A Sight for Sore Eyes (31 page)

not quite a shaking. 'While you're with me you do as I say, right? No phone calls, no getting on to Julia. We may as well get things straight now. I don't knowing people, don't need friends, you've got me. want you you You're living here with me now and that's how it's going to be, you and me on our own.' 'Please let me go.' She spoke with such calm dignity that it had its effect on him. As his fingers loosened she took his hands and removed them from her shoulders. 'I don't understand what you mean.' 'It's plain enough. I gave you my ring, didn't I? And I saved you. You don't have to see any of them again, not your father or your friends or anyone. You belong to me.' She was seldom silent and when she was he knew no way of managing her. Impotence extended from his body to his mind and he was filled with a bitter, ragged frustration. She made the coffee, poured a cup for him and pushed it across the table. Her face was stony, beautiful in cold disdain, like a marble statue in a gallery. He wanted to lay down the law - it was his grandmother's phrase, recalled from childhood - tell her he made the rules and what they were, that he was the boss and she must obey. She was to understand the truth of it, that he had made this place possible, had arranged everything, he had the money and the power, she had no right to dispute anything. But the look on her face stopped him. He poured the coffee she had given him down the sink and banged out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. The phone rang and because he evidently wasn't going to answer it, she did. A woman this time, again asking for Franklin Merton, and again she said it was a wrong number, though she was beginning to have her doubts. She dialled Holly's number, then Miranda's, got answering machines both times. Talking to Julia she had postponed, but the time had come to do it. Holly and Miranda being out hadn't really surprised her, but Julia's failure to answer did. Sitting at the table, sipping her coffee, she began to feel rather miserable. She wanted her father, but she didn't know the name of the hotel where he was staying. The next time the phone rang she didn't answer it. There seemed no point. After six rings it stopped and the machine took over. Presently she went into the living-room where there were a few books in a glass-fronted bookcase. They weren't her sort of books, but she preferred reading anything to nothing. Teddy came in after half an hour and found her curled up in an armchair with a paperback. He said he was going to work, he was doing a job for a man in Highgate and he'd be back by five. When he had gone she laid down her book and thought about things. Holly must be out somewhere with Christopher and somehow she knew that it wasn't like this for them. He wasn't a man who thought about nothing but sex and what Holly looked like, he liked talking to her and hearing her talk, and they could laugh and have fun and share things. But I can't go back, she thought, can I? I can't go back to mad Julia and be locked in my bedroom and turned into a sort of Cinderella. What am I going to do? It was usual for Franklin to phone Harriet a couple of days before he was due home. If she wasn't there he never left a message. After all, he had nothing to say to her except to make sure she'd arranged to have the boiler serviced and had the water meter checked. It struck him as he put down the phone that it mattered very little whether these things were done or not, mattered to him, that is, since he never intended living in Orcadia Cottage again. 'I suppose she'll keep it, will she?' said Anthea. 'Some arrangement will have to be come to.' 'Not the same sort of arrangement as was come to with me, I hope for your sake. I took you to the cleaners, didn't I?' 'What you might call the complete valet service with reproofing,' said Franklin with his skull's smile. 'In the present case all I really want is the furniture. Not that I shall tell her that. That is between you and me.' Anthea smiled. 'I suppose you'll come back to Half Moon Street with me on Wednesday?' 'We'll pick up De Valera from the kennels on our way. Mr Habgood had a wife. Teddy hadn't expected that, for she had never been mentioned. But there she was, a fussy woman, who seemed to think it strange that he had called at the house to find if they were accepting his estimate. Why hadn't he phoned if he was so anxious? No, she couldn't let him in, not if he had no identification. She seemed to expect him to carry a photograph of himself on a chain round his neck. Keeping him on the doorstep, she relented enough to discuss the cupboard designs with him. She disliked panelled doors and wanted brass fittings. Her husband wouldn't dream of giving him a deposit of fifty per cent, that was out of the question. Ten was more likely. If he would like to phone that evening her husband would be in after seven. But before nine-thirty, please, as they weren't nightbirds. Teddy couldn't phone that evening. He was taking Francine out. It seemed a more formidable task than making a whole suite of furniture would be. Firstly, he wouldn't be able to wear his usual sort of clothes, jeans and sweat-shirt and zipper jacket. He ought to buy something, but he didn't know where or how. Women's clothes were easier. He had had no difficulty over Francine's dress. She might know how to go about it, but he wasn't going to lower himself to ask her, she had humiliated him enough already. Then there was the question of where to go. He had never in his life been to that sort of restaurant, let alone taken anyone there, taken a girl there. He wasn't in the habit of asking advice, but he wished he knew someone to ask. Nige? Christopher? Both were impossible. Driving the Edsel home, he remembered Harriet's address book, the real restaurants and the pretend restaurant. He could phone one of those. Or he could get her to phone, she would know what to say. 'Who's Franklin Merton?' she said when he came in and found her reading in the living-room. 'I don't know. Why?' 'People have been phoning for him.' 'Don't answer the phone,' he said. 'I told you. I said not to answer it. The machine will answer it' He had written down the names of the restaurants and their phone numbers on a sheet of drawing paper. She said she'd call them if that was what he wanted, of course she would, but he didn't like the look she gave him, as if she were sorry for him or understood him. That wasn't possible, but even if it were, he didn't want to be understood.

