Poison Flowers (6 page)

‘This is different,' said Willow. ‘This is the kind of request for help that any old friend might make. Besides,' she added honestly, ‘I've missed you. It would be pleasant to have a meal together. What about it?'

‘Have you?' said Richard and there was an echo of his old pleading in the words. ‘Then let's meet. There's been a big hole in my life, Willow, and I'm prepared to forego dignity to fill it. Tomorrow's your first Cressida day of the week: what about dinner at Belgrave's as in the old days?'

‘Why not?' she said, wondering whether the things she had said could have constituted ‘leading him on'and whether to be fair she ought to tell him that much as she wanted to see him she still did not want to go to bed with him. But that would have been presumptuous, and she did not believe it decent to do or say the things that in other people made her spit with rage, and so she said no more.

Her dinner arrived soon after she and Richard had said ‘good night'to each other, and, having paid for it and tipped the young waitress who had brought it to the flat, Willow settled down at her sturdy oak table to a meal that was almost as good as the one she expected to share with Richard the following night.

On Thursday evening, after a tedious and frustrating day at DOAP, she arrived late and harrassed at the hairdresser she had patronised ever since her first book had been published. Struggling to find her way into the pink cotton overall that the receptionist was holding out to her, Willow saw the owner of the salon coming towards her with a most reproachful expression on his sharp-featured, swarthy face.

‘I know, I know,' said Willow more sharply than she usually spoke in the scented pink-and-green-and-silver bower over which he presided. ‘I'm very late, Gino. I'm sorry. I couldn't get away before. Do your best, will you?'

‘But of course, Miss Woodruffe,' he said, shrugging and pouting as he fingered a strand of her dirty red hair. ‘Don't I always?'

Willow smiled for the first time in hours.

‘Yes, Gino, and I'm grateful. It feels horrible. Is there someone free to wash it?'

The Italian gestured to one of his apprentices who led Willow away like a prize heifer garlanded with pink towels to the basin, where he proceeded to batter her stiff neck against the white porcelain edge of the basin and pull her hair as he tried to untangle it with his fingers and a powerful jet of over-hot water. Her eyes were watering slightly as she was eventually released from the minor torture and she looked curiously at the apprentice.

‘You must be new,' she said.

He nodded. Willow left him to go and sit in Gino's chair awaiting his ministrations. His experienced touch on her head and neck was far more gentle than his young assistant's and by the time he had finished cutting, drying and tweaking Willow's hair, she felt soothed. Looking round the gleaming room, she saw that there was only one other customer left and that all the hair clippings had been laboriously swept from around her feet.

‘Thank you, Gino,' she said. ‘I'm sorry I've held you up.'

‘No problem, Miss Woodruffe,' he said. ‘For me, that is. But the manicurist has had to go home. Shall I make another appointment for you tomorrow?'

Willow shook her newly sleek head.

‘No. My nails can stay unpainted until next Thursday. It won't kill me. Thanks, Gino.'

He escorted her to the front door himself and carefully helped her out of the floating pink garment and into her own jacket. She reflected with amusement on the effect of cossetting and its price. An hour of Gino's time had wrought the transformation between Willow's almost constant exasperation and impatience and Cressida's easier-going attitude to her luxurious life; and all for the cost of an admittedly expensive
coiffure.

Freed for the moment of Willow's puritanical burdens, she walked slowly home through the warm April evening, noticing the burgeoning leaves on the plane trees of Sloane Square and looking forward to the summer.

Her Chesham Place flat seemed to welcome her as she arrived and even as she noticed the sentimentality of her pleasure she revelled in it. Part of the ritual of her weekly transformation was to have a bath as soon as she reached the flat and so she went quickly to the yellow-and-white bathroom. It was extravagantly large, having been converted from what would otherwise have been the spare bedroom, and luxuriously appointed.

The water gushed out of the brass taps and Willow poured in an unnecessarily large quantity of Chanel No. 19 bath oil, breathing voluptuously as the fragrant steam reached her nostrils. Mrs Rusham had laid four clean, thick white towels on the heated rack in front of the old chimney breast and put out new bars of soap in the niche beside the taps and on the basin. A simple bowl of early yellow roses stood on the windowsill, and there were new novels lying on the table by the side of the bath.

