Pearls Read online

  Her office was in Pall Mall, on the sixth floor, high above the gentlemen’s clubs and the traffic.

  ‘Any joy, Mum?’ her son Jamie called as she closed the plain glass door with CBC Investment Consultants painted on it in small silver letters. Jamie looked up from the word processor with his father’s light-blue eyes, all the more startling against his curly black hair.

  ‘A little joy. Curiouser and curiouser, really. How’s the bulletin?’ Her son spent his Oxford vacations helping out around her office, and this year she had entrusted him with the job of preparing the monthly digest of market trends which was mailed to all their clients.

  ‘Er, not too bad. Put it this way – I thought an essay crisis was a good excuse for a nervous breakdown until I got into currency forecasts.’

  She walked round behind him, noticing how broad his shoulders were now as she peered over them at the screen. ‘We’re calling the Yen bullish, are we?’

  ‘I think so, it looks quite strong after oil prices came down last week.’ He looked up at her, compressing his thick, black brows with anxiety.

  ‘And you’re sure that’s valid?’

  ‘Pretty sure – I’m not basing it all on Chicago if that’s what you mean. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Yes, darling, of course I agree. I’m just testing. Can you tone this bit down? Your grandfather will kill us if we talk about the British having a blinkered obsession with short-term credit. You are right, just put it more diplomatically.’ She patted his sunburned arm affectionately and wandered across to the other side of the office, idly picking up pieces of paper and reading them without taking in their contents.

  ‘What time’s your flight?’ Jamie spoke without taking his eyes off the screen as he made the corrections.

  ‘Couple of hours – I’ll have to leave soon. Make sure the receptionist gets fresh flowers tomorrow, won’t you, darling? Those lilies look rather tired.’ She gazed out of the window at the handsome façade of the Athenaeum Club across the road.

  Her son abruptly switched off the word processor. ‘You’re worried, aren’t you? Come on, what’s on your mind?’ He came over and put his arms around her. ‘Is it the pearls?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s just so strange, Jamie. Nothing like this has ever happened before. There’s no reason, no meaning – I can’t understand it. They said they were priceless at Garrard’s. Who would give Monty and me two priceless pearls?’

  ‘Probably some secret admirer.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, no one could possibly fancy both of us. No one would dare.’ She laughed, trying to break her mood of anxiety.

  ‘Didn’t they give you anything else to go on at Garrard’s?’

  She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Nothing much. They just tried to persuade me to have them bored and made into a pair of earrings.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you do that?’ He squeezed her protectively and she smiled with unease. Catherine still had difficulty in bridging the gap in her mind between this brawny young god and the little boy with busy knees in a pedal-car who used to cry when he ran into a tree.

  ‘Go on,’ he urged, ‘you and Monty could wear them for six months each, every year.’

  Catherine gave another nervous laugh. ‘Listen, I’ve called my sister all sorts of things in my life, but the twinset-and-pearls-type is something she’ll never be.’

  In a cave of light in the middle of the vast auditorium a woman in a pink jacket was punching the air in time to the beat. Twenty thousand voices were roaring for her. Her hips ground to and fro as she stamped the rhythm.

  ‘Was it good for you too?’ Monty yelled, and the crowd rose up like a wave and howled. She flung back her head and felt the sweat trickling down her neck, her back, between her breasts. She snapped her head upright. ‘Shall we do it again?’ Another full-throated roar answered her, and she turned and pulled the band together with a wave of her arm. The crowd were clapping the time, whistling, screaming, stamping the floor, swaying like a cornfield in a storm as the lights played over them.

  Sometimes Monty thought she could die like this, on stage, with her people, all burned up with the noise and the music and the lights. Other times, she felt as if she was going to die, right there, as if her heart were going to stop or her brain burst with excitement and exhaustion. Her voice was raw now, at the end of her third night at the Superdome, but she liked the way it sounded. Raw was good for ‘Man Beats Woman’, her first big hit in the States, the song she always sang for her second encore. Deliberately, she slipped control of her voice and heard the sound tear out of her.

