Wicked Women (2 page)

“Would you like to see the Granny flat?” asked Elaine.

“I don’t have a family,” said Lila. “They have disowned me.”

“One moment,” said David Swain. “There is something fishy going on here. How come your mother’s name was Drewlove? There should be another name there somewhere if that cock-and-bull story is true.”

“My mother,” said Elaine, “never married. She was a very fishy woman. I am illegitimate. And I do not want you living in my family home; it will take you twenty minutes to walk to the station, the end of the line. My phone is out of order, or I would call you a taxi.”

“I heard it ringing just now,” said Lila.

“It does that sometimes,” said Elaine. “The lines round here can be very bad. You had better go now, and hurry, or you will have to wait hours for your next connection.”

“The Swains went away quickly,” said Defoe.

“Not soon enough,” said Elaine.

“We don’t have to sell this house,” said Defoe.

“You haven’t seen this morning’s letter from the bank,” said Elaine. “We do. They say it’s the end of the line.”

“Perhaps this house is unlucky,” said Defoe.

“It was okay until they extended the railway line, in 1919. That was the year my mother was born,” said Elaine. “And things go wrong anyway. One can hardly attribute all cosmic events to a verbal pun. One can hardly say we lost our income because you lost your job because the world lost interest in the nuclear threat because our house is at the end of the line.”

“Some could,” said Defoe. “Someone like the girl from the
New Age Times
could very well. New Agers drive winsome thoughts between ordinary notions of cause and effect.”

And his eyes drifted towards the window, to see if Weena Dodds was coming up the path. She was.

Elaine opened the door to Weena. Weena saw a woman who was a dead-ringer for her mother Francine, but without scarves and earrings. Her nails were broken and she was without eye make-up, which for someone of her age was foolish. This woman had clearly lived in the country too long.

“There wasn’t a taxi at the station,” said Weena. “I had to walk.”

“Walking would do you no harm,” said Elaine, “from the look of you.” Weena seemed to be a heterosexual version of her own daughter Daphne. Just one of those things.

“The bitch, the bitch!” said Weena to Hattie that night on the phone. “I expect she was jealous,” said Hattie. “Probably flat as a board herself.” Hattie had a nice little bosom herself, just about right. Weena giggled.

“Not flat,” said Weena. “There are advantages to flat. Just shapeless. You know how wives and mothers get.”

“I expect you had your revenge,” said Hattie.

“Oh, I did,” said Weena. “I did.”

“Well,” said Defoe, waiting until his wife had left the room, “this is a surprise. I didn’t think you’d have the nerve. I want my £20 back.”

“What £20?”

“The £20 you stole from my wallet while I was asleep.”

“That was the point,” she said. “I always take money from a man’s wallet if he falls asleep after sex. It’s policy. It repairs my self-esteem.”

“I was tired,” Defoe said. “It was after the show. You had no mercy. I am a tired old married man.”

“You could have fooled me,” she said. “And the wallet was so stuffed I’m surprised you noticed.”

“That was before Nemesis fell,” he said. “I could do with every penny now.”

“Not Nemesis,” she said, “but Karma. We all get what we deserve. But I know the feeling.”

“We get what we deserve!” he marvelled. “Do you honestly believe that?”

“I got you that night,” she said, smiling her pretty smile, “so I must have done something right.”

“When I called the number you gave,” he said, “the woman who answered said she didn’t know who you were.”

“The bitch! The bitch!” Weena moaned to Hattie later. “That’s my mother’s idea of a joke. I don’t know who she is.’ She’s always driving my men away.”

“Better than stealing them,” said Hattie, but Weena wasn’t listening. “Everyone I know has mothers on hormone replacement therapy,” continued Hattie, “who’re a real problem, but me, I’m motherless.”

“I can’t stand women who make jokes,” said Weena. “Men don’t like them either. The way to a man’s heart is through total solemnity.”

“If you want to get there in the first place,” said Hattie. “It seems an odd ambition to me.”

“Well I fucking, do,” said Weena. “I have simply got to get out of my home situation.”

“So you gave up,” she complained.

“Guilt undermined my intent,” Defoe said. “And then my world crumbled about me.”

“Of course it did,” she said, briskly. “Guilt is a destructive emotion. I never feel guilty about anything, especially sex!”

