Питер Робинсон - No Cure for Love

“Well,” said Paula, “I must say it’s a big improvement on the last time.”

“What is?”

“Don’t you remember? The make-up, the frizzy hair, the leather?”

Sarah laughed. “Oh. Yes, of course.” She didn’t remember, though, which was hardly surprising given the condition she had been in during her last visit home. That was before California, before the U.S. tour with Gary and his band, but it wasn’t before the drugs and the drinking; though she hadn’t recognized it immediately, the craziness had already begun. She didn’t remember anything very clearly about that period of her life. Nor did she wish to.

This time she was wearing stonewashed jeans and a red sweatshirt, carrying her quilted down coat of many colors over her arm, and her blond hair was trimmed neat and short. She also wore no makeup, a real treat after having the stuff plastered on every day at the studio.

“Mind you,” Paula went on. “You could do with putting a bit of meat on your bones. Have you been slimming and going to one of them health club places like they do in Hollywood?”

Sarah laughed. “I run every morning on the beach, but that’s about all.” In fact, only yesterday morning I stumbled across a dismembered body, she almost added, but stopped herself in time. No point getting into that with Paula. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s illegal to sell fatty foods in California.”

“Is it?”

“Only kidding. Though sometimes you’d think so.”

“Well, you looked a bit better padded last time I saw you on television. How long ago did you make that programme?”

“Not long. Television puts at least ten pounds on you, didn’t you know that?”

“How would I? I’ve never been on telly. I’m not the star in the family.”

“I just thought people knew, that’s all,” Sarah said. “Anyway, I hope I don’t look that fat on the series.”

“I didn’t say fat did I? Just a bit better padded.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Anyway, I suppose you look healthy enough,” Paula went on. “Though for the life of me, I can’t see where you’re hiding your tan.”

“Which way?”

Paula pointed and Sarah started pushing the cart through the throng. “I don’t tan well,” she said. “I never did. You know that. The sun just burns me.” Besides, she might have added, the studio prefers my “porcelain’ complexion; they say it goes with the plummy Brit accent.

“Well, pardon me for mentioning it.”

Sarah laughed. Same old Paula, prickly as a cactus, quick to take offense when none was intended.

Finally, they arrived at the car park and found the red Nissan.

“Unless you’ve learned to drive since you were last here, love,” Paula said, “I’d try the other side.”

Sarah blushed. “Sorry.” She’d gone automatically to the driver’s side. She got in the correct side and fastened her seat belt. “How was the drive over?” she asked.

Paula lit a cigarette and breathed a sigh of relief. “Not bad. Roadworks near Barton bridge and an accident just past Huddersfield, but other than that... ” She negotiated her way out of the car park, refusing Sarah’s offer of money to pay the man in the booth, and headed for the motorway. “It’s a bloody maze round here,” she muttered.

The car felt cramped and tinny to Sarah after Stuart’s gigantic hunk of Detroit steel. She wriggled around in the seat to get comfortable, but still the roof was too near to her head and the windshield too close to her face. Cars made her more nervous than planes, which was one reason why she had never learned to drive. The smoke made her cough.

“All right?” Paula cast her a sideways glance.

“Yes, fine.”

“I’ll open the window if you want.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“Really. I don’t mind. It’s no trouble.”

“Well, maybe just an inch or so.”

Paula opened the window a crack and pretended to shiver. The draft blew the smoke right into Sarah’s face.

“Shit!” Paula missed a turning and went around the roundabout again. Sarah thought of the little roundabout in Venice, one of the few she had seen in the United States. She felt a momentary pang of homesickness for her beach house. It was the only place where she had felt truly at home in years, perhaps because it was where she had started putting her life back together after Gary.

But thinking of the house also brought to mind a fleeting image of the severed arm and the heart in the sand. Then she remembered the letter she had slipped in her luggage, unopened. She had found it when she dropped by the house with Stuart to pack — at the last minute, as usual — before going to the airport.

She looked out of the window and saw a local diesel train rattling along beside a canal. Two boys stood on the stone banks leaning over the water with fishing nets. She doubted they had much hope of catching anything there in December, mild as it was. A yellow sign showing a man digging with a shovel appeared by the side of the road, then another. Soon the motorway was reduced to two lanes and they were crawling along between a silver Peugeot and a juggernaut from Barcelona. But there were no men digging with shovels.

Only when they had left the Manchester conurbation behind did Paula seem to relax at all. She still sat hunched forward in her seat, though, gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white and squinting at the road and the cars ahead as if they were some sort of malevolent entities bent on her destruction. She doesn’t like driving, Sarah realized. It must run in the family. Her father and mother, she remembered, had never owned or driven a car in their lives.

Soon the Pennines loomed ahead, furry green hillsides made eerie by mist swirling on their lower slopes.

There was still plenty of traffic on the roadway as it passed through the grimy urban sprawl around Rochdale and Oldham, but the cars thinned out as it climbed a long, slow hill and cut a swath through the Pennines.

All around, sheep grazed and becks and streams trickled through deep clefts in the dark green hillsides, flashing in the winter sun. They passed lonely barns, hamlets, small stone bridges, a reservoir. At one point the roadway got so high up that Sarah’s ears went funny like they did on the plane. She yawned.

Paula glanced sideways again. “Tired? You’re quite a hit over here, you know. There’ll be plenty of people in the village wanting your autograph. Just thought I’d warn you. You probably get enough of that over there.” She jerked her head back, indicating the Atlantic.

“Not really,” Sarah said. “Hardly at all, in fact.” In the first flush of her television success, Sarah had worried about people recognizing her and approaching her in public places. She dreaded living the kind of life Elvis Presley had, for example, imprisoned in Graceland, having to hire a whole movie theater just to see a film, or an entire fairground to go on one ride, always surrounded by bodyguards.

But after a while, she had learned a very interesting thing: people tended not to recognize her unless she went out of her way to be noticed. As herself, she could walk along the street, shop in the Beverly Center, or browse along Rodeo Drive, and nobody came up demanding autographs.

On the other hand, if she dressed more like Anita O’Rourke, then people spotted her immediately. Most of the time she went around in jeans, a T-shirt and a Dodgers cap. Even the detective she talked to at the beach hadn’t recognized her at first.

Again, she thought of the letters and the body in the sand. She remembered the touch of the hand, cold and stiff like a broken marble statue, and then the dark blood clotted with sand. There had been a body, she couldn’t deny that, but it had nothing to do with her. When she went back there with the police, the heart had gone. She had been under so much stress she must have started seeing things, she told herself.