Tilting the bottle to 45 degrees, he turned the cork sharply, pulling only slightly — and that was it. Out! He filled the two glasses, sat opposite her, raised his glass, and said, “Cheerio!”
It seemed to her a strange thing to say. “Hello!” would surely have been more appropriate? It was obviously something he’d stored away in his verbal baggage from a period at least twenty-five years (she decided) earlier than her own.
Not that that mattered.
She sipped the champagne; sipped it again; and concluded, although she knew nothing whatever of Bruts and Crus, that it might well be fairly expensive stuff.
“Specially bought for the occasion?”
“No. I won it in a raffle.”
She took a further sip, then drank off the rest in a single draught. “Lovely!”
He leaned forward and refilled her glass.
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“It might even things up a bit.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
“No. I’ll join you.”
“You took a lot of trouble about gettin’ me here—”
“Don’t you like taxis?”
“—and I’ve never been told exactly what to wear before.”
He surveyed her vertically striped brown-and-white dress, and counted the buttonholes: seven of them, the top three straining across her breasts.
“I like buttons. I’ve read that ‘unbuttoning’ was Philip Larkin’s favorite present participle.”
She let it go, fairly certain that she understood, and slowly unfastened the top button of her dress. “I shall expect a fee, you know that.”
“Fee? You mean as well as the taxi and the champagne?”
She nodded and pointed to the bottle. “Will one be enough, do you think?”
“I won two in the raffle. The other one’s cooling in the fridge.”
She drained her second glass, and sat back in the deeply comfortable settee, unfastening the second button as he again refilled her glass.
She patted the cushion beside her. “Come and sit next to me.”
“In a little while. It’s just that I’d like to get my fill of sitting here and lusting after you.”
She smiled. “I wonder how we would have been together?”
“Know something? You’ve just quoted T. S. Eliot, virtually verbatim.”
She let it go, fairly certain that Eliot was a poet. But there wasn’t much poetry out there — not in the world in which she moved. It all made her feel pleasingly important and decidedly sexy. Something more, too. As she tilted the third glass of champagne into her lipstick-moistened mouth; as she worked the third button of her dress loose; as she looked down at her braless breasts now almost fully exposed, she felt an animal sense of her own power — and she felt good.
He was right, though. She was enjoying teasing him, and he was enjoying being teased. No need for that rush to sexual congress the great majority of men (she knew full well) preferred.
“You know,” she said, “I thought first of all when you rang that you wanted to ask me about the murders.”
“Afterward, don’t you think?”
She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to light another cigarette. “No. Let’s get the inquisition over. Where’s the bedroom, by the way?”
He pointed to a door on his left. “Top sheet turned back in a very neat hypotenuse.”
She let it go, for her own mathematics had stopped well short of Pythagoras.
“I didn’t ask you here for any grilling — you know that. But there is one thing I’d like you to tell me.”
“Fire away.”
“I think you’ve got a good idea who murdered Harry. And if you have, I’d like you to tell me.”
“But I don’t — not for certain, I don’t.” She recrossed the legs that a little earlier had been provocatively open.
“Go on!”
“It’s just... well, I reckon perhaps it was Johnnie — might have been, anyway.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Somethin’ he said and... well, you get the vibes sometimes.”
He seemed to know nothing of “vibes” — interested only in strictly verbal significations.
“What exactly did he say?”
“Nothin’ really. Nothin’ I’m going to tell you, anyway.”
“When was this?”
“Sat’day night.”
“He was with you then?”
“Yes.”
“Did he often call round?”
“Quite often.”
“He’d been taking his time with your building alterations?” He drank the rest of the only glass of champagne he’d allowed himself — drank it swiftly, like a man in a pub who knows that if he stays any longer the next round will surely be his, and who therefore decides to depart.
“And you went to bed — quite often — with Barron?”
What the hell! If this fellow just so happened to be more gentle, more interesting, more articulate than some of her occasional partners — so bloody what!
“Yes!” She said it defiantly. “Pretty good in bed he was, too!”
“I’m sorry,” he said slowly, “but Mr. Barron’s dead.”
“You thought I didn’t know?”
“How did you know?”
“Come off it! I wasn’t born yesterday.”
He got to his feet and stepped over to sit beside her. For a while he held her right hand lightly in his; then, with his own right hand he refastened the top three buttons of the dress he’d specifically requested her to wear above no underwear.
Then he left the room and she heard his voice on the telephone: “Radio Taxis?... One of your drivers, as soon as you can... to Burford... on my account, please... Morse.”
The two recently refilled glasses of champagne — the one for her, and the one for him — remained untasted on the top of the coffee table that had been polished so carefully before the arrival of Miss Debbie Richardson.
Chapter forty-six
For the clash between the Classical and the Gothic revivals, visitors might go to the top end of Beaumont Street and compare the Greek glory of the Ashmolean on the left with the Gothic push of the Randolph Hotel on the right.
The Spires Restaurant in the Randolph Hotel is an impressively elegant affair. A full complement of Oxford College crests is mounted in a frieze around the room, the regal ambience of the place relieved by the soft lighting of flambeaux on the brown-papered walls, and by two central chandeliers, holding similar flambeaux, that hang from the high-beamed ceiling. Twenty or so tables are spaciously arranged there, cross-draped with maroon tablecloths, and laid with gleaming silverware, sparkling wineglasses, and linen serviettes of a pale-ochre color. The chairs, of uniform style, are upholstered in a material of bottle-green; and the color combination of the room in toto has appealed to many (if not to all) as an unusually happy one. Two large windows on the room’s northern side overlook Beaumont Street, with the Ashmolean Museum and the Taylorian Institute just across the way; whilst those seated beside three equally large windows on the eastern side look out on to the Martyrs’ Memorial, with St. John’s and Balliol Colleges beyond it, sharing with their fellow diners a vista of St. Giles, the widest street in Oxford and visually one of the most attractive avenues in England.
At 7:15 that same evening, a man in the company of a much younger woman appeared to have eschewed either of these splendid views, for they had chosen a table (set for three) on the restaurant’s west and windowless side, and now sat with their backs partly turned on the sprinkling of other early diners — like people who had no real objections to being seen, perhaps, but equally had no wish to draw attention to themselves.