Beth’s drugs, her drinking, her breakdown — caused by Billy’s infidelities. He understood it now; they had come through it, his sister had been put back together again, good as new. He smiled to himself in anticipation of her appearance. Now, he could even understand Billy’s behaviour, because it had caused no lasting damage to Beth. Billy had simply cracked under the pressure of marriage to someone cleverer, purer, brighter than himself. The women he chose as mistresses had always been glamorous, they were never intelligent.
Then she was on the steps, as if it were her twelfth or thirteenth birthday, not her forty-first, hovering excitedly beside Billy’s English butler in a silver sheath of a dress that bared one of her narrow, pale shoulders to the light.
‘Hi, Sis-‘ She was hugging him, childlike rather than in the desperation he had seen her through. He held the gift-wrapped present behind his back and felt her hands search for it. Her lips giggled warm little breaths against his cheek.
‘Johnny — I’ she exclaimed in mock disappointment and temper, pouting. He handed her the present and she held it against her girlish breasts for a moment, before taking his hand and half-dragging him into The mansion’s broad, high-ceilinged reception hall.
‘Excited?’ he asked.
‘I got through forty — I’m going to enjoy forty-one!’ A maid offered him a champagne flute. Stillman, the butler, regarded his mistress and her younger brother indulgently, judging them to be adolescents, but acceptably well-mannered. Beth drew him into her parlour.
There was a log fire in the hearth. Subdued lighting glowed on the marble fireplace and the gilded clock on the mantel, and reflected in the pieces of furniture she had gathered to the room.
American and English. Beth thought French too fussy, even vulgar, to the horror of a number of Washington matrons and climbers of her acquaintance. The drapes, and carpets, like the furniture, were her choice, not the diktat of a high-priced designer. Which was probably why he liked the room. Two Sisleys and a small Cezanne were the only paintings; there were books everywhere else., Books by their father, still regarded almost thirty years after his death as one of the best historians of the Civil War — books by Beth, from her doctoral thesis to her last and best-selling volume, the one she called her potboiler. Books on history, music, art, many of them Dad’s library recreated here … and one half-shelf left mockingly empty, or put there as a challenge.
The one reserved for his own books, whenever she finally goaded him into writing them.
Beth let him take the room in, as she always did, just as if she were a tour guide, or perhaps a mother who had kept his old room exactly the way he left it, year after year, waiting for him. She squeezed his arm in shared, silent memory. Then, breaking the reverie, she all but pushed him into a chair, her eyes bright. Not with drink or cocaine any longer, or even with a determined pretence of happiness. Just because — now — she was happy.
‘How was Russia, Johnny? Are things any better, for God’s sake?’ She asked as if she had near and endangered relatives there; the impression she always gave about any place or state or war zone she cared about — and she cared about most of them. Organised, donated, went sometimes … she wanted to accompany him to Russia next time he went. Strangely, she had never travelled with Billy. He would have seen nothing with her eyes, and she required someone to share her perceptions.
‘How were things? Come onV she added, as if his silence teased her.
‘It’s not good — though I met an honest cop.’ He grinned, ‘You were arrested?’
‘No. He interviewed me, over a fight in the hotel bar. Sort of a fight,’ he added quickly as her face clouded with concern.
‘Just an argument, really. Since I was State, I rated the chief of detectives himself. He seemed more amused by me than concerned.
He was about as cynical as you could get, but I quite liked the guy. Other than that, Billy’s investment’s safe, though what the Russian government and people are getting out of it ‘
‘Pete Turgenev’s here, with Billy. They flew up from Phoenix just today.’
‘Has Vaughn come up with them?’
‘No — he’s a little tired’
‘Nothing wrong?’
‘No, he’s fine. I think he overreached, presenting Pete Turgenev and his executives to major stockholders. He’s not Billy’s father in name only.’ She smiled.
‘How was your trip to New York? I get back from Russia, and you’re not even in town!’ he mocked gently.
‘You know. Rich students listening to a debate on the Third World’s hunger— how much can it mean to them?’ She spread her long-fingered hands. Diamonds glittered in the firelight, sparkled at her ears and throat. He did not remark the irony.
‘Well, maybe one or two were impressed by the UN. The others either wanted us to send the Marines or get the hell out.’
Images of her radicalism, her protesting and marching, flickered in his memory. He realised he was still staring at her in a doctor’s searching manner, and that it amused her. Recognising old contempts and angers in her expression was like seeing signs of returned health.
‘So, you’re entrenched as official caring professor at Georgetown, sister of mine?’
‘I’m not politically correct’
‘- so you’re not popular.’ He grinned. Belh held onto her academic tenure because she was dazzlingly bright, Billy had established a professorship in geopolitical studies, and she had written an academic treatise on Eastern Europe’s economies that had fluked its way into the non-fiction best-seller lists. Criticism was silenced by the power of the successful word.
He wondered whether she woukl nag him, even tonight, about his own book — the project that had accompanied him for years like a faithful but ignored hound. At State, they said every good boy needed a hobby, so the brightest and the best turned out monographs, papers, journalism when allowed — arts reviewing was favourite and he’d done a lot of it himself — but books, as he always protested to Beth, were real hard work, at which plea she would wrinkle her small nose with the mild, dismissive superiority of someone to whom the mind was a familiar room.
‘No, I’m not popular, but that doesn’t matter — not any more.’ She sighed, stretching like a small animal in the warmth and firelight. Once, it had mattered. His had been the only approbation she had been able to recognize. Billy’s fooling around had been a rejection. ‘Who did you meet?’ she asked.
‘Just a deputy prime minister — who’s in favour now but might not be by the weekend. Yeltsin’s shuffling them like cards, trying to keep the hardliners fed but not bloated.’
‘Is it all going to hell in a handbaskel?’
‘Maybe — maybe not.’
‘Billy says their economy is coming around.’
‘Billy would — he’s a great guy, but he still believes trickle down economics is enough to keep the peasants happy.’ He raised his palms in a gesture of peace. She would defend Billy like a bear its cub, now that she felt loved again, felt that her stability and happiness were not under threat or siege.
She smiled. ‘GraingerTurgenev must be doing some good.’
‘Some. There are Russians driving Porsches in Novyy Urengoy now. That’s got to mean something — I guess. But you and Billy?’
‘Fine.’ There was no hesitation, no uncertainty. ‘I lost sight of what Billy and I had together — so did he. Everything’s fine now.’
‘Good.’
He sipped his forgotten, tepid champagne. Relaxed in the firelight that threw their shadows together on the wall.
‘Open your present.’ She snatched it up from the arm of her chair and tore at the wrapping. Her eyes widened. The small, gold-framed ikon, a flat, cartoon-like image of the Virgin haloed with stars and heavily painted — like a whore, he thought irreverently — gleamed like the furniture.