Lovers and Liars (12 page)

‘I like it. I love it. I love you.’ She flung her arms around him, and hid her hot face against his neck. Age did not really matter, the lie was not an important one, she told herself: one day she would explain to him, but not yet, not yet. Midday heat shimmered; reflections of waves moved on the white walls. Closing the shutters, she took his hand, and drew him towards the bed. They lay down, and the lie no longer mattered. Time passed: hours, days, a week more together - until the break finally came, that one little truth was never expressed.

Let the past rest. She took the little ear-ring, and hooked it into

#1a A indulgence, perhaps, bringing with it the ghost of an old ‘ceiZ

, pp ss. Then the ordinary present reasserted itself. The pizza ed. She removed the ear-ring, packed it carefully away with other relics, pushed all of them into the box, and back into the

drawer. She was stem with herself. No more relics, no more talgia, she told herself. She unpacked the newspaper clippings had photocopied and spread them out on her desk.

John Hawthorne’s and Lise Hawthorne’s features stared back at She forced herself to concentrate. The Hawthomes, that percouple, looked famous, familiar and unreadable. She sighed, sank her head in her hands: behind this public facade was a secret life?

en she had been working for over an hour, she took a break, de coffee, returned to her desk. She felt a sense of frustration. re were all the staging-posts of a glittering career, here were the e anecdotes, the same quotes, endlessly repeated. Here was

home at twenty, at thirty, at forty - yet what had she actually ed? It was as if what she was reading were an authorized ion, formulated years before, perhaps by an astute PR advisor, a s by Hawthorne’s father, or by Hawthorne himself. It was

too perfect, all too pat. Most of the interviews recycled material t given by Hawthorne long before, a phenomenon she was ar with. It meant either that the journalists concerned had lazy, content to write from clippings, or that Hawthorne

self refused to depart from a set script. No-one here seemed ave reached below his guard: even those journalists obviously tile to him wrote articles that lacked sting.

Unlike his notoriously right-wing father, John Hawthorne had impeccable civil rights record. Sure, he had fought in Vietnam in late-Sixties and had been decorated three times for valour; but re he was drafted he had marched in Selma and Birmingham been befriended by Martin Luther King. His political stance was hard to define: pro-Israel, markedly so. In favour of

sive aid to the Russians but an early advocate of intervention Bosnia. Strong on law-enforcement, a hard-liner on capital .hment, a supporter of the NRA and anti gun-law reform, a liberal when it came to abortion and women’s rights.

ot a unique balancing act in American politics, perhaps, but Hawthorne performed with exceptional skill, none the less. s this the result of conviction, or opportunism? It was impos—

to judge. She had only her instincts to guide her and her initial

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reaction was suspicion: Hawthorne looked too good and smelled too clean. He was too adroit, too careful, too perfect - a verdict that applied equally to his political and to his personal life.

The coverage here of that personal life was extensive, the price Hawthorne paid for a famous name, a privileged background, and exceptional good looks. Here, before her, was Hawthorne the devoted husband, Hawthorne the proud father, and - old clippings these - Hawthorne the golden youth.

Here he was as an eighteen-year-old, flanked by his younger brother Prescott, by all three sisters, and by the patriarch, S. S. Hawthorne himself. They stood outside the Hawthornes’ country house overlooking the Hudson. John Hawthorne smiled fixedly at the camera, his father’s arm around his shoulders; two spaniels lay panting at their feet.

The resemblance between father and son was strong. Both were tall, strong-featured, strikingly blond. Both conveyed a certain arrogance in their stance, Gini thought - or was that something she read into the photograph, a prejudice of her own, a reaction to the wide lawns, the expensive sports cars parked in the drive, and the towering fapde of the house itself? She looked at the picture more closely. Thirty years old, a blurred copy of blurred newsprint. On closer exan-tination, she decided John Hawthorne looked ill at ease and constrained, as if he endured with reluctance that fatherly embrace.

