In the Presence of the Enemy

by Elizabeth George

  The stranger approached her. She remained where she was. In the change of light, Ted could see that he was an older man—of an age with Ted himself, perhaps—with a full head of white hair scraped back from his forehead and falling to touch the turned-up collar of a well-cut Burberry. His shoe soles were leather, and they struck the pavement with a sound like pistol fire despite the wet.

  They began to talk, Eugenie and the man. He took the umbrella from her and held it over them and spoke to her urgently. He was taller than she by a good eight inches, so he bent to her. She lifted her face to hear him. And Ted strained to hear him as well but managed to catch only, “You’ve got to” and “my knees, Eugenie?” and finally, loudly, “Why won’t you see—” which Eugenie interrupted with a rush of soft conversation and the placement of her hand on his arm. “You can say that to me? That’s bloody rich,” were the final words Ted heard from the man before he jerked himself savagely from Eugenie’s grasp, thrust the umbrella upon her, and stalked to his car. And at this, Ted breathed a cirrus of relief into the cold night air.

  It was a brief deliverance. Eugenie followed the stranger and intercepted him as he yanked open the car door. With the door between them, she continued to speak. Her listener, however, averted his face, and cried out, “No. No,” at which point she reached up to him and curved her palm against his cheek. She seemed to want to draw him to her despite the car door that continued to act like a shield between them.

  It was effective as a shield, that door, because the stranger escaped whatever caress Eugenie wanted to bestow upon him. He dove into the driver’s seat, wrenched the door closed, and started the engine with a roar that resounded against the buildings on three sides of the car park.

  Eugenie stepped away. The car reversed. Its gears ground like animals being dismembered. Its tyres spun wickedly against wet pavement. Rubber met Tarmac with a sound like despair.

  Another roar and the car was speeding towards the exit. Not six yards from where Ted watched in the shelter of a young liquidambar tree, the Audi—for now it was close enough for Ted to see the distinguishing quadruple circles on its bonnet—swerved into the street without so much as a moment’s pause for its driver to see if any other vehicles were in his way. There was just enough time for Ted to catch a glimpse of a profile that was twisted with emotion—rage, grief, hate, desperation?—before the Audi veered left in the direction of Duke Street and there turned right for the Reading Road. Ted squinted after it, trying to make out the plate number, trying to decide if he’d ill-chosen his moment to happen upon Eugenie.

  He didn’t have much time to select between scarpering for home and pretending he’d just arrived, however. Eugenie would be upon him in thirty seconds or less.

  He looked down at the dog, who’d taken the opportunity of this respite from their walk to deposit herself at the base of the liquidambar, where she now lay curled, with the apparent and martyred determination to sleep in the rain. How reasonable was it, Ted wondered, to suppose he could coax PB into a fast trot that would take them out of the immediate area before Eugenie reached the edge of the car park? Not very, his intuition told him. So he would offer Eugenie the pretence that he and the dog had just arrived.

  He squared his shoulders and gave a tug on the lead, preparatory to rounding the wall and entering the car park. But as he was doing so, he saw that Eugenie wasn’t heading his way at all. Instead, she was walking in the opposite direction, where a path between buildings offered pedestrians easy access to Market Place. Where the blazes was she going?

  Ted hastened after her, at a brisk pace that PB didn’t much care for but couldn’t avoid without serious risk of strangulation. Eugenie was a dark slim figure ahead of them, her black raincoat, black boots, and black umbrella making her an unsuitable ambler on a rainy night.

  She needs reflecting strips on that umbrella, Ted thought. She needs strips on her raincoat, on her boots as well. If she isn’t careful, she won’t be seen. On a night like this, she won’t be seen even if she is careful, come to that.

  She turned right into Market Place, and Ted wondered for the second time where she was going. Shops were closed at this time of night, and it wasn’t in Eugenie’s character to frequent pubs alone.

  Ted endured a moment of agony while PB relieved herself next to the kerb. The dog’s capacious bladder was legend, and Ted was certain that, in the lengthy wait for PB to empty a pool of steaming urine onto the pavement, he’d lose Eugenie to Market Place Mews or Market Lane when she crossed over midway down the street. But after a quick glance right and left, she continued on her way, towards the river. Passing by Duke Street, she crossed into Hart Street, at which point Ted began thinking that she was merely taking a circuitous route home, despite the weather. But then she veered to the doors of St. Mary the Virgin, whose handsome crenellated tower was part of the river vista for which Henley was famous.

  Eugenie hadn’t come to admire that vista, however, for she quickly ducked inside the church and was lost to view.

