Brian Freemantle: Two Women

‘I don’t ever remember you like this!’

‘Trying to sort out one or two things in my mind. Making choices.’

‘Involving me?’ she asked, with coquettish confidence.

‘You know the answer to that.’ He smiled back, trying to match her lightness. There was no feeling of hypocrisy or guilt, both of which he’d long ago rationalized, as he had all the uncertainties about morality.

John Carver was not a promiscuous man: indeed, he’d sometimes considered himself undersexed. His affair with Alice was his first and he was sure it would be his last. And hopefully lasting. He’d never consciously set out to seduce Alice Belling, nor she him. George Northcote had introduced them when Alice had come for the first interview session and he’d asked Carver to handle any subsequent questions, which he did on three occasions, twice over lunch. The fourth occasion, at her apartment on the West Side, had been to read the finished article, which was immaculately factual and in his opinion brilliantly written, which he told her, and her intended joking kiss of gratitude had become something more when he’d inadvertently turned towards her. She’d said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and he’d said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and they’d kissed again, intentionally this time, and after they’d made love they’d solemnly agreed it was one of those unexpected, accidental things that had been wonderful and should be immediately forgotten. He’d telephoned the following day and they’d lunched together and gone to bed together and the excitement – the flattery – of his first sexual dalliance had become a deeply loving affair.

Which was what it was. Quite simply he loved two women, neither of whom were endangered by the other. Carver would never leave Jane. Nor did he want – nor intend – ever to leave Alice. If their relationship ended it would be Alice’s decision – which she insisted she’d never make – and if she did he knew he would consider it an unsought and very much unwanted divorce. The word – divorce – lodged in his mind, refocusing it. Carver was sure Jane loved him as much as she was able: as she ever would. Maybe, even, that there would be love – bruised, wounded, but still some love – if Jane ever learned about him and Alice. But he was equally sure – surer even – she wouldn’t be able to love him, stay married to him, if he were responsible for publicly ruining and humiliating a father she adored. At once the conviction that Jane would reject him overwhelmed his fear of what effect any disclosure would have upon the firm and even more upon him, personally.

‘It must be important, for you to be like this?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, not knowing what else to say.

‘You want to tell me about it?’

‘I’ve gotten things out of proportion,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s what I meant about making choices, which wasn’t it at all. I’m trying to balance things.’ He never compared Jane with Alice or Alice with Jane, because they were incomparable, but physically they were remarkably similar, except for the most obvious difference of Jane being naturally deep brunette against Alice’s blondness, again natural. There was nothing to choose – a wrong word because he would never choose – between them in height nor in their small-busted slimness.

The difference was in their personalities: their imbued motivations. Jane had always been cared for: cosseted, accustomed from childhood to the best, although she had by no judgement or criticism – certainly not by him – grown from a spoiled child into a spoiled woman. Jane was someone grateful of her privileged upbringing, recognizing her advantages and working always to give back. Which she did sometimes with an almost relentless determination better fitted to a business environment than a charity organizer: indeed, Carver had occasionally wondered why Northcote had not groomed Jane to take over the firm upon his retirement. Carver’s reflection stopped at the thought. Knowing what little he did now about George Northcote’s criminal involvement was the most likely answer to that uncertainty.

Alice’s character had come from a similar but cracked mould. As far as Carver understood, although it was not a biography he’d deeply explored, her parents had at one time – briefly – been even richer and she more indulgently cared for than Jane. But her father had been a bull-and-bear-market gambler whose fortunes appropriately rose and fell upon his prediction of which way the market would go. His disastrously misplaced switch, between bull and bear when the markets were going in the opposite direction – and not reversing, when he’d further invested in the expectation that they would – financially ruined Alice’s family. Alice was left with a suicide note of apology, a final year at Harvard Business School, a roller coaster personal awareness that money was a buy-or-sell marketable commodity, not the green stuff in her purse, and a street savvy to invest her way extremely comfortably to her graduation ceremony. Unrecorded upon that graduation certificate – although an indication, perhaps, of how successfully she would later pursue her chosen heads-or-tails career – was that Alice Belling was not just a woman totally emancipated in mind, body and attitude but more inherently streetwise than her finally unable-to-cope father.

‘Hello, again!’

Shit, thought Carver. ‘It’s not my best night, is it?’

‘Is it a big problem, whatever it is?’

‘I don’t bring work home, remember?’ That wasn’t even true.

‘You just did.’

‘Let’s forget it, Jane.’

She looked surprised at the tone in his voice. ‘It’s nothing to do with us, is it?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’ He should have handled everything better than this!

‘Did you see Dad today?’

‘Briefly.’

‘He’s going back up to Litchfield tomorrow.’

‘I know.’ It had been Jane’s urging that they buy a weekend house less than five miles from her father in Litchfield County, both close to Woodridge Lake.

‘I thought I might drive up with him, for company.’

‘Why don’t you do that?’

Manuel came enquiringly into the dining room and Jane said to Carver: ‘Do you want anything else? Dessert?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m full.’

‘That’s a lie, but OK.’ To the butler she said: ‘After you’ve cleared away we shan’t need you any more tonight. Thank you. Tell Luisa it was a wonderful meal, as usual. But we weren’t hungry.’ Neither Manuel nor his wife, who cooked, lived in.

‘Den or where?’ she asked Carver.

‘Den,’ he decided, following her along the linking corridor. The eight-room duplex on East 62nd Street had been her father’s wedding present.

‘You want a brandy?’

‘No thanks.’

‘I’m worried about Dad,’ she announced.

‘Worried how?’

‘So often losing the thread of what he’s saying. That’s why I want to go up with him tomorrow: persuade him to see Dr Jamieson.’

‘It’ll take some persuading.’

‘I want you to help me.’

‘How?’

‘I want him to stop work. Completely. That’ll be twice as difficult as getting him to see a doctor. But I’m asking you to try.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Carver. ‘I really will.’

Stanley Burcher was unique and knew it and was not concerned that no one else ever would, because fame – or rather notoriety – held no interest for him. The total opposite, in fact. Stanley Burcher prided himself upon being the person no one ever saw or noticed. He was a totally asexual bachelor whose only sensuality came from his association with the people for whom he practised and the knowledge of their criminality. Total evilness – and the people he acted for in such an unusual way were totally evil – fascinated him, as anthropologists are fascinated by unknown species. Which Burcher recognized himself to be too, because he was not revulsed by anything they did. Burcher maintained a small house on the unfashionable north side of Grand Cayman, in the Caribbean, and a box-numbered office in the capital, Georgetown, because Grand Cayman was the tax-avoidance haven in which the people he represented hid their vast fortunes. However, he lived for the majority of the time in distinguished but discreet hotels throughout the world, ensuring that the affairs of his exclusive clients never attracted public attention, most particularly from any law-enforcement authority.