The Real Liddy James (19 page)

“No!”
said Curtis sharply, and Liddy looked at him concerned, as it was a sound of pure emotion, between a sob and a
shriek. “No,” he continued, a little more under control the second time. He looked at Chloe in appeal. “Your family will think I coerced you.”

He took an ungentlemanly slug of champagne.

“That is why these two ladies are here as witnesses,” said Lisbeth firmly, but her hand shook so much as she reached for her own glass that Curtis leapt to his feet to take it. He held the flute to her lips so she could sip.

“I can't,” he said softly. “I don't want this.”

But Lisbeth simply held out her arms to Curtis, who lifted her up with the greatest care and carried her away. And Liddy, watching them, suddenly wanted to be Fay Wray carried up the Empire State Building by King Kong, not because she felt helpless in her life, but because she wanted to be rescued from it. She knew this was absurd, but she also knew there was nothing absurd in the sight before her. She glanced at Chloe and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.
No one has ever loved me like that.

Liddy thought of how, straight after the split from Peter, she had been endlessly reassured that “someone like her” would find a new soul mate within a year, or two, or three.

But recently the consolers had given up. She wondered if this was because she had given up too. She feared she would never again have sex with a man who truly desired her. She tried to remember what sort of love she still believed in. And right there and then, she knew the cause of the strange melancholy feeling that had overwhelmed her when she least expected it in the past months.

It was loneliness.

She was struck by a profound sense of distance from the events in her own life. It was as if they were being acted on a stage and she were trapped in the audience, watching from the wrong side of the curtain.

Liddy reentered the hall to see that the velvet banquette on which she and Lloyd had been seated was empty. She knew she should look for him, but she didn't feel like it. Instead, she decided to wander through the French bucolic landscapes in the stone loggia, and ended up in front of a Whistler drawing beside the ladies' cloakroom, so entranced she forgot she was woebegone.

“Hello, Lydia Mary.”

Liddy turned, shaking her head, not just in disbelief but also as a desperate attempt to see if there were any escape routes nearby.

“Your client will have my response tomorrow,” said Sebastian Stackallan.

“We've been waiting,” Liddy replied.

“I won't ever give her the house in Ireland, as well you know.” He paused. “It was you who said ‘it's not a home, it's my history.'”

She looked at him.

“Just before you told me I was a
Neanderthal
,” he continued.

“When did I say that?”

And then she stopped. She knew what he was talking about.

“I truly don't remember much about that night, except that I was a total idiot,” she said sincerely.

“Jinx. I was an arrogant prick.”

They stared at each other. Out of the uniform of his working life, Sebastian was transformed. Liddy realized that in his tux, mismatched studs, and ill-tied bow he was still devilishly handsome, one of the most striking men in the room. She also realized that in the past years she had probably stood next to him at events like this, or brushed past him on the way to the coat check, or taken a last drink he was coveting from a tray and had not noticed him.

“It's a funny old world, isn't it?” he said.

There was something in his look that conveyed he had always noticed her.

Behind him, Liddy saw Marisa wandering aimlessly at the end of a tour group. When she saw Liddy, Marisa waved to catch her attention and mouthed
Lloyd's looking for you
.

Liddy waved back, but she did not move.

“How are you?” he said.

Liddy opened her mouth to say “Fine,” but she didn't.

“My supposed boyfriend just let slip that he only dated me so he could buy my apartment. My ex-husband's new partner has complications in her pregnancy, so my teenage son, who acts like he hates me, has moved in full time. My beloved nanny left and I'm stuck with this jock I don't particularly trust and I spend every day worried he's going to lose my children,” she said. “Not to mention the fact that my new book is late, my hours are too long, the roof of my apartment building is falling down, and my beautiful six-year-old boy asked me where his father is and I don't know what to tell him.”

The words had tumbled out, and Liddy was startled. Sebastian, however, appeared remarkably unfazed. Liddy put it down to his being European.

“Where is he? The father.”

