Slightly Foxed
Authors: Jane Lovering
Slightly Foxed
by Jane Lovering
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
www.samhainpublishing.com
Copyright ©2008 by Jane Lovering
First published in 2008
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Slightly Foxed
by Jane Lovering
CONTENTS
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* * * *
Slightly Foxed
by Jane Lovering
eBooks are
not
transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an
infringement on the copyright of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places,
and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have
been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any
resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale
or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
577 Mulberry Street, Suite 1520
Macon GA 31201
Slightly Foxed
Copyright (C) 2008 by Jane Lovering
ISBN: 1-60504-129-7
Edited by Anne Scott
Cover by Natalie Winters
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Slightly Foxed
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All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: August
2008
www.samhainpublishing.com
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Slightly Foxed
* * * *
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by Jane Lovering
To my father, James Playle Lovering, 1928-2008. A man
who loved books.
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by Jane Lovering
I fell in love, in the bath, with a man who had been dead
for a century.
Typical for me, this inclination towards unsuitable men.
This particular one was the author of a poetry collection, a
faded dowager of a paperback grown floppy with mildew and
bent-paged with waiting to be read. How much more
unsuitable could you get, I mean—dead? Even for me, that
was a first.
I let the book drop across my chest and stared up at the
damp patch on the wall of the tiny, unventilated bathroom,
which formed the exact shape of the land mass of Sweden.
Or, to the more uncultured eye, a limp willy. I could measure
the length of time I had been wallowing in the scummy water
by the increasingly priapic nature of that spreading stain,
which was presently set to annex Finland. Or star on Channel
Five.
"Mum!" A shoulder banged against the door which was
only held shut by the weight of the laundry basket propped
against it. The lock had been wrenched from the woodwork by
Grainger in his one evening of frenzied kittenhood, and never
replaced. "What are you doing in there? On second thoughts,
don't tell me, I've just eaten."
Slowly I rose from the grimy depths. "Sorry, Florence, did
you want the bathroom?" A sixteen-year-old girl with a
healthy social life? Does, as the saying went in our literary
household, toyevsky?
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"Nah. I'm just telling you I'm off to Dad's." A small silence.
"Okay?"
I bit my lip. "I wish you'd told me earlier that you were
going over there."
"Well I've told you now. I'm staying over. I'll get Piers to
drop me at school in the morning, right?"
My fingers tightened on the bath's crumbling enamel edge,
but the wetness of my palm made it slither with a sound
identical to a tremendous fart.
"I'll take that as a 'yes' then."
I sighed, more deeply than I had meant to. In
consequence, the waters lapped at the edges of my new love,
who lay upon my bosom like a suitor to whose charms the
lady has finally succumbed. "Do you have money for..." slam
went the front door, "...the bus?" Duty bound as a parent to
finish my sentence so that at least I could say, "I told you
so," even though she might not have been listening at the
time. Or, even, present.
I stared down the length of my body at the too-white
flesh. I was still reasonably trim "for my age", as Florence
would no doubt have pointed out. Thirty-six isn't old, is it?
Not these days anyway. But it
is
old enough for outlying
regions to start bearing a slight resemblance to mascarpone
cheese and having a distressing tendency to go their own
way, i.e. downwards. To distract myself from the
uncomfortable thought that my daughter would, as soon as
she arrived at her father's house, be comparing my loose
shape to her stepmother's expense-account-gym-membership
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litheness, I unpeeled the book from my chest and flipped it
open again.
The new object of my affection (I wondered how he would
have felt, coming runner-up to such luminaries as Florence,
our psychotic cat, Grainger, and Johnny Depp) was a man
called Theo Wood. Underneath the mould and the water
creasing, his pages were virginal and the spine was uncracked
as though the book had never been opened. I could imagine
him, all those years ago, crouched over candlelight, pouring
his never-to-be-read soul out onto the pages of a notebook.
Dark eyes fixed on the page, (he'd have deep, poetic eyes of
course) hand rubbing uneven stubble in an attempt to conjure
the words onto the paper. But despite its historical nature,
this book was reasonably new, privately published two years
previously. Had someone discovered the poems lying in a
dust-haunted attic and decided to make a few quid out of the
current vogue for arrhythmic autobiographia?
At the back of the book, almost as though unimportant,
came the picture. Black and white, befitting a man born, the
biography informed me, in 1850. I shifted my weight to allow
the spindly light from the forty-watt bulb access to the pages
and was confronted by a thin face, high-cheekboned, with
eyes of such depth and substance that I felt exposed being
naked in front of his gaze. Dark rumpled attractiveness
mingled with a distant stare, making him look almost
suicidally creative and also slightly short sighted. He also
seemed to be wearing a Marks and Spencer pullover, which
was impossible.
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I laid the book face down on a towel so as not to cause
further damage to the already leprous pages. After all, I had
only started reading it in order to find out where best to
shelve it. I suspected that Florence would have credited my
work with far more dignity had I worked in WH Smith. But it
paid the bills and the rent on our dingy little flat in an area
which was up and coming in much the same way as an
exploding muckheap. I got myself out of the bath, careful not
to drip on Theo, and had scuffled my way into the kitchen,
when there was a knock at the door.
"Alys?" There in the hallway stood Simon, blond and
aristocratic to the point of looking as though he'd been built
out of teeth. "I wasn't sure of the address."
In the five years I'd worked for him, Simon had never
shown any desire to take our employer/employee relationship
further than the local book auction. He also suffered from
borderline agoraphobia, which meant that on unfamiliar
territory he was liable to collapse hyperventilating. I was
therefore so astonished to see him on my doorstep that I
nearly dropped my towel.
"Come in. I was just..."
"Having a bath?" Simon's expression was gradually
returning to its usual resting state of benevolent arrogance.
"I'm sorry to have to come over like this on your day off and
everything but—we've got a problem."
We were only "we" when there was a problem. When
things went well, Webbe's was a very them-and-us
establishment, with Simon being the us, and myself and my
coworker Jacinta being the opposition. We didn't really mind
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and got our revenge in subtle ways, quite a few of them
revolving around Simon's HobNobs.
"It must be a big problem, to bring you all the way out
here." I readjusted the towel to cover as much of me as
possible. Although I'd spent the better part of the last five
years trying to determine in which direction his sexual
proclivities lay, now was not the time to discover Simon's
compass definitely pointed north. "Sit down a moment while I
get dressed."
I left him staring at the only chair in the room still decently
covered in its original upholstery rather than shrouded in a
dubious throw. The reason he was staring rather than sitting
was that this chair was occupied by Grainger, a cat whose
reputation spread further than his discarded coat, and stuck
every bit as hard. He was the only cat I'd ever met who slept
with a snarl on his face to avoid having to change his
expression on waking. By the time I returned, dressed and—
Simon's sexual leanings notwithstanding—heavily coated in
mascara, Simon was resting one buttock carefully along the
