The Yellow Scarf Page 7

  #

  Good for you, thought Peter, but he hoped it wasn’t jealousy talking. He’d worried about her throughout the day, but she didn’t appear to have caved in. He couldn’t imagine the willpower it must have taken to kick the addictions she’d had. He liked smoking pot, and he liked dropping acid, but he didn’t believe either of them led to harder drugs the way people claimed. He’d tried cocaine once, and it didn’t do anything other than make his nose run and make his throat itch. And he would not, under any circumstances, stick a needle into his veins. It was bad enough when the doctor did it. He really didn’t know if Pandora’s downward spiral was because she had no self control or was simply a by-product of the times, the company she kept, and an inability to handle the pressure of her meteoric rise to fame. Maybe it was the same with Brian Jones. Mick and Keith seemed to have their lives under control, though he suspected they both could party with the best of them. So what was it then that made one person an addict and another able to resist? He didn’t really believe that people were born with a predisposition to addiction. He believed life was a series of choices, and even if one made the wrong choice, there was always time to change directions and set off on a new path.

  Perhaps that was where Pandora was now, but as he eyed her across the table, he knew deep down he really didn’t believe that. She seemed empty, a psychic shell of her former self. He was no psychiatrist, but he liked to believe he knew a bit about human nature, and it struck him that Pandora was a blank slate, simply waiting for someone to come along with a piece of chalk and rewrite her purpose in life. He couldn’t see her reviving her modeling career, or the acting, and other than being beautiful and provoking fantasies in men, which she was no longer capable of doing, she had no skills.

  “I think I’ll go upstairs as well,” he said, breaking himself out of his morose preoccupation with the state of Pandora’s mental health. “How are the beds, Tristan?”

  “I’m sure the sheets are clean, just old, so they may smell a bit musty. Who knows when the last time was they were changed?”

  “Good night, Tristan,” Pandora said.

  “Shall I turn out the lights when I come up?”

  “Do as you like,” said Peter, and then thought better of it. “Leave them on. If anyone comes downstairs during the night, I wouldn’t want them to fall and break their neck.”