She turned on the full persuasive power of her baby blues; until that time, that would have been enough. ‘Couldn’t we give her a job?’ she suggested.
‘Don’t be daft. Give her a job as what?’
‘I don’t know. A live-in maid, something like that.’
‘But we don’t need a live-in maid! We’re not going to live here full time. What would she do while we’re away?’
‘Look after the place for us?’
‘God! Prim, you’ve never even met Gabrielle. She’s a nice kid, sure, but she’s a kid nonetheless. She’s too young to be given a responsibility like that.’
‘Did you tell Shirley about her? Maybe she’d take her on.’
‘Sure, and I’ll bet Lionell would give her a job as well, cleaning his brushes. Prim, the best is being done for her; Fortunato has her and he’ll make sure that she’s sent home under better conditions than she came here. The Philippines is a modern, developing country; she’s not simply going to be given back to her father so he can sell her again.’
‘Mmm,’ she muttered, ‘maybe you’re right. Still, I think I’ll phone Ramon just to make sure she’s still all right.’
‘Why?’ I asked her. ‘Don’t you trust him with the kid?’
She flushed. ‘Of course. I just thought that maybe he and Veronique could use a nanny. That wee Alejandro’s a handful.’
‘Too much of a handful to give to a sixteen-year-old. . If she is sixteen, that is. No. Take my word on this and leave things as they are.’
She looked reluctant to do that, but I knew that in the end she would.
‘We’ll see,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Do you have any other strange stories to tell me? Anything else I’m going to find out about?’
I hadn’t planned to raise the subject, but I knew that there was a better than even chance that someone else would, the bulk of the ex-pat community having been witnesses at Frank and Geraldine’s cocktail party.
‘Well there is one thing,’ I began. ‘Someone bust Steve Miller’s nose at a drinks do yesterday afternoon. He was boasting too loud about one of his conquests, and a guy took violent exception. Guess who the guy was? Guess who the conquest was?
‘Why didn’t you tell me you fucked him after I left?’ I looked her in the eye as I asked her.
It took her a while to answer me. When she did, her voice was small, not hers at all, someone else’s, that of someone uncertain and insecure. ‘Didn’t think it was any of your business.’
‘You’re right. It wasn’t.’
‘Who told you?’
‘He did, in effect. He told everyone else too, round the Barnetts’ pool, when he started talking about you getting horny in Madrid. But most of them knew about it anyway, I suppose.’ She stared at the coffee table. ‘You couldn’t stand the guy, Prim, any more than I could. Did you hate me that much, that you let him. . into you?’
Her face flushed again; I thought I could feel her shaking, beside me on the couch. ‘Yes,’ she yelled, silence-shattering.
‘At the time I did. You were such a calm, cruel bastard when you told me you were leaving me for Jan; cunning too, the way that you seized on my friendship with Davidoff as a counterweight for your conscience. . if you had one at all.’
‘A bit more than friendship, I remember. You told me so yourself, in some detail; about the two of you. “He was my lover”, I recall you saying, only a few days ago.’
‘No, it wasn’t!’ she snapped at me. ‘It couldn’t have been any more than it was.’
‘If he could have, you would have.’
‘No! Oz, he was very special, to you too. And he was very sad, and very old. It was nowhere near the same as you and Jan. You just chucked me to one side and you went back to her. Not out of the blue either. I knew that you’d got together again in Edinburgh before that, when you went back on business.’
She paused. ‘You were pretty late admitting that too. And you didn’t have to anyway; I knew for sure at the time, as I told you.
‘I found a credit card slip, from Laing the Jeweller. A gold necklet, as I remember.’ She laughed, short and shrill. ‘I actually thought you were going to surprise me with it. Oh you surprised me all right. Too fucking right I hated you! Too fucking right I had Steve Miller!
‘Good old Steve. “I say,” ’ she mimicked. ‘ “One size fits all.” ’
‘What?’
‘That’s what he used to say; when we were in Madrid. “One size fits all!” It was a sort of a war-cry with him, as he was struggling into his condoms. . Not that he was talking about them. God, he’s so crass, and God how you deserved it.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But did he?’
‘What do you mean? I’ll bet I’m the best lay he ever had.’
‘I wonder if he’d think you were worth it now?’
She frowned at me, her anger turned to fear. ‘Why? What have you done?’
‘Less than I might have at another time. I might have done a hell of a lot more than just spread his nose all over his face. I told you, he was mouthing off at the Society do yesterday. Of course I let him have it.’
‘Stupid bastard!’
‘Who? Him, or me?’
‘Both of you!’
‘No. All three of us, you included. If you had told me, Prim, I’d have understood. I might have said that you’d dropped your knickers to spite your face, so to speak, but I’d have understood. Yet you didn’t, even though you had going on two years to bring it up. At first you even made a point of telling me you hadn’t been with anyone after me. Then you sort of let it slip that there had been one casual thing. Fine; that didn’t bother me.
‘Then we get married, come back here on honeymoon, and I find out that it was more than casual. You will agree that living together and making a baby is more than casual, will you? Still, I understood; I felt as guilty as sin, in fact.
‘But now, I find out about Steve Miller, not from you at all, but from the local grapevine and from him. Too right I filled him in, and you can blame yourself for that just as much as me. You set him up for it by not telling me, just as much as he did himself.’
‘So much for your understanding then,’ she murmured, bitterly. ‘You found out and you battered him.’
‘But that’s my whole point!’ I yelled at her, shoving myself up from the couch. ‘I didn’t find out from you! You even let us get married without telling me.’
‘And if I had?’
‘It would have made no difference. I might even have admired you, in a strange way.’
‘Now?’
‘Now, nothing. It’s none of my business, just as it never was. Yes, I was mad when I found out, but I took that out on Miller’s nose. End of story.’
I looked down at her. ‘It is the end of the story, isn’t it?’ I asked, quietly. ‘There’s nothing else I might hear around the pool at someone else’s party?’
She shook her head and said, ‘No.’
If she’d come out with everything then, I think I’d have told her about Susie, to clear all the decks. But she didn’t, so I didn’t, and I let it go at that, for that time. Life can be a bit of a poker game, you know. It might be against the rules, but it’s always comforting to know that you have an ace up your sleeve.
She stood up, and came to me. She took my hands in hers and laid her forehead on my chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m also very tired. I didn’t sleep at all on that flight; Nicky Johnson talked non-stop all the way across the US, and all the way across the bloody Atlantic. Can I go to bed?’
‘Sure you can,’ I said, ‘once I make it up. I took the sheets off to be washed. Have yourself a drink, while I go and do that.’
She nodded and headed off towards the kitchen. I trotted upstairs and found a fresh fitted sheet from the linen cupboard; to be on the safe side, I changed the duvet cover as well. The room smelled fresh enough, but I raised the shutter and opened the window slightly, just to be on the even safer side.
When I went downstairs, Prim was on the couch once more. She was asleep, and the gin and tonic which she held was about to slip from her fingers. I took it from her, put it on the table and picked her up. As I carried her to bed it occurred to me that I had hefted enough weight up those stairs over the last few days for it to be classed as part of my work-out programme.