Authors: Harry Bingham
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Lottie, when the matron had left. ‘I definitely said the North Pier. Quite clearly, I’m positive.’
‘I’m sure you did.’ His tone was touched with sarcasm.
Lottie glared at him and pushed past him to a small room marked ‘
LINENS
’. The room was full of wooden racks, on which was stacked all the linen of the hospital: bedsheets, pillowcases, aprons, gowns, caps, dressings, bandages. Lottie folded her apron and put it away. Alan leaned against the racks and smelled the odours of starch and clean laundry. Lottie turned, but made no move to leave the room. When she spoke, there was a warning note in her voice.
‘You’ve never seen the hospital before. We’ve been fully open for five months now and you’ve never done a proper tour.’
He opened his mouth. ‘I’ve been –’
‘Of course you’ve been busy. So have I. So too has everyone here. So has everybody in the world. But you could still have come.’
‘Yes … Well, it looked most efficient. Most impressive indeed.’ Alan played with the white belt of one of the aprons that hung down from its place above him.
‘Oh, don’t be such a pompous ass!’
‘What?!’
‘If you don’t like it, you should damn well say so, not start speaking like some horrid little municipal inspector.’
‘Well, of course I like it. I –’
‘Really?’ Lottie was angry now. ‘Then why is it you’ve never come to look? Properly look, I mean. And why when you do come, do you start speaking as you never do normally?’
‘Well, maybe I don’t like it!’ cried Alan. ‘Maybe I don’t! The hospital is all very well, but I never see you these days. You’re always busy. Always rushing somewhere or other. I sometimes feel as though you’ve left the family completely.’
‘
I’ve
left, have I?
Me?
You have your oil business, your trips overseas, your constant worrying over a brother you haven’t seen for all of fifteen years, and
I’m
the one who’s left, am I?’
Lottie put her hand to her head. She still had on the white nurse’s cap she liked to wear while touring the wards. She yanked the cap off hard, accidentally pulling out a hairpin and releasing a long auburn strand of hair, which fell to an inch or two above her shoulder. She brushed it angrily away. Something in the gesture made Alan remember the girl he’d fallen in love with a decade and a half ago.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘For shouting just now. I didn’t –’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! For just a moment I thought you were going to say something sensible.’
Alan’s anger flared again. He opened his mouth, but she waved him down.
‘I couldn’t care less about you shouting,’ she interrupted. ‘It was all those months of not shouting that I minded. If you are upset about something, you should jolly well say so.’
‘Well, I suppose I am,’ he said, suddenly glimpsing a ray of light, suddenly hoping that maybe Lottie was about to compromise. ‘I mean you
have
been awfully busy. Of course I admire your work here, but –’
‘But nothing. If you admire it, then live with it. I shan’t give it up. I shan’t work here any less than I want to.’
Alan swallowed. ‘That’s your final word?’
‘Of course it is. It’s time you accepted that the woman you fell in love with during the war is the same person who’s involved here now.’
‘So much has changed.’
‘Really? Has it? Look out there.’ Lottie swept her hand at the world beyond the linen room. ‘The war isn’t over for those men. It isn’t even over for you. You dream about it. You feel obliged to chase the ghost of poor old Tom Creeley. Do you want to know the reason why you hate my hospital?’
‘I don’t hate it.’
‘The reason is because you’re still caught up in the war. You haven’t escaped. And you won’t escape until you acknowledge as much.’
Tom rolled sideways off Rebecca. He was panting and sweaty. She still had her eyes half closed, her arm still cradling his naked back. One of the utterly unexpected things about Rebecca was how much joy she took in lovemaking. Tom had never known a woman who gave herself more completely to the experience. He almost felt jealous of the depth of her feeling.
He groped for a cigarette. The bedroom was the only place he smoked them now and though Rebecca didn’t usually smoke, after lovemaking was an exception for her as well. He lit cigarettes for them both.
