With My Little Eye (11 page)

‘Yes?'

Douglas was struck by an idea calculated to keep George Eastwick busy and out of his hair for some time. ‘He's on the lowest floor of the house. Some of his floor is concrete but parts of it are timber flooring on joists. He could have taken up a floorboard or two and stowed anything valuable or confidential underneath.'

‘Thank you,' the DCI said. ‘I knew that I could count on you.'

‘Just don't let him know that I suggested it.'

D
ouglas lost Tash's help and company for the afternoon because her mother was busily gathering up her brood and all the necessary chattels in preparation for a visit to her sister. Then in the late afternoon the people carrier oozed quietly down the driveway and was gone. Tash and Douglas looked at each other.

‘I've prepared a meal for us upstairs,' Douglas said.

Tash swallowed nervously. ‘Are we doing a wise thing?' she asked.

‘Whether we do it or not is up to you,' Douglas said gently. ‘Either way, we have to eat. Then you can tell me what's in your mind.'

Tash nodded bravely.

The room that Douglas intended eventually to make into his dining room/kitchen was finished as far as the walls and floor were concerned, although no cooking equipment beyond a microwave oven, sufficient for the preparation of his breakfast, had so far been installed. Douglas had used the afternoon interval, during which the main kitchen was unused, to begin preparation of a simple meal, but Betty McLeish had discovered him, struggling, and had immediately divined his purpose and, approving, had taken over. Her friendship with Tash's mother did not supersede the desire in her romantic soul to aid the young lovers. There may even have been a hope on the part of one mother to score off the other. As a result a light but beautifully prepared meal was waiting upstairs, requiring only that the soup and then the main course be reheated before serving.

Champagne would have struck quite the wrong note. Douglas had brought and chilled what he considered to be a suitable Riesling. They were sipping it while making a start on the meal when Tash said, ‘I see you've put flowers on the table.'

‘It seemed to be the least I could do.'

She nodded approvingly. ‘I appreciate the thought. But I hope you aren't planning to produce more flowers for me, or chocolates or whatever. As I told you, this is not that sort of encounter and I don't want you to feel that I'm forcing you into a romance. We'll try me out and then think again.'

‘Very sensible,' said Douglas. More and more, Tash was showing up as a sensible and self-contained young woman, wise beyond her years.

They chatted about the affairs of the day but without thinking deeply about what they were saying. When they had finished and taken coffee, Tash's manner was expectant rather than reluctant so Douglas rose and drew her to her feet, leading her in the direction of his bedroom. ‘Would you rather undress privately, in the bathroom?' he asked her.

‘I'm only going by what I've heard,' she said, ‘but I rather thought that that was your job.'

‘To undress you? Is that what you want?'

She gave a little shiver. ‘Yes, I think I'd like that, to establish the mood. It would be exciting.'

In the bedroom he undressed her slowly, making a caress of each move. Her garments were clean and fresh, of good quality but not provocative. He managed to get rid of his own clothes at the same time without interrupting the process or breaking the mood. She was throwing aside her reservations. When they were both nude he took her in his arms but she crossed her own arms in front of her.

‘It's not too late to change your mind,' he said.

‘No, go ahead.' She seemed daunted by the size of him. She was very tense.

Douglas was not totally lacking in experience. There was sometimes a custom to write or say that a woman suffered sex in exchange for security and comfort, the assumption being that women never enjoyed the mating act. This he was sure was wrong. Each of his previous partners could surely not have been faking it, and so convincingly. If it was sometimes true, this was because the woman's partners had been selfish or unskilled. He settled down for a long period of foreplay, kissing and stroking and petting her in all the ways that a woman likes until she had relaxed and then returned his caresses. He knew that she did not want him to offer love so he whispered tributes, true as could be, to her beauty. Her eyes half-closed and her breathing quickened; her private parts softened, moistened and opened for him. He kept a generous part of his mind away from the immediate act so that he would not become too quickly and too fully engorged and therefore too large for her comfort. She returned his kisses. She no longer expected his penetration to hurt and so it did not.

He moved slowly at first until she had learned to respond. He tried to make every least motion a caress. Soon he found that he had woken a tigress. This was no passive maiden, waiting to be served. She was responding to him, move for move. She clasped him with her legs so tightly that he thought he might have to beg for mercy. In her movements against and around him he could feel her determination to give pleasure, both to him and to herself. He again used the old trick, thinking about something remote in order to postpone his own climax. Then, when he sensed that an orgasm was rushing at her, he released his own pleasure. Clasping each other tightly, they exploded in unison. She gave little squeaks of joy.

As they lay gasping in the afterglow she said, ‘I had no idea.'

He said, ‘Of course you hadn't. That was good. It has never been better.'

‘How do you measure that?' she asked into his neck.

He said, ‘We shall have to devise a formula.'

‘The Young-Jamieson Formula for posterity to judge itself by?'

‘Jamieson-Young. You thought of it first.'

They laughed together.

It was several minutes before he could follow Tash downstairs without betraying their secret.

T
o the other residents in Underwood House there was no obvious change in their relationship. He still treated her with courtesy and disguised his instructions as requests; she continued to show him the respect due to an employer and an elder; they still laughed together at the follies of the world around them. In private, however, there were major changes. She had entered their affair in search of knowledge, determined that this would not be an affair of the heart; she had gained the knowledge but she now knew that she had been mistaken. Along with her virginity she had given him her heart and he was handling it with care. She felt that her heartbeat quickened whenever she saw him.

A question in both their minds was whether their affair had been a one-night stand or the beginning of something more lasting. Neither felt brave enough to confront the subject for fear of getting the wrong answer; but when the next day's work was done they drifted – oh so accidentally – close. Talking feverishly about something quite, quite different, they kissed and soon found themselves back on the big, soft bed. The experience was as mind-blowing as on the previous occasion. Tash never bothered to return to sleep in her own bed and she never objected to words or symbols of love.

