Too Much Too Soon (55 page)

“Terrific.”

In the smoggy sunlight, she saw the sagging flesh of Sterret’s throat jump as if in a painful hiccup. “I’m not saying this, you understand. But other people have pointed out that it would
help if Mrs. Ivory showed up.”

“Honora?”

The light changed and they started across the street.

“If she were at the hearings his . . . well, his flamboyance wouldn’t be so damaging.”

“They’re separated,” Joscelyn said sharply.

“But not divorced.”

“His personal life is his own.” A mottled redness appeared on her throat. She was remembering the night she had attempted to enter into that personal life: time had in no way blurred the image of her brother-in-law’s revulsed yet pleading expression.

“I don’t like saying this, but the press has already found him guilty of a certain amount of, uhh, lax morals.”

“If you’re talking about his lady friends, why not say so?” Joscelyn snapped.

“With Mrs. Ivory in Washington, people might be more sympathetic—”

“Jesus!”

“Nothing like a good woman standing by her husband . . . .” His words trailed into a muted cough as if, Joscelyn decided, it was coming to him that this particular good woman had stood by her husband and cracked his skull with a large, Venetian glass ornament.

After half a block, Sterret asked, “You’re close to him. Do you think he could be convinced to at least talk it over with Mrs. Ivory?”

“There’s a subject
I
’d never bring up.”

“Having her there would be immensely
helpful.”

“Then why don’t
you
talk to Curt?”

They walked the remainder of the way in silence.

As they turned the corner to the Windsor she saw the rest of the Ivory Investment MBAs gathered beneath the canopy. It was only too obvious that Sterret had been elected spokesman.
If they’re so worked up about losing their job, maybe I ought to worry a bit, too
, she thought. Her anxiety was not directed at her own possible unemployment—husband killers don’t deserve the luxury of fearing for themselves—but for Curt. The smart money’s consensus was that Congress and the media would stretch Curt out like beef drying into jerky.
Are they right? Would Honora’s presence make the difference?

*   *   *

A pot of tea and heel of toasted Hovis smeared with butter, Honora’s lunch, waited on a bedside table while she clasped her hands around her knees, drawing her bent legs toward her chest to flatten her spine on the restorative electric heating pad.

It was Saturday, and a few minutes ago Vi and Lissie had bundled in rainclothes to go see a specially captioned matinee of
Sunshine Boys.
Honora had begged off to rest her capricious vertebrae.

It had been a loser of a week on all counts. Chill air from the North Sea had brought icy spring rain whose sibilance now hushed the square. She had shown preliminary sketches to
three prospective clients: none had phoned her back. Lissie’s Head Mistress had called a parents’ meeting to raise funds for a school for the hard of hearing in Zambia: Honora, moved by the black children’s plight, had donated a thirty-pound check before realizing that her
bête noire
, an improperly balanced bank account, left her with under five pounds. There wouldn’t be any deposits until payments came for her previous two jobs, so she had been forced—once again—to float a loan from Vi. Langley, yet gloomier from being kept indoors, had spouted jeremiads of universal doom. And a particularly copious period had added to her lower-back discomfort.

She straightened her legs, wincing, then rolled cautiously on her side to pour her tea. Picking up her book—she had finished
Far Tortuga
and was starting a yellowish paperback of
Lost Illusions
that she’d picked up at a second-hand stall—she alternately sipped her milky, sweet tea and munched her brown crust.

She was someplace deep in nineteenth-century Angoulême when the doorbell rang. Positive the intruder was a salesman, she stayed put. The bell sounded again and again, a vibrato of irritation. Cautiously she swung her feet down into the flattened fake fur of her slippers, drew her bathrobe sash tighter around her slight waist and went to unlock the front door.

“I’d abandoned all hope,” Joscelyn said.

Honora, who had never quite accustomed herself to the way her younger sister dropped in as though she lived nearby in Fulham,
pressed her cheek against Joscelyn’s icy, rain-scented one.

“What’s with you?” Joscelyn asked. “A cold?”

“No, it’s nothing. My back’s been kicking up a bit, that’s all. What brings you to this sunny clime?”