  Winston, her drummer, was playing like a madman, his shirt flapping wet with perspiration. She danced across the stage and wound her arms around Stas at the keyboards as he launched into an orgasmic build-up of scales. The crowd was a sea of reaching hands as she moved forward to the edge of the stage, slipping off her jacket. P. J. and Barbara shared a mike to her left, their legs working like pistons in their long, white skirts. Monty whirled her jacket around her head, her whole body whipped into curves by the motion; then she flung it out into the crowd and the arms folded over it like a sea anemone’s tentacles.

  One last chorus. In a white T-shirt and black trousers, her cropped, black hair slick with sweat, she stomped backwards and the guitarists moved in from each side to join her for the triumphant final chord. All right! All right. Breath tore into her chest and blood thundered in her ears as she bowed to the tempest of applause.

  Better bring them down gently now. A word to Tony, the lead guitar, and then Monty sat down at the edge of the stage and they killed most of the lights. Someone brought Monty her own guitar and she checked the tuning, gaining time to get her breathing more relaxed. Already the crowd was settling, knowing what was to come.

  ‘This song is very important to me,’ she told them, aware that most of them knew the story and anticipating the murmur of response. ‘It’s a song about who we are and what we’re doing here. It’s called “Broken Wings”, but I always think of it as Joe’s song.’ She looked away to the right, and there was Joe at the edge of the stage, tipping her an easy, little salute with a kiss in it. Then she forgot him, and concentrated on the song; why did I ever write something with such damned difficult intervals, she wondered.

  Ten minutes later Monty erupted into her dressing room, filling the small space with the surplus energy of her stage personality.

  ‘Cathy!’ she hurled herself into her sister’s arms and at once Catherine’s white Armani shirt was mottled with sweat and creased by Monty’s passionate embrace. ‘Darling, darling Cathy! You made it! You look wonderful! Doesn’t she, Joe? What’s the news – about the pearls?’ The veins in Monty’s neck stood out, she was gleaming with sweat and her arms were shaking with exhaustion as she hugged her sister closely. Cathy could feel the force of her sister’s heartbeats; not for the first time, she envied Monty her ability to surrender herself completely, body and spirit. Her eyes looked more cat-like than ever, their pupils dilated with the high of performing.

  ‘You’re coming home with us, aren’t you?’ Monty continued, talking too loud and too fast. ‘Say you’ll stay, Cathy. I’ll scream if you’ve got to go back to New York to do business. I miss you so much. Did you have a good flight? Tell me – what did they say? About the pearls, what’s happening, what are they?’

  ‘Not very much, nothing to go on. I’ll tell you tomorrow. You were great, Monty. What a crowd. Are they always like that?’ Catherine knew it would be hours before her sister came down and was calm enough to put two sentences together. She was like another person after a concert, jittery and explosive, on an emotional razor-edge, ready to plunge from the great high to the great low if she was not handled carefully.

  Joe always knew how to calm her. Cathy was never completely at ease in her sister’s world; nor was she completely at ease with Joe. Despite her best intentions, she was jealous. The sisters were so close Cathy often felt as if they were twins, psychically connect
ed even when they were apart. Cathy had never found such intimacy with another adult, but Monty had Joe, and now they had a baby, too.

  They were carried away in a river of people, swept through the concrete bowels of the Superdome and out into a limousine, then away to an airport and into a jet. Monty at last fell asleep on Joe’s shoulder, her lashes curling on her flushed cheeks.

  It was still dark when they emerged in the furnace of the Phoenix night, to be driven through the stark landscape to the home which Monty and Joe had built in the mountains. By the time they arrived, Catherine felt as if she were on another planet, not just because the house was walled with black lava rock: their world was one of extremes – but then so was the world of money, where Catherine lived. The difference was that Catherine succeeded because she remained apart from the craziness, while Monty had won by surrendering herself to it.

  Joe, Monty’s lover and manager, was one of those men whose sexual aura hung brooding like summer lightning in the atmosphere. Maybe it was because that narrow face, with its black eyes and full, curving lips, had also launched thousands of album covers in its day. Catherine was well acquainted with the power of a public image; that was not the whole story with Joe. He was the most disturbing man she had ever met.

