I nodded, conscious of Alison’s own breasts, tender and provocative under the soft silken folds of her dress, the nipples rising hard now like excited little fingers, seeming to reach through the bloodstains in the delicate jacquard pattern as though to point hopefully beyond. ‘Her sex was a secret, known only to millions, her dark side, you might say … her buried treasure …’ No longer: the police had their noses down there now, arguing about something. Her thighs had been pulled apart and the curled tip-ends of little straw-colored pubic hairs could be seen fringing the legbands of her panties. For some reason, it was making me dizzy. The glossiness of her panties or something. ‘But her … her breasts,’ I continued, taking a deep breath, forcing my gaze away (somewhere a toilet flushed; down in the rec room, the darts players were still at it), managing to draw myself back to Alison’s eyes once more, ‘her breasts were her public standard, what we knew her by …’ The placid depths of Alison’s eyes calmed me. I felt certain that everything was going to be all right. Somehow. ‘Her innocence and her light, you might say. The good white flag she flew.’ I smiled as our legs met: she touched her throat. ‘Flags …’
‘In the dark and dangerous land of make-believe,’ whispered Alison, not so much completing my thought for me as marrying her thought to mine in a kind of voluptuous melodrama.
‘Yes … yes, that’s it …’
There was something truly extraordinary about Alison’s eyes. Sometimes they seemed to penetrate my head as though copulating with it like a man, and then as quickly they’d go soft, almost opaque, inviting me in. Or they’d suddenly seem to pick up light from somewhere and cast it twinkling back at me, suggestively, mischievously – then just as suddenly withdraw it again, hide it, daring me to come and look for it. ‘Bewitching …’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your eyes, Alison …’
‘Ah, that must be the wormwood.’ She grinned. There was a simple gaiety in them again, and I could feel her releasing me.
‘Wormwood?’
‘The vermouth. That’s where the name comes from.’
‘I always thought it was just some kind of wine, I didn’t know I was giving you wormwood—’
‘Oh yes. The flowers anyway. And sweetflag root and cinchona bark and coriander seeds and sandalwood – shall I go on?’
‘I take it you’re trying to tell me something.’
‘Mmm, after that sandwich—’
‘I’ll be right back,’ I said and lightly touched her hip. ‘Don’t move.’
‘Nobody moves!’ barked the Inspector, glancing sharply up at me from under Ros’s skirt. ‘Nobody leaves this house without my permission!’
‘I’m not – it’s only – just an errand,’ I stammered. ‘The dining room …’
Pardew studied me closely a moment, hooded by Ros’s silver skirt like a monk. He stroked his thick moustache, glanced thoughtfully at Alison, then nodded and returned to his work, snipping through the legband of Ros’s panties now with a tiny pair of manicure scissors. He made two crosswise cuts, an inch or two deep, then peeled away the little flap of silk as though easing a stamp from an envelope. Jim came in with his black bag and handed the Inspector a probe with a light on the end of it, and the others in the room pressed closer. The Inspector looked up at me and frowned: ‘Off you go, then!’
Something, as I turned away, was worrying me, something just at the edge of my vision. The way Ros’s stockings had been rolled down to her ankles like doughnuts maybe, making her seem pinioned, the stark face-powder whiteness of her bare thighs under their silvery canopy, the shadows beyond, Jim shaking down a thermometer … Or was it that tube of lipstick I’d noticed, its greasy red tip extended as though in sudden excitement, lying not far from Mavis in the chalked outline of one of my wife’s fallen plants like a child’s crayon on a colouring book drawing? Or Tania, scrambling out of Roger’s way a moment ago, still clutching the—?
‘Boy, they sure tore up jack in here,’ remarked Daffie in the doorway: one of Dickie’s girls, regal tonight in her sleek indigo sheath. Her drink looked like pink lemonade, but I knew it to be straight gin tinted with juice from the maraschino cherries jar. ‘Your whole house looks like it’s suffering from a violent nosebleed, Ger.’
‘Well, it just goes to show,’ I said vaguely.
