Death in Disguise (13 page)

On the steps, she turned—indicating the glassed-in door by the Wellingtons. ‘You can go out that way. I don't know if you'd like to look round the gardens? Or there's a library.'

‘I think I'll go and dump my bag and have a shower. I've booked into a hotel.'

‘A hotel?'

‘I decided to stay over. I thought it might not be convenient here. I don't want to be any trouble.'

Suhami stared at him for a moment then smiled. The smile was prompted solely by amused surprise at the idea of her father not wishing to be any trouble, but Guy saw it as uniquely and transparently affectionate. All his previous confidence, vanquished by anger and distress, surged back. Everything would work out. All he had to do was play it her way. He could manage that. He would agree with everything and like everybody, and if he didn't he would dissemble. As he watched his daughter leave, Guy felt quite proud as if he had pulled this impossible achievement off already.

Sylvie would see that he could change and perhaps eventually would be able to acknowledge that his love for her was true. Excited and hopeful, he made his way past the old stove and wellies and out into the sunshine.

‘
T
here's someone on the terrace.' Trixie moved her cheek on the windowpane. It made a soft squeaky sound but the man did not look up. ‘I suppose it's Suhami's father.'

Janet crossed over and, hand pressing lightly on Trixie's shoulder, also looked down. Trixie moved away saying, ‘He looks like a gangster.'

He did a bit. Chunky enough head-on, foreshortened, Guy was practically cuboid. The bloom on his jowls, mauvey-grey directly after shaving, was now the colour of hot-house grapes.

‘And what a foul suit.' So, eagerly allying herself, did Janet dismiss the Gieves & Hawkes double-breasted silk and mohair. She observed the powerful, surprisingly shapely head covered with dark curls squatting on wide, meaty shoulders. He seemed to have no neck at all. ‘I bet he wears a toupee.'

‘Course he doesn't.' Trixie dropped into a green flock armchair swinging her legs over the side. She was wearing a thin nylon housecoat and little else. ‘I think he looks rather virile actually. A bit like that strange man in your book. The minnator.'

‘Minotaur.' Too late Janet could have bitten her tongue.

‘Should have been a teacher.' Stitchings of malice pointed up the subtext. Dusty blackboard, scornful or indifferent pupils, lonely nights marking careless homework. Lengthy unappreciated preparations for the following day. ‘Always picking people up.'

‘Sorry.'

‘What do you want anyway?'

‘I came to borrow some cotton.'

The truth was that Janet just loved being in this room, even when Trixie was not present. Sometimes she thought she preferred those occasions. She could be more herself then. Relax. Drink in the heady atmosphere: face powder, perfume, cheap hairspray, a bowl of roses. Once she had smelt cigarette smoke. This commingling of scents produced a slumbrous ante-bellum atmosphere with a base note of sweet decay. The roses were illicit. Garden flowers were meant to be cut only on special occasions and then displayed in public rooms where everyone could share them. But Trixie always did as she liked, banking accurately on the communal reluctance to criticise.

Janet pulled open a drawer and pretended to look for the cotton. She disturbed a peachy satin slip, gossamer tights and some garments made of oyster satin that she had once referred to as cami-knickers. An archaism she was not likely to repeat. The second drawer held two boxes of Tampax and several half-cup wired lace bras.

‘You won't find what you're looking for in there.'

‘No—how silly.' Janet's long bony face crimsoned and she dropped the filmy skimp like a burning coal. ‘I meant to put it on Arno's list.'

One day, she thought, when I come in for a plaster or an aspirin, a tissue or a safety pin, she's going to challenge me and say that she knows I really want none of those things. That I am here simply to breathe in the air that she exhales. Or touch the things that touch her skin.

‘I can't get over those muscle-packed shoulders.' There was always a curl of anticipation in Trixie's voice when she planned some unkindness. Janet recognised it now and braced herself. ‘I wonder what he's like in bed.'

