“Yes, but waffles...”
“Oh, that—well, it seems to involve her sitting on a couple of tennis racquets for ten minutes. Butter comes into it somewhere as well, for God’s sake.”
“Cultox,” observed Mr Rothermere, “manufacture eighty-two per cent of the world’s margarine. Think of that.”
Kicking off one shoe, she drew on a boot and lay on her back, the leg on erect display. It was, Mr Rothermere noted, a singularly shapely leg. She stroked from knee to thigh. “God, wouldn’t David just love this! He’s kinky as all get out, poor bastard.”
He glanced at the poised camera, then at Julia once more. “Don’t forget you still have tights on.” It was the quiet, unemotional observation of a photographer rather than a seducer.
Mr Rothermere came and stood over her. “Passion without practicality can be self-defeating. Here—let me...”
She closed her eyes, at the same time raising her hips slightly. Gently he peeled towards himself the nylon second skin, bent over, kissed very lightly the gold-downed flesh. Julia’s blind smile was annihilated instantly by her sharp intake of breath.
“I think,” said Mr Rothermere, in a tone of murmurous admiration that was almost entirely genuine, “that I have not seen so attractive a woman for a very long time.”
Julia half-opened one eye. “How long?”
He gave her chin a brief, playful caress. “Since 1956.” The hand passed down the line of her throat, gentle but confident, and curved about her breast. “No, I tell a lie. 1949. In Istanbul.”
She felt cool air invade shoulders, then breasts, and caught herself breathing so rapidly that her mouth was drying, so she closed her lips tight, but almost at once the word “yes” broke through and she went on helplessly repeating it in a series of gasps until the movement of hands over and beneath her had ceased and the cool air was on her whole body, but only for a tiny while until warmth, intense, heavy, possessive, enveloped her. She gave a great sigh and opened her eyes. She was looking straight into the lens of the camera above. There echoed ridiculously in her head the command given at some school photograph ritual. “Say Cheese.” But only for an instant.
Not that it mattered. Mr Rothermere, quite unprofessionally moved by the occasion, had not had the heart to set the delayed shutter release.
He retrieved the situation half an hour later, with all the props in place and with a degree of eager cooperation on Julia’s part that persuaded him to the happy conclusion that the day’s work had made him a friend.
Chapter Seven
Grandma Tring stood square on her stocky old legs in Flaxborough Market Place and stared up at the gyrating modules of Space Shot. Her face was brown and wondrously wrinkled, with a shrewd, sucked-in mouth, a nose much punished by a lifetime of reckless inquiry and assertion, and a chin like a sea captain’s. Lending shade to her eyes, quick and black as rain beetles, was the last surviving example of what had been standard headgear among the older women of the harbour district when Grandma Tring was born there eighty-two years ago—a man’s flat cloth cap.
For a while, she watched the coloured cars climb, dip and revolve, and listened to the whoops and squeals of their more excited passengers. Then she turned, spat, and trundled off through the fair towards East Street.
Grandma Tring paid scant attention to the rest of the huge mechanical contrivances that now dominated Flaxborough Fair. They seemed to her to offer ordeals rather than enjoyment. What had happened to the Golden Horses, the great shining prancers, with red nostrils flaring like Charlie Dugbine’s used to do when she let him take her round the back of the hut beside the Field Street level crossing, and all the little flags flying on the top, and the painted pictures of cowboys and Neptune and Roman chariots, and the twisty brass rails going up and down with the horses, and the boom and blare and ting-a-ling of the steam organ as you went round past it and saw the ginger-bread stall again and then the Try-your-Strength with its gong in the sky, and then the girls from the seed warehouse, waving, and up came the steam organ once again and a fleeting chance to see all the bits of mirror on it and the wonderfully painted model musicians working like mad to thump drums and ring bells? Where were the stately Twin Yachts, hanging magically in mid-air for a moment before swinging past each other and up again with a gentlemanly little double cough of steam? And how, for heaven’s sake, did young men nowadays put their girls in an itching and asking when there were no swingboats to stand up in and bunch their muscles while they heaved on ropes like blue and scarlet catkins until the girls screamed for them to stop but not really wanting them to because it was so exciting to see Saint Laurence’s tower keep turning upside down and to know that the lads on the coconut shies were looking up their flying skirts?
As soon as she could push her way through the crowd at the north end of the Market Place, Grandma Tring escaped through a side street into the relative quiet of Priory Lane and thence stumped along to Fen Street.
Despite the Tring family’s long history of conflict with authority, its matriarchal head had no qualms about entering a police station. On the contrary, she seemed to feel that as regular customers, so to speak, of the law, she and hers were entitled to some privilege in the matter of invoking it.
She ignored the inquiries hatch and went up to the counter behind which Police Constable Braine was doing some pencil-chewing.
She rapped on the counter. Braine took the pencil out of his mouth and scowled. He looked like a bespectacled toad.
“I want to see the head lad,” announced Grandma Tring.
“You want to what?”
“Come on, duck. Git off yer arse. I want the bean pole with the yeller hair. The inspector. And nobody else. Not that wet bloody errand boy of his, neither.”
Constable Braine’s fury at being called “duck” by this unseemly old besom was ameliorated somewhat by the salty disrespect offered Sergeant Love, whose equable disposition was in Braine’s opinion a most unpolicemanly failing.
“Name?” He reached grudgingly for the telephone.
A disdainful silence.
“Mrs Tring, is it?”
The old woman’s back stiffened. She wagged a bony finger. “Don’t you play silly buggers with me, son.”
Braine pressed a key on the switchboard. “Miss Tring is here, sir. She’d like to see you if it’s convenient.”
To Braine’s deep disgust, Inspector Purbright not only agreed to see Grandma Tring at once, but asked that she be made comfortable in an adjoining room in order to be saved a climb upstairs. Most galling of all was the instruction to get her a cup of tea if she wanted one.
The old woman followed her reluctant guide and tested all the chairs in the room before settling into the largest and least dilapidated. Braine watched gloomily from the doorway. At a moment when her inquisitive gaze was directed at a spot safely remote from himself, he mouth-mimed the question “Tea?” (Of course I asked her, sir—she ignored me.)