Margot's Secrets

Don Boyd

Description

Margot, a beautiful, young, American psychologist living in Barcelona, seems to have it all: a happy marriage, a flourishing practice serving the ex-pat community and an enviable social life in this vibrant and culture rich city. But when she is drawn into an obsessive, sexually charged affair and two of her clients are found dead in mysterious circumstances, she is forced to question her professional, personal and sexual boundaries. Whose secrets hold the key to the horrific death of the young lovers? Her husband's? Her lover's?

Informations

• Publié par: Ziji Publishing
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780955405167
• Langue: English

Extrait

Margot s Secrets
Margot s Secrets
by
Don Boyd
Published by Ziji Publishing www.zijipublishing.com
Distributed by Turnaround Distribution Services Ltd. Telephone [phone]
Copyright Don Boyd 2010
The right of Don Boyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sytem, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
ISBN: 978-0-9554051-5-0
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Mackays, Chatham, ME5 8TD
To Hilary Boyd
PROLOGUE THE MARTYRDOM OF SAINT EULALIA
A Videogram for the internet created by Domatilla Milliken and Paolo Lorca.
(Screenwriter s note: The shooting style in digital video will pay crude homage to the great American film experimentalists of the 1950 s and 1960 s who worked isolated from any commercial infrastructure).

Title Card:
I want to die from longing, and never live in boredom. I want there to be in the depth of my soul, a hunger for love and beauty.
Khalil Gibran Love Letters in the Sand

EXTERIOR. DAY. BARCELONA. DAWN

Images of mediaeval Barcelona culled from the city as it is now. The Cathedral interior. Some shots in the Barri Gotic area of the old city - its ancient streets, its old churches and squares. Nothing modern. All mediaeval or later. And in the Jewish quarter - its cramped houses, and a synagogue.

Walls. Stone. Statues. Paintings. Gargoyles.

All of these images form a patchwork which will be integrated into the text of this story of our Catalan heroine, Saint Eulalia.

TILLY is sitting outside the Segrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi s great unfinished modernista celebration of Catholicism.

The camera circles around the body of this young woman. A close up - her strawberry blonde curls hug her face which is photographed in the style of a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

