Old Flames (42 page)

‘We spent the night together. I had this beautiful little flat just off the Kings Road in Chelsea—but I had also had two flatmates. So Ronnie took a room at the Imperial. Mr and Mrs
Kerr. It was divine. He spoilt me rotten with little touches of luxury. I could ring room service and ask for anything I wanted.’

Troy was more puzzled. He had begun to realise that she spoke like an advertisement. It did not seem to be a vocabulary of real responses, more an acquired surface of phrasing. A veneer over
whatever, if anything, she felt, over whatever, and it had to be something, she was. The Imperial was not a hotel he would have chosen as a way to impress a new lover. It might once have been
luxurious, but the last time he visited anyone there it struck him as long past its best, shabby even. A man with the money Cockerell had, and he knew from the bank statements he was not skint even
in 1952, could have afforded the Dorchester in Park Lane, or Claridge’s in the heart of Mayfair, and would have had little need of the Imperial, tucked away in its corner behind the British
Museum.

‘After that I saw him every time he came to London.’

‘How often was that?’

‘About once a fortnight, I suppose. Then one day, a couple of months later, he rang me the second time in a week. Said he was back in London, and would I meet him at Victoria. I had to
drop everything and dash.’

‘Everything?’

‘Eh?’

‘You had a job?’

‘Well—yes. Of course I had a job.’

‘So, what did you do?’

‘I worked for a scientist.’

‘A scientist?’

She ostentatiously drained her glass of red wine and held out her hand for him to refill it. If it was meant to wrongfoot him it almost worked. Too long in the company of women like his sisters,
who had long since surrendered the formality of waiting for the man—as Madeleine herself seemed to have done until now—left him wondering for a second what she meant by the gesture. He
topped her up and returned to the point.

‘What sort of a scientist?’

‘A boffin. You know, hush-hush. I was his private, personal assistant.’

‘Private and personal?’

‘Look—do you want to hear about how I met Ronnie or don’t you?’

Troy nodded. He had lost nothing. She would not answer. There was no answer.

‘Anyway—you listening?—we went to Brighton. Bit of a surprise really. I’d been there once or twice before the war, when I was little. I’d always loved Brighton. I
don’t know how Ronnie picked up on that. To this day I can’t remember ever telling him that. It’s … it’s … exotic. Isn’t it?’

Was it? He had never thought of the word as applicable to anywhere in the British Isles. Exotic? It could hardly describe the natural. It was man in his setting that made for the exotic. He thought of the places he
loved: the view from his own verandah, willows, pigs and bats, but that was not exotic; the chiselled beauty of Ben Bulben, the most magnificent mountain west of the Alps, but that wasn’t
exotic either. Exotic was, according to cliché, dark, dusky, heady with spices—cinnamon and sandalwood—redolent of a market in Tangiers, in a thousand shades of brown, where
every wild splash of red and yellow told. It wasn’t Brighton. Brighton was the red and yellow of saucy postcards and the brown of warm beer. It was a step up from Blackpool or Skegness, but
it wasn’t Biarntz or Monte Carlo. You might toy with the notion on a warm summer’s evening as you passed the Prince Regent’s Pavilion, but you’d never actually mistake the
place for the Taj Mahal. What was the woman on about?

‘We had lunch, and we walked on the beach. He told me all about himself. I knew some things, of course. You couldn’t not know certain things about a man after eight weeks together.
But that day he told me everything. And in the end he told me his wife wouldn’t divorce him.’

‘You knew he was married?’

She sighed in mockery.

‘You can tell a man is married just by looking at him!’

Try me, he thought. Go on, guess. But he said nothing.

‘I told him I didn’t care. Then he said, let’s take another stroll before the sun goes. But I knew as he said it there was something … something he wasn’t telling me.
As though I could sense a surprise. But I like surprises.’

She pointed out over the balcony towards the Channel, glittering in the light of a silvery moon, to the West Pier jutting out into
the water.