She pushed that picture aside, and turned to others. A young Hawthorne with numerous well-connected girlfriends - but then the young Hawthorne had a reputation as a Lothario. There seemed to be a new girlfriend each month. Hawthorne at Yale, with a group of friends - John sprawled in a chair while two unidentified women knelt in worshipful attitudes, at his feet. Pictures of him in uniform; pictures of him as a young congressman, then as a senator. The first photograph of Hawthorne with Lise, snatched for a gossip column, as they left a Washington restaurant together. They were indeed, as Pascal had suggested, related. Third cousins, Gini saw, friendly since early childhood, part of the immense tribe of inter-linked Hawthornes and Courtneys who seemed to spend the endless summers of their youth in a round of parties at one another’s estates. Long Island, Nantucket, Tuscany; a stud-farm on the west coast of Ireland; an English manor house in Wiltshire; a castle, belonging to the Scottish branch of the family, in Perthshire

- they moved around the globe, the golden members of this tribe, always to an aunt’s, an uncle’s, a cousin’s place, always to a

where there were servants, tennis courts, swimming-pools, , abundant acres. They journeyed, Gini thought, and yet remained cocooned in that citadel peculiar to the rich.

Hawthorne and his distant cousin Lise had re-encountered other, she saw, some eleven years before. Lise, who had had training in art history, had been away working for old family

in Italy, cataloguing their art collection. It was some five or rs since she and her senator cousin had met. Their re-meeting staged by Hawthorne’s father - or so the gossip columns

- and it took place at the Southampton estate of another discousin, Lord Kilmartin, a diplomat then assigned to the UN. orne was then thirty-six, and known as one of Wash—

s most eligible bachelors; Lise was twenty-eight, though ked much younger; she was in mourning for her parents, in an air-crash some six months before. According to the

papers, the attraction had been immediate, the courtship Certainly the engagement was brief.

thin a year, the celebrated wedding. Gini scanned the photos in front of her. Again, she saw, Pascal had been correct. was Lise, radiant, legendarily lovely, encased from neck to in a nun-like, virginal, Yves St Laurent dress. Her black

was worn loose; a white lace veil framed her beautiful face. train, of heavy silk, was fifteen yards long requiring four utive pages and six tiny bridesmaids, in processional behind ride, to keep the train in place.

e wedding of the decade, the headlines screamed. And a decater, here were all the details: the name of the Catholic bishop officiated at the wedding mass; the special flights and trains on for the thousand-plus guests. S. S. Hawthorne had piloted own helicopter to the ceremony. In the photographs, formal informal, he was ubiquitous, resplendent in morning dress.

Fireworks had lit the sky - a Hawthorne family tradition. The ncing began at midnight and continued to dawn. The roster of ts’ names was an illustrious one - statesmen, politicians, a P

h of Euro-titles; the Hollywood contingent, the authors, the kol

mats, the opera diva, the English royal duchess.

kThere were many famous names here, and some infamous ones, Pee S. S. Hawthorne, less circumspect than his son, had contacts Ong back decades which irtight have surprised, even alarmed, Ope of the other wedding guests. A Middle Eastern arms dealer,

0-instance; a Sicilian-American rumoured to own a tranch of Las Fgas clubs … If such guests were cold-shouldered by his son,

S. S. Hawthorne, Gini saw, had made up for any neglect. There he was with the arms dealer, here with the Sicilian. Robust, huge, unquenchable, indestructible, radiating purpose and energy even from faded newsprint: S. S. Hawthorne, networking, pressing the flesh.

And here, finally, were the formal photographs, the posed wedding-group pictures, taken by Lord Lichfield. They had an idyllic and yet a mysterious quality. Perfectly posed, perfectly lit, they were designed to convey perfection - and yet Gini felt they suggested something beneath and beyond: there was an inner story here, she sensed, of which Lichfield conveyed hints.

In all the official wedding pictures, John Hawthorne seemed at ease with himself. Tall, debonair, astonishingly blond, his cool blue gaze rested unerringly on the heart of the photographer’s lens. He appeared, throughout, to be slightly amused by this circus; in every photograph there was a curious, almost disdainful, halfsmile on his lips.

His bride, then little used to such publicity, looked as lovely as legend claimed, but also a little nervous, a little stiff. Later, as Gini knew, Lise Hawthorne would master the art of the photo opportunity, but here, at the very beginning of her public career, her inexperience showed. She clung to her new husband’s arm as if in need of support; her eyes were either modestly lowered or fixed in anxious devotion on her new husband’s face. There was a startled, almost sacrificial quality about her, Gini decided. Her wide dark eyes stared out of newsprint a decade old, and they seemed to carry a plea - as if Lise, encountering fame in its raw form for the first time, were silently praying to escape.

