If he lost those dependents, his strength would leak away. He would be left totally alone to face shame and impending bankruptcy, hounded in the divorce courts, as well as in … No—ridiculous to panic. Three o’clock was a wild irrational hour which made problems breed and swarm, tacked huge looming shadows on to trifles. The boys would be safely asleep. He had tucked them in himself, lectured them about wasting time on Westerns when there was homework to be done.
He crept along to Charles’s room—his eldest son, conceived when he still paid tax like any other fool, and life was poorer, stricter, and a lot less complicated. He opened the door a crack. The light from the passage shone on to Charles’s fine dark head, the outline of his features almost a carbon copy of his own. He steadied himself on the door frame. He mustn’t wake the boy, alarm him with a sudden display of emotion. Boys must grow up tough, prepared for a world in which ruin and disgrace could strike at any moment.
He didn’t deserve disgrace. Tax avoidance could be regarded almost as a mission. Men like him, working hard and thanklessly, needed some incentive for their labours. It was their commitment which kept the country solvent, subsidised the layabouts who dodged not tax, but work. His scheme was only the rich man’s version of moonlighting, and one which cost him highly. There were fees to pay to accountants and advisers, constant vigilance required, a war of nerves to be fought out.
He closed Charles’s door, checked the other bedrooms. All the boys were sleeping peacefully. He stood and listened to their breathing, lightheaded with relief. Anne wouldn’t leave her sons. She was as much a part of this house as the beams and joists were, as firmly embedded in his life as the bricks were in the mortar. He stared through the small uncurtained window on the landing. The cold had breathed on it, leaving a film of spangled frost. Outside, the street lamps threw dark distorted shadows on the pavement. The trees were bare, gaunt. Only his ancient cedar, which blocked all the light and sunshine from the south side of the house, still outsmarted winter, its branches heavy with their prickly foliage.
He suddenly remembered what date it was. He had fallen asleep remembering, and then got swamped in nightmare. If things had worked out differently, he wouldn’t have gone to bed at all, but still be deep in champagne corks and congratulation. Last night was the projected date of London’s most glittering literary party, fanfare for his half a million sales—except the invitations had never been dispatched, nor the Moet & Chandon ordered. Certainly he had made a stir—made the headlines, even—secured his leading position in the gossip columns, but flushed with shame, not triumph.
He shivered suddenly, walked to the foot of the stairs which led up to the attic—Susie’s attic, used only as a spare room since the girl had been summoned home. Anne had cleared out piles of Susie rubbish—half-eaten chocolate bars, badges with broken pins, lurid paperbacks and dog-eared magazines. Now the room was empty. Or was it? A thin yellow ribbon of light was trailing from the door. Matthew’s hands were clammy as they edged along the bannister. He stopped. Had Susie come back to taunt him, appear to him in nightmare, remind him of things he had tried to lock up like a barred and shuttered room?
Pregnant, his sons had told him, and married to some prick of a photographer who drove a Lotus Elan and knew the Queen. Well, if he was anything like that other chap who had brought Susie to the party, the marriage wouldn’t last. Twins, the boys had said—confirmed by Mrs Chenies. Vera Chenies should mind her own damned business. All of them had told him different stories. Hugh had said Susie only married in September and the twins weren’t due till May, at least. Robert announced that she was as big as a hippopotamus and had already had the babies in a Harrods ambulance. All the boys agreed she had been carted off from the restaurant, more or less giving birth amongst the cakes. If that were so, then she had conceived the twins well before April and that party, and they were nothing to do with him. Nothing to do with her husband, either, since Charles had reported quite distinctly that she had bumped into her photographer only when she went back to Great Yarmouth. Susie had probably had scores of men, all younger and fitter than he was. He booted them down the staircase, kept only Susie there.
