The Facts of Life (22 page)

‘Teddy!’ she said. ‘How nice. Light this for me, would you?’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t smoke any more.’

‘Course you don’t,’ she said quickly. ‘Half a lung or something ghastly, isn’t it? Liebermann told me.’ A couple walking back inside stopped and the man struck a match for her and left her the box. Expertly fabricating delight, she asked a few quick questions about his family, ignoring the fact that the girl on his arm was plainly not his wife, then released them both with a smile.

‘Doesn’t bother you or anything, does it?’ she asked Edward, exhaling a small cumulus about them.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’

‘Walk with me, would you. I was feeling stifled in there.’

They walked along the terrace’s length to where its brief elegance gave way to a grim series of avenues between the high scenery docks.

‘Sir Julius is very nice,’ he said.

She only snorted in reply. By way of a public announcement that her liaison with Jerry Liebermann was now categorically over, she had arrived on the arm of her new fiancé who, to Liebermann’s interest, had mooted the possibility of investing in a film or two.

‘He’s not as thick as he looks,’ she said at last. ‘He can talk ancient Greek.’ She sighed. ‘Somehow I’d thought he’d be easier to manage though.’ When Edward had last seen him, the young man had been hobnobbing with her friends from the make-up and hair departments – Myra’s Boys as they were known.

‘Who
is
?’ he asked moodily, thinking of Sally and her recalcitrance. Myra seemed to read his mind.

‘You too?’ She turned in surprise. ‘I meant to ask you, darling. How’s the bouncing baby? D-Day was months ago wasn’t it?’

On any other evening he would have acted like the matchbox man and fawned in gratitude for her unnecessary interest in the mundane details of his life, but tonight a madness stole over him.

‘You don’t have to do all that stuff on my account, you know,’ he said.

For a second she froze at the breach in protocol, then she relaxed, her voice dropping down an octave, discarding its customary brightness en route.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ she said and continued walking.

‘But the baby’s fine,’ he said. ‘A girl. Miriam. Sally was meant to come tonight but the baby had a temperature.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I see. So what’s it like, then, marriage?’

‘I thought this was going to be your second time around.’

‘My first time didn’t count. I was so young my mother all but sold me to him. Now the prospect scares the hell out of me.’

‘It’s odd,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise two people could live so close and know each other so little. Sometimes I might not be Sally’s husband at all.’

It was a lie. He knew it for a lie and yet it nicely expressed the bitter bravado he was feeling. Myra’s perfume reminded him of that distant night when she had kissed him in the lift. It excited him like a bold caress. He made an effort to control himself, aware how drunk he was and how risky it was to be talking like this. He drummed up a polite enquiry about where she and her fiancé would be setting up home, but she stopped him with a kind of sneer.

‘Drop it. Just drop it. You don’t have to do all that stuff either.’

‘Sorry,’ he muttered.

‘And kiss me,’ she added.

‘What?’

‘No one can see us. Come on. Kiss me.’

If he had excused himself right then, pleaded drunkenness, pleaded anything, he might have escaped with only her transitory disdain, but he kissed her and knew from the way the blood surged into his groin at the feel of her fingernails on his backside that only she had the power now to stop what she had set in motion. She led him by the hands into the shadows then through a great opening into a scenery dock. Stumbling in the semi-darkness, he followed her through a Grecian temple to a mock-up of a lorry cab. She made him climb into the driver’s seat then she slid up beside him.

‘Put your hands on the wheel,’ she said, unbuttoning his fly, ‘and keep them there. Sammy was hours fixing this hair.’

Painfully swollen, his penis was doubled up inside his underwear. Eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, he watched in disbelief as she slid cool fingers around it and set it free. She kissed him once more, probing so deeply with her little tongue that he feared he might come in her hand, then she bent down into his lap and took him in her mouth. He sat rigid in the driver’s seat, peering out through the windscreen, petrified lest someone – Max Hirsch, Jerry Liebermann, anybody – appear before him with something similar on their minds. The assurance with which Myra led him to the cab told him it was a well-established trysting place.

Fighting the urge to grasp her head in his palms to bring the sweet torture to an end, he came with no warning. He felt the climax purely in his penis and testicles, much the way he did whenever Sally and he had made love first thing in the morning when he was tense with the need to urinate and too embarrassed to tell her. Myra swallowed everything he pumped into her. She buttoned him away again then sat up and made him hold burning matches in the air while she repaired her lipstick. Then she lit herself another cigarette. The flare of the matches flattered her preposterous glamour, not a hair displaced.

‘Er. Thank you,’ he mumbled.

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I gave you for nothing what that stoat Liebermann thought was his for the asking. Toye’s Law: Those who ask don’t get.’ Then she slipped down from the cab ably as a Land Girl, leaving him to follow after a discreet interval.

He sat on feeling light-headed. He knew he should also feel guilt, but the encounter had been too impersonal for that. He felt no closer to Myra now than if she had stumbled against him in the lunch queue or brushed past him in the sound studio corridor. Keeping all his clothes on, not even touching her after the preliminary kisses and surrendering himself entirely to her control: it was as though she had answered a passing need in them both for a transgression that left no traces. Her perfume lingered in the air around him but there was none of that feral muskiness that had seemed to cling to him after their encounter in the lift. Perhaps
that
smell had not been hers at all but Jerry Liebermann’s. More appalled at that possibility than by what he had just done, he rejoined the party.

In swift succession he registered her dancing cheek to cheek with her fiancé, eyes blissfully closed, then found the crowd abuzz with people looking for him. Apparently he had no sooner left the room than Sally called to leave a message about Miriam.

‘I looked and looked, Sir,’ the porter said. ‘Couldn’t find you anywhere.’

‘I … er … I slipped up to my office,’ Edward explained. ‘I’d forgotten some notes I left there.’