Elaine came into the room with a tray on which there were two mugs of instant coffee and some sugar in a little white-lidded bowl.

“I don’t take sugar,” said Weena, looking under the lid. “It’s poison.”

“Well, dear,” said Elaine, “don’t take any, then.” And she went out of the room, raising her eyebrows at Defoe. Weena caught the look. Very little escaped her.

“She doesn’t like me,” said Weena. “But then I’m not a woman’s woman. My mother doesn’t like me either. But you’re not interested in me.”

“I am interested in you,” he said. She was sitting silhouetted between the desk and the window. The fabric of her white blouse was fine. She wore no bra and the outline of her full breasts was visible: when she moved to adjust the tape recorder the nipple of her left breast flattened against the wood.

“Well,” said Weena briskly to Defoe Desmond, at Drewlove House, “I didn’t come all this way to talk about fucks past. I came to talk about Red Mercury and its implications for the future of the world. My editor says, though the nuclear threat is far from the top of the world survival agenda, it still has implications for concerned people everywhere.”

“It does,” said Defoe.

“I don’t actually drink coffee,” said Weena. “Most people nowadays don’t.”

“My wife is old-fashioned,” apologised Defoe.

“I can tell that,” said Weena. “Now, where were we? Oh yes, my editor said it didn’t matter I was science-illiterate, you were such a brilliant populariser even a Gaian could understand you.”

“Did he really say that?” Defoe was pleased.

“He did,” said Weena.

“Your editor seems to loom large in your life,” said Defoe. “What’s a Gaian?”

“There!” she said, pleased. “At last something I know, and you don’t. Gaia is mother earth as gestalt, a self-healing entity.”

“Self-healing? How consoling a notion,” Defoe observed.

“You get so gloomy, you scientists,” she said. “There’s a whole world of hope and happiness out there you know nothing about. Do you think your wife would allow me a glass of water?”

Defoe went to the door and called Elaine, and asked her to bring Weena a glass of water. Elaine did.

When Elaine was gone, Weena said, “She doesn’t like me much, does she?”

“Why do you say that?” asked Defoe.

“She didn’t even bring the glass on a tray. It’s all thumb-printy. Shall we get on with the interview?”

“I’m at your command,” said Defoe. Now Weena’s skirt was rucked up to show her long bare legs to advantage. She bent to adjust the tape recorder and again flattened her left nipple against the wood of the desk. It looked an expensive desk.

“It’s a nice desk,” she said.

“Eighteenth century, burr oak. It’s been in my wife’s family for a long time. It will have to go to auction.”

“That’s a pity,” Weena said. “There’s usually some way round these things.”

“Not this time,” said Defoe. “Or so my wife tells me.”

“Some people are just doomy,” said Weena. “Life falls into their expectations.”

“You may be right,” said Defoe.

“I love nice things,” she said.

“You deserve to have them,” said Defoe. “Someone like you.”

Elaine showed Harry and Rosemary Wilcox around the house. “A little less than a manor house,” said Elaine, “a little more than a farm house. It grew, like a living thing. It began as a single stone structure, without windows, this room here, we believe, back in the ninth century. There’s a dwelling here in the Domesday Book: 1070-ish. See how thick the walls are? The farmer, his family, his hangers-on, the animals, all sheltered in here together. A few good harvests, no wars and some clever barter, and the humans can afford to separate out from the animals: they get to live above them. That way you get the warmth but not the stench. You build a staircase up the side of the structure: even get windows with glass. Later you build out and the farmhands and servants live apart from the farmer. You enclose the staircase. You build a big hall and panel it; you begin to get grand. A major upheaval moves the animals out to stables and byres: the servants move up to the attics; the family moves down. You send the farmhands to war and ask the monarch to stay: you get given land, or buy it. Now you’ve got more land, you’ve got more trees and can afford to heat the place. You get more confidence: separate bedrooms for the kids. An elegant frontage gets built in the early eighteenth century, and bathrooms in the twentieth. Farming’s no longer the family business. Second half of the twentieth you sell some of the land off. So, yes, it’s historic: it’s also a mess. Some of the improvers had taste, some didn’t. The bathrooms being a case in point. Wretched little things tucked under the eaves.” The Wilcoxes looked at her blankly.

