Lovers and Liars (29 page)

‘You should have told me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t understand it was the first time.’

‘Would it have made a differenceT

‘No.’ He hesitated, then admitted the truth. ‘Nothing would have made any difference. Not once we were in this room.’

fore that,’ she said. ‘On the stairs. I knew then. I knew in eet … ‘

did U

glad.’ There was a triumphant candour in her face. ‘Today -showed me two things. Death and this. I’m glad, glad, glad did that … ‘ She broke off, then frowned. ‘I thought I hated I she went on. ‘At the hotel. I thought I hated you then. But I ‘t. just the opposite.’ She raised her eyes to his with a childlike ess. ‘Is it always like that? Like thisT

ever, in my experience/ Pascal said.

considerably later, they left the hot little room, and went into the cool of evening streets. They walked by the harbour, watched the fishermen prepare their nets. They ate dinner

e harbour, and watched darkness fall, and the city behind become a place of shadows and moving lights. They talked. could remember, afterwards, how they talked, but never

tthey said. He felt a sense of absolute communication; he watching her and wanting her across the table. He thought: strange, so this is how it happens - without warning. This is how feels, this is what it’s like.

ey had to touch each other, across the table, by the harbour, . g back through the streets. He had to clasp her hand, stroke arm; in the dark, at a street comer, desire mounting, he had ss her mouth, open her blouse, kiss her breasts.

ey fucked again then, with a desperate urgency, in the darkagainst the wall of an Arab tenement, her legs locked around waist. They went back to his room, and still he wanted her. At

in the morning, he took her back to the Hotel Ledoyen, and still could not leave her. He went up to her room. They talked, e love, talked: they had to be careful, she said, they had to be t. It was an expensive hotel, but the partition walls were thin. e remembered her father then, but her father was quickly missed.

n’t worry, don’t worry,’ she said, and a shadow passed ss her face. She clasped Pascal’s hand tightly. ‘He never Kross her J

I go or what I do. Anyway, I’m eighteen now. It Pies where

to do with him.’ Pi’s nothing

rAnd so it went on, day after day, night after night. It never ortce occurred to Pascal that she n-dght have fied, or misled him. It,was impossible: when he looked at her, when he touched her,

doubted nothing. Her eyes mirrored the love and need in his.

When he looked into them, he saw only truth, a perfect mirror image of the love he himself felt. It filled him with desire, and with a measureless contentment.

Day after day, night after night, week after week. They had no sense of time, time now could expand or contract. A day together passed in a second, an hour apart felt like a century. When Pascal held her he felt he held the future: there was the rest of their lives, in his arms. Sometimes, he could see, she looked ahead and feared; sometimes she would share his blithe optimism, but at other times she would doubt. The summer was passing. Her father would not let her remain in Beirut for ever. He was already planning his own return to the States.

‘He’ll make me go back to England/ she said.

Pascal clasped her in his arms. That was out of the question, he replied. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back to France. We can be married in France. I want you to meet my mother, my friends. I want you to see my village. It’s very beautiful. It’s in the South, in the hills. My father is buried there, in the little graveyard by the church. We could marry in the church, then drink wine in the caf6s, dance in the square. Darling, I want you to see my home, to see Provence … ‘

He could see all these events and these places as he spoke of them, and he thought she could see them too. They would light her eyes and transfigure her face. But then, a few hours later, or a few days later, he would see that belief drain away, and a curious sadness return to her face.

Once or twice he wondered if there could be some difficulty, or some doubt which she refused to express, but whenever he questioned her, she would deny this. He could not understand how she could seem to hesitate, or fear, when for him their future was so vivid and so inevitable. Perhaps, he thought, she doubted him, doubted his love for her? He found that idea unbearable. Waking once, seeing her standing by the shutters, her lovely body striped with dawn light, her face sad and thoughtful, he felt his heart contract. He must have used the wrong words - words were the problem: they were too small, too inexact.

‘Darling, don’t be sad. We’ll find a way/ he said, and drew her back to bed. When she was there, in his arms, he spelled it out for her as exactly as he could. He told her again that he loved her and always would.

