The High Flyer (7 page)

V

“About three years ago,” said Kim, “I developed back trouble. The pain wasn’t present all the time but when it did strike it was excruciating. However, both the Harley Street specialists I saw failed to help me, although the second one did say he thought the trouble was psychosomatic.

“By this time I was popping painkillers as if they were Smarties and beginning to be afraid all the drugs would affect my work. In desperation I made contact with a healer who advertised in one of the weekend papers, but he was just a quack who took my money and talked rubbish. The only good thing that came out of my meeting with him was that he happened to mention a bookshop which he said was a mine of information about alternative medicine, and it occurred to me that if I was going to emerge from this nightmare with my back cured and my wallet in one piece I was going to have to do some serious research into what was on offer in what you would no doubt call the nutty fringes.

“This bookshop turned out to be crammed with all kinds of esoteric stuff, but nobody was offering palm-readings or gazing into crystal balls or doing anything off-putting so I browsed around for a while. Then I came across a notice-board, and one of the many cards pinned there said: ‘MRS ELIZABETH MAYFIELD: PSYCHIC HEALER.’ And underneath this title were printed the words: ‘CLARIFYING THE PAST, ANALYSING THE PRESENT, ASSESSING THE FUTURE.’

“Well, you can see why the card caught my attention, can’t you? If the card had read: ‘MADAME ELISAVETA: FORTUNE-TELLER, CRYSTAL-GAZER, MIND-READER’ I wouldn’t have given it a second glance. But ‘Elizabeth Mayfield!’ The name sounded so English, so respectable! And ‘clarifying,’ ‘analysing’ and ‘assessing’ were such businesslike words, so down-to-earth and practical! It also occurred to me that if my back trouble really was psychosomatic, a psychic healer could be exactly the kind of person I was looking for.”

As he paused to refill his empty glass I said at once: “Right. A very understandable conclusion, particularly as you were so desperate. What happened next?”

“I went to see her. She was a widow, probably in her early fifties, very pleasant, very calm, very serene. She had a little house in Fulham, in that triangle by the Lots Road power station, one of those houses which you could have picked up for a song thirty years ago and would now be worth a very tidy sum indeed. But it was unremarkable inside—there was nothing to indicate that Mrs. Mayfield was making a fortune out of her healing business. I found that reassuring.”

“Yes, of course. So how did she approach your problem?”

“Well, there was certainly no crystal ball. After I’d told her about what was going on in my life she asked if I would put my hands on the table, palms upwards. ‘I don’t read palms,’ she said, ‘but I like to look at hands. It makes the pictures clearer.’ I didn’t waste time asking ‘What pictures?’ because by that time I liked the woman, trusted her. She was such a sympathetic listener—and so sane, you see, so reasonable . . . Anyway I put my hands on the table and she looked at them and after a while she picked them up, first one and then the other. There were no magic vibrations. Her touch was nothing special. But then—” He broke off.

My heart thumped. “What happened?”

“She told me things she couldn’t possibly have known. She knew I was German.”

“Well, if you introduced yourself as Joachim Betz—”

“Don’t be funny, of course I used a pseudonym! I called myself Jake Barton. But she didn’t only know I was German. She knew things about my past.”

“Such as?”

“Things about my early life. Things about my father. Things about Argentina . . . It was uncanny. Then finally, after I’d responded by telling her more about myself, she said: ‘You had this deeply traumatic childhood, dragged from one country to another and utterly dependent on the men your mother managed to sleep with. You’ve never been able to discuss the horror of this early life of yours with anyone, but now you’ve reached middle age your body’s finally breaking down under the strain of suppressing all this past pain—and the trouble’s being severely aggravated by your unsympathetic boss and by the wife who doesn’t understand you. The road to healing,’ said Mrs. Mayfield, ‘will take you through four stages. First of all you need to talk freely about the past to someone sympathetic. Second, you must get rid of your wife. Third, you must change your job. And fourth, you must marry again but this time to exactly the right woman.’ ” He paused to drink before adding: “She said she could guarantee a cure for my back if I took her advice and obeyed her more detailed instructions to the letter.”

