by John Lawton
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Must have nodded off.’
‘Nodded off. You was snoring.’
‘Sorry – shouldn’t sleepon my back. Never do as a rule.’
‘Don’t matter. You want to fuck some more?’
‘I couldn’t . . . I’m drained.’
‘No you’re not.’
One hand stroked his cock from tip to balls. He was up already. She had coaxed him to an erection even as he slept. The damn thing had its own life even as his seemed to have slipped from him.
‘I couldn’t . . .’
‘Right you are. It’ll ’ave to be girls on top.’
She slid one leg over him, all her weight on her knees, her hands flat on the mattress either side of his head. Less did he enter her than she enveloped him. With his cock inside her, her back arched, her hands flitted lightly over his face, fingertips tracing the line of his cheekbones and lips. Then they came to rest at the back of her neck. She pulled the rubber band off, shook her hair free and smothered him in it. For a while he thought it bliss. Flat on his back, getting fucked silly.
§ 62
The next day was Saturday. He spent it in bed, reading, recovering from the exertions of the day and the more demanding exertions of the night. He spent it in bed avoiding Clover.
It was gone six in the evening before she put her head round his door. She came in and sat on the end of the bed.
‘It’s Saturday night,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘Let’s go out.’
‘Go out?’
‘It’s Saturday night. People go out of a Saturday night. I been indoors since grandad dumped me on your doorstep.’
‘Where would you like to go?’
‘Dunno. You say.’
‘Ronnie Scott’s?’
‘Not my scene.’
‘The Flamingo?’
She pursed her lips, held one hand level at waist height and twisted it like an aileron – neither up nor down, neither yes nor no.
‘How about the Marquee?’ she said.
‘That’s not my scene,’ said Troy.
‘So we’re stuck in. Sittin’ in front of the fire like Darby an’ bleedin’ Joan!’
Darby and Joan. What she really meant was Stan and Valerie.
‘A film,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the pictures.’
‘The flicks? Is that the best you can do?’
‘It’s dark, it’s anonymous.’
‘What’s on?’
‘Lawrence of Arabia.’
‘Not the bloody war again!’
‘No – a quite different war.’
‘Don’t matter. Seen it anyway. Can I pick?’
Troy tossed a copy of yesterday’s Evening Standard at her.
Five minutes later she had found nothing she liked and let it slip from her fingers, let her lipcurl into the petulant beginning of the Elvis-sneer.
Troy took up the paper.
‘Jules et Jim’s on at the Academy,’ he said hopefully.
‘What, that place with all the foreign films?’
‘Yes.’
‘Subtitles?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d have to wear me specs.’
‘Who’s going to see?’
Dressed in Troy’s macintosh, buttoned to the chin, collar up, her hair wrapped in a headscarf, he felt Onions himself might not have known her. The spectacles came out as soon as the houselights dimmed. Vanity preserved. He feared her restlessness, her insatiable, lazy boredom, but she sat silently – so silently he soon recognised it for what it was. Rapture.
Emerging into the street once more, close by Oxford Circus, she stopped. Grabbed him by the sleeve.
‘You seen it before?’
‘Yes. Must have been about a year ago now, perhaps a little longer. When it was new.’
‘It’s . . . it’s fuckin’ fabulous!’
‘I know.’
He walked on in the hope she’d bend if not break her trance and follow. He didn’t want to stand in the bustle of Oxford Street all night. It was one of the most depressing places on earth.
‘I mean that’s it, isn’t it? That’s got to be it, hasn’t it?’
He’d no idea what she was talking about. But then all he had to do was let her walk and talk.
‘To die for each other. I mean. There is no greater love.’
Inadvertently hitting upon a jazz standard as her qualifier, she had also hit upon a colossal fallacy.
‘For each other?’
‘Yes. To die for each other. To know it’s all pointless, to get in that car, to drive off that bridge and die together, for each other.’
‘You mean like a suicide pact?’
‘Yeah.’
This was startling. Had they seen the same film?
‘She murdered him.’
