Past Imperfect (46 page)

Here we faced a dilemma. I had drunk little, knowing I would be driving back, but Terry had sunk the best part of three bottles. 'Let me drive you,' I suggested. 'You can send someone for your car in the morning.'

'Don't be so boring.' She laughed as if we were engaged on a teenage prank, as opposed to committing an offence that might very possibly include manslaughter. 'Follow me!' We then began one of the most hair-raising experiences of my entire life, shooting first up towards Beverly Hills, then skidding round the wide curves of the LA mountain roads, until we had somehow - don't ask me how - reached Mulholland Drive, that wide ridge, the spine that divides Los Angeles proper from the San Fernando Valley. There is a thriller,
A Portrait in Black
, a Lana Turner vehicle I think, which involves a woman who cannot drive being told nevertheless to get behind the wheel and follow her lover, i.e. the murderer, in a car. She weaves about and is almost undone when it starts to rain, since she has no idea how to work the windscreen wipers. From side to side she veers wildly, up, down, all over the place, weeping hysterical tears (or is that from
The Bad and the Beautiful
?). Anyway, this was more or less my experience the night Terry Vitkov took me home. Except that in my version I was following the crazy woman who was out of control of the vehicle, instead of her following me. I do not even now know how we arrived alive.

The house, when we got there, was perhaps a little more modest than I had been expecting, although it wasn't too bad. A large open hall, a bar that was pretending to be a library on the left and a big 'living room' that was glass on all three sides to make the most of the sensational view of the city below, a million lights of every colour, a giant's jewel box, twinkling below us. It felt as if we were coming in to land. But the rooms had a cheap and dingy feel, with dirty shagpile carpets and long sofas covered in oatmeal weave, going slightly on the arms. A couple of pretend antiques and a sketch in chalks of an artificially slimmed-down Terry by what looked like a pavement artist from outside the National Portrait Gallery completed the decoration. 'What'll you have?' she said, lurching towards the bar.

'Nothing for me. I'm fine.'

'Nobody's fine if they haven't got a drink.'

'Some whisky then, thank you. I'll do it.' This seemed more sensible if I were not to end up with a tumblerful. Terry poured herself some Bourbon, rummaging for ice in one of those ice-makers that loudly produce their chunky load at all hours of the day or night. 'Is Donnie here?'

'I don't think so.'

Again, her lack of enthusiasm made it hard to feel this was a union where their fingers were permanently on each other's pulse. I sipped my drink, wondering if I was glad to find we were alone, although whether I was fearful of a sexual advance or alcoholic poisoning I could not tell you. Either way it was time to start inching back to the story of Greg and the woman, Susie, which had to be done by Donnie's return. 'So, how long have you been married this time?'

'About four years.'

'How did you meet?'

'He's a producer. In television,' she added quickly, to differentiate this man as a working producer as opposed to simply a resident of L A. 'I make these programmes where we discuss what's on the market--'

'I know. Infomercials.' I smiled, thinking to show how up I was in the jargon of modern television.

Instead, she gave me a look as if I had slapped her across the table. 'I hate that word!' But the restaurant food wars had tired her out and she wasn't looking for another fight. Instead she just sipped her drink and then said in all seriousness, 'I prefer to think of myself as an ambassador for the buyer.' She spoke the words with great gravitas, so I can only suppose she expected me to take them at face value. After a suitable pause she continued, 'I went out with Donnie for a while, and then he proposed and I thought "what the hell".'

'Here's to you,' I said and raised my glass. 'I hope you're very happy.'

She sipped again, leaning back against the cushions. Predictably, her relaxation had brought down her guard and soon I learned that, as I had already surmised, she wasn't very happy. In fact, I would be hard put to it to testify that she was happy at all. Donnie, it seemed, was a lot older than her and since we were both at the upper end of our fifties, he can't have been much less than seventy. He also had less money than she'd been led to believe, 'which I find very hurtful,' and, worst of all, he had two daughters who wouldn't 'get off his back.'

'In what way?'

