‘That’s good,’ he said, clearly relieved. ‘Because I honestly didn’t know how you’d react. I felt like I was being dishonest with you before, but I was so scared of losing you if you knew. Do you understand now, why I thought our lives could never merge? You come from that fancy social set and I hang out with former armed robbers. I didn’t see how our worlds could ever mix.’
‘Well, you’ve made it clear to me that the “fancy” set I used to hang out with are no better than Spider,’ I said. ‘The only difference between him and Roger Thorogood and the rest of those thieves in designer suits is a few million dollars.’
‘And a few bars of soap,’ said James, grinning. ‘But what can you do?’
The first thing I thought when I woke up the next morning – after I had got over my usual amazement at the gorgeousness of the man lying beside me – was about Dee.
I woke James up by kissing him gently all over his face. He stirred, moaning slightly, and tried to climb on top of me, until he realized he was pinioned to the bed by his plaster casts.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten about my leg irons. Climb aboard, will you, Midshipman Ant?’
‘You really are the unstoppable love machine, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘But hang on a minute. It’s all very well us cavorting here, but I’m rather more concerned about Dee. She could be tied up in a car boot somewhere and don’t forget you have those appointments this morning.’
‘Dammit,’ said James, shaking his head. ‘You’re right. For a blissful moment there I’d forgotten about all that. It was a big night last night – all those true confessions – and I think I’m a bit dazed.’
He looked at his watch.
‘I’m seeing O’Hara in an hour. You’ll have to dress me,’ he said, smiling his naughtiest smile.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it makes a change from undressing you.’
It took us a while but I finally got James down into my car, with various carrier bags of photographs and video tapes.
‘What’s the plan?’ I asked him.
‘I need you to take me to the Police Centre in Surry Hills. They will want to speak to you as well, about Dee, but I’ll tell them to come and see you at the shop later on today. OK?’
‘What will I tell them?’ I asked, feeling a bit panicky about it. I’d seen too many TV cop shows to feel happy at the prospect of a police interview.
‘The truth,’ said James. ‘The simple horrible truth, exactly as you see it. You have nothing to hide.’
I glanced in the rear-view mirror at him, propped against one door, his plastered legs across the back seat.
‘How on earth will you get home from this police place?’ I said.
‘O’Hara will be so thrilled with what I have to show and tell them, he’ll probably send me home in a limo.’
‘Will I see you later?’ I said, trying to sound casual, but not liking the vagueness of this reply.
‘Don’t worry, there’ll be no more disappearing, Antonia,’ he said. ‘I’ll be able to put my phone back on after I’ve spoken to O’Hara, because his mob will be watching out for me, so you can call me whenever you want to.’
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that.
‘Promise?’ I said in my Piglet voice.
‘Promise,’ he said.
Later that morning the two men in cheap suits came back into the shop, with a lady police officer in tow. They waited until a couple of customers had left and then came straight up to the counter and showed me their warrant cards.
‘We’re looking for Dee Sullivan,’ they said.
‘So am I,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t seen or heard from her for over a week and I’m really worried.’
I put the closed sign up, made the three of them some tea and then I told them the whole story – how I had met Dee, her wary manner, how we had gone into business and right up to her last strange phone call about the last-minute plastic surgery appointment and her absence from the Silver Springs.
When I finished the police woman asked me if there was anything else I could tell them about Dee, anything at all.
‘It might not seem relevant to you,’ she said. ‘But the smallest little detail can help us.’
I told her about all Dee’s regular appointments for beauty treatments and gave her the names of some of the beauticians and salons she went to. But there was one thing I didn’t share – I didn’t tell them about Dee’s secret house up at Byron, because as I was talking to them it had dawned on me, that could be where she was.
After about forty-five minutes the conversation seemed to be over and I thought they were going to leave, but then one of the men – he said his name was George – took me by surprise.
‘What can you tell us about Suzy Thorogood and Nikki Maier?’ he asked me. ‘Have you seen them recently?’
‘Don’t tell me they’ve disappeared as well,’ I said.
They glanced at each other.
‘We’re just trying to build up a profile of each of them,’ said George, non-committally. ‘In relation to another case we are currently investigating.’
I told them everything I could think of, including Suzy’s strange behaviour, when she had suddenly dumped me after being so nice. They were very interested in that and wanted to know exactly when it had all happened. I saw them exchange another glance when I said she had cooled off around April. Must have meant something to them, but it was lost on me.
I rang James immediately after they’d gone and was almost surprised when he actually answered.
‘Hey, beautiful,’ he said. I could hear voices and traffic. He clearly wasn’t at home, or at the Police Centre. ‘I’m with Spider and the boys,’ he said. ‘We’re having coffee in Victoria Street. It’s so great to be out and about again, even if I can’t walk, although Spider didn’t really appreciate me arriving here in a squad car.’
I could hear snarling noises in the background, which were no doubt the Spiderman’s responses. Whatever he’d said, it certainly seemed to amuse James.
‘Anyway, darls,’ he said. ‘I can’t really talk with these hooligans around. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you later. I’ve got to speak to the guy from the Herald. He’s coming here in a minute.’
