Gentleman's Relish (14 page)

‘I need a key making for this,' he said. ‘And the lock freeing up.'

The man took the box. ‘Oh yes?' he said. ‘Ooh. Heavy, ain't it?'

‘Er. Yes. Don't shake it, though. It's…it's quite valuable.'

‘Well that shouldn't be a problem. I can do it while you wait, if you like. I've a stash of old keys out back. One of them's bound to fit.'

The wife reappeared briefly, to cast an appraising
glance over the man's shoulder at the casket. She must have been listening in from the breakfast table.

‘No hurry,' Chris stammered. ‘Honestly. I've got a few other things to do in town. You finish your tea. I'll take one of your cards, if I may.'

‘Right you are, then.'

As he left, the bell on the door jangled behind him in tinny accusation.

He drove off, bought a paper, found an old-fashioned baker's and bought them rolls for breakfast still warm from the oven and, from a shop nearby, local butter and honey. Instead of returning to the locksmith's, he drove back out towards Cawood and stopped by an ancient phone box on the edge of the village. He glanced at his watch. They'd surely had long enough. He took out the locksmith's cheap little card and rang the number on it.

The woman answered. A woman. Her voice was transformed and husky, somehow lubricated. ‘Hello?'

‘Oh. Yes. I brought the little tea caddy in for your husband about forty minutes ago. I wondered if he'd managed to get it open.'

‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘He got it open all right. Didn't you?' Her voice hardened suggestively. ‘I said didn't you!'

Somebody mumbled something then cried out as if struck.

When she came back on the phone, her voice was so close he imagined he felt her breath, hot at
his ear. ‘That was very clever,' she purred. ‘And rather nasty. Christopher.'

His hand shook so violently as he hung up that the receiver bounced off its bracket and swung with a clunk against the wall. He lurched out to the car and sped back to find Hugo.

The gatehouse was still quite silent. There were no signs of life from upstairs yet but neither was there that sense of all-seeing malignancy, he realized. They were free. They had been spared. He walked to the kitchen to put on the kettle and toss the rolls in the oven to keep warm. He poured an orange juice and downed it in three greedy draughts, its taste as fresh and clean as the reassertion of order. Then he filled a second glass and carried it upstairs.

Hugo didn't stir as he came in. He lay there with a hand thrown across his face as though to ward off a blow from an unseen assailant. It was such a pleasure to see him simply lie there, homely again, even vulnerable. Chris wouldn't wake him straight away.

‘What do you mean?' she said, fingers twined in his hair as he continued to nuzzle her awake. ‘Of
course
you do. Everyone does.'

‘Not me.'

‘You must. If you didn't you'd…'

‘Die?' He looked up from the breast to which he was paying sleepy homage. He grinned. ‘I don't think so.'

‘But everyone dreams. You must simply forget them.'

He shrugged. It could not have mattered less to him. She loved that in a man; that guileless, unquestioning confidence in his own normality.

‘So how about you?' he asked. ‘How'd you sleep?'

‘Fine,' she said, thoughtfully.

‘Did you…?'

‘Well yes,' she said, remembering. ‘I did. It was
rather amazing. You took me to a huge hotel and I was so excited but when they gave me the key to our room it was just a sort of drawer with a mattress in it. Not a room at all.'

‘What happened then?'

‘Well, I wasn't angry at all. It was rather cosy. You showed how you could lock me away and I'd be quite safe until you got back.'

‘That turn you on?'

‘Well yes. Yes it did. And then I…No. Don't stop. That's good.'

How could he not dream? Recalling and recounting her dreams was one of her earliest, deepest pleasures. The reality was probably scrappier, an impatient affair of hurried bowls of cereal and egg-stained school blouses, but when she recalled girlhood breakfasts, they came back as leisurely, sunlit affairs with her mother, all attention, asking her how she slept and whether she dreamed then listening, truly listening. If asked, she could date quite precisely the moment, aged nine, when she first understood the importance of escaping the family into marriage. The unpalatable insight came on the morning her baby sister first felt old enough to assert herself and interrupted the recounting of a dream with a weary sigh of, ‘Boring!' The interruption was allowed to pass unrebuked by their mother. A terrible moment, that. A truly terrible one.

