‘A penny for your thoughts, my love.’
I drew her close. ‘They’re worth more than that. In Niagara we can find a hotel and start making that baby. Tomorrow we’ll go across Rainbow Bridge and hop on a bus for New York.’
‘Or the day after,’ she said.
When we got into our room she took her clothes off, lay on the bed with her legs spread as wide as they would go, and closed her eyes. ‘Now,’ she told me.
Only when I’d kept my promise did she come to life. Such passion was too late, because all I could do was stroke her till she was satisfied, then go to sleep, struck dead by a mixture of jetlag, fear, the unexpected love affair (which I was now thinking I could well have done without), a new country, and the plain passage of time. She lay beside me and we went into oblivion.
Morning was my bad time. As I grew older it got worse, a fact I liked less and less. Whenever I woke up I wondered where I was, even if I’d slept in the same room for years. But because I was in a panic as to my latitude and longitude I invariably wanted to make love if there was a woman in bed with me, just to get my system working.
That morning in Niagara there was Agnes, and as soon as she opened her eyes I knew that she wanted to make love with me as well. Her cunt, cloyed with the sperm of the night before, increased her enthusiasm, and though I tried to hold back it wasn’t long before my backbone liquified into her, after which the events of the previous day began to pester me again. I was a hunted man.
Far from this causing me to kick her out and tell her to get back to St Albans, or wherever it was she came from, I embraced her as if never wanting to be separated from her comfortable body. Her suspenders, superfine stockings, frilly knickers, front opening brassiere and lace-edged slip hung over the rail of the bed, things she’d bought for the lucky man chosen to be her consort, but which looked like items for breakfast waiting to be eaten.
I didn’t know where the hell I was. For a change, one fuck wasn’t enough to get me into gear. If anything was, it was the realisation that I had to run and hide in New York, where I hoped no one would find me. We had to get moving. Her breasts pressed against me, and her night breath was the perfume of her soul. I said such things that came to me. How could a woman of thirty-eight blush? The great waterfall rushed to its doom under clouds of spray. ‘I could stay here forever,’ she said.
‘You’re not the only one.’
‘The room smells nice after all we’ve done in it.’ She put on a pair of pants but came back, and I held her by the hair and kissed her neck, and ran my hand around that soft material hiding softer skin.
We ate a Canadian breakfast of pork sausages, muffins and coffee. As soon as I saw that waterfall pouring over the precipice I knew she was pregnant. I would have fallen into the boiling spray but for the wire. No wonder honeymoon couples come here, I said. A woman’s only-got to look at such a mass of water to conceive. Aren’t there enough children in the world? Yes, yes, everyone shouts back, but they aren’t mine.
We got across the bridge and went southwest through the New England spring. Though I lay back on my bus seat in a cloud of crackpot infatuation and looked at the wonderful scenery, another part of my mind sorted out the permutations as to what form the hunt for me would take. When the boys in Toronto discovered the dud money on opening the bag and phoned the hotel to find out I wasn’t there, they would imagine I’d left on the first plane from the airport. By timing, they would guess to within half a dozen different destinations where I’d gone, but at each I could have changed planes for somewhere else, so I had got clean away, unless a couple of planes had left for New York around that time. To be on the safe side, when we got to the bus station I would jump on the next one to Philadelphia, on a hunt for brotherly love. My ultimate nightmare had always been that of falling into a trap, which was why the few I had got caught in had been so deadly. I never liked the idea of people waiting to do me an injury. As the bus drew out I thought I saw Harrow run to get on. My old two fingers went up in the V sign, and the man shook his fist at lunatic me whom he’d never seen before.
Agnes didn’t quibble at my plan. ‘I feel like a gypsy, going around with a writer who only wants material for his next book.’
Lies came in useful, though I made up my mind to confess as soon as we were back on home territory. ‘I’m a very jumpy person.’
‘I’ve got to make sure I’ll have my baby. Maybe we need a few more goes.’
I wondered what other plans she’d got for us, and felt morbid and superstitious. ‘It may be necessary for me to go back to England sooner than I thought.’
She held my arm, pressing closer. ‘If you could manage another night or two, I’d be very happy.’
‘I don’t want to go. I can’t explain fully, but I have to.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll fly back to Toronto and see my sister, then go to England from there.’
Halfway to Philadelphia we stopped off at a motel, and stayed three nights. We were safe, though it was a while before I lost my sense of apprehension. I told the manager and his wife we’d only been married a week, and were travelling around seeing the country. We loved the country. It was a great country. We’d never known such a fabulous country. ‘You’ve seen nothing yet,’ the man said. ‘America is the greatest country on God’s earth.’ They were wonderful to us, and made it hilariously obvious that they wanted to leave us alone as much as possible. I couldn’t remember such a wonderful time in cuntland and tit-country, the great united states of lips and nipples with its jungle lairs and mountain ranges — oh hymn to outright non-ashamed fuckery. We went at it as if I at any rate was going to be hanged in the morning, and when she said: ‘We’re certainly making sure of my baby,’ I laughed so much she even laughed with me, which showed how much in love we were.
I would take the bus to Philadelphia and she would leave in the opposite direction for New York. Separation was harder than we thought, which was the worst of being casual. She wanted to ask me not to go. I wanted to ask her to come with me. I was brainwashed by my inability to know what was happening. I felt as if I was committing suicide. Parting from her was a bullet in my brain. It would lodge there, but I would go on living.
My jacket was wet with her tears, something which hadn’t happened since Nottingham days. Her blouse was wet with mine. I felt as if I had been through the mincer and come out a different person. No such luck. She said nothing about seeing me again. My stiff upper lip had a blister on it. One clause of our contract was that if she became pregnant that would be the end of our affair. In spite of, or perhaps because of her passionate nature, I could see that she meant it.
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘Do you want me to stay another night?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to stay another night?’
‘No,’ I said. She was turning me into her husband, but I still loved her. She must have cared for me, in fact, if she was taking the trouble to turn me into her husband — or a facsimile of the man she had turned her husband into. Even though I loved her, I never wanted to see her again. In her suitcase, between the underwear, I left an address card, though I had no expectation of seeing her. I had served my purpose just as she had served her purpose in getting me this far without being killed.
At Philadelphia there was a special Air Nimbus flight to London with one bucket seat left, and with my pack of credit cards I was able to wangle myself on board. I would be safe after taking off, because these days, with so many terrorists wanting to dip their hands in the blood bucket, no one could get on board with a cut-throat razor in their hand luggage.