He tried to imagine her pregnant—thick golden hair rippling over a curving, swollen stomach. God! He desired her like that. But she could be dangerous, too—start inventing things, accusing him of … Supposing Anne had smelt a rat already? Jennifer might have betrayed him, tipped off his wife about his mistress?
Susie had never been his mistress. You couldn’t even use the word ‘affair’—just one brief evening, a fraction of an evening, something which almost hadn’t happened. But supposing Susie had distorted the whole episode, blown it up to monster proportions and now be claiming him as the father of those twins, without a shred of evidence? A paternity suit on top of everything else … The very phrase could disgrace and undermine him. And there were other damaging things which might leak out. He had been paying Susie’s wages out of the business, calling her his secretary instead of his wife’s home-help. It was only a minor tax dodge, and one which many respectable men resorted to, but added to all the other charges, it could land him in the dock. Wherever he looked, some nightmare figure threatened him—Edward and his cold contemptuous lawyer; Lyn always eluding his grasp; the inspector from the Inland Revenue storming the secret strongroom of his tax affairs, and now Susie and her treacherous accusations.
He crept up the last lap of the staircase, paused on the tiny landing outside Susie’s room. The door was half ajar, the light uncertain, coming only from a low-voltage bedside lamp. Someone was sitting on the floor—a woman—bending over with her back to him; a woman in a nightdress, a woman he had seen and touched before, a woman he had lain with. He could see only her silhouette, a shadowy silhouette, but …
‘Susie …’ he whispered. He closed his eyes, saw her as he had seen her back in April, spread-eagled naked on his office floor. He had taken her there simply to sober her up. She was too young and innocent to be left at that sordid party, in the clutches of a ruffian high on drink and drugs. All he had planned for her was a cup of coffee washed down with some vocational advice. She had told him she was out of work, and he knew influential people who could fix her up as a receptionist in a smart, high-status office.
He had been launching into the benefits of job security and staff pension schemes, when she yawned full-frontally and started taking off her blouse. He stopped in mid-sentence—stared at the full, high, pushy, blatant breasts. He had never meant to touch them. They simply reached towards him, filled his space and vision, got in the way when he tried to pour the coffee. His hands were trembling as he passed the cup, half its contents slopped into the saucer.
‘Ta,’ she said. ‘I’m boiling.’
‘Shall I … er … open a window?’
‘No fear! I loathe fresh air.’
He made every effort to return to luncheon vouchers, BUPA cover, pension funds. She was wriggling out of her skirt, a skimpy thing with a. gaping broken zip. He looked away, tried to count the leaves on his astounded rubber plant, glanced back again, made sure. No—he hadn’t been mistaken—she wasn’t wearing panties.
Nothing might have happened if he hadn’t seen her bush. Not fairish, like her scalp hair, but dark and thick and exuberant, tangling between her thighs. Anne’s crop was sparse and threadbare, concealed beneath waist-high knickers the colour of blancmange. Anne did it as a duty, lying on her back and staring at the ceiling. Susie had flopped on the floor and was lying on her front. Years ago, he had always done it that way. You had to be stiffer, but it was always more exciting. Buttocks over buttocks, crushing breasts against the carpet.
He had grabbed his cup of coffee, burnt his tongue in drinking it. All right, he had touched her once, but only for a second and even then, he had tried to keep on talking, provide her with some guidance, tell her sex was solemn and God-given and must never be debased. He still had all his clothes on. Her hands were reaching through them, unzipping him, refuting him. H
e forced his scalded mouth to return to matters of employment. ‘Always check the perks against the salary, my dear. In fact you should really try and …’
She wasn’t concentrating. ‘You’re big,’ she murmured. ‘I like them big.’ Measuring with her hands.
