Sextet (25 page)

‘
Our
son,’ his wife’s voice quietly corrected him, and he heard again her one attempt to justify her decision. ‘I want to live there, Tomas. I see it differently from you. I shall feel safe there. This has nothing to do with you. It’s
my
choice.’

That reply, which had infuriated him when she gave it, and which infuriated him now, explained nothing. It was in his wife’s nature to explain herself and her actions as little as possible, and it was this intransigency in her, this refusal ever to allow him to be sure he understood her, which bound him to her—or so he sometimes thought.

In a sudden rage with her and with himself, he slammed out of the apartment, wearing only a jacket and unprepared for the cold of the streets. He had a car available to him, and a discreet, reliable driver whom he could have called upon, but he disliked others knowing his movements as much as he disliked them knowing his thoughts, so he flagged down a cab, knowing he should go back for a coat, but refusing to do so. He had to be careful of cold air, of course, just as he had to be careful of dust, pollen, pollution, smoke and a thousand other hidden substances in the air; this disability he loathed and resented. His anger deepening, he told the cab driver to take him uptown to the Carlyle, where his son would be waiting for him. Then, changing his mind, and knowing he needed something else, he told him to go to the Minskoff theatre, where his wife would be on stage, and that night’s performance of
Estella
would now be taking place.

Why? Why? Why? This question pursued him uptown in the cab; it pursued him across the noisy, crowded space of Times Square, where he abandoned the cab, and it pursued him to the theatre, where he paused, looking at the lights that spelled out his wife’s name on the theatre front.

Why live there, and why exclude him in this way, when he was sure she still loved him and wished for a reconciliation as much as he did? Why, when she was eager to work with him, did she still refuse to live with him? Did her continuing fear of Joseph King explain this decision—or was there some other, hidden reason? He glanced over his shoulder, having, as he often did, the sensation that he was being watched. No-one appeared to be watching him, so he turned down the small alleyway leading to the stage door and entered the theatre, feeling as he had done on many occasions that he would find the answers to all his questions here, that they lay very close, within reach.

He was known at the stage door, and no-one detained him there, for these visitations of his were frequent. He went first to Natasha’s dressing-room, where his way was blocked, first by the strange androgynous creature Natasha insisted on having as her dresser, and then by one of the bodyguards—the favourite bodyguard, the Texan.

Court was a tall man himself, but the Texan was even taller. Court looked coldly at his blond, muscled good looks. He looked like an overgrown child, and was possibly more intelligent than he appeared.

‘I don’t see that you can offer my wife much protection if she’s on stage, and you’re here by her dressing-room,’ he said.

‘I agree. But Ms Lawrence insists.’

‘Give my wife a message, would you? Tell her I need to talk to her. I’m going up to the Carlyle now to see my son. I’ll wait there until she gets back after the show.’

An expression of doubt passed across the man’s face. ‘I’m afraid she’s going out after the show, sir. She’s having dinner with her property broker, Jules McKechnie. I think it was mentioned…’

‘Ah, so it was. Then tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.’

‘I surely will.’ He paused. Tomas Court felt his blue eyes, eyes which appeared as innocent as a summer’s sky, rest on his face. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr Court?’

‘No, there is not.’

Court turned away. He went into the backstage maze at the Minskoff, along corridors, through fire doors, up flight after flight of stone stairs. He paused on one of the upper landings, a warning constriction beginning to tighten around his chest. Then he went on, up more stairs, until, right at the top of the building, he came to the place where he had to be next.

He opened a series of doors and stepped into the lighting box, high at the back of the auditorium, above its top-most tier seats. This dark, boxed-in coffin of a room, glass-fronted, sound-proofed, jutted forward over the heads of the audience and gave him an eagle’s eye view of the stage. The two technicians there, used to these unannounced visits of his, looked up, nodded, then returned their attention to the winking lights of their computer consoles. One silently passed him a pair of headphones, and Court stood there, holding them, watching the console, watching their hands moving back and forth among the switches and slides and myriad tiny green and red cue lights. He had a confused sense of being piloted, of being in flight; they were taking off, banking, gaining height. He felt that at any minute, all the answers to his questions would be there in his mind, and he would understand his wife.

