“Whatever you say.”
“And we never slipped into the East Parlour together, and had this conversation.” She perched on the arm of my chair, her face inches from mine, and treated me to a whiff of her perfume. “Oh, Bernie,” she said. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this.”
“You do?”
She leaned in and kissed me, and without thinking about it I kissed back. She was always a good kisser, and she hadn’t lost a step in the week and a half since I’d seen her. I put my arms around her, and she put a hand on my knee for balance.
I guess it didn’t work, though, because the next thing I knew she was in my lap.
“My goodness,” she said, squirming around, and sort of rubbing her body against me like a cat. It was, though, a good deal more interesting than it is when a cat does it.
She moved her hand, then gasped in mock alarm. “Oh, my! Bernie, what have we here?”
“Uh…”
“I should speak sternly to you,” she said, “and tell you to take that upstairs to your wifey. Are you absolutely certain you’re not married, Bernie?”
“You’ve been to my apartment,” I reminded her.
“And made love beneath the fake Mondrian. I’ll never forget that, Bernie.”
“Did it seem like the home of a married man?”
“Hardly. But whether you’re married or not, it’s clear you and your little friend are more than just friends.” Her hand did something artful. “You’re planning on sharing a bed with her this weekend, aren’t you?”
“Well, technically, yes. But-”
“And she’s waiting for you, and you’re down here with me.” She was purring with excitement and delight. “She’s lying awake, and Dakin’s sound asleep, and we’re together, aren’t we?” She sort of flowed from my lap to the floor, as if she were a liquid drawn there by gravity. And she put her hands in my lap, and she put her head in my lap.
I reached to switch off the lamp.
“Poor Dakin,” she said a while later, getting to her feet. “I swore I’d be a faithful wife, and in less than half a day I’ve gone and committed adultery. Or have I?”
“Can’t you remember?”
She ran the tip of her tongue across her upper lip. “I shouldn’t think I’m in great danger of forgetting the act,” she said. “I was just wondering if it qualifies. In terms of adultery, that is. Does what we just did count?”
“Well, what’s adultery? Extramarital sex, right? This was certainly extramarital, and it seems to me it was sexual.”
“Quite,” she said.
“So I guess that makes it adultery.”
“Sitting in your lap was sexual,” she said. “Kissing you was definitely sexual. Rubbing up against you was deliciously sexual. You wouldn’t label any of those acts adulterous, would you?”
“No.”
“It seems to me,” she said, “that anything short of the main event, so to speak, is not exactly adultery.”
“I see, Lettice. In other words, you figure you ought to get off on a technicality.”
“Is it a technicality? Perhaps it is.” She grinned. “In any event,” she said, “you’re the one who got off. I just hope your sweet little nonwife won’t be too disappointed.”
“She’ll get over it,” I said.
“Oh, I do hope so,” she said, and flashed a wicked grin, and blew me a kiss, and left.
CHAPTER Ten
I stayed where I was, under the watchful gaze of the presumptive oryx, and I sat and mused. Was this the sort of thing that went on in English country houses? I swear nothing like it had ever happened in any Agatha Christie novel I ever read. Iris Murdoch, maybe, but not Agatha Christie.
Mine had seemed like such a clear and simple program-or programme, as young Millicent Savage would no doubt prefer it. Step One, get the book. Step Two, go home. But now, with an encounter in the Great Library having led to an interlude in the East Parlour, some sort of reappraisal of the agenda seemed called for.
First off, did we really have to cut out of Cuttleford House first thing in the morning? I’d wanted to avoid an unpleasant confrontation with Lettice, but I’d had that confrontation in spite of myself, and, while any number of adjectives could be pressed into service to describe it, “unpleasant” seemed an unlikely choice. It had been unanticipated, certainly. It had been unsettling, to say the least. But unpleasant?
Hardly that.
My role in the incident was one I would normally have found uncomfortable. There are those who hold that adultery is to adults as infancy is to infants, but I’ve always felt that a wedding ring on her finger places a woman off-limits. I haven’t always walked the walk, and sometimes I have in fact found myself grazing on the wrong side of a Keep Off the Grass sign, but by and large I’ve limited myself to single women.
Otherwise I tend to feel guilty and uneasy, and even if something gets started it doesn’t last long. But now, as I matched the glassy-eyed stare of the oryx with one of my own, an examination of conscience revealed neither guilt nor unease.
I felt terrific.
It certainly didn’t hurt that I’d taken an instant dislike to Dakin Littlefield. I’d loathed him at a glance, and I felt sure that a deeper acquaintance would see the feeling blossom into genuine hatred. One look at him was enough to determine he was no good. He was a cad, a bounder, and a bad hat, and he had a cruel mouth.
I didn’t really feel that I was poaching on posted land. After all, I’d been there first, enjoying a perfectly pleasant affair with Lettice before the son of a bitch came along and married her. Technically, though, I had to admit I was cuckolding him, and I can’t say it bothered me a bit. If anything, it gave me a special satisfaction to fit him with a pair of horns that would have been the envy of the oryx, the ibex, the zebu, and every other four-letter ruminant quadruped that ever stumbled out of a Scrabble dictionary.
If a run-in with Lettice was no longer something I had to take pains to avoid, what was the rush to get out of Cuttleford House? I’d gone to a lot of trouble and expense to get us here, and now that we were here we might as well stick around and enjoy it. There was a lot to enjoy-the food, the company, and the grand house itself, not to mention the odd wee dram of Glen Drumnadrochit. Why miss out on it?
First, though, I had to do something about that book.
In some of the country-house mysteries I’ve read, the houses come equipped with mazes. Characters wander outside and wind up getting lost in the maze. I don’t know if there are many real English houses with mazes, and I don’t know if anybody ever really gets lost in them, but there was no need for a maze on the grounds of Cuttleford House. The interior was a maze all by itself.
I don’t know how many ways there were to get from the East Parlour to the Great Library. I was tracing one of them, or trying to, when a wheelchair rolled out of a hallway on my right and just missed a collision with my foot. I stepped back, startled, and Miss Dinmont, for whom a backward step was an impossibility, shrank against the back of her vehicle and looked quite alarmed.
“Oh, Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said. “You startled me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.”
“But it’s I who should be apologizing,” she said. “Surely the pedestrian has the right of way in these matters.”
“It’s my fault,” I insisted. “I keep looking the wrong way before I step off the curb. I’m American, you see, and I can’t seem to remember that you lot drive on the wrong side of the road.”
“Oh, now, Mr. Rhodenbarr,” she said, and smiled a weary smile, and laughed a weary laugh. She was, I noticed, a pretty woman, albeit an exhausted one. “I was preoccupied,” she said, “or I shouldn’t have come so close to running you down. Have you seen my friend, Miss Hardesty?”
“Not since I saw her with you, and that was hours ago.”
“I think she may have stepped outside,” she said. “She’s mad about the outdoors, you know. And she loves weather.”