  “Damn,” Ted muttered. What to do now? He could hardly follow her into the church, dog in tow. And hanging about outside in the rain wasn’t a very appealing idea. And while he could tie the dog to a lamppost and join her at her prayers—if praying was what she was doing in there—he couldn’t exactly maintain the pretence of a chance encounter inside St. Mary the Virgin after nine in the evening when there was no service going on. And even if there had been a service, Eugenie knew he wasn’t a churchgoer by nature or inclination. So what the hell else could he do now except turn tail for home like a lovesick idiot? And all the time seeing, seeing, still seeing that moment in the car park when she touched him again, again that touch….

  Ted shook his head vigorously. Fry it, he couldn’t go on like this. He had to know by the worst means the worst. And he had to know tonight.

  To the left of the church, the graveyard made a rough triangle of sodden vegetation bisected by a path that led to a row of old brick almshouses, whose windows winked brightly against the darkness. Ted led PB in this direction, taking the time that Eugenie was inside the church to marshal his opening statement to her.

  Look at this dog, fat as a sow, he would say. We’re on a new course of action to slim her down. Vet says she can’t go on like this without her heart giving out, and her legs are already bad as the devil. So here we are and here we’ll be nightly from now on, making a circumvention of the town. May we toddle along with you, Eugenie? Heading home, are you? Ready to talk, are you? Willing to tell me what you were wanting to tell me, are you? Now? Can we make this the soon you spoke to me about? Because I don’t know how much longer I can hold on, wondering what it is that you want me to know.

  The problem was that he’d decided upon her. He’d decided upon her, and he didn’t know what to do with how it felt to have reached the decision without knowing if she’d reached it as well. Because in the last five years since Connie’s death, he’d never had to pursue a woman since women had done the pursuing of him. And even if those pursuits had demonstrated for him how little he liked to be pursued—damnation itself, when had women become so bloody aggressive? he wondered—and even if what evolved from those pursuits tended to be a Pressure to Perform under which he had consistently crumbled, still there had been an intense gratification in knowing that the old boy still had It and It was highly in demand.

  Except Eugenie wasn’t demanding. Which made Ted ask himself whether he was man enough for everyone else—at least superficially—but for some reason not man enough for her.

  Blast it all, why was he feeling like this? Like an adolescent who’d never been laid. It was those failures with the others, he decided, failures he’d never once had with Connie.

  “You should see a doctor about this little problem of yours,” that piranha Georgia Ramsbottom had said, twisting her bony back from his bed and donning his flannel dressing gown. “It’s not normal, Ted. For a man your age? What are you, sixty? It’s just not normal.”

  Sixty
-three, he thought. With a piece of meat between his legs that remained inert despite the most ardent of ministrations.

  But that was because of their pursuit of him. If they’d only let him do what nature intended every man to do—be the hunter and not the hunted—then everything else would take care of itself. Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? He needed to know.

  A sudden movement within one of the squares of light from an almshouse window attracted his attention. Ted glanced that way to see that a figure had come into the room that the window defined. The figure was a woman and as Ted looked curiously in her direction, he was surprised to see her raise the red jumper that she was wearing, lifting it over her head and dropping it to the floor.

  He looked left and right. He averted his gaze. He felt his cheeks take on heat. Peculiar it was, that some people didn’t know how a lit window worked at night. They couldn’t see out, so they believed no one could see in. Children were like that. Ted’s own three girls had to be taught to draw the curtains before they undressed. But if no one ever taught a child to do that…peculiar it was, that some people never learned.

  He stole a glance in her direction again. The woman had removed her brassiere. Ted swallowed. On the lead, PB was beginning to snuffle in the grass that edged the graveyard path, and she headed towards the almshouses innocently, just an old dog with no new tricks.

  Take her off the lead, she won’t go far. But instead Ted followed, the lead looped in his hand.

  In the window the woman began brushing her hair. With each stroke her breasts—heavy but firm—lifted and fell. Their nipples were taut, with deep brown aureoles encircling them. Seeing all this, his eyes fixed to her breasts as if they were what he’d been waiting for all evening and all the evenings that had preceded this evening, Ted felt the incipient stirring within him, and then that gratifying rush of blood to his penis, that throb of life.

  He sighed. There was nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. Being pursued had been the problem in his life. Pursuing—and afterwards claiming and having—was the sure solution.

  He pulled PB’s lead so the dog walked no farther. He settled in to watch the woman in the window and to wait for Eugenie Davies.

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH GEORGE

  A Great Deliverance

  Payment in Blood

  Well-Schooled in Murder

  A Suitable Vengeance

  Missing Joseph

  For the Sake of Elena

  Playing for the Ashes

  Deception on His Mind

  In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

  A Traitor to Memory

  I, Richard

  A Place of Hiding

  IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ENEMY

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published April 1996

  Bantam mass market edition / June 1997

  Bantam mass market reissue / August 2004

  Bantam trade paperback edition / May 2008

  Published by

  Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1996 by Susan Elizabeth George

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-37670

  Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.bantamdell.com

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90548-9

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