“That I can believe.” Ross watched her face. She was smiling faintly.
“Is your husband about?”
“Naturally. You didn’t think he worked in an office. He’s down on the bottom field. Harrowing.”
“It must be.”
The girl suppressed a giggle, then frowned. “I don’t like sarcastic people. If you’ll just tell me what you want...”
“I’m trying to trace a friend of mine.”
“Someone round here, you mean?”
“I think he’s been here.”
“What’s his name?” She leaned along the back of the couch and stretched to turn down the volume of the set. She could just reach the knob with the tips of her fingers. Ross noted appreciatively the hardening of the nearer buttock into the semblance of a lute. “Hopjoy,” he said, “Brian Hopjoy.”
“Never heard of him.” She settled again into the cushions, drawing one leg closely beneath her and allowing the other to trail to the floor. Ross abandoned himself to a familiar sense of wonder at the contrast between a stocking’s steely, slippery containment and the petal-white vulnerability of overtopping flesh. He once had thought the Can-Can a vulgar and pseudo-, indeed anti-sensual concession to callow tourists. Now he understood its truth. It was a sermon upon the insubstantiality of what separated the pretentiousness and artificial properties of civilization from venal reality—a division no greater than a garter’s width.
Ross leaned forward in his chair. “Mrs Croll...”
Abstractedly she felt for her skirt hem and tugged it down to her knee. Her fingers straightened and travelled on, in the lightest self-caress; then she raised the hand and held it towards him. He grasped her wrist and experienced a sort of contentment in exploring, with one finger-tip, its complex of fragile bones.
“You might not have known him as Hopjoy,” Ross said.
“Mightn’t I?” Still she stared at the screen; only the tiniest twitch of the hand Ross held contradicted her attitude of absolute indifference to what existed outside it. He slackened his hand and extended it slowly, her forearm slipping through the cupped fingers until his thumb nestled in the soft, warm hollow of the arm’s crook. A pulse—his own or hers, he did not know—stirred gently within the area of contact; it seemed a microcosmic prelude to...
“Here, we’re wasting time.” He withdrew his hand and reached into an inner pocket.
She looked round, startled by his brusqueness. Immediately she saw the photograph, her eyes widened. “Is that your friend?”
“Tell me about him.”
She pouted. “Why should I? I don’t know who you are. You haven’t even got his name right, anyway.”
Ross saw the look she gave the photograph of Hopjoy; it was compounded of fondness and a curious detachment, like that of a marksman turning over a shot bird with his foot.
“Names,” he said, “don’t matter much in our game, Mrs Croll. I don’t care what you called the man, nor what he meant to you...”
“And just what are you insinuating?” She had put on a tradesmen’s entrance voice. Ross decided that he recognized the dissimulation of the bored middle-class wife, hungering for sexual humiliation. “Your antics in your husband’s hay-loft are rather beside the point, my dear. I am interested solely in what brought Mr Hopjoy to this farm and in what he learned here. Now perhaps we understand each other.”
She had risen at his first words and stood now in what he diagnosed as trembling enjoyment of the insult he had offered. The rigidity of her indignation, he noticed, thrust into satisfying prominence a narrow, muscular belly and slightly flattened breasts like burglar alarms.
Mrs Croll turned, switched off the television set as if for ever, and faced him again. “There is nothing,” she announced coldly, “in the relationship of Mr Trevelyan and I that is any of your damn business.” She paused. “So damn you!”
Ross felt a twinge of pity. The clumsiness and inadequate sonority of the retort, its little grammatical discord, betrayed the girl’s uncertainty. He smiled at her. Into the suddenly silent room threaded the thin, clattering whine of a distant tractor.
“Trevelyan, you say?”
“Howard Trevelyan.” She pronounced the words defiantly and with schoolgirl relish.
“Sit down.” He took out his pipe and ruminantly fingered the rim of its bowl. The girl hesitated, then moved farther off and sat on a straight-backed chair in an attitude of prim exasperation.
Not looking at her, Ross said: “You are going to have to trust me, Bernadette. I could tell you my name—it’s Ross, as a matter of fact—and the nature of my work, but there really would be no point in doing so. I can neither prove my identity nor give you convincing evidence of my profession. If I could, it would cease to be my profession. You don’t understand. Naturally. You are not expected to understand. But at least let me assure you that what might seem to you duplicity and mystification are terribly necessary.”
He glanced at her face, which had become more bewildered than angry. “Don’t worry, you’ll not get hurt. I can see no need for your husband to learn anything you don’t wish him to learn concerning, er, Trevelyan”—he lingered sternly over the name as if he personally disapproved of it—“provided you are frank with me.”
“Are you a detective, or something?”
He considered, smiling again. “A something—I think we’d better settle for that.”
“Are you working with Howard?”
“We have certain objectives in common.”
Mrs Croll looked at the door. Then she crossed the room and settled in her habitual place on the sofa. Her face was turned fully towards Ross. She ran her tongue-tip over her lips before she spoke.
“Has anything happened to him?”
Ross shrugged. “We can’t trace him just at the moment.”
“He’s not back in hospital?”
Ross went quickly back over his mental copy of the Hopjoy reports. There had been a spell in hospital. Attacked with iron bar. Assailant thought to be Bulgarian. Never traced; probably smuggled out of Flaxborough dock. For victim, special compensation grant. But all that was some time ago. “No,” said Ross, “I think he got over that all right.”
“I was terribly worried. That’s where he came down...” She nodded towards the window. “Right on top of an old kennel that used to stand there. I thought Ben had killed him...”
“Ben?”
“My husband. He threw Howard out of the bedroom window.”
Ross stared at her, trying to bore through to the motives for the lie. Was she simply the willing victim of sexual fantasy? Or had someone coached her in a deliberately discreditable explanation of Hopjoy’s injuries?
“Tell me about it.”
She raised a hand and moved the middle finger lightly round the braided coil of her hair. The bunched strands shone, thought Ross, like the newly baked croissants of the Orgerus Region. Her frown was doubtful. “I don’t think I ought to say any more. I promised Howard...”
He leaned forward and grasped her shoulder. Tightening the grip, he saw a flicker of gratification in her eyes before the heavy lids drew down in white, lazy assent. The long kiss he gave her was an interrogation subtly wavering on the borders of brutality. Before it was over, she half opened her eyes and moaned through his teeth, like a prisoner entreating merciful execution.