  She watched him the following afternoon, patiently feeding some mashed banana to Paloma, his baby daughter, and wondered how it could be that his clothes gave the impression that they covered his flesh unwillingly.

  ‘She’s a lovely baby, Monty.’

  ‘C’mon, you hate babies.’ Monty smiled fondly up at the messy tableau from the black leather sofa.

  ‘Yes, but as babies go she’s adorable.’

  Monty sat forward, dismissing the ritual exchange of compliments. ‘The pearls, Cathy, we’ve got to know why. Nobody would give us both a present like that for no reason. They’ve got to have some meaning.’

  ‘I know that, Monty – but what? What have we two got in common, for heaven’s sake? We’ve lived totally separate lives for twenty years, almost.’

  ‘I think that’s the key to it.’ Joe put down the dish and walked down the wide, wooden steps to the level where the sisters were talking. ‘The only thing you two have in common is your blood. Sure, everyone knows how close you are, but there’s no other link between you at all except that you’re children of the same parents. Apart from that, the only thing that’s the same in both your lives is that they just don’t make any sense.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Cathy felt as if she were being criticized, then realized that she wasn’t. It was hard to tell with Joe.

  ‘What I mean is, from what Monty’s told me, you’ve both had turning points in your lives where something pulled you back from the edge – and it wasn’t anything ordinary.’

  ‘You mean, like me and the smack?’ asked Monty. Cathy flinched inwardly; she was always disturbed by the matter-of-fact way her sister could talk about having been a heroin addict.

  ‘Yes, you and the smack, and what about you, Cathy?’ Joe’s even, velvety voice was devoid of accusation, but Cathy knew she must also make her confession.

  ‘We’ve never really understood …’ she paused, not liking to remember past pain. ‘Well, I’ve got away with far more than I’ve had any right to, businesswise, I suppose.’

  Joe, pitiless, said nothing, hoping to pull a more specific declaration out of her, but the baby, furious that the supply of dinner had dried up, squawked and splatted its small hand into the dish, then hurled it off the tray. The awkward moment passed, and Joe went to wipe up the floor.

  Beyond the room’s glass wall, the searing colours of the Arizona sunset, bands of orange and neon pink, were intensifying out of the pure blue sky of daytime. Monty sighed and got up to get her sister a drink.

  ‘Do you remember Daddy telling us that the sun went down with a green flash in the tropics?’ She handed Cathy a Scotch and water, half-and-half, with one ice cube, and poured Coke for Joe and herself. ‘I’ve seen every colour of the rainbow out there, but never green. I’m sure the green flash was just one of those old colonial myths they were all so keen on.’

  Cathy sipped her drink thoughtfully. ‘Daddy never told us anything very much about Malaya, did he? When I think about it, all he ever mentioned were romantic little things like that.’

  ‘Wasn’t he some kind of war hero?’ Joe strolled down into the conversation with a cleaned-up Paloma tucked contentedly into the crook of his arm.

  ‘Yes, but he never talked about that either. And Mummy never told us anything because she hated the place. All I can remember is our amah and her black trousers.’ Cathy paused, scanning her childhood memories rapidly. She looked at Joe and Monty, now sitting side by side on the leather cushions watching fondly as Paloma crawled around the floor. Sometimes Joe seemed like a cross between Freud and Buddha; he knew the answers to everything. How could her sister live with anyone so disturbingly enlightened? Maybe I just don’t like men who’re smarter than I am, Cathy thought. Then Monty jumped up, fired by the new idea.

  ‘You’re right, Joe! Of course. We’ve no idea what Daddy’s life was like out in the East, and he didn’t tell us anything, not even what he did during the Japanese occupation to get his DSO. He never even told Cathy anything, and he was so close to her. He never saw any of his old army friends, and there weren’t any books in the house about the Malayan campaign. Now I think about it, it’s obvious! And the one thing the Garrard’s people could tell us was that the pearls must have come from the East somewhere – Thailand or Burma, didn’t they say? That’s just north of Malaya. There must be a link.’

