Death in Disguise Read online

  Suhami slipped Calypso’s leather collar on, gave her an apple and put a second in the lovely tapestry bag resting against the milking stool. The bag was a birthday present from May. The embroidery of glowing sunflowers and deep purple irises against a background of earth and red-brown leaves was almost identical to the design on May’s own bag which Suhami had long admired. Only the sunflowers were different. A shade paler, for the shop in Causton had run out of marigold wool and could only offer the slightly less rich amber. Suhami had been very touched, picturing May secretly sewing in her room, motivated solely by the wish for someone else’s happiness, hiding the work if Suhami came by. Suhami had received so much kindness since moving to the Manor House, in addition to the supreme kindness of the Master’s teaching. So many offerings of quiet concern, conversations where someone really listened, gestures of comfort, tasks shared. Now they knew who she really was all this would change. Oh—they would try to carry on as usual. To treat her just the same but it would be impossible. Eventually money would drive a wedge. It always did.

  Suhami’s lips twisted ironically as she remembered how excited and hopeful she had been at the idea of choosing a new name and leaving her old self behind in London. A naïve and childish way of going on, for how could one shed twenty miserable years or become another person by such an ingenuous device? Yet it had helped. As ‘Sheila Gray’ she had presented a new face for new friends to write their affections on. Then her growing interest in and determined practice of Vedanta, coupled with a deepening commitment to further change, had suggested her present title. Now her days were filled with quiet gratitude which she took for happiness, for it was as near as she had ever been.

  And then Christopher joined the commune. They had slipped almost immediately into an easy jokey friendship. He would tease her—not unkindly (he was never unkind)—crossing his hands over his heart in a mock languish of love, swearing he would waste away if she would not have him. This was in front of the others. When they were alone he was quite different. He would talk then about his past, his hopes for the future, of how he wanted to get out from behind the camera and write and direct. Occasionally he kissed her, grave sweet kisses quite unlike the heartless mouth-mashings she had previously endured.

  When she thought of Christopher’s inevitable departure Suhami had to remember very hard the Master’s maxim that all she needed to sustain her was not out there in the ether, or residing in another person’s psyche, but right in her own heart. This struck her as a tough and lonely dictum and she’d been alone enough already. As she pondered, footsteps disturbed the gravel outside and Suhami’s fingers trembled against the wooden stool.

  Christopher leaned over the stable door and said, ‘How’s my girl?’

  ‘She’s been eating apples again.’

  As always Suhami was both exhilarated and perturbed by the sight of him. By the soft black hair and pale skin and glowing, slightly tilted grey-green eyes. She waited to hear him say, ‘And how’s my other girl?’ for this was a well worn bit of cross-talk. But he simply pushed open the stable door and crossed over to Calypso, taking hold of her collar saying, ‘C’mon old fat and hairy.’ He had hardly smiled and in a moment they would both be gone.

  Suhami said: ‘Aren’t you going to wish me happy birthday?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Of course I am, love.’ He wound the chain about his wrist. ‘Happy birthday.’

  ‘And you haven’t declared your undying passion for nearly a week. It’s not good enough.’

  Struggling to keep her voice light, to make a joke of it, Suhami heard the echo of a hundred similar questions in a hundred other scenes. Won’t you come in for a minute? Shall I see you again? Would you like to stay the night? Will you give me a call? Must you go already? Do you love me…do you love me…do you love me? And she thought: Oh God—I haven’t changed at all. And I must. I must. I can’t go on like this.

  ‘I know you only do it in fun…’ She heard the pleading note and loathed the sound.

  ‘It was never in fun.’ His voice was harsh as he tugged at Calypso’s chain. ‘I said come on…’

  ‘Not…’ Suhami stood up, dizzy and weightless. She stared at him in disbelief. ‘Not in fun? What then?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Christopher.’ She ran towards him shaking with emotion, putting herself directly in his path. ‘What do you mean? You must tell me what you mean.’

  ‘There’s no point.’

  ‘The things you said…’ Almost exalted, she took hold of his chin and wrenched his face around, forcing him to meet her gaze. ‘They were true?’

  ‘You should have told me who you were.’

