Talking to Strange Men (15 page)

He had been afraid of love-making. His virginity, which had been nothing before he met Jennifer, which had seemed to him the normal condition of a single person, became a burden no longer willingly carried, a dragging weight and an absurd embarrassment. He would have felt it less if she
had been a virgin too, only he knew she wasn't. There had been Peter Moran and others, for all he knew. More than once she had hinted to him that they ought to live together – his expression, a euphemism – before marriage but he had said not exactly that he respected her too much but that he wanted to save love-making for when they were married, for their wedding night. Smiling, she had accepted. Perhaps he should have minded that she showed no disappointment.

It was all right on the night. Strange what an application that common phrase could have. It was just all right. An exercise he had never performed before, as using some unfamiliar machine might be, but possible if one followed the directions. The earth didn't move, nor did he soar to heaven, and he was sure she didn't. It was enough for him in those early days that he had acquitted himself respectably. He knew how to do it, apparently, and he had certainly done it. The burden had been dropped and left behind in the middle of the road.

Two days before they were married she said she thought she ought to tell him that if Peter Moran ever came back and wanted her she would go to him. She wouldn't be able to help herself. Jennifer was tired and a bit weepy and he put this down to pre-wedding nerves. He didn't really believe her. Peter Moran was in America, she said, teaching at a college in the Middle West, though how she knew that when she never had letters from him John didn't know. John had laughed and said he would have something to say about his wife running off with an old flame, he would lock her up. Various feeble jokes of that kind had been made. And then, at their Registrar's Office wedding, she had said suddenly:

‘You don't have to make any vows. Isn't that interesting? You don't have to promise anything.'

He thought he loved her. He really fell in love with her after they were married. What he would have liked was to have laid everything at her feet, the sun and moon and the heaven's embroidered cloths. All he had was his house and some small savings and an equally small inheritance from his parents. He would have liked to spend that on making the house nice for her but she wouldn't have it, she wanted nothing changed.

‘Leave it as it is,' she said. ‘I'm not houseproud and it's the garden you really like.'

So all he bought was this bed and the beautiful, expensive, old-fashioned bed linen that had to be starched and ironed. Between those sheets she was kind and polite to him, but after a while, after the time of indulgence was over, he didn't dare ask her for love more than once a week and then not more than once a fortnight . . . But he knew himself, he knew he would never speak to her about it. Frank talking, openness, wasn't in his line, the kind of thing Mark Simms seemed to advocate wasn't for him. If their marriage became white, sexless, it would have to be so, he would accept.

To his astonishment it was she who broached the subject, who said with a sort of admirable simplicity that it was awful, their love-making, boring at best, painful at worst. She couldn't stand it, it would make her ill. She spoke so softly and gently but she was firm. Couldn't she, wouldn't he let her – she baulked a little here, but she came to him and put her arms round him – suppose she were to try to teach him? Suppose they were to try together?

And there began his happiness, the learning of love with a woman who loved him, or who he thought loved him. That which had been a novelty, a source of satisfaction of various kinds, became a glory and a sensuous triumph. ‘Going to bed' took on a quite different meaning for him. She would draw back the curtains and fill the room with light, slip back into his arms and nuzzle him and whisper. Sometimes in the day she would embrace him downstairs and quickly lead him up to bed. She promised him she would never pretend to a pleasure she didn't feel, so he knew that first orgasm she had and all the subsequent ones were real and he had given them to her. Feverishly she talked while he moved and strove, ‘yes, yes, yes' and his name repeated, and ‘my darling!' and a cry of such evident bliss – from Jennifer who otherwise never made so loud a sound. Into the midst of this, at the peak of it, it seemed to him, when they had found each other and the heights of mutual sensuousness, Peter Moran came back and she left and went to him.

It would have been less, much less, if she had gone during that first year. His potency might have been spoiled for ever,
but what use was potency to him without her? She had gone when all was perfect between them, when they touched each other all the time they were together and held hands and acknowledged the other with secret smiles and glances of tenderness and remembrance. There was a night when they made love, in the evening and again at dawn, and then there was the day after on which, walking across Nevin Square, she saw Peter Moran sitting on the stone plinth where stood the statue of Lysander Douglas . . .

