Make Death Love Me (17 page)

‘Why does she live in his house?'

‘She was married to this Stewart who's quite something in the looks line. I've seen photos. I tell you, if I wasn't hetero up to my eyebrows, he'd turn
me
on. He and Una had a flat in Hampstead but he was always going off with other ladies. Couldn't resist them, Annie says, and they never left him alone. Una got so she couldn't stand it any more and they split up. They had this kid, Lucy her name was. She was two. Stewart used to have her at the weekends.'

‘Was?' Alan interrupted. ‘You mean she's dead?'

‘Stewart took her to his current lady's flat for the weekend. Slum, I should say. He and the lady went out for a slow one and while they were out Lucy overturned an oil heater and her nightdress caught fire.'

‘That's horrible.'

‘Yes. Una was ill for months. The beautiful Stewart took himself off after the coroner had laid into him at the inquest. He shut himself up in a cottage his mother had left him on Dartmoor. And that's where Ambrose came in. He fetched Una back here and looked after her. He was writing his
magnum opus
at the time,
Neo-Empiricism.
That's what he calls himself, a Neo-Empiricist. But he dropped that for months and gave himself over to helping her. That was three years ago. And ever since then she's lived here and kept house for him, and before he went off to Java in January he had the basement converted and redecorated and said she was to let it and have the rents for her income. He said it would teach her to assume responsibility and re-face reality.'

‘What happened to Stewart Engstrand?'

‘He turned up after a bit, wanted Una to go back to him. But she wouldn't, and Ambrose said he'd only be retreating into a mother-dream, whereas what he needed was to work experientially through the reality of his exceptional looks and his sexuality. So he worked through them by taking up with a new lady who's rich and who carried him off to her house in Trinidad. Another beer? Or would you rather have something shorter and stronger?'

‘My turn,' said Alan awkwardly, not knowing if this was etiquette when Caesar had invited him out. But it seemed to be, Caesar didn't demur, and Alan knew that he was learning and making friends and working experientially through the reality of what he had chosen back there in Childon with the money in his hands.

Rose was there in the Pembroke Market on Friday. She had wound her long hair about her head in coils and put on a long black dress with silver ornaments. She looked remote and mysterious and seductive. He had his speech prepared, he had been rehearsing it all the way from Montcalm Gardens.

‘I said I'd come in and tell you how I got on. I found a place from looking in that window, and it's ideal. But for you I'd never have thought of looking. I'm so grateful. If you're free tomorrow night, if you're not busy or anything, I wondered if I could – well, if we could go out somewhere. You've been so kind.'

She said with raised eyebrows, ‘You want to take me out because I was kind?'

‘I didn't just mean that.' She had embarrassed him, and embarrassment made his voice tremble. But he was inspired to say, afraid of his own boldness, ‘No one would think of you like that, no one who had seen you.'

She smiled. ‘Ah,' she said, ‘that's better.' Her eyes devoured him. He turned his own away, but he seemed beyond blushing.

In as casual a manner as he could muster, he said, ‘Dinner perhaps and a theatre? Could I fix something and – and phone you?'

‘I'll be in the shop all day tomorrow,' she said. ‘Do phone any time.' It was strange and fascinating the way those simple words seemed to imply and promise so much. It was her voice, he supposed, and her cool poise and the swan-like way she had of moving her head. She gave a light throaty giggle. ‘Haven't you forgotten something?'

‘Have I?' He was afraid all the time of committing solecisms. What had he done now?

‘Your name,' she said.

He told her it was Paul Browning. Some hours had passed before he began to get cold feet, and by then he had booked a table in a restaurant whose phone number he had got from an an advertisement in the evening paper. He stood outside a theatre, screwing up his courage to go in and buy two stalls for himself and Rose.

