The Broken Chariot (27 page)

‘What an awful thing to do.'

‘It makes a marvellous novel though. And he pays for it in the end. You'd like it.'

‘He should have stayed on the ship and looked after them, or gone down with it.'

Maybe he shouldn't have been on the ship at all, just as Phaeton ought not to have driven his father's sun chariot across the sky. Look what trouble that caused. Most come to grief when they overreach themselves, though if you don't overreach yourself you'll never know what you can do. And if you come a cropper it doesn't much matter as long as you're still alive. And if you aren't still alive your worries are over.

‘Then there would have been no moral in the story.' He reached for her hand: ‘Conrad does rather put old Hawksworth in the shade, though. I think you ought to tackle a bit of grown-up stuff now and again. Maybe you should start with Evelyn Waugh. He's very good.'

She smiled. ‘I do find you difficult to understand.'

Nor do I always understand you, and I don't care to, but what does it matter anyway? You only need to understand about someone when you're writing about them, and if it's someone you've never met that's even better, because then you can make it up, which comes out just as good if not more truthfully than if you had really bumped into them. ‘It takes a long time to understand a person.'

‘You don't tell me anything about yourself.'

Her twinge of complaint was difficult to forgive, since not only did he know so little of himself but her pathetic attempt to find out more than he even knew made it seem as if she was starting to nag.

‘Let's go for a walk, my love.' He manoeuvred her through a crowd at the door waiting for a table. ‘I've told you my life-story already.'

‘Yes, but it was a very skimpy one.'

Let her settle for that, and wonder about the inconsistencies, in her old-maidish droning. He held her by the waist as they walked towards Slab Square, her arm over his shoulder being a slight advance up the ladder of affection. The human warmth was good for him. He needed to have a body close to his own, and none could serve better than hers. However he thought of her, he wanted to hear that she liked his writing, but the sparse comments so far could perhaps be put down to the bottle of wine which had tasted like sock-juice, for which he couldn't altogether blame her. The next hope was for her body, but all he'd had up to now were a few kisses verging on the passionate from him and the hard given from her while saying good night at the gate of where she lived in Mapperley Park. ‘Very skimpy,' she repeated.

‘I'll write a novel about it one day, so's you can have a good read. I can't explain things to you in speech.' He let Herbert take over again. ‘I find it extraordinarily difficult to say what's on my mind, probably because I'm so fond of you. The ardent desire I feel for you puts me off. On the other hand, you haven't told me much about
your
life.'

‘I did, but you weren't very interested.'

‘I didn't want to be nosy.'

‘Are you only saying that because you don't want me to go on about you, and
your
past? I know you aren't who you say you are, but I don't care. I like it that way, in fact. I knew who my other boyfriends were, only too well, and they bored me to tears. I don't care where you came from.'

‘Well, I respect that opinion.' And he did. ‘But I still don't know much about you,' which he realized was more of a lie than not.

‘I think you do. Anyway, not much happened in my life. I went to Mundella Girls till I was sixteen. Then I went to work. My father could have kept me at home, but he told me to get a job, so that I'd know what it was like to earn a living. Not that I minded. What would I have done, staying at home?'

He wondered how many men she'd really had. She was at least thirty, but he thought there couldn't have been many. When he asked she said it was no business of his, and he had to agree that it wasn't, because she didn't want to know how many women he'd been with. In more ways than one she seemed older than himself.

They walked up gloomy Mansfield Road, all shops shut, and few people about, though with fists clenched he marked each shadow until it had gone by. They turned off by the cemetery. ‘I'm on my own in the house for a couple of weeks,' she said into his ear. ‘Mum and Dad have gone on holiday to France in the car.'

His heart went bump in the night. ‘Really? Where to?'

‘They're staying a night in Paris, then going down to Nice.'

‘That's really good news. Thanks for telling me.'

She looked at him as if he were a fool – as he'd supposed she would. ‘Why not? I only hope their travel allowance lasts out, and they don't come back too early.'

