"Suit yourself," Divine grinned and let out a low belch to get the barman's attention.
"Hey up!" he called, 'how 39 about some service? " Divine, anxious not to lose his ^audience, hadn't even got to the bit about the snake yet.
A cos lettuce and half a cucumber were waiting for him in the salad spinner, a Marks and Spencer lasagne in the microwave. Millington guessed from the spoons on the dining room table there'd be dessert, like as not that Greek yoghurt with honey.
Madeleine called down from the bedroom to say she'd not be many minutes, wouldn't he like to make them a nice cup of tea? While the kettle was coming to the boil, he wandered off into the garden; this time of the year, all you had to do was turn your back and the bloody grass wanted cutting.
Trills and worse wafted down from the upstairs window; auditions for the local amateur operatics were in the offing and Millington could sense this year his wife was nurturing ambitions beyond the chorus.
"What would you think, Graham," Madeleine asked a while later, showing the jar of Hellmann's low-calorie mayonnaise to her salad, 'if I said I were going to try out for the lead? "
"I'd say good luck to you," said Millington, poking around in his lasagne.
"You don't think I might be, well, wrong for it? The part, I mean."
"Depends what it is."
"The Merry Widow. I'm sure I told you."
"And that's the part? The one you're after? The merry, er, widow?"
Madeleine set down her fork and knife and prepared to look hurt.
"Yes."
Beneath his moustache, Millington smiled.
"Not trying to tell me something, are you, love?"
What? Oh, Graham, no. For heaven's sake! "
"Not been slipping down to the garden centre for the odd half gallon of weed killer A little arsenic in the salad dressing?"
"Graham! Don't say things like that. Not even in jest."
Millington went back to his lasagne, wondering what had happened to good old meat pie and chips.
"What I meant was," Madeleine began. It was later and she was spooning yoghurt into two bowls.
"The character, the one I'd like to play, she's meant to be gay…"
Gay? "
"Lively. Sort of sparkling, you know. Full of joy." Madeleine paused, scraping stray yoghurt from the back of the spoon on to the edge of the carton.
"Sexy."
"Well, that's all right, then."
"What?"
"For the part. Sexy."
Madeleine pushed her bowl away.
"That's what I mean."
"What?"
"It's just a joke."
"It'snot a joke."
"It is."
Millington stood up from his chair, leaned across the table and kissed her on the mouth. When he eased away, some few moments later, there were honey and yoghurt in his moustache and neither he nor Madeleine knew who was the more surprised.
"I was wondering" Millington said, turning away from a woefully unfunny situation comedy on the TV, 'if you fancied an early night? "
Across the room, Madeleine blinked across a pile of nine-year-olds' science notebooks. Thirty-seven drawings of a paramecium, all of which made it look like a hairy shoe.
"All right," she said.
"Yes, I could. I'll just have to finish these first." Already she was making calculations, dates and figures flying around her head, wondering if 41 maybe it was worth checking her temperature with the bathroom thermometer.
Chipper, Millington had put on the dressing gown his mother-in-law had bought him the Christmas before last and gone downstairs to make a pot of tea. Never mind Divine and all his bragging, Millington was prepared to wager it didn't get much better than that.
Madeleine, for whom it had actually been almost as satisfying a ten minutes as her husband had concluded, sat, propped up by a brace of pillows, searching for her place in Lives of the Christian Martyrs and still envincing a slight glow.
Millington brought the tea back up on a tray; best cups and saucers, green padded cosy, a small plateful of rich butter shortbread and custard creams. He remembered to stop whistling
"Don't Sleep in the Subway' out on the landing, not wanting to irritate her nerves.
"Graham," Madeleine said, all smiling reproach, 'we'll get crumbs in the bed. "
"Not to worry," he winked.
"Be changing the sheets tomorrow anyway."
Biting her tongue rather than telling him not to be smutty, Madeleine reached for a shortbread biscuit instead. Millington settled the tray between them, poured milk and tea, set his cup on the bedside table and reached for the book that Resnick had handed him.
Madeleine's only immediate reaction was to shift a little on to one side, leaning her weight towards the light.
If anyone had told me. Annie Jones, you'll end up spending your seventh wedding anniversary alone in the front seat of a rented Chevrolet, outside of Jake's at the Lake in Tahoe City, I'd have told them to go jump right in it. The lake, that is. But then if that same anyone. "Graham," Madeleine said, rolling towards him, 'what- ever's got into you? "
"How'd you mean?"
"First, you know, and now this."
This? "
"You're reading in bed."
"So?"
"You never read; not anywhere, never mind in bed."
"I read that what's his name? – John Grisham."
"You bought the book when we were on our way back from Devon, read the first two pages, put it in the bag for Christian Aid and saw the film."
"Two pages is about all I'll read of this as well, if you don't let me get on with it. Try engaging you in conversation once you're stuck into one of these door stops of yours and I get a look fierce enough to excommunicate the Pope."
"All right, Graham," Madeleine said, giving it just a touch of the long-suffering.
"I'm sorry. I won't interrupt you again."
"S'okay, love," Millington said, fidgeting his backside against her hip.
"Not as if it's anything serious, not like yours. No one's going to set me an exam on it when I've finished." He opened the paperback wide and cracked the spine a little, rendering it easier to handle.
But then if that same anyone had told me, the day I appeared, fresh out of law school, ready to start work at the offices of Reigler and Reigler, bright and full of promise in my newly acquired dove-grey two-piece with a charcoal stripe, skirt a businesslike three inches below the knee, that I would swap what was clearly destined to be a famous legal career for that of 43 a lowly private eye, I would gleefully have signed committal forms, assigning them to the nearest asylum, and tossed away the key.
"You know, Annie," my mother had said, the time I plucked up courage to explain, 'you can't really be a private eye, they only have them in the movies. And books. And besides, they're always men. "
My mom. God bless her, always seemed to have a vested interest in remaining firmly behind the times.
"Sure, Mom," I said, 'you're right. " And inched back the business card I had proudly given her, stuffing it back down into my wallet.
There'd be another time.
Madeleine turned with a start as Annie Q. Jones hit the floor with a small bump. Millington's eyes were closed and pretty soon, she knew, he would begin to snore. Leaning across him carefully, Madeleine lightly touched her cheek to his and then switched out the lamp.
The kids outside the amusement arcade at the end of Fletcher Gate stared back at Resnick with flat, hostile eyes. Fifteen, sixteen, younger: high-top trainers, T-shirts, jeans; cans of Coke and cigarettes and something in a polystyrene box from Burger King. Maybe they knew he was a policeman, maybe not; what they saw was someone older than their fathers, another version of their teachers, probation officers, social workers, another heavily built man in a shapeless suit.
A common incongruity, the windows in front of which they lounged or sat displayed pottery objects no one ever bought shire horses, vases, bug-eyed dogs all steadily gathering dust.