Her mind and her memories too were occasionally stronger than the book; then she laid it down to stare at the brownish cobweb-hung ceiling and the dusty prisms on the chandelier, to think and to remember.
The man Cellini she disliked, but that was of small importance. His inelegant conversation had awakened sleeping things, Christie and his murders, Rillington Place, her fear, Dr. Reeves, and Bertha. It must be at least fifty-two years ago, maybe fifty-three. Rillington Place had been a sordid slum, the terraces of houses with front doors opening onto the street, an iron foundry with a tall chimney at the far end of it. Until she went there she had no idea such places existed. She had led a sheltered life, both before that day and after it. Bertha would have married-those sort of people always did. Probably had a string of children who by now would be middle-aged, the first one of them the cause of her misfortunes.
Why did women behave like that? She had never understood. She had never been tempted. Not even with Dr. Reeves. Her feelings for him had always been chaste and honorable, as had his for her. She was sure of that, in spite of his subsequent behavior. Perhaps, after all, she had chosen the better part.
What on earth made Cellini so interested in Christie? It wasn't a healthy attitude of mind. Gwendolen picked up her book again. Not in this one but in another of George Eliot's, Adam Bede, there was a girl who had behaved like Bertha and met a dreadful fate. She read for another half hour, lost to the world, oblivious to everything but the page in front of her. A footfall above her head alerted her.
Poor as her sight was becoming, Gwendolen's hearing was superb. Not for a woman of her age but for anyone of any age. Her friend Olive Fordyce said she was sure Gwendolen could hear a bat squeak. She listened now. He was corming down the stairs. No doubt he thought she didn't know he took his shoes off in an attempt to corme and go secretly. She was not so easily deceived. The lowest flight creaked. Nothing he could do would put a stop to that, she thought triumphantly. She heard him padding across the hall but when he closed the front door it was with a slam that shook the house and caused a whitish flake to drop off the ceiling onto her left foot.
She went to one of the front windows and saw him getting into his car. It was a small blue car and, in her opinion, he kept it absurdly clean. When he had gone she went out to the kitchen, opened the door on an ancient and never-used spindryer to take out a netting bag which had once held potatoes. The bag was full of keys. No labels were attached to them but she knew very well the shape and color of the one she wanted. The key in the pocket of her cardigan, she began to mount the stairs.
It was a long way up but she was used to it. She might be over eighty but she was thin and strong. Never in her life had she had a day's illness. Of course she couldn't climb those stairs as fast as she could fifty years ago but that was only to be expected. Otto was sitting halfway up the top flight, dismembering and eating some small mammal. She took no notice of him nor he of her. The evening sun blazed through the Isabella window and since there was no wind to blow on the glass, an nearly perfect colored picture of the girl and the pot of basil appeared reflected on the floor, a circular mosaic of reds and blues and purples and greens. Gwendolen stopped to admire it. Rarely indeed was this facsimile so clear and still.
She lingered for only a minute or two before inserting her key in the lock and letting herself into Cellini's flat.
All this white paint was unwise, she thought. It showed every mark. And gray was a bad furnishing color, cold and stark. She walked into his bedroom, wondering why he bothered to make his bed when he would only have to unmake it at night. Everything was depressingly tidy. Very likely he suffered from that affliction she had read about in a newspaper, obsessivecompulsive disorder. The kitchen was just as bad. It looked like one of those on show at the Ideal Home Exhibition, to which Olive had insisted on taking her sometime in the eighties. A place for everything and everything in its place, not a packet or tin left on the counter, nothing in the sink. How could anyone live like that?
She opened the door of the fridge. There was very little food to be seen but in the door rack were two bottles of wine and, in the very front of the middle shelf, a nearly full glass of something that looked like faintly colored water. Gwendolen sniffed it. Not water, certainly not. So he drank, did he? Shecouldn't say she was surprised. Making her way back into theliving room, she stopped at the bookshelves. Any books, nomatter of what kind, always drew her attention. These were not the sort she would read, perhaps that anyone should read. All of them, except for one called Sex for Men in the 21st Century, were about Christie. She had scarcely thought about the man for more than forty years and today she seemed not to be able to get away from him.
As for Cellini, this would be another of his obsessions. The more I know people, said Gwendolen, quoting her father, the more I like books. She went downstairs and into the kitchen.There she fetched herself a cheese and pickle sandwich, ready made from the corner shop, and taking it and a glass of orange juice back to the dragon sofa, she returned to Middlemarch.
Chapter 2
It was a funny part of the world altogether. Mix hadn't got used to it yet, the Westway to the north and Wormwood Scrubs and its prison not far away, a tangle of little winding streets, big houses, purpose-built blocks, ugly Victorian terraces, Gothic places more like churches than homes, cottages cunningly designed on different levels to look as if they had been there for two hundred years, corner shops, MOT testing centers, garages, meeting halls, real churches for Holy Catholic Apostolics or Latter Day Saints and convents for Oblates and Carmelites. The whole place populated by people whose families had always been there and people whose families came from Freetown and Goa and Vilnius and Beirut and Aleppo.
The Gilbert-Bambers also lived in West Eleven but the upmarket fashionable part. Their house was in Lansdowne Walk, not as big as Miss Chawcer's but more imposing, with Corinthian columns all along the front and urns with bushes in them on the balconies. It took Mix no more than five minutes to drive there and another five to park his car on a meter, costing him nothing after six-thirty. Colette gave him one of her sexy looks as she opened the door, a look that wasn't in the least necessary as both knew why she had sent for him and what he had come for. For his part, he put up a show of formality, smiling as he marched in with his case of tools and saying it was upstairs if he remembered rightly.
"Of course you remember rightly," Colette said, giggling.
More stairs, but these were wide and shallow and anywaythere was only one flight to go up. "How's Miss Nash these days?"
He'd known she wouldn't like that and she didn't. "I'm sure she's fine. I haven't seen her for a couple of weeks."
It was at the Gilbert-Bambers' that he had first met Nerissa Nash. "Encountered" might be the better word. Until he saw her he had thought Colette beautiful, her slenderness and her long blond hair and her full lips, even though she'd told him about the collagen implants. The difference between them, he had thought, was that between the Hollywood star and the prettiest girl in the office.
Colette preceded him into the bedroom. "What she called her gym was really a dressing room that opened out of it next to the bathroom, and had been originally designed for the master of the house.
"He'd knock on her door when he wanted a bonk," Colette had explained. "They were all bonkers in those days. Isn't that funny it's the same word?"
The room was now furnished with a treadmill, a step machine, a stationary bicycle, and an elliptical cross-trainer. There was a rack of weights, a rolled-up yoga mat, a turquoise colored inflatable ball, and a fridge that had never seen the like of Boot Camp but held only sparkling spring water. Mix could see at once why the treadmill wouldn't start. Colette was no fool and was probably well aware of the reason herself.