Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (29 page)

He got back into the car, reversed noisily, the power of the engine, the futile roaring of the clutch, the screeching of his tyres, the fright of the passers-by - all stupidly satisfying. The roar again as he changed gear and drove off into the twilit night, the aggression and the speed dispensing with any other feelings that feebly beat their wings. He'd show her, vroom, vroom, vroom. Oh yes. She'd be getting her presents gift-wrapped now, all right, she'd be turning the screw about flowers with somebody else, and soon somebody else would start getting things wrong. They'd hear her say, 'Well, if you don't know, I'm not telling you' - all that, all that - and he was welcome to it. Poor, poor sod, he could have her.
He
was going to that party after all.
He,
too, was embracing life. He took the amber light at sixty and the power made a knot -in his gut. Hadn't taken her long to get over him, and just as bloody well. . .

Melanie sat down in the restaurant and looked at each of the tables, wondering if he might be there. If he could see how she was getting on with life, how she was attractive to other men, how she could laugh and enjoy herself, he would be stirred to do something. Her heart had been really thumping when they came in. Now that he wasn't there, she felt the pumping draining away and she just felt miserable again. She gave the man opposite her a very bright smile. Yes, she would like a drink - a very big drink, and very quickly. Of course, he might come in later, or walk by and see her inside. She must keep bright at all costs. She must look happy, relaxed, fulfilled - not like the old Melanie, not the old, unhappy, neurotic burden.

She leaned forward and put her chin in her hands, provocative, appealing. 'Now tell me,' she said to the man opposite her, 'what made you choose income tax as a career?'

Later she excused herself and went out to the Ladies'. On a whim she rang his number. If he answers, she told herself, I shall say something funny like, 'Help, I'm stuck in Popinjay's with a really boring man. Come and rescue me.' They should still be able to wear jokes like that - they knew each other well enough. It was all so silly this being apart, and stupid, stupid, to pass up all that knowing for this . . . She dialled and waited. Somebody had written the line of a song on the wall by the telephone. 'Tell Laura I love her', and somebody had added underneath, 'Tell her yourself . . .

*

'Do you mean,' said Janice
Gentle
, 'that I made a lot of money and Sylvia Perth spent it?'

Rohanne Bulbecker nodded.

'All of it?'

'More or less. Of course, you'll get some of it back in time.' 'How long?'

'Years,' said Rohanne. And then, because Janice looked so woebegone, she melted a little. 'I'm really sorry. Didn't you ever even suspect?'

Janice shook her head.

'Where did you think all the money went?' (Oh for a fraction of it, thought Rohanne Bulbecker.)

'Sylvia just looked after me. That's all. And there was always enough for my needs. What was left over was supposed to help me find Dermot Poll. Only there was never quite enough.'

This left the listening trio in some confusion.

Rohanne Bulbecker thought Der Mottpoll might be some kind of Germanic Mountain of Wisdom.

Erica von Hyatt thought it was something to do with the poll tax (the existence of which was one of the few benefits of calling a box home, since you did not have to pay it).

Gretchen O'Dowd thought of the North Pole and wondered what the most northerly part (she had watched many Open University programmes in her country solitude) of the earth's axis had to do with being a writer.

'Perhaps I should explain,' said Janice. 'Dermot Poll is a man.'

'Ah,' they said in comprehending unison.
'Of course.'

For what else could be at the centre of such a muddle? Even despite the woman's grubby countenance and undesirable curves.

'I shall begin at the beginning,' said Janice the storyteller. And she took herself back to a cold, dark, wet February night when the whole world seemed coloured by magic.

*

Red Gold was laughing to herself as
the train pulled out of the stati
on. She had wanted to take the tea-urn into the carriage with her, but the guard hadn't allowed it. 'You can't put it on the seat, it's too big for the floor and if it falls off the luggage rack you could be killed.'

'So?' she had wanted to say. There was something recklessly bizarre and amusing at the prospect of such an apposite end. But she had let him take it away without too much fuss. What a joke. How they had laughed about it last night. Amid the crumpled sheets and her spilling hair they had howled with merriment at its absurdity.

'I shall think of you,' she had said last night, 'every time I use it.'

'Ah,' he said, laughing wickedly, 'but which bit of me?' And he took her hand and pressed it to that most private part of him, the part she celebrated knowing, the part she liked to recall when she saw him dressed in his perfect tailoring, his proper shirt and tie.

Of course, she had been lying. She knew that as soon as the passion ebbed from them and he slept.

'Once and only once, for old time's sake,' was what she had said at the Ritz.

He looked at her across his champagne, the perfe
ctly
manicured fingers holding his glass, the neat white cuff, the dark, expensive blue of the sleeve above. His eyes were intelligent, considerate, amused. She wanted to kiss them closed, touch their lids. 'Are you absolutely sure?' he asked. 'I don't want to hurt you again.'

'Nonsense,' she said gaily, 'that's all in the past. Why, this is just a bit of fun . . .'

But he already had.

He had told her in that one sentence all she needed to make her heart ache afresh. It would be once and once only. He would be able to walk away and never return, he would not be hurt by seeing her go.

'Of course,' she continued, still smiling flirtatiously, 'we are both old married troupers now. You are a cabinet minister and I am a vicar's wife. We could not do it more than once. It would not be at
all
proper. It was only a whim on my part, just a lovely whim.'

'A dangerous one,' he said.

'Not at all,' she replied.