‘What?’
‘She could not have him. So she murdered him.’
‘She loved him!’
‘She did, throughout the film, exactly what she wanted. She was the most selfish of heroines, and when Jim comes to his senses and recognises this she kills them both. It was murder.’
‘But she was so beautiful. Wotsername was so . . .’
‘Jeanne Moreau.’
‘So beautiful. I don’t mean to look at . . .’
Why not? thought Troy, he’d fallen for Moreau at first celluloid sight.
‘But in herself.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Damn you, Troy. You just won’t see it the way it was. To die for each other. To die for.’
She lapsed into silence. He wondered what she was dredging up.
‘Romeo and Juliet,’ she said at last. ‘There was to die for. They died because they couldn’t be together.’
‘Indeed they did, but it wasn’t suicide. It was the great cock-up.’
He had to think quickly. Romeo and Juliet. Who killed who? Which one had the knife, which one had the poison? Who licked poison off whose lips? Who ever watched Shakespeare for his plots?
‘One of them commits suicide – or maybe both of them – but not together, and then only because one of them thinks the other’s dead, when they’re not, and thinking they’re dead commits suicide, and then the one that wasn’t dead but looked to be wakes up and seeing the other one really dead commits suicide too.’
‘Eh?’
It was perfectly logical remark on Clover’s part. ‘Eh?’ indeed. He should have known better than to try to summarise a Shakespeare plot in a single sentence.
Pyramus and Thisbe, he thought, that was easier. One of them got eaten by a lion . . . or was it a bear? Oh sod it. She’d probably never read Ovid anyway.
‘I can think of only one example of a suicide pact by lovers, and it isn’t fiction, it’s history,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘Mayerling. About twenty years before the First War. The heir to the Austrian throne, whose name escapes me, and his lover, whose name also escapes me, killed themselves at his hunting lodge.’
‘Why?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘But people do do it, don’t they. They do. It’s true!’
‘Idiots do,’ said Troy.
‘Can’t you see the love in it? Can’t you imagine a love so powerful you’d die for it?’
‘No,’ he said truthfully, ‘I can’t.’
Troy cut a devious route back home. Along Oxford Street, down Great Chapel Street into Soho. Then the double-back into St Anne’s Court. Clover dawdled, idly looking around. The habitual affectation of the bored teenager – at least habitual for as long as there had been teenagers. Troy could not remember that he ever was one. He wondered if she’d even notice his aberrant navigation. He stopped before a glass panel, next to a newsagent’s, and feigned reading the posted advertisements. And found he could not feign. He paid so little attention to London’s square mile of vice, perched as it was upon his own doorstep, that the advances in subtlety since the law had hustled the whores off the
street, begat an inventiveness little short of startling.
‘Well padded sofa – pretty in pink.’ And then a local telephone number.
He could not for a moment think what this meant. Then he felt Clover’s chin descend to his shoulder, her eyes next to his as she leant on him and stabbed at the ad with her finger.
‘White woman, good looker, big tits,’ she said as though she had read his mind to the letter.
‘Really?’ escaped him. He would have preferred to have said nothing.
Her finger shot out to ‘Double fronted mahogany wardrobe – suit bachelor.’
‘Black woman – even bigger tits. Anything else you don’t understand?’
In for a penny, he pointed to ‘Tired old 3 piece suite? Let Maggie the Upholsterer whip it into shape.’
‘Jesus, Troy. Where have you been all your life?’
She walked off and left him. He caught her up at the corner of Wardour Street. She was smiling gently and seemed almost to be laughing to herself. At Meard Street he turned in and she followed.
Meard Street was bolder. Prostitutes risked arrest, stood in their doorways, leant out of windows. Troy had few doubts that most of these women were slipping backhanders to his colleagues on a weekly basis. It was what he hated about vice and Vice – everybody bent to it.
A roguish whore smiled at him. He quickened his pace, only to feel Clover’s hand restrain him.