She opened her eyes and propped herself up. Her hair was a dark and tangled halo on the pillow. Her breasts were unselfconsciously free of the sheets. She took the cigarette but didn’t inhale at once. She gazed at her lover, then lifted her head to kiss him sensually one more time on the lips, hand tucked hard round the back of his neck. She sighed happily one more time and let herself sink back.
For the first few weeks of their lovemaking, back in California ten years before, Tom had steadfastly refused to ask Rebecca about her previous partners. But he could never lose the thought. She’d slept with hundreds of men, perhaps as many as a thousand. The thought had tormented him. When he’d made love with her, he’d flung himself around like an acrobat, hoping that she’d tell him he was the best, that no one made love like him. She’d said nothing of the sort. Their lovemaking had become painful to Tom, and Rebecca’s expressions of satisfaction had seemed wooden and conventional.
Then Tom could stand it no longer. He’d asked her outright. She’d been angry. ‘Make love? Make love? I didn’t make love with anyone. Not in all those years. Not once. I had sex. I got paid. I can’t even remember one single night that meant anything to me.’ She’d told him to stop treating sex like some kind of bedroom gymnastics and he’d slowly calmed down. Their sex had got better, but it had never really become sublime until those fondly remembered nights in the little cottage on Mrs Elwick’s farm. Since then, it had been constantly wonderful. Sometimes quick, sometimes slow. Sometimes passionate, sometimes tender, sometimes with so much laughter that they ended up falling off the bed and giggling helplessly on the floor.
They smoked in silence. Rebecca watched Tom. Tom thought about work and the Italian contract, which was obsessing him. Bard’s man, Marinelli, was already set up in Rome. He’d been given enough money to stay in a good hotel, to throw extravagant parties, and had already secured good friends in the Secretariat of Fuel and the Ministry of Industry and Foreign Trade. Marinelli had already dug out most of the details of Alanto Oil’s intended tender offer. Tom was now preoccupied in finding ways to go one better.
The absolutely crucial ingredient of any bid was the price involved. All the oilmen knew that they’d have to beat the prices offered by the previous contractor, Shell. The question was, by how much? Tom reckoned most of his American competitors would pitch in at two to three cents less than Shell. The million-dollar question (and, as a matter of fact, the question was worth very much more than that) was what price Alanto would offer. The question made Tom tense up. Though he had one hand curled behind Rebecca’s shoulder, his attention was absent, his touch wooden.
‘You are an evil stinking pig,’ said Rebecca meditatively, ‘and I think I shall never sleep with you again.’
‘What?’
‘You were thinking about work.’
‘Work?’
‘Don’t deny it or I might feel obliged to bite you.’
‘I
was
thinking about work. You’re right.’
‘I know.’
‘How?’
‘Everything. Everything about you. For instance –’ She held her cigarette between her index and middle fingers and raised it to her mouth. Her posture shifted subtly and became more masculine, a careful imitation of her husband, but her mouth still held the looseness of sex and her eyes were soft. ‘This is how you smoke when you’re still thinking about making love.’ She held the pose a moment to show him, then changed. She sat more upright. Her eyes went smaller and harder. She held the cigarette between finger and thumb with her other three fingers curled over the top. She dragged hard on it, and tapped the ash away with a brisk, dismissive gesture. ‘This is how you smoke if you’re thinking about work, and then only if it’s not going well.’
Tom laughed. He was always transparent to his wife. ‘Yeah. We’ve got a big deal on in Italy. It’ll be worth a lot if we get it.’ He scratched his nose.
Rebecca suddenly looked at him more intently. She too had now lost the dreamy afterglow of sex. ‘
And
something. Work
and
something. It’s not just about money, is it?’
‘Hey, come on! It’s –’
‘You scratched your nose. It’s an evasive gesture with you. You do it any time I ask you about your past back in England, for example. You give me an answer that tells me nothing, then you scratch your nose and change the subject.’