‘Where will I see you?’ I asked, pathetically. I still wasn’t quite able to believe he wasn’t going to disappear again.
‘Well, I thought I’d come and stay at your place for a while,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said. ‘And Tom will be ecstatic.’
I could hear coarse laughter from ‘the boys’ in the background.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Put Spider on. I want to tell him something.’
There was a bit of a kerfuffle and more male banter, then I heard an unmistakable grunt.
‘G’day,’ said Spider’s rough voice.
‘Hi, Spider,’ I said. ‘It’s Antonia …’
‘Oh yeah, Jackie Chan’s old lady. How ya doin’?’
‘Very well – thanks to you. You really did us a favour, Spider. Respect and all that.’
‘Argh, get out of here,’ he said. ‘Just looking after me mate. He’s a prick sometimes.’
‘Well, he’s my prick, thanks to you, and I won’t forget it.’
He roared with laughter and as he hung up I distinctly heard him say, ‘Silly cunt,’ in tones of great affection.
Percy was in when I got home. Noisily chopping up vegetables and apparently still not talking to me. Tom was glued to a video of Monkey on the television – reciting the entire opening speech, starting with ‘In the time before Monkey …’, was his new party piece – so I took my chance to clear the air with Percy. I sat down on one of the stools at the kitchen bench where he was chopping and handed him a carrot.
‘Can we talk, Percy?’ I asked him.
‘It depends what you would like to say,’ he said, still not looking at me.
‘Well, I’ll start with sorry,’ I said.
H
e looked at me.
‘Accepted,’ he said. ‘Talk away.’
I searched for the right words to explain it.
‘What I said the other day about James,’ I started. ‘You must know I didn’t mean it. I was just so bewildered that he had abandoned me, I was trying to find ways not to care.’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry too. I overreacted. You unwittingly hit a very sore point. Now tell me, any news of James – or Dee, for that matter?’
‘Yes on both counts,’ I said. ‘I’ll get us some wine, this might take a while.’
I told him the whole story. Right from the King George Hospital and why we were up there, to the visit from Spider’s friend, our Bondi reunion and my visit from the police that afternoon. The only thing I didn’t tell him about was Dee’s beach house. I’d promised her not to tell anyone and I intended to stick to that promise – and I was still deciding what I should do about it.
For once Percy sat and listened, without making fey comments and asking for more details on the sexy bits. I ended with the announcement that James – and his plaster casts – were coming to stay with us for a while. He reached over to the bag and took out three more carrots.
‘He’ll need feeding up,’ he said. ‘I’ll make him some healing chicken soup as well.’
I went to stand up, but Percy put his hand on my arm.
‘I have something to tell you,’ he said. ‘I want you to know why I reacted like that when you mentioned James’s shovelling.’
I sat down again and poured us both a fresh glass of wine.
‘I was in love once, Antonia,’ he said. ‘When I was at Oxford. When I was very young and very silly. I’d gone straight up to Trinity from Eton and I was an arrogant little shit, but when I first encountered Jack in a tutorial, I knew I had met my match.’
He took a long sip of his wine and I settled myself to listen.
‘Jack was a working-class boy from Salford,’ he said. ‘Doing Classics on a full Exhibition. Despite my own unusual beginnings, I was there on pure privilege and, like all my old school cronies, I was frittering my time away, caring far more about parties and dining clubs and appearing in witty revues than I did about essays. Jack – a miner’s son – properly appreciated the opportunity he had been given and he wasn’t wasting a moment of it.
‘He was gorgeously handsome – blond and tall, with strong shoulders, but I knew a lot of pretty boys. That wasn’t the thing. The thing about Jack was that he had the most brilliant mind I had ever encountered.
‘Despite all my class prejudices – which you must remember ran deeper in me, because I wasn’t really secure in my own position – I became besotted with him and amazingly, he seemed to feel some affection for me.
‘We had a passionate affair. Poetry in Greek under each other’s doors, punting down the river together – the whole lot. When I see your face after you have been with James, it reminds me how I felt with Jack in those precious days. I was mad about the boy.’
He nodded sadly to himself and lit one of his black cigarettes. I lit one too. Percy had never shared anything like this with me before.
‘From the perspective of today,’ he continued, ‘when things are all much less rigid, it’s hard to understand my behaviour back then, because I’m quite sure I could have been happy with Jack for the rest of my life. But I did a terrible thing, Antonia.’
He took another sip of wine. So did I. I was unconsciously mirroring him, I realized, I was so keen not to put him off.
‘I was part of an elite dining club called The Blaggards. It was quite the smartest set at Oxford at the time and I was terribly proud of myself for being part of it. Some chaps, who were rejected, left College, went down. Couldn’t stand the humiliation. You had to be related to a peer of the realm even to be considered and you had to compose a bawdy poem in iambic pentameter that amused the club sufficiently to allow you membership. Absolute crap, but it seemed terribly important to me at the time. We were all queer, but you didn’t go on about it then, it was just understood.
‘Anyway I was staggering along the High with my Blaggard buddies one evening after one of our dinners – needless to say, we were all plastered – and Jack came along the street. One of my number cried out, “There’s the miner’s son that Heaveringham’s in love with. Go on, Beaver” – that was what they called me – “proclaim your love for him.”
