Enchantment (20 page)

When the others went back to base camp to start the next battle, Tim sneaked off sideways through the trees, crossed a stream and found his way along the side of the wood and through a wire fence to where he had left Buttercup.

At home, he parked the car and got out, hoping Brian or Jack would see him wearing the cammo, disappointed to see through the garage side window that their car was not there. He went slowly up the stairs to give the neighbours a chance, if they were in their garden behind Jack's vegetable plot.

He felt absolutely marvellous. Normal. Real. Rooted on the earth. Light years away from the compulsive fantasies of the police witness and the haunting lorry driver.

When Helen arrived, he was sitting watching the door, with the CO
₂
pistol across his lap. She rang the bell. He put the gun under a cushion on the couch bed and opened the door. Helen gasped, and said, ‘Oh! You look –'

‘War games,' he said crisply.

‘Are you hurt?'

‘Paint.'

‘Was it fun?'

‘Terrific.'

She wore a rather dowdy sand-coloured dress, full and long – she had lived with those legs long enough to know what to do about them – and the childish sandals she had worn in the boat.

The oven was heating. The wine was opened. Tim had planned to say, ‘Welcome to my place,' but Blch would not let him. Suddenly, the bold warrior rushed in and took charge, and he pushed Helen on to the bed and undid the front of her dress.

‘Tim, you're so – wait, you're hurting me.'

Strong in his cammo armour, spattered with blood-paint, Blch had her skirt up and her pants down, even while she said, ‘Let me –' and he claimed his rights, as all returning heroes should, and she did not struggle, which was just as well, but let him ravish her.

Afterwards, she stroked the cammo overalls and said comfortably, ‘That was what you needed, then.'

‘You don't mind?'

‘Everybody needs something. With my husband, I used to have to imagine he was Robert Redford.'

‘Do you mind this?' Tim pulled the pistol from under the cushion.

‘I would have, if I'd known.'

They put the gun under the pillow when they went back to bed after they had heated and eaten the food. They had drunk the whole bottle of wine, and Tim had told Helen she was his oppo.

‘Do you want to keep this on?' Helen fingered the cammo.

‘I'd better. Do you think I'm daft?'

‘I had a boy friend once,' Helen said, ‘who went to bed in a great thick belt he'd bought off a market stall, with the buckle made of motorcycle parts.'

‘Rather painful.'

‘He turned it the other way round.'

She was quite experienced. It was amazing.

This you are not going to believe, Jack would say to Brian. Our life has really been enriched since the day we let the young 'un in upstairs.

Brian had gone off early to see his occasional lover, and Jack was having a late leisurely breakfast outdoors, on the paving at the back. Because Brian was not here, with his stern scruples and cautions, Cindy was sitting outside in a sun dress and dark glasses, large straw hat tied over the blonde hair with a scarf that ran round the crown and through holes in the brim.

Tim's door opened, she would tell Brian, and out came our
likely lad, and behind him – yes, I knew this was a lucky Sunday – a real … live … woman.

Go on, Brian would say.

No, honest. They looked as if they'd just got out of bed.

Tousled?

No, in good nick. They were both at the top of the stairs. Tim looked round a bit furtively, and his eye lighted on the top of my Ibiza hat. So after she'd gone …

No. Better leave the rest of it out.

Tim's eye alighted on the top of a wide straw hat with Brian's girl friend underneath it, at ease on a garden chair, with a mug of coffee and a toasted bun on the little table.

Helen would not let him drive her home. She would take the bus to the cathedral and go to the service at ten thirty.

‘Come with me?'

‘I don't think so.' Being unofficial tour guide and stigmata expert was one thing. Tim could not sit through a service. ‘I'll drive you there.'

‘Not if you're not coming in.'

He walked her down the road and waited with her for the bus. They did not say much. You didn't need to with Helen, which was a relief when you had nothing to say.

When he came back, the woman in the sun hat was still in the garden. Feeling bold, Tim walked under the stairs and went round behind the house, and said, ‘Lo.'

‘Hello.' The woman tilted the hat and smiled up at him with large lips that had lipstick on the outer edge, with a line where it met the uncoloured part inside. The smile was wide and cheery.

‘Here – hold on.' Tim took a step backwards. The woman was Jack.

‘Sit down, Tim. I'll get you some coffee.'

Speechless, Tim shook his head.

‘Come on, sit down while I get it. It won't take a moment.'

Once you knew it was Jack, you knew it was Jack, as it were. The first ‘Hello' from under the hat had sounded merely like a woman with a deep voice. Once you knew, the voice was a dead give-away. But if you didn't know, if you were not familiar with Jack's smiling face, you could be taken in.

So if Brian … then they were … hang on a minute, what about Jack's girl friend Janet Fox in Webster's Accounts Department?

Having given Tim a short break to recover, Jack came back with a mug of coffee. He walked like a man, his muscular legs in white tights.

