“We are,” she said with a smile, then went back to thinking about Bannister. “It’s very important to Tony to have a beautiful wife. It’s like his car or house, you see; something to impress other people with. And it helps in the business, too.”
“What happens if he wants to trade the wife in for a younger model?”
“Alimony,” she said too swiftly, “is a girl’s best friend.” We lay in silence for a long while. I heard an outboard on the river as someone made a dash through the rain towards the pub. Angela fell lightly asleep. Her mouth was just open and her breath stirred a wisp of her pale hair. I thought she looked very young and innocent as she lay in my arms. All the tense anger had leached out of her face in this afternoon; as if by coming to bed we had stopped fighting some foul gale and just let ourselves run before the wind. I kissed her warm skin, and the kiss woke her. She blinked at me, recognition came to her eyes, and a smile followed. She returned my kiss. “Tell me about you,” she said.
“I thought you were making a film about me. Don’t you know everything already?”
“I don’t know whether you’re in love with Jill-Beth Kirov.” The suddenness of the question surprised me. In this new happiness I’d clean forgotten that I’d only just returned from America.
“I’m not in love with her.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
Angela propped herself up on an elbow. “Did you fall out of love with her in these last few days?”
“I didn’t…” I stopped. I had been about to say I had not met Jill-Beth, but I did not want to lie to Angela. Not now. Lies twist life out of true, and this afternoon I’d found something that I wanted to be very true.
Angela was pleased with herself. “You’d be amazed how co-operative people are to television companies. Airlines aren’t supposed to reveal who’s on their passenger lists, but when you say you’re from the telly and that it’s terribly important to find Mr Sandman who’s flown to the States without his script, they do help. And Dallas, Nick, is a very, very long way from Boston. Or it was the last time I was in America. Has it moved?”
I smiled. “I thought I was being very clever.”
“Fooling you, Nick Sandman, is like taking candy off a very dumb baby.” She rolled away from me, lit another cigarette, and came back to my side of the bed. She lay on her belly, propped herself on her elbows, and blew smoke at my face. “So?”
I nodded. “I fell out of love with her in these last few days.”
“Did you go to bed with her?”
“No.”
She looked pensive. “You would say that, wouldn’t you? Being a gentleman.”
“Yes, I would. But I didn’t.”
“I’m glad.” She ducked her head and kissed me. “Will you be in love with me now?”
“Probably.”
“Only probably?”
I raised my head and kissed her. “Undoubtedly.”
“Silly Nick.” She laid her head on my chest, and I felt the heat of the cigarette as she drew on it. “Did you fly to America to go to bed with her?”
“No. Yes. She wanted to see me, but I wanted to go to bed with her.”
“Did you pay the air fare?”
“No.”
Angela laughed. “It would have been an expensive non-fuck if you had. Did she want to see you about the St Pierre?”
“Yes.” I suddenly wondered if this was a clever Bannister trick to make me confess all. Angela must have instinctively felt my fear, for she lifted her face and looked into my eyes.
“I didn’t tell anyone where you were, Nick.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want to finish the film.” She drew on the cigarette.
“Are they going to sabotage Wildtrack? ” I didn’t answer and she pulled away from me. “Did you meet Yassir Kassouli?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think of him?”
“Very impressive, very powerful, horribly rich, very obsessed, and quite possibly a touch mad.”
She smiled, then rolled over and sat up with her ankles crossed in front of her. She put an ashtray on the sheet and tapped her cigarette into it. Her naked body looked uncannily like Melissa’s, very thin and pale and supple. If love was a thing of lust, then I was already lost. “Kassouli’s always hated Tony,” she said. “He hated him for taking his daughter away. He thought Nadeznha had married beneath herself. She married him on the rebound, I think. That’s what Tony says, anyway.”
“Were they happy?”
Angela shook her head. “Not especially. But not especially unhappy either. But Kassouli didn’t help. He used to visit them all the time. Nothing was too good for his darling Nadeznha. He made them buy this house and insisted they put the pool in for him. He was always here, nagging her to go home.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“Nadeznha always did just what Nadeznha wanted.” I heard the dislike in Angela’s voice. “She quite liked queening it in England.
Here she was the heiress married to the show star, while in America she’d just have been another little rich girl.”
“I heard she was rather a sweet girl,” I said as innocently as I could.
“Sweet?” Angela almost spat the word. “She was unbelievably selfish. She was a monster! I always thought Tony was terrified of her, though he denies it.”
I thought how Bannister clearly fell for very strong women. “She was a very good sailor,” I defended the dead.
“That’s not necessarily a recommendation, is it?” I smiled, rolled off the bed, and walked to the window. I had been embarrassed at first because of the scars on my back, but Angela had laughed at the embarrassment. Now I stood and stared down at the river. The tide was rising, swirling to cover the mudflats and lift the moored tenders on the far bank. “Was Nadeznha going to leave him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Angela frowned. “Tony hasn’t said much, but he wouldn’t. I mean, it would have been a terrible blow to his pride if she’d walked out. Marrying her was a great coup, after all. But he’s sort of hinted at it. He thinks she was having an affair, but I don’t know who with. He gets angry if I talk about it now.”
“Does he often get angry?”
“Only with people he thinks he can bully. He’s a very insecure man.”
I leaned my backside on the sill and watched her angular body on the rumpled sheet. Her unbound hair hung to the base of her spine. The bedclothes, all but for the bottom sheet, had fallen in a heap on the carpet. It was time, I thought, to delve into yet another layer of truth on this wet afternoon. “Do you know what people say about Nadeznha’s death?”
She looked up at me. “I know, Nick.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “No.”
“No, impossible? No, he didn’t do it? No, you’re not saying anything?”
She stared down at the sheet for a long time. “I don’t think he’s got the guts to kill someone. Killing someone must be horrible.
Unless you’re so angry that you don’t know what you’re doing. Or in self-defence, perhaps?” She shrugged. “You must know, Nick.
Aren’t you the expert?”
“Good God, no.”
“The Falklands, I mean.”
“It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t easy, either.” I thought about it.
“Afterwards is the worst, when you’re clearing up. I mean, it’s one thing to pull a trigger when you know the bastard is pulling his, but it’s quite different when you see his body a few hours later. I remember there was one who looked just like a fellow I used to play rugby with.”
“Was it really bad?” she asked, and I heard a trace of her television producer’s interest in the question. She was wondering whether I would talk like this on her film.