They took a long break, the three of them, leaving X with her parents, and Gerald to his own devices.
Everyone, suddenly, seemed to have a lot more time on their hands.
To the satisfaction of her father—now enjoying early retirement far more than he had anticipated—she chose southern Africa as her destination. Victoria Falls. Chobe game reserve. Paddling in makoro wooden canoes through the Okavango Delta, amid crocs. Locations chosen not so much as routes to her roots, but as places that were a long, long way from North London, Munich, Detroit, Osaka, Kentish Town, Gerald.
Her employers had seized gleefully on her public misfortune to suggest that she depart the company forthwith and cash in her stock options in lieu of payment, thank you very much. But after very confidential verbal exchanges with her—revolving around her knowledge of the whereabouts and content of encrypted emissions software concealed in safety deposit boxes—they had agreed to write a glowing reference for the benefit of prospective bosses, reinforced by generous amounts of severance pay.
She refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Trust me, she told them with a smile. She had the drop on them. For once.
Dolores and Portia and Astra traveled on southward. They flew some of the way. They drove other bits, on long ribbons of highway that unfurled through brittle savanna where people in ragged clothes offered small pyramids of tomatoes and corn for sale at the roadside. They took an overnight luxury train. Portia said she was sorry and wept bitterly. And Dolores told her she had nothing to apologize for. She had been lonely. Her kindness had been taken advantage of. By a very bad man. She would not be lonely again.
Astra asked if she could have a puppy and Dolores said she would seek X’s permission.
At the back of the mother’s mind, there was the question of permanent removal to these southerly latitudes, once charted by navigators on their way to the East Indies. She contemplated real estate agents’ brochures and translated the local money into her own kind of money and figured she could afford a whole mansion, not just a mansion flat. Portia and Astra accompanied her with no apparent enthusiasm—indeed, with deep suspicion—to several sunlit schools where everyone seemed to play sport like Olympians against the backdrop of a famous, craggy, flat-topped mountain.
“Can we go home now?” Portia asked.
“Not this new home? Here? In Africa?” Dolores said.
“Real home,” Astra said. “Where Daddy is.”
“We’ll see,” Dolores replied, although she has already decided on her course of action.
Indeed, her lawyers are drawing up the paperwork in her absence and when he receives them, Gerald will probably count himself lucky that the visitation terms are so generous, even if his alimony is so modest as to enforce lifestyle changes on a significant scale. No more Range Rover. No more dizzy highs. Quite a lot of lows. And bus journeys. And abstinence.
Still, the outcome has not been all bad. After the debacle at Kentish Town, the cops agreed to look the other way on the matter of certain quantities of alleged class-A drugs—personal use only, m’lud—and focus on sending down John Gillingham, aka Lionel Jones, for as long as possible. Gerald’s clients for his trade in the aforementioned narcotics bolted to safer suppliers. His mistresses, too. Jenny Steinem did not even call when she moved out of her apartment—after a quiet but unmistakably ominous word from Dolores—and flew back to America. There has been the question of a motoring misdemeanor—driving without due care and attention, failing to halt at a traffic signal—but that did not merit a mention in the press. Intrepidly, Reg Crouch tried to interest his news editor, but the hoary veteran just told him with a wheeze that could have been laughter: “No point flogging a dead Nazi, Reg. Not even with a golf club.”
Once, in a newsagent’s shop, Gerald espied a copy of Hello! magazine proclaiming the marriage-made-in-heaven of a billionaire named Mark Danvers and an heiress called Mathilde de Villeneuve. The cover photograph of her in a luminous white wedding dress with train and veil coaxed a rare, wan smile. The virgin Madonna. And mark. Her new husband. Mark by name, mark by destiny.
He understood, now, how Marriage—in fact, marriage—ended. He did not relish writing it. But, in his rented “garden” flat, whose security-barred windows offered a sunless prospect of the lower legs of people scurrying by in the rain and early, wintry darkness on the sidewalk above him, he knew he would try hard, stabbing at his laptop, before Death was all that was left on his agenda.
This time, he printed out his chapters as he finished them and was pleased with the slowly mounting pile of typescript.
All work and no play. That was his life now.
And X? What happened to X?
She was found in a pool of blood where Astra’s puppy, which had turned out to be a pit bull, not a poodle as the pet store owner insisted, snapped her neck in a fit of bloodlust and feasted on the furry repast.
No. That is not what really happened. Thank goodness! That is Gerald’s dream of what should happen when X figure-of-eights through his legs and looks up at him with a kind of vague, mocking recognition on those prescribed days when he may visit with his daughters or fix a leaky tap in their kitchen or escort them to their new school in a different part of town where their story—like all our stories—is theirs to invent.