Chapter 34

He went upstairs and opened the door to the wardrobe she said was full of men's clothes. By the look of them it was an old man. Only old men wore tweed suits and check jackets and a thing he thought might be called a tuxedo. Until now he'd only seen them on television. This old man evidently wasn't fat, that at least was something. But could he bring himself to wear someone else's clothes? He shuddered at the thought. Oxfam was one thing, but everything from there could be washed. One suit only was a possibility. It was sheathed in a clear plastic cover. He took it out on its hanger, slipped off the cover and saw the dry-cleaner's label still attached to neck and waistband with small gold safety-pins. No one had worn it since it was cleaned, a plain dark cloth suit that might fit him. He went into the bathroom and ran a bath, putting in bath essence and aromatherapy oil. Washing himself and washing his hair, he felt he was scrubbing and swilling away all the accumulated dirt of his day, the words of that rude woman in Highgate, Francine's disobedience and contempt, his fear of the new world he was discovering. The towel he used to dry himself had been used before. There was a faint steak of something blue - bath oil, make-up? - on its hem. Tomorrow they must have a big wash A clean white shirt. He found one in a drawer. It had been beautifully washed and ironed, ~he couldn't have done better himself. But still he shrank away a little from its touch as he put it on and pulled on the trousers - they were an inch too short - and slipped his arms into the jacket sleeves. It might have been dry-cleaned but that wasn't like washing, not a total immersion, not a complete purification. He found himself cringing inside his borrowed clothes just as a man with a sensitive skin shivers at the touch of wool. Several times during the course of the afternoon Francine had tried to phone Julia. Then, when it was almost too late and everyone would be on the point of going home, she phoned her father's London office. They would know the name of the hotel where he was staying in Hamburg. But all she got was a voice saying its owner was away from her desk at present and offering all sorts of numbers, mobiles and faxes and an e-mail address. Francine left a message that she wanted the number of her father's hotel and would call again in the morning. A gale was blowing and it was raining hard. She would have liked to go out, if only for a walk round a district she barely knew, but outdoors looked uninviting. When she thought staff would be there, she booked a table in a restaurant in Primrose Hill. This was something she had never done before, but she had heard Julia do it and the woman she spoke to seemed to understand and made no difficulties. The man she met on the stairs as she was going up to change she barely recognised. Teddy looked handsome, suave, strange, a different person. He looked older too and, although she didn't admit this to herself until she was dressing, somehow rather frightening. Formal clothes brought out in him a cold austerity of expression she had never observed while he wore his jacket and jeans. His mouth seemed tighter, his eyes more hooded. He walked down the stairs in a feline way. He had always seemed graceful, but now there was something more studied and smooth, almost serpentine, in his movements. She would have liked to say something about the length of his borrowed trousers, not exactly laugh at him but perhaps make the comment that he would have to undo the waistband and slide them a little way down his hips. Something in his face, its awful cold gravity, told her to avoid this. But when he turned to look at her, to take in her appearance in the dress he had bought her, there was a lightening and a kind of relief in his expression. 'Beautiful,' he said. 'You are so beautiful.' 'It fits. You were clever.' 'Only because you're a perfect size eight.' She started telling him about Noele and her clients and how angry Noele had been. It seemed funny now, but it had been most unpleasant at the time. Noele had accused her of setting herself up as better-looking than the customers, which she hadn't meant to do and hadn't believed anyway. He wasn't listening. 'It's time we went,' he said. The restaurant wasn't the kind she had often been in, but sometimes she had been in places rather like it for lunch with Julia. Teddy was so plainly ill at ease that she took over most of the ordering and asking for things. He wouldn't drink - well, he couldn't really, not with having to drive the Edsel. She felt she drank rather too much, perhaps more than she ever had in her life before. She had to because, otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to get through the evening. It was painful, ugly, a lesson she understood, and understood uncomfortably, that she was learning too early in her life. He barely spoke. She talked to him about everything she knew, school, her father's marrying Julia, the house she had once lived in that was similar to Orcadia Cottage, the house she lived in now, or had done until the previous day, her friends, the job with Miranda's father that might have been. There was only one thing she didn't talk about. He reacted to the prospect of a job. She wouldn't need a job. He would keep her, he had money and would soon have more. 