“If a young man was interested in a girl,” she said, not looking at him, “would you think that young man might go off that girl if he found out she had done something…well, against the law, when she was a kid?”
“It depends on the young man. Now if you’re talking about Mr Jeremy Blythe…”
“You noticed. He is rather sweet on me.” Alice removed her hat and tossed back her fluffy hair in what she fondly thought was a femme-fatale ish sort of way.
“It depends on the crime,” said Hamish. “Now if you’d poisoned your mother or…”
“No, nothing like that,” said Alice. “Look, when I was about Charlie’s age, I threw a brick through Mr Jenkins’ window for a dare. Mr Jenkins was a nasty old man who lived in our street. The other girls egged me on. Well, he got me charged and taken to court. All I got was a warning and Mum had to pay for the window and the local paper put a couple of lines about it at the bottom of one of their pages. I mean, it was a silly little thing, really, but would a man like Jeremy mind? You see, he’s awfully ambitious and…and…well, he plans to stand for Parliament, and…and…oh, do you know now I’ve told you, I realize I’ve been worrying about nothing. I should have told him. In fact, I’d better before anyone else does. How he’ll laugh!”
“If it’s that unimportant,” said Hamish, pouring himself more tea, “then I am thinking that there is no need whateffer to tell anyone at all. In my opinion, Miss Wilson, Mr Blythe is something of a snob and would not normally be interested in you were he not on holiday…”
Alice leapt to her feet. “You’re the snob,” she said. “And rude, too. I’ll show you. I’ll tell Jeremy right now and when I’m Mrs Blythe, you can eat your words.”
“As you please.” Hamish shrugged. Alice rushed out of the house and slammed the kitchen door with a bang. Hamish cursed himself for being clumsy. Alice reminded him of Ann Grant, a young girl brought up in Lochdubh, only passably pretty. She had been seen around one of the flashier holiday guests two summers ago, driving with him everywhere in his car, and gossiping about the grand wedding she would have. But the holidaymaker had left and Ann had gone about ill and red-eyed. She had been packed off suddenly to a relative in Glasgow. The village gossips said she had gone to have an abortion and was now walking the streets. But Hamish had heard through his relatives that she was working as a typist in a Glasgow office and had said she never wanted to see Lochdubh or her family again. If her family hadn’t been so common, she said, then her beau would have married her.
Snobbery is a terrible thing, thought Hamish dismally. It can almost kill young girls. Would they kill because of it? That was a question well worth turning over.
♦
Alice ran all the way back to the hotel and straight up to Jeremy’s room. She pounded on the door until a muffled voice shouted, “The door’s open. I’m in the bathroom.”
She pushed open the door. Perhaps the murder had made her a little crazy or perhaps Alice had lived in a fantasy world for too long, but she justified her next action by persuading herself that they were going to be married, or would be married if she established a basis of intimacy. She strolled casually into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath.
“Hello, darling,” she said.
Jeremy hastily floated a large sponge over himself to act as a fig leaf and asked carefully, without looking at her, “Have you been drinking? I know we’re all shattered by this murder business but…”
Alice came down to reality with a bump. “I’ll wait for you in the bedroom,” she gasped. “I’ve got something I must tell you.”
She sat nervously on the bed by the window, fidgeting with the curtain cord and wishing she hadn’t been so bold.
Jeremy came out with a white towel knotted around his waist and drying his hair with another.
Alice turned her face away and twisted a handkerchief nervously in her hands.
“Now you look like your usual self,” said Jeremy. “For a moment there I thought you were going to rape me.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” said Alice, wishing he wouldn’t look so amused, so detached. What if Macbeth should prove to be right?
But if they were married, it might come out. Better tell him now. And so Alice did, simply plunging into her story at the beginning and charging on until the end.
As she talked, she was back there in that dusty court on that hot summer’s day with the tar melting on the roads outside. She could still remember her mother, crying with shame. She could remember her own sick feeling of disgrace.
When she finished, she looked at Jeremy awkwardly. He was studying her face in an intent, serious way. Jeremy was actually wondering whether to share his own guilty secret and at the same time noticing how Alice’s schoolgirlish blouse was strained against her small, high breasts. God, it had been ages since…Then there was all this fear and worry about the murder. Yes, he knew why Alice had dreaded Lady Jane printing that bit of childhood nonsense. Hadn’t he himself gone through hell to try to shut her mouth? He glanced at the clock. Eight-thirty. Too early for a drink but not too early for that other tranquillizer.
He sat down beside Alice on the bed and drew her against his still-damp body. “You don’t mind?” whispered Alice.
“Of course not,” he said, stroking her hair. She smelled of nervous sweat, sharp and acrid, mixed with lavender talcum powder. He put a hand on one little breast and began to stroke it.
Alice shivered against him. She was not a virgin, having lost that through curiosity and drink two years ago in the back of a car after a party with a man whose name she could not remember. It had been a painful and degrading experience, but he had been a heavy, vulgar sort of man.
Women’s Lib has a long way to go before it gets inside girls like Alice. As his lips began to move against her own, her one thought was, “If I sleep with him, he’ll have to marry me.”
As they lay stretched out on the bed, pressed together, as Alice’s clothes were removed, she had an idiotic wish that Jeremy might have been wearing some sort of status symbol, his gold wrist watch, say. For when the all-too-brief fore-play was over and she was rammed into the bed by the panting, struggling weight of this man, it all seemed as painful and degrading as that time in the back of the car. She wished he’d hurry up and get it over with. There was that terrible tyranny of the orgasm. What was it? He was obviously waiting for something to happen to her. She had read about women shrieking in ecstasy, but if she shrieked, she might bring people rushing in, thinking there had been another murder.
His silence was punctuated by grunts, not words of love. At last, just when she thought she could not bear it any longer, he collapsed on top of her. She let out a long sigh of relief, and Jeremy kissed her ear and said, “It was good for you too,” mistaking her sigh for one of satisfaction.
“I love you, Jeremy,” whispered Alice, winding her arms around him and hugging that vision of sports car, expensive clothes, good accent, and Member of Parliament.
“Do you?” He propped himself up on one elbow. “That’s nice.” He kissed her nose and then smacked her on the bottom. “Better get dressed. Gosh, I’m hungry.”
Alice scooped up her clothes and scuttled into the bathroom. After she had showered and dressed, she felt better. Love in the morning. How sophisticated. How deliciously decadent.
She was just putting on lipstick when Jeremy shouted through the door, “I’ll see you in the dining room. Don’t be long.”