Faces of Fear Read online

  Freddie said, all of a sudden, “You sound strange.”

  “Strange? In what way? I’m fine!”

  “Gerry – is something wrong? I mean, really? You don’t sound like yourself at all. And, well, I don’t mean to be rude, but when do you ever call?”

  “Everything’s great. Couldn’t be better. How are the kids? And that big stupid dog of yours?”

  “Petey and Nancy are fine. We lost poor old George, though. He was run over by a mail truck. He didn’t die right away but we had to have him put down.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I liked George.”

  Freddie went on chatting about the summerhouse they were building, but Gerry couldn’t help thinking about the girl lying in the road, her yellow dress rising and falling in the wind, and her blood trickling across the asphalt, into the grass.

  In the end, he said, “I have to go now. I’ll call you again real soon. I’ll send the kids some postcards, too.”

  “Are you sure you’re not in any kind of trouble?”

  “What trouble? I’m great.”

  “You’re not in love, are you?”

  He put down the phone, very quietly. In the street below two men were talking. He could see the glow of their cigarettes. He saw them turn their heads, toward the shadows, and almost at once a young girl appeared, in a spotted yellow dress, riding a bicycle. And just as an upstairs window in Joseph Cotten’s hotel had opened and spotlighted the upturned face of Orson Welles, an upstairs window in Gerry’s hotel was noisily flung wide. The girl looked up, photographed, and for a split-second she caught Gerry’s eye. Pretty girl, he thought. Then she was gone.

  He went over to his bureau and poured himself a miniature vodka. In the brown-measled mirror he saw a thin young man with an angular face and brush-cut hair. Red-and-white striped shirt, red braces. At twenty-five years old, the youngest vice-president in charge of overseas property acquisitions that TransWestern Hotels had ever had. This was his dream job. He loved the hotel business, and he loved France. More than anything, he loved the French people. Now he had killed one of them, and driven away without stopping.

  That night, as he lay in bed, not sleeping, he listened to the doleful clanking of ships’ rigging from the harbour, and the wind that made his shutters quake, and he tried to think rationally about what he had done at Mont St-Michel, as if by thinking about it he could give himself some kind of absolution. He heard the thump of the girl’s body hitting his car. He saw her skirt billowing, and her thin wrist raised, with a watch on it. A cheap gold-plated watch, with a thin red-leather strap. It had imprinted itself so much on his consciousness that he was sure that he could visualize the brand name, if he concentrated hard enough.

  I left her there, lying in the road. She might have been alive. Maybe I could have saved her, if I had driven her to a hospital. Maybe somebody did find her, and resuscitated her. He would never know; and it would be far too risky to try to find out.

  He whispered a clumsy, almost childish prayer. He hoped that the girl in the primrose-yellow dress had died instantly, without pain, not knowing what had happened to her. He hoped that she had been discovered by people who loved her, and that they had given her the kind of funeral she deserved. With flowers, and hymns, and tears of grief.

  In the middle of the night, he was sure that he heard the tick-tick-tick of somebody riding a bicycle along the Rue St Xerxes outside.

  He was sitting at an outside table at the Moulin du Vey when he noticed the girl looking at him. She had glanced at him once when he first sat down, but now she kept staring at him all the time, and making no attempt to conceal her interest in him. He gave her a brief smile and Carl said, “What? What is it?”

  “Nothing. I was just admiring the view, that’s all.”

  Carl made an issue of turning around in his white plastic chair. “Yes, see what you mean. Very scenic. Two trees, the side of a building, and a girl to make your hair stand on end.”

  “She’s just been smiling at me, is all.”

  Carl laughed, and sat back, and took out a cigar. “You should go for it. You know what the girls call you, at the office? Gerry the Cherry. I mean, you’re not really a virgin, are you?”

  “Get out of here. I was engaged once, when I was in college. And don’t you remember Francoise?”

  “Oh yes, Francoise. Who could forget her? Legs like the Eiffel Tower.”

