"There's a taxi waiting," she told me. "It's all right." She smoothed some hair away from my eyes, her touch like silk. "But I was going to drive —»
"You rest," she said. "You probably had too much wine last night, anyway. The taxi really is waiting." She slipped her hand under the covers, held my penis as she kissed me, then slipped away as I fell forward, trying to embrace her, hold her, keep her.
"Ashley!" I said desperately. She was at the door.
"Yes?" she said.
"I didn't dream that… signal last night, did I?"
She laughed. "Nope. Meant every letter; every word. With all my heart." One brow flicked. "Amongst other organs." She tipped her head to one side, eyebrows raised. "And you?"
"The same," I gulped.
She looked down at the floor, then back at me, still smiling.
"Good. Well, we can take it from there, okay?"
"I'll write every day!" I told her. "Don't be ridiculous," she laughed, with one shake of her head. "Just pass those exams."
"They'll be over by mid-June," I said, more to keep her there in my sight for a few seconds longer that for any other reason.
"Then I'll be back in mid-June," she said.
She pulled her black gloves from her jacket pockets and put them on. "Bye, Prentice." She blew me a kiss.
"Bye," I gulped. She closed the door. I flopped back, stunned, staring at the glittering red chandelier.
I jumped out of bed as the front door banged closed; I tore downstairs bollock-naked and waved to her from one of the drawing room windows, which went from about human knee level to giraffe's head level.
She saw me; I could see her laughing. She pushed the window down and waved, and pointed to my groin and made a shocked expression as the cab started away. The driver saw me too and looked amused and shook his head. The cab drove off around the curbed terrace. I opened the window and leaned out, waving, and Ashley pushed the cab's window right down and stuck her head and arms out and blew me kisses through her wildly waving, slip-streamed hair all the way until the cab rounded the corner and disappeared.
I sat down on the parquet, staring at the white gauziness of the huge net curtains, all my muscles complaining, my head pounding, my penis tingling, my flesh goose-pimpling against the cool wood of the floor. I shook my head. I collapsed back, banging my already internally abused head on a Persian rug. The carpet's pile was luxuriously deep however, so it didn't hurt as much as it might.
I looked up at the ornately carved wooden ceiling, not entirely sure what to think. Then I started to laugh, lying there in the enormous room, naked, tummy wobbling, laughing like an idiot and hoping the resemblance ended there.
"Oh well," I said, laughing, to the ceiling. "Here's hoping."
"Good; you're getting sensible," mum said. She walked carefully towards me, the big blue sheet folding and drooping between us. She took the sheet's other two corners from me.
"Getting?" I said indignantly.
Mum smiled, folded the sheet over twice more and put it on top of the tumble drier. I pulled another sheet down off the old clothes pulley that hung under the ceiling of the utility room. We took an end each, stood apart, pulled the sheet taut.
"Mm-hmm," she said, tugging at the sheet again. "I think selling the Bentley is very sensible." She folded the sheet over, hand to hand; I did the same. We pulled it taut again. Mum looked thoughtful. "Maybe we should sell that ancient thing sitting in the garage out there, as well."
"The Lagonda?" I said. We folded the sheet over again.
"Yes," mum said, walking towards me again. "It's just a waste of space at the moment."
"You mean you weren't thinking of going in for classic car restoration after you've finished the harpischord?"
Mum smiled as she took the sheet from me. "Well, actually that had occurred to me, but… " She wrinkled her nose. "No; I don't think so."
"Well, we won't get much for it in the state it's in at the moment." I pulled another sheet down.
"I'm not bothered about the money," mum said. She folded the sheet away, shot me a mischievous look. "And besides, whose fault is it the car's in the state it is, anyway?"
"What?" I said. I stood looking at her.
Mum took the sheet from me and put two of its corners in my hands as she backed off, pulling it tight. She smiled. "It was you who tipped the big dresser down onto it in the garage that time, wasn't it?"
She pulled the sheet; it flew out of my fingers, billowing over the floor of the room like some slow motion wave. I ran after it, catching it. I retrieved the corners, untwisted the sheet and studied the amused expression on my mother's face. She tugged the sheet again and I held onto it this time.
I'm ashamed to admit that it even occurred to me to deny it, albeit briefly. I grinned sheepishly as we folded the sheet over. "Yeah, guilty as charged, but it was an accident." I shook my head. "How did you work that out?"
She walked towards me, took the sheet from me. "Found a bit of broken glass in your underpants when I was washing them," she said, and gave a tiny laugh as she turned away to place the sheet on the drier.
I looked up at the ceiling. "Oh dear," I said.
Mum turned round, standing there in her jeans and blouse, glowing with what might well have been self-satisfaction. She reached up and pulled a last sheet down off the pulley, handing one end to me. "Yes. Well, we'll draw a discreet veil over that little incident, shall we?"
I nodded, pursed my lips. "Might be best," I agreed. I coughed, pulled the sheet taut with her, and with a textbook expression of interested interrogation, asked, "And how is the harpsichord-construction project going, anyway?"
"Well —»
It didn't end there, either. Nobody had thought to tell me, but obviously it was open season on Prentice's ignorance. If you were female, anyway.
"Well," I said. "I think my absorption spectrum must be hazy."
"No," Diana said. "I think it's much like anybody else's." She took a Waldglas beaker out of the display cabinet and glanced at me. She may have seen a hurt expression because she shrugged and smiled and said, "Okay, maybe yours has a few more black lines. You were always interested in all sorts of stuff, weren't you?"
I shrugged. "It runs in the family."
"Fact is," Diana said, breathing on the knobby green glass, "it's probably thanks to you I spend so much of my life fourteen thousand feet above Hawaii looking for I-R stars."
"It is?" I said.
"Yeah," Diana said, smiling at the glass as she polished it. "You remember the night there was Helen, me, you, Lewis and Verity and… Darren? We were up in the observatory?"
"I remember," I said.
"You got really stoned and started gibbering about how fantastic the universe was?"
I shook my head. "I don't remember that," I confessed. "Well, you were pretty ripped," Diana said. She handed me the beaker. "But you were coherent, mostly, and you were really enthusiastic. I mean you even shut Lewis up; you just raved about how amazing astronomy was. You meant cosmology, but what the heck. You were just bubbling with it." She brought a second Waldglas beaker out of the cabinet.
"Huh." I filled the beaker with polystyrene beads, found a box big enough to hold the two beakers and put the first one carefully into its bed of little white infinity symbols. "Well, I'll take your word for it."
"Oh, you were just so fascinated with it all. Especially with stellar evolution. That had obviously really blown your mind. 'We are made of bits of stars! you shouted." Diana laughed a little. "You'd been reading about all that stuff and it just tickled you pink. You told us about how the sun and the solar system were made out of the remnants of older stars that had blown up; how the elements that made up the world had been made in those ancient stars, and that meant our bodies, too, every atom. Jeez, I thought you were going to explode." She handed me the second beaker.