She had tried several men on for size until she found
this perfect fit. Healthy. Handsome. Good (e.g. not too extensive) fidelity record. Dead mother not overly mourned. Steady job. Own place. No unpresentable neuroses. An excellent lay. But now this. It was no more than a minor irritant. At first she actually liked the idea that he never dreamed but would listen intently while she recounted her night-narratives. It seemed all of a part with his uncomplicated maleness, like bristles or travelling light or having nothing in his bathroom cabinet but aspirin and a bottle of muscle rub. She began to boast of it in front of him.

‘He doesn't
dream
!' she would exclaim. ‘Isn't that so like a man?'

Friends would mock her, saying he must be keeping things from her, smutty fantasies, not-quite-forgotten girlfriends.

‘Ask him,' she'd say and would delight in watching him shrug and tell them, ‘What? So I don't dream. Is it a crime?' and she would cast him a proprietorial smile as he fended off her friends' inquisition.

She liked the difference between them because in many ways he was her superior – better paid, better educated, a lifetime non-smoker, a dumper not a victimized dumpee – but in this one sphere she could hold the upper hand. Compared to him, she entered sleep like a priestess into a tabernacle and emerged, her face shining with vision.

Then a business trip to Australia left her so badly jet-lagged that her sleep patterns were jangled for
several days. She lay there beside him rejecting first one elbow then the other for sleeping on, holding him until she became unpleasantly hot, backing off from him until it seemed he was invading her space, even risking waking him by sitting up to read.

Waking him? Fat chance. He simply lay there, a secretive smile dimpling his stubbled cheeks, deep in self-sufficient slumbers. And not dreaming. And it began to disturb her that in sleep he could become such a blank, however pornographic; it reflected badly on her. Any fool could dream.

So why couldn't he?

There was a woman in the office called Magda, an older woman, who had been in therapy of one kind or another for so long she was something of an expert.

‘I've got this friend,' she told Magda, ‘who's desperate because she wants to keep a dream diary but she can't seem to remember her dreams long enough to write them down.'

The colleague smiled in a way that was not entirely friendly and shook her head with the worldly, self-satisfied air of one who has experienced everything and for whom life holds no more nasty surprises.

‘I was just the same,' she said. ‘We all are, tell her. You wake up and all these other thoughts start crowding in and the dream sort of crumbles. All she
needs to do is write a little card saying any dreams question mark and stick it on her bedside table or her headboard or wherever she'll first look when she wakes up. If she does that and keeps a pad and pen handy too she'll soon find she stops forgetting. It'll become second nature. Did you want that last Cherry Bakewell or can I?'

So she tried it.

‘Humour me,' she told him as she stuck a little, prettily lettered card to the edge of his bedside table.

‘It won't work,' he said. ‘I told you I don't dream. I never have.'

She hesitated a moment, tempted by simplicity, then remembered that his dreamlessness was a kind of insult because it meant he never dreamed of her.

‘We'll see about that,' she said. ‘Relax. Go to sleep. Forget the card's there.'

And at first nothing happened. For three mornings in a row they woke to the confidential murmur of the clock radio and he read the card that asked him any dreams question mark and answered nope and turned to her with an I told you so air.

On the fourth morning, however, although he still said nope he did so with a minute hesitation and he couldn't meet her eye afterwards.

‘There
was
something!' she said, pouncing. ‘Wasn't there?'

‘No?'

‘You dreamed. I could tell!'

‘No.' He frowned. ‘Well. Yes. Do you know, I think I may have done.' He laughed uneasily. ‘But it sort of slipped away.'

‘Never mind,' she said and kissed him, triumph warming her from within.

‘I…I think it was a good one,' he said and frowned again. ‘Damn.'

‘Relax,' she said. ‘Don't fret. Plenty more where that came from. Do you want your tea in bed this morning?'

