Chapter Thirteen
A pine
coast—a Cézanne coast of impossible blues and golds. Rocky inlets,
new moon bays. A wild coast, backed by hundreds of miles of maquis
and pine forest. You could walk for a day and not see anyone. A
good place to hide a child.
Laurie
had wondered, looking out to the sea from his room in Elise’s
chateau, how long his mother would have held out. Forever,
possibly, though he was not sure that Elise could have tolerated
her part for long.
A more
robust soul than her sister, she had sat in the Mayfair house and
listened in horror while Laurie told her how Marielle had tried to
divert the focus of Clara’s disappearance. Like her sister, she had
felt the need to offer recompense, but while neither Sasha nor
Laurie could accept financial help, they did not turn down her
invitation to the Languedoc chateau. Elise was thinking of moving
back there, she said, once Clara was more settled. Of selling the
Mayfair house, with all its bad memories, if Clara’s trustees would
consent, and taking the girl and her mother back to the sunshine
world poor Marielle should never have left. Clara could go to
school with her cousins.
Could Laurie bear that? There would always be holidays. Laurie
would be welcome, together with the young man who would probably
still be referred to with a smiling, polite ton ami if he and Sasha lived to draw
their pensions.
Sasha bore no ill will. He had talked to Marielle on his own
quietly, both of them foreigners on strange English soil. Marielle
could more or less take things in again now, certainly to the
extent of knowing she had been forgiven. Better than that,
understood, because
Sasha, after all that he had seen and done, was not about to
condemn a mother for loving her own daughter best. They hadn’t
known one another then, he told her. Things would be different
now.
And so he and Laurie had come to France for their first
holiday. It was Easter, three hard-strapped months since Laurie had
been cut loose on the world. Sasha had ordered him, as soon as he
had heard of his latest career move, to drop Les Miz and rediscover his inner
Hamlet. He would rather they both starve, he said, than that Laurie
should wear out his strength and his talents in any chorus, no
matter how grand. Thanking him dryly on both their behalves, Laurie
had obeyed him.
Starvation had not quite been necessary. They had sometimes
come close—though not by Sasha’s standards, who still considered
himself almost guiltily rich if he had more than a tenner to
dispose of at any one time. Laurie had landed the role of Biff
Loman in a new production of Death of a
Salesman, developed on the spot a perfect
Brooklyn accent, and gone to work. The pay was twice what Jacobs
had been able to give him, and his first night at the Bloomsbury
Hall a vivid contrast to his debut, every one of his giveaway
tickets eagerly taken—Clara and Elise in the front row, shoulder to
shoulder with Sasha in his new, posh jacket, and Jacobs himself
next to him, bearing no grudges, beaming and mouthing the lines in
case Laurie forgot.
They
were doing all right. Sasha, asylum status granted, was working
too, translating for an outreach branch of the Romanian embassy in
London, gladly helping teach newcomers what he’d had to learn the
hard way. In September he would start at college. John Kucharski
had set that up for him, pointing out the necessity for turning his
various gifts into paper qualifications, after which, he said,
Sasha should come to him again. Interpol and Border UK needed
agents who’d seen the system from the other side. Sasha, who
plainly felt that much of his allegiance still lay with that shadow
world, could not imagine being part of the forces that controlled
it, but had said he would consider it. At the moment all he wanted
was to work and to learn.
And to
live with Laurie. They had not spent one night apart since Sasha’s
very nominal three-day return to the detention facility, just long
enough for Kucharski to draw up the paperwork to set him free.
Kucharski, anxious to protect his witness, had tried to move them
out of the East Hill flat, but both had refused to go. Sasha gave
his evidence, and still they refused. By then they could have
afforded something better, but their associations with the
place—their meetings there, the refuge it had been, the
life-or-death scene enacted in its living room—were too vivid. Even
Luca’s bloodstains on the carpet could not spoil it for them. They
hired an industrial cleaner to remove them, but Laurie wondered if
Sash thought Laurie didn’t see how he sometimes crouched down to
touch their shadows, as if they could avert further evil. They
slept in a passionate tangle in Laurie’s single bed.
The
Languedoc had come almost as a shock to them. So much light and
air—endless green spaces arched over with imperturbable blue sky, a
climate as serenely different as could be imagined from that of
London or Bucharest. Laurie had been here many times before but
somehow hadn’t seen it. It had taken him his first real-world
winter to reveal to him the perfect sunlit fantasy this was.
