I’m still fertile, although the menopause can’t be far away, but I was having trouble remembering the last time I looked at a bloke and thought, ‘I’d really like to fuck you.’ No, sorry, I lie. It was eight years in the past, the man in question was Oz, and I did, regardless of the small detail that he was married to Susie at the time. Biter bit, and all that.
Susie’s Duncan had been around for longer than most of her consorts, almost two years from start to what she had told me was the finish. His surname was Culshaw, and he was the nephew of her managing director. They were introduced at a company meeting in Glasgow, and before long, he was making regular visits to Monaco. He was a few years younger than her, but not so many that he could be classed as a toy boy. I’d met him a couple of times on visits to Monaco during his ‘tenure of office’, so to speak.
He was a good-looking bastard, I’ll give him that, not tall for a man, about my height when I’m in high heels, taller than Susie without towering over her, with fairish hair that wasn’t quite blond, pale blue eyes and a narrow waist. He scrubbed up well enough, and I’ll admit he looked not bad in swim gear around the pool, although he was a bit on the bony side and had unsightly clumps of hair on his back. When Susie asked me what I thought of him, I pointed this out. She couldn’t argue otherwise, but she assured me that his best feature was hidden from view. I didn’t ask for specifics, but I wasn’t sure I believed that; my scepticism was based on several years’ nursing experience, when I saw a lot of skinny guys … or a little, as was mostly the case.
I did ask about his profession, though, over dinner one night at her place when the kids had gone to bed and Duncan wasn’t in residence. ‘He’s a writer,’ she told me.
‘What does he write?’
‘Newspaper articles, magazine articles, that sort of stuff.’
There was a vagueness about her answer that was very un-Susie-like. ‘Who pays him to do this?’ I murmured.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Were you born cynical?’
‘I’m not cynical,’ I insisted. ‘But I don’t take a single fucking thing for granted either, least of all when it comes to men.’
‘That’s why you don’t have one,’ she chuckled.
‘Maybe … but I prefer to believe that since my boy’s going to start shaving in a couple of years, I don’t want him to have to compete for the bathroom mirror. So,’ I went on, ‘who does your guy work for?’
She laughed. ‘Your boy has an en-suite bathroom, so don’t give me that one. Duncan’s freelance,’ she continued. ‘He gets stuff in the Scottish papers, mostly their weekend magazines, but he says that his best clients are airlines. You know, those flight mags that you read then forget as soon as you step on to the air bridge.’
‘Your wild weekend in Shagaluf? Great European stag night venues? That sort of stuff?’
She nodded. ‘You’ve got it. Pays well, he says. He does other stuff, though; corporate. For example he’s going to write the text for the Gantry Group’s next annual report.’
‘How about books?’
‘He says he’s working on a manuscript. He won’t let me read it yet, but he says it’s a thriller. He’s looking for an agent just now. He says you can’t get published without one.’
‘How about Oz’s old agent? What was his name again?’
‘Roscoe Brown?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Primavera, he’s Hollywood; that’s not what he does.’
‘I could always send it to my brother-in-law,’ I suggested. ‘He’d read it if I asked him.’
‘Miles Grayson? I thought he’d retired.’
‘From acting, yes, but he still produces and directs. Although he has so many business interests these days, he insists that films are still his main focus. Everything else is just a sideline.’
‘Including the wine business?’
‘Very much so. It’s only a small part of his portfolio.’
A couple of years ago Miles and my sister visited me in St Martí. I introduced him to some of the better wines from our region and he was so impressed that he bought one of the producers. I’ve been a director for the last two years and it’s doing all right.
‘Well,’ Susie ventured, cautiously, ‘if you think he would read it, I’ll tell Duncan, and ask him to give you a call.’
Tom and I went back home next morning, and I thought no more about it, until last autumn, over a year later, my phone rang, and it was Duncan Culshaw, calling out of the blue. He’d booked himself into the Nieves Mar Hotel, in L’Escala, and he told me that he’d like to see me.
‘You came all this way on spec?’ I asked.
‘Susie said you’d be here,’ he said. ‘She told me that you might be prepared to show my book to your brother-in-law.’
‘I might, that’s true, but you don’t need to throw yourself at my feet for it to happen. If I do it, it’ll be as a favour to Susie, pure and simple.’
‘I appreciate that,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself with him by sending something blind.’ He paused. ‘Have dinner with me tonight, and I’ll give you a copy.’
‘I can’t do that,’ I replied, ‘unless you fancy feeding my son as well. But lunch tomorrow would be okay.’
He had his manuscript with him when we met in the hotel restaurant, not in printed form but on a four gigabyte memory stick. ‘It’s not quite finished,’ he told me. ‘I have a couple of rough edges that I need to smooth out.’ He handed it to me. ‘Read it please, and we’ll meet again, possibly for coffee tomorrow morning. I’ll call you to arrange something.’
‘That’s a tight timescale,’ I observed, ‘for a whole manuscript.’
‘You’ll finish it, I promise you. It’s a page-turner.’
I took the stick from him. ‘Obviously not literally,’ I pointed out, ‘but I’ll do it.’
We had a pleasant enough lunch; most of our conversation was about the Emporda region, its front-line tourist pitches and some of the spots off the beaten track. ‘That was very useful,’ he told me as he signed the bill. ‘I have a piece to write for one of my airline clients; you’ve given me just about everything I need.’
‘That’s handy,’ I remarked. ‘You’ll be able to put me down as a business expense.’
I had a flash of concern that I might have sounded waspish, or been ‘a nippy sweetie’, as my Glaswegian Granny Phillips would have put it, but far from being wounded, Duncan nodded, beamed, and replied, ‘Yes, indeed, Primavera; the whole damn trip in fact, with free air travel and car hire.’
My only reaction was a smile, but I felt that for the first time I’d had a flash of the real Duncan Culshaw.
I drove straight home, dug out the rarely used MacBook laptop that I keep as a back-up for my computer, took it out on to the terrace, with Charlie, our Labrador, for company, and plugged the stick into one of the USB sockets. There was only one document on it, a large PDF file, titled The Mask. When I clicked on it, a box came up on the screen advising me that it was read only and that I would not be able to copy or edit it. ‘Fine,’ I muttered, and clicked the button to proceed.
There was no foreword, only the title, author’s name and a copyright declaration. I turned to the first page and started to read.
‘My wee brother?’ she began, then paused, as if she was framing every word in her eventual reply.
‘He was like a loch on a fine summer’s day. Not a mark, not a ripple on his surface. You looked at him and you thought, he’s one of the fairest things I’ve ever seen. And he was, the boy I grew up with.
‘But then life took a hold of him and the water was disturbed, choppy at first, and then rougher, till it was storm-tossed, white-crested. He was still beautiful, but in a different way, darker, ominous, and you knew that not far below that surface there was another man, someone different, someone dangerous, like the monsters of legend given form.’