‘I tried there too,’ the porter insisted maddeningly.

‘Really?’ Edward stammered. ‘I must have missed you by seconds.’

He drove home like a madman. He was terrified at his inability to hold the car on a straight course and all too aware that the apparent clarity in his head was a dangerous deception wrought by adrenalin. Inevitably he made guilty pacts with fate.

‘Never again. Spare her and I’ll never do it again.’

When he had to swing out of the path of an oncoming lorry, startled by a furious blare from its horn, he even honoured the Hebraic teachings of his grandmother, considering the possibility of offering himself in poor exchange.

The Roundel was silent when he arrived and his footsteps rang out as he ran upstairs to their bedroom. Sally was dozing in bed, an open novel slipping from her hands. She woke slowly, smiled to see him there and yawned.

‘Oh it’s you!’ she said fondly. ‘I hope you didn’t rush.’

‘Of course I rushed. I got your message about Miriam.’

‘But I said not to rush home on her account,’ she said, laughing. ‘She’s fine. Her temperature dropped back down and I didn’t want you to worry.’ She kissed his cheek.

‘I drove like a bank robber.’

‘I’m so sorry. Poor darling. Kiss her goodnight and come to bed quickly. I got Richards over to look at her just in case. There’s been some meningitis around and –’ She yawned deeply as a cat. ‘It’s probably just a little cold. It was so silly of me to lose my nerve. Not like me at all. It was not having you around to calm me. Where
were
you? The porter man kept me hanging on for ages, and when I called again the person who answered said he was still out looking for you.’

‘I went up to my office for a bit then I went outside for a walk. I had a headache. It wasn’t much fun without you.’

‘I’m sorry. God I’m tired.’ She yawned again and stroked the lapels of his dinner jacket. ‘This needs dry cleaning again. You’re always spilling food on it or something. Wretch.’

He took the novel from her hands and pulled the bedding up around her shoulders, kissing her again, then slipped next door to kiss Miriam. Hearing her deep breathing, smelling her sweet, babyish warmth, he was disgusted that instead of delight at the child’s good health, he felt only relief that his act of betrayal had gone undetected.

Once back at work among his colleagues, he could not ignore a persistent feeling of fear and suspicion, tortured by the possibility that someone might be about to accuse him. Unable to forget, unable to suppress a detestable hope for a repetition, he at once dreaded and longed to see Myra again. So publicly and so advantageously engaged, she was unlikely to grant him any indiscreet acknowledgement. Her actual reaction was worse than he could have imagined. When she passed him in a crowd of costume assistants on his way to the sound studios, he prepared a careful, non-committal smile only to have her look straight through him. Their coming together the night before had been so abrupt, so brutal even, that now he was left with the crazed sensation that it might never have happened at all but had been the product of alcohol and feverish fantasy.

Once more, Edward tapped his baton impatiently on the music stand.

‘No,’ he said and the players broke off raggedly. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Again, please.’

Behind their window, the projectionists rewound the film, then one of the technicians wearily raised a thumb from inside the sound cabin. Raising his baton for silence, Edward tried to sound patient.

‘I know the sudden rhythm change in bar twelve is difficult at that speed, but it’s an
exact
reproduction of the sound a train makes as it goes over points. Think of that when you play and it makes sense. And if the strings mess it up, George can’t coincide his blowing the whistle with the image on the screen. And if he can’t do that then we must start again, and again until he can. All right?’

He glared at the ‘cellists, convinced that two of them were laughing at him but caught only innocent attention on their faces. He could not believe the story had not leaked out. For all the names on the payroll, the studios were small as a village when it came to the dissemination and elaboration of gossip. The smallest secret – from a bust size to a birth mark – was soon uncovered, so he could not understand how his, large by any standards, was taking so long to become shaming common knowledge. Perhaps they really had been unobserved and he was to go unpunished?

Edward waved to the technicians. The red recording light came on and the film began to roll again. On the big screen before him giant numbers counted from five to one. He gave the upbeat and the string players began to scrub at their furious semiquavers as footage of a train’s wheels and hammering pistons flashed overhead swiftly followed by the scarlet words
4.15
TO BUCHAREST.
There were more shots of wheels, then snaking track and flashing sleepers, then steam billowing white against a dusk sky and the gaping maw of an approaching tunnel, then a jet of steam from the whistle. George was still having trouble with his whistle and the sound came late. Edward stopped immediately, causing the orchestral train to derail messily around him.

‘Sorry,’ said George helplessly. ‘I … Sorry, boys.’

‘Again,’ Edward sighed, with an exhausted flap of the hand to the technicians.

Again the film was rewound, again the red recording light came on, again the strings and percussion mimicked the furious clattering of a train and carriages over points. This time the string rhythms were perfectly articulated and George’s whistle flawlessly synchronised, so they carried on well into the film’s title sequence. Surprisingly they flew through a tricky passage Edward repeated later in the score for a murder scene, in which the brass players had to slide mutes in and out of their instruments to suggest the distorted blare of another train hooting as it flashed by in the darkness. Then Edward glanced across from them to give George the cue for another crucial whistle blow.

The blow came exactly on time and the players were flummoxed to see Edward drop his baton on the floor, stagger off the podium and race around to where George was sitting. He stared hard in the faces of two women flautists and at George and they stared back, wondering what their offence could possibly have been this time. For a moment they thought he was going to wither them with sarcasm or throw a tantrum but instead, far more alarmingly, he seemed to crumple from within.

‘Forgive me,’ he stammered. ‘For a second I thought – Forgive me.’ Then, to everyone’s amazement, he slumped into a vacant chair by the kettle drums.

‘Sir?’ the junior percussionist asked him. ‘Sir? Are you all right?’