“You won’t ever stay away from me like that again?”
“I am a poor substitute, Gemma,” he said.
“I need,” she said soffly, “another kind of loving to make me forget.”
He guessed at what she meant but didn’t know what reply to make, so he sat silently with her, holding her hand, until at last her hand grew limp and she sank back against the pillows. He switched off the bed lamp and stretched himself beside her but on top of the covers. Presently her steady regular breathing told him that she was asleep.
The luminous dial of his watch showed half past ten. It seemed much later, as if a lifetime had passed since he left Grace and drove out here through the damp, rain-filled mist. The room was cold, perfumed and thick-aired and cold. Her hand lay loosely in his. He slid his hand away and edged across the bed to get up and leave.
Wary, even in sleep, she murmured, “Don’t leave me, Mike.” Thick with sleep, her voice held a note of terror, of dread that she might again be abandoned.
“I won’t leave you.” He made up his mind quickly and decisively. “I’ll stay all night.”
Shivering, be stripped off his clothes and got into bed beside her. It seemed quite natural to lie as he had lain beside Jean, his body curled about hers, his left arm around her waist, clasping the hand which again had grown possessive and demanding. Although cold to him, his body must have felt warm to her, for she sighed with a kind of happiness and relaxed against him.
He thought he would never sleep or, if he did, that he would fall immediately into one of those dreams of his. But the way they were lying, side by side, was what he had been used to in his happy years and had missed bitterly in the last wretched one. It brought him desire, but at the same time it lulled him. While wondering how he could bear this continuing continence, he fell asleep.
It was just beginning to get light when he awoke to find the other half of the bed empty but still warm. She was sitting by the window, wrapped in her shawl, a big album with gilt clasps open on her lap. He guessed that she was looking, in the first light of dawn, at pictures of her son, and he felt a powerful black jealousy.
For what seemed a long time he watched her, almost hating the child who came between them and drew his mother away with a ghostly subtle hand. She was slowly turning the pages, pausing sometimes to stare downwards with a passionate intensity. A resentment which he knew was totally unjust made him will her to look at him, to forget the child and remember the man who longed to be her lover.
At last she lifted her head and their eyes met. She said nothing and Burden didn’t speak, for he knew that if he did it would be to say cruel indefensible things. They gazed at each other in the pale grey morning light, and then, getting up silently, she drew the curtains. They were of brocade, old and frayed but still retaining their rich plum colour and, filtering through them, the light in the room looked purplish. She dropped the shawl and stood still in this coloured shadow-light so that he might look at her.
Her red hair seemed to have grown purple, but the colour hardly touched her body, which was dazzling white. He gazed at her in a kind of wonder, content for the moment to do nothing but gaze. This ivory woman, still and smiling now, was nothing like his lascivious dream woman, or did she resemble the distraught and weary creature he had comforted to sleep. The child had almost vanished from his jealousy and, he believed, from her thoughts. It was hardly possible to imagine that this exquisite firm body had ever borne a child.
Only a little stabbing doubt remained.
“Not out of gratitude, Gemma,” he said. “Not to reward me.”
She moved then and came close to him. “I never even thought of that. That would be to cheat”
“To forget, then? Is that what you want?”
“Isn’t all love about forgetting?” she said. “Isn’t it always a lovely escape from - from hatefulness?”
“I don’t know.” He put out his arms to her. “I don’t care.” Gasping at the feel of her, here the slenderness and there the swell of flesh, he said breathlessly, “I shall hurt you. I can’t help it, it’s been so long for me.”
“And for me,” she said. “It will be like the first time. Oh, Mike, kiss me, make me happy. Make me happy for a little while . . .”
Chapter 12
“Not bad news?” said Dr. Crocker. “About the Lawrence boy, I mean?”
Morosely eyeing the pile of papers on his desk,
Wexford said, “I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“You haven’t got a lead, then? I was sure there must be something when I passed Mike driving out of Chiltern Avenue at seven-thirty this morning.” He breathed heavily on one of Wexford’s window-panes and began drawing one of his recurrent diagrams. “I wonder what he was doing?” he said thoughtfully.
“Why ask me? I’m not his keeper.” Wexford glared at the doctor and at his drawing of a human pancreas. “I might ask you what you were doing, come to that.”
“A patient. Doctors always have an excuse.”
“So do policemen,” Wexford retorted.
“I doubt if Mike was ministering to a fellow who’d been struck down with stroke. Worst case I’ve come across since they called me out to that poor old boy who collapsed on Stowerton station platform back in February. Did I ever tell you about that? Chap had been staying here on holiday, got to the station and then found he’d left one of his cases behind in this hotel or whatever it was. Went back for it, got in a bit of a flutter and the next thing . . .”
Wexford let out an angry bellow. “So what? Why tell me? I thought you were supposed to treat your patients in confidence. I’ll have a stroke myself if you go on like that.”
“It was just that possibility,” said Crocker sweetly, “that inspired my little narrative.” He dotted in the Islets of Langerhans with his little finger. “Want a fresh prescription for those tablets of yours?”
“No, I don’t. I’ve got hundreds of the damned things left.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have,” said Crocker, pointing a damp finger at him. “You can’t have been taking them regularly.”
“Go away. Get lost. Haven’t you anything better to do than deface my windows with your nasty anatomical studies?”
“Just going.” The doctor made a dancing exit, pausing in the doorway to favour the chief inspector with what seemed to Wexford a meaningless wink.
“Silly fool,” Wexford remarked to the empty room. But Crocker’s visit had left him with an uneasy feeling. To rid himself of it, he began to read the reports the Metropolitan Police had sent him on Gemma Lawrence’s friends.
For the most part they appeared to be in the theatrical profession or on its fringes, but hardly a name was familiar to him. His younger daughter had just left drama school and through her Wexford had heard of many actors and actresses whose names had never been in lights or the print of the Radio Times. None of them appeared in this list and he was aware of what they did only because “actor” or “assistant stage manager” or “model” was written after almost every name.
They were an itinerant crowd, mostly - in Wexford’s own official terminology - of no fixed abode. Half a dozen had been convicted on charges of possessing drugs or of allowing cannabis to be smoked on their premises; a further two or three fined for conduct likely to lead to a breach of the peace. Demonstrating or taking their clothes off in the Albert Hall, Wexford supposed. None were harbouring John Lawrence; none showed by their past histories or their present tendencies a propensity to violence or perverted inclination. From reading between the lines, he gathered that, rather than desire the company of a child, they would go to almost any lengths to avoid having one.