For a minute she read his thoughts. He was weighing up the adventure of it, the heightened romance, against the risks. She knew what to do to allay his fears, and removed from her pocket her return ticket.

'I have to get the midday train back,' she said crisply, 'and I want to avoid any possibility of suspicion.'

He was seduced by that. Whereas the shadow of her curves, the message in her eyes were expendable, the promise of detachment without future responsibility won him. So she had had her illicit walk in the garden of Love before climbing back over the wall into her cabbage-patch life.

She leaned her arm on the parcels beside her and ran her fingers through her loosened hair. She cared not a damn for suspicion now. She had almost convinced herself that the old ghost was sated, the dream laid to rest, and that one such beautiful night was all she would ever ask. She must not enter that garden again, must never seek to. This was the last gate she could pass through, the key had been taken from her. Coming back, she was on her own. He had retained the key when she left him this morning. She must never enter there again. He had said so, stroking her hair, kissing her neck, his eyes dry, tears in hers.

'Only this once,' he had said.

'Only this once,' she had agreed.

Easy to say it then.

She began tucking her hair into a band, preparing to claim the tea-urn, descend the train, go back. She laughed as she looked in the mirror, and then she put her ringers to her mouth, for the laugh had been mirthless.

Arthur was on the platform, waiting, waving as her carriage passed him by, following the train as it slowed. Like a shepherd, she thought, in search of his lost lamb. A favourite text. If a man have a hundred sheep and one goes astray, does he not rejoice more for the one that is found than for all the others safe within their fold? Rather like her. With all the sheeply blessings she had in her life, still she sought and wanted the one which eluded her. She waved back. Arthur should really get out of the Bible and his precious Langland and come up to date. Did she want him to know? Did she care? Would it not be exciting to have an explosion of emotion? On her breast she bore a purpling mark. He who had been so careful had been too weak to resist her passionate insistence, too aroused to think beyond the offering-up of her flesh to be bruised. Now it was the mark of her guilt, the lover's brand on the sheep returning. She did not care.

Arthur held out his hand to help her down from the carriage. It felt like the hand of a cripple, without strength, without hope. He looked at her with an expression she could not fathom and then he released her.

In the car he said, 'Was everything satisfactory?'

'I think I got everything,' she said, brushing away a tendril of hair irritably.

'Nothing to go back for? Nothing you have forgotten?'

'I have forgotten nothing,' she said positively, 'and I got everything I needed, thank you.'

But already the slowness of the car, the bumping of the country roads, his unsophisticated hands on the wheel, even the smell of the upholstery were like a closing-in.

'Arthur,' she said, 'you haven't given a sermon on the lost sheep for ages. Don't you think you should?'

'Perhaps,' he said.

She stretched out her legs, letting her skirt ride up over her knees. 'I need shriving,' she said mischievously. 'London is such a wicked place.'

He said nothing.

'And I have entered the temptation of superstition.'

'Yes?' he said, turning the car through the gates. Rabbits in the dusk were caught spellbound in the headlights, feet up, ears stiff, noses twitching. 'How?'

'I gave a beggar woman a pound for luck instead of trusting in the Lord.'

'And were you lucky?'

'I think so.'

He smiled wryly. 'Maybe it was God's will all the time. If the tea-urn is unscathed from its journey, than we should give thanks for that.'

'Why?'

He turned off the ignition and looked at her. The lights showed her eyes wide and brilliant, unblinking like the rabbits. 'Because now it has arrived here whole, you will never need to go back for another.'

She shivered. The mischievous smile faded. She got out and slammed the door, leaving him to bring in the offending item. The rabbits, galvanized by the noise, scattered for safe haven. At the door she turned and looked back. She watched how he handled it with painstaking care and how he carried it with firm, sure steps towards the house.

Drop it, you bastard, she wanted to shout. Please, please, drop it.

*

'Suppose he is married?' asked Rohanne Bulbecker.

Janice wished not to hear. 'What?' she said.

Rohanne was a direct woman
and erred on the side of insens
itivity. So she spoke louder. 'I said, "Suppose he is married?"'

Janice looked at her blandly, eyes unwavering behind spectacles. 'He won't be,' she said.

'He might be,' said Rohanne. 'He might very well be . . .'

'A knight can always love a lady though she be married to someone else,' she said dreamily. 'It is allowed.'

'Nowadays,' said Rohanne crossly, 'it's divorce and alimony.'

Janice sighed. 'Then there won't be any need to write any more, and I shall retire from life completely.'

'But I doubt if he is
,' said Rohanne, quick as a gunshot. 'In fact, thinking about it, I am quite sure he isn't.'

'Funny, that's what Sylvia said.'

'I'll bet,' muttered Rohanne.

'He could be divorced,' said Erica kindly.

'He could be dead,' said Gretchen O'Dowd with equal solicitude.

Rohanne glared.

'Dead?' said Janice, and she pushed another sugared almond between her lips. 'Perhaps
that
is why he never arrived.'

Rohanne patted her shoulder and grimaced at Gretchen. 'Why not take a walk?' she said sourly. 'Now, Janice, why should he be dead? He sounds like a survivor to me.'

'Well, anyway,' Erica patted the other shoulder, 'you will never know unless you find him, will you?' She remembered her chats in the crypt. 'Faith will move mountains,' she said, 'if you believe. And we're only talking about a man, not a bleeding mountain, fuck it.' She added this last, feeling it was justifiable emphasis.