Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (22 page)

Rohanne Bulbecker looked at her. She could quite see why Sylvia Perth had kept her hidden. Well she would, wouldn't she? And secret from the moustachioed one too, if her expression of amazed admiradon was anything to go by. Funny old devious Sylvia, thought Rohanne Bulbecker, now your secret is
out.

'Are you recluse?' she asked the golden beauty before her.

'What do you mean?'

'Do you prefer to hide away from the world?'

Erica thought. In a big lie it was always best to stick as close to the truth as possible. She had not found the world a place in which she would choose to spend a lot of time. Not if she could live like this. This kind of hiding away seemed perfection. 'Yes,' she said positively, 'but I'm not hung up on it.'

'Good,' said Rohanne Bulbecker, 'because I'm going to call Mr Pfeiffer right away with the good news, and I just
know
he will want you to go over there whenever you feel ready to do so. Is there a phone here?'

Erica pointed to the sequinned scatter cushion on top of an inlaid desk. Gretchen lifted it. Rohanne was doubly blessed -happy are the technocrats - for behind a beaten-brass bowl that hid its undecorative outline also ne
stle
d a fax machine. 'Great,' said Rohanne, her eyes lighting upon it as one might light upon a hidden jewel. 'That's just what I want. I can send this off to him straight away.' And from the unzipped deeps of her jacket front pocket she produced the Pfeiffer contract. 'If you could look this over and then sign here,' she said to Erica von Hyatt, 'that would be great. Let me know if there are any problems,'

Erica flipped over the pages, understood nothing, nodded for authenticity and obedie
ntly
took the pen. 'How do you spell

Gentle?' she asked. Feeling Rohanne Bulbecker start nervously, she quickly added, 'Just a joke.' Her eyes were heavy with Jack Daniel's. She badly wanted to snooze again.

Morgan Pfeiffer stopped listening at the point in Rohanne Bulbecker's glowing description where she said 'slender as a willow'. Slender as a willow was not what he considered beauty. He sighed. Still, the rest of the world, almost without exception, would consider it so. Certainly, Enrico Stoat, listening on the other extension, was twirling his wrist-watch and rolling his eyes in a lather of jubilation. Morgan Pfeiffer sat back in his chair and recalled the Black Sea resort he and Mrs Pfeiffer had so enjoyed in the old days. There they had recognized the beauties of real flesh. Those women had rotated rather than walked, and when they lay on their backs in water the sea had held up their breasts like ripe pumpkins - mmmm, mmmm . . .

'Sure,' he heard Stoat say. 'Get her over here as soon as possible. It's good to know she's a looker. I was shit scared she'd be some kind of freak
..
.'

'Well done, Miss Bulbecker,' added Morgan Pfeiffer. 'I felt certain you would bring the deal off.'

'I'll fax the contract immediately.'

Behind Rohanne, on the couch, Erica von Hyatt slept. Behind the couch Gretchen O'Dowd stood guard. Gretchen removed her jacket because of the noon heat and, as she did so, the letter she had been handed that morning crackled beneath her hand. She had forgotten all about that. The tableau of beauty before her stirred, moved a little. She forgot about the letter all over again.

Rohanne Bulbecker began pulling out the drawers of Sylvia's desk, idly at first, then, as she began to pause and read some of the documents, her eyes grew luminous and large. She picked up several files and slipped them into the front of her jacket, pulling up the zip with a flourish. Here was news indeed.

*

Arthur smiled at her across the breakfast table. She caught the look, could not avoid it this
time
, and smiled back. There were delphiniums in the room, past their best, the colour fading to peppered blueness. They echoed her eyes, eyes which held a secret nowadays, eyes into which her smile had not quite reached.

'Perhaps,' he said, 'you should buy a hat.'

'Why?' she asked, curious despite her misery.

'Isn't that what you ladies are supposed to do to recover your spirits?'

'You're old-fashioned. All that went out with cloaks over mud. Anyway, my spirits are fine,' she said, and then, since it was patently untrue and the look in his eyes told her that he knew, she shrugged, 'Or almost fine.'

'Then, why,' he said, 'are you crumbling toast between your fingers like the despairing heroine of a Gothic novel?'

'For the birds,' she said defia
ntly
. 'They are God's creatures, after all.'

'Shall I butter and marmalade it for them?' Her laugh was no less dry than the toast.

He set aside the letter from their South-East Asian mission. He had been going to ask her to get the Guides to do something -less (if he was honest before his God) for the good of the mission and the Guides than to keep her occupied. Usually activity released her melancholy or defused her scratchiness, but this sad and almost total detachment was new to the pattern. It came back with her from London. He knew that she needed to take it back there if it was ever to be shed.

She put her chin on her hands and looked at him. She had begun to hate him for his ability to love her, for his clumsy attempts at gallantry, his mannered wooing. He saw the look in her eyes, somewhere between pain and contempt. He moved his head, questioning.

'It's the tea-urn,' she said. *You know how I loathe the bloody thing.'

'Ah,' he said, 'the tea-urn. Then perhaps we should buy you a new one instead of a hat.'

'It's love-hate, Arthur,' she said. 'Take that away from me and what have I got left?'
That,
she thought, was a fair metaphor. 'Besides, as you say to your souls, if God had wanted to make things easy for us he would have taken us straight to heaven without all this three-score-and-ten fuss on the way. The tea-urn is my cross to bear.' She smiled.

Somehow, from her lips and at that moment, this was no blasphemy.

'You can't appreciate heaven until you have suffered a little.' He folded his hands together and looked over the fingertips compassionately. 'Nor choose martyrdom. Bind and loose, as Eliot would have it.'

