Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (28 page)

They sat in silence for a while.

'I'm off to America and I'm going to have a baby there,' said Erica eventually. 'Haven't met the father yet. They're introducing me when I arrive.'

Janice, singularly failing to deal with both sweet and information, began choking.

Erica banged her firmly on the back. 'You never in the least know what's going to happen in life, do you?' she said cheerfully. 'Look at me. One minute I had nothing. Now, all this. Mind you, I never trust anything to last. Do you?'

'I did once,' said Janice sadly.

'Bad mistake,' said Erica, shaking her head. 'Always expect it to end, and then you are never disappointed.' She held out her hand to shake Janice's. 'Cheer up. My name's . . .' She was about to say Erica and then realized that it was no longer her name, but since she had taken it from a handbag tossed over Waterloo Bridge and empty of all but a calling card that said 'Erica von Hyatt Design Partnership, London, New York', she felt she could abandon it whenever she chose, anyway. 'My name is Janice,' she said.

'How odd,' said Janice, taking the proffered hand. 'So is mine.'

'Oh?' said Erica, rediscovering nerve endings that the comfort of this exotic place had padded in gauze. She withdrew her hand and a shadow darkened her pretty features. 'Oh?' she said again.

'Janice Gentle,' came the smiling reply. 'I write books.'

It was the first
time
Janice had said anything like that to anybody. It felt strange, but rather good - and it made her feel sort of real. She smiled across at her new friend, but the new friend was not smiling back.

'Fuck you,' said Erica von Hyatt, breaking her rule about swearing in other people's houses. 'Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.'

Janice's head throbbed. She had experienced quite enough opprobrium out on the street. That it continued indoors really was too much. If this was what it was like going back out into the real world, she didn't, really, see the point. 'Oh,' she said wearily, eyeing the answering machine as if, in some way, it retained its magical powers.
Was
she in there? Did she still live and breathe? 'Why do you say that?'

And Erica von Hyatt told her. She told her of what had been. She told her of what was to come. Or what she hoped was to come. What would not, now, be to come, because the real Janice
Gentle
had turned up.

'But I've got nothing to do with babies,' Janice said, puzzled. 'Apart from the fact that I call my books my babies sometimes. And I'm certainly not the sort of person to be a surrogate mother. Are you sure?'

'It's all legal. I signed some papers,' said Erica. 'Look.'

Janice looked. She smiled. 'I think,' she said, 'there is some confusion here. This is a publisher's contract. They want you - or rather me - to write a book.'

'A book?' said Erica von Hyatt wonderingly. 'What about?'

'Whatever you - or I - choose, I suppose,' said Janice.

'Oh well,' said Erica resignedly, 'it will have to be you, then. I have no stories to tell. I wouldn't know where to begin.'

Janice thought about her tortures on the Underground. '1 know what you mean,' she said, 'but they do say that everybody has at least one book in them.'

'Do they?' said Erica. 'I don't think I have. Not like the Princess of Wales or Joan Collins. Who'd want to hear about me?'

Janice settled herself next to her.
‘
I
would,' she said positively, surprising herself. And she thought as she adjusted the cushions around her that the couch was a great deal more comfortable than the seats of the London tube.

'All?' said Erica.

'Everything,' said Janice, who was suddenly very interested. 'Just tell me everything about yourself. Please.' So Erica, ever obliging, did.

*

Rohanne Bulbecker stopped the cab on the way back to Dog Street and bought a huge bunch of flowers, pointing to bloom after bloom. She could afford to be generous and she wanted to be. She would break the story very sensitively and spare Janice Gentle's feelings as much as she could. Sylvia's sticky fingers had played all the balls into her court and delicacy was not hard to offer when you had gained so much. The story seemed so fantastical that she was quite relieved to have Gretchen O'Dowd as witness. Sylvia's Man and Boy had no doubts on that score. Indeed, the Man and Boy had been so absolutely convinced about her own betrayal that she had left the solicitor, with a proboscis that had once been aquiline and was no more, reclining on his office carpet, a bloody handkerchief to his nose. Rohanne had to admit that he had been somewhat perfunctory in his delivery of the bad news: she rather doubted if he would ever dare to be so perfunctory with a disappointed mourner again.

At Dog Street Rohanne Bulbecker abandoned dignity and, clutching her flowers, ran two steps at a time up the stairs, leaving Gretchen O'Dowd to puff and pant her way up, beladen with the bags. At the penultimate landing the Bulbecker legs entangled with a man wearing a pinstriped suit, white collar, navy-blue silk tie and extremely pink face; he was down on all fours mopping up quite a mess. Despite her excitement Rohanne paused at the sight. A man cleaning his own entry? Wonderful!

Gretchen O'Dowd, carrying the bags, noticed nothing and merely left a trail of footprints across the newly washed floor. 'That's right,' said the pinstripe sarcastically. 'Sure you wouldn't like to go back and try again?'

Gretchen fled. Why did everybody in London seem so angry?

Rohanne was not going to be deflected from her immediate pleasure of offering her bouquet. When that was done, she would ask what the unspeakable character sitting next to Janice Gentle on the couch was doing here. For the moment, in high good humour, she said, 'Flowers for Miss Gentle,' and was astonished to see a large, round arm, attached to a plump and sausagey hand, reach out and take them.

'Thank you,' said Janice, in a wondering voice, and to hide her confusion she buried her nose deep into the bunch.

