Angel (17 page)

We ate Russian Egg and Rostbraten Esterhazy at the Bohemian, hardly said a word to each other. But he did insist upon a bottle of sparkling burgundy, which almost doubled the cost of the meal. Mr. Czerny waited on us himself, and when Duncan Forsythe bunged a crisp blue fivepound note on the table and told him to keep the change, Mr. Czerny nearly swooned.

We’d walked up, and we walked back. When the bulk of St. Vincent’s girls’

school loomed, I plunged diagonally across the road without stopping to think about traffic, and he reached to grab my arm, deter me. The touch made me panic, I blundered into a plane tree and found myself backed against it with him in front of me. I heard him gasp, then felt his mouth slide across my cheek, and I closed my eyes, found his lips and clung to them with a fierce joy heightened by my fears for the future.

After that I persuaded him by look and touch to come inside. The lights were on against our return, and there was Marceline looking up from her chair, yawning pinkly.

His head was thrown back, the pupils of his eyes still widely dilated from the night, and he breathed as if he’d been running. Oh, he looked so alive! And I knew that he was going to pay for this so dearly that I had to do everything in my power to make it worth the price.

So I loved him with skin and mouth and fingertips, delicately and smoothly, strongly and passionately. It was beautiful to be with a man again, especially this man. Nal had been a learning experience, heartfree and carefree, a means and an end combined. But Duncan Forsythe mattered. There could be no divorcing him from my life. The emotion! I kissed his hands and feet, rode him until his back arched between my slippery thighs, wrapped him within my arms and legs and fought him, muscles against muscles, until his greater strength bore me down and away.

He stayed until a little after eleven, I thought, completely lost to awareness of passing time, then suddenly he was out of my bed and looking down at me.

“I have to go,” he said, nothing more, but when he’d dressed and used his comb at my mirror, he came back to me, leaned over and touched his cheek against mine. “May I come tomorrow about four?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

Oh, yes. I think I must be in love. Otherwise, why would I have let this happen?

By the time I went upstairs at one for my session with Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, I’d already encountered Toby. I have no idea how news gets around so fast, because Toby knew, yet how could he?

“You’re a fool,” he snapped, eyes more red than brown. “If it’s possible, a bigger fool than Pappy.”

I didn’t bother to reply, just pushed past him and went into Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s living room.

“The King of Pentacles is here,” she said as I sat down and reached for my Kraft cheese spread glass of brandy. “I don’t believe this place,” I said, sipping abstemiously-best go easy, with Mr. Forsythe returning in a couple of hours.

“How does the news get around?” “Flo,” she said simply, jigging our angel puss up and down on her knee. Flo smiled at me, but sadly, then got off her mother’s lap and went to scribble on the wall. “It don’t worry you none that he’s married?” my landlady asked, doling out smoked eel and bread-andbutter.

I thought about that, then shrugged. “Actually, I think I’m glad that he’s married. I’m not sure I know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.”

“And what don’t youse want?”

“To settle down in a posh house and play Missus Doctor.”

“Just as well,” she said with a grin. “The cards don’t hold out much hope of a life in the suburbs for you, Harriet Purcell.”

“Do I have a life at Kings Cross?” I asked.

But she went vague on me, wouldn’t commit herself. “All depends on what happens to that.” And she pointed to the crystal ball.

I studied it curiously and with closer attention than I’d ever done before. It wasn’t flawless, though it contained no cracks or bubbles.

Just wisps of cloud as thin as the nebulae of stars in our southern skies. It sat on a black ebony base that must have been concave to hold the huge ball-it was at least eight inches in diameter-so firmly, and I noticed that a little fold of black fabric overlapped the rim of the base. Yes, she’d have to cushion it against the ebony wood in case it scratched. I’d looked up quartz crystal in the Queens library Merck, to find that it had a “soft” hardness. Unsuitable for gemstones but able to be carved and highly polished. Why did she say that?

Significant, but how?

“It all depends what happens to the Glass,” I said. “S’right.” So she intended to remain cryptic.

I probed by asking casually, “I wonder who first thought of rounding rock crystal into a ball and using it to see the future?”