Remembering that time was something John struggled against. The mind is said to block off recollections that are wounding or even disturbing to it, but John had not found this to be so. All sorts of things he fancied would be useful to him he forgot, but these bitter memories were always present and clear. He finished the bed and went downstairs but he wasn't interested in breakfast. Would she notice how thin he had got?

It was going to be a beautiful day. English weather has a way of behaving like this, of warming up slowly, half a dozen pleasant days burgeoning at last into the splendour of a heatwave that will endure for a week and then break up with thunder. This being early April, it was hardly a heatwave, but the sky was clear and blue, the sun misty but strong, and John could go outside without a coat on, felt he might sit out there quite comfortably in a deckchair. Did anyone but he still have deckchairs? She had asked him this, laughing, when he had set outside on the little lawn the two seats of striped canvas, the one for her with its detachable leg rest. Old-fashioned and conventional he was, he who had been young in the Swinging Sixties, though they had never swung for him. Perhaps that had been part of the trouble. He had wanted so much to take care of her, because he loved her and because he saw this as a husband's duty. She had never gone out to work while she was with him.

To distract his mind, or to attempt to, from the afternoon ahead, he got out his code notebook and studied it. Already, because he knew the first word must be ‘Leviathan' and the third ‘Dragon', he had made a little headway. Then he had got stuck. But now, immediately, as if his subconscious had silently, during the night, been working on the problem, he
saw what ‘Tosos' meant. ‘Ignore all Tosos commands' was now clear. It meant to disregard any messages that might be received in the
The Other Side of Silence
code. But did the bit that preceded it therefore mean that now April was here, a new month, the Bruce-Partington code must be adopted? Who, anyway, was Bruce-Partington?

Not some participant in this mini-Mafia, John thought. They all had those fabulous beast aliases. Bruce-Partington might well be an author of espionage fiction. John had never heard of him but this didn't mean he didn't exist. He wasn't very well up in the writers of this genre, knowing only the great ones really, Le Carré, Deighton, Yugall, and now Albeury and one or two others. He had hours and hours before the appointed time of his meeting with Jennifer. Why not go down to the library in Lucerne Road now and ask if they had any novels by Bruce-Partington? With luck the man might have written no more than half a dozen, in which case, provided the library had them in, it would be a simple task to check their opening lines for the April code.

First, though, he tidied up a bit. He cleaned the sink and wiped down the surfaces. It was pointless to think of cleaning the whole house at this stage, and hadn't she told him often she wasn't houseproud, that she was indifferent to these things? The sunshine showed up cobwebs, fingermarks on woodwork, curtains that needed cleaning. It would be nice to throw the lot away and buy new. And why not, for her, if she wanted it? She may be changed, he thought. If Peter Moran was about to desert her again, if she had suffered a double disillusionment, would she be bitter and despairing?

For the first time John confronted the possibility that she was only returning to him because Peter Moran was leaving her once more, that in other words, it was a matter of any port in a storm. He found he didn't much care. At any rate, this time, she would be cured of Moran, that would be the end of it. John recalled the feeling he had had about Peter Moran, the rather creepy intuition that Moran might have nasty sexual proclivities. Such as what, though? John didn't know much about this kind of thing. He couldn't be someone who preferred men. Perhaps he liked being beaten or even – John shrank at the thought – doing the beating himself. He
had been very quick and glib with his reference to Sacher-Masoch. Could it be this which was driving her away? As for him, she had loved him once and would again. Self-confidence came to him with the sunshine and he found that he was whistling as he pottered about the kitchen.

The librarian at the Lucerne Road branch was sure they had no books by Bruce-Partington. She looked through the author files they kept on a computer and showed John that there was no writer on record between Robert B. Parker and Harry Patterson.

‘The name does ring a bell, though.'