‘You mean never hire a lip as an interior decorator?’ She smiled, drawing deeply on a small black cigarillo. Over her shoulder, just inside the dining room, I could see Dolph’s burry head with its bass clef ears, and beyond him a crowd of people jammed up around the food and drink. At the sideboard, under one of his wife Tania’s paintings (a conventional subject, ‘Susanna and the Elders,’ yet uniquely Tania’s: a gawky self-conscious girl stepping over a floating hand mirror into a bottomless pit, gazing anxiously over her shoulder at a dark forest crowding up on her – no elders to be seen, yet something is watching her), Howard was stirring up a fresh pitcher of martinis. I was afraid he might use up all the dry vermouth, but Daffie had taken a gentle grip on my forearm, holding me back. ‘You know, Ger,’ she said softly, smoke curling off her lower lip as she spoke, ‘there’s something funny about those cops.’
‘What’s that, Daffie?’
‘Scratching around in Ros’s drawers like that,’ she said. Daffie was a model, one of the best, but in the soft-focus photos you never saw the worry lines, the dark hollows under her eyes, the nervous twitching of her nostrils. ‘I don’t know, but it’s, well – it’s like they’ve been there before.’
‘They’re professional. They’ve seen a lot of murders.’
‘No, I mean …’ She hesitated, withdrew her hand, took a stiff jolt of iced gin. ‘I want you to do me two favors, Ger.’
‘Sure, Daffie. If I can …’
‘One, tell that pint-sized ham-fisted ape behind me to stop messing around behind the scenes,’ she said loudly, Dolph’s ears reddening like dipped litmus paper as he disappeared around the corner, ‘and two …’ She leaned close, touched my arm again, lowered her husky voice: ‘Be careful, Ger …’ Then, bracing herself, her elbows tucked in, she drifted on into the living room (both the Inspector and the short cop, Fred, had their heads under Ros’s skirt now, Bob standing by with a test tube), moving with exaggerated elegance as though to demonstrate for me her sobriety. What she showed me, though, was a backside splattered head to foot with blood, a split skirt, and tights laddered from cheek to heel like torn curtains.
Most of the people in the dining room were crowded around the chafing dish on the table, spearing miniature sausages out of a barbecue sauce that bubbled lazily over a low blue flame. Squeezing through them on my way to the sideboard, Daffie’s warning still echoing in my ear, I was reminded (I felt flushed through by fear as though it were a sudden passion) of a night at the theater when we went backstage to see Ros after a play. On that occasion, too, I’d been cautioned, but by my wife, who, seeing Roger standing guard at Ros’s door and looking utterly demented, had clutched my arm, whispered her warning (‘Be care-ful …’), shouted at Roger to give Ros our love and blown him a kiss, and then had dragged me away through the frothy bustle of actors and their friends and hangers-on and on out the backstage exit. I’d thought she’d seen something more specific than Roger’s monstrous but by then familiar affliction – and indeed perhaps she had, for what she’d said when we got outside was: ‘I sometimes get the feeling, Gerald, that the world is growing colder and colder.’ Having just watched a corny but loving play about a houseful of prostitutes with an innocent virgin and old-fashioned boy-meets-girl romance on their hands, I’d wanted to say that, yes, and Ros was the flame at which all chilled men might well warm themselves; but instead, sensing my wife’s deep disquiet, what I’d come out with was: ‘You think Roger’s going crazy?’ ‘No,’ she’d replied, drawing me closer to her as we came out onto the street, pressing her cheek against my shoulder, ‘what scares me is I think he’s going sane.’
I greeted Howard at the sideboard and, noticing that the pitc
her of martinis he was stirring was only about half-full, asked him (the flush had passed; I thought: a passion, yes, but passion’s passion) how the vermouth was holding out, but before he could answer, his wife’s nephew Anatole, hovering crowlike beside him, shot me a dark long-lashed glance and asked bluntly, his voice breaking: ‘How much longer are you going to put up with this horseshit?’ Then he glared at his tumbler of bourbon and ginger ale as though discovering something trenchant there and, flinging back his long black hair with a toss of his head, promptly drank down most of it.
‘The vermouth’s not the problem, Gerald!’ his uncle Howard snapped. ‘But there’s no ice and the gin is all gone!’ He seemed unusually peevish. His cracked specs maybe. Behind them, when he looked up at me, his eyes appeared broken up and scattered like little cubist exercises, and probably the world seen through them looked a bit that way as well.