He took a step towards the glass wall, felt a second’s vertiginous fear of falling as he saw the deep, dark declivity of the auditorium open out beneath; then moved again, and saw across the gulf of the audience, infinitely distant, silent and gesticulating, the figure of Estella, the figure of his wife.

He watched her lips move, her mouth open and close, and her throat pulse. He watched her tenderly as, beautiful in her young girl’s first-act white dress, she moved centre stage. He savoured her silence, then, with a slow reluctance, he put on the headphones. The music hit him in a wave; soaring up through the currents of the song came the sound of Estella’s voice.

They had reached the fourth scene of the first act; he was hearing the duet between that cruel child, Estella, and poor, humiliated, confused, besotted Pip. Court had no liking for musicals, most of which he despised, and scant admiration for the composer of this one. He had advised Natasha against taking this part, and had had forebodings of failure for her when she did. None of those factors was relevant now.

This particular song, one of the great hits of the show, was not even a song he liked. He could see that technically it was difficult, and that melodically it was intricate—it interwove major and minor keys in a haunting way—but he had always found its bittersweetness not to his taste. Even so, it left him defenceless. To his anger and incomprehension, the power of his wife’s song bypassed his mind and sent a shock to his heart, just as—no matter how he resisted—it always did.

Again he felt that warning constriction in his chest; he heard himself make some strange wounded sound; he removed the headphones and fumbled his way out of the darkness of the box. He descended the stone staircases without seeing them, still hearing the voice of his wife, both on the Tannoy system and in his head. Halfway down the stairs, he took a wrong turn and found himself lost in that labyrinth of backstage passageways. He turned, leaned against a wall, retraced his steps, descended again, and found himself, at last, at the stage door. He ignored the man on duty there, who, on seeing him, rose with an exclamation of concern. Pushing his way through the doors, he fought to control his breathing and fought to control the anxiety which always made these paroxysms worse. Finding himself in that dimly lit alleyway, he blessed its darkness; he moved away from the door, away from prying eyes, and slumped back against a wall, now gasping for breath.

It was a bad asthma attack and the pain was acute. He listened to the sirens of this city, to the incessant growl of automobiles pumping out their poisons, as he fumbled for the inhaler he always carried. He tilted his head back and depressed the plunger once, then again, sucking hard. At the third attempt the beta-adrenoceptor stimulants at last took effect. They soothed his breathing, if not his mind, and that fist which had been squeezing his lungs slackened its grip.

He waited, breathing quietly and shallowly. Two women entered the stage door; one man came out. No-one took the least notice of him and perhaps no-one saw him; Court, who hated others to witness these attacks, was grateful for this.

He watched the man, the unremarkable man, walk down the alleyway, turn into the street beyond and disappear. It came to him, in the clear but distanced way that ideas often did after an attack such as this, that the man could be Joseph King, who—as he had informed his wife—could be alive or dead. That man could be King, and so could any other man he encountered today, tomorrow, any day of the week.

King could be driving his taxi-cab, or taking his order in a restaurant; King could be the man he sat next to in a screening-room, or met briefly at some movie festival. King might have worked for him, or with Natasha in the past—this last suspicion, that King was connected with the movie industry in some way, having deepened recently, for King’s knowledge of movies, he had come to see, was as deep and as intimate as his knowledge of Tomas Court’s wife.

King was no-one, and could be almost anyone; indeed, when Court slept badly and had nightmares, as he often did, it was in Court’s own mirror that he often manifested himself. And King, who had administered his poison so well, pouring the substance into his ear drop by drop, was not a man who was easily killed off. Court thought of him as immortal and invisible; even if he were dead—and Court never felt he was—he lived on in the minds of those he persecuted. In this capacity lay his peculiar evil and his peculiar strength.