‘I just want to win the deal. There’s way more oil in Texas than we know what to do with and the Italians want to buy a whole load. The deal would be the making of Norgaard.’ His nose began to get uncomfortably itchy and he had to fight himself to avoid putting his hand up to scratch it.
Rebecca continued to read him with her eyes. Then she put her hand to his chest and massaged him lovingly, ending with a long stroke that began at his collarbones and ended between his legs.
‘Why not talk about it?’ she said. ‘Your past, I mean. It’s gone. Whatever it was can’t reach out to get you here.’
‘No.’
She found his gaze and held it. ‘I’ve worked as a prostitute, you know. I’ve been in debt. I’ve seen my brother die of tuberculosis. I’ve left my parents in another continent and I’m scared for their safety. What on earth do you think you could tell me that would shock me?’
‘It’s not about shocking you. I just don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I think you’re dying to talk about it. I think your past burns inside you every minute of every day.’
‘And I think you’re wrong.’
‘Who cares if you win the Italian deal? You know, it won’t make any difference.’
‘It’ll make us a hatful of money. That’s a difference.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I meant it won’t make any difference to whatever it is that bothers you so much.’
‘Nothing bothers me,’ cried Tom, conscious that he was hardly speaking the full truth. ‘I’m not remotely bothered.’
‘Your past isn’t outside of you. It’s inside. You can’t run from it.’
‘I’m not running. I just want to win a contract, for Chrissake.’
Rebecca looked annoyed. She finished her cigarette briskly and stubbed it out. ‘Will you win?’
Tom nodded. ‘It’s going well. We’ve got an excellent pitch. It’s just a question of making sure we got the best prices.’ He didn’t say anything about Marinelli, the news filtering out of Rome, his spy placed in the heart of the Italian camp.
Rebecca sat up and pulled her hair back from her head, hard enough to pull her skin tight around her forehead and ears. Then she dropped her hands, shook her hair free and dropped back into bed. She rolled on her side and began to play with Tom’s nipple with her tongue and mouth. When she bit him, she bit just hard enough to inch across from pleasure into pain.
‘It’s inside you,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, it sits inside.’
‘A beautiful evening, no?’
Alan looked around. His memory for faces wasn’t always good, but this face wasn’t one you forgot in a hurry. It was red and black, badly scarred, almost certainly the result of an oil blaze at some far-off well.
‘Beautiful,’ agreed Alan, trying to put a name to the face, but failing.
‘Cigarette?’ said Oil-Blaze, holding out a case.
‘Thank you, no.’
Behind the two men, a banquet was running its course. The Italian Secretariat of Fuel had thrown the extravaganza for the various foreign oilmen in town. Alan was the most senior oilman there, and rumour and intrigue had swirled around him all evening. The final bids on the Italian oil contract were required within a matter of days and Alan still hadn’t decided what price to set.
Oil-Blaze lit a cigarette for himself and leaned on the balcony, copying Alan’s posture. Beyond them, Rome glowed gold in the last light of the evening.
‘It’s crazy,’ said the Italian, jerking a thumb at the ballroom behind them. ‘Too much craziness for me.’
Alan smiled in agreement. ‘You speak English very well. And you’re an oilman. That means, I suppose, you’ve spent time in America.’
‘No, alas. I would like to go. It is the home of oil, no?’
‘Well, I’ve a soft spot for Persia myself, but I know what you mean.’
The din of the banquet didn’t get any less, and Alan showed no inclination to go in. When the Italian lit a second cigarette, Alan accepted one for himself. The two men continued to chat idly about the dinner, the guests, and oil – inevitably oil.
‘The air,’ said Oil-Blaze. ‘The next big market for oil. After Charles Lindbergh, we will have paying passengers across the Atlantic soon. No, really! I believe it.’
Alan laughed and disagreed, but the Italian – obviously passionate about aviation – was adamant.
‘You must be very proud of Marshal Balbo, in that case,’ said Alan, referring to the recent highly publicised feat of Italian airmanship. ‘Ten seaplanes, all the way from here to South America! Astonishing. And only six men dead.’