‘Your father must have stuffed his back pocket with five-pound notes, you can bet.'

She pulled her arm away. ‘He'd never do anything like that.'

Oh, wouldn't he? She had no right to be so naive at her age. He really was a fool. She only meant you never
said
that kind of thing.

The large house had its own space, lilac bushes and trees heavy from rain, a damp soil smell reminding him of muddy and murderous rugby matches on the playing fields at school. ‘I'd like to see inside. I don't think I've ever been in a big house like that.'

She squeezed his arm, at being able to grant his wish. The kitchen covered the same acreage as Mrs Denman's ground floor, but the decoration reminded him of his clergyman uncle's place near Malvern, all pine wood and marble top. ‘What sort of work does your father do?'

‘Work? He goes to business. He has property. Shops in town. Things like that.'

He watched her make a pot of tea, so prissy and precise with the doses of leaf it was bound to be as weak as gnat's piss, but at least she did it with her coat off, a white blouse over slender bosom from neck to wrists, all done up, with beads as well, which made her look, as Archie would have said, like lamb and lettuce. ‘What's upstairs?'

Her smile of amusement was real, though time would tell whether it was because she had already arranged everything. ‘Just bedrooms. Why?'

‘Can I see?'

‘If you promise to behave' – a positive laugh this time.

‘Of course I promise.'

On the landing at the top he said: ‘I suppose you have a woman in to clean all these carpets?'

‘Oh, I vacuum them sometimes, on Saturday afternoon.'

He put both hands forward over her breasts, finding some shape after all. Encouraged by a trembling hand at her shoulder he kissed the ringlets from her neck and licked the warm skin, a hard-on pressing into her skirt. ‘I'd love to be intimate with you,' he whispered, on an all or nothing course.

He expected to be pushed away, but she turned, and he tasted the cachou breath around her mouth. ‘Can you cope?'

If he answered yes she would take him off for a rake who had a dozen women on the go. But if he said no she might write him off as inexperienced, such virtue not doing him any good at all. Remembering the triple-packet of frenchies in his left waistcoat pocket he had to say that he could.

He knew he would have to take special care with her delicate body, in any case, otherwise she might break up under his bit of rough stuff. Another thing was that a pregnancy would be fatal, the baby so big it would end up having her. He felt as if he had never before been in such a situation, that his time with Eileen was puppy love from another age, almost from another country, which with fiery Alice in Cyprus it had been, though their love had been full-blown, and he hoped Cecilia would come up to it; but going into the furnace of a new affair cut off the others as if such phases of his past life were like the carriages of a train, each abandoned to rot in a siding when done with.

He stood by an armchair as she took off her clothes, needing minutes to come down from three-o-one with so many pearl buttons to her blouse. Her brown eyes glowed, and a faintly modest smile made her look like the whore of Babylon, apt for the moment, but something she could never otherwise be as she unclipped her pretty white brassiere and gave her tits a stroke before attending to her stockings and skirt. Had she put on her best underwear knowing how the evening would end, or did a woman like that always wear such clean and flimsy stuff?

The light was clinical, which must be what she wants, he thought, the full-length mirrors of the white wood wardrobe doors seeming to multiply the dazzle. She neither wanted to hide the slight wrinkling of her mouth nor diminish the intensity of his scar. Her figure was thin but not inelegant, and he lustfully noted her charming breasts with their delicate carmine nipples. Seeing her whole nakedness appear, though she was no Aphrodite parting the waves and coming into land, he noted how shapely her legs were now that he could see them all the way up, and robust as well, as if made for a fuller figure than she had, and which some day she might grow into. Dark ringlets turned her into a houri, out of an illustration in some fairy-tale book he had once seen.

‘I always knew you were beautiful.' He smoothed a palm down the neat bush of pubic hair. ‘But you're far more so with no clothes on.'

She blushed almost to her shoulders. ‘Thank you. I like looking at myself in the mirror, as I'm doing now.'

‘Do you do it often?'

