Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

Jason Rose stood as she approached and stretched his hand. Only then, by the slightest miscalculation of direction did she realise he was blind. He smiled as the chair was drawn out for her. ‘You’re very quick, Mrs Brompton. I can usually fool most people for five minutes or so. It’s a sort of childish game,’ he added dismissively.

‘It was good of you to ask me here, Mr Rose,’ she said sitting down.

‘Pure selfishness,’ he assured her. ‘When you told me you’d lived in Vietnam up to last year I saw my opportunity to find out what’s going on in a land I loved. There are tourists now of course but I suspect that’s not really for me.’ She watched him move easily into his chair opposite her.

‘You were wounded there?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Along with many, many others on both sides. First let’s have some tea. Then we can tackle your questions. And then mine.’

From the attitude of waiters and passing members, Nan Luc quickly came to understand that Jason Rose was well liked in the Meyerick Club. The tea he ordered was overseen by Vic Impari himself.

‘So what can I do to help?’ Jason asked. ‘I can call you Nan Luc, can’t I?’

‘Of course.’

‘The girl at the fund office said you were looking for information.’

‘In the US evacuation I was left behind,’ Nan said carefully. ‘My mother was already dead and my American father somehow lost me. I was barely seven years old at the time. The truth is, I don’t remember it that clearly.’ She was throbbing with excitement, trying to keep her voice as flat and calm as she could. But she was certain that she was at the end, or very nearly, at the end of her search. Certain that her father was known to this young man, perhaps even well known.

She knew now that she must make no mistake. She had planned this moment carefully, trimming the story she was prepared to tell Jason Rose. Her plan was to leave herself at the end of the meeting knowing where her father was to be found, without allowing Jason enough information to believe she knew. Certainly without allowing him to guess why she wanted to trace her father. Above all, she didn’t want him warned in advance.

‘My difficulty,’ Nan Luc said, ‘is that living in an orphanage in Saigon just after the war we weren’t encouraged to dream about an American parent or use his name. By the time I was eight my memory of the name had been wiped.’

‘I can understand that. How can I help?’

‘You’re membership secretary of the Meyerick Fund.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been making enquiries since I’ve been in the United States,’ Nan Luc said. ‘Someone who believes he met my father once or twice in Vietnam tells me that, years later, he heard of him here in Meyerick, in connection with the fund.’

‘He didn’t have a name to give you?’

‘No, it was some years ago. And just a casual meeting.’

‘Your friend couldn’t say what the connection was between the fund and your father?’

‘He was said to be a member.’

‘Without a name, that doesn’t give us much to go on.’

‘I thought perhaps if I could look at your membership list, the name might come back to me.’

‘Is that likely?’ Jason said, carefully locating his wine and lifting the glass. ‘We have three thousand full members and associates. Do you think a name could come floating back just like that, after fifteen years or so?’

‘It looks like my only chance.’

‘I’m intrigued,’ he said. ‘A search for a missing father. I like it.’ He paused, smiling. ‘But, you’ll forgive me for asking you. Will he?’

‘You mean he might already have a family.’

‘He might have had a family all along, Nan Luc.’

‘I don’t plan to rush into the middle of a ready made family waving my arms crying, Here I am!’

‘I’m sure not.’

‘But you would still prefer not to give me the list.’

He thought for a moment. ‘No. I think you have the right to find your father. I know a little about Vietnam. I know how important it can be.’

‘Does that mean you’ll show me the list?’

He hesitated for only a moment longer. ‘I can show you the regular membership list off my own bat. To let you have sight of the contributors list is a different problem. To do that I would have to have permission…’ he gestured over his shoulder to one of the line of portraits, ‘from our president, Cy Stevenson.’

Cy Stevenson. The name hit her like a thunderbolt. ‘Cy Stevenson,’ she said.

His sightless eyes turned towards her. ‘He’s the man in the portrait next to old Joshua Meyerick. Third portrait along, isn’t it?’

Nan looked up at the picture. A man with blond, brushed hair, his eyes metallic blue, a good-looking combination of Slav cheekbones and a long Scandinavian jaw, stared down at her, arrogant, not humourless, but with a humour of his own, for defence against the world.

She had stood up without being aware of it. She heard Jason say something, but no words registered. The room seemed to be in movement but the frame enclosing the picture was completely still. She couldn’t trust herself to speak. She reached for the edge of the table and gripped a handful of cloth. She could scream with hate. She could propel her frozen limbs forward and tear at the confident air that came off the canvas, gouge at those cold, smiling eyes. She could feel madness rising in her.

Jason Rose’s hand was on her wrist. ‘Sit down, Nan Luc,’ he said. She sat down, exhausted by the shock wave of feeling.

‘We have to talk,’ Jason said. She was silent. ‘Drive me to my house,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk there.’

She nodded, working the dryness from her mouth.

They stood up. With one arm round her shoulder Jason gently turned her towards the door. ‘You finally found him,’ he said.

The words came. ‘Yes,’ Nan Luc looked back towards the portrait, ‘I finally found my father.’

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was as old an American house as Nan Luc had ever seen. In the early evening light it was dominated by a dark horror film gable and at ground level a wide Gothic arch set off to one side signalled the oddly placed front door.

Lights shone in ground floor windows and in the stone porch itself as Nan Luc and Jason got out of her hired car and walked towards the front door.

A woman stood in the porch, a tall grey-haired woman with a face that was less hard than unrelenting. Somewhere, Nan thought to herself as she shook hands with Mrs Rose, there was a softer persona imprisoned in that rigid, straight-backed body.

‘You know, of course,’ Mrs Rose said, ‘that the Meyerick Fund is pretty much a Rose family affair. My late husband was the founder. I was the first appointed trustee and now Jason works full time on fund raising and membership drives.’

They were walking along a wide first floor gallery, the walls panelled in oak and set with mullioned and leaded windows.

Mrs Rose gestured towards a meticulously constructed model of Meyerick City at the turn of the century which covered the surface of an enormous Victorian table. ‘When I came to Meyerick as a girl…’ Nan watched Jason’s face assume a patient expression. ‘…the warehouses were full of down-river grain and up-river manufactures. Now what are they? Lofts for Wall Street yuppies and national insurance company offices.’

‘The fund’s offices are in one of them,’ Jason reminded her.

‘Cy Stevenson’s choice,’ she conceded. ‘At least he was smart enough to buy it for the fund before the city developers could lay their hands on it.’ They walked on.

‘My husband and I were very much involved in the fate of the Vietnamese people during the war,’ she said. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Mrs Brompton, we were not marchers or protesters. Far from it. We were staunch patriots who simply saw, felt if you wish, the sufferings of a trapped civilian population.’