‘I made up an impromptu verse on the spot, in Latin, the general gist of which was that Jack was just a pretty catamite – a sodomite’s slave, in case you aren’t familiar with the term. All my friends thought it was frightfully amusing. Jack just looked at me like a wounded dog and walked away.
‘In my arrogance I really thought he would see the wit and humour of the situation and that all would be fine when next we met. I actually thought he’d think I was clever. I was so wrong. He never spoke to me again. And those marvellous dining companions, whom I had thought such special friends, dropped me as well. Such an open declaration of homosexual love was not permitted, even in that perverse company.’
He took another sip of wine and sighed deeply.
‘I’m going to show you something,’ he said and digging around in his kelim bag he brought out his wallet, from which he took an old black and white photograph. It was of a beautiful young man, of the Rupert Brooke type, but a bit more butch, lying in a punt holding a bottle of beer and smiling blissfully at the camera.
‘That was Jack,’ he said.
‘Oh, Percy,’ I said, almost whispering. ‘I’m so sorry. I do understand now why my snobbish remarks offended you. What happened to Jack?’
‘He got a starred double first. He never spoke to me again, but the day I was leaving – I went down early, you may remember, never got my degree, now you know the real reason – he left a note in my pigeon-hole. A poem in perfect iambic pentameter on the subject of what happens when you try to move outside your world. Marvellous images of oil and water and the like. Sadly, I destroyed it.’
‘Did you never see him again?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’ve seen him plenty of times,’ said Percy, laughing bitterly. ‘But he still never speaks to me. Jack runs a multinational publishing company – he’s terribly important, never out of the Financial Times. Quite often we’ve been at the same parties, but Jack always turns his back on me and, frankly, I don’t blame him. The last thing I heard, there was talk of him being knighted. A New Labour queer peer. Ironic, non?’
I went round the kitchen bench and hugged him.
‘Oh, my darling Percy, that is the saddest story. I’m so sorry.’
He patted my hand, rather absently.
‘Never mind, my dear, all in the past. Long ago and faraway. It’s just made me allergic to snobbery, that’s all. Now I’m going to make your James a lovely apple pie. That’s just the sort of thing that will make him feel better.’
He tied on his frilly apron and set about making pastry like a dervish.
24
James arrived – lying along the back seat of a taxi – in time for dinner and we ate it together as a family in the sitting room, with him reclining on the sofa, Tom somehow perched between his legs. To Percy’s great satisfaction James had three helpings of apple pie.
‘Am I holding my spoon right, Tom?’ James asked playfully and Percy caught my eye and smiled.
‘Oh, do have some more pie, James darling,’ he said. ‘I made it specially for you. There you are – just one more little sliver. And a dab of cream so it won’t be lonely.’
‘You lot are going to be the death of me,’ said James. ‘Feeding me up when I can’t exercise. I’m going to get all fat and flabby and then none of you will like me any more.’
‘I’ll always like you,’ said Tom. ‘Can I write on your plaster? My friend Hermione had a broken arm and we all wrote on her plaster. I wrote “bum” on it, when she wasn’t looking. She kept it afterwards. Can I keep yours?’
‘No, you can’t, that’s a disgusting idea, but
you can write on them,’ said James. ‘But nothing rude.’
‘I’ll draw a picture of you doing kung fu,’ he said, brandishing a purple felt tip. ‘So people will know how it happened.’
We didn’t disillusion him.
*
Getting James up and down the stairs was a challenge – as was persuading Tom he had to go to school the next morning, when he felt James needed him around to ‘help’ – but it was a total joy having my beautiful man at home with me. I kept feeling as though I had to pinch myself that he was there all the time and I didn’t have to worry about when I was going to see him again.
Percy said he’d look after the shop and I had James to myself all day. We played backgammon until we were practically cross-eyed, drank endless cups of tea (herbal for James, Earl Grey for me) and just lay around talking. I also gave him a very amusing ‘blanket bath’.
But while I was wallowing in my contentment with James, something was nagging at the back of my mind. Dee. We still hadn’t heard anything from the police about her. After turning it around in my head I finally decided I had to go and see if she was at her secret house.
I had just been pondering how I was going to explain to James that I needed to go away for a couple of days when I realized he was looking at me intently.
‘It’s your throw, Ant,’ he said. ‘But you’re miles away. What’s on your mind? Tell me.’
I exhaled loudly.
‘You know when you’ve made a promise to someone and you really feel you have to keep it?’ I said.
James nodded. ‘Sure do. I’ve got more of Spider’s filthy secrets locked away in my brain than I care to think about.’
‘Well, I made a promise to someone – and I might have to go away for a couple of days to keep it. I can’t tell you where or why. Is that OK?’
He looked steadily at me.
‘Probably. But just tell me this – is it something to do with Dee?’
‘Maybe,’ I said reluctantly.
‘You think you know where she is?’
‘Maybe maybe,’ I said.
‘Well, that’s good, but are you sure you don’t just want to tell the police? Remember, it was her husband’s henchmen that did this to my legs. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.’
Mad About the Boy Page 28