‘Perhaps that’s the most sensible idea.’
Could there have been a more wonderfully intelligent-looking young woman with such a Venus de Milo figure? If only she had no arms to match, though I supposed in that case she would have been very dextrous with her feet when it came to defending herself. ‘What would you like?’
‘Vermouth.’
‘Splash?’
‘Please.’
‘Ice and lemon?’
She nodded. ‘I wonder what’s happened to Ronald?’
‘I expect he’s gone off to Hamley’s for another panda, and to Mothercare for a pram.’
She put on a show of concern. ‘You don’t like him, do you?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘put it this way: no.’
She looked around. ‘I still can’t believe this is Gilbert Blaskin’s flat.’
‘Do you like his books?’ I said nonchalantly.
She thought for a while. ‘Well, yes — though I think his attitude to women is putrid.’
I held up my glass. ‘You can say that again. Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
I was unable to bite off my tongue. ‘This place isn’t a patch on Delphick’s Yorkshire manor, I admit.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’
I looked into her eyes made smoky by the rimless specs. ‘What do you mean? Do you mind telling me?’
She made a little tremor with her mouth. It was impossible that such a sensitive mechanism as her face couldn’t detect even the most feeble lie. I held out my hand. ‘Come on, I’ll show you the flat.’
I drew her into Gilbert’s study. ‘Look around. Feel free. His first editions are in that bookcase. In the drawers underneath are his press cuttings. On that filing cabinet is a photograph of him as an army officer with two of his mates. You can easily pick him out. He’s already bald, and you can see by his features that he’s hopelessly corrupt.’
She walked from wall to wall, sipping her drink. ‘You don’t seem to resemble him very much.’
‘You’ve made my week.’ I passed a couple of pages from his latest novel. ‘Read this. Apart from Blaskin, you’ll be the first one to do so — and I doubt if even he has, he was so busy writing it.’
Flushing, she sat on the couch. ‘Really?’
‘You’re the first one.’
‘Shall I read it aloud?’
‘If you must. I mean, if you like.’
‘I can’t read as well as Ronald.’
‘Nobody can.’ I sat by her side. ‘But I’d love to hear you, all the same.’
‘“As soon as he saw her,”’ she read, ‘“he knew it was The Road to Cheren all over again. The paper flowers on the table were pretty, and when he lit his cigar at the candle he tried not to blow smoke into her face. She didn’t trust him, and didn’t like him, but when did that have anything to do with love?
‘“The coppery glow of spring spread over the flat fields. Nothing comes of waiting. He told her that he loved her. She said he never had. He never would. Nor much of hoping, either. Only out of doing does a light show through. And that, all too often, incinerates. There was but one thing he wanted, and he hoped she too was in the mind for it. Moral regeneration was his only hope, and therefore hers.
‘“She looked at him, and realised that for all his thirty years, he wasn’t grown up. He never would be, so what was she doing at the Fenland Hotel? But if he was to grow up, she could see all too clearly what he would grow up to be, and she didn’t like it. The fact that she could see into the future, however, made all the difference between a live and a dead relationship. ‘If a rolling stone gathers no moss,’ he said, ‘whose loss is that?’
‘“(If I don’t get her knickers off, I’ll burst. Never say it cannot happen here. It always might, whether it does or not. That doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Everything’s too turgid. Write it fourteen times. You need a drink, you lazy swine. No, get her as far as that four-poster bed at least. Lead up to it slowly. Make ’em wait. Make yourself wait, you awful old prick. Why don’t you admit it?)
‘“She sipped her brandy, and the pursing of her lips boded well for when she lay naked on the bed and he lowered his head to suck an orgasm out of her lovely full-lipped cunt. He loved women, but loved those women more who loved women. Oh, Lady Samphire of the Ouse! What do we have to lose except the reek of virtue?”’
It was time for me to cough. He always spoiled it, and things would get worse. Such vile words coming out of Frances Malham’s lovely mouth in the purest of accents seemed, to say the least, incongruous. I put my arm around her shoulder. ‘Maybe you should stop. It’s only the first draft.’
She laughed, flushed though she was. ‘It’s funny.’
‘It’s foul.’
‘I’m getting an insight into the way he works. It’s wonderful.’
‘It gets worse. It must be the specimen sheet that he lets lady thesis-writers read when they come to interview him. Then he lays them down where you’re sitting now — if they get the message. It’s almost as bad as Sidney Blood without the violence. There’s no trick he doesn’t stoop to.’
She put the papers on the table. ‘I suppose all writers are the same.’
If Blaskin walked in she was lost. I dreaded the click of the door. ‘It’s the creative process. They’re in a permanent state of randiness. I’ve written a couple of books for Blaskin, so I know.’
‘You?’
I kissed her hair. ‘He has so many ideas he has to farm them out. He gives me the gist, I knock it off, he polishes it up, his secretary types it, the doorman posts it, some daft publisher prints it. One day I’ll branch out on my own. You learn a lot working for Blaskin.’
She took off her glasses, and our faces touched. We were fully clothed, but I noticed the heat of her body. I could only assume she felt mine, for she moved a few inches. Being scientifically minded, she realised that such narrow space would make the heat increase, till the flashpoint came.
I had such an elegant hard-on that, if need be, I could have balanced a plate of black puddings on it as I made my way towards her up a flight of stairs. I put my hand on her leg and gently touched the thigh under her skirt. My hand went as far as it could go. She was in flood. I wasn’t far off. Being in love, I came too quickly when we lay back on the couch. I wanted her to take her clothes off, but she said it was too late. Such easy success was bad for me. I had expected to pursue her for days, maybe weeks, but she had arranged for events to rip along at her own special pace, something which women did more and more these days. It was the way we fucked now — sometimes. Back from the bathroom, she said: ‘I’d like another drink. I made myself come, otherwise I feel lousy.’
‘Sorry it didn’t work together.’
She smiled, and kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’d like a cigarette as well.’
We sat in the living room. ‘I don’t know who you think I am or what I’m like,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure your ideas are wrong. My father was a doctor who died ten years ago, when I was twelve. He went to the surgery one day and the receptionist phoned my mother two hours later to say he’d had a heart attack. He was sixty and they’d been married fifteen years. He smoked and drank very heavily and that was what killed him. As well as overwork. I was the only child. My mother was over twenty years younger. She had practically no money, and got a job as a doctor’s receptionist to pay for my education. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Jeffrey I think she would have gone under. He’s my mother’s brother. He’s been wonderful, and still helps out, though he has a family of his own. But he won’t have any more children because he had a vasectomy three years ago.’