‘Did you bring it?’
She smiled, shook her head, took the note from me, folded it carefully and pushed it into the wet top half of her bikini.
‘It’ll be safe there,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘How about a vodka martini?’
She had brought drinks, ice and delicious food. The sun in due course shifted thirty degrees round the sky, and I lay lazily basking in it while she put the empties back in the picnic box and fiddled with spoons.
‘Allie?’
‘Mm?’
‘How about now?’
She stopped the busy rattling. Sat back on her ankles. Pushed the hair out of her eyes and finally looked at my face.
‘Try sitting here,’ I said, patting the sand beside me with an unemphatic palm.
She tried it. Nothing cataclysmic seemed to happen to her in the way of fright.
‘You’ve done it before,’ I said persuasively, stating a fact.
‘Yeah... but...’
‘But what?’
‘I didn’t really like it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t like the boy enough, I expect.’
‘Then why the hell sleep with him?’
‘You make it sound so simple. But at college, well, one sort of had to. Three years ago, most of one summer. I haven’t done it since. I’ve been not exactly afraid to, but afraid I would... be unfair...’ She stopped.
‘You can catch a bus whenever you like,’ I said.
She smiled and bit by bit lay down beside me. I knew she wouldn’t have brought me to this hidden place if she hadn’t been willing at least to try. But acquiescence, in view of what she’d said, was no longer enough. If she didn’t enjoy it, I couldn’t.
I went slowly, giving her time. A touch. A kiss. An undemanding smoothing of hand over skin. She breathed evenly through her nose, trusting but unaroused.
‘Clothes off?’ I suggested. ‘No one can see us.’
‘... Okay.’
She unhitched the bikini top, folded it over the twenty dollars, and put it on the sand beside her. The pants in a moment followed. Then she sat with her arms wrapped round her knees, staring out to sea.
‘Come on,’ I said, smiling, my shorts joining hers. ‘The fate worse than death isn’t all that bad.’
She laughed with naturalness and lay down beside me, and it seemed as if she’d made up her mind to do her best, even if she found it unsatisfactory. But in a while she gave the first uncontrollable shiver of authentic pleasure, and after that it became not just all right but very good indeed.
‘Oh God,’ she said in the end, half laughing, half gasping for air. ‘I didn’t know...’
‘Didn’t know what?’ I said, sliding lazily down beside her.
‘At college... he was clumsy. And too quick.’
She stretched out her hand, fumbled in the bikini and picked up the twenty dollar note.
She waved it in the air, holding it between finger and thumb. Then she laughed and opened her hand, and the wind blew her fare home away along the beach.
11
London was cold enough to encourage emigration. I arrived back early Tuesday morning with sand in my shoes and sympathy for Eskimos, and Owen collected me with a face pinched and blue.
‘We’ve had snow and sleet and the railways are on strike’ he said, putting my suitcase in the hired Cortina. ‘Also the mild steel you ordered hasn’t come and there’s a cobra loose somewhere in Regent’s Park.’
‘Thanks very much.’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Anything else?’
‘A Mr. Kennet rang from Newmarket to say Hermes has broken down. And... sir...’
‘What?” I prompted, trying to dredge up resignation.
‘Did you order a load of manure, sir?’
‘Of course not.’
The total garden in front of my house consisted of three tubs of fuchsia, an old walnut tree and several square yards of paving slabs. At the rear, nothing but workshop.
‘Some has been delivered, sir.’
‘How much?’
‘I can’t see the dustmen moving it.’
He drove steadily from Heathrow to home, and I dozed from the jet-lag feeling that it was midnight. When we stopped it was not in the driveway but out on the road, because the driveway was completely blocked by a dunghill five feet high.
It was even impossible to walk round it without it sticking to one’s shoes. I crabbed sideways with my suitcase to the door, and Owen drove off to find somewhere else to park.
Inside, on the mat, I found the delivery note. A postcard handwritten in ball point capitals, short and unsweet.
‘Shit to the shit.’
Charming little gesture. Hardly original, but disturbing all the same, because it spoke so eloquently of the hatred prompting it.
Felicity, I wondered?
There was something remarkably familiar about the consistency of the load. A closer look revealed half rotted horse droppings mixed with a little straw and a lot of sawdust. Straight from a stable muck heap, not from a garden supplier: and if it looked exactly like Jody’s own familiar muck heap, that wasn’t in itself conclusive. I dared say one vintage was much like another.
Owen came trudging back and stared at the smelly obstruction in disgust.
‘If I hadn’t been using the car to go home, like you said, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the garage this morning to fetch you.’
‘When was it dumped?’
‘I was here yesterday morning, sir. Keeping an eye on things. Then this morning I called round to switch on the central heating, and there it was.’
I showed him the card. He looked, read, wrinkled his nose in distaste, but didn’t touch.
‘There’ll be fingerprints on that, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Do you think it’s worth telling the police?’ I asked dubiously.
‘Might as well, sir. You never know, this nutter might do something else. I mean, whoever went to all this trouble is pretty sick.’
‘You’re very sensible, Owen.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
We went indoors and I summoned the constabulary, who came in the afternoon, saw the funny side of it, and took away the card in polythene.
‘What are we going to do with the bloody stuff?’ said Owen morosely. ‘No one will want it on their flower beds, it’s bung full of undigested hay seeds and that means weeds.’
‘We’ll shift it tomorrow.’
‘There must be a ton of it.’ He frowned gloomily.
‘I didn’t mean spadeful by spadeful,’ I said. ‘Not you and I. We’ll hire a grab.’
Hiring things took the rest of the day. Extraordinary what one could hire if one tried. The grab proved to be one of the easiest on a long list.
At about the time merchant bankers could reasonably be expected to be reaching for their hats, I telephoned to Charlie.
‘Are you going straight home?’ I asked.
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Care for a drink?’
‘On my way,’ he said.
When he arrived, Owen took his Rover to park it and Charlie stood staring at the muck heap, which looked no more beautiful under the street lights and was moreover beginning to ooze round the edges.
‘Someone doesn’t love me,’ I said with a grin. ‘Come on in and wipe your feet rather thoroughly on the mat.’
‘What a stink.’
‘Lavatory humour,’ I agreed.
He left his shoes alongside mine on the tray of newspaper Owen had prudently positioned near the front door and followed me upstairs in his socks.
‘Who?’ he said, shaping up to a large scotch.
‘A shit is what Jody’s wife Felicity called me after Sandown.’
‘Do you think she did it?’
‘Heaven knows. She’s a capable girl.’
‘Didn’t anyone see the... er... delivery?’