Ivoria by Tanith Lee (ebook reader with android os TXT) 📗

time - people falling sick, parking fines, stalkers… So what did we think they should do?”

Laurence had laughed. “You’re making this up.”

“Well, our waiter probably was.”

“Like you used to when we were kids.”

“Oh, were you ever a kid, Laurence? I must’ve missed that.”

“You still haven’t finished your story.”

“Haven’t I?”

“How come you got to take it?”

“I didn’t. Well. the girl I was with, she said she’d take it off them. She didn’t believe in crap like that. Anyhow. We paid, left, went back to her place.”

“I hope you’re careful with all these liaisons, Nicolas. Johnnies to the ready.”

“Thanks. Yes, I’m careful.”

“So, your inamorata of the afternoon took possession of the fatal ivory.”

“When we were at the flat - we’d been there about - oh, two hours - the phone went. Her mother had died, suddenly, no warning. About the same time she and I left the restaurant.”

Laurence pulled a face.

Nick said, “That was the end of our afternoon. She had to pack for Scotland, go up. She was crying. She’d forgotten all about the piece of ivory. But I took it with me when I left. I was bothered. Just… she might have begun to think it had jinxed her.”

“But nothing’s happened to you. Not visibly. Or have you turned bright green somewhere?”

“No. I don’t believe anything will happen, either. Of course, it’s rubbish.”

“You don’t think it’s rubbish. You are troubled, Nicky. God, I know your troubled look. Claudia used to dread that look. Oh, he’s troubled, she’d say. It was one of the many ways you used to make sure she was always fussing over you.” And Laurence yet again picked up the ivory. “So I’ll take it, shall I? That help?” Laurence had inquired with a deep, patronizing, overacted concern.

Nick knows that aspect of Laurence, his brother, incredibly well. Along with other aspects.

He thinks now how he, Nick, did not have to say another word, Laurence had already been pocketing the ivory counter. And Laurence had added, “I’ll see if I can turn anything up on it. It looks, come to think of it, a bit like a bone counter from an old board game, maybe 18th Century African even. Might even be interesting. Anyway, look, here it goes. Safely with me, and out of your self-involved little life. See you, Nicky. And don’t forget your rubbers.”

2

Claudia Martin:

Her first film appearance was at age sixteen, in 1958, in the black and white romantic comedy film The Lion Run. Her best known film, thought in its era very funny and risqué, and still regarded with some respect and affection, was Dizzy, in which she co-starred with Michael Deane. It was released in 1965, about the same time she met and married Joss Lewis, an ‘ordinary’ business man, and then gave birth to her first son, later the historian and writer, Laurence Lewis. Her final film was Last September, Next July, (1977), which she made when already pregnant with her second son, Nicolas. The film was an intense drama, part political thriller and part love story. She was then thirty-five. (Around 1971 Claudia had also borne Joss a daughter, later the actress Serena Claire.)

Claudia additionally often acted in live theatre at such venues as the Old Vic, and later London’s National Theatre, where she played Sylvie’s nurse in Rasselet’s The Scholar’s Handicap. She was by then forty-eight, and this was her last stage appearance. She died in 1995, aged fifty-three.

Nick’s memories of his mother were inevitably forged during the eighteen years he knew her. After that they seldom shifted, merely intensifying in some instances, or fading slightly - the normal method with memory. But she had made a great impression on him. She had been reckoned extremely beautiful. Certainly he thought so, though he took her beauty and her cool flamboyance simply as facts, thrilled but never awed by them. She was his mother.

She had genuinely very fair hair, often bleached for her early films, but which by the year of his birth, (and thereafter until she began to grey at forty-seven) she left alone. Her skin was unusually good, very white, and never inclined to tan, either naturally or cosmetically; ahead of her time in that. The blue of her eyes was compared to violets, as had been those of two much more famous actresses, Vivien Leigh and Elizabeth Taylor.

She always publicly declared Joss Lewis was her predestined soul-mate, the prince of her fairy story. But, handsome in his thirties, he gradually lost his looks - as Claudia did not. Ten years her senior, when she was a slim and radiant forty, Joss had become a lumbering, portly fifty-year-old who actually, in the ‘wrong’ light so many photographers seemed capable of accessing, might more logically have represented her father than her fairy-tale prince. But he did at least have the grace to stay rich until her death, when his business interests betrayed him in one of the financial crises of the 1990’s.

Much later on, Nick sometimes wondered if Claudia took lovers. Wondered if she had had one or two even through Joss’s more physical years.

The supposition never shocked him. Why would it? Though not disliking his father, he always found Joss slow, if clever in business skills Nick himself neither had nor aspired to. Of course, Nick had wanted to be an actor himself in his youth. His older sister, after all, had been bitten by the vicious asp of acting, (as Claudia’s agent, Torvind Heyler, put it). Serena stuck to her guns and made a career for herself too. But though enchanted as a child, and amused as a boy by the glimpses he had of Claudia’s world of work - at long weekends in Joss’s country houses, or on studio lots at Pinewood or, subsequently, in the US or Italy - Nick never ultimately assayed the necessity of drama school, or even properly responded to occasional slight interest among Claudia’s bevy of producers and directors. He might have made a go of it, he