Like Alan Groombridge, Nigel lived in a world of dreams. The only thing he liked about Marty's magazines were the advertisements which showed young men of his own age and no better-looking, posing with dark glasses on in front of Lotus sports cars, or lounging in penthouses with balloon glasses of brandy in their hands. He saw himself in such a place with Joyce as his slave, waiting on him. He would make her kneel in front of him when she brought him his food, and if it wasn't to his liking he would kick her. She would know of every crime he committed – by that time he would be the European emperor of crime – but she would keep his secrets fanatically, for she worshipped him and received his blows and his insults with a dog-like devotion. They would live in Monaco, he thought, or perhaps in Rome, and there would be other women in his life, models and film stars to whom he gave the best part of his attention while Joyce stayed at home or was sent, with a flick of his fingers, to her own room. But occasionally, when he could spare the time, he would talk to her of his beginnings, remind her of how she had once defied him in a squalid little room in North London, until, with brilliant foresight, he had stooped to her and bound her to him and made her his for ever. And she would kneel at his feet, thanking him for his condescension, begging for a rare touch, a precious kiss. He would laugh at that, kicking her away. Had she forgotten that once she had talked of betraying him?

Reality was shot through with doubt. His sexual experience had been very limited. At his public school he had had encounters with other boys which had been nasty, brutish and short, though a slight improvement on masturbation. When he left he found he was very attractive to girls, but he wasn't successful with them. The better-looking they were the more they frightened him. Confronted by youth and beauty, he was paralysed. His father sent him to a psychiatrist – not, of course, because of his failure with the girls which Dr Thaxby knew nothing about. He sent him to find out why his son couldn't get a degree or a job like other people. The psychiatrist was unable to discover why not, and this wasn't surprising as he mostly asked Nigel questions about his feelings towards his mother. Nigel said he hated his mother, which wasn't true but he knew it was the kind of thing psychiatrists like to hear. The psychiatrist never told Nigel any of his findings or diagnosed anything, and Nigel stopped going to him after about five sessions. He had himself come to the conclusion that all he needed to make him a success and everything come right was an older and perhaps rather unattractive woman to show him the way. He found older women easier to be with than girls. They frightened him less because he could despise them and feel they must be grateful to him.

Joyce, however, wasn't an older woman. He thought she was probably younger than he. But there was no question of her looks scaring him into impotence. With her big round eyes and thick lips and nose like a small pudgy cake, she was ugly and coarse. And he despised her already. Though he affected to be contemptuous of gracious living and cut-glass and silver and well-laid tables and professional people and dinner in the evening and university degrees, his upbringing had left on him an ineradicable mark. He was a snob at heart. Joyce was distasteful to him because she came from the working class. But he wasn't afraid of her, and as he thought of what he would gain, freedom and escape and her silence, he became less afraid of himself.

On Saturday morning he brought in coffee, a cup for her and one for himself. Marty had stopped drinking anything but whisky and wine.

‘What's that you're knitting, Joyce?'

‘A jumper.'

‘Is there a picture of it?'

She turned the page of the magazine and showed him a coloured photograph of a beautiful but flat-chested and skeletal girl in a voluminous sweater. She didn't say anything but flicked the page over after allowing him a five-second glimpse.

‘You'll look great in that,' said Nigel. ‘You've got a super figure.'

‘Mmm,' said Joyce. She wasn't flattered. Every boy she had ever been out with had told her that, and anyway she had known it herself since she was twelve. We long to be praised for the beauties we don't have, and Joyce had started to love Stephen when he said she had wonderful eyes.

‘I want you to go out tonight,' said Nigel to Marty while Joyce was in the lavatory.

‘You what?'

‘Leave me alone with her.'

‘That's brilliant, that is,' said Marty. ‘I hang about out in the cold while you make it with the girl. No way. No way at all.'

‘Think about it if you know how to do that thing. Just think if that isn't the only way to get us out of here. And you don't have to hang about in the cold. You can go see a movie.'