“Oh, mightn’t be the future. Might be the past. I dunno, but they was old when Merlin was a boy,” she said, refusing to be drawn.

I left a little early so I’d be downstairs when Mr. Forsythe arrived, but some things weren’t going to change just because he existed. Flo would come for her two hours with me, and he could either like it or lump it. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz demurred, but I won. When Harold arrived, angel puss would come down to me.

He was there outside, in the darkness, Harold. Waiting. Eyes filled with hate. I ignored him, started down the stairs.

“Whore!” he whispered. “Whore!”

Mr. Forsythe turned up on time. I was down on the floor with Flo and the crayons because she refuses to play with anything else. I’d brought some of my old toys from Bronte, a doll with a wardrobe of clothes, a weeny trike, building blocks with a letter of the alphabet on each side. But she wouldn’t even look at them. It was always the crayons.

“Door’s open!” I called.

So the first thing the poor man saw was his girlfriend down on the braided rug playing crayons with a fouryear-old child. His face was a study, I couldn’t help laughing.

“No, she’s not mine,” I said, getting up and going to him to put my hands on either side of his neck, pull his head down until I could put my lips and nose against the snowwhite hair of his temple. He smelled delicious, of expensive soap, and he didn’t muck up that wonderful hair with oil. Then I took him by the hand and brought him over to Flo, who stared up at him without a trace of fear and smiled immediately.

“This is Flo, my landlady’s daughter. I mind her every Sunday from four to six, so if you’re in a hurry, I’m afraid all you can do with me is talk.”

He squatted down and stroked Flo’s hair, smiling at her. “How do you do, Flo?” Orthopods were always good with children because a good proportion of their patients were children, but try though he would, he couldn’t get Flo to talk.

“She appears to be mute,” I said, “though her mother says she talks. You may be sceptical about it, but a friend of mine and I believe that she communicates with her mother without words, by a sort of telepathy.”

He was sceptical-well, he’s a surgeon. They don’t have any flights of fancy, at least about things like telepathy and extrasensory perception. You need a psychiatrist for that, and maybe one from Asia somewhere into the bargain.

Harold, however, got short shrift today. Flo hadn’t been in my flat more than half an hour when Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz thundered through the door, still open.

“Oh, there you are, angel puss!” she squeaked in an artificial voice, as if she’d been searching The House high and low. She then propped like a hammy comedian and pretended she hadn’t seen a man until that very millisecond.

“Oho! The King of Pentacles!” she bellowed, and grabbed the bewildered Flo.

“Come on, angel puss, don’t be a nuisance. Give ‘em some privacy, hur-hurhur.”

I cast her a glance which informed her that it was the worst performance I’d ever seen, and said, “Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, this is Dr. Duncan Forsythe.

He’s one of my bosses at Queens. Sir, this is Flo’s mother and my landlady.”

The old horror actually dropped him a curtsey. “Tickled to meet youse, sir.”

Flo tucked under one arm, she marched out with another hur-hur-hur.

“Ye Gods!” said Mr. Forsythe, staring at me. “Is she Flo’s biological mother?”

“She says she is, and I believe her.”

“She must have been menopausal when she had the little thing.”

“Didn’t even know she was up the duff, she told me.” Which were the last words spoken for at least an hour. Oh, he is a lovely man! We fit together so well.

“You’ll have to stop thinking of me as Mr. Forsythe and calling me sir,”

were the first words spoken after that hour. “My name is Duncan, which you must already know. I’d like to hear it from your lips, Harriet.” “Duncan,” I said. “Duncan, Duncan, Duncan.”

That led to another interlude, after which I heated up the lamb neck chop casserole I’d made this morning, and boiled some potatoes to go with it. He ate as if he was starving.

“Don’t you mind my being married?” he asked as he sopped up the gravy dregs with a piece of bread.

“No, Duncan. I realised yesterday that you’d thought it out before you arrived. It doesn’t matter a bit to me that you’re married, as long as it doesn’t matter to you.”

