringe benefits of the sort Craw had so coarsely referred to. But that was her problem, he reckoned. Had been from the start.

In the Japanese restaurant they were given the corner table, thanks to Lizzie’s smile and other attributes. She sat looking into the room, and he sat looking at Lizzie, which was fine by Jerry but would have given Sarratt the bends. By the candlelight he saw her face very clearly and was conscious for the first time of the signs of wear: not just the claw marks on her chin, but her lines of travel, and of strain, which to Jerry had a determined quality about them, like honourable scars from all the battles against her bad luck and her bad judgment. She wore a gold bracelet, new, and a bashed tin watch with a Walt Disney dial on it, and scratched gloved hand pointing to the numerals. Her loyalty to the old watch impressed him and he wanted to know who gave it to her.

‘Daddy,’ she said distractedly.

A mirror was let into the ceiling above them, and he could see her gold hair and the swell of her breasts among the scalps of other diners, and the gold dust of the hairs on her back. When he tried to hit her with Ricardo, she turned guarded: it should have occurred to Jerry, but it didn’t, that her attitude had changed since she made the phone call.

‘What guarantee do I have that you will keep my name out of your paper?’ she asked.

‘Just my promise.’

‘But if your editor knows I was Ricardo’s girl, what’s to stop him putting it in for himself?’

‘Ricardo had lots of girls. You know that. They came in all shapes and sizes and ran concurrently.’

‘There was only one of me,’ she said firmly, and he saw her glance toward the door. But then she had that habit anyway, wherever she was, of looking round the room all the time for someone who wasn’t there. He let her keep the initiative.

‘You said your paper had a hot tip,’ she said. ‘What do they mean by that?’

He had boned up his answer to this with Craw. It was one they had actually rehearsed. He delivered it therefore with force if not conviction.

‘Ric’s crash was eighteen months ago in the hills near Pailin on the Thai-Cambodian border. That’s the official line. No one found a body, no one found wreckage and there’s talk he was doing an opium run. The insurance company never paid up and Indocharter never sued them. Why not? Because Ricardo had an exclusive contract to fly for them. For that matter, why doesn’t someone sue Indocharter? You for instance. You were his woman. Why not go for damages?’

‘That is a very vulgar suggestion,’ she said in her duchess voice.

‘Beyond that, there’s rumours he’s been seen recently around the haunts a little. He’s grown a beard but he can’t cure the limp, they say, nor his habit of sinking a bottle of Scotch a day, nor, saving your presence, chasing after everything that wears a skirt within a five mile radius of wherever he happens to be standing.’

She was forming up to argue, but he gave her the rest while he was about it.

‘Head porter at the Rincome Hotel, Chiang Mai, confirmed the identification from a photograph, beard notwithstanding. All right, us roundeyes all look the same to them. Nevertheless he was pretty sure. Then only last month a fifteen-year-old girl in Bangkok, particulars to hand, took her little bundle to the Mexican Consulate and named Ricardo as the lucky father. I don’t believe in eighteen month pregnancies and I assume you don’t. And don’t look at me like that, sport. It’s not my idea, is it?’

It’s London’s; he might have added, as neat a blend of fact and fiction as ever shook a tree. But she was actually looking past him, at the door again.

‘Another thing I’m to ask you about is the whisky racket,’ he said.

‘It was not a racket, Jerry, it was a perfectly valid business enterprise!’

‘Sport. You were straight as a die. No breath of scandal attaches. Etcetera. But if Ric cut a few too many corners, now, that would be a reason for doing the old disappearing act, wouldn’t it?’

‘That wasn’t Ric’s way,’ she said finally, without any conviction at all. ‘He liked to be the big man around town. It wasn’t his way to run.’

He seriously regretted her discomfort. It ran quite contrary to the feelings he would have wished for her in other circumstances. He watched her and he knew that argument was something that she always lost; it planted a hopelessness in her; a resignation to defeat.

‘For example,’ Jerry continued - as her head fell forward in submission - ‘were we to prove that your Ric, in flogging his kegs, had stuck to the cash and instead of passing it back to the distillery - pure hypothesis, no shred of evidence - then in that case -’

‘By the time our partnership was wound up, every investor had a certificated contract with interest from the date of purchase. Every penny we borrowed was duly accounted for.’

Till now it had all been footwork. Now he saw his goal looming, and he made for it fast.

‘Not duly, sport,’ he corrected her, while she continued to stare downward at her uneaten food. ‘Not duly at all. Those settlements were made six months after the due date. Unduly. That’s a very eloquent point in my view. Question: who bailed Ric out? According to our information the whole world was going for him. The distillers, the creditors, the law, the local community. Every one of them had the knife sharpened for him. Till one day: bingo! Writs withdrawn, shades of the prison bars recede. How? Ric was on his knees. Who’s the mystery angel? Who bought his debts?’

She had lifted her head while he was speaking and now, to his astonishment, a radiant smile suddenly lit her face and the next thing he knew, she was waving over his shoulder at someone he couldn’t see till he looked into the ceiling mirror and caught the glitter of an electric blue suit, arid a full head of black hair, well greased; and between the two, a foreshortened chubby Chinese face set on a pair of powerful shoulders, and two curled hands held out in a fighter’s greeting, while Lizzie piped him aboard.

‘Mr Tiu! What a marvellous coincidence. It’s Mr Tiu! Come on over! Try the beef. It’s gorgeous. Mr Tiu, this is Jerry from Fleet Street. Jerry, this is a very good friend of mine who helps look after me. He’s interviewing me, Mr Tiu! Me! It’s most exciting. All about Vientiane and a poor pilot I tried to help a hundred years ago. Jerry knows everything about me. He’s a miracle!’

‘We met,’ said Jerry, with a broad grin.

‘Sure,’ said Tiu, equally happy, and as he spoke, Jerry once more caught the familiar smell of almonds and rosewater mixed, the one his early wife had so much liked. ‘Sure,’ Tiu repeated. ‘You the horse-writer, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Jerry agreed, stretching his smile to breaking-point.

Then, of course, Jerry’s vision of the world turned several somersaults, and he had a whole lot of business to worry about: such as appearing to be as tickled as everybody else by the amazing good luck of Tiu’s appearance; such as shaking hands, which was like a mutual promise of future settlement; such as drawing up a chair and calling for drinks, beef and chopsticks and all the rest. But the thing that stuck in his mind even while he did all this - the memory that lodged there as permanently as later events allowed - had little to do with Tiu, or his hasty arrival. It was the expression on Lizzie’s face as she first caught sight of him, for the fraction of a second before the lines of courage drew a the gay smile out of her. It explained to him as nothing else could have done the paradoxes that comprised her: her prisoner’s dreams, her borrowed personalities which were like disguises in which she could momentarily escape her destiny. Of course she had summoned Tiu. She had no choice. It amazed him that neither the Circus nor himself had predicted it. The Ricardo story, whatever the truth of it, was far too hot for her to handle by herself. But the expression in her grey eyes as Tiu entered the restaurant was not relief, but resignation: the doors had slammed on her again, the fun was over. ‘We’re like those bloody glow-worms,’ the orphan had whispered to him once, raging about her childhood, ‘carting the bloody fire round on our backs.’