Declan Hughes: The Color of Blood

WHEN SHANE HOWARD SAID HIS WIFE WAS WAITING IN the house, it turned out he didn’t mean the house we were in: that was only used as a dental surgery these days. Anita directed me downstairs through a stone-floored kitchen piled with boxes of drug company samples and calendars and laundered white tunics and out into a sodden, half-wild back garden. Through the thickening mist, I walked along another damp cobbled path flanked by rowan trees until I came to a dark green marble pond about fifteen feet in diameter. The low walls formed a hexagon, and each side and angle was inlaid with a greenish crystal flecked with red the size of a child’s fist. Orange and yellow leaves floated on the surface of the cloudy water. The whole thing looked beautiful and grave and strange, like a memorial without a dedication, and I wondered what its purpose was, what puzzle it was asking me to solve. Then I reflected that a downside of my job was the habit of searching for mysteries where there were none; sometimes a pond is just a pond.

At the bottom of the garden a tongue-and-groove door in a whitewashed roughcast stone wall opened into the garden of what Anita had rather loftily called “Howard residence.” (Anita had also scrupulously avoided mentioning Mrs. Howard by name.) Howard residence was a seventies-style L-shaped dormer bungalow with great floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. The garden was tended to within an inch of its life, with snooker table lawns and tightly sheared borders of bay and box. At the front of the house, a black Porsche lurked on the gravel drive, sleek and feline; the garden there dropped steeply to another white stone wall, shielded by a row of mature eucalyptus; a hundred feet below the wall, the railway tracks vanished into a tunnel; beyond that, a shroud of grey where the sea spread out toward the sky. What sounded like gunshots snapped in the damp air, and then the crackle and hiss of fireworks sparkled through the gloom, and I remembered it was Halloween. I rang the doorbell and Jessica Howard answered it and led me into a room the depth of the house with walls of glass back and front.

Jessica Howard was maybe a little too blond for her age, and the skirt of her dark suit was maybe a little too short, and another woman mightn’t have worn heels so high or a top cut so low or perfume so musky, not this early in the morning, or at all, but another woman might have looked tarty, or cheap, or desperate, and Jessica Howard didn’t: she looked bold and direct and careless. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me at first; then again, I wasn’t another woman. While she made coffee I looked around the room, which was sparsely furnished with a couple of long couches and a round glass table with four metal chairs. On the walls, there were framed posters advertising theatrical productions: Juno and the Paycock at the Abbey, An Ideal Husband at the Gate, Shopping and Fucking at the Project. Above the fireplace, two photographs hung: one showed a younger version of Mrs. Howard in Restoration costume with cleavage fit to bust; in the other, she sat naked on a rug with her back to the camera, her head turned around to smile, heavy-lidded, into the lens. Between them, a portrait of the lady in pop art oils, big-haired and glowing like a trophy bride. I began to see where at least some of Emily’s anger might have come from.

Jessica Howard brought a tray with a pot of coffee, a jug of hot milk and two mugs to the table, and I joined her there. She offered me a cigarette, which I gladly accepted, poured coffee, which I took black, blew a fine jet of smoke toward the ceiling and smiled at me. I shifted in my seat and said, “Mrs. Howard-”

“Jessica. Call me Jessica. And I can call you Ed, can’t I?”

I said she could. Her blue eyes flickered, as if registering a victory, and I noticed how cold they were; the sex that animated every curve of her body didn’t seem to touch her soul.

“Well, Ed, did my husband manage to tell you anything of worth-in between banging on his desk and shouting his head off?”

“He gave me the basic outline,” I said, laying the photographs and the note on the table between us. She leafed through the shots, shaking her head and sighing heavily, but her dismay seemed more aesthetic than maternal.

“That hair is such a mistake,” she said. “Not to mention the tattoo and the piercings. Emily has a good body and fine features, but she seems determined to make the worst of herself. Still, if these photos do end up on the Internet, the consolation is, no one will ever recognize her.”

“Provided she reverts to being an orange-faced south county Dublin blonde,” I said. “Maybe she’s frightened no one will ever distinguish her either.”

“Not everyone can stand out from the crowd,” Jessica Howard said. “Now, what do you need from me? I have to show a house later this morning.”

“I thought you were an actress.”

“So did I. Not enough people agreed. Of course, when theatrical fashion swings toward the more homely type, one begins to feel foolish for having hung on to one’s looks. And sometimes, sleeping with all one’s directors can be as bad for one’s career as sleeping with none of them. But that’s the way it goes. And selling houses in the current market is like catching money in a bag-not a comparison one could ever make with working in the theater.”

She smiled and passed the photographs of her daughter back to me, taking care to brush her hand against mine as she did so. She licked her lips and widened her eyes in a “what are we going to do next?” kind of way. I tried not to take her flirting personally, but I was the only man in the room, and I was a man, and I still hadn’t had any gin.

“You don’t seem too anxious about what’s happened to your daughter, Mrs. Howard,” I said. Jessica Howard didn’t exactly roll her eyes, but she came close.

“Do you know what’s actually happened to Emily? I don’t,” she said. “Shane wants to keep treating her like a child. She’s nineteen years old, for Christ’s sake. When I was nineteen, I was living in Paris with my boyfriend, I’d had an affair with a married man, an abortion, I’d taken cocaine, acid, heroin, I’d had any number of threesomes,” she boasted, gesturing dismissively toward the photographs of her daughter, as if they presented some kind of threat, as if mother and daughter were rivals. Maybe they were.

“And would you wish all of that for your daughter?” I said. My voice rang pinched and priggish in my ears, but I intended the reproof.

“What I’d wish for her is that she’d get out into the world and live. And it looks like, at last, that’s what she’s doing.”

“Your husband believes she’s being held against her will, that she was forced to have sex on camera-that’s abduction and rape, Mrs. Howard.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. I think this is some scheme the girl’s dreamt up to squeeze more money out of Shane. And to give him two fingers as well, let him know she’s not Daddy’s little girl anymore. That’s what I would do if I were she.”

“Why would Emily need to blackmail your husband? Surely he’s always given her whatever she wants?”

“Only as long as she does what he wants. That’s the Howard family motto: do what we want and we’ll tolerate you. The code of the Howards.”

She drew hard on her cigarette and exhaled in a long sigh of rancor and discontent.

“They wanted me to give up my career when we had Emily. Sandra, and the mother. Said it was unfair to the baby, and to Shane, who had his rugby and was building the surgery and needed support at home.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said Shane wouldn’t have married some frau whose only ambition was to raise his children and keep his house, and I had no intention of turning into one. In retrospect, I think that’s precisely what Shane did want. But he didn’t get it. His mother hated me. Always had, hated me even more then. Wouldn’t even come to see me onstage, not once in twelve years.”