Julia returned to where she had left her car. All the lights in the office block were on, although most of the staff had gone home an hour ago. Through one window she saw a pair of women in pinafores and dust caps. They were vigorously up-ending waste paper bins and lashing desk tops with dusters.
A row of three windows belonged to the boardroom. It, too, was lighted, but the curtains of blue and gold striped satin had been drawn. That was where David would be now, with McGregor probably, and Donaldson, and perhaps chinless Higgins, punishing the pink gin and replaying games of golf.
Julia passed into the reception lobby. A girl was seated behind a desk that consisted substantially of a sheet of black glass. She had a phone beside her, but nothing else. Julia thought how sad she looked, as though she had been kept behind after school for something she hadn’t done.
“Oh dear, I’m afraid he’s in conference,” the girl said, suddenly attentive but looking more pained than ever. She extended a timorous hand towards the phone. “Would you like me to tell him you’re here?”
“No, that’s all right, Eileen. I’m a bit early, actually. He is expecting me. I’ll come back.”
Along the southern boundary of the site occupied by Doggigrub was a path that once had been a bridleway between Northgate and farms on Heston Down. It now was little used and some stretches had become overgrown, but it did not require much diligence, even on a dark evening, to follow this path as far as the opening in the perimeter fence that had been made some years before by dwellers in adjoining Twilight Close and since renewed by them so perseveringly after each repair that the factory management had finally conceded victory. What the management had not done was to solve the mystery of why the inmates of a local authority’s home for the aged should want to have access to the grounds of a pet food manufactory. Many suggestions, some sinister, had been offered. All were wide of the truth, which was simply that the pleasantly landscaped and planted area provided for a few at a time of the old men and women a secluded refuge from the strictures and (much worse) solicitous jollities of their captors.
Julia reached the gap in the fence without having seen anybody or encountered worse obstacles than a patch of thistles and a number of elder bushes whose berries, hanging in shadow at face height, had brushed unexpectedly across her cheeks like bunches of little clammy finger ends.
She climbed through into the driveway of Twilight Close and walked swiftly and as quietly as she could to the rear exit, which was used only by tradesmen making deliveries to the kitchens during the day.
The big yellow Fiat was waiting on the opposite side of Leicester Avenue, twenty yards down.
Julia hurried to the car and got in.
Mr Rothermere, swaddled in warm air, cigar smoke and a Mozart quintet, gave her a sideways beam of welcome.
“No one saw you leave?”
“Not a soul.”
He nodded and squeezed her thigh.
The journey through Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire into Norfolk took two and a half hours. For some of the time Julia slept, leaning lightly against Mr Rothermere’s shoulder. She did not snore, a fact he found curiously endearing; indeed, twice during this interlude he looked down at the sleep-smoothed face with sadness and something that could have been self-reproach.
They stopped in Norwich for a leisurely dinner amidst oak and stone and pewter and American Express cards. Mr Rothermere played a solo on the wine list with characteristic panache, a performance he followed up by recounting how the Gironde Maquis had sabotaged a consignment of wine for Germany by putting into it corn plasters that fastidious Nazis would suppose to have floated off the feet of the grape treaders.
“One actually did get into a bottle that was delivered to Goering.” He raised a finger, as if admonishing her laughter. “No, it really did.” Somewhere in those jauntily curled whiskers was a grin, surely? She began, warily; “Were you...I mean, I haven’t really gathered...” But always the barrier of modesty. “God, it was so long ago. And so dreadfully unimportant.” She did not press him. Some of his memories must be pretty terrible.
As soon as Julia climbed wearily out of the car and stood on the empty forecourt of the little Cromer hotel, she was aware of the long breathing of the sea. She was slapped fully awake by the pungency of salt and wet sand and mats of weed. She stared at the dark that hung, like a heavy curtain, beyond the cliff’s edge. Such intensity of blackness compelled a straining to discern the slightest pinpoint of light that would make it credible. After a while, Julia saw a tiny gleam, then another, fainter. Ships, she supposed, far out. Then high up, a diamond speck, two, six, a dozen. A glittering frost of stars. Feeling foolishly relieved, she turned and followed her escort into the hotel.
The woman who appeared in response to Mr Rothermere’s shaking a little silver handbell at the reception counter was a florid-complexioned, dumpy woman with a round face and beaklike nose that gave her the profile of a parrot. He entered in the register the names of Mr and Mrs M. H. Rothermere, Greenfield Lodge, Well Road, Hampstead, London, N.W.3.
“I,” said the parroty lady to Julia, “am Mrs Cartwright,” and she stared at her with great interest.
“How do you do,” said Julia.
“My wife will be staying on for a few days,” said Mr Rothermere. “I, alas, must return to town first thing tomorrow. I did mention that in my letter, didn’t I?”
Mrs Cartwright inclined her head. “Mr Cartwright’s Army,” she said to Julia. After a pause, the awkwardness of which made Julia wonder if some sort of password was expected of her, she added emphatically: “Major.” Again there was silence.
Mr Rothermere took charge. Putting an arm round his supposed spouse’s shoulder, he leered fondly down at her and said: “Up the wooden hill you go, little woman. I shouldn’t think you’ll need much rocking tonight.”
Upon hearing which unpromising sentiment, and not aware from where she stood that it was belied by a hand cupped about Julia’s left buttock, Mrs Cartwright turned and sought out the key to their room. At the same time, she hooted two or three times, summoning thereby a stringy, sandy-haired man in khaki shirt and trousers, who took the cases upstairs.
Mr Rothermere followed, with his little woman, a quartern bottle of brandy, two glasses, and the gratitude of Mrs Cartwright for his understanding the problems posed by shortage of staff.
“She does know why I’m here, doesn’t she?” Julia demanded anxiously as soon as they were alone.
“But of course.”
“She seemed to be making heavy weather of the Mr and Mrs thing.”
He smiled. “Your own guilty feelings. Oh, and very nice, too. My analyst maintains that sex without guilt is like Bierwurst without gherkin.”
“When will you be seeing my husband?” Now that the excitement of planning, decision and action was subsiding, Julia felt an emptiness, a bewilderment, that a first brandy was disappointingly slow to dispel.