‘It was a privilege,’ he said softly, ‘and I’d like to say thank you.’
I was still wearing the jeans I show up to work in. They have a buttoned fly. I felt his fingers tugging softly at the clasp on the belt and I reached out for him, cupping his face. He kissed the palms of my hands, one after the other, nuzzling the soft little pad inside the thumb, then he slipped off the sofa, kneeling before me on the carpet. I tensed a moment, not quite at ease, not quite decided, then I felt the gentlest pressure as he pushed me back.
‘Hey,’ he murmured. ‘Relax.’
My jeans peeled off. Then he was running his tongue up the insides of my thighs. I wear very skimpy briefs. After a while I felt him nuzzling me, the lightest, deftest touch through the thin cotton. I was wet, and he knew it. I wanted him. Properly. My hands again, reaching out. His kisses again, telling me to wait, to be patient. The insides of my thighs, at the very top, have always been a very special place. Harvey, my ill-starred Bournemouth lover, once boasted that he could make me come just by looking at them. He never did, of course, but some nights - playing - he’d count to ten, like the anaesthetist, and if he’d done everything else right I’d never make it past five. Harvey was good, no question, but Brendan, I was beginning to suspect, was in a different league entirely. Palme d’Or. Cannes Film Festival. Standing ovation.
My briefs, don’t ask me how, seemed to have gone. Scissors? Smoke and mirrors? I didn’t care. My legs spread, his fingers parted me, wider and wider. I felt myself swelling, and then my back began to arch, and I called out for him, all of him, but all I got was the lightest flick of his tongue, dancing and dancing, perfect control, perfect timing, and then a deep, deep surge, the big, big waves, my little board at sea again, abandoned, gleeful, utterly helpless.
Not long afterwards, he did it again. And then again. I’ve never come so often, or so easily, in my life. He didn’t want anything back, the favour returned. He didn’t try and fuck me. He didn’t even kiss me. He was simply happy, as he put it, to say thank you.
‘For what?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
He gazed at me, his face moist and shiny. ‘I love you,’ he said simply.
Later, he insisted on making a bed up for me on the sofa. When I asked about the outside door, he said he’d locked and bolted it. After he’d tip-toed away, I sank beneath the blankets and dreamed about my father. He was home on leave from the Navy. He took myself and my brother sailing in a dinghy on Chichester Harbour. Afterwards, we went to a pub in Bosham and played skittles with those small chicken pies you can buy at Sainsburys. None of my pies made it to the end of the alley but it didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. It was a lovely dream and I awoke at dawn with my father still chuckling about how useless I was at skittles. I lay in the darkness for a while, savouring the dream, and then I got up and picked my way across the darkened lounge until I made it to the kitchen. In the light from the kitchen, I found the door to the hall. Brendan’s bedroom was at the end. He was asleep when I slipped under the duvet but it wasn’t hard to arouse him. He tasted wonderful and we did it again, an hour or so later, together this time.
Brendan took me to work next morning in the Mercedes. Doubleact wasn’t the kind of place where anything stayed a secret for very long but even so I was surprised by his indifference to office gossip. In the car, he’d told me I should move in with him. Before he took the stairs to the third floor, he kissed me on the lips and told me he loved me. The phrase would have been relayed to the bitch-queen within minutes. I expect she looked it up in the dictionary.
After lunch, with Brendan’s blessing, I returned to Napier Road. I’d left my number at the police station, and at two o’clock, as promised, the phone rang. I was expecting a woman’s voice, Gaynor, but it was the young guy I’d met the previous evening. This time he took the trouble of introducing himself. PC Hegarty. Or Dave, for short.
‘Someone’ll be round in an hour or so,’ he told me. ‘You’ll be in?’
I was still explaining how busy I was at work when he cut the conversation short. Someone would be calling by, he repeated. Then he hung up.
He was outside the house twenty minutes later. I watched him getting out of the little white Panda car and straightening his jacket before he locked the door. There was no sign of Gaynor.