  Gerry shook his head and devoted himself to his pork in mustard sauce. The Moulin du Vey was one of his favourite restaurants in Normandy: an old ivy-covered mill on the banks of the Orne, with a huge barnlike dining-room and a pretty gravelled verandah overlooking the river. It was a warm, lazy day, and he and Carl had driven out here to look for new country hotels to add to TransWestern’s inventory. Butterflies blew around them, and geraniums nodded in the breeze.

  It was the girl, however, who had completely caught his attention, and he found that he could hardly taste what he was eating or understand what Carl was talking about. She was sitting with a very smart middle-aged couple who could have been her mother and her father. Her hair was long and blonde and it shone in the sunlight like the gilded thistledown that blew across the surface of the river. She had one of those disturbing French faces that attracted Gerry because of one imperfect feature. Her eyes were wide; her cheekbones were high; her nose was short and straight; but she had a slight overbite, which gave her a look of vulnerability. She wore a white sleeveless blouse with embroidered lapels, and Gerry could see from where he was sitting that she was very full-breasted.

  In a strange way, she reminded him of somebody, but he couldn’t think who it was.

  Carl was saying, “When you take over a place like this, there’s always a problem with rationalizing the menus.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “You have to find frogs with sixteen legs; otherwise you’ll never meet the demand. The trouble is, if they have sixteen legs, you can never jump up high enough to catch them.”

  “Absolutely. You’re right.”

  Carl tapped his knife on his wineglass. “Hallo in there? Have you heard a single word I’ve been saying?”

  “What?” asked Gerry. Then, “Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with me.”

  Carl turned around again, just in time to catch the girl giving Gerry a fleeting, secretive smile. “I know what the hell’s the matter with you. You’re in lust.”

  After lunch, Carl had to drive down to Falaise to see a man about a franchise, so Gerry took the opportunity to go up to his room and finish his report. He sat at a faded rococo desk in front of the open window, tapping away at his laptop, but it wasn’t long before he stopped tapping and sat back, listening to the endless sliding of the river over the weir, and the rustle of the ivy leaves against the open shutters.

  He wondered if the girl were still out on the verandah, talking to her parents. He stood up, and peered outside. The parents were there, talking and drinking coffee, but the girl had gone. Gerry was just about to return to his report when he glimpsed a flicker of white, further up the river bank. The girl was walking through the apple orchard that had been planted almost down to the water’s edge, trailing her hands through the long feathery grass.

  Gerry watched her for a while, Then, decisively, he switched off his laptop and closed it. He hurried down the steep stairs to the Moulin’s reception desk, and out into the brilliant sunlight. He crossed the gravel and went down the steps into the orchard.

  He found the girl leaning against a tree, chewing a long stem of grass. He tried to approach her as if he had simply decided to go for a stroll, and found her here by accident. Small bees bobbed and droned around the ripening apples, and the sunlight made dancing patterns on the girl’s face. For some reason, that reminded Gerry of something, but he couldn’t think what.

  He stood a little way away from her, looking at the river.

  “Are you American?” she asked him, after a while.

  “How did you know?”
/>   “I heard you talking to your friend. Besides, you look American.”

  “I thought I was beginning to look quite French.”

  “No, no. A Frenchman would never wear a suit like that. And you never use your hands when you talk.”

  “Maybe I should take some gesticulation lessons.”

  She smiled. “You shouldn’t. I like men who are very restrained.”

  He came closer. He guessed from the smoothness of her skin and the firmness of her breasts that she wasn’t much older than nineteen or twenty. The vulnerability of her slightly-parted lips was contradicted by the look in her eyes. It was challenging, watchful, provocative.

  Her eyes were really the most remarkable colour. They were steely grey, almost silver, like the surface of a lake just before a heavy storm. Close up, Gerry could smell a light floral perfume, and an underlying biscuity fragrance. It was a combination that he hadn’t smelled for years: the smell of warm young girl.

