"When? I mean when's the appointment?"
"Tuesday. Right after Easter."
"Good," said Brenda, going back to the tea tray. "Anybody interesting at the club?"
The dub was a long way from St James's in more than the geographical sense and existed for the benefit of unprosperous middle-aged and elderly men of professional standing. In order to survive it had recently had to sell half of itself, of its premises that is, to a man who had constructed a massage parlour there. "Just the usual crowd," said Jake, accurately enough.
"I see. Ooh, the Thomsons have asked us round for drinks one evening next week," she said, mentioning one of the comparatively few couples in Orris Park who didn't go on about their cars or their children the whole time. "I've put it in the diary."
"Well done."
"You know, we ought to give a party some time. We can't go on just taking other people's hospitality."
"I quite agree, but it's so bloody expensive. Everybody drinks Scotch or vodka these days."
"They can't do much about it if you just offer them wine."
"I suppose not."
"I was thinking." Brenda stood with the tray held in front of her stomach. "I thought we might give that new Greek place a try."
"Tonight?"
"I just thought...."
"I don't really like Greek food. I always think Greek food is bad Turkish food and Turkish food isn't up to much."
"What about Sandro's? We haven't been there for ages."
"They charge the earth and they never seem to change their menu. Isn't there anything in the house?"
"Only the rest of that chicken."
"Sounds fine. You could fix up a salad, couldn't you?"
"I suppose so..... Then we could go to a film."
"There's nothing very marvellous on, I looked at the 'Standard' yesterday. Oh, apart from that thing about Moloch turning up in the crypt of a San Francisco church and having children fed to him alive, 'The Immolation,' that's it, I wouldn't mind seeing that."
"Well I would."
"You are funny, I keep telling you it's all pretend. Look love, I vote we pull up the drawbridge tonight. I know it's selfish of me but I don't honestly feel quite up to stirring out and that probably means I shouldn't, don't you think? Let's be absolute devils and have the heating on and huddle round the telly."
So when the time came, Brenda went and sliced the chicken and made a salad and a dressing and got out the rather swarthy Brie that needed eating up and put it all on trays and brought them into the sitting-room. The TV was a colour set, small but all right for two. On it she and Jake watched episode 4 of 'Henry Esmond,' the News, including film of a minor air disaster in which a good half of those involved hadn't even been hurt, International Snooker, with a commentary that laid great stress on the desire of each player to score more points than the other and so win the match, World Outlook, which consisted largely of an interviewer in a spotted bow-tie being very rude to a politician about some aspect of nuclear energy and the politician not giving a shit, and Rendezvous with Terror: 'The Brass Golem.' Or rather Jake watched that far; Brenda gave up at the first soccer result and opened her Simon Raven paperback. At the start of the collegno violin passage advertising the approach of the rendezvous just alluded to, she got up from the sofa which she had herself covered with crimson velvet.
"You off, darling?" asked Jake. "These things are always innocuous ballocks, you know. About as frightening as Donald Duck."
"No, I'll be off anyway. Still the spare room?"
"I think while we're still sleeping badly."
"Mm. Ooh, I'm sorry I didn't thank you properly for the chocolates."
"The..... Oh yes. Oh, I thought you did."
"If the scales aren't too bad in the morning I might treat myself to one tomorrow night. Well...."
"Good night, love."
She bent and kissed him on the cheek and was gone. Jake washed down his Mogadon with some of his second glass of what was supposed to be claret. He was sorry now that he hadn't done what impulse and habit had suggested and told Brenda about the abortive wine-switch. Done properly the tale would have amused her, its confessional aspect given her pleasure, the row over the Mabbotts been prevented or disposed of, not merely broken off. But to have done it properly would have meant taking trouble, not much, true, but more than he had on the whole felt like taking at the time. Well there it is, he thought.
Despite everything the background bass clarinet could do, and it did indeed get a lot done in quantity, terror as expected failed altogether to turn up at the prearranged spot. Summoned by an ancient curse but otherwise unaccounted for, the metalloid protagonist ran his course in twenty minutes less commercials. His most mysterious endowment was the least remarked: that of always coming upon his quarry alone, out of sight and hearing of everyone else, in a blind alley, in a virtually endless tunnel, in a room with only one door and no usable window, etc. He ground to a halt finally through gross overheating of the lubricants in the Turkish bath where Providence, in the form of total chance, had led his last intended victim to take refuge. Very neat.
As he went round the room turning everything off, Jake reconstructed the brief script conference at which the creative producer had outlined the story to his colleagues. "Right," he snarled, stabbing at the air with an invisible cigar to point the turns in his argument, "got this guy made of like brass, see, buried somewheres for a coin's age, okay, comes like an earthquake or explosion or whatever, right, anyways he done get gotten dug up, see, this old like parchment says any motherfucker digs me up gets to done get gotten fucked up good, okay, he fucks up three—four guys around, right, chases the last guy into somewhere fucking hot, see, now the brass guy done gotten oil like instead of blood, okay, so 'he' gets to done get gotten fucked up, right, Zeke and Zack get on it right away, see, they don't get to done get gotten done it by tomorrow, they lose their asses, okay, and any number of cunts all over the world who know a bloody sight better will watch the bloody thing. Right."
Upstairs, Jake unhurriedly cleaned his teeth and peed, feeling a comfortable drowsiness at the edge of his mind. Light showed under Brenda's door: she liked to read for a time before settling off, which he didn't. He went into the spare room and undressed. There were pictures in here no less than everywhere else, most of them non-modern black-and-white unoriginals; in almost every case he could have said whether or not a given one belonged to the house but he would never have missed any of them. He put on his pyjamas, turned off the light and was about to get into bed, then changed his mind and went to the window.
Looking out, he remembered with no great vividness doing the same thing one night some shortish time after Brenda and he had come to live here. Then as now there had been plenty to see, mainly by the street-lamp that stood no more than twenty yards off: houses, trees, bushes, parked cars, the bird-table in the garden diagonally opposite. Then, too, some of the windows must have been illuminated and it was quite possible that, as now, the only sounds had been faint voices and distant footsteps. After some effort he remembered further his feelings of curiosity, almost of expectation, as if he might find himself seeing a link between that moment and things that had happened earlier in his life. He remembered, or thought he did; there was no question of his re-experiencing those feelings, nor of his wishing he could. What was before him left him cold, and he didn't mind.