‘You took it,’ Evie says, astonished at the cheek of it and the ease with which the theft was accomplished.
‘You ave it back, if you come tonight,’ the girl calls.
‘She’ll have it back right now,’ David replies and runs after her, chasing her across the bare flower borders while Evie watches, laughing. He corners her in the littered ground behind a boarded-up café.
The child’s hat has slid from her head and dangles on its cord, exposing a tangle of yellow hair.
Evie comes forward to help him, arms spread to block her escape, while the girl gazes about serenely, all the time in the world, figuring her next move.
Then makes a bolt for it.
They reach down to grab her but are too slow. Evie loses her balance (something inside is still not right) and collapses against the rotting shell of the building, bringing down the end of a sagging awning and a gush of freezing rain water, while the girl charges through the gap between David and a heap of broken folding chairs.
David turns and follows and corners her again, but if the girl really wants to escape them, she is agile enough to have surely been able to do so.
‘I’ll call the police,’ he says, although from his voice it is clear he never would (or could) and is enjoying the game as much as she is.
The child laughs. ‘La police not bon, juste fuckers.’ Telling him what they already know. ‘They not aider the likes of you.’ She curls a loose strand of hair around a knuckle like silk thread around a bobbin. ‘But je not want get you into any more shit. You ees alone ere with no’un t’aid yer.’ Evie has never imagined anyone like this. Her mouth is a sewer and she should be repelled but she finds herself transfixed.
Evie moves in close, cutting off her escape. The child’s dog, which has managed to stick close to her heels throughout the chase, gazes up at her with disappointed eyes.
‘Besides,’ the girl continues, glancing behind her, ‘you ain’t clapped Pompie when he ees in a fury. He can tear un grand homme adult into two, leaving heem in bloody parts.’ She grins, the tips of her eye teeth showing cunningly over her lip, as if she might grab Evie by her outstretched arm and gnaw on it.
‘Time to return it,’ David says sternly.
The child smiles and tucks the ribbon away in her pocket, making it obvious that this is what she is doing. Her pink lips form a satiny bow.
‘Just give it back. It’s not yours.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Evie intervenes. ‘Let her keep it, she’s only little, she means no harm.’ Then, as the girl’s guard drops away, she pounces.
It is a clever move and the child, so full of her own tricks, is herself tricked; Evie grips her and searches inside her skirt. Despite the tight openings, stitched to suit small hands, Evie finds the interior capacious with a multitude of hidden pockets.
She pulls out her ribbon, bringing with it in a tangle a lady’s scented handkerchief out of which bounces a gold ring.
The child fights free and backs away through the stiff weeds and they stare at one another, both a little out of breath. The look between them holds for longer than it should, neither willing to break it off.
The tall man in pantaloons strides over. ‘Any trouble here?’ he asks gruffly, rubbing his jaw and smearing his lipstick. It is unclear which party he is asking.
The child’s face cracks into a smile, perhaps to pacify him but it feels to Evie that it is actually for her. Dimples pop in her cheeks, ‘No Pompie, tout est bien.’
Leaving the park, Evie and David continue to wander without knowing where they are going. The city is huge, the streets all strangely similar, dotted with shuttered shops and leafless trees. As they walk, they talk about children.
‘A lot came to visit me,’ he says. ‘Brought by their parents. Spoilt brats mostly who just giggled spitefully and stared. No one like that one.’
‘She was naughty,’ Evie muses, ‘but also very sweet.’ Feeling warm inside, she absent-mindedly links her arm through his, as she used to with Matthew.
They need somewhere to recharge, so take a room in a small hotel, the angled facade of which is held up by scaffolding. Alone again, with the door closed and the key turned, Evie feels almost secure. She lies back on the pillow, her head full of the girl, recalling her sly stare.
What sort of existence would the child have? Probably not a particularly sweet one. She should have let the poor thing keep the silly ribbon. What harm would it have done?
Evie wakes in the afternoon to find David close beside her. The bed is small and his shoulders have wedged her to the edge and one of his heavy arms has fallen across her.
To her surprise she becomes aware of his, what Matthew with boyish delicacy referred to as his ‘chap’, pressing into her thigh and, reaching behind, she slips her fingers under the waistband of his shorts. His body shifts, his grip around her tightening. He goes rigid.
Then he recoils, knees in her back, pitching her forward over the mattress-edge to land on her hands on the floor.
He pulls himself upright and sits, staring forward, face flushed.
Evie slowly gets to her feet.
Despite the shock of the fall, it is difficult not to see the funny side. ‘It’s all right,’ she says. What had stemmed from a combination of straightforward curiosity and a throb of loneliness has developed a life of its own. In some respects, she is as chaste as he is – a widow who has known only a husband’s touch. But she is unable now to call a halt to what is to all intents a seduction. I am a seductress, she thinks wryly. It is a role which previously she would have found it unseemly to admit, but one which, within the confines of marriage, she was nevertheless designed to perform.
David’s face is an agony of confusion, but right now her own arousal is clamouring her on.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ Evie says. She moves around the bed end, slowly, so as not to frighten him further, advancing until they are less than twelve inches apart. She draws her vest over her head, watching him watch, and lifting his large smooth hands, she places them over her breasts.
‘It’s all right, I know what to do. This will be nicer than anything you have ever imagined, you must just trust me.’ She stands on tiptoes, laces her fingers behind his head, and tilts his face down so that she can reach his mouth.
29
Moving Evie’s head to one side, David unfastens her fingers from his neck and gently guides her body away. It is the tenderness of the rejection, the firm softness of his touch, which makes it so painful, and so embarrassing. She can’t look at him, nor does she know what to do with her hands which he has gently returned to her sides, where the palms throb hotly.
‘What is the matter?’ she asks, flush with embarrassment that her inexperience has allowed her to misread what she took to be signs.
David shrugs and blinks. His mouth falls at the corners. ‘It is not you, it is me. What they did.’
‘What did they do?’ she asks impatiently.
‘Things.’
‘What things?’ She wants him to be open with her. Find a way to shift the sense of failure, despite being nervous that she may not want to hear what he has to say.
‘They’d find me after the show was over for the day,’ he says quietly.
‘Who?’ she asks, still in a state of confusion and not cottoning on to what he is trying to tell her.
‘All of them. All of them,’ he repeats, and he begins to list the multitude of physicists, psychologists, uniformed museum attendants, janitors, wealthy sponsors and the neglected wives and daughters of wealthy sponsors, who over the years have taken advantage of his being alone at night and restrained, and straddled his lap as if he was nothing more than an elaborate sex aid.