'You look exactly like a vicar
should
look when you do that.'

For a moment her eyes were very blue again, flashing fire, angry. The red of her hair seemed to sharpen.

'And you,' he said mildly, 'look nothing like a vicar's wife when you do
that*

'What?'

'Rage with your eyes.'

'It's the tea-urn,' she said firmly.

'Then we shall buy a new one.'

'Oh no,' she said. 'Too easy.'

'Even Our Lord had his Simon of Cyrene.'

'The cross-carrier?'

He nodded.

'Was he willing, or was he made to do it?'

He leaned back in his chair and no longer looked at her. 'Willing or unwilling, it helped. We will . . .' - he stared at the letter from the Asian mission, then picked it up and folded it neady back into its envelope. A child and a grandmother stared up at him warily.
Strictly
the Guildford money had been for local benefit, after all - '. . . buy a new, improved, dynamic, state-of-the-art tea-urn.'

'State of the art? Arthur, where do you pick up these phrases?'

'I am not,' he smiled, 'quite ossified yet.' He tucked the envelope beneath a pile of others, 'and you will go to London and effect the purchase.'

'Why London?' she said, incredulous, shaking.

'Because . . .' He reached over and took her hand. It lay limply in his, cool and unmoved, belying her face, which was flushed to rose, and her eyes, which shone. And then she withdrew it, quickly, smoothly, and began picking at the toast again. He thought of a magical experience, he thought of saying, 'Come to bed. Let us make each other happy again.' He said her name, she looked up.

'Because what?' she said shortly, afraid of what she read in his face.

'Because I believe it is in London that your best tea-urn replacement lies.' He put the magic away and got up from his chair. He spoke firmly, business-like.

'When?' she said.

'As soon as you like.'

She closed her eyes in the wonder of a doubtful prayer answered.

*

From behind her, somewhere near the window, Rohanne Bulbecker heard a terrible howl — the kind of howl that would not be out of place in Baskerville territory, but which, in a small room behung with silks and padded with cushions, was distinctly
de trop.

'Jeezus,' she sighed. 'What the hell was that?'

'I don't think that your friend' — Erica, awakened, naturally enough, was pointing at Gretchen O'Dowd — 'likes what's in that letter. . .'

Rohanne looked. Gretchen O'Dowd was hopping from foot to foot, her face contorted with dreadful emotion, holding her letter with one hand while punching it with the other.

'I'd say,' said Rohanne Bulbecker, staring in wonder, 'you were right.' She looked at her watch. 'Do you know what I think?'

Erica shook her golden head.

'I think it's time for a celebration lunch. You choose where. You know London much better than me.'

Not the London you mean, thought Erica dryly. But she remembered that she had once had a rather good doorway along Piccadilly, not a stone's throw from its most famous hotel. She had stayed there for a number of nights and it was beginning to feel quite ho
mey unti
l the passers-by complained. After that they sprayed the whole area with water so that she had no choice but to move on. She had not been back since.

'The Rite,' she said. And added truthfully, 'I haven't been there for
ages'

*

Janice
Gentle
crossed the river at Vauxhall and knew that she was passing into the dangerous world of the rich and the sophisticated. An alarming thought. She didn't mind using it in her books, but she did not want to be a part of it. It frightened her, all that class and style. She opened another fudge finger and played the game of making it last by sucking and not biting, a game she never won. Some urge always overtook her and she ended up chewing.

By the third fudge finger she had reached the other side of Vauxhall Bridge. Hitherto she had been as mindful and careful as Chaucer's Prioress, prissy Madame Eglentyne - 'Ne wette hir fyngres in hir sauce depe' - and despite the sun had stayed relatively unsullied. She had made every finger of fudge count. But now, as she surveyed the new land of Chelsea and Pimlico, she gave up. She dug into her bag any old how and chewed as she went, angry that she had been foolish enough to set out. She looked back towards dear, familiar, undemanding Battersea and felt certain that its cloistered quiet would never be hers again. She felt distin
ctly
medieval. For so, of course, it had been for the Pilgrims. So, of course, it was for any traveller. Leaving the familiar for the uncertain always meant you were changed irredeemably. That was why she had never sought a journey

beyond the enclosed world of the tube. She wished never to embark anywhere to be changed irredeemably until she was
confidently
en route for Dermot Poll. That was the only life-change she sought, and for that she had been perfectly prepared to wait. And now this. And on such a hot, uncomfortable day, too.

The Prioress, with her ingestive etiquette, bowed, gave way and finally departed in the heat of the day. She was Janice Gentle once more, afraid of the journey before her and just as afraid of the one she had left behind. She walked on. She ate. There was Millbank, the Tate Gallery, and there was chocolate around her mouth. There was Westminster, there was Churchill, and there was chocolate on the front of her beige cardigan. Her hands were sticky and grimy already with the pollution of London streets. The hot sun had reddened her face and she walked uneasily with chafing thighs. She noticed irritably that there was still scaffolding around the Abbey; it had been there the last time she visited this part of London in a taxi with Sylvia Perth.

If ever, she thought earnestly, a pilgrim was required to travel in grim discomfort, she qualified. Surely, given the sacrificial nature of her effort, she would be rewarded somehow? Something must happen after Dog Street. When she had done her kindly silencing of Sylvia Perth, something had to begin, surely
something!’
And for perhaps the thousandth time in her history, she wondered where, at that exact minute, Dermot Poll might be. Her spirits lifted. If they were still mending Westminster Abbey after all this time, then what was
time
? He might not be so far away, after all. It was with this comfortingly peculiar piece of logic that Janice Gentle journeyed on.