“How much was all this going to cost?”

“She said that when I was cured I could make a donation to her company, but in the meantime she would only charge her regular fee of twenty-five pounds a session. After my experiences in Harley Street I thought that was a bargain, and I figured that if she cured me I’d be more than happy to make a donation.”

“What’s all this about a company?”

“That covered her whole business. She ran self-help groups in addition to the one-to-one sessions, and one of these groups featured in the later stages of my cure—it was a form of group therapy with Mrs. Mayfield doing the supervising. That was when I met Steve and Mandy Simmons.” More Scotch disappeared.

“How long did the group therapy go on for?”

“Well, after three months I was fine, no more back trouble, but Mrs. Mayfield wouldn’t let me quit—she reminded me that my healing had to go through three more stages before I could hope to be permanently cured and that in the meantime I should keep attending the group sessions. ‘The trouble will soon come back,’ she said, ‘unless you get rid of your wife, change your job and remarry.’ So I talked to Sophie about a divorce—and when the big job came up at Graf-Rosen I decided to go for it . . . In fact I wound up taking Mrs. Mayfield’s advice all the way along the line until—” He broke off again.

“Until?”

“—until I quarrelled with her. I broke with the group,” he said, “and I washed my hands of that whole scene.”

I stared at him. “But why?”

He drained his glass, looked straight into my eyes for the first time since he had begun to describe his meetings with Mrs. Mayfield, and said simply: “I met you.”

VI

“You mean—”

“Mrs. Mayfield didn’t approve. So the group didn’t approve either.”

I was outraged. “What a bloody nerve!”

“Mrs. Mayfield said I needed a woman of my own age who had no career and whose chief interests were sex and shopping.”

“You’ve got to be joking!”

“That’s exactly what I said, but she took no notice. ‘Never trust a woman who calls herself by a masculine name,’ she said. ‘Never trust a woman who won’t introduce you to her family.’ ”

“But I’ve every intention of introducing you to my family! And as for my name—”

“I explained why it made good sense to call yourself Carter and why we hadn’t yet visited your family, but then she said—”

“This woman’s like a runaway tank!”

“—then she said: ‘I’m getting a clear picture of her. She’s so spiritually ignorant that she’ll start flirting with the enemy, and once they’ve ensnared her they’ll try to smash up your marriage.’ ”

“That’s vile!” I was on my feet without knowing how I got there. “It’s wicked to make predictions which can only upset people—and predictions for which there isn’t a shred of evidence!”

“Sweetheart, I’m sorry”—he too was on his feet—“I shouldn’t have told you—”

“Oh yes, you should! And what’s more you should have told me about this wicked old cow right from the start, but never mind, I do accept that you wanted to protect me from her bloody awful nonsense.” I clenched my right fist, thumped the back of the sofa to relieve my feelings and finally felt calm enough to add: “Of course if what she said wasn’t so disgusting it would be funny. You mentioned earlier, didn’t you, that she refers to Christians as ‘the enemy’? Well, I don’t know any Christians! I don’t want to know any Christians! There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll ever get mixed up with any Christians! So that prediction about how I’ll start ‘flirting with the enemy’ is one hundred per cent total crap!”

“I told her that. In fact that was when I decided that she and I had reached the parting of the ways.”

“And not a moment too soon! How did the old bag take the brush-off ?”

“Not well. And the group too pestered me not to leave, but everyone went quiet as soon as I married you.”

“No wonder you didn’t want to see Mandy and Steve again!”

“It was bad luck we bumped into them at that party . . . Carter”— his arms slipped around me—“I’m just so sorry you’ve been bothered by all this garbage from the past but at least you can understand now, can’t you, why I wanted to protect you from it?”

“I can understand,” I said, “but wrapping me in clingfilm is the wrong solution. If there are problems from the past we should share them.”