I invited him into the kitchen. I’d already put a chair on the table beneath the hole in the ceiling but he was far too tall to need it. He peered up.
‘When did it happen?’
‘Last night. I told you.’
‘That’s when you first noticed it. I asked you when it might have happened. When he might have made it.’
It was a daft question, impossible to answer, and he must have realised that from the expression on my face because he changed the subject at once. I’d left the kettle on the gas stove.
‘Are you offering me coffee then?’
His bluntness touched a nerve. Already, after last night with Brendan, I’d half-decided not to pursue Gilbert through the police and the only point of returning to the flat was the prospect of meeting Gaynor. If she had experience of this kind of thing, I was more than happy to take advice. What I wasn’t going to do was encourage the likes of Dave Hegarty. One obsessive was quite enough for me.
‘I’ve run out of instant,’ I said.
‘Tea?’
‘That, too.’
He didn’t bother to disguise the fact that he didn’t believe me. He began to inspect the ceiling again.
‘There’s no proof, of course,’ he said. ‘No real evidence that he did it. It could be anything, loose plaster, cracks around that crappy fitting.
These toshed-up places,’ he gestured dismissively around, ‘they’re falling apart.’
‘You’re telling me he didn’t do it?’
‘I’m telling you it’s unproven. In the hands of a good brief, you’d be laughed out of court. Assuming it even got that far.’
‘Laughed?’ This was a new departure. To date, I hadn’t found Gilbert remotely comic.
‘Yeah,’ Hegarty nodded. ‘It’s a game, love. I’ve seen it a million times, rock solid case, absolutely sincere, torn to pieces. You’ve got a problem? Fine, I believe you. But you need evidence, witnesses, corroboration. Without that, it’s his word against yours.’
I thought at once of the people in the video shop, the couples in the street outside. They’d been there. They must have seen Gilbert marching me off. But how would I find them? Where on earth would I start?
Hegarty produced a baton. With a flick of his wrist, he extended it full length. I had the impression he practised this a lot. He reached up, poking at the hole. A big piece of plaster broke off, shattering on the kitchen table below. Great. The hole was now three or four times its previous size.
Hegarty seemed unperturbed.
‘See what I mean? Crap plaster. Crap workmanship.’
I was still looking at the hole. At this rate, Gilbert wouldn’t have to use the door to get into my flat. He could shimmy down on a rope. I began to have second thoughts about the tea. Maybe it would save my kitchen from further damage.
I filled the kettle and switched it on. Hegarty had returned the baton to his belt and stepped out into the hall.
‘Mind if I look round?’
I didn’t say a word. Seconds later, I could hear him moving around next door. Next door was my bedroom. By the time he came back, the tea was brewing in the pot. I’d recovered the chair from the table and swept up the plaster. Hegarty sat down.
‘Is he in, do you know?’
I said I wasn’t sure. I’d been out in the back garden looking for the cats and I’d heard or seen nothing of him but that didn’t mean he wasn’t up there.
‘Take a look then, shall we?’
I followed Hegarty out into the hall and up the stairs. The ba
ck of his neck was mapped with acne scars. On the top landing I stood to one side while he rapped on the door. Even if Gilbert was in, I knew there was no chance of him making an appearance for our benefit. He’d have seen the police car outside. He’d probably been listening to our conversation down there in the kitchen. Why on earth would he want to take part in this pantomime?
After the second knock, Hegarty turned ponderously away. I had some faint notion that he might have kicked the door down, or drilled out the lock, but this obviously wasn’t to be.
Back in the kitchen, he spooned sugar into his tea.
‘Diver, are you? Keen on the old watersports?’
‘Windsurfing.’
‘Ah,’ he nodded. ‘I clocked the wetsuit. Funny that, I thought.’
‘Funny?’
‘Keeping it in the bedroom.’ He smiled a private smile, ‘Good fun, is it?’
