"I've come to stay with you. That's why I'm here. You and I are going to confirm arrangements for the wedding." If she said it slowly and clearly enough, Betty must believe her. But no, Betty was a fool. Betty had always been a fool. "The week beginning the fourth of June. It's been in the diary for months."
Mrs. Kingsley's tears poured down her plump cheeks, scoring tiny pink rivulets in her overpowdered face. "You've already been, my darling. You came down a fortnight and a half ago, spent the week with Daddy and me, did all the things you were supposed to do, and then went home to find Leo packing his bags. Don't you remember? He's gone to live with Meg. Oh, I could murder him, Jinx, I really could." She wrung her hands. "I always told you he wasn't a nice man, but you wouldn't listen. And your father was just as bad. 'He's a Wallader, Elizabeth...' " She rambled on, her huge chest heaving tragically inside a woolen dress that was far too tight.
The idea that nearly three weeks had passed without her being able to recollect a single day was so far beyond Jinx's comprehension that she fixed her attention on what was real. Red carnations and white lilies in a vase on her bedside table. French windows looking out on a flagstoned terrace, with a carefully tended garden beyond. Television in the corner. Leather armchairs on either side of a coffee table-walnut, she decided, and a walnut dressing table. Bathroom to her left. Door to the corridor on her right. Where had Adam put her this time? Somewhere very expensive, she thought; the Nightingale Clinic, the nurse had told her. In Salisbury. But why Salisbury when she lived in London?
Betty's plaintive wailing broke into her thoughts. "...I wish it hadn't upset you so much, my darling. You've no idea how badly Daddy's taken it all. He sees it as an insult to him, you know. He never thought anyone could make his little girl do something so"-she cast about for a word-"silly."
"Little girl?" What on earth was Betty talking about? She had never been Adam's little girl-his performing puppet perhaps, never his little girl. She felt very tired suddenly. "I don't understand."
"You got drunk and tried to kill yourself, my poor baby. Your car's been written off." Mrs. Kingsley fished a newspaper photograph out of her handbag and pressed it into her stepdaughter's lap. "That's what it looked like afterwards. It's a mercy you survived, it really is." She pointed to the date in the top right-hand corner of the clipping. "The fourteenth of June, the day after the accident. And today's date"-she pushed forward another newspaper-"there, you see, the twenty-second, a whole week later."
Jinx examined the picture curiously. The mass of twisted metal, backlit by police arc lights, had the fantastic quality of surrealist art. It was a stark silhouette, and in the distortions of the chassis and the oblique angle from which the photographer had taken his shot, it appeared to portray a gleaming metal gauntlet clasped about the raised sword of the pillar. It was a great picture, she thought, and wondered who had taken it.
"This isn't my car."
Her stepmother took her hand and stroked it gently. "Leo's not going to marry you, Jinx. Daddy and I have had to send out notices to everyone saying the wedding's been canceled. He wants to marry Meg instead."
She watched a tear drip from the powdered chin onto her own upturned palm. "Meg?" she echoed. "You mean Meg Harris?" Why would Leo want to marry Meg? Meg was a whore. You whore ... you whore ... YOU WHORE! Some horror-what?-lurched through her mind, and she clamped a hand to her mouth as bile rose in her throat.
"She's been out for what she can get for as long as you've known her, and now she's taken your husband. You were always too trusting, baby. I never liked her."
Jinx dragged her wide-eyed stare back to her stepmother. That wasn't true. Betty had always adored Meg, largely because Meg was so uncritical in her affections. It made no difference to Meg if Betty Kingsley was drunk or sober. "At least Meg thinks I've something sensible to say," was her stepmother's aggressive refrain whenever she was deep in her cups and being ignored by everybody else. The irony was that Meg couldn't tolerate her own straitlaced mother for more than a couple of hours. "You and I should swap," she often said. "At least Betty doesn't play the martyr all the time."
"When was this decided?" Jinx managed at last. "After the accident?"
"No, dear. Before. You went back to London a week ago last Friday after Leo phoned you during the afternoon. Horrible, horrible man. He called every day, pretending he still loved you, then dropped the bombshell on the Friday night. I don't suppose he was at all kind in the way he did it either." She held the handkerchief to her eyes again. "Then on the Sunday, Colonel Clancey from next door rescued you from your garage before you could gas yourself, but didn't have the sense to ring us and tell us you needed help." She swallowed painfully. "But you were so cool about it all on the Saturday when you phoned home to tell Daddy the wedding was off that it never occurred to us you were going to do something silly."
Perhaps she'd been lying ... Jinx always lied ... lying was second nature to her... Jinx looked down at the newspaper clipping again and noticed amid the wreckage in the photograph the JIN of the personalized number plate that her father had given her for her twenty-first birthday present. J.I.N. Kingsley. Jane Imogen Nicola. Her mother's names-the most hated names in the world. JINXED! She had to accept it was her car featured there. You got drunk ... Colonel Clancey rescued you... "There's no gas in my garage," Jinx said, fixing on something she could understand. "No one has gas in their garage."
Mrs. Kingsley sobbed loudly. "You were running your car engine with the doors closed. If the Colonel hadn't heard it, you'd have died on the Sunday." She plucked at the girl's hand again, her warm fat fingers seeking the very comfort she was trying to impart. "You promised him you wouldn't do it again and now he wishes he'd reported it to somebody. Don't be angry with me, Jinx." The tears rolled on relentlessly in rivers of grief, and Jinx wondered, basely, how genuine they were. Betty had always reserved her affections for her own two sons and never for the self-contained little girl who was the product of Adam's first wife. "Someone had to tell you, and Dr. Protheroe thought it should be me. Poor Daddy's been knocked sideways by it all, you've broken his heart. 'Why did she do it, Elizabeth?' he keeps asking me."
But Jinx had no answer to that. For she knew Betty was lying. No one, least of all Leo, could drive her to kill herself. Instead, she dwelled on the incongruities of life. Why did she call her father Adam while his wife of twenty-seven years called him Daddy? For some reason it had never seemed significant before. She stared past her stepmother's head to her own reflection in the dressing table mirror and wondered suddenly why she felt so very little about so very much.
A young man came into her room uninvited, a tall gangling creature with shoulder-length ginger hair and spots. "Hi," he said, wandering aimlessly to the French windows and flicking the handle up and down, before abandoning it to throw himself into one of the armchairs in the bay. "What are you on?"
"I don't know."
"Heroin, crack, coke, MDMA? What?"
She stared at him blankly. "Am I in a drug rehabilitation center?"
He frowned at her. "Don't you know?"
She shook her head.
"You're in the Nightingale Clinic, where therapy costs four hundred quid a day and everyone leaves with their heads screwed on straight."