Joscelyn didn’t answer. Taking off her raincoat, whose epaulets were dark with wetness, she slung it across her overnight bag. “Let’s go where you’ll be comfortable.”

Honora returned to her room to lie on her comforting heating pad, expecting her sister, after the long flight, to kick off her wet flats and stretch out on Lissie’s bed for a chat about their daughter. Instead, Joscelyn paced wordlessly around, crossing and recrossing the scrappy maroon carpet to touch the daffodils Vi had bought yesterday to cheer Honora, to shift a schoolbook on Lissie’s shelf. As she adjusted the dressing table mirror, the murky light reflected her as if from a deep pond.

Honora was beginning to get anxious. “Joss, what about some tea? It’s no trouble to make fresh.”

Joscelyn’s eye twitched. “Have anything to drink?”

“Vi just bought some vodka. I’ll fix you a Bloody Mary.”

“Don’t move. In the kitchen?”

“In the cabinet above the sink. The tomato juice is in the fridge.”

The sounds of Joscelyn fixing the drink were torturingly slow. She returned, sitting on the
dressing table chair, holding the glass with both hands.

Honora’s throat felt bruised, but she managed an easy modulation. “Joss, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Do I always have to be your crippled sparrow?” Joscelyn inquired, exhibiting the perversity that from earliest childhood had disguised her troubles.

“You seem a bit nervy, that’s all.”

“I’m not in the market for a ministering angel.” Joscelyn took a long drink. “But Curt is.”

“Curt?” Honora’s head jerked up from the pillow. “Is he ill?”

“Fit as a fiddle, whatever that means.”

“Is it something to do with this hearing?”

“Yes, and I don’t know why you should rush to his support after he’s been such a Grade-A shit to you.”

“I left him,” Honora murmured.

“Who wouldn’t, after learning he’d been getting it on with Crystal and having a kid with her? And what about his whorelets?”

“Did he send you?”

“He’d string me up if he knew I were here. Either that or excommunicate me from my profession.”

“But I gather you feel I ought to be helping him.”

“I’m ambivalent.”

“Joss, there’s simply no way I could be any good to him. I’ve met quite a few Washington people, but he introduced me to all of them and knows them far better than I do—not to
mention that he’s a major campaign contributor.”

“Did I ask you to suborn Congress?”

“Then how on earth could I help him?”

Joscelyn examined her ice cubes. “Remember at the Watergate hearings how Maureen Dean sat behind John, showing the television audience her wardrobe and wifely support? Could a man so beloved be all bad?”

“I understand what you’re saying, but you know how things are between us. He didn’t even call when Lissie had that bad case of mumps. Believe me, he doesn’t want me there.”

“They’re out to crucify him.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“You would too, if you’d been reading American papers, seeing network TV.”

“But why?”

“It’s an election year and the Morrell Subcommittee will get a circusful of publicity.” Joscelyn raised her voice. “Come one, come all, see the sterling electorate body prove that it can cut down to size the billionaire who lives on a world-class yacht with ten, count ’em, ten gorgeous starlets.”

Honora shifted on the bed, a furrow biting between the dark, luminous eyes.

Joscelyn kept silent. Though fecklessly incapable of guiding her personal relationships, in business dealings she was a tough cookie: she had learned that silence can be a most effective weapon. She sipped her Bloody Mary.

“Joss,” Honora said at last, “let’s assume I’m ready to help him, and let’s assume that
my being with him at the hearing would help. I don’t see how I can sit there behind him and prove my loyalty if he doesn’t want me around.”

“It’s my opinion he misses you.”

“Oh, absolutely. But when does he find the time from his ten, count ’em, ten gorgeous starlets?”

“Look, I don’t blame you if you ignore the whole thing. Why should you spring to his defense? At least poor Malcolm never humiliated me publicly.”

“I’m not being punitive.”

Joscelyn put her glass on the floor, yawning. “The jetties just hit me,” she said.

Kicking off her flats, she stretched on Lissie’s bed and pulled the green satin eiderdown up to her collar. In less than a minute her breathing slowed. She was pretending sleep.