  ‘But this is who I am.’ She held out begging arms. ‘The same person I was yesterday…’

  ‘You don’t understand. I fell in love with someone and now I find she’s someone else. I’m not blaming you Suze—Sylvie—’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’

  ‘But I feel completely thrown. You know my situation. I’ve nothing. Well, nothing compared to the Gamelins—’

  ‘Oh God…’ Suhami cried out, jerking back her head as if from a blow. ‘Am I going to have this all my life? Gamelin Gamelin Gamelin… I hate the word. I’d carve it out of myself with a knife if I could—I’d burn it out. Do you know what it means to me? Coldness, rejection, lack of love. You’ve never met my parents but I tell you they are hateful. All they care about is money. Making it, spending it. They eat and breathe and dream and live money. Their house is disgusting. My father is a monstrous man, my mother an overdressed dummy kept going by pills and drink. Yes! my name is Sylvia Gamelin and it’ll be the bloody death of me…’ And she burst into a torrent of abandoned weeping.

  Christopher seemed for a moment unable to speak. Then he stepped forward and folded her into his arms. After a long while he dried her tears, saying: ‘You must never, ever cry like that again.’

  Chapter Two

  Guy and Felicity Gamelin were in the doorway of their much-photographed town house near Eaton Square. The door, blinding pillar-box red, stood open beneath the Georgian fanlight. Smart bay lollipops grew in tubs on the black and white tiled step.

  Guy and Felicity were saying goodbye. That is to say, Felicity was murmuring vexedly at the sight of her reflection in the writhing tangle of Mexican glass that was the hall mirror, whilst Guy fluently cursed Furneaux—at that moment stuck in a traffic jam in Chester Row. Neither addressed the other. Anything of import had long since been said. Or shouted, or shrieked and screamed. Now Felicity was careful, Guy indifferent. He had wondered once, on one of the rare occasions when he paid her any mind, why she bothered to go through this air-kissing, hand-waving ritual every morning, never thinking that his departure might be the one certain moment of satisfaction in a treacherous and hazard-ridden day.

  Felicity shook out her silvery-tipped apricot mane and briefly imagined it netted in a Botticelli chignon of gold thread and pearls. Guy’s invective rose to fever pitch. He had a mind like a well-stocked cess pit and never minced his words, which were full of spite and filthily inventive. The car finally arrived and Furneaux, grey-capped and suited, stone deaf from choice, parked and got out to open the nearside door. Immediately a queue of hooting vehicles formed. Guy gave a ‘yah boo’ smirk and leaned on the Roller’s thickly padded door. It did not occur to him, thriving as he did in the narrow blank-eyed fastnesses of the city where respect was index-linked, that the queue might be under-impressed by the magnificence of his equipage. This tiny victory, the first of the day (for he had long since ceased to regard his wife as a foe of any merit), cheered Guy up considerably as he settled back into the ivory leather and lit the first of his forbidden Dom Pérignons.

  Left alone Felicity drifted into the drawing room. This time, these first few moments after her husband left, would decide the shape and flavour of the hours to come. And—she recalled his overnight case—the evening, too. She prayed for a good day. Not happiness, never that. Just a bland unfolding of or
dered assignations hedged about with the usual conventions. Where ‘How are we Mrs Gamelin?’ and ‘Lovely to see you again’ were never spoken from the heart and so, thankfully, demanded no sincere response. She had all sorts of little dodges, fail-safe mechanisms to set her on the right path. Or at least keep her off the wrong one.

  Charity lunches, private views, dress shows, tastings of exotic foods and fine wines. The invitations were always there. Come as you are and don’t forget your cheque book. Today was an auction of Russian icons and a yearling sale at Newmarket. Otherwise she might ring a gossipy acquaintance and ask questions about people in whom she had not the slightest interest. She would force brightness into her voice, and darkness out, like some effervescent actress/housewife in a washing commercial.

  Her movements were becoming vague; a dangerous sign. Keeping busy, they had said at the clinic, was most important. By this she assumed they meant physically busy for her mind was never still. When she had first come home many people offered advice that frequently concluded with the words ‘whatever happens you don’t want to go in there again.’ Felicity felt it impolite to disagree and could imagine the amazement had she told them the truth, which was that she had been as near to contentment in the hermetically sealed warmth and comfort of Sedgewick Place as she had been in her entire adult life.