From that moment on, there was no concealing the changed relationship. Every glance that they exchanged was so charged with emotion that even the dogs seemed to recognize it. There was a little gentle leg-pulling, but on the whole they felt that they were approved of. When Mrs Jamieson returned at the next weekend, before she had time to observe the changed sleeping arrangements, a mother's instinctive insight into her daughter's emotional development led her direct to the correct conclusion. As positively as a sheepdog, she shepherded Douglas out from among the interested observers and captured him alone in her unpretentious but comfortable sitting room.

‘You and Tash have become an item, haven't you?'

Douglas had been considering how he would meet the subject. Now was the hour and he had to make a rapid choice between three possible attitudes. She did not look as stern as he had feared, nor as angry. Mrs Jamieson was proving to be a much more modern mother than he had given her credit for. Frankness was his best option.

‘Yes. Not through any active manoeuvring on my part, but I'm a very willing party.'

Mrs Jamieson nodded several times. ‘I won't say that I should have expected it. I knew that it was bound to come. I've been watching Tash falling for you. I would have stepped in if I hadn't been sure that you were well intentioned. You are being careful?'

‘Very.'

‘So far so good. Promise me, you will let her down gently?'

That came as a surprise but so also did his own reply. His thinking had not yet progressed so far. ‘I have no intention of letting her down at all,' he said severely, ‘and I'm surprised that you should expect it. As far as I am concerned she is now a permanency in my life. I have not yet told her so.' Even to his own ears he sounded pedantic but the occasion was one for formality.

Tash's mother sat back, her eyebrows up. ‘This I did not expect,' she said. ‘I trusted you to behave like a gentleman or I would never have gone away and left you together, but in this day and age one has to move with the times. I'm sorry if I'm talking in clichés but the subject is as old as life itself. I was sure that Tash would become a woman soon and I hoped that it would not be with one of these mannerless youths who seem to be taking over the world. I was relieved to see her falling for a professional, educated man. Are you thinking of marriage?'

‘I'm waiting to see how Tash's mind goes. But –' Douglas's mind recoiled from a picture of Mrs Jamieson advising Tash in one direction or the other ‘– I am certainly not inviting you to influence her. It must be her decision. I'm twelve years older than she is. It isn't an unbridgeable gap but it's a wide one. You've brought her up incredibly well and I congratulate you. Sometimes I get the feeling that she's as mature as I am if not more so. Let's just see how things develop.'

‘Yes, let's do that. But nothing is a hundred per cent safe. Suppose she were to become pregnant …?'

‘I would offer marriage immediately.'

She smiled suddenly. ‘I can begin to envisage you as a son-in-law.'

‘I have been looking on you as a future mother-in-law. Happily.'

‘One thing about you, Douglas, you always say the right thing. But you must be careful about the impression you give; and I depend on you to keep Tash's reputation – what shall I say? – untarnished. I'll tell you a story which you may find funny – to her dying day my mother could almost fall out of her chair laughing about it – but there's a truth buried in it.

‘Between the wars, when these things were taken very seriously, my aunt was a nursing sister and it was known that she was in line for promotion to matron – senior nursing officer, they'd call it now. She was nominated to attend a nursing conference, in Paris of all places. Her colleagues thought that she had landed jammy side up, except that my sister always wore flannel pyjamas.

‘Her friends insisted that she couldn't go to Paris with hairy pyjamas. What would the maid think? So they clubbed together to buy her something pink and frilly. Her train was about to leave so there was no time to do more than tuck it into her case and wave to her. She arrived safely at the conference and met some seniors over dinner, so she arranged for drinks to be put in her room and invited several quite important persons to come for a nightcap.'

As the story progressed, Mrs Jamieson's own amusement had begun to take her over and as she arrived at the climax her laughter rendered her barely coherent.

‘They all went together up to her room, where the maid had unpacked her bag for her and turned down both sides of the bed, putting the frilly nightie on one side and the hairy pyjamas on the other.

‘The point I want to make is that she was perfectly innocent but looked very guilty. She did not get that promotion to matron although she was later appointed SNO at a different hospital. Much of what happens to you in life may depend, not on what you are or what you do, but on what the world thinks you are and do.'

Douglas had lived through the betrothal of a brother and two cousins and as his tender secret emerged into the light of day he was expecting his life to be turned upside down with giggles and hints and controversy on such vital matters as who were going to be bridesmaids. However, that area of discussion was drowned out for the moment by a subject of more general interest. On the next Sunday morning, inconveniently early, Chief Inspector Laird arrived, insisting that all those of the household who had reached teenage years or above should hold themselves ready for a round-table discussion as soon as breakfast was past and the washing-up done.

Traces of breakfast could still be detected in the form of toast crumbs and the smell of coffee when the teenage and adult population of Underwood House assembled in the kitchen/dining room. The sky outside was black, so nobody resented the loss of their leisure time more than very slightly. Seymour McLeish had been booked to play golf despite the weather but he was glad of the excuse to remain warmly indoors and talk about murder. His wife had been hoping for a quiet day on her own but it now seemed that she must assist Hilda Jamieson in providing Sunday lunch. Professor Cullins and Hubert Campion were very smart in well-pressed slacks and shirts with cravats. George Eastwick turned up and, as usual, was making a show of bad tempter.

Tash, who knew nothing of the talk between her mother and Douglas, had seated herself firmly beside Douglas where she could feel the comforting warmth of his thigh against hers. Her mother was seated on her further side, as if to lend propriety. DCI Laird was accompanied by his sergeant and by a woman sergeant equipped with recorder and dictation book. The big room was almost crowded.