'I can't live off you, Teddy.' 'Why not? You lived off your~ dad.' 'That was different,' she said. 'That's always different. A child is kept by its parents until it earns for itself. Well, herself. I ought to keep myself until I go up to Oxford.' He fell into a mutinous silence. Their bill came. He didn't know what to do with it, made furious impotent faces at her across the table, finally passed notes to her under the cloth. She had to tell him it wasn't enough. It pained and embarrassed her, he looked so aghast, so distressed. She had never seen anyone so engulfed with shame. More notes were passed until she could pay the bill and manage an inadequate tip. They left without speaking to the waiter or each other, without saying goodbye or thank you. She had forgotten all her exasperation with him, all her dismay at his failure to listen to what she said, all his demands that she should obey him. Everything was swallowed up in a huge pity. It seemed to her that whatever had been done to him in his childhood and youth, what cruelties and deprivations, they had damaged him fearfully, perhaps irrecoverably. She wanted to show him that she too had lost a mother in a dreadful way, that she shared his traumas and his injuries. The silence was maintained all the way back. She went alone into Orcadia Cottage while he parked the car in the mews. When he came in she was sitting on the ivory satin sofa in her dark-green velvet, her hair loose about her shoulders, clasping her hands, loosening them and laying them in her lap. 'I want to tell you something.' He nodded. He sat in an armchair, staring at her. 'When I was seven a man came into our house and murdered my mother. I was upstairs, I'd been sent to my room, I'd been naughty, and I heard the doorbell ring and looked out and all I could see was his shoes and the top of his head. My mother came to the door and let him in.' He was listening. Almost for the first time he was listening with total concentration to something she said. His attention brought strength to her voice and her resolve. 'Our house was a bit like this one, a sort of big cottage with that same plant climbing the wall. Coming here keeps reminding me, but that doesn't matter. I want to tell you, I know how it is. I do know how it is to have something dreadful happen to you when you're young, and how you don't really get over it, how you live it every day. I lost the power of speech, I couldn't speak a word for six months.' He said hoarsely, 'What happened?' 'You really want to know?' 'What happened?' 'I heard the shot. He shot her. More than once, I think. Twice or three times. The man was looking for drugs or money from the sale of drugs, the police thought he mistook my father's house for a doctor's with the same name. She must have got in his way, have tried to stop him.' 'Why didn't he kill you?' 'You think he would have wanted to? Perhaps. I don't know. I hid in a cupboard in my bedroom and he came in. He went into all the bedrooms, looking for drugs, I suppose. When he'd gone I went downstairs and found my mother.' He said again, his voice breathless now, 'What happened?' 'There was - blood. A lot of blood. My father came home and found me sitting there covered in my mother's blood. The man had shot her in the chest, one shot had gone into her heart. I couldn't tell them about the man, not for months, I couldn't speak.' His concentrated gaze alarmed her. She flinched a little. 'Teddy?' 'Someone murdered your mother? Why didn't you tell me?' 'I have told you. Don't look at me like that.' Something dreadful then. Unbelievable. He got up and came to her, moving as if going in for the attack. His face had gone blank, an empty mask. He was pulling off his clothes as he came, undoing his flies, dropping the too-short trousers, tripping on them, no longer graceful. He made a grab for her, holding her down hard against the shiny slippery sofa. His breathing was as if he had an engine inside him, revving up, spurting. She felt an iron-hard pressure against her stomach and it was something she had never felt before, a rod between her soft flesh and his bones. His hands had become a workman's tools, sharp, hard, certain. He pulled the dress over her head, but not quite over, leaving enough to wind round her face and mask it. The dress became a blinding hood. The hard rod was out now, no longer separated from her by barriers of clothes. She felt it questing her thighs, seeking entrance, as his hands pressed folds of dark-green velvet into her mouth, her eyes. She kicked him and fought him with her hands. Her shoes might have been a weapon but they flew off. She heard one of