Rohanne stared. She was not in the habit of buying anybody flowers, and it grieved her to see this caring gesture appropriated by the wrong person.
Quite
the wrong person. In fact a really, altogether
disgustingly
wrong person. She crossed her arms and looked defiantly at the body attached to the arm and the sausagey digits.

'What the hell are
you
doing?' said Rohanne Bulbecker, the shock making her forget that a moment before she had been at one with the world. 'Those flowers are for Janice.'

'I am Janice,' said Janice, quite used to such aggression since her sortie from her cell. 'Janice Gentle. I write books.'

She closed her eyes and waited. She waited not in vain.

Rohanne pointed a finger, keeping another in her mouth, tantalizing the edge of her teeth with its nail . . . 'You are
who?
And you do
what?'

Wearily Janice repeated the two short sentences. 'I am Janice Gentle. I write books.'

Once more she closed her eyes.

Once more it was not in vain.

She did not see Rohanne look at Erica, nor Erica return the look with a shrug of apology and a nod of assent.

Then it came. First an intake of breath, followed by a gurgling of a throat, and then the soft voice of Rohanne Bulbecker saying,
'Fuckyou, fuckyou, fuckyou. . .'

'Oh,' said Janice, suddenly very annoyed at the triple invocation of such crude Anglo-Saxon. 'I'm going home.' But the door was already barred by the pale-haired woman in black, who rested one arm across it as if she defended the very deeps of her own honour while chewing at her free hand's finger-end. Janice felt in her pocket. If all else failed, there was still that.

*

Morgan Pfeiffer and Enrico Stoat took a glass of champagne together. 'To Janice Gentle and the future,' said Enrico Stoat, raising his glass high. 'And to marketing.'

Morgan Pfeiffer sipped and looked pleased. 'I thought Ms Rohanne Bulbecker would do it. They don't come much tougher than her.'

'To her, then,' said Stoat, raising his glass again. 'To Ms Rohanne Bulbecker,' agreed Morgan Pfeiffer, and they drank.

*

The object of their praise had recovered a
little
. Not very much. Merely enough to form words and project them cohere
ntly
.

Everything, then, was in ruins. She had been fooled by that bogus beauty, and she had trumpeted her befooled state to the Pfeiffer world. T
hey were expecti
ng gold and she would bring them only dross. She looked at the real Janice Gentle, who looked back at her owlishly.

Rohanne closed her eyes. 'What am I going to do?
' she wailed. A rhetorical questi
on.

'About what?' asked Janice politely.

Rohanne knew it was weakness. She knew it opened her up, made her vulnerable, allowed the listener to have something over her. All the same she could not stop herself. She needed to speak out, she needed to tell the truth. To this fat and unspeakable stranger she poured forth her terrible quandary. About Morgan Pfeiffer and Enrico Stoat and her own depressed position. There was no point in trying to hide any of it from Janice
Gentle
. I
t was far too late for equivocati
on.

'I suppose,' she said, when she had finished, 'that we could go on pretending she was you.' She pointed an accusing finger at Erica von Hyatt, who was sitting, serene and philosophical, next to Janice
Gentle
on the couch, while Gretchen O'Dowd stood behind her, uncomprehending but stalwart, Saturn and Mars.

'I don't mind,' said Janice Gentle. 'I'm not at all interested in writing any more books. I really only came here to switch Sylvia off. And to check she really was dead.'

'She is certainly that,' said Rohanne impatiently. 'And her mother has buried her.'

'Her mother?' said Janice, interested. 'I didn't know she had one.'

'Not you as well,' said Rohanne irritably.

Janice remembered the brave Christine's advice to older women in the state of virginity. Maidens should remain moderate and tasteful and never get into arguments or disputes with anybody.

Sometimes the road was hard.
‘I
shall go home now,' she said, and she placed the beautiful bunch of flowers on the couch wistfully.

'No,' said Rohanne Bulbecker. 'Not yet. I've just come from a lawyer's office. And knowing what we now know, I wouldn't be too sure about never writing another book again.' She looked Janice up and down defiantly. 'Not if you want to eat . . .' Rohanne squatted down on her haunches and brought her face on a level with those pale, rather frightened eyes. Let me tell you,' she said, 'a thing or two about your dear Sylvia Perth.'

*

Square Jaw saw them before they saw him. He stopped the car and watched them furtively. Melanie was wearing a very short skirt - too short, far too short - and boots that came up to her knees -
white boots,
for God's sake. She looked like a tart, a
tart.
Sexy and daring. He did not want her to be sexy and daring. Especially he did not want her to be sexy and daring in the company of the bloke she was with, who looked, from the back at least, a right smooth bastard. A bright shirt, rolled-up sleeves, jeans, casual, confident - confident about what? Confident about bloody Melanie, from the look of it. He knew all those dodges. The way the bloke held her elbow as they reached the restaurant door (why that restaurant? Close to his place, a favourite, they'd walked there often enough), the way he put his hand on her
lower
back to guide her in. The gestures
of possession, the gestures of
I
mean to have.
Square Jaw remembered them. They were one of the reasons he enjoyed a long-term, one-to-one relationship, why despite the difficulties he had persisted in it - because he could let go of all those petty formalities, all those attendances that kept you on your toes, let go of them to just relax and
be.
That smooth bastard was on the make, moving in for the kill and she - white boots, short skirt — was encouraging it to happen. He got out of his car and stood on the pavement. He could go in there — have a pasta or something - and why not? He lived just round the corner, he had every right - more than they did. He got back into the car.
Shit,
he thought, who cares? He saw her turn and smile as the door swung to. Melanie happy. So why wasn't he? Well - he could bloody well be happy, too.