Blame It on the Bossa Nova (15 page)

“Well you don’t surprise me, Frank,” I said. “... I would have expected that to be the Pentagon line.”

He chuckled. “You would, huh, Alex?”

Frank got another drink and we sat around looking at our distorted reflections in the convex sides of our glasses, following cracks in the ceiling until they dived into the picture rail, that sort of thing.

“No,” said Frank. “... that’s not the Pentagon line... that’s the word out on the street, on the Rue Saint Michel, in the Paris gutters. That’s the Western Reds view, the view that Pascale and her Commie friends take. Aint that right Pascale?” He was quite worked up by the end of this little speech and his final sentence was more of a challenge than a question. He glared at her. Pascale’s countenance opened a new wing in my gallery of her facial expressions. I wouldn’t say that the colour had drained from her face, but she certainly didn’t have a rosy glow. For a second her mouth hung open in shock and a hunted look passed across her eyes, then she partially recovered.

“What is this, Frank, the McCarthy hearings?” she laughed weakly.

“Are you, or have you ever been..?” I chimed in dutifully in an attempt to defuse Frank’s coup de theatre.

“No, I’m not joking, Alex. This woman here is a Red, a Commie,” he clarified in case I wasn’t familiar with the colour coding.

“Go on,” I snorted in disbelief. “... Pascale? You’re joking.”

“I’m sorry sunshine, she is.” Frank’s face too was tense. He was calling the shots but he wasn’t enjoying it. He looked as if after a lifetime of self-indulgence he had just been told that Coca Cola rots your teeth.

“... For all I know you are too. My boys haven’t dug up any shit on you yet. Any political shit, that is... but this little lady...” he paused. Pascale looked as if she was waiting for the jury’s verdict. “... Well, just ask her what she was doing in Algeria between fifty-six and fifty-eight. It wasn’t a workout for the Kennedy Peace Corps, I can tell you that.”

“Pascale, is this true?” I asked, the horrified Victorian father. She didn’t bother to answer. I realized then that I still had something for her inside me. She didn’t look at either of us. I got up and turned the tele off, its noise was grating.

“Don’t worry baby,” said Frank. “... I still love you, we have fun together. I’m not going to hurt you. And you sure as hell aint gonna hurt me. We’ll get on fine.”

We none of us did a lot of talking after that, least of all Pascale. It didn’t make me feel particularly comfortable to imagine that little card with my name on it filed away somewhere near Grosvenor Square. It wasn’t the card so much, it was Frank. All the time we’d taken him for Dumbo…we thought, both of us individually, that we had conned him good and proper. We should have known he couldn’t be such a simpleton to have got into the position he held... Not that we’d got anything out of him, not that I’d tried, but I couldn’t imagine that Pascale had achieved much.... What hurt was that all the time I’d been talking to him over the last couple of months, smiling with my face and simultaneously thinking what a thick arsehole he was, I’d been talking to a guy who wasn’t the guy I thought he was, and who was looking at me and thinking, this guy thinks he’s conning me... It was embarrassing. We were like kids who’d been caught out by teacher poking fun behind his back.

They left not much later, with muted goodbyes and mumbled promises to see each other on our part and a distinct lack of inhibition on Frank’s. I went to the window to watch them get into Frank’s car. Gallant as ever, before going round to his side, he held the passenger door open as Pascale got in. As Pascale had stood on the pavement her face had given no clues to her inner feelings, she had recovered her composure at least. After she had got in I could still see her face and I kept my eyes fixed on it until the car drew away.

*****

A couple of days later Pascale phoned me. She was agitated. I hadn’t given much thought to Frank and Pascale after they had left me. In fact, far from developing the empathy I thought I had detected at her time of trial, I was glad to get shot of them.

“Alex, have you seen Toby lately?”

I hadn’t.

“Have you tried to phone him?”

I never had felt the impulse to volunteer to speak to Toby since I first met him. On the occasions that he surfaced in my consciousness I tried sinking him by reciting random sequences of numbers or conjugating Latin verbs. It frequently worked.

