“Quite a lot,” he answered quietly.
She laughed out loud. She remained very much in control, so as not to rouse the bartender (whose eyes had fallen closed), but she was also very much amused. “How could it possibly matter?” she exclaimed.
“My husband is on the other side of the dominion, and what dear Roland doesn’t know will never, ever hurt him. I’m sure I don’t know a great many things of his doing, and I’ve not lost a moment’s sleep over any of them.”
“Mrs. Oliver - ” Bushell said again.
“Stop that!” Now her eyes sparked. “If you do it again, you will make me angry. Don’t tell me you’re not interested. I’ve been watching you for hours. I know better.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you that,” he answered. His face felt wooden; getting each word out took a separate effort. “But what I am interested in doing and what I do are not necessarily one and inseparable.”
She stared at him. “What on earth?” she said in honest bewilderment. Then her gaze happened to fall to the ring she’d displayed a moment before. “Don’t tell me this bothers you?” she said. When he nodded like a machine whose mechanism needed oiling, she took it off and put it in her handbag. “There! Is that better?”
He shook his head, as jerkily as he’d nodded.
“A man of scruples!” she exclaimed in wonder. Bushell had always thought of himself so, but not in the way she said it. From her red lips, it sounded foolish, outmoded, useless. She cocked her head to one side, studying him like some strange biological specimen. “You shan’t even let me seduce you?”
He discovered the Jameson he’d taken on board was still with him after all. It had just been lying low. Without it, he never would have replied as he did: “Mrs. Oliver” - he stared at her, through her, so fiercely that she did not correct him - ”were that ring not on your finger, I should like nothing better than taking you upstairs and” - not even the whiskey could make him say to a woman fucking your brains out, which was the thought uppermost in his mind - ”making love to you. You may forgive me for declining or not, as you see fit, but I have a” - he hesitated again before coming up with the right word ”a horror of adultery.”
He waited for Patricia to say something else cutting. How quaint was what he thought most likely. But she was a RAM, and a good one, or she wouldn’t have been in New Liverpool, and she had a police officer’s itch to know. Very quietly, she spoke one word: “Why?”
He wanted another drink, wanted it with a sweaty passion not much different from lust. But the Irish whiskey already in him kept his tongue loose in his mouth. “I used to work out of Victoria myself, some years back now. Once, I finished a piece of business up in the Oregon country a couple of days sooner than I’d thought I would. I didn’t telegraph or telephone - I thought I’d come home early and surprise Irene.”
“That’s enough,” Patricia Oliver said, looking not at him but down at her hands. “You don’t need to tell me anymore. I don’t want you to tell me anymore.”
Obediently, he fell silent. But he did not need to tell the rest of his story to have it unwind in his head as if played on a cinema a finger’s breadth in front of his eyes. He’d opened the front door, set down his bags, and heard some small noise in the bedroom that told him Irene was there. He’d walked in quietly and . . .
She’d been naked, straddling Sir David Clarke, sliding up and down on his thick, hard tool, her head thrown back in abandon, little whimpering noises coming from her throat. Then she’d gasped, and then he had, and then, as they’d slowly begun to come back to themselves, they’d noticed Bushell standing in the doorway.
“You never know for certain where anyone is until you actually see him,” he remarked, not so much to Patricia Oliver as to Irene back in the days when he’d thought he was a happy, lucky man. Patricia had grit. She slid the wedding ring back onto her finger. Then she raised her eyes to his face and said, “I hope this won’t interfere with our working together.”
“Captain Oliver, if I can work with Sir David Clarke - I’m not giving out any great secrets there; you’ll hear it from others if not from me - I can work with you.”
She nodded at that, and then again to show she’d noticed him using her title. “I am going up to bed now,” she said, sliding off the bar stool. “Good night, Colonel.” He dipped his head in return. Formality was a grease that could help people from grinding against one another. Bushell rose, too. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a couple of shillings, and set them on the bar: quietly, so as not to disturb the dozing bartender. He walked out into the lobby. Patricia had already disappeared; catching a lift upstairs at this hour must have been easy. Under the glow of electric lamps, the streets were almost deserted. Every now and then, a steamer rolled past, nearly as silent as the rest of the night. A couple of women who probably were not ladies stood on a street corner, talking in low voices. Here and there, in shadows where the streetlamps did not reach, men with no better place to stay slept curled in ragged blankets or wrapped in newspapers to hold chill at bay. Some of them clutched the bottles that were at once their solace and ruination. A tavern just a few doors down from RAM headquarters was an oasis of light and noise. Flickering images from the large televisor screen at one end of the bar showed a London soccer match that had to have been filmed a couple of weeks before. As Bushell walked past, one of the teams scored a goal. The tavern erupted in cheers, as if the action itself, not a faded, tardy simulacrum, had taken place before the eyes of those who watched it. Bushell rubbed at his mustache, marveling that so many people confused with reality what the televisor showed.
Televisor or no, he thought about going in, and even took one step halfway in the direction of the door. Another drink, or two, or three? Why not? But even as the temptation formed in his mind, he forced it to dissolve. He knew why not, all too well. Another drink, or two, or three, another drunk, or two, or three, and he might find himself one of those broken men on the sidewalk, a bottle in hand, oblivion all he craved. He shuddered and walked on.
The sergeant at the duty desk nodded to Bushell when he strode in. If he found anything in the least unusual about his chief’s appearance there in the wee small hours of the morning, he did not presume to show it.
A Nuevespañolan janitor sweeping the hall in front of his office did give Bushell a curious glance as he went in, but said nothing. Bushell locked the door after himself, took off his shoes, loosened his tie, and sank down in his swivel chair. He put his feet up on the desk, as he’d told Patricia Oliver he would, and did his best to sleep.
But sleep would not come. Despite weariness, despite Jameson, behind his eyelids he kept seeing Irene’s white buttocks clench and loosen, kept hearing her moans of delight, kept smelling her sweat and her lover’s. The images came to him all too often, even now, but seldom with such force as tonight.
“Damn that Oliver woman,” he muttered, shifting in the chair as he searched for some spot that was comfortable, or at least restful.
The bells of the Anglican cathedral chimed two. He did not hear them chime three. Bushell’s chin came up off his chest. Light was leaking in through the closed Venetian blinds. He pulled out his pocket watch: a quarter to seven. Four hours’ sleep would get him through the day. He snorted. If he’d managed on one, he could manage on four.
His head throbbed dully. It wasn’t a hangover, not quite, but it wasn’t the way he cared to start the day, either. He jerked open the middle drawer of his desk, unscrewed the lid from a bottle of paracetamol tablets, and dry-swallowed two. When he got out of the chair and stood up, he discovered his head was not the only part of him that ached. In his army days, he’d slept on hard ground as if it were a feather mattress. His army days, he had to keep reminding himself, were well behind him. He hoped the paracetamol would start working soon.