Janice Gentle Gets Sexy (46 page)

'I think,' said Janice dreamily as she sank like a soft fondant cream into the centre of the bed, 'that in my new book there will be lots of
lovely
sex. I shall make it a celebration of the act . . .' She reached out and riffled her fingers in a box of chocolates placed enticingly on the pillow. Morgan Pfeiffer was entranced. She placed a walnut cream deep into the recesses of her mouth and sucked hard. 'Mmm,' she said, 'I can't wait to begin. And Rohanne Bulbecker is going to look after me . . .'

'New book?' said Morgan Pfeiffer, suddenly anxious, for he saw the vision of his king to her always available queen fading.

She rolled over on to her stomach. He touched her gleaming contours lightly. Here was his ideal, here was perfection.

'Now is not the time,' she said. She sucked the tips of her fingers and looked at him with eyes that yielded up their innocence. 'Is it?'

Already she was dreaming of Dante and Beatrice, Laura and Petrarch, Michael and Rosalia, and the countless others who had been consigned to an eternity without the delights of the love bed. She thought it would be nice to put all that right. Release them from their purity. Once she had experienced such a release herself. She imagined how the entire canon of literature would look if Dante and Beatrice had coupled, if Laura and Petrarch had known more than acquaintance. And supposing Theseus hadn't abandoned Ariadne but married her? Just
think
-
no Catullus, no Ovid's
Heroides,
no Chaucer's
Good
Women
.
.
.

She crept her plump hand along the coverlet, over the apricot-ruffled hills, towards him. And
she sang again, '"I have a genti
l cock, Croweth me day . . ."' as her fingers drew nearer and nearer . . . And Morgan Pfeiffer was forced to agree that this was no time to discuss the future of books.

*

Gretchen O'Dowd looked out from the shore of Skibbereen. The sailing boats gathered the wind in greedy mouthfuls and sped through the waves, looking quite as buoyant as she herself felt. During the last few months she had grown very fond of this view. It was never the same twice and she was no longer seasick at the sight of it. She began to understand the fascination of mariners for their calling and to look upon the painting Sylvia Perth had given her with much more affection. Indeed, it hung above their bed on a fresh white wall and looked rather fine - homely, as if it, and therefore she, belonged. Skibbereen had begun to feel curiously like home. But then, as Deirdre said, it was hardly surprising given her surname, now, was it?

She sniffed the salty air and felt at ease. Nothing on earth, nothing in the water, was going to trouble her now. In her pocket she fingered the Gold Barclaycard, symbol of so much. And it was true: once you had such a thing, people left you in peace, they left you
deferentially
in peace, or hopped about doing your bidding if you so wished. Good old Sylvia. She hadn't been quite so bad, after all
..
. Gretchen slitted her eyes against the sun's misty light - there was something of the effect of the painting when you did that. Sylvia's own little memorial triumph . . .

The day after Dermot Poll's funeral (she sighed at the happy memory) Gretchen had taken Deirdre to the Antiques Roadshow, which was visiting Skibbereen, thinking it would be an acceptable form of fun for a new widow. To give the visit some point they took the seascape painting along. And there was a most gratifying moment when the languid assessor with monocle and the upraised nose of an Afghan hound fell off his stool with shock. J. M. W. Turner was, apparently, a much sought-after painter of the sea and its ships, and this appeared to be one of his works. With
that
kind of security, a Gold Card was easy.

She smiled and looked away from the water towards a black-clad figure sitting on a rock further down the beach. The distant figure looked up and waved. Gretchen kissed her fingers to the waver and then stroked her moustache. Deirdre was fond of this silky growth and quite often touched it and said so. It reminded her, so she said, of her mother who had cut cabbages all her life, died doing it, a woman of considerable strength and loyalty, who had never once seen fit to pluck a hair from her body in the name of conformity. She was sure Gretchen was no different.

Indeed, as Deirdre said to
still
the tongues of idle gossips, where would she have been without Gretchen O'Dowd's comfort a
nd help in this most trying of ti
mes? Gretchen had arranged the funeral,
everything
- the flowers, the coffin, even the wake with its food and a ceilidh. Deirdre said to those same wagging tongues that Gretchen O'Dowd had handled the whole thing as if she had been waiting for just such an event all her life. And where she slept was nobody's business
..
.

Gretchen, enjoying the peace, heard a noise on the beach behind her. Before she could turn to look, she felt a resounding thump in her lower back - so forceful that she was nearly felled by it. The watching figure on the rock laughed heartily and the sound of her laughter came clear across the breezy distance. Gretchen O'Dowd turned. She refused to smile though the urge to was strong. One of them had to be firm . . .

'Down, Sylvia, down,' she said sternly. 'Good girl. Down, girl. Sit. . .'

*

Erica von Hyatt felt anxious. To overcome the feeling of anxiety she put the key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, removed the key, stepped back, closed the door and repeated the ritual several times. It always cheered her. She spent quite a lot of time going out and coming in again because the pleasure of putting her own key in her own lock was irresistible. What she was not so happy about was going out of the building and into the streets, for no matter how she devised new routes, there was always some living reminder of her past. Today's had been more telling than usual because it was a girl she recognized. Erica had walked past with her eyes fixed unseeing, just as passers-by had once done to her, but it made her feel sick to do it. The girl would not be a survivor. Some fought and won through, some decayed and faded away. So what good, she said to herself, would my parting with a pound have done her? What good would my giving her a room have done her? What good the coat from my back? There are too many of them and I can do nothing. She put to the back of her mind a voice that echoed, mockingly, 'They all say that
...'