“No, I haven’t tried to ring him.”

“He’s not answering his phone.”

“Perhaps he’s not in.”

“He hasn’t answered it for two days now. I’ve been phoning all the hours of the day and night.”

This was strange. Toby loved his creature comforts and needed to relax in the personalised ambience of his flat at approximately the same intervals that an electric milk float needs to be re-charged at its depot. A forty-eight hour absence was unthinkable.

“So what d’you want me to do about it?”

“Will you come round with me?”

“Sure, I’ll see you outside if you like.”

“No, I’ll pick you up.”

“Pick me up? You don’t even drive.”

“I’ve got a car.”

“OK. When are you coming round?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“OK.”

She was round in twenty-five minutes. It gave me time to clean my teeth and find a comb. She’d got hold of a Phase One Standard Vanguard from somewhere.

“Where d’you get hold of this?” I asked as we pulled off in what I considered an uncontrolled manner. She didn’t answer. I’d been right, she didn’t drive. She somehow got the car to move and then relied on other people to get out of the way.

“What the fuck are you playing at?” I screamed as without warning she pulled into the outside lane going along the Embankment. A lorry gave us a prolonged blast on its horn and then turned its headlights on us from a point about a foot behind our rear bumper.

“Hey watch out, that was a red light. That means be prepared to slow down... Are you mad? ... For fuck’s sake Pascale.... For fuck’s sake!”

Eventually we arrived at Great Russell Street. We had to park round the corner where Pascale found a space reserved for a doctor.

“I’ve never been sure of the legal status of those Do Not Park signs,” I said as we walked back and crossed the road. Toby’s flat was on the third floor and someone had left the lift-gate open on the second, but I was glad to walk, to feel the use of my limbs. It’s so easy to take these things for granted. The front door was ajar and I pushed it. From inside we could hear a woman talking, a careful voice, rising and falling within carefully constrained extremes, measured, boring. The hall was bare of furniture. I looked at Pascale and saw her incomprehension. We went into the big living room overlooking the British Museum where the woman was talking. She was, as I would have imagined her, had I taken the trouble - a worsted grey suit and glasses and a tight curled perm. She motioned us in as if she owned the place.

“It’s alright I knew you were coming, they phoned up.”

I looked at the telephone sitting on the carpet at the end of a long snake of cable that led back to a junction box on the skirting. All this now visible in the room’s naked state that before had been hidden, like branches by leaves in summer. I wondered who had rung to inform her of our impending arrival - M16, the CIA? She was talking to a younger woman who looked as if she might be a secretary. “... And of course it’s convenient for the West End and City, Holborn underground is five minutes walk... I’ll be right with you.”

The young lady took notes on a shorthand notepad.

“Perhaps you’d like to look around while I see to these people..... So you found it then,” she addressed us as she approached, extending her hand. I took it briefly, Pascale didn’t bother.

“Ye-he-hes...” I injected a chuckle into my affirmation. “... Didn’t we darling?”

“Well.... this is it. I should point out that we don’t expect it to be on the market long, this is a very popular block in a very popular position.”

“Well yes, I can see that... What d’you think darling?”

Pascale had moved to the window and was looking out and my mind returned to the first time I had come here and she had stood at the window, smoking nervously and I had wondered what she was like underneath what she presented to the world... And now here we were with the furniture and Toby gone, and I still didn’t know.

“What d’you think darling?” I repeated.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “No furniture.”

“It is an unfurnished flat,” said the lady, piqued.

“Of course,” I soothed. “... But we’d been rather hoping we might inherit some pieces from the last tenant. Did he take everything with him, or her?”

“The last gentleman left rather suddenly,” she said, irritated by the memory. “... Some other people came and picked up his furniture... and belongings. It was quite unusual.”

“I must say that if you are interested in the flat you should contact our west-end office as soon as possible. There’s a gentleman interested already, and I believe that this young lady represents a foreign bank who are very keen.”

