The Night People! fashion feature seemed an aberration, as though it had been thought up by a different editorial team. I was surprised the publishers hadn’t demanded it be toned down; those centre pages were not the sort of thing normally considered suitable for the shelves of a family newsagents.
‘OK,’ I allowed grudgingly. ‘It might not be a coincidence.’
Duncan said nothing. He was fiddling with his thumbnail, doing something unbelievably vicious to the cuticle.
‘I said, ‘If you’re really worried, I could check it out.’
He looked up at last. ‘How?’
I dropped the end of my cigarette on to the floor and ground it out with my heel. ‘I could go and see them. They look as though they could do with some creative consultancy. Lulu says they pay well.’
‘Lulu says? How in hell would she know?’
‘She said she was going to see them.’
'Like hell she is. She’d better keep out of this.’
I didn’t think this was entirely fair, and said so. Lulu might have had half her brain missing, but she was still entitled to make her own decisions.
‘Lulu knows nothing,’ Duncan said, perhaps more truthfully than he intended, ‘and I want it to stay that way.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, but I’ll go in and talk to whoever thought up those photos. Or maybe I can talk to the editor.’
‘The editor,’ he echoed. All of a sudden there was a faraway look in his eyes. ‘That name. Did you see?’
‘See what?’ I turned back to the masthead. ‘Rose Murasaki? Never heard of her.’
‘Murasaki Shikibu was a Japanese writer of the Fujiwara era. Eleventh century. She wrote The Tale of Genji.’ I’d almost forgotten Duncan had once been an avid Japanophile. He’d had a big thing about martial arts movies, had seen Sanjuro ten times or more, trying to work out how Toshiro Mifune had managed to draw his sword and plunge it into Tatsuya Nakadai’s heart, all in a single movement so the blood spurted out like a geyser. I wondered whether he’d been able to watch it again at any point over the last thirteen years, what with his latterday aversion to gore. Maybe he still found it bearable; the film was in black and white, after all, and he’d told me the gushing blood was nothing but chocolate sauce.
‘So this is a distant relative,’ I suggested. ‘Or more likely someone’s idea of a hip literary reference.’
‘That name,’ said Duncan. ‘Murasaki.’
‘So?’
‘It’s the Japanese word for purple.’
This was so rich I started to laugh, but I forced myself to stop before I got carried away. Even in my own ears, the laughter sounded too loud in that cramped space.
Duncan was beginning to ramble. ‘Pink and purple. Did you know the Japanese don’t have blue movies, they have pink ones? And did you know the French title for Pretty in Pink was Rose Bonbon? And did you know Rose Bonbon was the name of a striptease at the Crazy Horse?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Isabella Rossellini told me that.’
‘Really?’
‘And she also said that — ‘ He stopped in mid-sentence and picked up whichever thread it was he had lost. ‘It’s the ultraviolet,’ he said, jabbing the magazine with his finger. ‘Sunburn and ultraviolet. Purple. Violet. Murasaki. That’s why she picked the name.’
‘Do you really think so?’ I asked doubtfully.
‘I know so.’
‘Duncan, you don’t know anything.’
He looked wounded. ‘I knew her. You didn’t know her at all. To you, she was less than human.’ I bit my tongue to stop myself blurting out that it wasn’t just my verdict — she was less than human whichever way you looked at it.
‘Be careful, Dora,’ he said, so solemnly that I almost started laughing again. It was the first time anyone had ever told me to be careful of… what? A magazine? The colour purple? Someone who had been dead for thirteen years?
‘You’re probably right,’ he went on in a rush. ‘It’s probably just coincidence. But of all the things I’ve done in my life, that was the most evil, the most awful, the most unforgivable, and someone, somewhere, is wanting to make me suffer for it, and — do you know — I think we deserve to suffer, because I don’t feel good about what we did at all…’
‘I know I’m right,’ I said in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. ‘I know there’s nothing to worry about. You’re getting worked up over nothing. Look, I’ll go and see these people and find out what’s going on, but I promise you: it will be nothing. Nothing.’
I didn’t believe what I was saying for an instant, I was just saying what I thought would shut him up, but he took a deep breath and was back to his normal charming self. ‘What on earth would I do without you, Dora?’ He smiled and dipped forward and pecked me on the forehead. ‘You don’t mind? I never wanted to drag you into any of this. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m still not thinking straight…’
I tried to make my face glow with sincerity. ‘You’d better get back to your guests. Lulu’s imagination will be running riot.’ I felt like kissing him properly, none of that pecking, but he would have been shocked. Not because he was afraid of being unfaithful to Lulu, more because it wasn’t the sort of thing he expected from me.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Lulu.’ He picked up the magazine and rolled it into a thick tube and held it up to his eye, like a telescope. ‘She wanted Alicia to have a look at this, didn’t she.’ He hovered uncertainly, as if waiting to be told what to do next.
‘If I were you,’ I said, “I wouldn’t show Alicia. Too tasteless. It might upset her.’ I eased the magazine from his grasp. ‘Tell Lulu you’ve lost it. Tell her you’ll buy another one tomorrow.’
‘Oh yes. Of course.’ As he was moving towards the door, I added, ‘And don’t forget to tell everyone we just had great sex.’
He smiled warily, unsure whether this was supposed to be a joke. ‘You shouldn’t be nasty to Lulu. She really likes you.’
‘Oh, I bet she does.’
‘She does,’ he insisted. ‘Only the other day she was saying how much she admires how you always get what you want.’
‘She does all right for herself.’
‘She’s been having a hard time of it lately, only you’d never know it. She keeps things bottled up.’
I was fed up with all this talk about Lulu. She didn’t interest me in the slightest. ‘Why don’t you go back into the other room,’ I said. ‘I’m going to stay here and have another cigarette.’ I couldn’t have one outside; Alicia would have killed me for contaminating the baby’s airspace.
‘Right,’ he said, backing through the door into the office. He paused again. ‘Dora…’
‘It’s OK, Duncan. Really it is. It’s not her. She hasn’t come back. There is no way on earth that she could come back. Not after everything we did.’
‘You’re right,’ he said. He seemed relieved, as though my word was law. ‘And you won’t mention any of this to Lu?’
‘Don’t be daft. She’d get us locked up.’
He forced a smile. ‘See you,’ he said. He went out, and I heard Lulu saying something as the office door opened. Then it closed again, and the sounds of the outside world were cut off, and I was left alone with my thoughts. I finished that second cigarette, and promptly lit another one. I reckoned I had every right to chain-smoke. My cigarette hand was shaking. The more I tried to hold it steady, the more it shook. I stared at it detachedly. It belonged to someone else.