‘This cannot change.’ He caught her to him. ‘If it could then nothing has any meaning, nothing.’ He touched the tiny ear-ring

wore, then bent and kissed it. ‘You should have let me buy ring/ he said. ‘I wanted to buy the ring. I wanted you to wear

1 don’t care about ceremonies, pieces of paper, priests. When marry it will alter nothing. You are already my wife.’

e believed him then, he was certain. He could see belief, ing, in her face. That blindness, of joy and desire, and they both shared - later he came to understand that. it

e the rest of the world recede. It never occurred to him, nor thought - to her, that others were less blind, that they might Talk, however, they did. And one night, when Gini was at otel, and he was returning late, around three in the morning, seeing Arab contacts he used in West Beirut, he returned to small room by the harbour, and found Sam Hunter sitting on air behind the door. Pascal did not see him at first. He was g into the room beyond. The room had been trashed.

ere were very few possessions in the room, and there was little furniture, but what there was had been smashed. The ers were open, and in the moonlight, in that strange eerie white light, Pascal could see how effectively someone had this work.

e single lamp, a chair, a table, lay broken in pieces. Film coiled ss the floor. Pascal’s spare cameras lay smashed in fragments. hotographs, his precious photographs, covered the floor like leaves. They were crumpled, slashed, ripped. In the centre of m, the bed had been stripped. The sheets, stained with the e of the previous night’s love-making, had been laid out on

floor, as if made ready for some inspection by the police.

N entered the room, and stopped, staring at this destruc……….

, Hunter rose out of the darkness by the door and lurched to feet.

He reeked of liquor. Pascal could smell the bourbon at four feet. lRunter wasted no time on preliminaries. He swung a punch at scal’s head, missed, almost fell over, then righted himself. He pped himself against the wall. The moonlight caught his face, wet blur of ra e.

9 fuc * g bastard/ he said. ‘You goddamned fucking sonabitch. You’ve been screwing my daughter. She’s fifteen fucking

.,years old. She’s still at fucking school. Jesus Christ, you bastard.

11 kill you for this.’

He came at Pascal again, fists windmilling. Pascal stood absolIftely still. He thought - Fifteen - and one of the random blows Vonnected. Hunter was a big man, a heavy man, and though he

was drunk, there was force behind the blow. It connected with the side of Pascal’s head, and Pascal reeled back.

The anger then, swelled by sudden pain, made his mind blank. He looked at the sheets, and the torn photographs, this desecration both of Gini and of his work. It took thirty seconds, if that, then he swung around and hit Hunter back.

It was, after that, an unequal contest. Hunter was the heavier of the two, and the slower. Pascal was lithe, strong, young, and fit. Hunter had once boxed for Harvard, but Pascal had grown up in a small village, where no-one used the Queensberry Rules. He smashed his fist blindly into Hunter’s face, punched him low in the stomach. Hunter attempted to grapple with him. He grunted, made a grab, lurched against Pascal with his full weight. Pascal hit him again; Hunter grabbed his throat. Pascal punched him hard in the neck, then kicked him in the ribs. Hunter made a choking noise, and slumped. He fell to his knees and crouched there, breathing heavily. Blood was smeared across his face. He levered himself slowly to his feet, then lurched to the door. He stood there, breathing heavily, dripping blood on his Brooks Brothers shirt.

‘You piece of shit,’ he said at last. ‘You mother-fucker. Just wait. I’ll get you for this.’

And, of course, he did. Pascal saw Gini just one more time, the following morning, at the Hotel Ledoyen. Her father was present throughout the interview, and the circumstances of that interview Pascal had no wish to recall even now, twelve years later.

It lasted half an hour. By noon Gini was on a plane, under escort from Hunter, leaving Beirut.