“Look,” said Pascale, “... they’re queuing up to see the Elgin Marbles.”

The Museum Tavern didn’t supply the answers to Pascale’s questions but it helped put them into perspective. To me it didn’t matter, Toby could be out in Cuba dismantling rocket silos or in Germany , redecorating the Berlin Wall for all I cared. I suppose I’d never really thought about her relationship with Toby. She was in a state. Perhaps it was a combination of the business with Frank the other night and two days of worrying about Toby; perhaps it was other things, but as we sat there in the pub, in the middle of ordinary folks’ lunch breaks, she broke down crying. It wasn’t obvious. First of all she went quiet. This I didn’t notice at first, as there were frequently silences in any conversation in which she was a major participant. Then she started to shake slowly, not violently, and then as I looked at her face I saw a tear come out of each eye and run quickly down her cheek.

“Come on luv,” I said quietly and put a friendly hand on her thigh. A man and woman at the table next to us noticed she was crying, examined her at their leisure and then looked away. Another guy looked up briefly from his Sporting Life and then continued to make his selections. She let the tears come freely now, but quietly, letting out a sort of high pitched moan that sounded like it came from behind the bar.

“Come on luv,” I said again and the moan subsided but the tears continued. I gave her my handkerchief; unfortunately it wasn’t as clean as I would have liked, and she took it but wisely refrained from wiping her eyes with it and instead clenched and unclenched her hand around it. The tears started to dry up and I felt I could safely leave her and get a large brandy. As money was beginning to get a bit of a problem again I got myself a light ale.

Occasionally there comes a time when your assessment of someone’s beauty ceases to be based on their physical characteristics. From the way I’ve described Pascale so far she probably doesn’t come across as likeable, more probably the opposite. But from the first, perhaps because of her perversity, I’d been attracted to her, and now she was down and thought she was alone, there in the Museum Tavern, I found her irresistible. We started fucking regularly from that day. After we left the pub I drove her back to my place. On my side there was a great emotional wave of relief that the rock-hard exterior had for a brief moment softened. She acquiesced to our lovemaking but I didn’t sense a similar catharsis in her. She had needed an injection of someone else’s passions to make up a temporary deficiency, but now she felt better thank you. She wasn’t even embarrassed that the mask had slipped - It had never happened, she’d never cried in a pub in Bloomsbury. She was re-writing history to suit the view from five foot six above her feet... Still it was a good fuck, purposeful and experienced. It knew where it was going and what it wanted out of life, and we both got there at the same time.

She was still seeing Frank, but he didn’t come round to Battersea Park so much now and they never fucked there, although Pascale told me that they still did fuck, sometimes. I wondered why she still bothered, but then fucking was no big deal to Pascale. Frank might be the hottest thing in U.S. Navy trousers for all I knew, but even if he wasn’t I could imagine her continuing to let him have her just because the agonised debate about why she wouldn’t would be too much of a bore. It didn’t bother me. With Pascale you knew there was no long term future, no walking into glorious distant sunsets. You just grabbed what came along from day to day, because tomorrow it might not be there.

And so, as I’ve said, we fucked, and I suppose now, although I didn’t realize it then, that at that time I was the closest person to her. And as I got to know her body better I started to notice the tiny scars that it bore, like towns on the map of a country.

*****

The night that things started to get out of hand was really an accident - I’m no believer in the fickle finger of fate. Neither have I ever been the sort to go in for lavish hospitality on any scale. Frank and Pascale though were the cross I had elected to bear, part of a strange deal, for which, as I remembered, I was originally supposed to be getting some kind of reward. When Frank told me he’d invited a few of his friends along to Battersea, I’d already thought that this was outside the terms of reference of the arrangement, but when Forsythe arrived at quarter to midnight, bringing with him Sandie and Jenny - The blonde from the Earls Court and Cuba night parties - I knew the management were taking the workforce for a ride.