“Why don’t you let me take your coat?”
“It’s okay.” But he put down his glass, shrugged off his suit jacket, and Hannah hung it in the hall, beside her own.
“Please, sit down.”
Hesitating, Resnick took the settee. Not quite able to sit beside him, Hannah sat in the easy chair nearest to the stereo.
“You didn’t see anything you fancied?” she said, indicating the CDs.
“I didn’t know.”
“Not your kind of music, then?”
At last, Resnick smiled. “I’m a jazz man myself, I’m afraid.”
“Well,” Hannah said, reaching round for the controls, “nothing ventured …”
The sounds of a piano, tentative at first, rolled out across the room. Then a woman’s voice, slightly husky, unaccompanied, warm but bare. Why walk, she was singing, when you can fly?
When the other instruments came in behind the vocal, Resnick thought, for a second time that evening, he could hear an accordion. He leaned forward and lifted his glass from the mantelpiece and, without drinking, placed it on the floor beside his feet. Hannah watching him, her lips moving, just faintly, to the words. The space between them seemed a million miles wide, uncrossable. Resnick moved his foot and the glass overturned, spilling wine.
“Oh, shit!”
“It’s okay.” Hannah was on her feet, heading for the door. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry.” Returning with a tea towel in her hand.
“I’m sorry.” Resnick was still sitting there, legs apart, all but empty glass in his hand.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hannah assured him, pressing the cloth hard against the carpet where the wine had spread. “That’s why I bought this color. Nothing shows.”
“It’s my fault for being so clumsy.”
“No, there. See. Nothing. Well,” laughing, “nothing much.” Straightening, she placed her hand on his leg; as she reached her other hand towards his neck, the darkened towel fell away. His mouth was closed against hers and then it was not. Wine on his tongue. Somewhere inside Hannah’s brain she was thinking, I should have waited for “Shut Up and Kiss Me!”, but track six was too far on. Resnick’s knees were tight against her side, his hand in her hair.
“Charlie,” she said, some fifteen minutes later. He had swung one of his legs round onto the settee, and she was half-lying across him, trying not to get a cramp or notice that her hip was rubbing rather painfully against the settee’s sharp edge.
“Mmm?” he mumbled, close against her face. His tie had disappeared and his shirt was mostly undone.
“Come up to bed.”
At the door he stopped her, catching at her hand. “Look, Hannah, are you sure?”
He was startled by the ferocity of her laugh.
“What is it?”
“Sure?” she said. “I don’t know if I can afford to wait that long.”
The bedroom stretched across the top of the house between two sloping roofs. The floorboards had been sanded and polished; two chests of drawers and the wardrobe were in stripped pine. There were two rugs, one at either side of the bed, one white, the other blood red. Plants hung in baskets from the ceiling, fronds pushing up towards the light that, even now, showed through the uncovered skylights, one at each side of the room. In the city it was never quite dark. Hannah would lie there some nights, staring up, vainly searching for stars.
Now she lifted herself up onto one arm and was surprised to find that she was still shaking a little; she had not made love to anyone since Jim and that already seemed longer ago than it was. So strange, the first time with anyone new; after the first blind excitement of caressing and undressing, the clumsiness of finding that fit, the almost stubborn awkwardness of it. She remembered in a film she had seen once-Robert De Niro, was it, and Uma Thurman? — charging at it headlong, a mêlée of arms and legs and sheets that ended up with the pair of them, startled and breathless, on the floor. And, of course, in movies there was never that embarrassing non-conversation about the condoms. Which of you, if either, has them and are they within reach? The answer had been on the upper shelf of the bathroom cabinet, behind the mouth ulcer gel and the spare dental floss, down on the second floor.
She noticed Resnick’s breathing change and thought he might be asleep again, until, fleetingly at first, he opened his eyes.
“What time is it?”
Hannah narrowed her eyes towards the digital clock on the floor. “A quarter to four.”
Resnick eased himself up onto his elbow and lay facing her, this woman he scarcely knew who had invited him into her bed. He felt honored and would have liked to have told her so, but couldn’t quite find the words. He kissed a corner of her mouth instead.
“Do you have to go?”
“I ought to, soon.”
“An early start?”
“Responsibilities.” He smiled. “Cats. And I have to change out of this suit. That suit.” The trousers were somewhere between the bed and the stairs.
“And if you stay the night,” Hannah said, “it might mean something more.”
He looked at her; in this light her eyes were gray-green, stone polished by water. “Might it?”
With a swift movement, she was out from beneath the duvet and on her feet. “We’ll see.”
Resnick watched her walk, barefooted, across the floor; the dark ends of pubic hair visible between her legs before she disappeared behind the door.
In the kitchen they sat and drank tea while the light slowly changed behind the window, Resnick dressed in everything save his suit jacket, Hannah in a T-shirt and chenille dressing gown, dunking stale dark chocolate biscuits, all she had been able to find. How, Hannah thought, had she ever kept chocolate biscuits long enough to go stale? Her self-control must be better than she’d imagined. Until tonight.
Resnick sat listening for the sound of a car engine; the cab company had told him twenty minutes to half an hour. When he heard it on the road near the rear of the house, he quickly swallowed down the last of his tea.
Slippers on her feet, Hannah walked with him along the narrow alley to where the driver was waiting.
“I’m not much good at one-night stands,” she said.
“Neither am I.” He didn’t know if that were true.
She held two of his fingers tight inside her hand. “Then I’ll see you again?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. If that’s what you want.”
On the pavement, he kissed her softly on the mouth and she kissed him back; she watched as the car drew away, out onto the Boulevard, indicator blinking orange light. Well, Hannah, she thought as she turned back towards the house, so the earth didn’t move, what did you expect? At the gate, she laughed lightly. “You didn’t even see stars.”
The phone was ringing when Resnick entered the house.
“Charlie, where the fuck have you been?”
Taken aback by the ferocity in Skelton’s voice, he didn’t know how to respond.
“Where the hell was your bleep?”
There on the hall table; he had forgotten to transfer it into the pocket of his suit.
“What’s happened?” Resnick finally asked.
“Bill Aston,” Skelton said, his voice like sour milk. “He’s dead. Some bastard’s killed him.”
Twenty-one
You could see the lights of the emergency vehicles once you passed the corner of Meadow Lane and approached the bridge; patches of muted color bleeding out into the day. Mist hung in low gray rags over the surface of the river. Rain teased the air. A temporary covering had been set up on the flat spread of grass of the Embankment, a tent of ill-fitting orange plastic around which lighting had been quickly rigged. Figures wearing dark-blue overalls were already examining the surrounding ground on hands and knees. At the perimeter of the scene others were gathered in knots of conversation, heads bowed. It was Skelton who turned away from one of these and moved towards the road to meet Resnick, more than tiredness darkening his eyes.