I looked up at Gail. She was watching me.
‘Do you always read the sports page?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘Curiosity,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see what you’d written. That article... it’s disturbing.’
‘It’s meant to be.’
‘I mean, it leaves the impression that you know a great deal more than you’ve said, and it’s all bad, if not positively criminal.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s always nice to hear one has done exactly what one has intended.’
‘What usually happens when you write in this way?’
‘Repercussions? They vary from a blast from the racing authorities about minding my own business to abusive letters from nut cases.’
‘Do wrongs get righted?’
‘Very occasionally.’
‘Sir Galahad,’ she mocked.
‘No. We sell more papers. I apply for a raise.’
She laughed with her head back, the line of her throat leading tautly down into her dress. I put out my hand and touched her shoulder, suddenly wanting no more talk.
She nodded at once, smiling, and said, ‘Not on the rug. More comfortable upstairs.’
Her bedroom furnishings were pretty but clearly Sarah’s work. Fitted cupboards, a cosy armchair, book shelves, a lot of pale blue carpet, and a single bed.
At her insistence, I occupied it first. Then while I watched, like the time before, she took off her clothes. The simple, undramatised, unselfconscious undressing was more ruthlessly arousing than anything one could ever pay to see. When she had finished she stood still for a moment near the window, a pale bronze naked girl in a shaft of winter sun.
‘Shall I close the curtains?’
‘Whichever you like.’
She screwed my pulse rate up another notch by stretching up to close them, and then in the mid-day dusk she came to bed.
At three she drove me back to the station, but a train pulled out as we pulled in. We sat in the car for a while, talking, waiting for the next one.
‘Do you come home here every night?’ I asked.
‘Quite often not. Two of the other teachers share a flat, and I sleep on their sofa a night or two every week, after parties, or a theatre, maybe.’
‘But you don’t want to live in London all the time?’
‘D’you think it’s odd, that I stay with Harry and Sarah? Quite frankly, it’s because of money. Harry won’t let me pay for living here. He says he wants me to stay. He’s always been generous. If I had to pay for everything myself in London my present standard of living would go down with a reverberating thump.’
‘Comfort before independence,’ I commented mildly.
She shook her head. ‘I have both.’ After a considering pause she said, ‘Do you live with your wife? I mean, have you separated, or anything?’
‘No, we’ve not separated.’
‘Where does she think you are today?’
‘Interviewing someone for my Tally article.’
She laughed. ‘You’re a bit of a bastard.’
Nail on the head. I agreed with her.
‘Does she know you have... er... outside interests? Has she ever found you out?’
I wished she would change the subject. However, I owed her quite a lot, at least some answers, which might be the truth and nothing but the truth, but would certainly not be the whole truth.
‘She doesn’t know,’ I said.
‘Would she mind?’
‘Probably.’
‘But if she won’t... sleep with you... well, why don’t you leave her?’
I didn’t answer at once. She went on, ‘You haven’t any children, have you?’ I shook my head. ‘Then what’s to stop you? Unless, of course, you’re like me.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Staying where the living is good. Where the money is.’
‘Oh...’ I half laughed, and she misunderstood me.
‘How can I blame you,’ she sighed, ‘When I do it myself? So your wife is rich...’
I thought about what Elizabeth would have been condemned to without me: to hospital ward routine, hospital food, no privacy, no gadgets, no telephone, lights out at nine and lights on at six, no free will at all, for ever and ever.
‘I suppose you might say,’ I agreed slowly, ‘that my wife is rich.’
Back in the flat I felt split in two, with everything familiar feeling suddenly unreal. Half my mind was still down in Surrey. I kissed Elizabeth and thought of Gail. Depression had clamped down like drizzle in the train and wouldn’t be shaken off.
‘Some man wants to talk to you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He telephoned three times. He sounded awfully angry.’
‘Who?’
‘I couldn’t understand much of what he said. He was stuttering.’
‘How did he get our number?’ I was irritated, bored; I didn’t want to have to deal with angry men on the telephone. Moreover our number was ex-directory, precisely so that Elizabeth should not be bothered by this sort of thing.
‘I don’t know. But he did leave his number for you to ring back, it was the only coherent thing he said.’
Elizabeth’s mother handed me a note pad on which she had written down the number.
‘Victor Roncey,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ agreed Elizabeth with relief. ‘That sounds like it.’
I sighed, wishing that all problems, especially those of my own making, would go away and leave me in peace.
‘Maybe I’ll call him later,’ I said. ‘Right now I need a drink.’
‘I was just going to make some tea,’ said Elizabeth’s mother reprovingly, and in silent fury I doubled the quantity I would normally have taken. The bottle was nearly empty. Gloomy Sunday.
Restlessly I took myself off into my writing room and started the clean unscribbled-on retype for Tally, the mechanical task eventually smoothing out the rocky tensions of my guilt-ridden return home. I couldn’t afford to like Gail too much, and I did like her. To come to love someone would be too much hell altogether. Better not to visit Gail again. I decided definitely not to. My body shuddered in protest, and I knew I would.
Roncey rang again just after Elizabeth’s mother had left.
‘What the devil do you mean about this... this trash in the paper? Of course my horse is going to run. How dare you... how dare you suggest there’s anything shady going on?’
Elizabeth had been right: he was stuttering still, at seven in the evening. He took a lot of calming down to the point of admitting that nowhere in the article was it suggested that he personally had anything but good honest upright intentions.
‘The only thing is, Mr Roncey, as I said in the article, that some owners have in the past been pressurized into not running their horses. This may even happen to you. All I was doing was giving punters several good reasons why they would be wiser to wait until half an hour before big races to put their money on. Better a short starting price than losing their money in a swindle.’
‘I’ve read it,’ he snapped. ‘Several times. And no one, believe me, is going to put any pressure on me.’