The Diamond Ring. Primula Bond

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СКАЧАТЬ diagonal journey across Manhattan is like a parody of a car chase. We are in a rush to find Pierre, yet the evening traffic is against us and we are crawling rather than careering. The set of Dickson’s broad shoulders as he steers skilfully through the one-way grid system would normally make me feel safe and secure. But the atmosphere in the car is too tense.

      Gustav keeps trying his brother’s number. I pray with all my might that Pierre is nowhere to be found, because he’s the one Gustav will listen to next. I’ve told him we sneaked off together, and then I realised my mistake and ran away, but how can I tell my fiancé how perilously close Pierre and I were to shattering everything?

      Pierre won’t hold back. Oh no. He’ll rehearse every gory detail. The ripped muslin drawers, the velvet buttons flipping open his velvet breeches, my legs pulling him towards me as I urged him to hurry, the rope he tied round my wrist to keep me there. He won’t tell Gustav how I stopped him. He’ll put his own spin on it and say we went the whole way. He’ll convince Gustav that we’ve committed the worst possible deception.

      We pass Katz’s Deli where Sally faked her orgasm in front of Harry – God, if only life was so simple – and cross over Rivington Street.

      I can’t work out where we are. According to Polly, when she did some digging to find out more about him, Pierre lives in an apartment still owned by Gustav’s ex-wife Margot. But Polly said it was in Soho, not the Lower East Side, which is where we are now. It’s an area I’ve never been into, and after the almost eerie quiet of the Meatpacking District late at night, this place is still humming with neon-lit stores and cafés. Dickson drives behind the main drag and pulls round into a narrower street. The engine of the car sounds intrusive and loud bouncing off the tall, looming tenement buildings, where iron fire-escapes zig-zag across the red brick walls above the back entrances of bars and restaurants.

      Polly was wrong. After all, she has never been here. Pierre never invited her to stay, even when, for those intense few months over the winter, they were lovers. Dickson, however, knows exactly where he’s heading. This might be Pierre’s apartment now, but Dickson must have driven here plenty of times in the past when someone else was in residence. When he had that other passenger in his car.

      ‘I hoped I’d never come to this godforsaken place again. Despite what Polly thinks she deduced, Margot has no hold over Pierre any more. She walked out of that apartment and out of his life six years ago, so the fact that he’s been living there all this time means he’s even more boneheaded than I thought,’ mutters Gustav half to himself as the car stops. He steps out into the cold night air and shudders as if someone has just thrown a bucket of iced water over him. ‘I guess staying there rent-free swung it for him. But I should have sold it when I had the chance rather than let Margot keep it.’

      There’s the clatter of cutlery and barked orders from the surrounding restaurant kitchens. The primaeval heartbeat of club music thumps up from somewhere underground. But this street has a dark silence all of its own. It reminds me of the ghetto area of Venice where I wandered with my camera last month, thinking of Gustav. Thinking of Manhattan. Thinking it was all over between us.

      The city noises clang and echo in my ears. The tall buildings in this narrow dark street are bending over, intent on crushing us. My fiancé turns his back on me, still clutching his mobile phone, and glares up at the mostly unlit windows in the building above.

      I can no longer escape the series of disasters that has brought us to this narrow dark street. Maybe to the metaphorical end of the road.

      The reason Polly had the incriminating photographs of me and Pierre which so infuriated Gustav was that she had been stalking us. The reunion of her boyfriend with his brother Gustav meant that when Pierre dumped her for no apparent reason after the New Year, Polly thought I could help her. So when Pierre commissioned me to shoot a storyboard at the theatre where he was working, that seemed like the perfect opportunity. Polly asked me to find out what was going on in Pierre’s head and ask him if he would take her back.

      But instead of trusting me to carry out my mission, she decided to spy on Pierre and me in the Gramercy Hotel bar. And if she’d heard how graphic the conversation became she would have pounced on us sooner.

      When I interrogated him about my poor cousin, Pierre decided not only to share but to shock. He laid out his entire sexual history in intimate detail. I was given chapter and verse about the volcanic sex he and Gustav’s ex-wife Margot indulged in after they had run away together, and how ultimately it destroyed him, because when she chewed him up and spat him out six months later, he realised no other woman would ever match up.

      He had spent five years searching for the perfect specimen. Polly looked promising when they met at a magazine shoot. She was sexier than most, prettier, funnier, and English like him. They even shared a flair for fashion and style. But in the end, despite her connection with me and Gustav, she was the latest in a long line of casualties. Women who would never satisfy him.

      Except that then, fired up by my slightly drunken attention, Pierre hinted that someone new might have come close. Me. He helped me into my coat as I prepared to leave, and knowing I was flummoxed by his insinuations he ran his lips across my mouth, and that’s what my cousin saw.

      So Polly took this as hard evidence that I was the reason Pierre had dumped her. His own damaged psyche was too complex to grasp. And when she stormed into our apartment, Gustav chose to believe a couple of grainy photographs over my emphatic professions of innocence.

      That was the night my world caved in. Polly thought I’d gone behind her back with the boyfriend she still wanted. Gustav thought I’d been unfaithful with his own newly returned brother. I was incandescent that the pair of them could have so little faith.

      So I went alone to Venice. Vulnerable. Broken-hearted. The perfect target for Pierre Levi. He came after me, impersonated his brother and got within an inch of penetrating me.

      But I need to focus on what’s happening now.

      I follow Gustav towards the apartment block, but before I reach him I see that parked outside the entrance is a sleek grey Porsche.

      ‘Let’s go home, Gustav. Better still, let’s get that table you booked at La Lanterna before it goes to someone else. We’ve got plans to make! We can just walk away, and you and Pierre can carry on as you were. He got it wrong, that’s all. He’ll be like a cornered animal if we go storming in there. He’ll lash out.’ I tug on Gustav’s sleeve, aware that I’m mewling like a kicked kitten. ‘You won, and he lost! Think how embarrassed he’ll be!’

      Gustav stares at the apartment building, his arm hanging by his side. ‘Embarrassment won’t cut it! He could try shame. Remorse, if it’s true that he tried to take advantage of you. Sorrow, for upsetting and confusing you like this. And as for winning and losing? Serena, this isn’t a competition!’

      ‘It is to him, Gustav! That’s just it! He’s desperate to be your little brother again, but he also wants whatever you’ve got! That’s how it’s always been. He wanted, and took, Margot—’

      ‘She stole him, you mean. She knew exactly how to hurt me the most. He may have been a willing participant, but he was still a kid.’ Gustav’s face is set in a series of hard lines as he takes another step across the pavement. ‘Going after my girlfriend six years later is totally different.’

      Yet again I regret saying anything. I slide my hand up to his face, lay it on his cheek. I can feel the muscles flickering with tension around his clenched jaw.

      ‘We can drop this now. What’s important is that you and he have made up. You’re brothers. СКАЧАТЬ