They both drank heavily that night so their respective sleeps were a comatose blank, but the night after that he woke her up in his excitement.

‘I dreamed,' he said.

‘Wha—?' She was still half asleep.

‘I dreamed. I really dreamed.'

‘Great.' She sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. ‘What happened?'

‘I was in a field,' he began.

‘Yes?' she prompted him at last. ‘And?'

‘That's it. I was in a field.'

‘Is that all? What did you do there?'

‘Nothing. Just stood, I suppose. But it was a big field, huge, and so green and the sky was this incredible blue. It was like one of those Renaissance paintings you like, like the background of a Piero. You know? How he sort of paints the silence?'

‘Just you,' she repeated. ‘In a field. Nothing else. No one else.'

‘No. But I had this wonderful feeling. Something amazing was going to happen!'

‘It was just a dream,' she said, indulging her need to flatten his spirits in her disappointment.

‘Yeah,' he said, slumping beside her as he turned out the light. ‘I guess.'

The next night they ate old French cheese which, cliché or no, had always produced spectacular results for her. Sure enough it seemed she had barely closed her eyes before she was living through an entire Barbara Stanwyck film, with her in the steamy lead role, fighting her way to the head office of a vast corporation by sleeping with a succession of ever more powerful and ugly, suited men. Only she didn't sleep with them because it was enough to know they wanted her and how badly. All she had to do was press them in the middle of the chest so their eyes narrowed with lust and she seemed fairly to light up with gratification. It was all superbly art directed, with restrained nineteen-forties details everywhere, flattering lighting, a great wardrobe and even tracking shots. And there was a magnificently bizarre climax in which she left the top of the building on a sort of flying desk, leaving all the pleading suits behind and below her.

But when the alarm woke them he was in there first, eyes bright with the need to relate a boyish extravaganza involving jungles, horses, treasure and
a powerfully erotic encounter with the Foreign Secretary.

‘But that's wonderful,' she managed. ‘You dreamed. You really did this time.' She was about to cut in with her dream but found that somehow, in the effort of picturing his, she had lost all but a few greying rags of it.

‘How about you?' he asked, touching her cheek with one finger in a way that had always faintly irritated her.

‘What about me?'

‘What did you dream about, Pumpkin?' He snuggled up to her which lessened the pain somewhat.

‘Oh,' she said lightly. ‘You know. Girl stuff.'

That night some rather pushy friends served them Cornish hen lobster for dinner. For her as for many, lobster was next only to mescalin and magic mushrooms in its ability to induce frightening dreams if eaten soon enough before sleep. She took off her make-up and climbed beneath the duvet with the same, not unpleasant queasy anticipation of a teenager taken to a slasher movie by a boy she wants to kiss.

Only the lobster affected him before it could take hold on her and she passed a shattering seven hours, repeatedly kicked or jolted awake as he became acquainted with his unconscious terrors. She returned to the office so grey-faced and lacking in concentration that two clients asked if she were unwell.

Making up the bed with fresh Egyptian cotton
that evening, she accidentally knocked the
any dreams?
card out of sight into the mess of out-of-favour shoes, old magazines and dust bunnies that lurked under the mattress. She did not retrieve it.

Now that there was no stopping him, however, he needed no encouragement. The dreams came thick and fast and, as he became adept at remembering them in ever-greater detail, he sometimes had as many as three a night to tell her, often beginning his urgent reports before it was even light. A lot of his dreams were about food, vehicles or thinly veiled desire for world domination. They rarely featured her and when she did appear it was never in a starring role but as a sort of cute younger sister (and she projected the cute part) gamely watching his exploits from a safe distance.

In the mornings, she began to slip out of bed before he woke sufficiently to start talking. She began to grow painfully tense between the shoulderblades if dinner-party conversation strayed from coffee offers to talk of sleeplessness. She began to take more notice of Brian from Accounts, a tantalizingly self-contained, rather handsome bachelor, who played squash every evening after work and had always struck her as an eminently sensible, feet-on-the-ground sort of man. Brian, she felt sure, was not a dreamer.