“The private detective says possibly Brazil, but he dropped out of sight about a year ago. For all I know, he's in jail.”

Liddy had never said this out loud before, but she had often wondered how it would sound. Now she knew.

“That's a joke, right?” said Sebastian, then he saw Liddy's face. “Isn't it?”

Liddy shook her head again. “It was a one-night thing. I have a file prepared with everything I know about him. I mean, he's not a psychopath or anything . . . a few petty thefts, that's all, but . . . I just wanted more time before I had to deal with it. I thought it would be like in a film, and I'd tell my son everything on his eighteenth birthday.”

There was a long silence. Liddy found it excruciating. It was occurring to her that the main reason she had not confronted the possibility of Cal's interest in his paternity was because she had assumed she would have met someone else by now, and therefore found him a father figure.

“I didn't know who my father was until I was fourteen,” said Sebastian. “And I found out when my housemaster at school told me he'd died.”

Liddy did not suggest he was joking.

“My mother wanted to protect me, of course. The man was completely indifferent to my existence, apparently, and she was
driving to the school to tell me herself. It's just some wires got crossed.”

“That must have been awful for you.”

“It was, but what I remember most is being given a glass of sherry. It was the seventies.”

In the distance, a gong signaling the start of dinner sounded. People poured from rooms all around them and headed toward the dining room like tuxedoed trout in a stream.

“I can't let anything like that happen to Cal. What am I going to do?” said Liddy.

“I've got a brilliant ex-CIA guy who does work for me in South America. I'll give you his number.”

“I wasn't asking you as a lawyer. I was asking you as a human being.”

Sebastian considered this. “Liddy, most days I don't remember the difference,” he said. “Look, I turned out reasonably okay, I think.”

“Yes, you did,” Liddy said. And she smiled a real smile.

“I don't know why I told you all that,” she said. “It wasn't . . .
professional.
Now I might regret it.” (Liddy did.
Not again
, she thought
.
)

But he reached over and touched her lips with his finger.

“I am a forty-six-year-old man exiting a crap marriage with no kids, wondering how I pissed so many good years away and at what age I'll stop being a good catch and become a tragic skirt-chasing has-been. I suppose I should blame my mother, Chloe certainly does, as I'm sure you know. Mum's personal life is like
a car crash—I have a half-brother and a half-sister, four stepbrothers, and at school I used to pretend I was an orphan.”

Sebastian loosened his tie with his left hand, a gesture that seemed familiar to her. There were dark hairs on his chest just below his collarbone.

“My therapist thinks I married Chloe because she fit all the criteria I was looking for in a wife and that she married me because I was a ‘good catch' and to her surprise she caught me. Neither of us asked ourselves if we loved each other.”

“That sounds a bit harsh.”

“I don't know. I liked that she was remarkably beautiful, old, but not too old, and she had a glamorous job, but not so glamorous that she wouldn't give it up when we had kids.”

Liddy shook her head.

“You don't fool me, Sebastian Stackallan,” she said. “I don't buy it.”

“Okay, yes, I wanted the dream. I committed for better or worse. But things got worse pretty quickly. I think we both thought we'd get pregnant straightaway, and when we didn't . . . it all got ugly. Before I moved out, Chloe told me that the worst thing for her was that she hadn't had a baby. She said then, at least, she'd have got something out of it. I was glad she was so honest. I felt exactly the same way.”

Liddy did not know what to say to this.

“And the thing is, all the same people who told me how
perfect
we were for each other, and how I'd never meet anyone else like her, are now sending me links to OKCupid and texts setting me
up with women they consider suitable for me. Even my brother's giving me strict instructions that I should ‘get back in the saddle again.' I wish I could bloody well throw my phone away. I dread which single female's going to be on the line next. The other week Chloe's
sister
called me.”

“That's it. Enough information,” said Liddy. “It's good you're talking to someone about it.”

“Oh, yes,” Sebastian replied. “I'm doing everything. Reading self-help books. Journaling.”

“Is
journaling
a word?” asked Liddy.