‘Why not?' She drew back the covers of the bed, and their first tentative slow-motion movements hardened him more. He had taken the precaution of being already sheathed and, by midnight, three well-blobbed specimens lay discarded around the bed.

‘Weren't you good?' She seemed an entirely different person to him now. ‘Don't you think it was worth waiting for?' Her smile was brief, faintly teasing, which he liked because it drew them even closer together. ‘I think it was, certainly,' she went on, wanting him to agree, while he could only wonder that she saw an altered man in him as well. ‘You'd better flush those things away, though, and be careful not to spill anything.'

She was nothing if not practical, influenced no doubt by reality, which he couldn't care less about at such a time. He bombed them into the toilet bowl, each making a satisfying splash, as if retaining their individuality to the end, then pulled the chain, but even after a ton of water one of them surfaced like a poor benighted jellyfish that didn't want to go into that bourne from which no traveller returned. He waited for the cistern to build up, and tried again, but the same forlorn homunculus spluttered up and eased its bulbous tail out for another circuit. The head of number two peaked from under the porcelain lip to see how his brother – or sister maybe – got on. Two more attempts, but number three still wanted to survive. Herbert didn't fancy plunging a hand in to drag the recalcitrant bleeders out and throw them from the window for fear Cecilia's parents would think a funny bush had grown in their garden during their time away.

She knocked on the door. ‘Are you all right, darling?'

‘Yeh, fine, coming.' Another massive flush sent the final unwilling spunk bag to its doom – or he hoped so. Maybe it would surface in the morning for a final pathetic look at the sunlight coming through the mock stained-glass window, and only then do the decent thing and drown itself. At least he wouldn't be there to hear her comments if the bloody thing didn't succeed.

On the way home he told himself he was in love, said it over and over on the long depressing stretch through town, not even complaining at the thought of having to be in his overalls by seven. Words, however, were not rivets to fasten his emotions into place. He loved her compliance, and the pleasure of going round the world on her body again and again on her parents' great bed. If he saw no more of her he would surely miss such delectable copulation. It was not, on the other hand, the profound and life-long love he ought to have felt, for it didn't have that rootish tug of the heart, the all-enveloping sinking into the depths as between him and Eileen in the old days, which memory surfaced after his flesh to flesh fucking with Cecilia as if it had been only yesterday – though when seemingly flying home he felt no reason for complaint.

On Sunday morning he saw Archie and his pansy brother Raymond out by the shallows of the Trent near Clifton, both in their waders and hoping for a bite from fish that had just about had time to congratulate themselves at escaping the peril of the weir. Raymond went off to moon by himself, and Archie complained to Bert that the pair of them hadn't been out for a booze-up lately.

‘It's all right for you,' Bert told him. ‘You can see your women in the week because they're married, but me, I'm courtin', and I can only meet my tart on Fridays and Saturdays.' After a genuine no-nonsense berserker laugh, he added that his backbone was turning slowly, almost without him knowing – though he would most fully by the end – into a string of shiny Wollaton Park conkers.

Archie sat on the bank to watch his float. ‘Who is she, then?'

About to blurt out the truth, honour forced Herbert into an account of how he met a young woman called Joanna on his way back from guzzling a jar or two in the Admiral Rodney at Wollaton. He described how he sat next to her on the top deck of the bus, rain peppering at the windows all the lumbering way uphill and down into town. ‘I didn't know how it was. We just got talking.'

Archie soaked in the account, enjoying the story whether true or not – though Herbert realized he took it for gospel, because why shouldn't he? What you said to people they believed, as he would have taken in a similar story from Archie. ‘You clicked good and proper.'

‘Yeh, we talked the hind leg off a donkey. Then we got off the bus in Slab Square, and went for a drink in the Old Salutation. Lovely, she was. Dark hair, and a nice slim figure. She towd me she worked in an office and had a room of her own at West Bridgford, in a house owned by a Polish bloke.'

Archie clapped him on the back, saying what a ram he was. ‘I'd like to meet her sometime.'