"She was everything a man could ever ask for," he says quietly, willing himself not to look at Daisy, knowing she has a right to be offended by the insinuation that she is less.
But Daisy is not blind to his words or his sudden coolness. "What happened?" she asks, though she would rather not.
"Long story," he says, finally relieved that he no longer has to pretend, either to her or himself. "Maybe I'll tell you one day."
But where does zhat leave me? questions Daisy silently, with a look of pleading, and Bliss sees what is going through her mind and tries to soften the blow. "Daisy," he says, gently taking her right hand. "I look into your eyes and I see a beautiful, warm woman and, in a way, I love you."
"But —"
"There is no magic, Daisy. There never was. We became friends before we were lovers and I… well, I thought I would get over her."
"But you didn't."
"No. I could lie. I could marry you and tell you that you are the one I truly love, but that wouldn't be fair. I know, deep down, that I would always wish that you were her."
Tears are streaming down Daisy's face — tears for herself. "But she is dead," she reminds him, as if he needs reminding.
"I know. That's the worst thing. I have no way of ever getting my heart back. She took it with her."
"What about her grave — you could visit," begins Daisy hopefully. "You could kneel at her grave and say —"
"Cremated, I think," says Bliss, lightly putting a hand on her arm to stop her. "No grave. I never even saw her body. I was wounded… we crashed… I crashed."
"A car?"
"A plane."
"You were flying?"
"Yes… no… not really… I don't know," he says, and then he stares out over the sea and relives the terrifying moments in a rusty Illushyn cargo plane when he grappled with the controls at the side of a dying woman — the woman who ran off to heaven with his heart and left him in hell.
"I did not hear," says Daisy once he has given her a sanitized version of the incident when he and Yolanda rescued a group of Western computer experts from Saddam Hussein's clutches before the Americans slung the dictator in jail.
"No one heard, Daisy. In fact, officially, I think I'm supposed to kill you now that I've told you." The Frenchwoman shrinks back in concern, but Bliss cracks a wan smile. "Just joking. Although you probably shouldn't tell anyone. We shouldn't have been there."
"What is her name?"
He wants to correct the tense but doesn't, and he knows why; he knows that she is still alive in his mind, that she will always be alive, that she will outlive him. "Her name is Yolanda… Yolanda Pieters," he says, and finds himself going off into the distance again searching for an image. It's an easy search. Her face, sheer unadorned beauty — the most beautiful face he ever set eyes on, with just a single imperfection that he found intriguing — is dreamlike today, though it isn't always that way. Sometimes, when he's feeling the loss most, it's nightmarishly marred by the agony of her death throes.
"Daavid. You must move on," Daisy tells him as she sits beside him and tries to comfort him.
"I've tried. God, how I've tried."
She reaches out to stroke his cheek. "Now I understand," she says, as tears stream down her face.
"I wish I understood," mutters Bliss. "It's been more than three years. How long will it last?"
"Forever, Daavid," she says, knowing that her tears are not only for him and his lost love, they are for those who took a piece of her heart when they departed. And she turns to the Château Roger, where, along with memories of her grandfather and several other relatives who were swept up by the Nazis during the war, she too can find an image.
Roland was his name, and Daisy closes her eyes as she reruns the painful image of the young Parisian boy — a city sophisticate with a Beatles haircut and Daddy's souped-up British Mini — who was the first to sample her tender young flesh. She was a pretty fifteen-year-old schoolgirl at the time, in the mid-sixties, and was diving after a shoal of sardines in the bay one sunny summer's day. Roland was diving nearby with an entirely different kind of fish on his mind. He struck, and landed his virginal catch in a little hidden cove where the tunnel from the château's basement comes out onto a golden beach. Forty-five seconds later Roland hit his stride, and with a triumphant yelp and a premature ejaculation he left Daisy in the sand while he shot off up the château's tunnel in search of another adventure.
"It is très dangereux. You cannot go zhere," Daisy yelled after him, but his motor was running so fast he didn't care if he was coming or going.
Daisy shudders at the memory of Roland's dead body being washed ashore a couple of days later — minus his zizi — but at that time she was still scared of the château's legendary ghosts and kept silent about their tryst, worried that a vengeful resistance fighter in the basement mistook him for a Nazi storm trooper.
She shakes off the unhappy memories of her loss, realizing that she is facing another, and asks, "But why you in Iraq?"
"They did have weapons of mass destruction," replies Bliss. "Cyber-weapons. That's why the inspectors never found them."
"Cyber-weapons."
"A computer virus to attack our systems."
"What will happen?"
"Maybe nothing," he says, not wishing to alarm her with the prospect of a super-virus kicking in and screwing up the world. "Although I think we've seen the signs: major power outages in America; bank computers on the blink for a week; the internet crashing." He pauses, knowing that the big one is still out there, that everything to date has been small fry. But he knows that it is like waiting for the earthquake that will one day kill Los Angeles. "It's coming… it's coming," everyone warns, then bang, the bottom falls out of the Indian Ocean and swallows a quarter of a million people in Asia. And all you have to do is constantly worry about one dead woman, he chastises himself, but then admits that it's not constant, only when it's triggered — similar hair, voice, colour, eyes, shape.
Stop it… stop it… she's been dead for years, he tries telling himself, but the more that time has gone on, the worse it has become. You need closure, says the voice in his mind, but he disagrees. I need Yolanda. Need to know that I didn't kill her.
You didn't kill her. You would have died for her — you wanted to die for her.
And still she left me.
She didn't want to. It wasn't her choice.
"Daavid," breaks in Daisy from outside.
"I thought I'd got over her," he says, but he can't help comparing her to the château's victims as he sits looking towards the old building. Sixty years on and many of the town's widows still dream that their lovers were sent to a remote concentration camp and will one day march home, strapping young men.
Daisy's grandmother was amongst those who stayed awake night after night when the war ended, but the pain was always still there the following morning: the gnawing, insidious pain of hope, watching the door for hour upon hour, begging, praying, screaming, pleading. "Come back. Please come back. I love you — I love you more than you can possibly know."
"Daavid. You have to move on," Daisy tells him, and he wants to say he'll try, but he finally gives up.
"So do you, Daisy," he says as her tears continue to stream. "I'm sorry, but I can never take a chance with you or anyone else. I can never look into your eyes and say with honesty, ‘You are the only one for me.'"
chapter six
Daphne Lovelace has dug out a serious-grey pillbox