  Monty’s enthusiasm always charmed Cathy, whose temperament was naturally cool.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she said. ‘But there might be some connection.’

  ‘Private detectives!’

  ‘Monty, for heaven’s sake, this isn’t a soap opera.’

  ‘I know, but there must be private detectives.’

  Cathy smoothed her blue silk skirt as she considered the next step. ‘It’s so melodramatic, I’m sure they’re all bone-thick ex-cops anyway, all thinking they’re Humphrey Bogart, and trying to charge $100 a day plus expenses.’ She recognized that she was being unreasonable, and shook her head. ‘Do you know what really bothers me, Monty? I’ve never felt that Daddy killed himself just because he got into debt. He’d have just laughed it off and charmed someone into lending him more money. There was something worse, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘And you’re scared of finding out what it is?’ Monty took her sister’s slender, straight-fingered hands in her own.

  ‘I am scared, yes. You’re the only person I’d admit it to, but I’m really frightened. I’ve got this awful feeling about the whole business. My intuition is just screaming NO.’

  The three of them were silent. Cathy was always so calm, so decisive, so economically poised as she shifted millions of dollars around the world for her clients; Monty knew that her sister could feel as terrified as any other woman inside but very seldom showed it: so this admission of fear was a shock.

  The baby tumbled off the bottom step of the short flight which separated the two areas of the vast living space; she whimpered because she had bumped her head. Joe jumped up and scooped the infant into his arms.

  ‘What do you feel about it all, Monty?’ he asked as he sat down again. She looked into his eyes and Cathy felt the intensity of their intimacy like a spark passing between them.

  ‘I have a strange feeling, too, but it’s not scary. It’s more like I’m being called in, or called home, or something. I feel as if something is coming full circle. Like you, I suppose, I think maybe we’ll be able to understand some things that we couldn’t before. But I’m not scared – just for once.’

  Throughout their lives it had been Cathy’s job to look after her younger sister, and the responsibility had become a habit. Cathy resolutely shook off her forebodings.

  ‘Somewhere in the world there must be a private detective who hasn’t walk
ed out of a bad film. You’re right, Monty, we might as well start by investigating the eastern connection. And why Daddy died. There might be something – anyway, that’s all we’ve got to go on.’ She stood up with a swish of silk, her dark brown hair swinging into place as she moved. ‘I’ve got a couple of clients who’re big in Hong Kong, I’ll ask their advice. I’ll brief someone, and get a report when. I’m in Singapore next month for the tin crisis conference, and then we can all meet up at the opening of the Shahzdehs’new development.’

  Joe and Monty smiled at each other; Cathy had a kind of puritanical guilt about taking holidays, and they had been hoping she would overcome it to take up an invitation issued by one of her oldest clients, an Iranian couple whose multifarious interests included a chain of luxury resort islands.

  ‘Isn’t it so typical of my work-obsessed sister to think of a jet-set playground as just another development?’ Monty chinked the ice in her drink happily.

  ‘OK, it’s a deal,’ said Joe. ‘I’m glad you’re coming to the Shahzdehs’ new island, it sounds like quite a place.’

  Monty’s butterfly mind had already settled on a new idea. ‘Cathy, can I ask you something, sister-to-sister?’

  ‘If you can’t, I don’t know who can.’

  Monty pointed to the baby’s neatly diapered rear, as Paloma crawled towards the steps once more. ‘Did it ever bother you to have that mark on your thigh?’ In the centre of the child’s plump upper leg was a light-brown, leaf-shaped birthmark. Cathy involuntarily slid her hand under her own right thigh, where she too had an area of darker pigmentation.

  ‘Only when we were all wearing mini-skirts and bare legs, in the sixties. That was the only time it showed. I forget about it mostly.’

  Monty frowned, knowing her sister’s capacity for camouflaging the smallest area of vulnerability. Joe was staring at the ceiling; Monty knew he thought she was obsessed with the baby’s birthmark. She had been fretting over it, and wanting to see a specialist, ever since the birth. Monty’s own version of the mark was a much narrower shape, darker, but higher up, on her right buttock, so that it was never visible unless she wore a brief bikini or leotard.