‘Thanks for not minding,' Jack said, disregarding the obvious fact that Tim did mind. ‘I put in two sugars, that's right, isn't it? Come on, Tim, take a good look at me, it's all right. You came out here just now believing I was a woman, didn't you? That's really great. And the few times you've seen me before, through the window, I passed, didn't I?'

‘Yeah.' Tim looked into his coffee, out over the small lawn to the vegetable garden, down at his hands, which had gone white at the fingertips. ‘I thought you were Brian's girl friend.'

‘Hardly.' Jack laughed.

‘I know. I mean, when I realized that he – well, it didn't, sort of, match up.'

‘It wouldn't.' Jack crossed a leg high on his knee and rearranged his skirt. The biceps of his smooth brown arms – shaved? – looked a bit weird coming out of the sleeveless dress. Above the light scarf which covered his Adam's apple, his throat was as sinewy as you would expect. ‘No, Brian and I are friends. I share this house with him because he doesn't mind me cross-dressing. He understands.'

‘Understands what?' Tim's mind was seething with questions, none of which he was able to ask.

‘About me. Not many people do, Tim. That's why I'm grateful to you for not being shocked.'

I am shocked.

‘How do you like the dress? Marks and Sparks. Very useful, they are, because the sizes don't vary.'

Jack chatted on, quite casually and naturally, but Tim did not want to hear any more. He finished his coffee and put the mug down in a gesture of departing.

‘Just one thing.' Under the golden wig which had been all right when Tim thought it was a woman's hair, but now was grotesque, Jack looked a bit nervous. ‘This is between you and me. Nothing said at Webster's.'

‘What about' – Tim had to voice the bewilderment – ‘what about Janet Fox?'

‘She doesn't know, although we're close friends. She's talked about us being married. Bit awkward really.' Jack stretched his half-painted mouth in the shape of a grin, without life to it. ‘She'd have to get used to me wearing a nightie in bed.'

A nightie. That did it. Tim had been holding down all the objections of his Wallace Kendall heritage, but they came charging up and delivered the word: disgusting.

He got up, mumbled an excuse and escaped to his eyrie.

Disgusting.

Hang on a minute. What about him in bed with the pistol and the cammo?

‘You've got some of our stuff.' Derek rang Tim that evening.

‘I'm sending it back. First post tomorrow.'

‘Why did we lose you?'

‘I had to go. I didn't feel well.'

‘Come off it. I heard you ran like hell for the flag.'

‘Oh – well, I – yes. Thanks.' Tim managed a short laugh. ‘Feverish. Thought I was coming down with something.'

‘You sound all right now.'

‘Oh. Yes. I'm all right today.'

Well, not as all right as I was before I had that talk with Jack. He's kinky. I'm kinky. The whole world is kinky. ‘Five per cent of men in business suits have got women's underwear on underneath,' Jack had said.

Come
on
. Do me a favour.

At work next morning, Tim got some brown paper and tape. He parcelled up the gun wrapped in the cammo overalls with some sadness and a sense of loss, as he saw them go off the post office scales and into the bin behind the counter.

The relatively normal course of Tim's affairs, which had climaxed with the capture of the flag single-handed and the ravishment of Helen, was only short-lived. Whether the shocking revelation about Jack set it off, or whether it was his biological clock, it was not long before Tim was into one of his far-out phases.

His two weeks' holiday was coming up in September, and he had no idea what he was going to do with it. The Boathouse was closing. He could never do another Enterprise weekend, because of Norman. He could not go back to Warfare, because Derek had sounded stuffy about the overalls and pistol.

If he was a millionaire, he would go to Australia to see Zara, whose last postcard had sounded a bit low, and ended, ‘Wish you were here with me.'

His parents had been to the Isle of Wight. The damp had got into his father's chest and they came home two days early. His mother pretended that they had come home because the stairs at the Shanklin Hotel were too much for her. Val and Colin went to the Canaries. Brian climbed a mountain in Scotland with Jack (in camiknickers?). Helen went to stay with her cousin in Hull while Julian was at the camp, also in the Isle of Wight, where he might have come face to face with Wallace Kendall, and spat on his shoe.

Pocket Pickups
, chapter 13. ‘FOLLOW UP: You're on your way. Follow it up with a bang (excuse pun). Don't give her time to wonder whether to you it was just a one night stand.'

Helen rang up when she got back from Hull. She would have Julian with her now until the end of August. She told Tim that twice, as if to make sure that he got the message, ‘Sex is out', not
knowing that it was probably good news rather than bad, now that the cammo had gone back to Warfare.

‘How is Julian?' Tim wanted to see him. He wanted to feel the strong skinny arms clutching at his neck as the child fought urgently to climb up him, wanted to see the side of the gold-dusted cheek above which the blue eye stared mysteriously beyond him.

‘He's fine, I think. I've not heard of any trouble.'