What does she expect me to say? What can I say? Laugh it off? Make some all-girls-together joke? ‘There's only one way to find out?' But of course, if I could do that, she'd never have asked the question.

Pictures flared in Janet's mind. Pale delicate limbs twined around swarthy, hirsute, rutting masculinity. Hands gloved by black hair, roaming, probing. Thick blunt fingers squeezing tender breasts, knotting honeyed curls. Nauseous, near to tears, she glanced across at the armchair and caught a stone in the sling smile.

‘I really fancy screwing a millionaire. Everyone says power's an aphrodisiac don't they?'

‘Who's everyone?' Trixie was like Cleopatra, dowsing for gold.

‘I bet it's true. This one really looks as if he's built to do damage.'

It was the perfect opening for a sharp reply. For when Trixie had first joined them it was plain that a fair bit of damage had only recently been inflicted. Her arms and neck were badly bruised, her lip cut, her hair tufted patchily. But, in spite of Heather's frequent early attempts to corner her for some compassionate one-to-one counselling, Trixie had never even referred to, much less explained, these injuries. Dare Janet refer to them now? She came timidly close.

‘Don't tell me you're one of those people who enjoy being knocked about by men.'

Trixie laughed: A spontaneous shout of amusement, as if Janet had said something completely ridiculous. Then she swung her milky legs forward again and stood up. ‘If you only knew…'

‘Knew what?' Janet stepped hungrily forward at this hint of a possible revelation into the other girl's past. Perhaps Trixie would explain the letters that sometimes came in cheap blue envelopes. Or the phone calls where she hung up if anyone came into the room.

But Trixie just shrugged and sauntered over to the window. Guy was still there, chunkily looking about him. He had moved to the terrace steps which dropped to the herb border and was gazing over the lawn. Trixie lifted the latch.

‘What are you doing?'

‘What's it look like?'

‘But you're not…at least put something…' Janet watched helplessly as Trixie perched on the window ledge, holding her robe bunched lightly at the waist, the fabric slipping from her left shoulder. She glimpsed Trixie's daring excited profile and saw how fascinated she was.

‘Hullo-o-o.' Then, after a pause, ‘Up here.'

‘Hullo.' He had smiled but you would never have known from his voice which was harsh, graceless and impersonal.

The gown slithered and slipped again as Trixie leaned out a little further. ‘Isn't anyone looking after you?'

Janet opened the sweater drawer, saw the colours blur. She started to rummage furiously.

Trixie said: ‘How d'you like this weather?' nodding at the drooping flowers and limp-leaved shrubs. As she spoke she agitated the loose drawstring neck of her blouse revealing, then concealing, a creamy freckled upsurge of swelling delights.

‘Hot for me.' There was a suggestion of an upturn on the final word. It could have been a question.

Trixie laughed, husky, sassy. ‘I should think it is in that suit.' She was standing on the terrace, a shade closer than normal civility required, her feet firmly on the ground and set slightly apart. The challenging stance of a principal boy.

‘A drink might help,' continued Guy.

‘There's some lemon-balm tea in the fridge.'

‘I meant a real drink. I'm just going to check in at my hotel. We could get something there.'

‘Ohhh…' This is so sudden said the quickened breath and downswept baby-doll lashes. ‘I don't know about that.'

Trixie's confusion, which Guy immediately labelled an attack of the cutes, was not entirely faked. Flinging on some clothes, running down to the terrace she had been driven by nothing more complicated than a childlike wish to gaze at someone rich and famous. But not long after introducing herself—and they had been talking for about ten minutes now, mainly about Suhami—she became aware of a not unfamiliar physical agitation. Her remark about money being a turn-on, made half in jest and half from a wish to irritate Janet, had proved to be compellingly accurate.

Trixie had never heard the saying the rich are different from us only in that they have more money, and if she had would have profoundly disagreed. Guy seemed to her a most mysterious being. The personification of a character previously only encountered in power-packed soap operas. Wheeling and dealing, making and breaking lives, glittering at the top of a shining dynastic tree in sultanic splendour.