‘You mean,' John said hopefully, ‘there may be such a writer but you don't have his books?'

‘I don't think it's actually a writer. More a name of something. Like a firm or a make of something.'

It didn't much matter. Next week, anyway, he might not have the time or inclination for breaking codes.

It was twenty-five past two when John walked through the main gates into Hartlands Gardens. He had had lunch, a very sparse lunch, and bathed and put clean clothes on, washed the dishes, dried them, put everything away and it was still only one-thirty. And then it was simply that he couldn't stay in the house any longer. He had to be out in the air and walking about.

The bus had come at once and for some reason there was very little traffic to hold it up. A summer's day it had become, a freak hot day, the leafless trees having a strange look against that blue unclouded sky. The broad central walk which led from the gates up to the Douglas mansion were bordered with masses of golden-eyed white narcissi, thousands upon thousands of flowers, and their rich heady scent had been brought out by the heat. John left the main path and took a right-hand turning, heading for that part of the grounds that was always known as Lady Arabella's Garden.

Lady Arabella had been the wife of Lysander Douglas, a society hostess and a great gardener. John's mother, as a child, could remember seeing her being driven about the city in a big Lagonda car. John and Cherry had often come here
with their mother and naturally had preferred the play area with the swings and slide. At that time the park hadn't long been made over to the city, the result of death duties which had nearly impoverished the Douglases. John's mother's favourite place was this garden which he was now making for and which had been designed by Lady Arabella herself. As he approached it, John wished he had thought of suggesting to Jennifer that they meet there instead of at the tea place. He and she had been there and sat and walked on several occasions.

It was a white garden that somehow managed to have flowers blooming in it at three seasons of the year. Yew hedges enclosed it and it was not until you had walked down one of the passages between them and under an arch that you could see the flowers at all. John was astonished to see so much in bloom, such a variety of narcissi, white tulips coming into flower, snowy arabis, ivory crocus just touched with mauve, honesty and some type of early iris he didn't know the name of. The branches of a cherry tree were clustered with fat buds, not yet open, but a clematis that overhung the wall of the small pavilion was covered with star-shaped delicate papery blossoms.

He found himself quite alone in the garden. The beauty of it, with the scents and the warm sun, affected him strangely so that he felt tremulous and weak. He could have gasped aloud. He sat down on one of the stone seats and thought, suppose she were to come in here now, come in from the other end behind the pavilion, and walk up to me? It was possible, it was even likely, for she couldn't be far away. He looked at his watch. Two forty-five. Perhaps he would bring her back here after they had had tea. There were white violas growing everywhere between the stones, on the edges of the symmetrical flowerbeds, among the other flowers, as if the gardener had opened and scattered packet after packet of seeds. John thought, I shall will her to come in here now, and he closed his eyes, concentrating, praying really. But when he opened them he was still alone. Only a butterfly had arrived, a winter survivor, fluttering above the arabis and as appropriately white as its petals.

He left the garden and walked back towards the house
along one of the high terraces. From these it was possible to look down on to the circular stone-paved courtyard where in summertime tables and chairs were set out and the doors to the restaurant thrown open. Normally, at this time of the year, it would have been too cold for this but as John came along the narrow path and leaned over the railing, he saw that the tables were out and even one or two sunshades up. At a table in the full sun, sitting upright in her chair and apparently reading a newspaper or magazine spread out in front of her, was Jennifer.

She was early. And she looked as if she had already been there for some minutes. John, after his heart had lurched and his throat dried, enjoyed the considerable pleasure of watching the beloved person without being oneself observed. She was dressed as he best liked to see her, simply enough in skirt, shirt and pullover, but the skirt must have been a very long very full one, for it spread out in thick folds nearly to the ground, showing only her fine slender ankles, her feet in pointed flat pumps. The sun shining on her hair had turned it to the tawny gold Rembrandt used for Juno's crown, John thought, admiring her, wondering if he could bear the pleasure that would come to him if she turned and saw him and waved, or if it would be too much for him, for his heart, and he would die of it.