I was still thinking about the wetsuit, hanging on the back of my bedroom door. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to continue this conversation. I changed the subject, asking about Gilbert again. What were the police proposing to do? And why wasn’t Gaynor on the case?
‘Flu.’ Hegarty smothered a yawn. ‘I’m double-shifting to cover her. She’s back next week. I’ll pass on the file.’
I thanked him, all gratitude, remembering our conversation in the interview room at the police station. Judging by what little he’d bothered to write down, Gaynor would be inheriting one of the thinner files.
‘What can she do? What’s the procedure?’
‘She’ll do what I’ve done. She’ll come round, ask you a few questions, try and raise chummy upstairs. Normally, she’d talk to the Social Services people, too, but I’ve done that already.’
‘And?’
‘They’ve never heard of him. Mind you,’ he frowned, ‘we’ve only got the name and address to go on. The address is obviously kosher, but the name? You tell me.’
‘You think it’s not Phillips?’
‘I don’t know, love, and you don’t, either. Anyone can invent a name. Names mean nothing. Two a penny, names.’
I tried to work out whether this was a bid to impress me, another piece of macho street lore, and decided it wasn’t. It must be strange, I thought, having to operate in a world where nothing was certain, nothing was beyond doubt.
‘Phillips is pretty common, too,’ he was saying. ‘Must be thousands of them. If you wanted to disappear, Phillips is exactly the kind of name you’d choose. You with me?’
I said I was, then I brought the conversation back to Gaynor. Say something else happened? Say I suddenly needed help?
‘She may give you a bleeper. Little hand-held thing.’
‘What would that do?’
‘Bring us running.’ He favoured me with a rare smile. ‘Lucky thing.’
After Hegarty had gone, I sat down and, forced myself to think. The instinct was to rush back to work and plunge into that deep, deep pool of manic phone calls and impossible deadlines, the best anaesthetic I’d yet found for the very real pain that living beneath Gilbert had become. But immersing myself in Doubleact was simply postponing the moment when I’d have to make a decision and last night had brought matters to a head. Thanks to Gilbert, I knew I was facing at least the possibility of violence. But thanks to Brendan, I now had a very agreeable alternative. He wanted me to move in with him. He wanted to turn last night into real life.
I sat through another cup of tea, weighing the pros and cons, trying to imagine what lay the other side of either decision. Might last night have equally frightened Gilbert? Might he now, at last, behave himself? And might it, therefore, be wiser to hang onto my hard-won independence? On the other hand, might Brendan turn out to be the man I’d always, deep down, been wanting? Someone strong, and warm, and funny? Someone who’d know how to unlock me? Someone genuine who really cared?
I piled the questions up, did my best to sort them out, then returned the cup to the kitchen sink. Being me, like being more or less everyone else on the planet, you can only take so much of all this rational shit. Then you just get on and do it.
I met Sandra by the photocopier at Doubleact that same afternoon. Sandra has a hard disk instead of a memory. She forgets nothing. She told me she needed to ball-park the spend on the last four programmes in the series. We’d done that three days ago.
Sandra’s office was on the same floor as Brendan’s. I sat across the desk from her. When she got really angry she had a habit of compressing her lips so her mouth became a thin white line. Just now, it was practically invisible.
The nonsense about budget estimates was, as I’d thought, a pretext.
‘He’s a dickhead,’ she raved. ‘He’s self-obsessed, he’s weak, he lies all the time, and he puts it about wherever he thinks he can get a free ride. There are no free rides, Julie. I’m just telling you, that’s all. Just telling you.’
I thought hard of something to say. Thank you seemed appropriate.
‘Another thing. You’ll find he’s very persuasive. You’ll think he cares. You’ll think he can’t possibly have said all those wonderful things to anyone else. And just when he’s got you where he really wants you, he’ll bugger off again. It’s too early for that yet, way too early, but just have a think about the rest of what I’ve said.’ She glared at me, demanding a reaction. ‘Well?’