‘What do you take me for, Troy? You think I haven’t seen all this before? I been coming up West since I was thirteen. I seen all this and so what? So bleedin’ what? Is this your morality tale? Are you trying to tell me this is where I’ll end up? Poor little Jackie Clover on the stony path to hell, earning her living on her back? Troy – it’s not my problem. It’s yours. You’re the one with this vision of hell, not me. And you’re about as wrong as you could be. It’s been a wasted lesson. I’ve learnt only one thing I didn’t know.’
OK, he thought, play the game.
‘And what’s that?’ he said, dutifully playing.
‘’Ow to use a peashooter.’
She pointed down Meard Street towards the narrow end where it bottlenecked into Dean Street to emerge almost opposite Gennaro’s restaurant. Good bloody grief, he’d never even noticed. A young whore was leaning out of a first-floor window blowing dried peas at passing men. She had discrimination – only those whose footsteps lingered – and she had aim – Troy watched her ping one right off the back of a bloke’s neck. He slapped a hand to his neck and looked around, as though expecting to see an aggressive insect of some sort. His eyes caught the whore’s. She waved, fingers in a rolling fan, like an elementary five-finger exercise at the keyboard. The man reddened and walked on.
‘See?’ said Clover.
She left Troy standing again, turned into Dean Street. Troy followed before the Maid Marian of Whores drew a bead on him. He could not grasp Clover. Equally he could see no reason why he should be able to grasp her, but grasp her he could not. The naive romantic, entranced by his Mayerling tale; the hardened cynic unintimidated by the bare facts of metropolitan prostitution. Perhaps he’d asked for this? Served him right. But then . . . when he’d been thirteen he was still making models of balsawood aeroplanes.
§ 63
It was raining before they reached home. Cold enough for the gas fire. He lit it and lay back in the chair. It was the time of day he flagged badly. Past that time. He’d pushed it by a couple of hours. Not been out this late in an age. Closed his eyes.
Clover kicked off her shoes and whacked them carelessly into a corner. He felt her hand on the topof his head, fingers playing with a strand of hair.
‘Are you coming up?’
The proprietorial nature – good fucking grief, the middle-aged nature – of the remark. It went with slippers and cardigans, rollers and the permanent wave, and milky drinks before bedtime. It reached into his blood, colder than a Moscow night.
‘Up?’ he whispered, incredulous.
‘You know . . .’
‘I can’t.’
He was not at all sure why he had chosen the word ‘can’t’ in preference to ‘won’t’ or ‘couldn’t’. The prospect of sex with Clover rooted him to the spot. He who knew no guilt, rigid in a recliner while a woman of sixteen or seventeen propositioned him in the vocabulary of a tired housewife.
‘All right then. We’ll do it here.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t.’
She was quickly undoing the buttons of her blouse, fingers dancing down the line from neck to belly button. Then it was off, and she stood in her bra and slacks. The slacks zipped at the hip. The beguiling twist of the torso, the thrust of the hipsideways as she pulled the zip.
‘Why not?’ she said bending to push her slacks off her feet. ‘What’s a fuck between friends?’
What’s a fuck between friends? Was this the philosophy of the incoming age? What’s a fuck? Only the most complex action he knew. Lives bent around the act; new lives came into being because of it. And she made it sound like a handshake.
‘And we are friends. Aren’t we?’
Leaning over him. One hand on each of his knees, bracing herself.
‘I can’t.’
Then he did.
§ 64
He awoke on the hearth rug. Gas fire hissing soporifically. Clover looking at him in the pink light of the flame.
‘You din’t take your pill.’
‘Forgot.’
‘Forgot?’
‘Maybe I’ll sleep without it tonight. Make a change.’
‘Can I have it if you don’t want it?’
‘Not a matter of “it”. There’s plenty. If you can’t sleep, take one.’
She dashed to the bathroom, returned with a glass of water and a jar of his pills. She sat cross-legged, naked, on the rug, and tipped a couple of dozen into her hand.
‘One’s enough,’ he said.
‘You got hundreds.’