  Drugged at first, then gradually weaned into a more subtle dependence, each day had been one long highlight. Flowers would arrive followed by exquisitely arranged trays of delicious food. Smiling people bathed her, then combed her hair with slow languorous strokes. Doctors heard out her sorrows, and the cruelties of the outer world beat on the clinic walls in vain. Nothing was real. She felt like an imprisoned princess in a high and mysterious tower. The phenomenal cost had not even grazed the surface of her fortune.

  They called it a nervous breakdown. A neat phrase explaining many antisocial actions—from bursting into tears at Harrods to clawing one’s face in a convulsion of self-loathing. She had done both and in the same day, too. A terrifying escalation of abandonment and despair. But that was all in the past. All in the past, Felicity.

  She said her name aloud a lot. It helped to counteract the frequent sensation that she was constituted so vaguely as hardly to make a complete person at all. Artificially brisk, she strode down to the basement, her heavy cream satin robe slapping at her calves.

  In the huge Italian-designed hi-tech kitchen, the smell of chocolate brioche hung melting on the air. Verboten if she was to stay size ten. Guy had eaten four. Weight looked good on a man.

  He’d been lean and hungry when they’d first met; slinking round, low-bellied like a starving cur. All she’d had to do was crouch down, extend the palm of her soft white idle hand, show him the words ‘McFadden and Latymer’ and smile. In those days there’d been a quick lightness in the turn of his head and a neck-or-nothing set to his wide, slightly turned down lips. He’d reminded her of a handsome frog. A young Edward G. Robinson.

  Felicity grabbed at still warm pastry and rammed it into her mouth, knuckling in the overhanging fragments, hurting her lips. She chewed and chewed and sucked and chewed, voraciously extracting all the buttery, chocolatey vanillary essence, then spat the pulp into the disposal unit and ground it away. Then she lit a cigarette and stared up through the basement bars at the sad pollarded plane trees. She pictured them growing straight and tall, tender leaves uncurling high above London’s muck and murk. All these poor things had were a few twigs sprouting from scaled-over wounds. Someone walked by glancing down. Felicity dodged away and hurried upstairs.

  Her bedroom was on the third level. She locked her door and sank, panting, on Guy’s bed as if she had been pursued. They still shared a room, whether out of cussedness or malevolence on his part she could never quite fathom. It was not a comfortable experience. Guy was restless, his face on the pillow usually expressing some extreme emotion. Sometimes he laughed in his sleep and Felicity was sure he was laughing at her. On his bedside table was a photograph of their daughter in a mother-of-pearl frame. Felicity never looked at it. She knew it by heart. Or would have done if she had a heart to know it by. This melodramatic reflection made her eyes sting with self-pity and she screwed them up tight.

  Foolishly she picked up the frame and slid further into ruinous introspection. As she stared into the wide hazel eyes the face seemed to dissolve, regressing in a flowing series of images into babyhood. Sylvie’s first clumsy efforts at ballet class, her bewildered tears at being sent away to school and terrible anguish when Kezzie, her adored pony, died. Felicity slammed the photograph down, splintering the glass and thought, Christ I need a drink.

  A drink and a couple of Feelgoods. The brown bombers. They should do the trick. Strictly for emergencies the clinic had said, but if being alone and in despair at nine on a terrible bright sun-ridden morning in deepest Belgravia wasn’t an emergency what the fuck was? And a bath. That should help jolly things along. Felicity wrenched at the delicate golden taps and scented water gushed out.

  She drew on her cigarette and saw her mirrored cheeks cave into corpse-like hollows. A web of fine lines spun out from the corner of her eyes. So much for the embryonic serum for which so many unborn lambs had given up any chance of skipping about the greensward. She stubbed out her cigarette in the honey-coloured gell. A hundred and fifty, and for what? A web of fine lines. She traced the network with the tips of her index fingers then suddenly thrust the nails hard into the delicate skin, leaving cruel half moons. Then she picked up the tranquillisers and returned to the bedroom.