He said yes, he agreed but he didn’t foresee any more past problems surfacing. We smooched for a while to express our mutual relief. But of course, as Kim realised sooner than I did, the problem of Sophie’s stalking still remained unsolved.

VII

“What am I going to do about Sophie, sweetheart? It’s clear she’s obsessed, and I can’t stand the idea of her harassing you like this.”

“You may have to.” Criminal law did not cover stalking, and as far as I could see I had no remedy in civil law either; I had insufficient grounds for an injunction.

We mulled over the legal conundrum gloomily. By this time we had eaten some peanut-butter sandwiches, watched the
News At Ten
and were pottering around the kitchen. Kim was pouring himself a glass of Evian water while I was stacking the dishwasher.

“Alice Fletcher suggested,” I said as we wandered down the corridor to the bedroom, “that Sophie might leave me alone now that she’s achieved a conversation and delivered her warning.”

“That theory assumes Sophie’s rational.” He slumped down on the bed to take off his shoes. “What’s this Alice Fletcher like?”

“Oh, definitely a professional. I’m sure she’ll do a competent job.”

“And she’s Tucker’s girlfriend?”

“No, there’s some other man in the background.”

“Does Tucker have a girlfriend?”

“I never,
never
discuss personal matters with Tucker. It’s all part of my strategy for keeping the hormones under control.”

“You discussed the dinner-party with him—that’s personal!”

“He simply came to my rescue, just as a good PA should, when I was tearing my hair and climbing the walls.” I refrained from reminding Kim that his devoted PA, Mary Waters, would have slaved through the night, if required, to ensure the success of any dinner-party he had asked her to arrange. “Talking of PAs and PIs,” I remarked, “I wonder if Sophie’s PI ever tapped Mary for information about me. Maybe Mary would have welcomed the chance to show feminine solidarity with Sophie and demonstrate her disapproval of the second Mrs. Betz.” Having been allowed by Sophie to organise every detail of Kim’s London life for some years, Mary had experienced a sharp curtailment of her pseudo-spouse role since I had entered his life. I could well imagine her snooping in Kim’s organiser and passing on my address and phone number to the PI, but Kim now sprang loyally to her defence and declared that his office paragon was quite incapable of such treachery.

“Tired?” he murmured later as I slipped into bed beside him.

“No, wired. Let’s tango.”

But although he responded to this invitation with enthusiasm, he eventually had to admit defeat. “It was the Scotch,” he said ruefully. “I shouldn’t have drunk so much of it at the end of a long hard day.”

I snuggled up to him and stroked his chest comfortingly, but half an hour later I was still awake, still remembering all that whisky, still wondering why it had been necessary to drink so very much more than usual.

VIII

When I awoke I resolved to push all thought of fortune-telling old bats and nutty stalkers to the back of my mind in order to focus on the dinner-party. I had been ambivalent from the start about this event not merely because I was nervous of making a
faux pas
which would allow our English guests, the judge and his wife, to classify me as a trashy social climber but because Kim and I were still sorting out our domestic life. It had certainly suited us to begin our marriage at my flat; Kim had needed time to rearrange his financial affairs, and after the strain of changing jobs and surviving the divorce, neither of us had felt immediately inclined to take on the stress of house-hunting. But although the Barbican tower blocks offer many advantages, lavish space is hardly one of them. Of the three bedrooms I possessed, one had been assigned to Kim’s junk and one to mine after I had compacted my clobber to give him some space. (Of course we never had time to sort anything out.) All this chaos meant we were conducting a somewhat cramped existence in the living-room and master bedroom, hardly an ideal set-up for grade-A entertaining.

To compound my feelings of disorganisation I had not yet had the time to acquire a reliable cleaner who would also do shopping for me during the week. I had barely managed to find time to track down a caterer, and that move had hardly been an unqualified success. Currently, I told myself that morning, I was neither in the mood nor in the running to be the slickest hostess in town. Indeed the very thought of the dinner-party was making me yearn to add vodka to my morning orange juice.

