A Coffin For Two (Oz Blackstone Mystery)

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘And the picture, the Toreador?’

  ‘Davidoff painted it.’

  ‘So it really isn’t a fake, after all.’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe it isn’t, maybe it is. I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve already told Gavin Scott that it is, though. I called him last week. He accepted it pretty well. He said he’d hang it on the wall of his boardroom anyway and let it be judged on its merit. The artist would have been okay with that. He’ll have to tell the shareholders, of course, but he’s made three million profit this year, so he reckons he’ll survive.’

  I looked at her again. ‘But tell me, love. Just suppose Davidoff’s Noddy car hadn’t started first time. Would you have gone with him?’

  She smiled through her tears. ‘You mean would I have left you and gone off with a man as old as Methuselah? Probably not.’

  ‘But you did feel for him?’

  She looked at me for a long time. ‘I was drawn to him,’ she said, at last. ‘He was a fantasy, I suppose.’

  ‘The coming together in the garden. Could that have been a fantasy too?’

  She shook her head, vigorously. ‘Oh no, Oz. That was for real. That’s what’s got me so shaken up.’

  A large part of me wanted to hug her; but the ruling majority in my mind told me not to, that a moment of decision was approaching.

  Instead I said, ‘And has it affected the way you feel about us?’

  Her face twisted into an expression that was half smile, half despair. ‘You mean don’t I love you any more?’ she blurted out. ‘Oh, I love you. That hasn’t changed. But what Davidoff said about why I let him touch me ... yes, let him make love to me ... well, that was true. That night in Shirley’s garden, I loved him too, and I will every time I remember it.

  ‘I guess you can love two people at the same time.’

  She paused. ‘I have to ask you now; now that I’ve told you. Can you bear to touch me again?’ She twisted her fingers together. ‘The thing is, I can’t say that I’m sorry for what happened, and I can’t ask you to forgive me; because that would mean that I regretted it, and I don’t. All I can say is that I love you just as much as I ever did, and that when you and I have made love since my night with Davidoff, there’s been no one else in our bed.’ She shivered in the cool of the night.

  ‘Call me a selfish wee cow if you like, but I have to know that there’s still a solid foundation to my life. I need you to ask me again like you did a couple of weeks ago, to know you still love me, even if it’s only so I can tell you again to wait for a year.’

  Her voice rose slightly. ‘Whatever, I need some sort of reaction. Christ, I confess my infidelity to you and you just stand there. Show me you care, can’t you, even if it’s by getting mad. Imagine I fucked Steve Miller, if that helps!’

  I felt as if the floor was moving under my feet, but I just stood there. Inside my head, something swam to the surface. I opened my mouth to tell her, to spill the beans about Jan leaving Noosh, about our weekend together, about my infidelity to her, not with a demi-ghost like Davidoff, but with a strong, lasting spirit that I had loved since our childhood. I opened my mouth to tell her all that, and to throw her own question back at her. Could she still bear to touch me? But she cut me off.

  ‘And anyway, Oz,’ she burst out. ‘I have to say this, I sense something else. Something in you. I don’t know what it is, but I have a feeling that it’s been there for a while now, waiting to come out. I think it’s time that it did, don’t you?’

  I looked at Primavera, and as I did, the truth broke the surface at last. The fundamental reason for a lifetime commitment for which I had been rummaging through my cluttered, untidy mind. Ellie, as always, had given it to me, only I had mislaid it for a while. I think that putting the lid on Davidoff’s coffin must have helped me to recover it.

  Like my sister said, ‘If I died tomorrow, who would grieve for me the most?’

  It isn’t just about who you want to live with for the present, and to have with you. It’s about who you’ll want beside you to hold your hand at the very end of the last day, when it’s all over. Or, if that can’t be, it’s about whose face you’ll see with your mind’s eye at the dying of the light.

  I wondered how Prim would answer that one. I wondered how Gala would have answered it.

  I looked at her some more, then smiled at her. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But before it does emerge, if you don’t mind I’m going for a walk. Down on the beach, to consult some of my own ghosts in the moonlight.’

  So I left her in our apartment, and strode down the path to the acres of sand below St Marti. And there I walked through the night, almost as far as L’Escala, and back again. I thought of Davidoff, of his honour, and of the softness of his tears. I thought of Jan. And I thought of Primavera.

  She was right. You can love two people; but you can only be with one.

  55

  I felt as if I had been away for a long time. I suppose I had.

  She was awake when finally I made it home. She stood in the open doorway, looking out across the balcony at the rosy autumn dawn.

  She could have seen me approach from where she was standing. She might have heard my key as I stabbed at the lock with my trembling hand. But she must have heard the front door as it closed with a bang. She must have heard me climb the stairs, two at a time. Yet as I crossed the room she stayed there with her back towards me, gazing eastwards, until the moment when I put my hands on her hips, on the silk of her dressing gown. Gently, I turned her round to face me.

  She wasn’t startled, not at all. She just looked at me solemnly, almost eye to eye, as it all came tumbling out.

  ‘I love you more than I have words to say,’ I blurted breathlessly. ‘I can’t conceive of a world without you, and I sure wouldn’t want to live in it. Please, please marry me and be with me until it’s time to place the lid on my coffin.’

  My declaration made, I waited, aware of the heavy thump of my heart. She gazed at me for an unmeasured time, inscrutable, offering me nothing in her expression. Until, finally ...

  ‘Since you put it that way ...’ she said, with her deep, raunchy chuckle. ‘Okay.’

  As I looked at her, a lock of her hair fell across her forehead, over one eye. And at last she smiled, and kissed me. ‘I hoped that’s how it would be,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘How could you not?’ I rebuked her, as I drew her to me in a rustle of silk, and as the first rays of morning sun shone on us both. ‘I’m Oz, and I haven’t changed either.’