A Quiet Life(72)

‘Nina, my sweet,’ Laura called out, ‘are you all right?’ There was no answer, so she knocked at the lavatory door. Again, no answer. Laura turned around and saw the maid still folding linen towels. ‘My friend is in there – I’m not sure she is all right.’ Why did she have to spell it out? Surely it was obvious that something was wrong. The maid tried the door and knocked too, and then shook her head and left the room. Laura was still knocking and calling when she came back with a key that opened the door from their side. The maid had not said a word. Laura pushed open the door, but something was keeping it closed, and the something was Nina’s foot. Nina had slipped off the lavatory and was on the floor, unconscious. There was vomit on her grey velvet dress. Her underpants were around her calves, her dress rucked up. The maid was pulling up Nina’s underpants and straightening her dress, and Laura was wetting a handkerchief and putting it to Nina’s face, calling her name. ‘I’ll get the doctor,’ said the maid. Nina opened her eyes and gazed at Laura with the same glassy stare as before.

‘Not their doctor,’ she said clearly, ‘my doctor.’

‘I’ll get you to a room,’ Laura said. ‘Blanchard’s room?’

‘Yes, let’s go to Chéri’s room, and he can call my doctor. Ugh,’ and Nina shuddered, turned and vomited again into the lavatory. Laura asked her if she could stand, and then supported her into the corridor and to the elevator, where Nina leant heavily against Laura, so that Laura could smell her tainted breath. She felt repulsed by her. Nina had a key to Blanchard’s room in her purse, but her hands were so shaky that Laura had to open the door and then usher her in. Clearly, the room had been used just before Nina and Blanchard had come down to the ballroom – it was a mess. The bedding was a swirl of linen, there was discarded underwear on the floor, and a bottle of brandy and other things – pill bottles, medicine bottles – on the table by the bed. Nina picked up one of the bottles and shook it, but it was empty. She fell clumsily onto the bed and Laura attempted to straighten it around her.

‘Are you going to throw up again?’ Laura asked, when Nina sat up restlessly.

‘I need Chéri – I need my doctor.’

Laura told Nina to lie down and put the wet handkerchief in her hand so that she could wipe her face. Nina asked her to unzip her dress, and Laura did so. She was not wearing any undergarments except the blue silk underpants, and Laura saw bruises on her skin: a yellowing one on her breast, a fresh purple one on her thigh. Laura straightened up and left the room, telling Nina she was going to get Blanchard.

Walking through the ballroom was like moving across a stage, through the colour and chatter of the crowd, with lines that seemed laid down for her. When she reached Blanchard, she bent down and whispered in his ear that Nina was ill and that she wanted her own doctor. Blanchard got up and Laura went with him, back up to Room 248. He seemed to take in Nina’s condition at a glance, and went to the telephone to call someone. As he did so, Laura went to Nina and wiped her forehead again with the handkerchief, asking, with exaggerated concern, whether she was feeling any better.

‘I’ll go now,’ she said to Nina, with honey in her voice. ‘You ring me if you need me. I’ll leave my number here,’ and she scribbled her telephone number on the pad next to the telephone, noting Blanchard watching her.

He followed her out into the corridor, then asked her exactly what she expected him to ask her, which was to say nothing to anyone.

‘What would I say?’ Laura said with false matter-of-factness, as though every day she saw a drugged girlfriend collapse in the ladies’ room of the Dorchester and left her in the care of her violent boyfriend. There was a total lack of surprise or concern in her voice; she was acting, in fact, as she thought Nina herself would act in a similar situation. Blanchard looked at her assessingly, and Laura looked back at him. ‘Maybe Nina needs a rest,’ she said in her blank voice. ‘She was talking about going to visit our friend Sybil in the countryside. It might be a good idea.’ Blanchard nodded. ‘I mean,’ Laura said, ‘I’ll miss her, obviously.’ And then she did something that was so out of character for her it made her feel momentarily dazed, as though she had lost her own sense of reality. As she said ‘I’ll miss her’, she stepped right up to Blanchard, so close her breasts almost touched his chest, and looked directly into his eyes. Then she withdrew and turned and walked down the corridor. She wasn’t quite sure what she had done, but somehow she knew she had made him an offer as directly as it was possible to make one, and had told him that Nina was too much trouble for him.

At the next meeting with Stefan, Laura said little about how things were going, only that she was trying her best. But less than a week later the telephone rang one Wednesday afternoon and Blanchard was speaking to her. ‘Little Nina is gone to the countryside,’ he told her, ‘and I wondered if you would like to have dinner with me?’ Laura agreed to meet him at the Dorchester at eight. As soon as he put down the telephone, Laura put on her coat, calling to Ann that she had to go out to buy some more cigarettes. She went out of the house to a telephone box, where she rang the cigar shop and left a coded message for Stefan. It was beginning to snow, and she felt foolish as well as freezing as she stood in the phone box in her old muskrat coat.

After ten minutes of tense waiting, Stefan called back and Laura told him briefly that she might be able to do it if he could detain Blanchard somewhere at eight.