I laid a consoling hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Howard, there’s ice in the kitchen and more gin down here below. Excuse me, Anatole.’ I knelt for the gin, and the boy jerked backward, thumping up against Vic, just coming for a refill of his own. Vic swore, Anatole stammered an apology, and Howard said: ‘And someone’s stolen the fruit knife for the lemons!’ Looking up, I saw then that he’d been using his scout knife. His hands, stained and soiled, were trembling.
‘Those three dicks probably borrowed it,’ said Vic sourly, his speech beginning to slur. ‘I think they’re in there now, trying to peel Ros’s cunt with it.’
Anatole laughed, took a nervous puff on his French cigarette, and said: ‘That’s just it, those stupid turds can’t see what they’re looking straight at!’
‘I’m afraid the whole fucking species has much the same problem, son,’ Vic growled, cocking one shaggy eyebrow at Anatole. ‘Like bats in daylight, we can’t even see when we’re pissing on ourselves.’ Vic was a hardnosed guy with a spare intellect, but he had a weakness for grand pronouncements, especially with a few shots under his belt. I handed Howard a new bottle of gin, pushed the cabinet door shut with my knee, poured a wineglass full of vermouth for Alison, and then, on reflection, one for myself as well.
‘Here’s a good one,’ said Anatole. He was reading the cocktail napkins Kitty and Knud had given us, which were decorated with the usual party gags based on lines like ‘Please don’t grind your butts into the carpet,’ or ‘Thou shalt not omit adultery.’ The one he showed us was of a policeman frisking a girl bankrobber. He had her face up against the wall, her skirt lifted and her pants pulled down (as though on cue, the cop with the test tube limped in, pushing people aside, and snatched the salt away from Mrs Draper, went bobbing out again), from which heaps of banknotes were tumbling out, and what he was saying was: ‘Now, let’s get to the bottom of this!’
‘Tell me,’ said Vic, plunging his fist into Howard’s martini pitcher for a couple of ice cubes, Howard sputtering in protest, ‘where do you think the cop got that line? Did it come natural to him as a simple horny human, or did it get thrust on him somehow?’
Anatole flushed, a nervous grin twitching on his thin lips. ‘You mean about free will or—?’
‘I mean, has he emptied his own incorrigibly shitty nature into the vacuum of an occupation here, or has the job and society made him, innocent at birth, into the crude bullying asshole that he’s become?’
‘I – I don’t know … I guess a little of both—’
‘Just as I thought,’ grunted Vic, ‘another goddamn liberal.’ And he turned away as though in contempt, sucking the ice cubes, squinting down at some of the other cocktail napkins, held at arm’s length.
Anatole, badly stung, looked to Howard for support, but his uncle, absently stirring the martinis, was distracted, his head bent toward the TV room where several couples were necking. Ah. Probably the true cause of his bad temper: I’d interrupted his little spectacle. Howard the art critic. At the far wall, Charley Trainer’s wife, Janice, was in a stand-up clinch with some guy whose back was to us, her arms wrapped round his neck schoolgirl-style, her pink skirt rucked up over her raised thigh. Our eyes met for a moment and what I saw there, or thought I saw, was terror. ‘I guess I’ll get something to eat,’ Anatole muttered clumsily and slouched off toward the dining table, looking gangly and exposed. ‘I’m feeling drunk or something …’
Ginger was over there, jabbing clumsily at the sausages in the chafing dish with a toothpick. She caught the tip end of one, lifted it shakily toward her little comic-book ‘O’ of a mouth. It fell off. As she bent over, stiff-legged above her heels, to pick it up, Dolph stepped up behind her and, as though by accident, his eyes elsewhere, let his cupped palm fall against her jutting behind. Anatole saw this, spun away, found himself moving on through the doorway into the living room, puffing shallowly on his cigarette stub.
‘You were pretty hard on him, Vic.’
‘He’s all right. But he’s all style and no substance. He needs to grow up.’ Ginger rose, holding painfully with her fingertips the hot sausage, furry now with dust and lint. She looked around desperately for some place to put it, finally gave up and popped it in her mouth, then brushed at her rear end as though flicking away flies. ‘Isn’t she the one that cunt-hungry fashion plate brought here tonight?’
