He tiptoed around the debris and placed the cherries on a shelf in the fridge, then looked beneath the sink for some newspapers to clean up with, and was crouched there reading the front page of an April edition of Libération when he heard what sounded like the soft opening or shutting of a door somewhere in the body of the apartment. He stepped into the passage.
‘Franklin?’
Not even Madame Barbossa’s vigilance was perfect. Franklin might have returned long ago, slipping past her while she admired someone’s dog or baby. When he wished to he could move very quietly, a tall ghost, padding up behind people, startling them with a sudden tap on the shoulder.
László moved along the corridor to the studio, the largest room in the apartment, with big windows overlooking the church, and a door at the far end leading into a small washroom.
‘Franklin?’
Along the length of the wall opposite the windows was a long table – an old dining table – its surface covered with a guano of slopped and dried paint. Brushes and palette knives stood to attention in a score of tins. Above the table, the shelves were loaded with coiled aluminium paint tubes, aerosol cans and plastic bottles of pigment, fabulous colours that would have exhausted László’s vocabulary had he attempted to name them all. And there were tools for gouging and scraping, boxes of charcoal, print rollers, a staple gun, all the paraphernalia of the artist, which writers, condemned to pen, keyboard and ashtray, feel such envy of. But there was nothing on the easels or pinned to the walls, not even a sketch, though on the floor there were half a dozen large canvases stood up with their backs to the room, as though in disgrace. No scattering of rags, no endearing mess, nothing to suggest the sanity of work. The place looked to have been finished with, abandoned. László could remember a time when there had always been flowers there – fistfuls of them in jars of discoloured water.
He lifted the outermost canvas on to the pegs of an easel, and stepped back. Though the greater part of Franklin’s output had always been abstract, large-scale, incensed with colour, the painting on the easel was figurative in the style of the German expressionists – Kokoschka, perhaps, or Barlach – and depicted a newly married couple on the steps of the mairie. The bride, in her costume of rose blooms, was immediately recognizable as Laurence Wylie. Not the young Laurence (a woman centred in her smile, in the warmth of her regard), but Laurence as she was now, Laurence the martyr, the victim, the dupe. It was grievous to see, but such was the quality of Franklin’s attention to her, the scrupulous depiction of an unhappiness he himself had authored, that László felt his throat constrict and his eyes become moist. Confronted with such a face, with the perverse love that had laboured over its depiction, blame or anger was beside the point. Useless.
He turned from the woman to the figure at her side. A man in a black suit, his head tightly wrapped in what appeared to be cellophane, or that plastic film used to preserve food, so that his features were flattened and distorted like a bank robber’s in a stocking mask. His back was arched in the agony of a suffocation, his fists bunched in rage, but his bride, oblivious to his torment, or just helpless to relieve it, ignored him, and looks directly forward, engaging the gaze of the viewer as if searching for some deliverance beyond the frame, though there was something else in her expression, some mute communication painted into the eyes like a code, that László could not immediately make sense of. He had to stand farther back – two, three steps – before he saw that it was a look of warning.
In the telephone box on the corner of the road by the church, an Arab girl was hunched down on the steel floor, smoking and talking intensely. László checked his watch, then leaned against the railings to contemplate the sparrows bathing in the gutter, scrupulous little birds, shivering the water from their feathers and hopping about in the sunshine. Ten minutes later the girl came out and László went in. The receiver was warm from her hand still, faintly scented. He dialled very carefully. After three rings he was answered.
‘Is Françoise there?’ he asked.
7
It was twilight at Brooklands. Larry came out on to the terrace and sat in the canvas chair opposite his brother.
‘Ella in bed?’ asked Alec.
‘Yeah. Mum?’
‘Asleep. I think.’
Larry had a bottle of Teacher’s from the off-licence in Coverton. He had driven out in Alec’s car before lunch and since then had worked his way through half the bottle. He poured himself another two fingers, drank one of them, then leaned forward and said, ‘Ella’s taken something.’
‘Hardly the first time,’ said Alec. He was drinking tea.
‘No. This is different. This isn’t a bracelet or a ring.’
‘Money?’
‘She’s taken a pill,’ said Larry. ‘I don’t know how but we’ve got to get it back.’
‘One of Mum’s?’
‘One of mine. From my wash bag.’
‘What kind of pill?’
Larry shook his head.
‘A painkiller? Sleeping tablet?’
‘I wish.’ He took a deep breath and started to explain, though he knew the story required more context than he could ever hope to provide. He said he had gone to LA to discuss a film deal. He omitted to mention the nature of the film, though he gave Alec something of the characters of T. Bone and Ranch, despite the fact that talking of them in the calm of an English garden made them seem like figures in some outlandish cabaret. He mentioned the hotel, the lunch party, the bathroom, the box. The pills. He’d hoped to make it sound casual and mostly normal, but actually it didn’t sound normal at all.
‘Suicide pills?’
Both of them – a reflex with its roots in the hinterlands of childhood – glanced up at the window above as though the light might suddenly flick on, and Alice lean out, wise to their secrets and demanding explanations.
‘Fucksake…’ said Larry, wincing. He had not introduced the ‘sex’ pills. Nor did he know which of the two Ella had taken because he could no longer remember Ranch’s explanation of the difference. Either way, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Alec blinked behind his glasses for a while. ‘You’re sure it was Ella?’
‘Of course it was Ella.’
‘You talked to her?’
‘For an hour, yesterday, as soon as I found the thing was gone. Again today. She blanked me completely, both times. When I told her how dangerous it was she seemed to understand, but with Ella you never know. I even phoned Hoffmann…’
‘Hoffmann?’
‘Her shrink in Frisco. He’s away at some child homicide convention in Detroit, so I left a message on his machine, then had a panic attack thinking what if he tells Kirsty? Can you imagine? So I called back and left another message saying he was only to talk to me about it. Not that I trust him much.’
‘Did you tell him what she took?’
‘I said she was having a regressive episode. After a while you start to speak like them.’
Alec sipped from his mug. Larry the athlete, Larry the party king, Larry the handsome, Larry the successful, Larry the happy husband. And now Larry the man who kept suicide pills in his wash bag. He hardly knew who he was sitting next to.