Interesting, Gini thought - and interesting too how quickly Lise adapted, how adept she soon became at dealing with photographers, with public appearances, with the campaign trail, with the Press. Now, only a decade after that wedding, Lise had carefully forged a very public identity for herself. She was celebrated for her charity work, for her skills as a hostess, and - on a thousand magazine covers - for her continuing, unrelenting, chic. No sign, in recent photographs, of any strain or unease. Lise now greeted photographers with a radiant calm. Gini might find Lise’s present image a somewhat cloying one but this, she knew, was a minority view. The popular conception of Lise Hawthorne was that she was beautiful, good-hearted and devout. She was an exemplary wife, an exemplary mother. Her friends, constantly quoted in profiles, spoke with one voice: Lise might not be her husband’s intellectual

qual, indeed intellect was not Lise’s strongest point, but what did oat matter? Lise was that great rarity - a beautiful woman with a mod heart. ‘The thing you have to understand about Lise,’ said e friends, ‘is that she’s just terribly, terribly nice … ‘

‘ Was she? Gini frowned. Personally, she found niceness hard gequate with a taste for thirty-thousand-dollar Yves St Laurent messes. But perhaps that was unfair, churlish, puritan even -

6ther example of her own prejudice. Vanity was a pardonable Owmess, perhaps, in a woman as lovely as Lise. All the evidence We told the same story. Lise worked hard for her pet charities; she Oored her husband and children; she lived an upright, blameless Oe.

Pf;ini sighed, and pushed the bundle of newsprint to one side. Ow turned to the last item, not culled from the press archive, but Ou -stand that evening. It was the latest issue of the ght at a news

Wigazine Hello!, that bland periodical chronicling the home lives

0,,the famous and rich. There on the cover, and inside across jor pages, the pictures in brilliant colour, were the Hawthornes W*mille. They had been photographed in Winfield House, the Owly decorated ambassadorial residence in Regent’s Park.

OAse was famous for her taste; the re-vamped house looked as js!fect as a stage set: not so much as a newspaper marred its Orenity; every chair, vase, cushion was in exact alignment; every

0our used was harmonious. Lise, readers of the magazine were ODrmed, had selected the chintz used to curtain the room because r

nded so well with the Picasso that hung above the fireplace. s

suppressed a smile. The rose-period Picasso, she noted, was ‘e

d by an equally pinkish Matisse.

the photographs had this roseate glow. They must have been E

[en the previous summer, for here were the Hawthornes in the e

egarden behind the house; here they walked along a path e

ed with pink roses; here they sat in a huge bower of pink s, flanked by their two angelic-faced sons. The two boys, S,

saw, were aged six and eight. Both the elder, Robert, and younger, Adam, bore a marked resemblance to their father. Y,

like him, had startlingly blond hair, and blue eyes. The ear-old seemed the more outgoing of the two. He met ty

C camera lens with a mischievous grin, and in several of the en pictures, swung from his proud father’s arms like an agile monkey. Adam, the younger, was the child who had been

k.seriously ill, some four years back. According to his mother, he kA made a near-miraculous recovery from the meningitis which

had threatened his life. In contrast to his brother, Adam seemed nervous and subdued, ill at ease with the cameras. In several pictures he averted his eyes, and clung closely to his mother. ‘Adam’s just fine now/ his father was quoted as saying. ‘All he needs now is some toughening-up.’

An interesting remark, Gini thought, given John Hawthorne’s own rigorous upbringing. She closed the magazine, but its images of roseate domesticity remained. She rubbed her eyes tiredly, and thought of the story Nicholas Jenkins had recounted earlier with such malicious delight. Either he had been misinformed, or these photographs lied. Which was the true version - her editor’s or this?

She thought back, trying to recall every small detail, to those two occasions on which she had encountered Hawthorne herself. The second, the previous year at Mary’s party, told her nothing beyond the fact that Hawthorne was now an accomplished, experienced, politician. But the previous occasion - what about that?

She could remember it vividly. The meeting had taken place at the house Mary then lived in, in Kent. It was the end of the Easter holidays and Gini was due back at her boarding-school that afternoon. A friend from school had been staying, and the two of them were taking the train back together.