They walked towards the car. Trixie stared at the diamond-hard mirror-bright perfection of the sweeping fuchsia chassis. At the huge headlamps, dazzling whitewall tyres and the hood that was like the furled sail of a yacht. It did not occur to her to pretend to be unawed. She said: ‘How absolutely beautiful. You must be very rich.'

To which Guy replied simply, ‘I'm as rich as God.'

Furneaux, seeing their approach, put down his
Evening Standard
, donned his peaked suede cap and jumped out to open the rear door. Trixie climbed in and perched on the edge of the seat with great delicacy as if it were made of spun glass. But once they had moved off she gradually edged back until, by the time they entered Causton, she was nestling in the corner, one arm lying casually over the side ready to wave should she, in fact or pretence, spot an acquaintance.

Guy, working on his usual principle of never doing one thing when you could be doing half a dozen, was edging his hand ever closer to Trixie's knee, looking into her eyes and questioning her further about the commune.

‘What's he like then—this guiding light?'

‘The Master? All right. That is kind and…you know… well,
good
.' It surprised Trixie, now that she was asked, to realise how little she could think of to say. Guy still looked expectant. She scraped around for another morsel. ‘He's wonderful to talk to.' Everyone said this so it must be true, though Trixie's own occasional tête-à-tête with the magus had left her feeling exposed and nervous rather than comforted. ‘He spends a lot of time in meditation.'

Guy snorted. He was deeply contemptuous of anyone not fully engaged in the chaotic cut-and-thrust of the working world. He himself, as he constantly pointed out, worked a forty-eight-hour day. Felicity said he made it sound as if he were breaking stones.

Trixie was much more interested in hearing about Guy's life than talking about her own, but before she could turn the conversation round he said: ‘You must know more about him than that.'

‘No, honestly.'

‘Come on—you're an intelligent girl.' Guy smiled into the slightly blank unfinished face. ‘For instance—does he own the place?'

‘I don't know. There's a committee runs things.' His hand caressed her knee. ‘May, Arno. People who've been here a long time. Don't.'

‘Don't what?' The vulgar energetic pounce in his voice was almost unnerving. His powerful bulk gave off a multiplicity of scents: tobacco and liquor, hair oil, sharp lemony cologne inadequately masking male sweat. He closed the gap between them and whispered in her ear. Trixie gasped.

‘That's an awful thing to say.'

‘I'm an awful man.'

Guy's hand ascended a little higher, exploratory, determined. He did not agree with the superstition often held by soldiers and athletes that linked sexual intercourse with a depletion of physical reserves. Sex left Guy clear-headed, drained of troublous humours and smartly on his toes. He would need to be all those things if the evening were to go as successfully as he had planned, and he regarded Trixie's appearance as fortuitous in the extreme. He took her hand, turned it over and scratched the palm with his nail.

When, with some difficulty, Trixie unglued her gaze from that of her libidinous companion, it came to rest on Furneaux's back. Although the line of his body was slide-rule straight and his eyes, reflected in the driving mirror, fixed squarely on the road ahead, she got the strong impression he was laughing.

Guy pressed his full, red, hot lips to Trixie's ear, slipped the third finger of his right hand between the third and fourth fingers of her own and pushed it, more and more quickly, back and forth. Trixie tried, not too determinedly, to move away. She did not appreciate that it was only the fact and duration of the journey that caused her to be exposed to all these rousing preliminaries. Guy's usual idea of foreplay was to check if the girl was awake.

The car swung into the winding drive of Chartwell Grange and Trixie smoothed down her hair. Furneaux parked and unloaded the bags. The reception area was huge with many glazed-chintz sofas, deep armchairs and little tables holding magazines of a sporty or countrified nature. There were also two magnificent flower arrangements perched on Corinthian-style columns.