Heartbreaker (40 page)

Later, as I flush away the vomit in the lavatory bowl, I remember Nicholas talking of wholeness, of how body, mind and spirit should be one. My body’s in perfect health but the rest of me’s cut off from it and strung out on a rack. What’s my spirit anyway? I suppose it’s got to be my real self, Gavin Blake Me, but is the spirit just the fundamental “I” of personality or does it exist above and beyond all that? And most baffling of all, who’s that mysterious Other, the one who’s not “I,” the one who’s not any of my roles, the one who keeps whispering through the closed doors of my mind: “Help Carta. Save Gil. Help Carta. Save Gil . . .”

The buzzer sounds. I’m still standing stark naked in front of the bathroom mirror where I planted myself for a fat-cell check. Wiping all dotty thoughts about an Other from my mind, I vault into my jeans and sprint off to face the next client who wants to use me.

Colin fails to arrive on time for his double-slot which concludes the late-shift. I wait and wait, fearful that he’s sussed the link with Asherton, yet when I finally call Elizabeth she’s still sure he’ll show.

At six o’clock, just when I’ve written him off, the buzzer sounds and I let him in.

“Hi!” I say concerned as he stumps out of the lift. “You okay? I was worried.”

He grunts, offering neither an apology nor an explanation, and suddenly I’m remembering our first meeting when he was upset but concealing his feelings behind a mask of bad temper.

“Can I get you a drink?” I ask, keeping calm.

He shakes his head, hangs up his coat with a savage swipe of his arm and starts to plod upstairs.

If he wants to unnerve me he’s succeeded. In fact I’m so unnerved that I activate the cameras. There’s no need to record the scene now Asherton’s no longer interested in him, but if there’s trouble I can at least film it so that Elizabeth can see I wasn’t at fault in any way.

I decide to tackle the problem head on. “Hey!” I say, closing in behind him as he stands staring out of the window. “What’s up?”

Swinging round he slaps me so hard on the cheek that I reel backwards and sprawl across the bed. Adrenaline floods through me. I’m on my feet in a flash, every muscle tensed, all my self-defence lessons slotting into sequence in my brain. Thank God I switched on the cameras! Although he’s never been violent before, his buttoned-up emotions and filthy temper make him a prime candidate for the meltdown scenario— but what’s triggered this meltdown? He’s got to have uncovered the connection with Asherton, there’s no other explanation.

“Okay,” I say rapidly as he stands panting and glaring at me. “Okay, okay, okay, whatever I’ve done I’m sorry, but can you tell me what it is? Honestly, Colin, I’m in the dark here—” I’m in pain too. My face is still throbbing.

“You’ve lied to me!” he says, his voice shaking with rage. “You’ve deceived me about a most fundamental aspect of your true nature!”

“Huh?” I’m so relieved that he hasn’t uncovered the Asherton link that I’m not as quick on the uptake as I should be.

“You fuck women!”

Oh my God. How did he—

“No, don’t you deny it—I’ve had enough of your bloody lies! I know you’ve been seeing a woman! I’ve had you watched!”

“
Watched?
But for God’s sake why?”

“I didn’t like the way you looked at that woman last weekend. I suppose you thought I was so infatuated with you that I wouldn’t notice!”

“Well, I may have flirted mildly with her but that was nothing, just a bit of social role-playing—”

“You
bloody
liar, you were having an affair with her and she asked you to help her get money out of me for St. Benet’s!”

“Colin, I have never—repeat,
never
—had an affair with Carta Graham! Why should you think—”

“I engaged the private detectives first thing on Monday morning so I know all about that slim blonde woman you took to Austin Friars!”

“Shit, Colin, that wasn’t Carta!”

“I know it wasn’t—my men took pictures! Obviously you’d either finished with Miss Graham or else you were running the two affairs simultaneously!”

“I’VE NEVER HAD AN AFFAIR WITH CARTA!”

“Well, what about the other girl? Don’t tell me you brought her here just to admire the view!”

“Okay, that’s my friend Serena, but it’s all platonic, I’ve known her for years, and the reason I brought her here was because I didn’t want to take her to Lambeth. Elizabeth doesn’t approve of her.”