TILLY (VOICE OVER)
This is my story. This is the story of Eulalia. She is my spirit. She was I and I am she. I live through her and she lived in the certain knowledge that within centuries she would live through me. She died for me and I will die for her
* * *
Chapter One
Sunday mornings in early Spring were usually spent lazily rustling up brunch for friends on the terrace of their Montjuic apartment with its magnificent view of Barcelona s harbour and its old city. Margot s American culinary roots and her husband Archie s quirky British breakfast obsessions were creatively integrated with the Catalan delicacies they ferreted out from stalls at the Mercat de la Boqueria off Las Ramblas. But on that Sunday, St. George s Day, April 23rd, the English ex-patriot community were celebrating their patron saint with an exclusive lunch to honour Eusebio Casals, a renowned Catalan artist. This annual event was traditionally just a good excuse for a raucous alcoholic binge and some light-hearted jingoistic patriotism - hardly reasons to cancel a treasured weekly ritual. But Archie s status as an eminent professor at the university and a fine art consultant for Sotheby s made it obligatory, yet he was grumpy at the prospect.
Why don t you go on your own, darling? I ll be perfectly happy moping around here.
Still in his huge, ruby red dressing gown, Archie was immersed in the Sunday newspapers. Like a Pasha in the library of a nineteenth century oriental Palace, he was clearly bemused at the thought of abandoning the cosy four walls of their large drawing room with its leather-bound first editions and his two beloved, original Pre-Raphaelite oil paintings. A light Mediterranean breeze wafted across from the French windows - this was Archie s taste of paradise. But Margot was shy socially and very reluctant to attend parties on her own. She was determined to muster some enthusiasm from her entrenched husband.
Don t be such a curmudgeon!
She continued with a charming barrage of witty repartee and affectionate mockery from the bathroom where she was luxuriating in an extravagant pseudo-Victorian bathtub, submerged in bubbles. All of it fell on deaf ears. Archie was buried in the magazine section of the Catalan equivalent of the National Enquirer . In exasperation, she reminded him that his favourite young god-daughter, Tilly, would be there with her boyfriend Paolo, the artist s stepson.
You know how much she makes you laugh.
He was still unmoved. I suppose Tilly is an exception. She s special. But the rest of that crew are all so insufferably smug. Spoilt brats; they seem to stay out of all the turmoil, whatever murky happens to the rest of us. They remind me of the reasons why I would never want to live in England again.
Margot wasn t letting him off the hook.
They re not so bad - they probably think the same of us! I m sure that we re going to have some fun. I thought you liked Eusebio Stay grumpy, if you must or you can come and have a swim in the lovely pool, or talk to Robert flirt with Stella. They ll be there.
Archie was not impressed.
Stella is staying in London this weekend - since her bank went bust, she s had to work a little harder for her bonus. I phoned Robert to tell him that our brunch here was off today. Eusebio doesn t count, he s a Catalan. But you re quite right, he sighed, I do love seeing Tilly and Paolo. They make me laugh. Teenage love can conquer all. How old is she now? Eighteen?
Margot knew that she had finally won the day as Archie shuffled off to change out of his striped flannel pyjamas, muttering to himself about the handicaps of marrying a woman twenty-five years younger than him. Margot giggled like a naughty schoolgirl as she waddled over to him and planted some soap suds on his forehead.
They really had no alternative but to forego their usual Sunday luxuries and make their way down from the Montjuic. They walked across Barcelona s harbour towards the Arts, a tall, post-modern tower dwarfing Frank Gehry s copper and steel lattice Fish sculpture, which playfully overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. It was a magnificent spring morning and the sandy white beach glistened in the sunshine. The palm-lined promenade was already full of skinny kids in multi-coloured tee-shirts on roller blades and skateboards. Neither Margot nor Archie were in the mood to talk much, which suited Margot who was now lost in thought. She was going to come across some of her clients at the party - an inevitable occupational hazard in the small, close-knit, English-speaking community which defined their social life. She tried not to rationalise the tenuous nature of these public encounters. Even Archie would have found it difficult to identify who were her patients , as she called them, although he would probably have been able to hazard a good guess. She discouraged anything except the slightest of innocuous banter with her clients, particularly at large social gatherings, and Archie was sensitive enough to notice this nuance and respect it. Only Tilly and Paolo, also clients, had been able to break through her professional barrier.
She was also feeling a little vulnerable and lonely. Although she was very popular amongst Archie s university friends, she had no pals of her own age in Barcelona who might have an inkling of her way of life in her home state of California, and who could provide a more frivolous balance to the heavy academia of her husband s coterie. As much as she adored Archie and her new life in one of Europe s great cities, she was beginning to yearn for some of that easy-going, intimate banter that had been the feature of all her peer group friendships at home in La Jolla during the few years she had lived there after college. She had tried e-mails and video phone lines to establish communication with her cultural past, but they proved poor substitutes for the real thing. She missed frivolous chit-chat sessions over cocktails in the evening, and longed for an indulgent milkshake gossip after the yoga class. For all his other considerable qualities, Archie was no substitute for a girlfriend or confidante of her own age.
None of this had been helped by one over-riding problem: for nearly a year now, she had also been inadvertently denied one of the essential aspects of all qualified practising psychotherapists - regular sessions with a supervisor. At the time that Archie had come into her life, Margot had felt no further need for a regular supplement to the intensive analysis she had undergone during her training, but she knew that however professionally qualified she was, there would always be a need for a mentor from within the psychological arena. Very much for this reason, the Institute that gave her the necessary qualification to practise insisted on providing supervisors to monitor the work in progress of all their members. Margot had resisted their imposition at first. She hadn t rated the reputations of any of the therapists fielded towards her and turned them all down. But she then had a stroke of luck; Marie-Christine Traille, the only supervisor prescribed by the Institute living in Barcelona, turned out to be extraordinary. She was a wonderful and wise French woman whom Margot had met coincidentally at an American Psychological Association junket when she had first arrived in Barcelona.
As would be expected of an eminent Freudian, she had unpicked Margot s childhood with such clarity. Many of the anxieties she had been harbouring about her marriage to a man the same age as her father had been to a large extent mollified by Marie Christine s perceptive worldliness. Fluent in English and sensitive to Margot s fish out of water tendencies, she had helped Margot navigate the treacherous waters of European vocal cynicism about America s damaged cultural and political status, particularly in the wake of the war in Ir