‘We were down there. Right at the end. It’d be late summer, I suppose. Late afternoon, early evening, but not quite dark. We were standing at the end. And Ronnie said to me,
“Get your tits out. I want to see your tits.” So I took off my jacket and I took off my blouse and stood there looking out at the sea. “Turn around,” he said. “I want
you to look at me.” Well, I knew the pier wasn’t deserted. We’d passed enough people on the way down. But I turned around, and there was a middle-aged couple with a dog sitting
there. And I heard something from the woman like, “Well I never. Come on, George.” And she dragged the poor old bloke off. He walked sideways like a crab all the way back just to be
able to look at me. There was only one other person left. A really old woman in a plastic mac, putting away her knitting. “Lean back on the rail,” said Ronnie. “Flaunt it. I want
you to flaunt it.” So I did. And the old woman came up to me and said, “Nice titties, dear. I used to have a pair just like those. Mind you’ll catch your death of cold.” Then
she turned to Ronnie and said, “Lovely titties, don’t you think, dear?” And shuffled off.’

This was not the same man. This could not be the same man. This was not Arnold Cockerell. Yet it was. Was this the magic of a change of name? A simple shuffling of words, but as powerful as a
sea change? Cockerell into Kerr. Weasel into lounge lizard. Frustrated little man, drearily thumbing a dirty magazine, into a pervert of preposterous imagination. A man with style, an élan
of sexual provocation.

Madeleine showed enough sensibility to pause in her story while the waiter set the fish in front of them, but it scarcely broke the stride of the tale.

‘I slipped my blouse back on and he walked me up Cavendish Hill. A little surprise, he told me. Wasn’t so little. It was 2 Chatsworth Place. “Is it yours?” I asked as he
showed me round. “No,” he said. “It’s yours.” And then he bowled me over again. Took me next door to number 3 and said, “This is yours, too. Spread your wings,
my lovely.” It was the way he said it. “Spread your wings, my lovely.” So I did. I went back up to London. Told the girls I was leaving the flat. Gave in my notice at work and
moved to Brighton. All that autunm the builders were in. Ronnie let me do anything I wanted. A wall here, a doorway there. And of course—I let him do anything he wanted.’

She ran her index finger around the rim of her glass and then sucked it slowly, pulling it back and forth, smiling as she did so, and looking at Troy with eyes full of mischief.

‘Ronnie never forgot the night we met. He said he knew I was the woman for him the minute he found out I’d no knickers on. So—I went everywhere without underwear.
Ronnie’s tickled my fanny or fingerfucked me in half the restaurants in Brighton.’

He had never heard the word ‘fingerfucked’ before. Its meaning was explicit. Its existence perfectly logical. It was the kind of word which—if she knew it—his wife would
use. But he had never dreamt of such a word, nor that he would hear the notion it represented so neatly summed up in a single word—it was a single word, wasn’t it?—on the lips of
a middle-class Englishwoman.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Did he ever …’

‘Yeeeeeeees?’

‘Did he … well … did he ever ask you to …’

‘Wear a rubber suit?’

‘Well, no … actually I was going to say … did he ever ask you if
he
could wear a rubber suit? His frogman suit, to be precise.’

‘Oh—we both wear them. We had his and hers wetsuits. You know—with holes in all the right places.’

She glanced down, a quick, unbelievably coy tilt of the eyes groinward, then she bunched up her breasts into an alpine cleavage with her hands, picked up her fork and returned to her meal as
though everything she had said and done in the last couple of minutes had not been wholly outrageous.

Yet again her glass was empty. They were into the second bottle. He did not wait for the prompt. He topped her up and resigned himself to the fact that she was going to get pissed as quickly as
she could.

The tide was high. The gentle breeze of evening was chilling with the coming of night. She slipped off her shoes and dropped them on the sand.

‘Are you coming in?’

‘A swim?’ He sounded incredulous.

‘A paddle, stupid. Or did you think I was going to strip off and dive in?’

‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ he said.

‘Touché.’

Troy watched her walk to the edge of the sea and stand where it was hardly ankle deep, barely washing over her feet. He heard the shrill squeak of delight as the cold water touched her
blood.

Just under the sea wall was a solitary deck chair, a lost lamb missed by the deck chair shepherd. He pulled it upright, sat in it, watching her wade farther out until the water crept up to the
hem line of her dress. And beyond. By the time she was through, the dress would be sodden.