After a few more goes with the key, and feeling better, she entered the apartment. It was full of flowers and greenery -jugfuls, bowlfuls, jam jars of them - and littered with half-made wreaths, bridal sprays, dainty table decorations and fan-shaped bouquets. Some days there was scarcely enough space for all the outwork the florist sent to her. She gathered up an armful of lilies to move them out of the sunlight, turned, found no free surface, and replaced them. It was absolutely no good, that television thing of Janice's that was not a television would have to be moved. She was sure Janice would not mind if she just unplugged it and put it on top of the chest. She would tell her when they next spoke. After all, she would have
little
use for it now she was in America and never planning to come back. She pressed a switch and the screen startled her by bursting with light, but she could see nothing within, only green emptiness. Nothing there, she decided. Nothing to worry about.

She would put it on Janice's clothes chest. Erica never used this, and all it contained was the pink gown with silver tassels. She couldn't quite bring herself to throw the gown away, though she did not know why. Perhaps because it had made her feel like a princess when she wore it, the kind of princess found in books, the kind of princess that children loved to draw, the unreal princess of a thousand fantasies. The princess Dawn would have wanted her to be. So she kept it. It did no one any harm.

She had thought that perhaps she would wear it for revisiting the crypt — just for a bit of fun and because it would surprise them. But she had never got round to it. Part of her wanted to see the priest who had told her about the different kinds of love, but an ever bigger part of her wanted to stay away
..
. She was on the other side now, she was straight, and she certainly didn't need reminding of Before. She was content, quite happy with

what she was doing, and she was waiting for the day when Dawn would become eighteen and get in touch with her now that she had a place of her own. After all - she picked up a lily and breathed in the scent - after all, the years would soon pass. She didn't mind the waiting. And if she shopped mostly at the corner shop in future she would avoid the unhappy reminders she had experienced today.

She unplugged the machine and lifted it on to the chest. Then she placed a tea towel over it to save it from getting dusty and began weaving the lilies into a wreath.

Chapter Thirty

S

quare
Jaw is holding on to the strap in the carriage and hoping the lucky band of seated travellers will shortly reach their destination so that he can sit down. He is avoiding the small printed poem above his head which begins:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

He does not want to read it. Look where reading poetry got him last time.

He thought he had done so well. The alien woman told him
she
thought so, too. She said, after it was all over and he had crawled back into bed, that he had dealt with the situation very
sensitively,
very
correctly,
very protectively of
her
feelings. Basking in the praise, and needing the comfort of her arms about him, he did not correct her and say that, really, he had not given her a second thought but considered only himself and, to a much lesser extent, Melanie. She, the alien woman, had not featured in his consciousness at all.

The alien woman clearly believed that she had. Pressing his head to her bosom all the harder, she reiterated this and he, allowing his cheek to lie there and his ear to pick up the soothing sounds of her heart which pumped away with steady calm, did not point out the error. Months on now, today, he wished he had.

What was it she had said to him this morning as he shuffled around looking for shoe number two? 'You loved me so selflessly at the beginning and in so few months it has come to this
...'

To this what? he had wondered, moving her rowing machine, stumbling over her long black boots, opening the cupboard for

the third time to look and this time finding. As he sat on the bed to do up his laces, he heard that unmistakable sound, felt that unmistakable movement: she was sobbing into the pillow and he had a meeting at nine. Why didn't he say, 'Go on, get out of my life.
Go!'
He turned. There were those naked shoulders, there was that small neck, the curving bre
ast, the clenching hand, the outline
of her bottom under the duvet as she lay on her belly and sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed.

He sighed, reached out, accepted his defeat. 'I'll come over to your place tonight and we can look at the brochure. OK?' He patted the bottom and stroked the neck. The head turned. The wet eyes no longer looked as if he had taken a hammer to her. A nipple peeped above the scrunched bedding. Pink and sweet and innocent of anything, it winked at him. He pinched it. She smiled. Wanly, but she smiled. And then she nodded. Out he went, dressed for life. And all
that,
he thought, as he gave the door a harder than necessary bang, because he had clung to a straw of independence. He had arranged to go on a motor rally with a chap from work. That was all. You'd have thought he had suggested going for a fortnight of exotic lust in Bali the way she carried on. It was hardly disloyal to take twelve days in June to go to the wettest part of Ireland and drive a Ford Escort roughshod with Adam Barnet, who had no hair to speak of, a very large nose and about the pulling power of Gandhi.

It was now or never, he thought fiercely as he made his way into the Underground. Stand up for your rights, man. An invitation to breakfast was not meant to be for life. So what if she
does
want to go to a villa in Rhodes? He wasn't stopping her. But he
didn't
want to. Why should he? He knew it had been a mistake that night. He should have just marched back into the bedroom after Melanie left, told her he wanted to be alone, got her a cab - and,
bingo,
freedom.
But now, months on, here he was - fucking well
committed
again. And this one hadn't just moved in her make-up and her books and the odd item of clothing.
She'd
brought things like a rowing machine and pot plants and even a bloody Magimix
...
He wouldn't be able to put those into a cardboard box when the time came
...
If it ever did.

He sat down thankfully, finally turning his back on the words of the poem, 'They are not long . .