  “It’s very peaceful here, isn’t it?” he remarked.

  “It’s too peaceful for me,” she replied. “I hate the countryside. I always dream of living in a big city in America.”

  “You’d hate it. All that noise, all that pollution. All that crime.”

  “Do you hate it?”

  “Why do you think I wanted to work in France?”

  She stood against the tree watching him and watching him, and flicking the stem of grass across her lips. “Would you hate it if I was with you?”

  This could have been the simplest of questions. Yet the way she put it, it was like a clock mechanism, full of complicated levers and springs and secret movements.

  “I guess that could make a difference,” Gerry replied. “I never liked Paris too much; but then I’ve never been there with anybody I loved.”

  “There you are, then,” she said.

  She started to walk through the orchard and he followed her. Beneath her blouse she wore a pale yellow linen skirt, through which the sunlight cast tantalizing shadows of her legs. She wore sandals made of twisted leather thongs, which laced around her ankles.

  “My name is Marianne,” she said, without turning around. “I’ve lived in the country all my life. My father wants me to be a famous cellist.”

  “But what do you want to be?”

  She caught hold of the branch of one of the apple trees, and swung around, laughing. “I want to be the greatest prostitute that ever lived.”

  He laughed, too. “That’s some ambition.”

  “You think I’m joking?”

  “I think you’re teasing me.”

  She reached up and plucked one of the apples from the tree. She held it up in her hand. “You see this apple? We use them for making calvados.” She bit into it, so that its juice smothered her lips. She chewed and swallowed the fragment of apple, and then she reached out and took hold of his hand, and drew him toward her.

  At first he couldn’t think what she was doing, but then she lifted her face to him, and kissed him. He tasted sharp, sticky apple and saliva. He felt her tongue-tip, probing between his lips. He felt her full breasts pressing against his shirt.

  He kissed her more urgently. They smothered each other’s faces in kisses and apple juice. She bit his tongue, bit his lips, and dug her fingernails into his back. They were both panting, as if they run all the way here.

  Abruptly, she stopped kissing him and held him away. Her eyes were dark and excited. “You know what we did?” she asked him. “We were like Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden. Now we don’t have to pretend to be innocent any longer.”

  She took two or three paces back. She twirled around, so that her yellow skirt billowed up. Then she stood facing him, and the expression on her face was almost triumphant. Without a word, she lifted up her skirt and bunched it around her waist, revealing long suntanned legs and the fact that she was wearing nothing underneath. Her thighs were so slender that they formed a triangle of empty space between them. Her pubic hair was as golden as the hair on her head, and shone just as brightly.

  “There,” she said, walking away from him, her skirt still lifted. “The greatest prostitute who ever lived. How much will you pay me?”

  He couldn’t think what to say. Was she serious? Would she really have sex with him for money? Or was she simply making a monkey out of him?

  He glanced around the orchard. Maybe this was some kind of elaborate practical joke that Carl had set up, to show that ‘Gerry the Cherry’ wasn’t so virginal after all. Maybe he was being filmed by a hidden camcorder. But all that he could see were trees and long grass, and they had now walked so far into the orchard that they couldn’t be seen from the hotel.

  “Marianne—” he began.

  “How much do you think I’m worth?” she challenged him. “A thousand francs? Two thousand francs?”

  “I can’t put a price on it.”

  She let her skirt fall back a little way, although her vulva was still exposed. “You don’t want me?”

  He hesitated for a moment. Then he reached into his back pants pocket and took out his billfold. He took out all that he was carrying – over 7,500 francs – and he held it out to her.

  She didn’t even look at it, and for a moment he was afraid that she had been subjecting him to some obscure test of character, and that he had lost. But then she unfastened her waistband and let her skirt drop into the long grass. She unbuttoned her blouse, and let that fall, too. Finally, without hesitation, she reached behind her and unclipped her bra. Her breasts were bared with a soft double-bounce – huge creamy-pale breasts with nipples as pink as sugar mice.

