Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

Not me, not any woman, just some man he could be totally honest with.”

“Friends are harder to find than lovers,” I said.

“Do you have friends, Nick?”

“Yes.” I thought about it for a second. “Lots.”

“He doesn’t. Nor do I, really. So, yes, I’ll marry him because it will make me feel safe.”

“Safe?”

Angela raised her face and kissed my cheek. “Safe.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m tired of being chased by men. Now, because people know that I belong to Tony, they don’t try.”

“Belong?”

“He’s very possessive.” She said it in a slightly apologetic tone, then lay staring at the ceiling for a moment. “He wants me to give up my job if we marry.”

“Would you?”

“It wouldn’t be fair to other people if I didn’t, would it? I mean, they’d say I got all the best jobs because I was Tony’s wife.” I reflected that people must already be thinking that, wedding ring or no.

She shrugged. “And I’d never have any more money worries, would I? And I’d get this house, and I could see you whenever you sailed Sycorax back to the wharf. That wouldn’t be bad, would it?” It was a long way, I thought, from a semi-detached Baptist minister’s house in the Midlands to a mansion above a Devon river. “It might not be bad,” I said, “but would it be good?”

“That’s a romantic’s question.”

“I’m a romantic. I’m in love with love.”

“More fool you.” She wriggled herself into comfort against me as the wind slapped rain at the window. It was a north wind and I imagined the small yachts beating hard towards shelter through the bucking waves at the river’s bar. Angela was still thinking of love and its dishonest shifts. “Tony isn’t faithful to me, but I’m not to him any longer, am I?”

“Would he be angry about this?”

She nodded. “He’d be horribly angry. And hurt. He’s unfaithful to me all the time, but he never thinks that it might hurt me.” She shrugged. “He has a terrible pride. Terrible. That’s why I think he might ask me to marry him.”

“Because he thinks you’ll stay faithful to him?”

“And because I’m decorative.” She twisted her head to see if I thought her immodest.

I kissed her forehead. “You’re very decorative. The very first moment that I saw you, I thought how decorative you were. It was lust at first sight.”

“Was it?” She surprised me by sounding surprised.

“Yes,” I said gently. “It was.”

She smiled. “You were very gaunt and frightening. I remember being very defensive. I didn’t think I was going to like you, and I was sure you were going to hate me.”

“I was just fancying you,” I said, “but I was nervous of you. I thought television people would be much too clever and glamorous.”

“We are,” she said with a smile, then went back to thinking about Bannister. “It’s very important to Tony to have a beautiful wife. It’s like his car or house, you see; something to impress other people with. And it helps in the business, too.”

“What happens if he wants to trade the wife in for a younger model?”

“Alimony,” she said too swiftly, “is a girl’s best friend.” We lay in silence for a long while. I heard an outboard on the river as someone made a dash through the rain towards the pub. Angela fell lightly asleep. Her mouth was just open and her breath stirred a wisp of her pale hair. I thought she looked very young and innocent as she lay in my arms. All the tense anger had leached out of her face in this afternoon; as if by coming to bed we had stopped fighting some foul gale and just let ourselves run before the wind. I kissed her warm skin, and the kiss woke her. She blinked at me, recognition came to her eyes, and a smile followed. She returned my kiss. “Tell me about you,” she said.

“I thought you were making a film about me. Don’t you know everything already?”

“I don’t know whether you’re in love with Jill-Beth Kirov.” The suddenness of the question surprised me. In this new happiness I’d clean forgotten that I’d only just returned from America.

“I’m not in love with her.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

Angela propped herself up on an elbow. “Did you fall out of love with her in these last few days?”

“I didn’t…” I stopped. I had been about to say I had not met Jill-Beth, but I did not want to lie to Angela. Not now. Lies twist life out of true, and this afternoon I’d found something that I wanted to be very true.

Angela was pleased with herself. “You’d be amazed how co-operative people are to television companies. Airlines aren’t supposed to reveal who’s on their passenger lists, but when you say you’re from the telly and that it’s terribly important to find Mr Sandman who’s flown to the States without his script, they do help. And Dallas, Nick, is a very, very long way from Boston. Or it was the last time I was in America. Has it moved?”

I smiled. “I thought I was being very clever.”

“Fooling you, Nick Sandman, is like taking candy off a very dumb baby.” She rolled away from me, lit another cigarette, and came back to my side of the bed. She lay on her belly, propped herself on her elbows, and blew smoke at my face. “So?”

I nodded. “I fell out of love with her in these last few days.”

“Did you go to bed with her?”

“No.”

She looked pensive. “You would say that, wouldn’t you? Being a gentleman.”

“Yes, I would. But I didn’t.”

“I’m glad.” She ducked her head and kissed me. “Will you be in love with me now?”

“Probably.”

“Only probably?”

I raised my head and kissed her. “Undoubtedly.”

“Silly Nick.” She laid her head on my chest, and I felt the heat of the cigarette as she drew on it. “Did you fly to America to go to bed with her?”

“No. Yes. She wanted to see me, but I wanted to go to bed with her.”

“Did you pay the air fare?”

“No.”

Angela laughed. “It would have been an expensive non-fuck if you had. Did she want to see you about the St Pierre?”

“Yes.” I suddenly wondered if this was a clever Bannister trick to make me confess all. Angela must have instinctively felt my fear, for she lifted her face and looked into my eyes.

“I didn’t tell anyone where you were, Nick.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want to finish the film.” She drew on the cigarette.

“Are they going to sabotage Wildtrack? ” I didn’t answer and she pulled away from me. “Did you meet Yassir Kassouli?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think of him?”

“Very impressive, very powerful, horribly rich, very obsessed, and quite possibly a touch mad.”

She smiled, then rolled over and sat up with her ankles crossed in front of her. She put an ashtray on the sheet and tapped her cigarette into it. Her naked body looked uncannily like Melissa’s, very thin and pale and supple. If love was a thing of lust, then I was already lost. “Kassouli’s always hated Tony,” she said. “He hated him for taking his daughter away. He thought Nadeznha had married beneath herself. She married him on the rebound, I think. That’s what Tony says, anyway.”

“Were they happy?”

Angela shook her head. “Not especially. But not especially unhappy either. But Kassouli didn’t help. He used to visit them all the time. Nothing was too good for his darling Nadeznha. He made them buy this house and insisted they put the pool in for him. He was always here, nagging her to go home.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“Nadeznha always did just what Nadeznha wanted.” I heard the dislike in Angela’s voice. “She quite liked queening it in England.