'They keep ringing him up, they keep wanting to see him. I know they're after his money when he goes.'

This was quite hard to respond to. There was nothing unreasonable in their desire to see their father and
of course
they expected his money when he went. It didn't make them unloving. 'At least they don't want it before he goes,' I volunteered.

She shook her head fiercely. 'You don't understand. I
need
that money. I've
earned
it.' She was extremely drunk by now, as she ought to have been, given how much Chardonnay, Merlot and Jack Daniel's had passed down her capacious throat that evening.

'Well, I'm sure he's planning to give you a fair share. Why don't you ask him?'

'He's planning to give me a life interest in half his money, which reverts to them on my death.'

What made this odd was that it was delivered as if she were describing a crime against nature, when it seemed eminently sensible, even generous, to me. I didn't dare go that far, reasoning that while I knew Terry, Donnie was a stranger to me so he could not feel justified in relying on my help. I settled for: 'That's not what you want?'

'
Damn right!
' She reached across me for the bottle and filled her glass. As she did so, she caught sight of a framed photograph among a group of them arranged on the shelves behind the bar. It was of an elderly, white-haired man with two young women, one on either side. They were all smiling. 'Those bitches,' said Terry with soft malignity and reaching out with the hand that was not holding the glass, smashed the picture forward, face down. It hit the wood with a loud smack, but I couldn't quite tell whether the glass had broken.

'And you've been married four years?' I asked tentatively, attempting to row for shallower water, but unable by the very nature of my task to leave her private life alone.

'Yuh.' More Jack Daniel's poured down her ever-open gullet.

'Then maybe he'll alter things when you've been together for longer.'

'Four years with Donnie is a lifetime, believe me.' What always fascinates me about people like Terry, and I have known a few, is their absolute control over the moral universe. You and I know that she had been approaching desperation while making her dreadful infomercials and wondering if her life would ever begin again. Then along comes this nice, lonely old man and she decides to marry him, in the hope of inheriting everything to which she had no right whatever, and the sooner the better. She then discovers that he intends to leave his fortune to his two daughters, whom he loves and who are obviously the very people he ought to leave it to. They are affectionate and close to Donnie, and apart from no doubt
loathing
their new stepmother they are, I'm sure, normal, sensible women. Yet Terry, and others like her, are able to take this kind of simple tale and turn and twist it until, with a glass splinter in their eye and through some kind of tainted logic, they recast the universe making themselves the ones who have the right to complain. They are the deserving put-upon victims of a cruel system. They are the ones to be pitied. I tell myself that they must know they are living a lie, yet they display no sign of it, and usually their friends and associates give in eventually, first by pretending to take their side and often, in the end, by actually believing they are in the right. My own value system had, however, survived the assault and in fact I wanted to write to Donnie with my support there and then.

My ruminations were interrupted when Terry's shrill voice brought me back to the present. 'Get this!' she shouted by way of introduction. Clearly, I was going to be treated to another example of Donnie's outrageous choices, with most of which I was sure I would agree. 'He's even planning to leave a sum to Susie. Outright.' She paused, to punctuate this unbelievable injustice. 'But not outright to me. For me, it's a "life interest".' She spat out the words, nodding almost triumphantly, as if at the end of a hilarious anecdote.

I was starting to like Donnie more and more. So much more than I liked his wife. 'She is his stepdaughter.'

'That's funny!' She rocked with artificial laughter.

'Where is Susie? Is she in Los Angeles?' With this question, as I should have seen, I had overplayed my hand. It was late and I was still faintly jet-lagged and perhaps, by this stage, a bit drunk and, anyway, I just wanted to get on. My words seemed to echo in the room, altering its atmosphere.

Terry was many things, but not stupid. 'Why are you here?' she said, and her voice suddenly sounded completely sober and absolutely reasonable.