“You mean she’s jealous! You and Mrs. Delamere are lovers, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely not! Colin, Elizabeth’s over fifty years old! If I was straight—which I’m not—I’d be into chicks, not mother hens!”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Gavin. You’ve made the mistake of thinking that just because I don’t know as much about sex as you do I know equally little about human nature, but I know corruption when I see the evidence for it! There’s a connection, isn’t there, between Mrs. Delamere and Asherton? I’m sure now it was no coincidence that we met him at the opera that night. I think he uses you to recruit for that perverted society of his.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! Give your imagination a rest!” I exclaim, but of course I’m shocked rigid and Colin takes no notice of this routine denial.

“If you’d never set eyes on Asherton before that night at the opera,” he says, “why did you look so stunned when you saw he’d turned up at the Hall? Obviously there was some kind of deep connection there, and at first I just wrote him off as one of your former clients, particularly when you told me later that he’d asked for your phone number. Refreshing his memory, I thought! But then I started to wonder. I’d already seen you looking at the woman as if you were a heterosexual, and I thought: if he could lie about the sex he could lie about anything—and now I realise you’ve told me lie after lie, but you can stop lying now because we’re finished—it’s over—I never want to see you again!”

I lose it. That’s because deep down I’m scared about how I’ve screwed up. I suppose I’m thinking something like: what the hell, since I’ve already screwed up so badly, let’s bloody well screw up all the way.

“I never want to see you again either, you ugly old fart!” I yell. “And if you ever thought I enjoyed heaving your bloated old body around, maybe you were born yesterday after all! Get the fuck out and good riddance!”

Then all hell breaks loose as he goes for me.

I curse myself for the loss of temper but it’s too late. Of course I can get the better of him in a fight, but if I hurt him he might call the police and although we’d have him on film as the aggressor, the police could be much too interested in someone who can connect Elizabeth and Asherton.

I weave and dodge—and finally decide to bolt downstairs. If I can grab a knife from the kitchen I reckon I can threaten him to his senses.

So I hurtle out of the bedroom onto the landing, but then the hell of a thing happens: the world tilts as if London’s been hit by an earthquake, and losing my balance I start to tumble down the stairs. I break my fall by clutching the rail, but in doing so I bang my head and that’s the last thing I remember for a while.

I lose consciousness.

When I open my eyes again the buzzer’s rasping above my head. Dimly I realise I’m lying in a heap on the hall floor. The clock on the wall says six-thirty, which is an odd time for a client to be arriving, but no, wait a minute, this week I’ve been fitting in bumped VIPs, so . . . no, wait again, this is Friday, one VIP was fitted in at three o’clock, the other picked up a cancellation earlier and Colin was definitely my last punter of the day.

Colin . . .

I remember, but even as I gasp the buzzer goes again—two short toots and a long blast. The noise goes right through my aching head and out the other side. Dragging myself onto my knees I reach for the receiver. “Yep?”

“Gavin! I thought you’d forgotten about me and gone home!”

It’s Carta. Can’t remember why she’s here but never mind, she can make me a cup of tea. I press the button to let her in and then I slump back into a sitting position. My brain’s still off-colour but otherwise I’m in one piece. Bruised but unbroken. I’ve been worse.

“What’s happened?” she exclaims as soon as she sees me.

“Fell downstairs. Row with client.”

“Colin?”

“Oh right, I told you he was coming, didn’t I? That’s why you’re here.” I peer into the mirror by the front door, but to my relief I find the marks left by Colin’s slam have faded. Lucky it was his palm he used and not his fist . . . I lurch against the wall as the wuzziness returns.

“Sorry,” I mutter. “Got to be horizontal. Please could you make me some tea?” I seem to be fixated on the idea of Carta making tea. It must be because tea-making’s so domestic, so absolutely the favour one friend would do for another in a crisis.

“Leave it to me,” she says, taking charge. “You go and lie down.”

I clamber upstairs and plop down on the bed as the memory of the row hits me again. Elizabeth’s going to be furious that Mr. Moneybags has gone down the drain and horrified that he’s linked us to Asherton. I start to sweat.

“Try some of this.” Carta’s arrived and she’s handing me a mug of dark tea. “I put some sugar in it to counter the effects of shock.”

“Thanks.” I hitch myself up on the pillows and take a swig while she draws up a chair, the wooden one which I scrub down after it’s been used for sex games. It’s wonderful to see her sitting on it. I feel it’s been cleansed at the deepest level, just as the cuff links were cleansed when I handed them to Nicholas.