A day later, his commissions began to dry up. The New York Times called, then the Washington Post, then Time. For two years after that, Pascal sold not one single photograph to any major outlet in America. He neither forgot, nor forgave Hunter for this. He felt, for Hunter and for those Hunter could influence, the deepest and most bitter contempt. It was from this period in his life, as he knew, that he truly began to take risks. Adrenalin sickness, perhaps, but Pascal believed the condition went deeper than that. In war zones, it was easier to take good pictures if you did not care whether you died or lived. It was from that date that the myths about him really began: that Pascal was indifferent to danger, and its possible outcome, was something his friends and rivals refused to accept. They glamourized his ennui, Pascal thought. While he endured two years, three, of this withering state, they claimed - wrongly

- that it was excitement which motivated him, a death wish.

ascal knew that to be untrue. During this period, there was a at the heart of both his personal and his professional life. the seductions of work, and of women, left him cold. He women to provide brief sexual satisfaction; he used men, en and children ruthlessly to get the pictures he needed. He d on, to the next assignment, the next woman, untouched. felt neither love nor compassion; he was distanced, alienated cold. It was, he thought sometimes, a kind of living death,

brought only one benefit: his new cold eye, his disregard nger, gave his pictures a distinctive edge.

friends, not understanding that he was dying inside, that could feel death in his brain, heart and bloodstream, claimed sought death out, courted it, made love to it. Pascal didn’t her to argue with them, or correct their mistake - let them ve their myths. He knew: why would he court death when ad already possessed it? He and death were intimates, lovers: th was beside him while he worked; death sat down at the e when he ate and drank; death watched him when he had ; death greeted him every morning on waking, and waited for m faithfully every night when he slept.

That period of his life was not something he liked to recall w. It had, in due course, become less grim. He had almost suaded himself that it was possible to escape from that prison . lie had married, believing this. He had tried hard to hide

e darkness that clouded the edge of his vision from his wife. hen she was expecting their first child, he allowed himself hope - and he continued to cling to hope even after the scarriage. Later, there was Marianne, and he saw her, his ing child, as a great gift. Amid the tumult and wreckage of dying marriage, Marianne was music: by her very existence, rough the passionate and protective love he felt for her, she uncled a sweet, pure and enduring note.

She giwc him his heart back; in his capacity as her father, if in ,no other, he could know death receded and he lived. Marianne s his comfort, the one person who could give meaning tohis e. Yet now he could not be with her, except by appointment,

permission, and so even this last hope was marred by grief. It was now four in the morning, still dark outside, the deadest e of night. With a sudden desperation, Pascal rose to his feet. walked back and forth in the room. With despair he examined re-examined these incidents, these states of mind, this plot that

as his life. It seemed to him then, momentarily, that all the wrong

turnings he had taken linked back to the same time, and the same place. That little room by the harbour, in a once beautiful city. How different might things be now, if he had acted differently then?

He stopped pacing, crossed the room, and stood silently by a door. Beyond that door, Gini slept. For an instant he felt a wild and heady conviction that if he opened that door now, even if he spoke to her only, and did nothing else, he could perhaps undo time, mend, amend, the course of his past life.

He actually allowed himself to touch the handle of the door, and to turn it. Then he stepped back. The conviction fell away, and he saw it for what it was: a by-product of fatigue, a delusion fed by despair and lack of sleep. He was, he thought, no longer that impetuous young man he had been in Beirut. These days he placed greater value on friendship than on love. Friendship was less combustible, but endured longer. Love affairs, for the most part, had painful, messy conclusions. He believed now that their corollary was parting, just as the corollary of marriage was disillusion, hurt children, the broken heart and the divorce.

He returned to the sofa and lay down. He extinguished the light. For the rest of the hours remaining before dawn, he forced himself to think only of work, and of the Hawthornes, that perfect couple who might or might not have achieved that rare thing, a perfect marriage. His mind dwelt in their story, their space. The hours passed; he did not sleep.

In the room beyond, Gini also lay awake. She heard Pascal’s footsteps approach her door, then turn back. She almost called out to him, then remained silent instead. Shortly afterwards, the band of light beneath her door disappeared. Gini lay in the dark, and tried to will herself to sleep. When sleep finally came, she dreamed vividly. She was searching a war-torn city, despairing and frantic. The object of her search was uncertain, and the details of the dream shadowy. Sometimes the city resembled London, and sometimes Beirut.