  She came up to him, completely naked except for her sandals, and kissed him. By now he thought that he was delirious, that this couldn’t be true. Her fine hair floated against his face, and her fragrance almost overwhelmed him. The orchard was so quiet that he could actually hear her stiffened nipples brushing against his shirt. Still she didn’t look at the money. She opened his shirt, and caressed his bare chest. She unbuckled his belt, tugged down his pants, and then lifted his tusk-hard penis out of his shorts. She rubbed it up and down a few times, his huge penis in her small long-fingered hand, the glans leaving glistening moisture on the inside of her wrist.

  “Now then,” she whispered, and lay back in the grass, her thighs apart, her knees raised, her arms stretched out for him. He dropped the money and it fluttered and flicked across the orchard. All Gerry could see was that dreamy, girlish smile, and those rounded breasts, and that glistening pale-pink opening with its wavelike lips.

  He knelt down between her legs. She took hold of him and guided him up against her. The feeling of her warm, wet flesh was such a pleasure that he wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to bear it. He pushed into her, and she gripped hold of his buttocks and pulled him as deep as he could go. When he drew out of her again, he felt the gentle breeze cooling the juices that anointed him, and the feathery grass tickling his thighs.

  They made love for over an hour, while the thick white clouds floated over their heads, and the afternoon moved as slowly as a dream. At last she sat up, and drew back her hair with her hand. There was semen sparkling in her eyelashes.

  “I have to go,” she said. “My parents will be wondering where I am.”

  “When can I see you again?” he asked her.

  She started to collect up the money that he had dropped – naked, crouching in the grass. “You want to see me again? A prostitute like me?”

  “You’re not a prostitute.”

  “Well, no.” She smiled. She picked up the last 1000 F bill and handed all of the money back to him. “I just like to play games.”

  She dressed. He sat on the ground watching her.

  “I’d still like to see you again.”

  “Then you shall.”

  They walked back to the Moulin du Vey. Marianne’s parents were still on the verandah, talking to madame la patronne.

  “Come and meet them,” Marianne urged.

  “Do I have t
o? Your father looks as if he can drill a hole in six-inch steel just by looking at it.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about papa. He’s a darling.”

  Very reluctantly, Gerry followed Marianne up to their table.

  “Papa, maman, I wish you to meet my new friend,” said Marianne.

  Marianne’s father was silver-haired, with a silver summer suit and a clipped white goatee beard. He reached into his breast pocket, took out a stainless steel spectacle case, opened it up, and put on a pair of rimless glasses.

  “How do you do?” he said, grimly.

  “I’m fine, thank you, sir. Enjoying this wonderful afternoon.”

  “God blesses us,” her father replied.

  Marianne’s mother was silver-haired, too, but even in her mid-fifties she was just as attractive as her daughter. She wore a summer dress of clinging dove-grey wool and a wide-brimmed black straw hat.

  “What kind of a man are you?” she asked him.

  “Well, I’m in the vacation business. Hotels, restaurants, you name it.”

  “I didn’t ask you what you did. I asked you what kind of man you were.”

  Gerry frowned at Marianne. “I’m sorry, madame, I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “It’s really very simple,” she persisted. “Are you, for instance, the kind of man who would give his life for the woman he loved?”

  Gerry glanced back at Marianne, looking for clues. Did her mother really expect him to answer a question like that? What the hell did it mean? But Marianne continued to smile at him, and her papa continued to stare at him through those rimless spectacles as if he couldn’t decide whether to hit him or bite him, and maman waited unflinchingly for the answer to her question.

  “I, uh …” Gerry wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand. “I think that’s kind of hypothetical. It all depends on the circumstances, if you know what I mean. Not only that, it all depends on being in love.”

  “Are you in love?” asked Marianne’s mother.

  “We only just met each other.”

  “My wife didn’t ask when you met,” Marianne’s father interrupted. “She asked if you were in love.”