‘Not hundreds. A hundred. Fifty in that jar, fifty in the other.’
‘She wrote you a ’script for a hundred!’
She palmed two, tipped the rest back, capped the jar and handed one to him. He swallowed it with a gulpof water. Watched her do the same. Watched her grin at him.
‘What’s the joke?’
‘You don’t know about Mandies do you?’
‘Mandies?’
‘Mandrax. The pill you just took.’
‘It’s a pill. A sleeping pill. That’s all.’
‘Yeah, well . . . but if you don’t go to sleep.’
‘The point, the whole point, is to sleep.’
‘Just you wait, Fred. Put it off, stifle the yawns, prop up your eyelids and stay awake for another half-hour.’
‘I find they tend to work in about half that time.’
‘Trust me.’
She went upstairs when he complained of the cold, pulled the eiderdown off his bed. Wrapped them in it. A cocoon for two. The bounded frontier. Him helpless. A ridiculous desire to grin. Then it hit him. A wave of erotic arousal that forced the grin. Into laughter. Almost a giggle.
‘Told yer,’ she said.
Then he saw the same stupid grin reflected on her face, felt the same wave from her, and felt it wrap around them deeper than the eiderdown, warmer and wetter than the night.
It was like playing wigwam. The containing game of childhood. Refugees, orphans of storm – bigger storms by far than the celestial tantrum which danced outside the window now. It buttressed what she felt – or what he thought she felt, had to feel, didn’t she? – abandoned by her father’s death, neglected by her mother’s life. Buttressed what he felt, certainly – the conventional coital conceit that the rest of the world had ceased – buttressed by the madness of idleness that was TB and its cure.
§ 65
Clover emerged from the bathroom as Troy was buttoning up his overcoat – the childhood ritual of keeping well wrapped up when poorly. It went with string vests and Vick rubs. By contrast she
wore only the towel, clutched to her front.
‘Troy. Lend us a few quid, will you?’
‘What for?’
‘There’s things I need. Grandad bundled me up so fast I scarcely had time to pack.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘God, you’re suspicious. Thing things. Woman things.’
Troy said nothing.
‘All right, you asked for it. Knickers. I’m right out of clean knickers. And Tampax. I’ve got no Tampax at all.’
Troy unbuttoned his coat and jacket, reached for his wallet and took out a five-pound note.
‘Make it a tenner,’ Clover said.
‘A tenner!’
He should have put his wallet away instead of standing with it folded open. She pulled another fiver from it and ignored his protest. Then she flipped the wallet shut and shoved it back inside his pocket. She had to let go of the towel. It fell to the floor. She locked her arms around his neck – the familiar wrestling hold of a woman wanting something – a five-pound note in each hand. He could hear them crackle past his ears. She pressed her chest onto his, and he felt her nipples pushing through the fabric of his shirt.
She kissed him. One ear. Then the lips.
‘Ta. You’re a sweetie, really you are.’
And he knew he’d never see his ten quid again.
At the Bailey Troy wondered whether Cocket would put Fitz on the stand. If he were Cocket he would not – there was too much in the life of Paddy Fitz which Furbelow could exploit to advantage. But if not Fitz, who?
Cocket rose. ‘I call Professor Martin Pritch-Kemp.’
The court buzzed softly. Mirkeyn asked counsel to see him in chambers, and when they returned the call went out for Pritch-Kemp. Troy could guess what had been said. Mirkeyn reiterated that he had not allowed the Professor to be named, because he had been told quite clearly that the prosecution would not call him. Cocket would have replied that he had never said he would not call Pritch-Kemp, had no obligation to disclose such information and what the prosecution chose to do or not do was not his domain. Cocket would also have said that the court could not prevent Pritch-Kemp from giving evidence if he volunteered. And he surely had volunteered? God knows what Furbelow had said. Nothing, would have been the wisest course. If the prosecution had gambled on Pritch-Kempwanting to avoid scandal, then they did not know the man. Or perhaps it had never occurred to them that the Professor could be Pritch-Kemp?