He felt, he realised, the beginning of a reluctant admiration for Cockerell. He had got what he wanted: the classic, but often impossible dream of a double life. And it worked. Or at least it
had worked for the best part of four years. Janet Cockerell surely gave him something or he would have left her long ago, and he did not for one second believe the line Cockerell had spun Madeleine
about ‘my wife won’t agree to a divorce’. Janet Cockerell had never mentioned the prospect. Indeed, part of his idea of Cockerell was that the man enjoyed the double life, and
without the wife it would have been singular, enjoyable—he looked at Madeleine in the moonlight, practically up to her hips in the water, arms outstretched like a crucifix, singing a wordless
song to herself, beautiful, bizarre and pissed—hugely enjoyable, but singular. He could imagine the delight it had given Cockerell to sit with his wife amid the straining verbal violence of
marriage and recall the last time he had fingerfucked his mistress in public. The weasel’s revenge. It was bloody nigh perfect. ‘What you want, when you want it.’ Heartbreak Hotel
with room service.

Madeleine hopped from one foot to another, splashing madly and shouting something.

‘Ow, ow ow ow!’

Troy left the chair and met her at the water’s edge.

‘Bloody fucking hell. What kind of a bastard—’

She leant heavily on his arm and bent back her left leg.

‘What kind of a bastard leaves bits of glass on the beach?’

He sat her down, where the sand was drier, and looked at the soles of her feet.

‘Not glass,’ he said. ‘Shell.’

‘Hurts just the same.’

‘It’s in deep.’

‘Then for God’s sake pull it out.’

He could get no grip on the fragment. It would need tweezers. He locked his teeth onto the broken edge of the shell, pulled back and spat out a sliver of shell over half an inch long.

She sighed with relief. He still had hold of her foot. Before he could let go she said, ‘More. Just a bit more.’

Troy said nothing.

She propped herself up, her arms straight out behind her, her hands flat on the sand.

‘Just a bit more. Won’t hurt, honest.’

He knew he was being called out. The schoolyard cry of ‘cowardy custard’. He sucked on the wound, salt and sand mingled with the taste of blood, and she squirmed gently and threw
back her arms and stretched. Now all he could taste was blood. He let go of her and was wondering what he was supposed to do next. She sat up, put her fingertips to his lips and read his mind, to
the very syllable.

‘The woman’s dilemma throughout history. Do you swallow it, or spit it out?’

She kissed the back of her hand, pinched his lips together and he swallowed on the reflex.

She drew back, a satisfying smile on her face.

‘There. Told you it wouldn’t hurt.’

‘I’ve something to show you.’

She peeled off the dress. Scarlet above the waist, black where the water had drenched it. Troy was delighted to find that this was one of the occasions when she had seen fit to wear underwear.
She padded barefoot across the room, leaving a faint trail of blood on the carpet.

She opened a door in the vast wardrobe. There, side by side on the rail, were two rubber suits. Exactly as she had said. His, complete with frogman flippers, and hers. Madeleine unhooked hers,
and held it up to show to him. Two large holes in the chest showed where her breasts would protrude when she wore it. Troy kept his eyes up, and tried not look at the unsubtle alterations that had
been carried out on the lower half of the costume. It struck him as being a mould for woman—with enough plaster of Paris you could make a plaster woman. Your own Venus de Milo for the garden.
Look nice next to the pond with the goldfish. And it struck him as shudderingly repulsive.

‘I could slip mine on,’ Madeleine said. ‘You wouldn’t have to wear Ronnie’s. Wouldn’t fit you, anyway. But I could wear mine.’

‘I couldn’t,’ he said.

‘Be a devil.’

‘I couldn’t,’ he said again, thrashing around for an excuse. Any excuse. ‘You’ve had far too much to drink. It would be taking advantage of you.’

She giggled. The giggle became a laugh. The laugh became the raucous mockery he had asked for.

‘You don’t mean to say you’ve never made love to a woman who’s pissed before?’

Troy never had. Lately he hadn’t made love to any woman. Pissed or sober. She danced up his cheekbone with her lips, setded on his ear lobe and nipped it lightly with her teeth.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Really I can’t.’

She whispered in his ear. The heat of her breath tingled through half the veins in his body, coursing down to the loins to stir the bits he would rather leave unstirred.

‘Has anyone ever told you you’re a bit of a spoilsport?’

Most of the women in his life had told him that.

Cowardy custard.