‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To the capital.’
I had a blurred terrifying image of a house in a quiet town near London – a giant nest of rooms every one empty except for a single chair. In mindless reaction I tried to stretch the stick between my hands. Brond laughed.
‘The Prevention of Crime Act 1953 – it’s against the law to carry a weapon in public without lawful reason or excuse. Did you know that? Anyway, a sword stick really is not a practical weapon in a car.’
I forced my hands to lie still.
‘You gave me the stick in the interrogation room,’ I said, ‘in front of those detectives.’
‘Fortunately,’ Brond said, ‘like yourself, they weren’t sufficiently curious.’
The car slowed as under our lights orange strips on the road rippled. On the roundabout, we passed a sign for the Forth Bridge and took the next exit.
I knew the city now but not why we should be going there.
‘Glasgow has street walkers,’ Brond said as we passed along that long straight entry into the mother of Alba, ‘and an unpalatable collection they are. It has to do, I suppose, with the lack of a substantial middle class. Edinburgh has those, of course, but offers a more genteel service in addition. The advantage, one must suppose, of having the Faculty of Advocates and a plethora of civil servants about the place.’
We came to the Haymarket and went up the hill to the right instead of going forward into Princes Street. After a maze of dark winding streets, we came out on to a broad road and a little later, as I ducked my head searching for some sign I could identify, the car stopped. Primo switched off the engine and I followed Brond out on to the pavement.
Away to our left curved a terrace of substantial houses. In front of us there were stone pillars marking the entrance to a driveway. We seemed to be on a street set above the main road for through the railings behind us the orange lamps shone level with where we stood. Their light followed us into the drive which was longer than it looked from the street, with plenty of space for cars to park discreetly. There was only one at the moment, but I recognised it as a Porsche 911 because the estate owner’s son at home had one; Trailtrow’s son, just turned eighteen, roaring past with a girl beside him, a French girl, an actress, and the calves blockily in flight kicking up their heels.
‘If it is a brothel,’ I said loudly, ‘neighbours in a district like this should object. They should send for the police.’
Primo who was behind me grasped my arm in warning, but Brond looked back seemingly unperturbed.
‘Even discreet brothels,’ he said loudly in a kind of humorous parody of my tone, ‘make a noise from time to time. I expect their neighbours have learned to ignore it.’
A carpet of pebbles gleamed under our feet. Traffic murmured with an effect of distance. We might have been lost deep in the country, coming to knock and ask our way.
The woman who opened the door looked young at first glance, but at a second I thought she was in her fifties at least; and then again there was something not easily defined – she was well dressed, expensively perhaps, nothing immodest – that made me understand Brond had used the exact unvarnished word to describe this place we were about to enter. Maybe that should have made me feel safer, but it didn’t. I didn’t feel happier or safer; just puzzled when she did not admit us at once.
‘Last time was a mistake,’ Brond said, and he leaned forward and spoke to her too softly for me to hear.
‘. . . last time,’ the woman said. ‘. . . last time . . .’
It was eerie to see Brond refused. The illusion of his omnipotence had been imposed upon me. What she was doing filled me with anxiety. I wanted her to stop before something terrible happened. At that moment, however, a car swung into the drive, jerked to a halt in a scatter of pebbles behind the Porsche and ejected a plump bouncy little man whose hair gleamed silver in the light from the open door as he approached.
‘Evening, Maisie.’
He had the air of a familiar guest. As he went to pass us, he glanced at Brond and stopped abruptly.
‘Good God, Maisie!’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re keeping this man on the doorstep. I’ll vouch for—’
‘Mr Smith,’ Brond interrupted him, very easily and as if making a joke. ‘And friends.’
On the ebullience of the little man, all four of us were carried inside. We followed the woman through the hall into what you would have thought of as the front room of a family house. When I looked round for the little man as a protector, he had vanished. There was a table with glasses and bottles and when she asked us what we would drink I noticed for the first time that she had a trace of an Irish accent. The glass she put into my hand was an expensive whisky tumbler, solid and comforting.
When the door opened, I looked round expecting to see the little man who had vouched for us. Instead it was a young girl who might have been seventeen. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a soft wool sweater – the kind of outfit worn by daughters of what my father would call ‘the gentry’ – very genteel.
‘Yours, I think,’ Brond said.
On her cue, she smiled at me.
‘Angela,’ she said. ‘Nice to have you here. Would you like something else to drink?’
I said, no. Mine?
‘I think you’re wanted somewhere else,’ the Irish woman called Maisie said sharply as if she had authority, but the girl ignored her.
‘Perhaps you’d like to see upstairs?’
I looked at her. In my head, I knew she had given me an invitation and what it meant; but in my stomach I did not believe it. Not because of Brond and all the dangers and strangenesses that had brought me here – that would have been too rational. I believed in the place as a brothel. What I did not believe was that any girl who spoke and dressed like the expensive daughters of the gentry would ever get into bed with me.
But she did.
Undressed she still looked expensive. She had little breasts and her stomach was flat. Her skin shone. She looked very healthy.
‘Let’s fuck,’ she said, and it didn’t sound like a whore, but like one of the expensive permissive girls I had dreamed about meeting at a party and seducing with my charm.
I got on top of her and as I slid inside could not help a little cry of triumph.
When we had finished, she half sat up on the pillow and yawned. The sheet was caught round her middle. She held one of her breasts, rubbing her hand on it back and forward.
‘That was your first time,’ she said.
I felt too good to care. In a little while, being one of those who took pleasures sadly, I would start to worry about herpes, crabs and the rest of the sad litany of public lavatories.
‘I’m a late developer. A country boy.’
She had a nice accent. I wondered if it could be genuine. Maybe she was a rich man’s daughter doing this for excitement – and going back later to some rich girls’ boarding school, in Surrey, say, or St Andrews.
‘Should we get up now?’
‘No hurry,’ she said.
From what I had read about prostitution, it seemed to me this must show we were in a very high class establishment indeed. Maybe I would save her from herself; we would marry and I would be taken into daddy’s business.
‘Let’s see what’s going on,’ she said and rolled like a cat out of bed.
I lay and looked at her. She was brown all over except for a narrow band of paler colour round her hips. Even her breasts were lightly tanned.
‘Come on,’ she said and held out her hand.
She was standing in front of what I had taken to be a mirror.
‘Put out the light.’
‘Why?’
‘Go on! Do it!’
I did not know what all this cost but it began to seem like unusual value. The lamp by the bed was lit and I switched it off. At first it was dark but then I could see the shape of her glimmer by the wall. My sex stirred and rose as I moved towards her.
She must have touched the mirror in some way for I found myself looking into a room. It was brightly lit: lamps by the bed and door, an overhead cluster of bulbs, all were on.