The two sculpted white faces are staring at one another as if I don’t exist. They waver and blur, almost seem to merge, as my eyes fill with hot, hopeless tears.
‘I told you before, Gustav. I thought I was with you, but then I felt the scars on his back!’
There is a long silence, peppered only by some exploratory drops of rain ringing off the metal ladder outside the window. A police car makes a whoop in the street below then shuts off as if it’s changed its mind. There is a burst of angry voices, also silenced abruptly. Maybe they’ve all sought shelter.
At last Gustav turns towards me. But his hands are still on the arms of Margot’s chair and her wrists are still striped with his red fingermarks. His voice hits me from across the room. ‘You got close enough to touch his skin, Serena. Which means—’
‘That they were naked. History repeating itself wouldn’t you say, Gusty darling? Pierre did what he does best. Pilfers your women.’
Margot lifts an arm and swipes Gustav aside. She stands gracefully and walks over to the window. She stalks like a heron, or a flamingo, picking her high-heeled claws across the carpet. She has a dancer’s gait, the balletic twitch of the buttocks as she walks, but I notice she presses at her face as she pulls the curtain back. Sheets of rain are whipping across the glass.
I get up and dart across to Gustav, take hold of his hands and pull him round to face me. His eyes are too deep to read. I cup his chin in my fingers, our gesture to calm each other down. I need him to look at me.
‘Yes, my hands were under his shirt. I felt his scars and kicked him where it would hurt the most, and I ran away, up on to the bridge, and that’s when you found me!’
Margot’s sharp laugh cuts through my words like a knife. Although I’m trying to get Gustav to focus on me, we both swivel towards her.
‘Oh, look at that innocent face, all flushed and indignant! But she’s no angel. She’s had two Levi brothers in her knickers, after all! Just like I have! So just you wait, Gusty. We belong together. And you’ll be grateful I made you see the light about this little bitch.’ She points the feather at us again as if it’s a wand. ‘You should know that they were fucking in that gondola, Gustav. I saw them.’
The rain outside turns into a torrent, bouncing off the railings, smacking on the awnings on the shops below us. Drumming on the window behind Margot.
I keep my hand in Gustav’s and move very close to him. The fire is too hot behind me, sweat is prickling up under my hair as I shake my head, over and over. I’ve handed her this on a plate because I was too cowardly to go the distance and tell him every detail.
Very slowly, Gustav curls his fingers into a cage around my hand and lifts it towards his mouth. He rubs his lips almost thoughtfully across the tender skin before he speaks.
‘Good try, Margot. Your best ever. But, bizarrely, you’ve just advanced Pierre’s case. If Serena has unlocked something in him, something tender, something not even you could winkle out of him, well, that has to be a good thing, right?’ His voice is quiet, but humming with the determination and strength that drew me to him in the first place. ‘I know and love this girl better than I’ve ever known or loved anyone. And I would know if she’d had another man. I would sense it. God knows, I would smell it on her.’
Margot is silent for a moment. Her white face is a bland, hard mask of disdain. She takes a long drag from her cigarette, then jabs it at us. ‘That’s very touching, Gusty, but you’ve been totally hoodwinked.’
‘Thanks to you, I know that Pierre likes his sex rough. He’s bragged about it. But see?’ Gustav lifts my wrist and the silver bracelet he gave me in the very early days, to which he used to attach the silver chain, glints in the firelight. ‘I was in bed with Serena that night. We made love in the shower the following morning. I went over every inch of her. He never left a mark.’
Margot blows out the smoke she’s been holding inside. I notice a slight redness in the whites of her eyes, despite the heavy black kohl make-up. That cigarette aroma is herbal, all right. She’s smoking some kind of weed. And it seems to have taken the sting out of her tail because, instead of the nasty cackle I expect, she simply holds up her pinky finger with its long black nail and makes a winding motion around it.
‘She’s got you wrapped round here, Levi. She could have been personally trained by me!’ She takes another drag of the joint. ‘Christ, if I didn’t want her wiped off the face of the earth I’d hire your little girlfriend myself.’
It’s Gustav’s turn to laugh mirthlessly. He holds my hand up, fans my fingers out to show her the beautiful diamond ring.
‘Hasn’t anyone told you? That proves that you and Pierre haven’t spoken in the last six weeks. So either those listening devices you planted are faulty or they’re non-existent. She’s not my girlfriend. Serena is my fiancée now.’
Margot’s thin neck snaps backwards as if he has slapped her. The hand that isn’t holding the cigarette clutches at the curtain and the rings rattle along the pole as the drape takes her weight.
Her black hair seems to writhe on her head like Medusa’s as her slanted eyes half close with fury, and that’s when it hits me. What’s happened to her face. She was painted to look like a swan the first time I glimpsed her in the flesh, when she was dancing with Pierre at the theatre. Her eyes and eyelids and brows were all painted black, with black lines swooping down her nose to make her look like a bird. But now I see it’s not just warpaint. Her nose looks as if a carpenter has gone at the sides with a plane, shaving off the natural sweep of the bridge until it’s almost flat, then tapering straight down between her eyes in what an ‘aesthetic practitioner’ would describe as a ski slope, but what anyone with a pair of eyes would call a beak, complete with unnaturally flared nostrils.
‘Your funeral. And believe me, that’s how it will end. It’s plain as that hideous carrot hair that she and Pierre are perfectly suited. Same age. Physically, they’re extremely compatible. She’s not worthy of you. You’ll see. There will be no wedding.’
Now it’s my turn to let an evil smile creep across my face. I turn my hand deliberately slowly in front of me, letting the facets from the diamond ring shoot out their multicoloured lights.
Gustav threads his fingers through mine and starts to lead me towards the door. I look up at his dark, troubled face, searching for the calm triumph that has been there ever since we got engaged.
And after his lovely words, it’s returning, like sunshine after rain. But still, still he’s staring at Margot. And she is staring back at him, her red mouth stitched shut at last. Without the power of words, it looks puffed, bruised, and petulant. Her eyes have sunk back in their sockets as if she’s looking up from the bottom of a pond, but there’s still a sick flame flickering there.
I’ve seen that look before, in a wild animal that is about to die.
‘Watch your back, Gusty. I’ll be everywhere, in your dreams, in your nightmares, until I’m the only thing you can see. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll haunt this little bitch instead,’ she hisses through those lips, bunching the curtain up in her fingers. ‘Don’t say I haven’t warned you. I wanted this to be friendly, but you’ve made that impossible. If you go with her now, there’ll be no happy ever after. For you. For her. For any of us.’
The floorboards creak as we reach the door. Suddenly Gustav lets go of my hand and walks back to her. He snatches the feather from her and runs it slowly over her sharp nose and swollen lips. There is deadly affection in the gesture, and I want him to stop it. Margot goes very still as the feather strokes her, her eyes red hot with longing.
He steps away and holds the feather low over the gas flames.
‘You’re sad. Insane. And nothing to me.’
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