Billy was in their bedroom high up in the house when Newman arrived. Through the open window he heard the murmur of a car on the drive, and then voices, Newman’s to start with, silky but authoritative, followed by a woman’s. Hers had a blur to it, and he sensed right away that English wasn’t her first language.
He didn’t meet her until shortly before dinner. He was sitting on the terrace with Emma, drinking a beer, when a young woman appeared in the doorway. She had long black hair, and wore a sheer black dress that clung to her body. She was from somewhere like Japan, he thought. As she was about to venture out on to the terrace, Emma sprang forwards, blocking the doorway with one arm.
“Password,” she said sternly.
“Emma, it’s all right,” Billy said. “I think you can let her through.”
Emma grudgingly lowered her arm.
When the woman came over, Billy explained that Emma was just playing a game. If you didn’t know the secret password, it meant you were the enemy. You would have to be locked up. Put in the tower. The woman had been watching Emma, but now she turned her depthless black eyes on Billy, giving him a look that was somehow both startled and intrigued, and seemed to bear little or no relation to what she’d just been told. Her name was Lulu, he learned when they sat down, and she was Korean. She worked in a casino.
Emma had never met anyone like Lulu before — Ipswich had a fair number of Bengalis and Iranians, Iraqis too, but very few people from South-East Asia — and she was utterly besotted. Perhaps that was why the evening went so smoothly. Newman seemed relaxed, almost benign, chuckling over Emma’s sudden infatuation.
After dinner, Lulu let Emma brush her hair.
“Beautiful.” Standing behind Lulu, brush in hand, Emma’s whole face appeared to be radiating light.
“No, you’re beautiful,” Lulu said over her shoulder.
“No, you!” Emma boomed. She’d never been able to stand being contradicted.
Later, when it was time for bed, Emma took Lulu by the hand and led her away. After a while, Billy went upstairs to help Lulu out, only to meet her on the landing. She had started telling Emma a story, she said, but Emma had fallen asleep almost immediately.
“She gets very tired,” Billy said.
“How do you call it,” Lulu said, “what she has?”
“Down’s syndrome.”
“She’s very different…”
“There isn’t a cell in her body that’s the same as yours or mine.” The moment the words had left his mouth, Billy felt as if he’d said something oddly intimate.
Lulu only nodded. “Like a dolphin,” she said, then glanced at him quickly.
“It’s all right.” Billy grinned. “I think I know what you mean.”
When they returned to the dining-room, there was a CD playing, some French singer Billy had never heard of, but Sue and her father were nowhere to be seen. Lulu poured Billy a glass of champagne, and they sat out on the terrace. The warm air shifted; the leaves of a palm tree scraped against each other. He asked Lulu about her job. It paid well, she told him, but the hours were long. The dresses they wore didn’t have pockets, which was supposed to stop them stealing chips, but one girl had a special technique; though Lulu didn’t go into any detail, Billy was left in little doubt as to what this might involve. She said she wasn’t allowed to give out her phone number, or even accept tips. Men were always hitting on her — that was the phrase she used — sometimes women too, but fraternisation with the patrons was strictly forbidden.
“So Peter’s not a gambler, then,” Billy said slyly.
Lulu sipped her champagne. “I met him at a party,” she said. “On a yacht.”
As they were talking, Newman appeared in the garden below, stepping backwards, then sideways, a woman in his arms. It took Billy a few moments to realise that it was Sue, and he felt an instant surge of resentment. There was no reason why they shouldn’t dance together, of course — for all he knew, it was a ritual of theirs — and yet, somehow, everything Newman did seemed calculated to exclude him. No, it was more pointed than that. He behaved as though he was quite unaware of Billy — as though Billy didn’t actually exist.
“Fathers and daughters,” Lulu said, following his gaze. “Always special.”
Billy looked at her smooth face — the wide cheekbones, the eyes that seemed so bottomless, the luscious crushed rose of a mouth.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“You’re lovely,” he told her.
He was speaking as an older man, and not one who wanted anything from her, and she understood this perfectly.
“Thank you,” she said. “Would you like to dance as well?”
He shook his head. “I’d only tread on your toes.”
“Maybe I should open more champagne.”
“Now you’re talking.”
He was smiling now. The same smile. Apart from that one flash of jealousy, which Lulu had extinguished with just five words, the evening had been marked by a rare innocence, an utter lack of subterfuge. Something so unusually pure about the whole experience.
It didn’t last.
In the morning he woke when Sue got up, but lulled by the crisp, plump sound of a tennis ball being knocked about on the court next door he dropped back into a deep sleep, and by the time he dressed and went downstairs, Sue and Emma had gone out. In the dining-room, Newman and Lulu were having breakfast.
Newman waited until Billy was seated, then fixed him with a gloating look. “You ever had a Korean?”
Billy glanced across the table at Lulu, but she was paying close attention to the kiwi fruit on her plate. Slicing the end off, she carefully peeled the rough brown skin. The sleeve of her robe had fallen back on her right forearm, and he could see a raw red mark encircling her wrist.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Newman said.
Gazing out into the garden, Lulu placed a segment of fruit in her mouth. She gave the impression that she was alone at the table — or that she didn’t understand the language that was being spoken.
“If you’re interested,” Newman went on, “I’m sure I could set something up…”
There are certain people who have to be treated with extreme caution, or else avoided altogether. They’re like toadstools, or coral snakes — all bright colours on the surface, and poison underneath.
Billy wanted to apologise to Lulu, but he didn’t have the chance to speak to her again. She left that morning, and didn’t say goodbye — not even to Emma, whose face crumpled when she was told. She stood all alone on the drive in the brilliant sunlight, head thrown forwards, fingers splayed. “Lulu,” she bellowed. “Want Lulu.”
It took most of the day to console her.
The following evening they flew back to England.
Afterwards, Billy would often wonder if Lulu had been coerced. Could she have been drugged, for instance, or blackmailed? Or had she been a willing participant? She could have been trying to please Newman, he supposed, she could have done it out of love for him — though she didn’t have the look, at breakfast, of somebody in love…It was always possible, of course, that she’d been paid. How much would that cost, he wondered, on the Côte d’Azur? Then again, what if it was something Lulu had specifically requested? It was what excited her. She needed it. The situation was so ripe with ambiguity that Billy never felt he got any closer to a definitive interpretation. In the end, all he could be sure of was the extent of Newman’s corruption, and the ambivalent, insidious nature of the world he inhabited, how it could both repel you and seduce you.