Marty did think about it, and he saw it made sense. But he saw it grudgingly, for if anyone was going to make it with Joyce it ought to be himself. For the
machismo
, if he had known the word, rather than from inclination, but still it ought to be he. Not that he had any ideas of securing Joyce's silence by such methods. He was a realist whose ideas of a sex-life were a bit of fun with easy pick-ups until he was about thirty when he would settle down with some steady and get married and live in a semi-detached. Still, if Nigel thought he could get them out that way, let Nigel get on with it. So at six he fetched them all some doner kebab and stuffed vine leaves, drank half a tumbler of neat whisky, and set off to see a film called
Sex Pots on the Boil
at a nasty little cinema down in Camden Town.

‘Where's he gone?' said Joyce.

‘To see his mother.'

‘You mean he's got a mother? Where does she live? Monkey house at the zoo?'

‘Look, Joyce, I know he's not the sort of guy you've been used to. I realize that. He's not my sort either, only frankly, it's taken me a bit of living with him to see that.'

‘Well, you don't have to talk about him behind his back. I believe in loyalty, I do. And if you ask me, there's not much to choose between the pair of you.'

They were in the kitchen. Joyce was washing up her own supper plates. Nigel and Marty hadn't used plates, but they had each used a fork and Marty one of his new glasses. Joyce considered leaving the forks and the glass dirty, but it spoiled the look of the place, so she washed them too. For the first time in his life Nigel took a tea cloth in his hands and started to dry dishes. He put the gun down on the top of the oven.

His lie about Marty's mother had given him an idea. Not that mothers, feared, despised, adored, longed-for, were ever far from his thoughts, whatever he might pretend. The reason he had given for Marty's going out had come naturally and inevitably to him. An hour or so before, Marty had brought in the evening paper and Nigel had glanced through it while in the lavatory.
Sabena Hostage Tells of Torture
and
New Moves in Pay Claim
, and on an inside page a few lines about Mrs Culver recovering in hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Nigel dried the glass clumsily, and with an eye to the main chance, told her what had happened to her mother.

Joyce sat down at the table.

‘You're maniacs,' she said. ‘You don't care what you do. It'll just about kill my dad if anything happens to her.'

Using the voice he knew she liked to hear, Nigel said, ‘I'm sorry, Joyce. We couldn't foresee it was going to turn out this way. Your mother's not dead, she's going to get better.'

‘No thanks to you if she does!'

He came up close to her. The heat from the open oven was making him sweat. Joyce was on the point of crying, squeezing up her eyes to keep the tears back. ‘Look,' he said, ‘if you want to get a message to her, like a letter, I'll see she gets it. I can't say fairer than that, can I? You just write that you're OK and we haven't harmed you and I'll see it gets posted.'

Unconsciously, Joyce quoted a favourite riposte of her mother's. ‘The band played “Believe it if you Like”.'

‘I promise. I like you a lot, Joyce. I really do. I think you're fantastic looking.'

Joyce swallowed. She cleared her throat, pressing her hands against her chest. ‘Give me a bit of paper.'

Nigel picked up the gun and went off to find a piece. Apart from toilet paper out in the lavatory, there wasn't any, so he had to tear one of the end-papers off Marty's much-thumbed copy of
Venus in Furs.
The gun went back on top of the oven, and Nigel stood behind Joyce, putting on a tender expression in case she looked round.

She wrote: ‘Dear Mum, you will recognize my writing and know I am OK. Don't worry. I will soon be home with you. Give my love to Dad.' She set her teeth, grinding them together. Later she would cry, when they were asleep. ‘Your loving daughter, Joyce.'

Nigel put his hand on her shoulder. She was going to shout at him, ‘Get off me!' but the gun was so near, within reach if she put out her left arm. There might be no later for crying, but a time for joy and reunion, if she could only keep her head now. She bowed forward across the table. Nigel came round her. He bent over her, put his other hand on her other shoulder so that he was almost embracing her, and said, ‘Joyce, love.'

Slowly she lifted her face so that it wasn't far from his. She looked at his cold eyes and his mouth that was soft and parted and going slack. It wouldn't be too disgusting to kiss him, he was good-looking enough. If she had to kiss him, she would. No good making a big thing of it. As for going any further . . . Nigel brought his mouth to hers, and she reached out fast for the gun.