“I’m not Greville.”
“No... Would he mind?”
“I shouldn’t think so.” I moved my hand, rubbing a little. “Do you want to go on?”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” I said.
She sat up fast and put her arms round my neck in a sort of released compulsion.
“I do want this,” she said. “I’ve wanted it all day. I’ve been pretending to myself, telling myself I shouldn’t, but yes, I do want this passionately, and I know you’re not Greville, I know it will be different, but this is the only way I can love him... and can you bear it, can you understand it, if it’s him I love?”
I understood it well, and I minded not at all.
I said, smiling, “Just don’t call me Greville. It would be the turn-off of the century.”
She took her face away from the proximity of my ear and looked me in the eyes, and her lips too, after a moment, were smiling.
“Derek,” she said deliberately, “make love to me. Please.”
“Don’t beg,” I said.
I put my mouth on hers and took my brother’s place.
As a memorial service it was quite a success. I lay in the dark laughing in my mind at that disgraceful pun, wondering whether or not to share it with Clarissa.
The catharsis was over, and her tears. She lay with her head on my chest lightly asleep, contented, as far as I could tell, with the substitute loving. Women said men were not all the same in the dark, and I knew both where I’d surprised her and failed her, known what I’d done like Greville and not done like Greville from the instinctive releases and tensions of her reactions.
Greville, I now knew, had been a lucky man, though whether he had himself taught her how to give exquisite pleasure was something I couldn’t quite ask. She knew, though, and she’d done it, and the feeling of her featherlight tattooing fingers on the base of my spine at the moment of climax had been a revelation. Knowledge marched on, I thought. Next time, with anyone else, I’d know what to suggest.
Clarissa stirred and I turned my wrist over, seeing the fluorescent hands of my watch.
“Wake up,” I said affectionately. “It’s Cinderella time.”
“Ohh...”
I stretched out a hand and turned on a bedside light. She smiled at me sleepily, no doubts remaining.
“That was all right,” she said.
“Mm. Very.”
“How’s the ankle?”
“What ankle?”
She propped herself on one elbow, unashamed of nakedness, and laughed at me. She looked younger and sweeter, and I was seeing, I knew, what Greville had seen, what Greville had loved.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “my friend’s wedding will be over by six or so. Can I come here again?” She put her fingers lightly on my mouth to stop me answering at once. “This time was for him,” she said. “Tomorrow for us. Then I’ll go home.”
“Forever?”
“Yes, I think so. What I had with Greville was unforgettable and unrepeatable. I decided on the train coming down here that whatever happened with you, or didn’t happen, I would live with Henry, and do my best there.”
“I could easily love you,” I said.
“Yes, but don’t.”
I knew she was right. I kissed her lightly.
“Tomorrow for us,” I agreed. “Then goodbye.”
When I went into the office in the morning, Annette told me crossly that Jason hadn’t turned up for work, nor had he telephoned to say he was ill.
Jason had been prudent, I thought. I’d have tossed him down the elevator shaft, insolence, orange hair and all, given half an ounce of provocation.
“He won’t be coming back,” I said, “so we’ll need a replacement.”
She was astonished. “You can’t sack him for not turning up. You can’t sack him for anything without paying compensation.”
“Stop worrying,” I said, but she couldn’t take that advice.
June came zooming into Greville’s office waving a tabloid newspaper and looking at me with wide incredulous eyes.
“Did you know you’re in the paper? Lucky to be alive, it says here. You didn’t say anything about it!”
“Let’s see,” I said, and she laid the Daily Sensation open on the black desk.
There was a picture of the smash in which one could more or less see my head inside the Daimler, but not recognizably. The headline read “Driver shot, jockey lives,” and the piece underneath listed the lucky-to-be-alive passengers as Mr. and Mrs. Ostermeyer of Pittsburgh, America, and ex-champion steeplechase jockey Derek Franklin. The police were reported to be interested in a gray Volvo seen accelerating from the scene, and also to have recovered two bullets from the bodywork of the Daimler. After that tidbit came a rehash of the Hungerford massacre and a query, “Is this a copycat killing?” and finally a picture of Simms looking happy: “Survived by wife and two daughters who were last night being comforted by relatives.”
Poor Simms. Poor family. Poor every shot victim in Hungerford.
“It happened on Sunday,” June exclaimed, “and you came here on Monday and yesterday as if nothing was wrong. No wonder you looked knackered.”
“June!” Annette disapproved of the word.
“Well, he did. Still does.” She gave me a critical, kindly, motherly-sisterly inspection. “He could have been killed, and then what would we all have done here?”
The dismay in Annette’s face was a measure, I supposed, of the degree to which I had taken over. The place no longer felt like quicksand to me either and I was beginning by necessity to get a feel of its pulse.
But there was racing at Cheltenham that day. I turned the pages of the newspaper and came to the runners and riders. That was where my name belonged, not on Saxony Franklin checks. June looked over my shoulder and understood at least something of my sense of exile.
“When you go back to your own world,” she said, rephrasing her thought and asking it seriously, “what will we do here?”
“We have a month,” I said. “It’ll take me that time to get fit.” I paused. “I’ve been thinking about that problem, and, er, you might as well know, both of you, what I’ve decided.”
They both looked apprehensive, but I smiled to reassure them.
“What we’ll do,” I said, “is this. Annette will have a new title, which will be Office Manager. She’ll run things generally and keep the keys.”
She didn’t look displeased. She repeated “Office Manager” as if trying it on for size.
I nodded. “Then I’ll start looking from now on for a business expert, someone to oversee the cash flow and do the accounts and try to keep us afloat. Because it’s going to be a struggle, we can’t avoid that.”
They both looked shocked and disbelieving. Cash flow seemed never to have been a problem before.
“Greville did buy diamonds,” I said regretfully, “and so far we are only in possession of a quarter of them. I can’t find out what happened to the rest. They cost the firm altogether one and a half million dollars, and we’ll still owe the bank getting on for three-quarters of that sum when we’ve sold the quarter we have.”
Their mouths opened in unhappy unison.
“Unless and until the other diamonds turn up,” I said, “we have to pay interest on the loan and persuade the bank that somehow or other we’ll climb out of the hole. So we’ll want someone we’ll call the Finance Manager, and we’ll pay him out of part of what used to be Greville’s own salary.”
They began to understand the mechanics, and nodded.
“Then,” I said, “we need a gemologist who has a feeling for stones and understands what the customers like and need. There’s no good hoping for another Greville, but we will create the post of Merchandise Manager, and that,” I looked at her, “will be June.”