“I’m sitting in the car,” Max said, “so if Terman and Isabelle drive off they’ll have to take me along as bloody hostage.”
“He doesn’t get drunk like other people,” Marjorie explained to Isabelle, “he merely behaves oddly.”
“Is it odd, I ask you, to have a conference with my conspirator? We’ll put the question to Isabelle whose biases are either unknown or non-existent.”
“When Terman makes up his mind to go somewhere, he wants to be at that place in the flash of an eye,” Isabelle said. “That’s the way he is, I’m afraid.”
“Are you in a hurry, son?” Max asked. “Is there time for a word or two between us?”
“It’s cold as a witch’s tit,” Marjorie said. “I’m going back to the cottage if no one minds.” She blew them a kiss then turned to go, though didn’t.
“I’ll help you back,” Isabelle said, taking her arm.
Marjorie pulled away, said she preferred making it on her own if that didn’t interfere with anyone else’s plans. She took four maybe five steps and fell heavily. Neither of the men got out of the car. Isabelle hurried to her and asked Marjorie, who was making an effort not to cry, if she hurt herself. “I feel like letting out an enormous scream,” Marjorie said.
“One of us ought to go out there,” Max said. “It would be a great favor to me, Terman, if you represented the partnership on this occasion. Just tell her that Max sent you, that you’ve come in place of Max.”
Marjorie was on her feet, moving unsteadily toward the house, Isabelle followed protectively a step behind. “No need,” Marjorie said over her shoulder.
Terman opened his window to call to either or both of the women, but could think of nothing he wanted to say.
He looked into the rearview mirror and noted that Max was slumped like a ragdoll against the back of the seat. “Are you all right, Max?” he asked. There was no answer for the longest time. “Max!”
The eyes opened with apparent reluctance, or offered that illusion in the dark. The voice boomed in the closed space. “Why don’t you wait until the morning, old son?” it said. “Nothing useful or enobling can be done at this time of blight. Am I not speaking truth?” He let himself out of the car, opened his fly and peed in a wide arc toward the house. “Serve them right if they get a whiff of that.”
Terman could hardly make out the numbers on his watch, studying its unillumined face in the dark car, refusing to turn on the light or open the door. He squalled Isabelle’s name through the partially opened window and thought he heard it echo back after a time lapse of several seconds. It was possible that he heard Tom crawling through the brush like a commando, gradually approaching the car, stopping every few minutes to disguise his progress. The gun was in his hand as he crawled, held just above the ground so as not to get fouled by dirt or twigs. In two more sequences, he would be close enough to open fire at the silhouette in the driver’s seat.
The assassin in the woods rested for a count of five — Terman counting the seconds to himself as he imagined the other doing — then crawled the final thirty feet to the garden’s edge.
A few seconds later, he heard footsteps and he threw himself across the seat, hands over his head, to avoid the gunshots he anticipated. There were a series of raps like machine gun fire at some great distance. Isabelle’s face was at the opposing window, slightly distorted by his perspective.
“You don’t mean to sleep in the car, darling, do you?” she was saying. She opened the door on the passenger side to make herself understood.
He lifted his head to give her space to sit down, unable to give up the idea that an assassin awaited him just outside the window of the car. When she was seated and had closed the door he put his head in her lap.
“If we’re not going to London,” she said, “we ought to go inside, don’t you think?”
He could smell her sea-scent beneath the wool of her pants — the wool rough agaist his face — mingling with her perfume and something else, something not quite defineable. The pants had a fly and he worked the zipper open with his teeth.
She slapped at the back of his head, half reprimand, half play. “Mind,” she said.
Her smell had depths like a well-aged wine, though seemed somewhat murky as if it hadn’t travelled well or had been shaken up in transport. She wore a bikini under the mannish pants, an odd conjunction, an aspect (he thought) of disguise.
Terman had not thought of Isabelle as overpoweringly sexy before, was never so taken with her as this moment in the car with his head like some rooting animal buried in her crotch.
Isabelle offered no encouragement, even held the back of his neck with her hand as if (though not seriously) to restrain him from going further. He found an arm cramped under him and he used it, despite the stiffness in his shoulder, the numbness of the tips of his fingers, to open her pants at the waist. She murmured something, neither assent nor complaint, some English cry or sigh he had never understood. He thought of it, if he thought of anything, as getting to the bottom of Isabelle.
Intoxicated by her scent, his nose, that surrogate pointer, forced its way between her legs. The scent had not even its usual pleasure for him — something murky and contravening in it — yet he pursued it with some urgency, tracked it to its source.
The taste was different too this time — she opened for him to taste, her first compliance in the cramped silence — like a great wine twenty years past its peak, not quite gone bad though beginning to turn.
At any moment a gunshot might come through the window and tear off the top of his head. He thought of that, or the thought touched the edge of consciousness, as he supped at her well. For that space of awareness, he sucked on terror, dying and reviving, frightened to death.
She wanted him on top of her, she whispered, and he was aware at least for that moment that she was there too.
He was, oddly, in no special hurry and she had to tug on his arm to bring him to her, to remind him of her request. And that too, the fucking itself, was as good as he could remember it. He said or meant to say it, his mouth at her ear, hearing gunshots in his dreams as he slept, his weight centered on her.
The bullet took a devious path, wound itself around his head before going in one ear and coming out the other.
It was almost four AM when she woke him, the time in his head corresponding to the clock in the car. She was buttoning his shirt, though that may only have been the last part of it, his pants already restored, fly closed, belt buckled.
When he was finally awake — who could say how long it took? — he felt lightened and refreshed. He started up the car without a word to Isabelle, without even the barest acknowledgement. She curled up in her seat and he covered her with his jacket, his tenderness lasting only for the duration of the gesture. He had woken angry, its object undefined.
The night yielded by degrees. He was more than halfway to London when the cause of his anger clarified, the message deciphering itself as he drove. Isabelle had slept with Max, said intuition, and intuition almost never deceived him. He felt disappointment, not much more than that, grieved privately at the insufficiency of his passion. I ought to break Max in half, he thought. And if not Max, who?
Isabelle was asleep when he arrived at the Holland Park house and he left her as she was — a light coming from the second floor study he wanted to investigate — to go inside. “Don’t leave me,” she called after him as he returned to the car in delayed response.
In sleep, she appeared childlike and fragile, an innocent, unprotected by the disguises of will.
He had difficulty waking her. When he whispered her name a shadow of pain scarred her face. Her eyes opened and closed like a doll’s eyes.