‘One of them.’ Dolph took his hand away and (Vic, moving like an aging lion, now stalked off into the TV room, flinging open doors, peering behind furniture) rubbed his nose with it. Poor Dolph. Bachelorhood, since his break-up with Louise, had not sat well on him. Ginger blew out her cheeks around the hot sausage and bobbed up and down on her high heels, her halo of carroty little pigtails quivering around her heart-shaped face like nerve ends.
‘Hey,’ I said when Vic returned (Howard had left us, taking up a position over near the dining table where he still had a view into the TV room, his fractured lenses aglitter with myriad reflections of the candles on the table), ‘fatherhood doesn’t last forever, you know.’
‘She’s a fucking innocent, Gerry, and I’m telling you, if that cocksucker gets his filthy hands on her, so help me’ – he ripped a wadded-up cocktail napkin apart in demonstration – ‘I’ll tear his balls off!’
I believed him. It was what made Vic more than just an armchair radical: he could kill. ‘I’ll get some more ice,’ I said, taking the bucket along with me, dumping the empty bottles in it, and Vic called after me: ‘If you see Sally Ann, damn it, tell her I want to talk to her. Right now!’ Alison’s husband came through just then with Roger’s law partner Woody and his wife, Yvonne, and as I passed them I heard them laugh together behind me. All three were carrying croquet mallets: had they been playing out there in the dark?
Louise stood up suddenly when I entered the kitchen, almost as though I’d caught her at something. She’d been squeezed in at the breakfast bench, watching my wife whip up what looked like an avocado dip – or perhaps helping with some of the chopping: there was a little cheese board and knife in front of her – and she nearly took the buttons off the front of her dress trying to jump out of there.
Patrick, halving a grapefruit at the counter with a small steak knife, exclaimed: ‘My goodness, Louise! I felt that all the way over here!’
‘You don’t have to leave, Louise,’ I said, raising my voice as the dishwasher thumped suddenly into its wash cycle. ‘I’ve only come for some ice and mix.’
‘Let her go, Gerald,’ my wife called out, getting to her feet. ‘She’s just eating up all my potato chips anyway.’
‘Are you still making more food?’ There was a huge platter of freshly prepared canapés on the counter, empty tuna cans and cracker boxes scattered about, dip mix packets, bread from the freezer, the wrappers still frosty, home-canned pickles and relishes up from the cellar, smoked oysters on toast squares. And something was cooking in the oven. ‘I thought you had everything ready before the party.’
‘So did I. But it’s all going so fast.’ Louise glanced suspiciously past the bucket of empty bottles I was carrying to the two full wineglasses in my
other hand, as without a word but accompanied by the splashy grind of the dishwasher, she shifted heavily toward the dining room. ‘Did you notice how many sausages were left in the chafing dish?’
‘Not many. Should I turn the flame off?’
‘No, I’ve got more.’ She went to the refrigerator and brought out a ceramic bowlful, bumping the door closed with her hips. ‘Louise, would you mind?’ she called, stopping her at the door.
‘My, what cute little weenies,’ Patrick remarked as Louise, flushing, took the bowl from my wife’s hands.
‘Can I fix you a drink before you go, Louise?’ I called, but, averting her face darkly, she backed out through the dining room door without replying. ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘She was badly bruised in there,’ my wife said, speaking up over the dishwasher. She brought the avocado dip over and set it on the butcherblock worktable in the middle of the room, under the big fluorescent lamp, and I thought of Alison again, that play we’d seen. ‘Don’t you notice? Everything that happens,’ she’d said that night, ‘happens where the light is.’ ‘Didn’t you see her face?’
‘Ah, was that a bruise … ?’ I poked my nose in the fridge: about a dozen cans of beer left – Dolph must be drinking them six at a time. They were squeezed in there among dishes and dishes of prepared foods, tins of sardines, anchovies, pimentos, bags of sliced and chopped vegetables, pâtés, and dozens of sausages and wrapped cheeses.
‘She said Roger bumped her cheek with his elbow,’ my wife explained over her shoulder, pulling hot bread out of the oven, hurrying it gingerly to the butcherblock.
‘I’m afraid her face isn’t all that’s bruised,’ Patrick announced archly. ‘It’s a good thing for you this house has firm foundations!’
‘Now, Patrick,’ my wife scolded playfully (her busy hands, slender, a bit raw, stirred dips, arranged biscuits and crackers, sliced bread), winking at me as I dragged a case of beer up to the fridge, ‘she’s not that heavy!’
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