It was stuffy in here. ‘It was supposed to be my room.’ Lol prised open the window – one pane, eighteen inches square. ‘But for some reason I keep going back to a camp bed in one of the lofts over the stable.’
Yes, he would do that; he’d need the feeling of impermanence.
Merrily sat on the bed. She felt like an asylum seeker in a hostel; tomorrow seemed as impenetrable as Prof Levin’s living room.
‘Hang on a minute.’ Lol went off and came back with a small wooden reading lamp with a parchment shade. He placed it on the deep window sill and plugged it into a socket underneath. With the ceiling bulb switched off, the lamp turned the room a hazy buttermilk. Monastic cell to cosy boudoir in two clicks.
Lol asked if could bring her up a drink. ‘Probably better if you didn’t see the kitchen tonight.’
‘Bad?’
He shrugged. ‘The rats live with it.’
‘Is there a kettle, say, and a teapot that we could perhaps bring up?’
‘Sure.’ He was hovering in the doorway. ‘I’ll… fetch your case in, then?’
‘You want some help?’
Lol held up both hands. ‘Stay. Luxuriate.’
She spread the duvet on the bed and sat down again, staring at the rough plaster. She and Lol had shared some secrets again. She wondered if he still had the sweatshirt with the Roswell alien motif.
With Lol, it all went back to a teenager called Tracy who had a mate called – Kath, was it? Karl Windling, the aggressive and unpleasant bass-player in Hazey Jane, had fancied this Kath and set Lol up with Tracy – she was about four years younger than Lol, but you probably wouldn’t have known, seeing the two of them together, and he certainly wouldn’t have suspected. And then Windling had decided he wanted Tracy as well, and it had all turned nasty, and Windling had squirmed out of it, leaving Lol – innocent in everyone’s eyes but the law’s – with a conviction for having sex with an under-age girl, six months’ probation and rejection by his family.
That was the start of it. A long time ago. A long time for anyone to remain an alien. But it would partly explain his reaction, both times, to Stephanie Stock.
‘You must have thought she was unreal… a ghost.’
‘I’d’ve been happier with a ghost.’ Lol put down the tea tray.
Merrily thought back to his involvement with the ethereal Moon, who’d lived on Dinedor Hill. ‘It’s like cats, isn’t it?’
‘Cats?’
‘Put a cat in a room with someone who’s afraid of cats or allergic to cat hair, the cat invariably heads straight for them, jumps onto their laps.’
‘I like cats.’
‘Well, I know that. And you quite like women, too – I realize this is an inexact analogy. I’m talking about women with problems. Weird women. They tend to come on to you like cats. And you put out a tentative hand, and then experience tells you to back off.’
‘I’m not proud of backing off.’
‘I don’t like to imagine what might have happened if you hadn’t.’ Merrily poured the tea. ‘Could she have been stoned?’
‘Or was she ill?’ Lol wondered.
‘What? Something long-term? Schizophrenia? Could that have been why Stock kept her apart from the community? Was he drinking to excess to cope with it? The mad woman in the isolated kiln? But you can’t really do a Mr Rochester these days, can you? You can’t keep this kind of thing secret any more – if she was on medication, for instance… and schizophrenics are almost invariably on medication.’
‘And she apparently went out to work.’
‘Yeah, but did she?’
‘She said she was temping for a car-dealer in Hereford.’
‘But was she?’ Merrily leaned her head against the side of the bed. ‘All this will have to come out.’ She looked at Lol. ‘That night in the hop-yard – was she aware of you?’
‘Yes.’ Lol drank some tea. ‘And no.’
‘Good answer. Helpful.’
‘It was dark.’
‘She was aware of you in the bedroom, though. And she was certainly aware of you downstairs before we began.’
‘Well… coming on to me like I used to be this big rock star – what kind of crap was that? She’d probably never heard of me until Stock mentioned I was staying at Prof’s. But she gave absolutely no sign of recognizing me from the hop-yard. Not then, anyway.’
‘But you recognized her?’
‘Wasn’t sure at first. Not till we were upstairs together and she was on the bed and you and Stock had gone… and then suddenly she was.’
‘Because of the hop-bine?’
‘The Lady of the Bines? Who never existed? Who is an invented ghost?’
‘Remind me about that again.’
Merrily lit a cigarette; she’d smoked it by the time he’d finished.
‘So the museum woman made it up. You been back to ask her, Lol?’
He shook his head.
‘Hops.’ Merrily tapped the tea tray with her fingertips. ‘Think hops.’
‘Hop-pillows? Stock said hop-pillows were supposed to give you a better night’s sleep. But not in this case.’
‘Hops as a turn-on? The first time you saw her, she was naked and winding a hop-bine around her. And up in the bedroom, she was playing with an old hop-bine again – a hop-bine, which she was again using in a… lubricious fashion. How did you feel?’
‘Embarrassed. Scared.’
‘And maybe just a bit…?’
‘I’ll stick with scared and embarrassed.’
‘Basic nymphomania?’ Merrily wondered. ‘That can be a mental illness, can’t it? I mean, people have a good laugh about it. Men in pubs always like to pretend they wish their wives would catch it, but it’s a mental illness, isn’t it?’
Lol considered. ‘I don’t even think it’s a clinical term. There are no criteria to back it up. It’s applied to women who want “too much sex” – but how much is too much? And what do you call a male nymphomaniac? Could be a purely sexist term, because a woman who lives for sex is a slut, while a man who can’t get enough is a role model.’
‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘you really have been on a course.’
He looked uncomfortable at that. He pulled off his glasses and began to polish them on the hem of his T-shirt. Merrily slid down to the rug and leaned back against the side of the bed, her bare arms around her knees. She was aware of the irony of being alone in a bedroom talking about sex with a man she’d always found attractive, but in circumstances that rendered the whole subject forbidding. Like going into a tobacconist’s to discuss emphysema.
‘We’re going round in circles, Lol.’
He told her about the odd words uttered by Stephie in the bedroom, the foreign language which definitely wasn’t French, might have been Welsh. And then Don’t say no to me…
‘As if someone else had been saying no to her? Well, Stock’s a lot older than she was and probably close to being an alcoholic, which—’
‘—is no cure for impotence,’ Lol said. ‘And I think I’m right in saying the number one reason for men killing their wives is being drunk and on the receiving end of taunts about not being able to perform. And Stock’s an arrogant guy. Very, very hard for someone like that to admit to sexual inadequacy. And if he doesn’t say another word to explain why he did it, that’s probably what they’ll put it down to.’
‘If,’ Merrily said heavily, ‘there hadn’t also been what they will insist on describing as an exorcism.’