“None of the doors are flush,” said Rosemary.

“We could soon replace them with something more modern,” said Harry. “You could really do things with this house.”

“Look at the state of my heels!” she said. “There are actually cracks in the kitchen floor.”

“Those are flagstones,” said Harry. “We could tile them over easily enough.”

“I expect what moved your editor to send you over to me,” said Defoe, “was the documentary on TV last week. I was the nuclear expert he saw, sitting in a Moscow hotel with my face in shifting squares, electronically blurred, to no real purpose; experts are never in real danger. Everyone needs them. The chambermaid always survives the palace revolution. Someone has to make the beds. In my hand I held an anti-rad flask, and in it was a helping of Red Mercury, looking just like goulash. I tilted the flask, and it sloshed around as would any oily stew in a cooking pot, only with a paprika tinge, which is why I compare it to goulash, and why it is called Red Mercury. Hoax or not? A fictitious substance devised by the Russian Mafia—and in fact goulash? Or a real and dangerous addition to the nuclear arsenal, a substance so secret governments deny its very existence. A new element which will give the terrorists’ A-bomb in a suitcase the fillip required to turn it into an N-bomb in a golf ball, capable of destroying life for miles around—with one quick fizzle, one flash of radiation so profound it kills all living things, while leaving buildings, highways, transport, microwave towers, post-office towers to you—and water supplies untouched.”

“You’re very good at this,” she said, admiringly.

“I earned my living at it for twenty years,” said Defoe. “I should be.”

“One thing,” said Weena, “wouldn’t the water supply be contaminated?”

Defoe brushed the comment away, and accidentally brushed her breast. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t have a thing about body space. I’m the touchy-feely type, as it happens. Aquarius. You’re Taurus, aren’t you?”

“I’m a man,” he said. “That is all the definition I need. Where was I? Red Mercury, fiction or fact? Oddly, until the stuff was in my hand, I had assumed it was a fraud, a con. But there was a kind of reluctance of movement in the stuff, something about the sluggish way it shifted in the flask, as I said earlier, like chunks of meat in oil, which made me think it was authentic. The natural world hesitates when it’s on the verge of self-destruct. Surface tension prevents the lava spilling out: simple air pressure keeps shifting tectonic plates in place—to bring two pieces of plutonium together to reach critical mass requires a gigantic effort: as improbable as slamming together two pieces of magnetised metal with similar polarity. Everything in nature cries out no, no!”

Defoe paused for breath.

“You’re very romantic,” said Weena, “for a scientist.”

“Scientists have hearts, too,” Defoe said. “Who better than scientists to understand the romance of the universe, the mystery of matter?”

“Tell me,” said Weena, “if it’s true, if this stuff exists, why do governments deny that it does?”

“The function of governments,” said Defoe, “is to hold truth in reserve, as a last resort. If it doesn’t exist, so what; if it does exist, then the technology required to fit it into warheads is available only to governments, and major armies.”

And Defoe produced his diagram.

“I think it’s wonderful!” she said. “Did you draw that circle freehand?”

“I did,” he said.

“I thought Leonardo da Vinci was the only man ever known to draw a perfect circle freehand.”

“Leonardo da Vinci and me,” said Defoe.

Elaine put her head round the door.

“Do you want to explain the boiler to some people called the Wilcoxes?”

“No,” said Defoe. “I’m in the middle of an interview.”

Elaine went away.

“Does she always do that?” asked Weena. “Interrupt you in the middle of things?”

“If in her judgement her needs are more urgent than mine, yes.”

“Well,” said Weena, “I think it’s rather rude to me. As if I was unimportant. You mustn’t worry about being temporarily out of work. The world can’t do without you. You talk so really well. Very few people can do that. That night in the hotel after the show I should never have let you go.”

“I was tired,” said Defoe. “I don’t suppose I did much talking.

Have you read any of my books?”

“No. I know I should have. But I don’t get to read much. But I love reading, all that.”

“I’ll give you a copy of my latest,” said Defoe.
“Science the Terminator.”

And Weena actually clapped her hands with pleasure, and dropped her pen in so doing.

Perhaps Defoe would have helped Weena find the pen under the desk, but Elaine entered with Harry and Rosemary Wilcox.