However, since subsiding in a drunken heap was not a serious option, I rose at five-thirty and put in an hour’s deep cleaning of the living-room and main bathroom before I dressed for work, buffed myself to the highest of lustres and arrived at the office for an eight o’clock meeting. The morning rapidly disappeared amidst a rising tide of crises. I had intended to buy flowers at lunch-time and nip back to the flat to put them in water, but that bright idea came to nothing because by one o’clock the fax had gone mad, sending a constant stream of unnecessary documents from Beijing, and I had to try to reach the Beijing partner by phone to demand an explanation. I hated the China office, but as a global law firm we had to buy our clients’ land and arrange their leases and draft their contracts and keep their fiscal noses clean even when they were hell-bent on pretending to be clones of Marco Polo.

My success in escaping from the office at five-thirty was entirely due to Tucker the WonderTemp who took control of the fax pandemonium and tracked down the Beijing partner’s minion who was sending all the stuff which looked as if it had been drafted in a rice field. It turned out that the Beijing partner was having a nervous breakdown. No one seemed much surprised except the senior partner, who took it as a personal affront and said the man was hardly displaying the spirit which had built the Empire. Some of those old dinosaurs had to be heard to be believed.

In the ladies’ loo a small voice in my head said: “I hate this bloody place and I hate this bloody work and I hate never having any time for anything and I hate life being one long crisis and most of all I hate giving dinner-parties for people I don’t care if I never see again.” But of course this stream of heresies was only erupting because I was stressed almost out of my skull, and I knew I had to shape up straight away before someone decided I was a wimp and tried to stamp on me.

Taking a cab to the florist in Moorfields, I told the woman to give me thirty pounds’ worth of yellow and white stuff plus a slice of jungle, and staggered back into the cab with what felt like half a rain forest in my arms. At Harvey Tower I had trouble working out how I could push the lift button but luckily some helpful resident arrived before I could try to kick-box the panel.

On my arrival in the flat I found there was a mess in the living-room. A picture had fallen, slamming into the sideboard, knocking over a lamp and hitting the floor with a force which had shattered the glass in the frame. Muttering curses I dumped the flowers in the bath and returned to the living-room to survey the damage more closely but concluded the mess could be eliminated without too much trouble. I was relieved to see that although the picture—a print of Kim’s Oxford college—would need reframing, the print itself was undamaged. Wasting no more time I bagged the broken frame and swept up the glass.

I should perhaps state that I was neither amazed nor incredulous that the picture should have fallen from the wall. When one lives thirty-five floors above the Barbican podium, which is itself on average two and a half floors above street level, one expects one’s living quarters to shift fractionally from time to time; tall buildings need to have a certain flexibility built into them and I was accustomed to the hairline cracks which occasionally appeared in the plasterwork. My prime emotion on discovering the mess had been annoyance that I had used a mere nail instead of a Rawlplug to fix the picture to the wall.

It was not until Alice arrived minutes later that I thought of Sophie. No doubt Alice’s presence conjured up the memory of Sophie in the supermarket, but I suddenly found myself remembering my past comment that Sophie would take her revenge and call it justice. It then occurred to me that although Sophie had achieved her aim of a confrontation, I had repulsed her in no uncertain terms. Could she have felt that God was now commanding her to give me hell by invading my living-space and trashing a picture which she would know had sentimental value for Kim? This was a deeply unnerving theory, but fortunately I soon grasped it had to be wrong; it would have been impossible for her to gain entry to the flat. The lobby at podium level was manned twenty-four hours a day, and at street level there was always someone on duty in the car park to repel intruders.

Thrusting all thought of Sophie from my mind I arranged most of the flowers into two vases, one for the living-room and one for the bedroom, where the guests would be leaving their coats. I was then faced with the challenge of designing the remaining flowers into a small, supremely tasteful table arrangement, but I soon decided this would take more time and talent than I possessed so I dumped the floral surplus in my junk-room. Better to have no table arrangement at all than one which failed to be perfect.

Struggling at last into my favourite black dress, I told myself fiercely that dinner-parties should be banned by law.