Sighing in relief and delight, Willow stripped off her clothes and, wrapped in a pale-yellow towelling dressing gown two sizes too big for her, went to fetch a glass of sherry. Returning to the bathroom, she put the glass down on the table with the books, shed her dressing gown and sank into the bath. Lying there, sipping her sherry and feeling the water gradually heating up her long, thin body, she looked around the pretty room and wondered whether it would be too absurdly extravagant to have the old chimney opened up again so that she could have a proper fire in the bathroom. She was never cold in it because there was a huge radiator as well as the heated towel rail, but there was something about actual flames in a good grate under a well carved white marble chimneypiece that added the final touch to any room.

Half an hour later, so relaxed that she had forgotten her sherry and had not even picked up either of the books, she heard the front door bell buzz. Reaching out with her left hand, she found the button of the intercom and pushed it.

‘Willow? It's Richard.'

‘Heavens I'm late,' she said. ‘Sorry, Richard, come on up.' Having pressed the button that would release the electronic lock of the front door, Willow heaved herself out of the bath, wrapped herself up in the yellow dressing gown again and went out into the hall. She noticed that she was leaving foamy damp marks on the bathroom carpet and the hall parquet, but knew that Mrs Rusham would do whatever had to be done to get the marks out in due course and refused to worry about them.

‘Richard,' she said opening the door to his knock. ‘So sorry to be like this. I was held up at DOAP. Come in.' He leaned down towards her and she, thinking it unnecessarily churlish to spurn his gesture, reached upwards so that their cheeks touched.

He was a good six inches taller than she, but something about him, some inner disengagement perhaps, made his size far less obtrusive than Tom Worth's. Richard gave no impression of physical power, despite his reputed prowess on the squash court and cricket pitch. As always he was well dressed in an impeccably cut, conventional dark-grey worsted suit, a shirt of widely spaced claret stripes on white, an Hermes silk tie and a pair of heavy gold cufflinks.

His eyes were an indeterminate, very English mixture of green and grey and blue, and his thick hair was the dull brown of a sparrow's breast. His long face was clean shaven and usually held an expression of vague amiability that disguised his formidable intelligence. Willow had known him look tender, ecstatic, occasionally sulky and sometimes wildly amused, but it was when he was half smiling that he looked most familiar to her. All in all, he looked what he was: a kind, clever, successful, not particularly forceful or imaginative child of a conventional southern English family with a profitable job in the City.

‘You look glorious,' he said. ‘I've never seen you in that colour before. It suits you – yellow.'

‘Haven't you?' she said, looking down at the dressing gown in some surprise. ‘Yes, my dressing gowns always used to be white. I suppose Mrs Rusham must have bought this one to match the bathroom wallpaper. Never mind. Will you help yourself to a drink while I go and dress?'

Richard obediently walked in the opposite direction from her bedroom. Willow was relieved by his docility and annoyed with herself for the unfair provocation of opening the door to him clad only in a dressing gown. She went quickly to put on a very unrevealing, though quite flattering, dark-blue silk dress. A little makeup on her face anchored the pinkness produced by the hot bathwater and plenty of mascara gave her eyes their Cressida-like allure instead of Willow's discomforting pallor. The finishing touch was provided by an antique diamond brooch that she pinned at the apex of her modest neckline.

‘My God but you're glamorous,' said Richard when she went into the drawing room. ‘Sorry. I'd just forgotten the extent of it. New brooch? Have I been supplanted?'

Her glossy lips tightening a little at his assumptions, Willow poured herself another small glass of sherry.

‘Yes, it is a new brooch. I bought it in the Burlington Arcade as a present to myself when I finished
Simon's Simples
and the American publisher doubled the last advance,' she said, ignoring his last question.

‘Have I been supplanted?' Richard repeated obviously, determined not to let her get away with it.

‘No, Richard,' she said, looking frankly at him. ‘There is another man whom I see sometimes, but he and I do not have the same relationship that you and I had. No one else has that. Must we do this? Can't we be civilised? You like overt emotion as little as I, even when it's your own,' she added.