Drenched in scents of myrtle, in the tang of heated resin blowing
in from the coast. The Devereaux estate was only three miles from
the sea. They walked there and back almost every day, often with
family, alone as often as they could without seeming
rude.
Sasha had drawn a little ahead of him among the dunes. Laurie
had let him, happy with the rear view. No one could have taken more
rewardingly to sunshine and good food than Sasha. At the end of
their two weeks in the sun, he was still whip thin but had filled
out his hollows in lean muscle. His skin glowed. He hadn’t owned
much by way of summer clothes, but Laurie’s fit him now, and the
male Devereaux cousins, sardonic and friendly, lifting dark
eyebrows at their shared room and declaring that,
bien s?r, they’d always
known about Laurence, were happy to share their wardrobes. Today, a
white shirt worn soft with sun and washing and a pair of Lucien’s
jeans, whose fit left nothing to the imagination. Laurie, who
remembered the torn parka, the huddle of sweaters beneath which he
once had found the skinny refugee boy, watched him in unadulterated
pleasure. A breeze was coming off the sea, making the blazing day
bearable. It stirred Sasha’s hair, made the cotton of his shirt
flutter and flatten against him.
Almost
unadulterated. Sasha did not run these dunes the way the Devereaux
cousins did. Laurie felt an ever-present background note of anxiety
rise up and blend with his desire. Stefan Petrica and his vast
network of dealers and runners had been most efficiently rounded
up, but Kucharski had warned them that such gangs were never truly
stamped out. That they should get on with their lives—but watch
each other’s backs while they were at it. The warning hadn’t come
as news to Sasha, Laurie could tell. In the city, the care with
which he moved, his caution, were not so apparent. Most people kept
sharp eyes about them there. Out here, Laurie observed how his
guard was never quite down. He chased Clara up and down the dunes
but stopped before he broached their skylines, ducking down to scan
the bright distances that glimmered all around. On pine forest
tracks, he would keep to the tree line—or, more often, subtly make
sure that Laurie did, placing himself on his other side, between
him and the direction from which any harm must come. He had gone
ahead now, Laurie guessed, because their path was widening out into
a bay whose far side was bounded by a tumble of lichen-starred
rocks, the only direction without a clear view.
Somehow
Laurie had never seen this bay before. It was not far from their
usual walks, just half a mile down a white sand track from the
forest. Invisible from there, though. You followed the track on
faith and emerged into the bay at the last moment. Sasha had slowed
down as the turquoise sea suddenly revealed itself before him,
flashing diamonds and purring up softly onto ivory sand. The beach
was quite narrow, shaded all along its crescent by pines that had
caught enough soil in their roots for a thick, rich turf to grow,
scattered with wildflowers. “Sash,” he said yearningly, holding out
a hand.
Sasha
stopped. He turned to him, and Laurie saw that he was ready too,
eyes dark with passion even in the brilliant light, cock lifted
explicitly beneath the worn denim as if he had been waiting for
Laurie to end the pursuit. The pine shadows dappled his skin.
“Yes,” he said, taking Laurie’s hand and pulling him in. “Where’s
Clara?”
“Gone back with Lucien. They’ve all gone back.”
“Thank God.”
Laurie
smiled. Sasha kissed him with joint-dissolving intensity, holding
his backside and gently shoving until Laurie was erect as well,
moaning with arousal and discomfort at restricting fabric. “Thought
you liked them,” he said, when Sasha had let him go and was deftly
unfastening his shirt.
“I do. They’re perfect, beautiful people. But you can’t do what
you’re about to do to me with family members present. Or even in a
five-mile radius.”
“Bloody hell,” Laurie observed, grinning widely. He wasn’t as
tidy with buttons as Sasha and removed the white shirt the basic
way, seizing its hem and pulling it up and over Sasha’s head. The
satin-skin chest and shoulders, the stomach beginning its adult
musculature, snatched the breath from him as it always did. He said
faintly, staring at Sasha, “What am
I about to do?”
“Requires you to take my pants off. Completely, or…” Sasha
hesitated, and Laurie saw in the drifting shade that he was
blushing, as if unnerved by his own boldness. “Or I won’t be able
to wrap my legs around you.” He swallowed audibly, looking down,
and Laurie took pity even while the shuddering wave of need
occasioned by the words washed through him. He drew Sasha forward,