Tall, short, dark, fair, old, young? After five years he still could answer none of these questions. He leaned back against the wall, waiting for his heart-rate to slow and his breathing to relax. When it had done so, he moved away from the protection of the wall and began to walk slowly up the alley. He stationed himself at the kerb in the street beyond, averting his eyes from the flash of his wife’s name on the theatre front. He watched the flow of traffic, waiting for the one cab with its light lit which would take him out of this cold foul city air and uptown to his son. Cab after cab, all occupied, and he could sense that although the pain was subduing, his disquiet was not.

Natasha had claimed, closing her bedroom door to him some months before their separation and divorce, that it was he himself who gave King power by believing, or half-believing, by dwelling on all the lies King wrote or said. She further claimed that his obsession with King had not only poisoned their marriage and permeated his work, but was slowly but surely eating away at his health. ‘That man will be the death of you,’ she had once said.

Court did not view his concern with King as an obsession, and if it were, that was excusable—presumably he was allowed to be obsessed with a man who knew his wife’s and son’s movements so precisely, and constantly issued threats? But he did acknowledge some truth in her remarks: he admitted that, for several years now, it had been King’s actions or communications that brought on the worst of his asthma attacks.

The cure, then, ought to be to forget King, to put out of his mind all those whispering suggestions King wrote, or said—a process that should become easier if King had been silenced and was actually dead. Yet Tomas Court was not sure he wanted to be cured; there was a part of him, and a vibrant part, that clung to King, even as he watched him destroy his marriage and endanger his health. He now missed King’s communications; sometimes, at night, when he lay on his bed, listening to replays of King’s past calls, he found himself frustrated at the five months of silence. What he wanted was a new message, another revelation, an up-date.

He needed that dark side, he thought, as a cab finally pulled in at the kerb. He needed to listen to the unspeakable. He wondered, in a distanced way, as the cab eased forward into grid-locked traffic, whether he ought to explain that to his wife. Not necessary, he decided; such ambivalences lay at the very heart of his marriage, as he had been reminded when assaulted by the power of his wife’s singing, tonight.

‘So this is the Conrad,’ Colin Lascelles said to Lindsay, coming to a halt beneath a huge encrusted entrance portico. ‘Now do you see what I mean? It is powerful, don’t you think?’

‘I certainly do see what you mean. Dear God, Colin…’ Lindsay looked up at the portico, which towered over them both. The architect of the Conrad, as Colin had just been telling her over dinner, had been a strange man; the twin Conrad brothers, both financiers, who had commissioned him to design the building, had been equally strange, and—if Colin’s account was accurate—the building had a strange chequered past. It boasted several ghosts, the most fearsome and vengeful of which was said to be Anne Conrad, unmarried sister to the twins, who in 1915, or thereabouts, had leaped to her death from one of the windows of the apartment she shared with her brothers. Stepping back to examine the Conrad’s façade, Lindsay wondered which window this was.

Anne Conrad’s manifestations were infrequent but ill-omened, Colin had said. Further details had not been forthcoming; Lindsay had intended to prompt Colin, but now she saw this building, she changed her mind. She was too suggestible: if Colin described these hauntings, she might imagine herself into an encounter with the dead woman, who had been young, beautiful—and deranged, or so people said, Colin had added, by way of an afterthought.

She must have passed the building dozens of times, Lindsay thought, yet she had never paused to look at it. Now she did, and at night too, she realized just how magnificent and grim it was. This was how she had always imagined the House of Usher might look. She glanced across, over her shoulder, to the great tract of darkness at the heart of Manhattan that was Central Park, then looked back more closely at the Conrad building’s huge entrance mouth.

A cluster of liver-coloured Corinthian columns flanked its approach steps, giving it the air of a sombre classical temple. These columns supported a vast dark carved pediment; even Lindsay’s untrained eye could see, however, that the proportions here were infelicitous, for the pediment was oversized, so that the pillars seemed oppressed by its weight. They looked squat, and their appearance was not enhanced by the surface treatment of their massive stone plinths. ‘Vermiculation’, according to Colin, was the correct term for this doubtful form of decoration; to Lindsay’s eyes, the plinths looked as if their stone had been eaten away by millions of blind, hungry worms—or maggots, perhaps.