After that, he forgot about her future and invested in the present. He tried to take it slowly, do sound preparatory work. He believed in exacting standards, in the bedroom and the boardroom, and this had somehow become both at once. He was still urging her to relax and savour the transcendental dimension, when his body contradicted him and swerved shamefully off schedule—a tiny twitch and dribble instead of thunder and encore. He had lain there, limp and sticky, listening to Susie’s sudden switched-off silence. They were still in contact—just. He tried to stiffen again inside her. He could do that in his twenties, when he had first met Anne. But he wasn‘t in his twenties. He was a greying, leaking, rapidly shrinking bungler, a laughing stock, a write-off.
‘I’m … er … sorry, Susan.’ he stuttered. ‘We should never have … It was quite unwarranted of me to …’
She shrugged him off, snatched up the small portable radio he kept in the office for checking on the Stock Exchange reports, slammed the lavatory door on him, rammed the bolt. He knocked, hovered, kept explaining and apologising, as much to himself as to the deaf unheeding door. His only answer was the wisecracks of some disc jockey on Capital Radio and the blare of punk rock. When she came out, she still had nothing on. He could see her nipples greedy and erect, the bush a dark blaze on her milk-pale body. He should never have kissed her down there. It had made him come too quickly. He took a step towards her. ‘It won’t happen again, that I promise you. Next time, I’ll …’
There had never been a next time. In fact, she had blackmailed him for touching her at all. ‘If you don’t give me that job, I’ll tell your wife what happened.’
He shuddered. If she could threaten a thing like that, then she might well pursue him over the pregnancy. The last thing he needed in his life was the faintest breath of any extra scandal. If the newspapers got hold of it, then …
He steadied himself a moment against the bannisters. He had been backing down the stairs, away from Susie’s room and was now shivering on the lower landing. The December night was freezing. He remembered standing there one Sunday morning in the summer, scorching with heat and lust on that same attic staircase, when everyone else was out, creeping into Susie’s room, fingering her tee-shirts, sniffing at her panties, kissing the rumpled hollow in her unmade, teasing bed. When she returned later, giggly and dishevelled with the boys, he had shouted at her for trampling mud into the drawing-room. It was the only way he could cool himself, like throwing a bucket of water over a rutting dog.
Had she sneaked back to make him dog again, trap him and accuse him? He clenched his fists, took one step up. The light was still shining from her room. She had probably gone to sleep with the bedside lamp left on, the heater switched to ‘high’, wasting money, squandering electricity. It was time he bawled her out again. He heaved back up the stairs, barged into her room. The walls were no longer solid, but billowing and swaying like washing on a line, bed and chair blundering towards him. He tried to fend them off, made a grab for Susie’s hair. If she thought she could outwit him, then she’d better damned well realise …
‘Matthew, what’s the matter?’
He froze. The voice was wrong. Susie never spoke like that. Her voice was shriller, gigglier, less polished and controlled. The hair between the fingers was limp and brown and scraggy, not long and thick and gold. It was his wife who was sitting there, dressed in the chaste rebuffing Victorian-style nightdress she always wore in winter. She was surrounded by Christmas wrappings—sheets of coloured paper bright with holly and robins, fancy ribbon, gold and silver bows. On the bed was a pile of presents already wrapped and tagged; at her feet, the toys and toiletries still waiting for their transformation—things she had bought in rushed and hungry lunch-hours and then ticked off her list. She had turned the attic into her private Christmas workshop, so as not to disrupt or untidy the rest of the house. There were stacks of cards waiting on the table, boxes of crackers, rolls of paper-chains. He had taught her himself to treat Christmas as a full-scale operation, almost a military campaign, tackle it with the same efficiency and verve she brought to her job, yet not let it interfere with those vital office tasks. She had taken him at his word, and there she was at three o’clock in the morning, wrapping, sticking, labelling, to save precious working time.
She struggled up to greet him. ‘What’s wrong, darling? You look awful.’
He forced his mind to focus. What did she mean, ‘awful’? Old, feeble, ludicrous? He smoothed his hair, ordered the floor to stop trembling underneath him. He didn’t want her pity. ‘N … Nothing. Couldn’t sleep, that’s all.’
