Suckers

She continued to speak in the same mild, even voice as before. 'You must understand,' she said, 'that Duncan is mine. He always has been mine and he always will be mine. He is the only thing — the only thing — I care about in this wretched existence, and if you interfere again I will kill you.'

She dropped me back into the chair and turned away in disgust. 'You smell like a slaughterhouse. If you wish to survive the night, you had better get my Hatman to take you home. Now get out.'

Back in the concrete-lined room, Grauman was sitting with his hands behind his head and ostrich boots up on the leather upholstery. He watched with a disinterested expression as my knees gave way and I collapsed on to the seat opposite and took a number of very slow, very deep breaths, trying to slow down my galloping pulse.

'The headmistress was strict, huh?'

Her last words were still echoing in my head. The journey to W11 stretched in front of me like an endless void and I knew I couldn't make it on my own. 'She said you're to take me home.'

'But of course,' he said, looking at his watch. 'Say in about one hour. Then we can get a lift. I have no wish to negotiate the London Underground. Can you walk?'

I nodded.

'Then perhaps you would care to inspect the penthouse while we wait?' I nodded again, not really listening. He could have broken every single one of my fingers just then and I wouldn't have felt a thing.

He got up and disappeared for a few minutes. I breathed in and out, counting slowly. When he came back he was wearing some kind of shit-eating grin.

As the lift shot upward, I felt the silence of the tomb fall away from my ears. It was replaced by a rapid-fire popping. 'The hospitality suite,' Grauman announced as the door slid open. 'Fiftieth floor.' We stepped out on to a black marble floor which reflected the floor-to-ceiling windows. The city stretched out in all directions, bright lights on a matt black background. 'Hampstead,' said Grauman, waving his arms like a ringmaster. 'Westminster. Crystal Palace.'

'Very impressive,' I said, wishing I could get more worked up about it.

'Let me get you a drink. I mean a real drink, none of that Profondo Rosso, or whatever they call it. You tried it, yes? And it was the vilest thing you have ever tasted, am I right? I too have tried it, and it was completely revolting. Perhaps you have started to wonder how anyone can ever develop a taste for such unpleasant stuff. I ask myself such questions all the time.'

I eyed him warily as he produced a bottle of Bollinger from the refrigerated bar. 'What is there to celebrate?'

'A new era,' He said, removing the wire and easing the cork out with his thumbs. 'A new city — one in which the trains run on time. And a new collaborative spirit. I gather Murasaki offered you a job.'

'Sort of,' I said, still suspicious. He was being too chummy by half.

The cork came out with a gentle phut and he filled a couple of glasses and handed me one. 'To this new job of yours, whatever it turns out to be,' he said, raising his glass. I raised mine back and took a sip and instantly felt a whole lot better. Grauman lowered the bottle into a bucket and packed it with ice. 'Let us sit over here for a while and savour the view,' he said, settling down into a seat by one of the windows and patting the empty place next to him.

I hesitated, feeling manipulated. 'Did Violet tell you to bring me up here?'

He seemed genuinely puzzled. 'Of course not. Why should she?'

'You're being very friendly all of a sudden.'

'That is because I have realized we are no longer enemies, Dora dear. We are on the same side.'

'Uh-huh,' I said. I'd heard that one before. I sat down, but not where he'd suggested. I maintained a safe distance.

'You are going back to Notting Hill Gate tonight?'

I nodded.

'And you will see Duncan Fender?'

'Perhaps.'

Grauman rocked gently back and forth, tapping the glass against his front teeth. After a while he said, 'What I am about to say must go no further. You understand?'

I said I understood.

'You will not be surprised to know that I do not want them to get together. Not again.'

'Yes, I've gathered that.'

He hummed and hahed for a bit, then said, 'And I know that you do not want them to get together either.'

'That's right.'

'So we are wanting the same thing.'

'I suppose so. Same as before.'

He bared his horrible teeth at me. 'But this time you will not double-cross me.'

'Wouldn't dream of it.'

'Good,' he said. 'Have some more champagne.'

I held my glass out and he topped it up. I said, 'Perhaps it would have been better if you'd told me more about what was going on. I don't like feeling like a pawn in someone else's master plan.'

'Of course you don't. And neither do I. So what would you like to know?'

'What's in it for you?'

'Ah,' he said. 'You want to know that? It's a long story.'

'Tell me,' I said. So he did. The way he told it, there were these two women. The first woman was more than three hundred years old. The second woman, by comparison, was a stripling — in her early thirties — but she was very beautiful and very talented. They loved each other very much, these two women — the love that dares not speak its name and so on. The elder had long since grown weary of her endless existence and despaired of ever finding a companion who would rekindle in her breast the fading embers of human feeling. The younger was eager to taste everything that life had to offer. She sensed the elder woman would be able to give her everything, and more. So the elder prepared to initiate her lover into the mysteries of the inhuman condition, but the younger said, 'Wait. First I must have a baby.' And the elder of the women said, 'Where you are going, babies don't matter.' But her protegee was insistent — she had to experience this miraculous act of giving birth, before it was too late.

'This is 1947,' Grauman said, 'and we are in Paris. Now you must imagine this cute little baby with curly blond hair. He has lost his mama and papa in the air-raids on Berlin. And the elder of the women thinks, ah ha, I will adopt the cute little orphan baby with the curly blond hair and present her to my protegee, whose mothering instincts will thus be assuaged and she will think no more about becoming pregnant.

'And so she does this. And for a while the cute little boy with the curly blond hair does the trick, and the two women dote on him, and he in turn adores them both. But alas, the younger woman becomes broody once again, and this time she will not be denied. "I must have a baby," she cries, "a baby of my very own." And so the elder of the two fixes things up once again. This time, she arranges for her protegee to be made pregnant. She had carefully selected the man who will do this; he is feckless, an artist and a notorious womanizer who has already fathered several illegitimate children by different women, and abandoned them all. He is perfect, she thinks. And so, her beautiful, talented young protegee is encouraged to sleep with this man, and so she does, and she even insists on marrying him because she does not wish her child to be illegitimate, and by and by she finds she is indeed pregnant.'

Grauman topped our glasses up with more champagne, lit my cigarette, and continued. 'Unfortunately for Clara, and despite her very great wisdom, she has been too long divorced from the vagaries of human nature, and her plan begins to go wrong. The beautiful Marguerite is now, what? Thirty-six, thirty-seven years old? This is old for a first pregnancy, am I right? And she has a very difficult time — a very difficult time indeed. And the father, who up until now has lived up to his feckless reputation, suddenly becomes very solicitous, for he too has fallen in love with the beautiful, talented Marguerite — as who would not? And now he begins to take an unexpected interest in the welfare of his wife, and in the development of his new-born son, and Marguerite is filled with mother-love, and for the child's sake, she finds herself responding to her husband's overtures.'