I was wondering, by now, just how much she knew about us both. In truth, it only amounted to a couple of hours of the most sensational oral sex ever but even that was enough to have lit a very big fire indeed, so maybe she had a point. Either way, she definitely wanted him back, and the harder she tried to disguise it, the more obvious it became. Given last night, I can’t say I blamed her and it crossed my mind that the marriage might have been a lot stronger than Brendan had so far admitted.
‘We’re friends,’ I said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you breaking up.’
‘It’s not? So how come you know about it?’
‘Everyone knows about it.’
‘But you know more about it, huh? You know lots and lots about it, huh? Because he’s told you, am I right?’
In this mood, Sandra was a force of nature, like wind off a rock face, gusting Force Zillion. I spun on my rope, hanging on like mad.
‘He’s told me practically nothing,’ I said wearily. ‘And in case you’re wondering, I haven’t asked, either.’
‘Why not?’ Sandra was outraged.
‘Because it’s none of my business.’
‘So what is your business? Is my husband your business?’
I didn’t answer. Then I told her about the windsurfing. The day on the coast had been his idea, not mine. Me? I was cheap tuition, nothing more. Sandra followed this aside with an interest I sensed was unfeigned.
‘So how did he do?’
‘He was terrible. Completely clueless.’
She threw back her head and barked with laughter and for a second or two there was an expression on her face that I recognised as affection. Not just the oral sex, I thought. Not just the wild nights. She loves him. She really does.
She was slumped in the chair now, her long fingers entwined around a pencil. She was a tall, angular, raw-boned woman. The set of her face told you everything, barely caging the passions inside.
‘He’s crazy about you,’ she announced wistfully. ‘You know that, don’t you? He’s been crazy about you since the day you turned up. Live with a man long enough, and you can read it in his face. He wanted you and now he’s got you. I should have been a weather forecaster. I’m never bloody wrong.’
‘But you think it will pass,’ I pointed out. ‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Him. He is. Brendan’s the problem. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Julie. That’s why I asked you up here. You think it’s wonderful. I can see it. He’s your boss. He’s the older man. All that experience.
All those stories. He’s so funny. He’s so wise. He’s so accomplished, so good at everything.’ She paused, shaking her head. ‘But it’s not what you think it is. It just isn’t.’
‘I don’t think anything. It’s not like that.’
‘Then what is it like?’
‘I don’t know.’ I was looking hard at the Egon Shiele print on her wall. ‘You’re right, he’s said things, lots of over-the-top things, but I’m not sure I take them seriously.’
‘Not yet you don’t.’
‘Maybe not ever. I just don’t know.’
‘But you’ll try, won’t you?’ She nodded, winding herself up again. ‘Bet your sweet fanny you’ll try. That’s his gift, you see, that’s his special talent. He becomes the proposition you can’t resist. You think he’s flaky, he’ll prove you wrong. You think he’s totally coked out of his head most of the time, he’s suddenly Mr Clean. You think he’s sold out, he’ll come on strong with all that documentary shit. Am I right, Julie? Am I getting warm?’
It was my turn to listen hard. This was a Brendan I recognised. This was the man who’d saved my life, cooked me a wonderful meal, and crowned it with an unforgettable desert. Fruit salad would never taste the same again.
‘Well?’ She was watching me, amused.
‘I don’t know,’ I repeated.
‘But you’ll damn sure find out?’
I looked her in the eye, realising all too late that there was a great deal more to this woman than I’d ever suspected. Not just the bitch- queen. Not just the manic phone calls from the third floor. But a human being. Hurting.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘But it’s not my problem.’
Sandra shook her head, part sorrow, part anger.
‘Not yet it isn’t,’ she said, tossing the pencil onto the desk then turning away.
I moved in with Brendan that night. At first it was a strictly temporary arrangement, a form of camping-out that we both accepted as a kind of foreplay. We had to get to know each other. We had to bend to each other’s funny little ways. Quickly, though, we acquired a routine that itself became a cement that hardened the relationship, turning it into something semi-permanent.
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