“Madame! You are the most beautiful lady I see!”
Then, turning to Cornford: “Please excuse, sir!” With which, picking up Shelly’s right hand, he imprinted his full-lipped mouth most earnestly upon the back of her wrist.
After the pair of them had emerged into the cobbled lane that led up again into Holywell Street, Cornford stopped and so roughly pushed his wife’s shoulder that she had no choice but to stand there facing him.
“You — are — a — bloody — flirt! Did you know that? All the time we were in there — all the time I was telling you—”
But he got no further.
The tall figure of Sir Clixby Bream was striding down toward them.
“Hell-o! You’re both just off, I can see that. But what about another little snifter? Just to please me?”
“Not for me, Master.” Cornford trusted that he’d masked the bitterness of his earlier tone. “But if...?” He turned to his wife.
“No. Not now. Another time. Thank you, Master.”
With Shelly still beside him, Cornford walked rather blindly on, suspecting (how otherwise?) that the Master had witnessed the awkward, angry scene. And then, a few steps later — almost miraculously — he felt his wife’s arm link with his own; heard the wonderful words spoken in her quiet voice: “Denis, I’m so very sorry. Do please forgive me, my darling.”
As the Master stooped slightly to pass beneath the entrance of the Turf Tavern, an observer skilled in the art of labiomancy would have read the two words on his smoothly smiling mouth:
“Well! Well!”
Chapter four
Wednesday, February 7
DISCIPLE (weeping): O Master, I disturb thy meditations.
MASTER: Thy tears are plural; the Divine Will is one.
DISCIPLE: I seek wisdom and truth, yet my thoughts are ever of lust and the necessary pleasures of a woman.
MASTER: Seek not wisdom and truth, my son; seek rather forgiveness. Now go in peace, for verily hast thou disturbed my meditations — of lust and of the necessary pleasures of a woman.
“Well, at least it’s left on time.”
“Not surprising, is it? The bloody thing starts from Oxford. Give it a chance, though. We’ll probably run into signaling failure somewhere along the line.”
She smiled, attractively. “Funny, really. They’ve been signaling on the railways for — what? — a hundred and fifty years, and with all these computers and things...”
“Over one hundred and seventy years, if we want to be accurate — and why shouldn’t we? Eighteen twenty-five when the Stockton to Darlington line was opened.”
“Yeah. We learned about that in school. You know, Stephenson’s Rocket and all that.”
“No, my dear girl. A few years later, that was. Stephenson’s first locomotive was called The Locomotive — not very difficult to remember, is it?”
“No.”
The monosyllable was quietly spoken, and he knew that he’d made her feel inadequate again.
She turned away from him to look through the carriage window, spotting the great sandstone house in Nuneham Park, up toward the skyline on the left. More than once he’d told her something of its history, and about Capability Brown and Somebody Adams; but she was never able to remember things as accurately as he seemed to expect. He’d told her on their last train journey, for example, about the nationalization of the railways after World War II: 1947 (or was it 1948?).
So what?
Yet there was one year she would never forget: the year the network changed its name to “British Rail.” Her father had told her about that; told her she’d been born on that very same day. In that very same year, too.
In 1965.
“Drinks? Refreshments?”
An overloaded trolley was squeezing a squeaky passage along the aisle; and the man looked at his wristwatch (10:40 A.M.) as it came alongside, before turning to the elegantly suited woman seated next to him:
“Fancy anything? Coffee? Bit too early for anything stronger, perhaps?”
“Gin and tonic for me. And a packet of plain crisps.”
Sod him! He’d been pretty insufferable so far.
A few minutes later, after pouring half his can of McEwan’s Export Ale into a plastic container, he turned toward her again; and she felt his dry, slightly cracked lips pressed upon her right cheek. Then she heard him say the wonderful word that someone else had heard a month or two before; heard him say “Sorry.”
She opened her white-leather handbag and took out a tube of lip salve. As she passed it to him, she felt his firm, slim fingers move against the back of her wrist; then move along her lower arm, beneath the sleeve of her light mauve Jaeger jacket: the fingers of a pianist. And she knew that very soon — the Turbo Express had just left Reading — the pianist would have been granted the licence to play with her body once more, as though he were rejoicing in a gentle Schubert melody.
She had never known a man so much in control of himself.
Or of her.
The train stopped just before Slough.
When, ten minutes later, it slowly began to move forward again, the Senior Conductor decided to introduce himself over the intercom.
“Ladies and Gentlemen. Due to a signaling failure at Slough, this train will now arrive at Paddington approximately fifteen minutes late. We apologize to customers for this delay.”
The man and the woman, seated now more closely together, turned to each other — and smiled.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“You often ask me that, you know. Sometimes I’m not thinking of anything.”
“Well?”
“I was only thinking that our Senior Conductor doesn’t seem to know the difference between ‘due to’ and ‘owing to.’ ”
“Not sure I do. Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters.”
“But you won’t let it come between us?”
“I won’t let anything come between us,” he whispered into her ear. For a few seconds they looked lovingly at each other. Then he lowered his eyes, removed a splayed left hand from her stockinged thigh, and drank his last mouthful of beer.
“Just before we get into Paddington, Rachel, there’s something important I ought to tell you.”
She turned to him — her eyes suddenly alarmed.
He wanted to put a stop to the affair?
He wanted to get rid of her?
He’d found another woman? (Apart from his wife, of course.)
“Tickets, please!”
He looked as if he might be making his maiden voyage, the young ticket collector, for he was scrutinizing each ticket proffered to him with preternatural concentration.
The man took both his own and the young woman’s ticket from his wallet: cheap day returns.
“This yours, sir?”
“Yes.”
“You an OAP?”
“As a matter of fact I am not, no.” The tone of his voice was quietly arrogant. “To draw a senior citizen pension in the United Kingdom a man has to be sixty-five years of age. But a Senior Railcard is available to a man who has passed his sixtieth birthday — as doubtless you know.”
“Could I see your Railcard, sir?”
With a sigh of resignation, the man produced his card. And the slightly flustered, spotty-faced youth duly studied the details.
Valid: until MAY 7, 1996