‘Nor could I. Thought I’d get on with this lot. I didn’t wake you, did I?’
‘No.’ It was never she who woke him, only Edward Ainsley tapping on his skull; only Susie shouting obscene erotic words through the bolted lavatory door.
Anne was hiding something under a piece of wrapping-paper—his own present, he suspected—something he wouldn’t want or already had. And yet it seemed ridiculously precious, because she had gone out and chosen it, proved she cared. Even now, she was trying to conceal it, so it would still be a surprise for him. She looked older, somehow, slighter; her hair fading from glossy raven to speckled thrush, her neck thin and frail like crumpled tissue paper. If she was old, then he must be, as well. His wife was only a reflection of himself. He had grabbed her young and turned her into his duplicate, teaching her his order and his methods, so that she could run the house and family as well and efficiently as he ruled his business and the world. Even when the children were born, she had hardly let out a whimper. She’d had three of them at home, and he had sat downstairs listening to the stoic silence grit and flinch around him.
‘Brave,’ the midwife had called her. He had shrugged it off at the time. Women were built to have babies and of course they should be brave. Yet, the memory of his own mother had always nudged and scarred him. Women could die in childbirth. Susie could die and he would be called a murderer. Anne could die, or simply disappear. Even tonight, he might have found her gone. He stood at the door, with his back firmly placed in front of it, as if blocking her escape.
I love you, Anne … He couldn’t get the words out. It had been too long since he had used them. (Had he ever used them? If so, they had aborted on his tongue.) Instead, he knelt beside her, picked up the present she was wrapping, a tome on larger British mammals.
‘I’ll do that.’ It was a declaration of support and devotion.
‘No, really, Matthew, I’m just filling in time, that’s all. Let’s go back to bed.’
Matthew smoothed out a piece of gift-wrap. Anything to stop his hands from trembling. If he returned to the bedroom, Edward Ainsley might be lying there in wait for him, huge cavern mouth bawling through the silence.
‘I’d like to help. Please.’ He stared at the picture of the earth’s surface on the cover of an atlas. It was pitted like Edward’s face in close-up. He couldn’t escape that face. At first, it had kept its distance in the newspapers. Now it thrust into every gap and crack of his existence. He saw it in mirrors, blurred behind his own face, or staring from his plate at mealtimes when he cut, not into veal escalopes, but into Ainsley’s tanned and flattened features. And yet the flesh-and-blood face he had seen only once—glowering in his office.
Edward could be anywhere by now, even the other end of England. He might have leapfrogged his lawyers and gone in search of Lyn himself, tracked him down, talked him round, got him on his own side, lured him with a bribe. It wouldn’t take much. Lyn didn’t need vast sums when he had no responsibilities and had even left his wife. Or had he? Jennifer might well be in the plot herself, her so-called separation from her husband just another lie to put him off the scent. The three of them could
ruin him together—plan some new and fatal onslaught on his … He snatched up the Sellotape, ripped a piece off in his teeth.
He had no more time, for Christ’s sake. Things were closing in on him. He had tried to stall, plead illness and overwork, had been to his own solicitor and told him half the story, keeping quiet about his suspect tax affairs. Josef Suzman was bald, fat, Jewish, shamelessly expensive and extremely sound. He had agreed to play for time and told Ainsley’s lawyers that his client would co-operate, given a reasonable breathing-space in which to produce the documents. Displaying his usual skills in persuasion and prevarication, Suzman managed to extend the deadline from a week to a month.
But now the month was up—or all but half a night of it. Would there be one of Suzman’s letters in the morning, impeccably typed on that heavy cream-laid paper, with the ingratiating phrases now hardening into warnings? Both sets of solicitors now threatening ultimatums? If he could beg just another week or so, then Christmas would close the courts for a merciful fortnight. But after that, what then? He would still have to produce the facts and figures, or risk a court appearance which could be still more damaging.
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