Gus walked dourly beside him, and said nothing.
‘Yes—I thought so. The signals turn red very abruptly. You’d get no further, I assure you. She would kill you or herself rather than actually surrender. I have good reason to know. She’s emotionally crippled for life, and it’s my life-work to protect and conceal her disability, and prevent her from doing harm to herself and others. I married her to take care of her. As I have done already through several affairs, all as fictional as this one with you.’
He felt, and misunderstood, or understood only in part, the obstinate silence walking beside him.
‘Yes,’ he said challengingly, almost as if defending his manhood against some implied accusation, ‘I love her as much as that. It was a little late, in any case, for me to marry for any other kind of passion. This does well enough. It’s more than anyone else will ever have of her.’
Gus came out of his own private chaos of speculation and enlightenment just in time to capture the implication, and too late to absorb the shock in silence.
‘You mean to say that even you…’ He swallowed the rest of the indiscretion with a gulp, and was thankful for the darkness. His mind had been careering along in quite a different direction, it was too much to ask him to assimilate this all in a moment.
‘The inference you’re drawing,’ said Paviour, in a voice thinner and more didactic than Gus had ever yet heard it, ‘is a correct one. I knew all about her panic abhorrence before I married her, Sexually, I’ve never touched her. She is a virgin. She always will be.’
Dignified, pathetic and decent, the man stood there quite obviously telling the simple truth as he saw it, and who was likely to see it more clearly? And it all made sense, or would have done if Gus’s blood hadn’t still been racing with the remembered persuasion of her body against him, and the ravenous expertise of her mouth, and the ferocity of her nails scoring into his back. That memory confounded the argument considerably. And yet it was true, the initiative had still been hers. All he’d had time to do was go along with her wishes; and if he’d just been reaching the point of having wishes and intentions of his own, he’d been saved by the bell, and she hadn’t had to react. Try it! she’d said. Touch me! But deliberately he’d left the next move to her. And now maybe he’d never know which of them was crazy, himself or this elderly masochist—or hero, or whatever he was—who got his satisfaction in cherishing and protecting his wife like a delinquent daughter.
‘So you see why it’s essential,’ said Paviour, gently and firmly, ‘that my wife should not see you again. You’re not in any illusion that her heart is involved, I hope?’
‘No,’ said Gus, ‘I’m not in any illusion. She won’t have any trouble getting over my loss.’
By common consent they had halted well short of the low hedge of the garden at the lodge. The house was in darkness, Bill could not have left the village yet. It would be quite easy, however inconvenient, and there was now no help for it, nothing to be done but what Paviour obviously wanted and expected of him.
‘I’ll remove myself,’ he said, ‘totally and immediately. She needn’t see me again. I’ve got my car here, I can pack and get out before Bill comes back, and leave him a note, and my apologies to deliver tomorrow. I shall have had a telephone call. Family business—illness—I’ll think of the right thing.’
‘I shall be very much obliged,’ said Paviour. ‘I felt sure I could rely on your good feeling.’ And he turned, with no more insistence than that, and no firmer guarantee, and walked away towards his own house, leaving Gus staring after him.
He did exactly what he had promised he would do, and did it in ruthless haste, for fear Bill should come back too soon. True, the same excuse could be offered to him face to face, but there might be some dispute over whether it was strictly necessary to leave before morning, and moreover, in view of Bill’s own remarks on the subject of the Paviour marriage, he was not likely to be deceived. Far simpler to leave a few fresh doodles on the telephone pad, and a note propped on the mantelpiece, and get out clean.
‘Dear Bill, Client called home, and they ran me to earth here. He wants me to drive over to Colchester and look at a piece he’s been offered and has his doubts about. Rush job, because if good it’s very good, and there’s another dealer in the field, so I’m going across overnight. Didn’t want to call the house at this hour, please make my apologies to Mr and Mrs Paviour, and thanks to you and them for generous hospitality. I’ll be in touch later.’
Probably Bill wouldn’t believe any of it, certainly not the last words, but it would do. And Lesley was no doubt used to abrupt diplomatic departures, and would shrug him off and look round for the next entertainment. Perhaps even give a whirl to Bill, whom she hadn’t fancied, but who rather more than fancied her, if everyone told the truth. Better not, that might be a collision she wouldn’t shrug off so easily.
He needn’t go far, of course, but all the same this was a nuisance just at this stage. They might elect to fetch him off the job altogether, and put someone else in in his place. That couldn’t be helped. What mattered now was to get out.
He dumped his case in the car, and drove out from the gate of the lodge, and up the gravelled track that ran within the boundary of Aurae Phiala. Bill would be walking home from the village by the riverside path, and the whole expanse of the enclosure and the bulk of the curator’s house and garden would be between him and the way out on to the main road. With luck he wouldn’t even hear the car. If he did, he would never think of it in connection with a sudden departure until he read his guest’s note. All very tidy.
He had to get out and open the gate when he reached the road. He drove the Aston Martin through, and parked it in the grass verge while he went back to close the gate again and make sure it was fast.
He had the stretch of road to himself, and the late moon, at the beginning of its sluggish climb and rimmed with mist, cast only a faint, sidelong light over the standing walls and pillars of Aurae Phiala. Just enough to prick out before his eyes a single curious spark, that moved steadily along within the broken wall of the frigidarium, appearing and disappearing as the height of the standing fragments varied. It proceeded at a measured walking pace, and at the corner it turned, patrolling downhill towards the tepidarium; and for a moment, where the standing masonry dropped to knee-height, he saw the shadowy figure that walked beneath it, and caught the shape of the glowing crest against the sky. The enlarged head, with its jut of brow, was all one metallic mass, hardly glimpsed before it was lost again in the dark. A helmet, with neck-guard, earpieces, he thought even a visor over the face. Dream or substance, the helmeted sentry of Aurae Phiala was making a methodical circuit of the remaining walls by fitful moonlight.
He left the car standing, and let himself in again through the gate; and even then he took the time to snap the lock closed before he set off at a cautious lope across the grass towards the walls of the baths. Once into the complex, he had to slow to a walk, but he made what speed he dared. The night had grown restless with a rising wind; rapid scuds of cloud alternately masked and uncovered the veiled moon, and drifts of mist moved up from the river in soft, recurrent tides along the ground. A night for haunting. He wondered if there was a policeman standing guard overnight, and felt sure there was not; there are never enough men to cover everything that should be covered He and the sentry had the place to themselves.