You must understand that I was nearly at the end of my search. There were only Terry and Candida left, and so there had to be a fifty per cent chance that Susie was the Holy Grail Baby. In a way, I confess to hoping, for Damian's sake, that it would be Candida Finch's child, but there was no reason why it shouldn't be this one. I felt I might as well just ask the question, far away from home as we were. I had no intention of telling Terry about the list and after all, Damian wouldn't be especially newsworthy in this neck of the woods if Terry wanted to make a story about her infidelity to her first husband, which I doubted. 'You said you'd been with Greg for quite a while when you got pregnant.'

'Yes.'

'Damian remembers that he had an affair with you around that time.'

She smiled, not immediately making the connection. 'We didn't have an "affair," not then, not ever. Not what you'd call an affair.' She had relaxed again and was once more drawling her words. In some way I thought she was rather enjoying herself. 'We had a funny on-off thing for years. We never quite went out, we never quite broke off. If you're asking if I was unfaithful, I never felt it counted with Damian.'

'Anyway, the point is' - this was it - 'he wonders if Susie is really Greg's daughter.'

I had expected at least token indignation but, unpredictably, Terry threw her head back and roared with laughter. This time it was completely genuine. For a while she was quite unable to stop and she was still wiping her eyes before she could answer. 'No,' she said at last, shaking her head, 'she's not Greg's daughter.' I said nothing. 'You're right. I had been sleeping with Greg for a long time by then, for quite a long time since I decided to get pregnant. I was taking no precautions and I began to wonder if he could have children. If he was, you know, fertile.'

'So you revived things with Damian, to see if you could get pregnant that way.' I could easily see how this had happened. She wanted to bring Greg up to the mark and the whole paternity issue was much muddier in those days. It was a scheme that might easily have worked. Obviously, it did work. It just didn't quite fit with the original letter that had started all this, given that the whole thing had been planned by her. Damian could hardly be accused of seduction or 'deceit.' The charge would more properly be levelled the other way. Still, we could clarify that later.

'Yes. I guess that's exactly what I did.' She was defiant now, made brave and even brazen by the liquor. She tilted her face as if to challenge me.

'I'm not here to judge you. Only to find out the truth.'

'And what does Damian want to do about it?'

So, I had reached my goal. We had arrived. With this in mind I thought some modest helping of honesty would not now go amiss. 'He's dying, as I have told you. I believe he wants to make sure that his child is well provided for.' That seemed enough.

'Would Susie have to know?'

This was an interesting question. I would have thought that Susie would have wanted to know, but would it be a condition? Then again, was it up to her mother? Susie was in her late thirties, after all. 'That's something I'll have to check with Damian. There'll be a DNA test, but I dare say we can come up with some other perfectly believable reason for that if we have to, or it could be done without her knowledge.'

'I see.' From her tone I could tell at once that my words had changed things, but I couldn't quite understand why, since I was not aware I had made any very stringent conditions. She stood and walked towards the glass wall, taking what I could now see was the handle of one of the panels and sliding it back to let in the night air. For a moment she breathed deeply. 'Damian isn't Susie's father,' she said.

I hope I can convey how totally inexplicable this seemed. I had sat all evening and listened to a woman who was rapacious for money, other people's money, any money that she could lay her hands on; a woman disappointed by life and everything it had brought her; a woman trapped in an existence she hated and by a husband she cared nothing for, and now, here she was, on the brink of the luckiest break anyone living has ever heard of, the chance to make her daughter one of the richest women in Europe, and she was turning it down without the smallest argument. 'You can't know that,' I said. 'You say yourself she isn't Greg's. She must be someone's.'

She nodded. 'Yes. She must be someone's. But she isn't Greg's and she isn't Damian's.' She paused, wondering, I now realise, whether to go on. I am glad she did. 'And she isn't mine.'

For a moment I was too astonished to say an obligatory 'What?' or 'How can that be?' or even 'Oh.' I just looked at her.

She sighed, shivering suddenly in the draught, and moved back into the room towards the dingy sofa. 'You were quite right. About what I was trying to do. I wanted to be pregnant, because I knew Greg would marry me when I was. I'd been sleeping with Damian every now and then for a couple of years so I was sure he wouldn't mind. And he didn't. It was just after you all went on that crazy holiday in Portugal.'