Too intelligent to dismiss that reminder as malicious, Richard shrugged, but when he next spoke, his voice and his yearning eyes were under control again.

‘I've booked the table for nine o'clock. Is that all right for you, or would you rather have a bit more time?'

‘No, thank you, Richard. That's fine,' she said. ‘Shall we go?'

They were greeted in the dark cosy restaurant with slightly nauseating cries of welcome, recognition and relief and shown to the ‘table you always used to have'. When the elaborate menus were presented, Willow made up her mind to choose something she had never eaten before in order to stop the nostalgia before it choked her, and before it reinforced Richard's obvious determination to retrieve their old relationship. Eventually she chose sorrel soup and grilled lobster.

When Richard had ordered their food and chosen the wine, without any reference to Willow, he turned back to face her.

‘If I'm not to talk about the past or ask you questions about the present, what about your asking me about Titchmell?' he said.

‘Thank you, Richard,' said Willow, once more accepting the sense of his words rather than his tone. ‘I suppose I want to know everything about him. Why don't you just talk and if I have a specific question, I'll interrupt you.'

‘As you perfectly well know, I hate being interrupted,' he said, with the first gleam of real humour he had shown that evening. ‘But I'll do my best to put up with it.' He picked up a handful of the almost unbelievably delicious, warm, salted nuts that had been put between them in a small glass dish.

‘The family is middlingly well-off and based in Sussex, Waltrincham, I think. Papa was in the wine trade – but at the rather smart end of it. Simon qualified as an architect some time ago and started out, I think, to work in one of the big practices doing mainly local government work. He went solo about five years ago, since when he'd forsaken tower blocks for slightly precious restorations of derelict country houses. The property disaster and mortgage-interest rises cast a bit of a damper on his practice, but most of his clients were rich enough not to mind too much.'

‘Quite successful, then?' suggested Willow.

‘Oh yes. Caroline always talks – or rather talked – of him as her “rich big brother”.'

‘And what is she?' asked Willow, picking three nuts for herself.

‘Patent agent. Probably going to be a lot richer than most architects in the end, but it takes a bit of time,' said Richard, smiling. Something in his smile made Willow wonder whether Caroline could have supplanted her in Richard's life, but she could hardly ask directly.

‘How do you know them?' she asked instead.

‘Oh, I met her around. As one does. I can't actually remember where. It was several years ago. I like her.' He grinned suddenly. ‘I think you would, too. She's very down-to-earth, and doesn't let anyone get away with anything. A bit like you, now I come to think of it.' Richard looked across the crisp white damask cloth to where Willow was picking some more nuts from the dish.

‘You haven't painted your nails,' he said suddenly.

‘No. I just couldn't get away from the office in time to get them done and I'm incapable of doing it myself,' said Willow, looking up at him. ‘The sister sounds interesting,' she added, suddenly seeing a way to useful information. ‘I'd love to meet her. Why don't you have a dinner party, Richard? You must owe lots of people: you're always dining out.'

‘Dinner party? I don't give dinner parties,' he protested. ‘Come on, Willow, I have neither the time nor the talents for that sort of thing. And I don't owe anyone. I always pay my debts.'

His emphasis on the pronoun made Willow smile before it occurred to her that he might mean that she still owed him a debt.

The
sommelier
appeared and went through his ritual of presenting the corked bottle to Richard for his inspection of the label, opening it, cleaning some invisible residue from the neck and pouring an inch into Richard's glass. Richard, grasping the glass by its foot, held it up to the light for a moment, swirled the wine round, sniffed and eventually took a sip. After a moment's judicious thought, as he moved the wine around his mouth like mouthwash, he nodded at the wine waiter, who sighed as though in relief and poured a glassful for Willow.

Sometimes the mutually-massaging performance amused her; sometimes she thought it entirely idiotic. If there had been something wrong with the wine, the smell alone would have given it away to all three of them as soon as any had been poured and she very much doubted whether Richard knew the taste of the wine he had chosen well enough to detect any fraud. Even if he had, she could not believe that he would be able to conquer his disinclination to complain.