“You should see a doctor,” she’s saying. “Shall I call Val? I’m sure you don’t want to go to hospital and wait hours in Casualty.”

It occurs to me that sending for Dr. Lush-Lips could be a wise idea. I’m still feeling floaty, keen to stay horizontal. “Okay,” I say, and Carta goes downstairs to retrieve Val’s number from her bag.

Back in the bedroom after making the call she asks: “Can you tell me about the row with Colin?”

The short answer is no, not entirely. That’s because I don’t want to tell her about Serena. However I get my battered brain to do a little editing, omit mentioning the detectives and just say Colin became suspicious after seeing how well Carta and I got on last weekend, so suspicious that he eventually decided I was a closet hetero.

“He must be paranoid!” exclaims Carta, justifiably amazed that Colin should leap to this conclusion on the strength of a couple of hot looks.

“Sure he’s paranoid!” I say. “He’s one of the misogynists who think any man who does a chick chat-up can never be trusted gay-wise.” I then tell her how I lost my temper and he lost his marbles. “So I’m afraid the donation’s gone down the tubes,” I conclude, genuinely depressed. “I blew it. I’m really sorry.”

But she’s wonderfully forgiving and good about it.

“It’s not your fault,” she says. “You’re not to blame for the fact that he’s irrational about women, and he may well have had no intention of donating anyway.”

“True. But all the same—”

“Gavin, don’t feel badly—please! You’ve still raised an amazing amount of money for us and we’re still enormously grateful.”

I feel better when she says this. In fact I even haul the extension phone out of the bedside table’s cupboard to call Elizabeth and warn her I’ll be late back.

“Did Sir Colin show up?” she demands at once.

“Yeah—I’ll tell you everything later,” I stall and hang up before the buzzer blares. Val’s been visiting a patient in Bow, just outside the Square Mile, so she hasn’t had far to come.

Carta hurries downstairs to let her in.

“The good news is there’s no serious damage,” says Val after examining my eyes with an ophthalmoscope. “You’ve got a small bump on your head where you hit the wall, but the skin’s not broken and I don’t think the blow itself could have been hard enough to make you unconscious. Did you say you felt dizzy before you fell?”

“Yes, but—” I break off. A horrific thought’s hit me. Maybe I’m ill. Maybe I’ve finally picked up HIV. Maybe in ten years’ time I’ll be dead. And as this terrible prospect erupts in my mind I want to shout: “But I haven’t had the chance to live!” and I know that has to be the real me talking, the Gavin Blake whose spirit’s been so crushed for so long that he’s not even sure what his spirit is.

“Let’s just take your blood pressure,” Val’s saying as she fishes in her medical bag for the right contraption, but even when the procedure’s finished her expression remains impassive. Nothing for me to read there, not even a flicker of sexual interest. “You a lesbian?” I demand at last in a feeble attempt to divert myself from my panic.

Val doesn’t bother to reply, just tucks the blood-pressure bondage gear back into her bag. Then she asks neutrally: “Have you been feeling unwell lately?”

“Nope.”

“Eating properly?”

My sentence of death is abruptly lifted as I realise what’s wrong with me. “Maybe not,” I mumble, so relieved I can hardly speak.

“When did you last eat?”

“I had a big breakfast mid-morning but I couldn’t keep it down. Same thing happened yesterday too.”

“Lunch?”

“Skipped it.” I smile at her. “No wonder I’m feeling wuzzy! It’s a stomach upset plus lack of food.”

But apparently Val doesn’t think this is the end of the consultation. Turning to Carta, who’s been hovering nearby like an anxious older sister, she says: “I’d better have a word with him on his own.”

Carta slips away, beautiful feet tapping on the stairs, and immediately Val turns up the heat.

“How often have you been vomiting?”

“Oh, not often at all! Just after meals.”

“How long’s this been going on for?”

“Few days.”

“Open your mouth, please.”

“My
mouth
? But there’s nothing wrong there—I don’t even have a sore throat!”

“I want to look at your teeth.”

I’m so astonished that I open my mouth wide without any further protest and Dr. Lush-Lips peers inside. I do recover enough to say “Aaah!” in a suggestive way, but when there’s no reaction I know she just has to be a dyke. The reason why I failed to realise this sooner is because she’s so different from Nightmare Norah.