them strike against something and break it. The tinkling of china shattering was overpowered by a more brazen sound, the phone ringing. It was enough momentarily to stay him. Briefly she felt the loosening of his hands. She leapt and pushed him, kicked him as she went, fled across the room, stumbled and fell in the doorway. The phone stopped abruptly, half-way through a ring. She struggled to her feet, certain he would seize her now, that this would be the end for her. He sat on the floor, half naked, his head in his hands. She saw his shoulders shake. He was crying. For a moment she simply didn't know what to do. The shock of what he had attempted was making her heart drum heavily. Her mouth had dried, her hands were shaking. A voice, her own voice, inside her head kept saying over and over, 'How could he? How could I? Why did I? Why did I?' To touch him now, comfort him with her hand on his shoulder, perhaps stroke his hair, take his hand, all this was impossible. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she dragged herself out of the room and upstairs, hanging on to the bannisters. There was another bedroom with another bed in it, an ordinary, rather pretty brass bedstead. A key was in the lock. She went inside and locked herself in. The irony of it struck her after a few minutes, that here was she, who had been forcibly imprisoned in a bedroom, now voluntarily locking herself in another, to protect herself from the man who had rescued her. In the morning she came into the big white bedroom to find her clothes. He watched her in silence. For the first time for a long while he wasn't up at first light. He lay there in misery because he had nowhere to go and nothing to do. The rain had come back. It was pouring. She still had the velvet dress on. In the grey water-washed light he watched her taking jeans, a shirt, a sweater out of the suitcase she had brought with her. She wouldn't put on her clothes in front of him. I-Ic watched her go into the bathroom, carrying her clothes, he heard her bolt the door, then the shower running. When she came back she was dressed the way he hated, but he scarcely noticed that now. She went to the dressing-table and began braiding her hair, winding the plait on to the back of her head. On her right hand she still wore his ring. He said, 'I thought you'd gone away. It was the nearest he could get to an apology. She made no reply. She opened the wardrobe and he supposed she was looking for her coat. 'Don't go,' he said. The words were wrenched out of him. It was like the squeezing of a nearly empty tube. His voice was dry and hoarse. She turned round and came to sit on the end of the bed. 'You're going.' She shook her head. 'I don't know what to say. I was frightened last night. You tried to rape me. That shocked him. 'Me? How could I rape you? You're mine, we're together.' 'Rape', she said, 'isn't only when the girl's someone you give a lift to or meet in a street at night.' 'Anyway,' he said, 'I didn't mean it. Not that.' 'Why did you, Teddy? Why did you want to?' He shrugged, swung his legs over to the other side and got out of bed. 'Don't go,' he said again, biting on the words as if they hurt him. She was in the kitchen when he got downstairs, drinking coffee, making toast. It was raining so hard that the room was dark and the windows misted over. She shocked him by talking of something quite different, almost social small-talk. Her voice was neutral, polite, distant. 'I keep trying to phone Julia, but I'm not getting an answer.' And you won't. But he didn't say so. 'I'll get hold of my dad today. I shouldn't be here and no one knows where I am. I'll feel better if I can speak to my dad in Hamburg.' 'It's too wet to go out,' he said. 'You'll have to stay here today.' 'Teddy,' she said, her tone very serious, 'if I go out I promise I will come back. I know you're worrying I won't come back, but I will. I wouldn't just leave you. After that he had to pretend he didn't care. And of course she'd come back - where else did she have to go to? He drank some coffee, went into the living-room and picked up the pieces of the blue-and-white china figurine her flying shoe had broken the previous evening. On a fragment were printed a crown and the words Royal Copenhagen. It had been beautiful, that child in pastel porcelain, and he hated to see it broken by careless indifference. Could he get it mended? And how much would that cost? Wanton destruction of something so lovely made him feel sick with dislike of humanity. Moodily, he cleared a space in the mist on the window and looked out into the yard. Everywhere was wet, the flagstones darkened by rain and water lying in puddles. The protective plastic over his wire netting and cement structure flapped in the wind. So much had happened, so many disturbing things, that he had forgotten all about the manhole, that it had been open, covered only by that thin membrane, for hours. It had been raining all night and water must have got into the