  Taking out a half bottle of champagne from the tortoiseshell and ebony armoire which Guy had had converted to an ice-cool receptacle for his bedtime tipple, she put the tranquillisers on her tongue and tipped back the sparkle, letting it run all over her face and throat. In the bathroom the perfumed water overflowed, soaking the carpet, oozing outwards to the door.

  Felicity, having drunk two more bottles, curled up, shrinking and dry-mouthed on a low brocaded chair. She was trying to avoid touching the fabric which had taken on the aspect of a mysterious landscape: spiked trellises; dissolving lovers’ knots running into crimson lakes; clouds like blue-bunched fists. It was all sinisterly vivacious and filled her with foreboding.

  The encroaching tide, the slap-slap at the edge of the bath, finally attracted her attention. She tried to stand up. Her limbs were heavy and her head ached. She blinked at the water which seemed to be vigorously on the move. Feeling bereft and frightened she started to cry.

  Outside in the street a pneumatic drill started up. Drrrrrrrrrr… Felicity rammed her fingers in her ears but the sound continued, splitting open her skull. Drrrrrrrr…

  She lurched over to the window, flung it up and screamed, her voice cracking like a wet sheet in the wind, ‘Shut up you bastards… Shut up!’

  The drill stopped independently of her intervention. She was about to withdraw when a voice directly beneath her said: ‘Mrs Gamelin?’

  Felicity craned out further. Standing on the black and white steps, looking up at the house with an expression of covetous respect, was a perfectly strange young man. She ran down and opened the poppy-red door. The young man jumped back no doubt recalling the manic shrieks from the upstairs window. Behind him, parked at the curb, was a van inscribed ‘Au Printemps: Luxury Dry Cleaning & Invisible Repairs.’ He produced a piece of paper.

  ‘From the desk of Mr Gamelin, Mrs Gamelin.’

  Felicity gave a hawk of laughter at such pomposity but she took the paper, which listed various items of clothing and read them out. ‘One navy pinstripe suit, one grey chalk-stripe, one cream linen dinner-jacket. To be collected.’ And a signature: ‘Gina Lombardi’.

  ‘Wait.’ She left him on the step knowing he’d be in the hall the moment she was out of sight, and climbed back upstairs. In Guy’s dressing room she pulled out the clothes noticing, as no doubt she was meant to do, the lipstick on the tuxedo lapel. An unnecessary directive. As far as Felicity was concerned Gina could have him
not only mounted but stuffed.

  She walked to the landing and looked down. The front man for Au Printemps was examining his zitzy complexion in the Mexican sunburst. Felicity shouted ‘Catch’ and threw down the clothes, watching their ballooning descent.

  The young man flushed. He moved quietly into the hall where he knelt and folded each item with ostentatious neatness. Felicity was sorry for her rudeness. She had been brought up always to be polite to inferiors which, her parents had led her to understand, included everyone but the Queen, the heir apparent and, on Sundays, Almighty God.

  He did not reply. He was checking the pockets, pulling the linings out, tucking them back. He was not really put out by her behaviour. Everyone knew that the rich, like the very old, did and said just what they damn well liked. And for the same reason. Nothing to lose. This one was well away. He could always smell champagne. It would be something to tell Hazel when he got back. They always said in the office he was a proper little Nigel Dempster. Whilst half hoping for a further tasty burst of obscenity to round the story off, his hand came into contact with a pale green envelope. He took it out and placed it carefully on the hall table. She made a sound of inquiry.

  ‘We’re trained to check all the pockets, madame.’

  ‘I say,’ said Felicity, hanging over the banisters. ‘Is it a long course?’

  When he had gone, slamming the door behind him, she went back down and picked up the envelope. It was not like Guy to be careless. He had a shredder in his study at home as well as in the office. True he had been very distracted the last couple of days, but even so…

  The envelope was recycled. She turned it over. It was addressed to them both. Strangely this perfidious concealment evoked a response far stronger than any sexual or social infidelity might have done. Her fingers trembled as she drew out the paper. What a bloody cheek! Her letter, her letter. She read the note several times, at first shaking with anger, not really taking it in. When she had fully absorbed the information she sat for a long time as if in a trance. Then she went into the sitting room, picked up the telephone and started punching.