Emotions burst wildly through Honora. The pain of Curt’s fathering Crystal’s son, the crazy yearning to see him, the shame of crawling back to him. She was remembering the loss of self that came over her when her naked body pressed against his, remembering the revulsion that last time when he had raped her. She was visualizing unlined beauties parading on his arm. She was pitying a starving six-year-old. But when had Honora Sylvander Ivory reached her decisions by logical progression?

Her mind was already made up.

It was one of those spring days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away every trace of smog and the distant mountain ranges rear up, their dark ridges showing as a warm, immediate purple. The California sky was a brighter, deeper blue than Honora remembered, and this ravishing color was echoed by the man-made Los Angeles Harbor. Curt’s seafaring home was too large to dock at the Marina so he berthed here with commercial vessels.

Reaching the waterfront, Honora’s hands clutched the padded leather steering wheel of Joscelyn’s sporty, late-model red Corvette: she knew she should make a left, but all at once lacked confidence as to which side of the street she should be on—she had driven only an occasional hired car in five years and was accustomed to traffic flowing on the opposite side. She turned cautiously. An hour of racing along the freeway system had jelled her thighs, tensed the musculature of her neck, and given her an incipient headache to compete with the nagging of her spine. En route she had been too involved in traffic and handling the Corvette to consider her greater anxieties, but only a couple of cars moved along the wharf and she no longer needed to concentrate on driving. In the crisp, clean-smelling ocean breeze, apprehensions rushed at her.

Curt didn’t have the foggiest notion she was coming. She hadn’t phoned, being positive that either he would hang up or tell her to bug off. And by now she was positive it was crucial that she be at his side at the subcommittee hearing. Her task of convincing him to let her accompany him to Washington had taken on the exalted significance of finding and partaking in the holy grail.

If I only looked more human
, she thought.

Never able to properly separate the internal from external truths, Honora took it for granted that her appearance reflected her grungy weariness. Last night she had fallen asleep instantly on the sofa bed in Joscelyn’s living room. She had dreamed that she and Curt were young and in a green springtime place where shafts of misty light and jeweled birdsong fell from the newly leafed branches far over their heads. Her conversation had the surrealistic quality of happy dreams when each word one says is true, witty, wise and utterly fascinating to the listener—as far as she could recall on waking, she told him how to prune rosebushes. Smiling, he had cupped her face, leaning forward to kiss her. She’d awakened, her thighs clenched around moist desire. The digital clock had told her she had been in bed less than ten minutes. The remainder of the night she had turned restlessly, dozing briefly just after dawn.

The road curved between massive warehouses, and her pupils took a few seconds to adjust to the deep shadows. She was blinking rapidly as she emerged again into the brightness.

Ahead of her gleamed the
Odyssey.

After the battered freighters, the yacht seemed yet more preposterous, a sleek floating miracle willed into existence by a magic lantern. The three decks were contoured together; the white paint gleamed as if freshly applied.

She pulled in at the end of a small row of cars. Even while she took calming breaths, traitor memory was repeating details that Lissie had brought back to England. The
Odyssey
carried a custom-built Jensen for Curt, two Chevies for the crew, as well as a Chris-Craft from whose stern Lissie had mastered water-skiing. There was a helicopter pad—Honora could see it extending like an accent mark above the top deck—and an enormous saucer of a satellite system that enabled Curt to dial any number in the world. The master suite had a closet bigger than their whole living room to stash Curt’s vast wardrobe, and a bathroom with an enormous, circular, blue marble hot tub. There were four guest staterooms, and Lissie’s had a small entry hall and a toy room. The two round, white leather tables in the dining saloon could be joined together by removable leafs to seat twenty for conferences or dining on the Italian chef’s specialties.

Intimidated—no, frightened—Honora stumbled as she got out of the low-slung car. She dropped her purse and coins from two countries spilled, as well as a lipstick, a tampon, her paperback novel. She bent her knees, scrabbling for her possessions.

Straightening, she saw Curt.

He was at the point of the bow, his bare arms crossed on the wooden rail. His face and arms were burned dark, the breeze ruffled sunbleached hair.

They gazed at each other across the years and maybe a hundred feet, and in their mysterious joining she felt a warmth pass from her abdomen to her extremities—her fingertips, toes, her ears—the identical sensation of yearning eroticism that had melted her in her dream. Unconsciously, she drew a hand toward her breast.