That way you would be safe.’
‘Would I? Do you really think your family would believe me? Believe that I had published everything I know?’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because they know I know things, Lamia. Things I can’t tell anybody. Things that I can’t publicize.’ He suspected for a moment that she was going to ask him to dot the i’s and cross the t’s – use the unexpected intimacy that had sprung up between them to wheedle information out of him. A woman’s curiosity, and all that twaddle. But she didn’t.
Instead she stared him straight in the eyes. ‘You want to take this all the way through to the end, don’t you?’
He pretended to consider her question, but he already knew the answer. ‘I’ve got no choice in the matter. These nightmares. They’re something to do with it. But it’s not only that. I’m changing, Lamia. Changing inside. I can’t really describe it. But something happened to me down there in that cellar in the Camargue. Something that I still don’t understand. I find myself drawn to things. Almost as if I had experienced them before, and now need to revisit them to fully understand their significance.’ He shook his head. ‘No wonder you think I’m crazy.’
‘You’re making no sense. Yes. But I don’t think you’re crazy. I was wrong to say that.’
‘And you? Why are you tagging along with us? It can’t be for protection. For Captain Calque and I are probably of less potential use to anybody in that department than, well, than Laurel and Hardy.’
Lamia burst out laughing. ‘Laurel and Hardy. That’s it. That’s who you are. The two of you. Laurel and Hardy.
‘Thanks. Thanks a bunch.’
Lamia’s face became serious again. ‘Why don’t you have a woman of your own, Adam? What are you? Mid- thirties? You’re even quite handsome in an off hand, dean Martin kind of a way.’
‘A Dean Martin kind of a way? I look like Dean Martin?’
‘Yes. A little. And someone else. Some 1930s film actor I can’t remember. But it will come to me later. I’m certain of that.’
‘W. C. Fields?’
She punched him lightly on the arm. ‘But I’m serious, Adam. Most men have settled down by this time. Started a family. Yet you are living in a far bigger house than you can ever use. With a beautiful garden. In an exquisite part of America. Why aren’t you married? What’s wrong with you, Monsieur Sabir?’
‘I suppose you’re going to ask me now if I’m gay?’
‘No. I know you’re not gay.’
‘Oh yeah? And how do you figure that?’
‘By the way you responded earlier this evening when you helped me climb out of the window.’
Sabir could feel himself flushing. ‘Oh come on. I just hefted you for a split second. You might as well have been a sack of grain.’
‘I don’t think so. French women understand such things. I’m not saying you’re attracted to me. Don’t think that. But a woman knows when a man responds to her as a woman. Gay men don’t respond that way. You’re way straight, as the Americans say. So answer my question.’
Sabir laughed. But he was actually caught mid-way between embarrassment and awkwardness. He wasn’t used to women speaking to him in this way. Part of him liked it, and part of him wanted to be a million miles away. ‘It’s about my mother, I suppose.’
‘With men it usually is.’
Sabir rocked back against the pillar, surprised, once again, at Lamia’s directness. ‘It’s not what you think. Not the usual, I mean. During the better part of my adolescence and through into my twenties, my mother was always ill. I mean mentally ill, not physically. It got so bad sometimes that she had to be taken off to a clinic and tranquillized for weeks at a time to prevent her from committing suicide. It destroyed my father’s life. And I suppose it destroyed part of mine, too. I couldn’t bring anyone home, you see. And somehow it felt like a betrayal if I went with girls my mother would never get to meet. She wanted to be normal, Lamia. Desperately so. But there was something – some short circuit in her brain – that didn’t allow her to be. I went to college like everybody else. Had a few short-term affairs. Minor things, that didn’t mean anything. But I could never hold a woman. There was something detached in me – something damaged. When my father died three years ago, I was a 32-year-old man still living for the better part of the year at home.’
‘And your mother?’
‘Oh, she finally succeeded in what she’d been trying to do for half her lifetime. I was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, when she took the Nembutal and slit her wrists. I was the one that found her. She did it like Seneca the Younger – in the bath. Only she left the taps running. The blood-stained water came cascading down the stairs like a waterfall. A heck of a way to go. As always, she involved everybody.’
‘But you loved her?’
‘I loved her and I hated her. Does that answer your question?’
Lamia put out a hand and squeezed his arm, but Sabir jerked unconsciously away from her, as if there was something he feared in her touch.
26
The trio drove all of the next day, right along the line of the Appalachian Mountains and down into Alabama. They each took it in turns to share the driving, and both Lamia and Sabir managed to doze a little when it was their turn to take a break.
Calque had attempted to persuade Sabir that civilized people didn’t stuff themselves full of eggs, bacon, and waffles at breakfast time, and then snack their way through the day until they ran up against the stone wall of a gargantuan, seven-o’clock dinner. Instead, they started off in the continental fashion, on the strict understanding that they had a good lunch to look forward to, with a light supper to bring things to a satisfactory conclusion.
‘This time I shall choose the restaurant. We are not being followed. We don’t need to use a drive-thru. It is not required that we sit in the car and stink it up with inadequately fried food.’
Neither Lamia nor Sabir felt it appropriate to draw attention to Calque stinking up the car with his cigarettes – something which he was doing on an ever more regular basis. Neither did Lamia mention Calque’s snoring. She was aware of a certain unexpected fragility in him – a fragility that verged on narcissism – and she was also aware of his susceptibility both to her and to the opinions of her sex.
During lunch – for which Calque had unexpectedly found a family-run restaurant near Knoxville which specialized in hickory-smoked baby back ribs, served with corn bread and pinto beans, but, lamentably, no wine – she questioned him about his wife and daughter.
Calque sighed, and stared down at his plate, as if it held within its purview some symbolical key to the human condition. ‘My wife wished, from the very first moment that she met me, that I had been a businessman and not a policeman. She managed to convince herself – without, I should add, any encouragement on my part – that I would eventually subscribe to her wishes and switch professions. We would then be able to live a comfortable, bourgeois existence, in a respectable Paris suburb, and take our holidays on the Ile de Re, just as she and her family had done for the past two generations. I let her down in this, just as I let her down in everything else. We had a daughter. At first this daughter seemed fond of me. I would take her to the flower market, and to the Jardin du Luxembourg to float her sailing boat. When my wife realized how fond I was of this little girl, she understood that her opportunity for revenge had finally arrived. She spent the better part of twenty years alienating my daughter from me in every way she could contrive. I fought back, of course, but a man who works full time, and long hours, in a sometimes brutalizing profession, has a weakened armoury. Eventually, my daughter married, and left home. Now, when I telephone, her husband speaks to me, but not her. Without the presence of my daughter, my marriage seemed even more of a sham than I had originally suspected. I therefore divorced my wife, effectively ruining myself in the process. This is only justice. If a man is a fool, he deserves to be treated like a fool. I was, and am, a fool. But now that I am older, I can look back on my folly and smile. Before, I could only weep.’
Sabir and Lamia stared speechlessly across the table at Calque. Never, in the time that either one of them
