Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

‘I’m not blaming you, Louise. I was too young. I don’t remember enough of those times. I grew up in an orphanage. OK, it wasn’t that bad.’

‘Where was Bernadette?’

‘She came back from Paris when the north took over Saigon.’

‘And she left you in the orphanage?’

Nan Luc shrugged. ‘She knew I was there. I wouldn’t expect her to have wanted me out.’

‘We’re in America now. Forget the past, Nan. It can ruin you.’

The silence in the room hung heavily. Through the door voices from the reception area came in waves of bird-like chatter. From where Nan Luc sat she could see a police patrol car bump across the rubble-strewn grass to pull up outside the tenement blocks opposite.

‘Why did you come?’ Louise broke the silence. ‘You live in California. San Diego. You didn’t come all the way to New York to look up your mother’s sister, someone you barely remember.’

‘I came to ask you about my father.’ She watched her aunt’s eyes. ‘There’s no one else I can ask.’

‘I never knew your father,’ Louise said. ‘You were already three or four years old when your mother found me at the Eros. I hadn’t seen her for five or six years since we all left Hanoi.’ She stood stiffly, her back to the window of her office. Behind her head Nan Luc could see the grey layer of cloud hanging over a line of broken tenements.

‘But you know who my father was.’ She shook her head. ‘His name, at least.’

‘I know nothing, Nan Luc,’ Louise said, facing her with finality. ‘Your mother was my elder sister, four or five years older. Most of the time we were apart. In any case she was different from me. She kept her own secrets. You don’t understand perhaps. She wasn’t like the rest of us. People respected her. They knew better than to ask Pham questions like that. As far as we all knew you never had a father.’

Nan came forward. ‘Let’s go out and get coffee somewhere, Louise,’ she said. ‘There are things I must know.’

‘Some other time, Nan Luc. When you’re next in New York maybe.’ She pointed to the outer office. ‘You can see what it’s like out there. People need help, attention, advice. I’ve no time for coffee.’

‘You’re afraid, Louise,’ Nan Luc said. ‘What of?’

Louise was shaking her head. ‘Listen, Nan Luc,’ she said, her voice rising, ‘try to understand. The past could ruin me. If my husband guessed I’d worked a bar…’ Nan Luc watched her silently. ‘It was the times, Nan,’ Louise said. ‘Everybody was crazy. Crazy for sex, drugs, drink, blood. Times when soldiers went about with peace bandannas round their helmets and used their rifle barrels for smoking dope.’

Nan Luc came forward and stood opposite her aunt, her clear green eyes dramatic in a frame of dark hair. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that you have no father. We were all at constant risk of pregnancy. Yes, even your mother. GIs passed through. Any girl could get pregnant and never know who…’

‘My mother too, you say?’

‘For God’s sake,’ Louise said wildly, ‘try to understand what I’m saying. I’m still Vietnamese enough to remember what a family, a father, should mean. But it’s too late, Nan. You’ll never find your father. His name died with your mother. It’s as if he doesn’t exist.’

Outside, behind Louise’s head, a group of young black boys came racing down the concrete staircase of one of the tenements and burst out across the vacant lot. Behind them two uniformed policemen gave up the pursuit and stood on the bottom steps staring after the disappearing boys before climbing into their car.

Louise began to gather things from her desk drawers, her head down, refusing to look at her niece, aware of the younger woman’s intimidating silence. ‘I have work to do, Nan,’ she said. She brought her head up. ‘I’ve nothing more to tell you.’

‘Bernadette knew him.’ Nan’s voice was harsh. ‘She said he was an American named Stevenson.’ Louise recoiled in shock. Pencils and a spiral notepad spilled from her hands and rattled on the desktop. Nan watched her as Louise fought to suppress the fear in her face. ‘You knew him too, Louise. You knew he was no passing GI.’

Louise rounded the desk and pulled open the door. ‘Get out of my life, Nan Luc,’ her voice rose in panic. Heads in the outer room turned towards the door. ‘I want nothing more to do with the past. People scratch about in the past, they always find things they’re better off not knowing. You want a family, go back to your rich husband in California and make one of your own!’

Chapter Thirty-Three

The big rooms of the Belgravia apartment were suddenly almost empty of people. Standing at the door Max shook hands with old friends of his mother, people barely known to him, men and women in late middle-age, dressed in expensive black. It had been, he reflected, an occasion which had brought out the crepe de Chine, the jet Victorian mourning jewellery.

He closed the door on the last mourners. A butler and two maids hired for the occasion were already clearing glasses and sherry bottles from the drawing room. Max looked at his watch. His taxi to London Airport would arrive in less than half an hour.

Taking a drink with him he went into his mother’s bedroom where he had left his duffel bag. Quickly he changed out of his dark suit and into light slacks and a leather jacket. On the bed lay his black topcoat. It would be cold in New York this time of year.

Ever since he had spoken to Ottenshaw his mind had operated on two separate levels. On one level he had gone through the offered condolences and the grim drive to Putney Vale Crematorium in a black limousine at the head of a column of other black limousines. On the other level his consciousness was totally occupied with the fact that Nan Luc was still alive. It was a fact that he couldn’t dismiss from his mind for a moment, couldn’t even push entirely to the back of his mind as the cortege swept through the stone-capped gates of Putney Vale.

In the last hour, greeting near strangers, thanking them for coming, he had acted like a robot, but a robot always aware of the ticket to New York tucked into his passport in his briefcase. And the single piece of information (apart from the details of the preposterous accusation) that Ottenshaw had been able to give him: the name of Nan Luc’s guarantor in the United States, Commodore Edward P. Brompton, of San Diego, California.

He took his drink and sipped it as he looked around the room. He felt himself to be on the edge of a new life with Nan Luc, time to pack off to the auction rooms all these dozens of expensive trinkets, miniature bronzes and porcelain figures. It all represented a style of life he had never been comfortable with, a style which had divided him from his mother since his early teens.

As the butler’s staff rattled the dishes in the main part of the flat his mind moved to his father and the curious feeling that he had found out now all there was to know, by the simple fact of the death of everybody who had anything to tell.

He took another pull at his drink. It was a huge old room, crammed with furniture. All these cupboards and drawers and bureaux and secretaires would have to be cleared, his mother’s clothes disposed of, her jewellery sorted, her papers read. Looking from locked drawer to locked drawer it had seemed a monstrous invasion to use the bunch of keys she had pressed into his hand the morning of her death. The keys lay on her writing table now. He picked them up, juggling them in the palm of his hand.

He checked his watch. Still fifteen minutes before the cab arrived. He walked across to the secretaire, sipping his drink as he poked first one and then another key into the lock. The third key lifted a lever within the lock and turned it in a smooth, oiled two-hundred-year-old movement. He opened the desk. A bank of perfectly made mahogany drawers faced him, each containing some minor privacy in his mother’s life.