But of course it does matter to him that he’s married, as he proceeded to explain to me at greater length than I honestly cared to hear. What a burden guilt can be. The truth lies in the fact that he sought me out-his wife is a cold fish, and to her, he’s a meal-ticket. That’s what a lot of doctors are to the women who marry them. I knew from listening to Chris and Sister Cas that he’d married a classmate of Sister Cas’s-the prettiest and most vivacious nurse of her year, just as the Duncan of those

days was the most eligible and attractive bachelor registrar at Queens. Added to which, his family is quite sinfully wealthy. Old money, Sister Cas contributed, sounding awed. Old money is awesome in a country that only started yesterday, though I don’t think that the Australian definition of old money is the same as the English one.

He and Cathy had been happy enough for the first few years, while he was establishing his specialist practice and she was having their two boys. Mark is thirteen, Geoffrey eleven. He loves them dearly, but he sees hardly anything of them, between the miles and miles his Jaguar clocks up and the long hours in operating theatres, consulting rooms, wards and Out Patients. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why on earth they all seemed to live way up on the North Shore when so often their hospitals are at the opposite end of Sydney, and their rooms have to be in Macquarie Street, convenient neither to hospitals nor residences. The H.M.O.s at Vinnie’s Hospital, which is convenient, are mostly Catholics or Jews who sensibly live in the Eastern Suburbs.

But I didn’t say any of it because my why is not the reason Duncan would give me. My why is that their wives love the upper North Shore. They cluster between Lindfield and Wahroonga, where they can drive their smart little British cars safe from the worst traffic, can congregate for bridge, solo, committee meetings and tennis. Their children go to posh private schools in the

area and there are heaps of trees, snatches of real forest. The upper North Shore is idyllic for a wealthy wife. Anyway, Cathy Forsythe sounds like a right bitch to me, though Duncan defended her staunchly and blamed his infidelity on himself. And perhaps-entirely subconsciously!-a weeny bit on me.

“You’re a witch, my dark darling,” he said, holding my hand across the table.

“You’ve cast a spell on me.” How to answer that? I didn’t try.

He carried my hand to his lips and kissed it. “You don’t know what it’s like to be too successful,” he said, “so I’ll tell you. The very last thing the people who love you understand is that you enjoy the work for the work’s sake. You’re caught up in an image which belongs to everyone but you. Even with the work, half of it consists in keeping other people happy, of not creating an adverse ripple on the big hospital pond. My uncle is Chairman of the Hospital Board, which has been a damned nuisance over the years. I was content as a junior H.M.O.-I had more time for research and more time for my patients. But as the senior on Orthopaedics, I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of my time in meetingshospital politics are like any other form of politics.”

“That must be a terrible bog,” I said warmly, tickled that he hadn’t crawled to Unk after all. Duncan Forsythe is exactly what he appears-a thoroughly nice, decent, educated, brilliant man. “Never mind, Duncan. You’re welcome at 17c Victoria Street whenever you can spare the time.”

That wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear, of course. He wanted me to tell him that I loved him madly, would shift mountains for him, wash his socks, give him fellatio. Well, I’d wash his socks and I’m into semifellatio, if that’s the correct term for not quite all the way. But I am not sure that I want to hand him the key to my soul. I pity him deeply and I like him enormously and I adore our lovemaking and we have an extra bond, professional companionship. But love?

If it’s the key to my soul, not love.

After he left about nine o’clock tonight, I sat for an hour just thinking about us, and at the end of it I still wasn’t sure that I love him madly. Because I’m darned if I’ll give up my freedom for him. It’s as I told Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, I don’t want to live in a posh house and play Missus Doctor.

A re-read of Saturday night’s entry tells me how quickly my attitude has changed. Then, I saw it as having to be love. Now, I see it as everything except love. What’s swung me around over a mere twenty-four hours? I think it has to be listening to him talk about his life and his wife. She wangled him the senior post!

He picked me up at the Cleveland Street lights tonight as I walked home in the dark, but though he gave me that melting smile and his eyes shone, I could tell at once that

his mind wasn’t on lovemaking. Which made me feel a little better about us; clearly I was more to him than a female body he happened to fancy.

“I don’t have very much time,” he said as he drove, “but I realised today that I’ve made no effort to care for you, Harriet.”

What an odd thing to say! “Care for me?”