The building had now — officially — closed down and sad clusters of under-employed aliens were dumped, long coats covering their uniforms, at the riverside; to wait on a gale-tossed pier for the shuttle to Wapping, Cherry Gardens, London Bridge, and Chelsea Harbour. The cartel of pigged-out gourmets were the only humans still conscious between the sugar factory and Barking Road. A royal box of candlelight flickering over the angry black waters.
‘And why not?’ She shrugged. ‘What the hell.’ This sort of boardroom grapple happened all the time (usually at the end of chapters) in her husband’s sweaty, screen-tested fiction. (If not in his private life; which she thought, on reflection, was not very probable.) She could never bring herself to try his stuff. She granted it all the credibility of a government-approved white paper, without any of the literary flair of the Wykehamist mandarins. His books, she assumed, were only purchased by smart young women on the promotional side of publishing, who wanted to create a sensation at dinner parties by boasting, to howls of derision, that they had actually bought one at Kennedy — and read it!
Unashamed, she met his arrogant gaze. She stared back — her firm breasts rising and falling under the simple Ralph Lauren sweater — into those smoky, steel-blue orbs. The darkened picture window over the King George V dock was the screen of a word processor. Green sentences stuttered and rushed at her, syllable by syllable, line by line; bringing the hot blood to her cheeks. She must not give herself away. But she could hardly contain the mounting excitement she felt as she admired that sharp profile, the Roman brow, the consular authority. This was a man to command crucifixions. Those slender, cruel lips could compose passionate speeches, or soothe a high-blooded stallion. Cacharel, Eau de Toilette? She knew instinctively that his fierce mask hid a gentler and more sensitive aspect. The Katharine Hamnett storm-trooper jacket hung easily from his powerful shoulders. He was coolly, openly undressing her with his eyes. How lucky then that she had slipped into her sheer black Dior stockings and her peach-coloured Janet Reger underthings. She was unafraid. She wanted his hot maleness. She could wait no longer. Her fingers tore at the buttons of his collarless Calvin Klein shirt. How sweet and traditional he was! How unaffected by the dictates of quotidian (Cancel. Illegitimate. Type again. Substitute: ‘everyday’) fashion. ‘Take me, take me,’ she sobbed, as she fumbled to unbuckle his sadistic (Cancel. Illegitimate. Substitute: ‘snakeskin’) Benetton belt. ‘Take me here, now — make me yours.’
The romantically enhanced appeal of this sensual and yielding creature was, for the moment, wasted upon the Architect. In his first, bug-eyed, response to her grab at his pleasure principle, he had inadvertently dropped one of his contact lenses into the sorbet — and was now impotent with fear, trying to convince himself that the crunching sensation in his mouth was caused by nothing more alarming than a shard of lemon-flavoured ice. Tiny slivers of deadly plastic were — he could feel them — targeting his intestine, eager to slash their way to freedom. And bugger the consequences. Was it not a fact that the post-mortem lens would carry the imprint of the unconscious assassin? Some swampland pathologist would tweezer up this curved miracle of micro-technology, and have a better idea of the woman’s looks than the disadvantaged Architect would ever enjoy. He didn’t want to check out while humping some blue-stocking turkey. But there was no time to validate her status (in the centrefold department): his trousers were around his ankles, and the life force was returning, in spasms, to his battle-scarred member.
Dear God, had she noticed that his eyes were, quite suddenly, different colours? Maybe she was turned on by freaks. He breathed heavily on the back of a silver spoon, and polished it on the cloth to reassure himself, in this distorted mirror, that she had not spotted the tiny distinguishing mark — do not call it a wart — in the cleft of his chin. Ladies of a certain age apparently considered this trivial flaw leant a saturnine quality to his otherwise classical (Stewart Granger?) good looks. They also went for men who limped. But there was no opportunity to try that one. She was astride him and ripping the shirt from his back.
A curious sensation rippled upwards from the soles of his feet, to break — in hair-raising confrontation — on the waves of involuntary surrender, spiralling blindly down the freeway of his spine. All six chakras were in critical overdrive. He licked his lips like a man drowning in sand. Was that a bowl of yogurt? What was she up to? ‘Eh? Eeee. I–I. Ohh, you-uuuuu!’ he vowelled his distress, rupturing in a single convulsion the elocutionary pretensions of a lifetime. She was, very slowly, devouring him. He couldn’t stand it. He was lifting from the runway, surging through railway tunnels, breaking over rocks, pounding the white buildings, waterfalling; with a singular greed to rewrite all previous definitions of ecstasy.
At this hour only the Sh’aaki Twins were not pissed out of their skulls: they were getting rather silly on lime-flavour carbonated water. They were playing the game of spinning an empty claret bottle: whoever it pointed at could choose an item from his brother’s collection of contemporary lithographs. Nobody was keeping score, but it appeared that the one remaining wine waiter (who slept on the premises) was now the proud possessor of forty-eight prime examples of Kitaj, Schnabel, Kieffer, Koberling, Penck, Bellany, Baselitz, Polke, Johns and Warhol. Indeed, the man was able, in a modest way, to set himself up as a respected dealer, and adviser to new investors in this notoriously high-risk field.
The Film Producer, who had snuffed his way through his own supplies, was starting to ‘freebase’ the sugar basin. It was, as Professor Catling judged, the optimum moment to make his outrageous pitch. ‘We’ve dutifully rubber-stamped the shitty Bayreuth we were convened to bless, OK, fine; but now we have a chance to make our mark and — within the same budget — initiate another project, an original proposal that can slip through on the back of what the grey men require. We can recover our reputation for probity, hold our heads high among the community of artists. Let us act with stealth and in a way they will never suspect — until it is far too late.’ He let his balled fist drop on to the table, startling the recumbent Producer, and throwing the Sh’aaki Twins into a fit of the giggles. His rhetoric expired over a palpitating dunescape of naked buttocks that strained, diligently, to make the earth move. ‘We don’t want our names in lights,’ Catling said, ‘but neither will we allow them to be scribbled on the water.’