I picked up the tray before the breakfast got cold, not caring whether I made love to Alice or not. In fact I positively didn’t want to and, I was sure, neither would she want me to. On the evidence of her diary, which it had served me right for reading, I was the last person she’d hope to see first thing in the morning, even with a breakfast tray.
My mind was on higher things as I knocked at her door and went in. She slept on her stomach, her face turned away from the wall and towards me. I opened the curtains. The diary was no longer on the dressing table. I edged bottles and tubes aside and set down the tray. My only thought was to go out, but I couldn’t leave the coffee to get cold. I had to wake her first, so touched her shoulder. ‘What is it? Oh, it’s you. What do you want?’
It was hard to say what dreams she had been in, but I could only suppose that she regarded me with the same dislike as I had looked on Matthew Coppice an hour ago. ‘I thought you might like breakfast. Hot coffee, orange juice, toast and teacakes.’
She sat up, not knowing where she was and looking as if I’d gone out of my way to injure her during the sleep from which she had been jerked. Her otherwise sensitive face was creased with distrust as she took in the landscape of the tray. I suppose we’re all funny people the moment we come out of our dreams. ‘What’s this?’
It was too much. ‘Your bloody breakfast.’
She stared. ‘Breakfast?’ She held both hands to her small breasts. ‘In bed?’
‘Why not?’
‘Breakfast in bed!’ She laughed. ‘And served by a man!’
I gave her the juice and she knocked it back. ‘What’s funny about it?’
‘Shall I tell you?’ I poured the coffee and handed it to her. She took a sip while I buttered her toast. ‘I’ve never had breakfast in bed.’
‘You must be joking.’
‘I’m not. No man’s ever made my breakfast.’
‘You haven’t lived.’ I had often taken it upstairs to Bridgitte. In fact I’d always made breakfast at home, and felt pain that such a chore was finished. It was the only meal I could cook which didn’t cause ulcers. ‘It’s the least I can do for you. I’m afraid I made a fool of myself yesterday, pestering you and talking all kinds of nonsense. I want us to be friends.’ Thinking of the times I had taken breakfast in bed to Bridgitte, after the children had gone to school, and of the occasions when we’d made love among the crumbs, cornflakes and flecks of scrambled egg, got me at the quick for having thought of being disloyal to Bridgitte with an opinionated diary-writing thin-rapped woman like Alice Whipplegate who, when she had finished eating, reached out for me with tears in her eyes which were caused, I thought, more by being too suddenly ripped out of sleep than by sentimental gratitude at my gesture of getting up especially early to go down to the kitchen and prepare her a delectable breakfast with my own hands. ‘You’re wonderful,’ she said.
She kissed me, her lips moistened with a smell of coffee and oranges. I was still in my dressing gown, nothing underneath. She must have slept well, because the sheets of her single bed were hardly disturbed, until I slipped between them and felt her relaxed body folding towards mine.
I was uninterested, yet moved like a snake because I had the biggest early-morning hard-on that I could remember, and I didn’t even finger her but rucked up her shimmy-nightgown after a few salivating kisses, and went straight in without a murmur. I’d had enough of tongue-wagging. So had she. We were a duet of moans. Maybe she thought she was still in her sleep. The one-off atmosphere made it seem like a dream. I lifted myself on my hands and rubbed up close. She came once, and soon, and then I let myself go. When the eddies died away we laughed. I wasn’t trying to compete with Parkhurst by making her come four times.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘What for?’
‘A lovely breakfast.’
I liked her sense of humour. ‘We do our best at this hotel.’ I gave silent thanks to Matthew Coppice. ‘It’s all in the price of the Away Weekend.’
‘I was certainly away just then.’
My old red lobcock flipped out. ‘I must be off. I’ve got two more breakfasts to deliver.’
She put her arms around me. ‘Do you think you’ll manage?’
I kissed the lovely shoulder where her nightdress slipped. ‘I have to do my best, or I’ll lose my job. The management has to live up to its advertisements.’
‘Doesn’t it wear you out?’
I stood by her bed. ‘It tends to. But it keeps my weight down.’
‘Did you do any breakfasts before you came to see me?’
‘You were the first on my list.’
‘That’s a relief. It was nice. Doesn’t happen often in my life, I don’t know why.’
‘Not even with Parkhurst?’
She laughed. ‘Caught you! No.’
I could have killed her, but smiled. ‘What about with your husband?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘How?’
She rested her chin in her hands. ‘One evening the police phoned to say he’d wrapped the car, and himself, around a tree. An oak tree, as I remember. Why he added that little detail I don’t know. Maybe he took an interest in such things. When he added as a tailpiece that my husband was dead beyond resurrection my first thought was that I would have to get a job. It was more a decision than a notion and it occurred to me in spite of the shock, there being no better time to make one, since it was more than necessary on getting such news not to fall down dead at the sudden emptiness of life.
‘He’d gone out that morning and hadn’t made his usual enquiry as to how well or badly I’d slept, so I waited all day for disturbing news. Such an unusual omission on his part served, I suppose, as a warning that something was on its way. The clouds were low and grey. I looked at the rain from the living room window, and the extent of my thought was in wondering when it would stop.
‘I remember every detail of that day. It was rare for my mind to be so empty, and for me to be so inert. The occasional cigarette tasted foul — though I chain-smoked in the hope that the next would be better. It never was. I cooked an omelette for lunch and even that was tasteless. In the afternoon I went into the bathroom and satisfied myself, something I’d never done at such an hour, and rarely did, in any case. I felt hardly any relief afterwards. My breasts were turgid, as they sometimes are before a period. I even wondered whether I was pregnant. Then the phone call came which explained it all.’
I always kissed a woman when I saw tears under her eyes. What else could you do? ‘Sorry about your tragic life.’
‘I’ve never spoken to anyone like this.’
‘Because I brought you your breakfast?’
‘I suppose so.’ She got out of bed. ‘I’ll use the bathroom first, if you don’t mind. Then I must dress and get to work. Lord Moggerhanger is an early riser.’
Matthew Coppice had laid out a breakfast in the English style, which was welcome after my continental snack. Moggerhanger, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, read the Financial Times and through the window I saw Chief Inspector Lanthorn striding along the gravel path consuming a cigar. I ate breakfast as if I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from — the very opposite, I supposed, of the way an elderly patient at Forget-me-not Farm must have eaten when confronted by the avaricious phizzog of Elsie Carnack.
After reading the Daily Mirror I got out a bucket and cloth to swab the car. Moggerhanger had told me to do it and I should have objected since it was not part of my job, but never having been an English workman, demarcation disputes were not in my blood. If they had been I would have said that a skilled driver such as myself should not have to stoop to common cleaning. Neither was it part of my nature to quibble about any kind of work while in the presence of a man who only asked me to do something as a test. Or so I told myself, to save my pride. In any case, at this stage of my rehabilitation with Moggerhanger, I didn’t want the sack.