“I wondered that too, but I fear so. Yes, apparently
journaling
can be a useful tool on the journey of self-discovery, blah di blah, you know.” He adopted a stenorous tone. “‘When an object breaks, the light comes in.' That's what people say, isn't it?” He paused.

“I'm very in touch with my feelings these days—a reformed character entirely.”

They both looked around the loggia.

“Don't worry, Liddy. We have
omertà
between us now. Like the Mafia. We know too much about each other to break the code of silence.”

“Really?” she said, and when he nodded she added, “Thank you.”

He stood still for a moment, not quite sure whether he should stay or go. Now that they knew unexpected secrets, their perception of each other had changed and it was harder to walk away.

“Will it make Chloe happy if she gets my apartment, Liddy?” said Sebastian. “You see, I find I don't really care what happens to
her, though I suppose I should. But if it would make her happy, I'll give her what she wants.”

“Well, she does want the apartment,” said Liddy.

He appeared oddly content all of a sudden. He smiled roguishly. She noticed the gray stubble on his face.
Maybe age had mellowed him? Or just exhausted him?

“It's only money,” he said.

Liddy suppressed a smile too.
So that's it
, she thought. Her reactions to Sebastian Stackallan, nice and nasty, had nothing to do with physical attraction or repulsion; they arose because she recognized the nice and nasty aspects of her own personality in him. They were not magnets but mirrors; both shrewd, both selfish, both capable of extraordinary acts of kindness and carelessness. She had told Curtis she did not hate Sebastian, and had discovered this evening it was true.

“Send me over the papers,” he said. He moved to walk away.

“I hope everything works out for you, Liddy.”

“Likewise,” she said.

“You know, I hear your Irish accent today.”

She smiled again. “I'm tired, it always comes back when I'm tired, even though I tried so hard to lose it. I spent hours watching
Dallas
to train myself out of it.”

Then Liddy's phone rang and when she saw the number she answered it, tenderness in her voice.

“Hi, Mommy, Josh took us to the water park!” said Cal.

“It's my son,” she whispered, and walked a little ways away.

When she hung up, Sebastian was gone.

The dinner gong sounded again, and suddenly starving, Liddy
followed its call. Lloyd was waiting for her attractively in front of the seating plan, and she decided to shelve any further conversation about real estate and concentrate on his looks, not his helpful ideas. Her stomach was growling now, and with speeches about to begin, and at least an hour to go before the whiff of a main course, Liddy scurried after a disappearing silver tray in pursuit of the rare roast beef on tiny triangles of rye. When she caught up, she stuffed three straight down. This was a mistake.

She started coughing, first delicately for a couple of exhalations, and then barking and gasping alternately as the third sliver of meat stuck in her throat. Lloyd, alarmed, ran over with a glass of water and forced it into her hand, but when Liddy raised it to her mouth, her body convulsed forward and she poured it over her face and down her dress. A few people laughed until she dropped it, and the sound of glass shattering reverberated around the room.

Liddy gripped Lloyd's outstretched hands in terror now, as the feeling of slow strangulation took hold of her. Bright white starlike specks were floating all around her and she could no longer cry or scream or breathe. Lloyd looked around frantically. Although he had played a doctor in more than fifty episodes of a TV show, he had absolutely no idea what to do.

“Help!”
he shrieked, as the crowd froze in fear and disbelief. A waiter ran to find the chef, who was trained in CPR, and Marisa Seldon called a private ambulance, but then, from nowhere, a strong pair of male arms wrapped around Liddy's waist. She felt herself lifted into the air and a sharp, insistent pressure just
below her rib cage, once, twice, three times, until the piece of meat was expelled from her mouth, fast, in a perfect parabola, ending against a minor work by Gainsborough.

There was silence, then a polite round of applause. Curtis, entering at this moment with Chloe on his arm and expecting a string quartet to be playing, instead saw Liddy, crumpled like a length of gray silk, her mouth wide, drinking in air. They ran, horrified, over to Lloyd.