Whose opening had it been? He had no memory of it-he was not even sure he had ever been in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. Maybe she too was thinking of someone else. He felt a sudden sweet pang for the lost past, all those possibilities now gone, never to be offered again. He kneaded the plump flesh of her flank just below her ribs and she twisted away from him and laughed and told him to stop, that he knew how ticklish she was. He released her and stood up, then bent to find his jacket on the floor and the cigarettes in the pocket. Lighting one, he walked to the big picture window and stood there naked, smoking, squinting out at the sunlight.
“Let me guess why you’re here,” she said.
He glanced over his shoulder. She was lolling on her back on the chaise, the shawl covering her lap. He saw how her breasts, slacker than he remembered them, were slewed sideways, the nipples as if looking at him, endearingly cock-eyed. She was a handsome woman still, and he was sad to see the signs of how she was aging.
“Guess away,” he said. “Why am I here?”
“Because of what’s-his-name, your partner, Delahaye.”
“Oh. You heard.”
She laughed. “It was all over the papers!” She turned over onto her stomach, and the shawl slithered to the floor. She wriggled her behind. “What happened? The papers said it was an accident. Was it?”
He turned back to the window and the overgrown garden. Those tangled roses looked sinister, he thought, like briars in a fairy tale. “You have convolvulus,” he said.
“I have what?”
“Bindweed. That creeper, with the white flower. It’ll strangle everything if you don’t get it dug out.”
“Jack Clancy, nurseryman,” she said, and laughed again, throatily. She rose and came and stood beside him, picking up the shawl and hitching it round her waist for a makeshift skirt. He caught her familiar smelclass="underline" perfume, sweat, warmed flesh. She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, and gave it back, blowing smoke in the direction of the ceiling. “Do you not want to talk about it?” she said.
“Talk about what?” He was still eyeing the convolvulus.
“All right, sulk.” She went to the pile of clothes and pulled on her knickers, her shirt, the tight black trousers. “He killed himself, didn’t he,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“When it’s a suicide, the papers have a certain way of reporting it. You can always tell. What was it? Was he sick?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Business in trouble?”
“On the contrary. Business”-he gave a brief laugh-“is booming.”
She stood a moment studying his back; he still had a nice bum, she thought, though it was scrawnier now than she remembered. “You don’t seem exactly heartbroken,” she said.
He turned. “Don’t I?”
She went on looking at him, slowly arranging the shawl about her shoulders and pinning it up again at one corner. “You know why he did it, don’t you,” she said; it was not a question. “You know, but you’re not saying.” She came to him and touched a fingertip to his face. He looked back at her blankly, his eyes gone dead. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you,” she said softly. “Aren’t you? You can tell me, you know. I’m the wild horses’ despair, I am.”
He turned from her to the garden again. “You should get that convolvulus seen to,” he said. “It’s a killer, if you let it get established.”
She went up the steps, and he heard her in the kitchen up there, opening drawers and cupboard doors. He got dressed; he felt as if he were putting on not his clothes but his troubles, the ones that had fallen from him earlier when Bella had wound her arms round him and whispered hotly in his ear. How long was it since he had been here last? Two years? Three? Bella had always been an easygoing girl. You turned up, she opened wide her arms, you lay down together, then you got up again and left. Never once, in all the times he had walked out of here, had she asked if he would be coming back. Maybe she was the kind of woman he should have married.
She came down the steps again, carrying a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and two wine glasses. She held the bottle aloft in a Statue of Liberty pose. “Have a drink,” she said, “before you go.”
They took to the chaise again, sitting side by side this time, facing the big window. The sunlight had gone from the garden but a bronze glow lingered, polishing the rosebushes and lending an amber tint to the white convolvulus flowers. Jack lit another cigarette. The wine tasted bitter in his mouth. He had a cavernous sensation behind his breastbone, as if his chest had been hollowed out and emptied of every organ. It was not exactly fear he felt but a heavy, dull dread. Something was coming that would not be avoided.
“And how,” Bella asked, “is the Lady Sylvia?” She put on a prissy accent. “Spiffing form as usual, I suppose, what?”
He drank his wine and said nothing. He did not mind her mocking his wife. He supposed he should. He felt protective towards Sylvia, most of the time. She had done her best with him, for him, and he was grateful to her, in his way. Thinking this, he imagined her turning aside from him with that deliberately abstracted expression, frowning, as if she had lost something and was trying to remember what it was. Grateful, dear? I must say, you have a funny way of showing it. It was true. He owed her a debt, he knew that, but he knew too that he had no intention of settling it, not yet, anyway, not while he still had this fire in him; not while he still had Bella, and the others like her, discreet, easy, indulgent. He closed his eyes briefly. He knew in his heart that it was all over, that old, carefree life. There would be no more simple fun; from now on, everything would be complicated, knotted, insoluble. Half an hour ago, lying here in Bella’s arms, he had relaxed and felt like weeping.
“I suppose you’ll be the boss now?” Bella said.
“Do you think so?” He cast a crooked smile at her and she saw that flash of mischief she remembered from the old days, that look of a boy who has got his first kiss and means to have more.
“Isn’t it what you always wanted?” she said, smiling in her turn.
Her warm haunch was pressed against his leg, and there was a look of slightly unfocused merriment in her eye-she never could hold her drink; it was something that had always amused him. In a minute she would be swarming all over him again. He made to stand up, but she put a hand in the crook of his elbow and held him back. “Don’t go,” she said.
“Got to,” he said. “I’m expected.”
Yet he lingered. He did not want to go home, did not want to face Sylvia, did not want to meet that look she would give him, anxious, soulful, searching. How much did she know, how much did she guess? All this past year he had been sure she knew he was up to something. She did not trust him, never had; he could hardly have expected that she would. He did not trust himself, anymore.
“How is the widow?” Bella asked. “What’s her name-Monica?”
“Mona.”
“He was about twice her age, wasn’t he?”
“She’s young, yes.”
He felt a sort of ripple in her thigh, and she sat forward and swiveled about to look closely into his face. “Oh, Jack,” she said softly, “I hope you haven’t been a naughty boy, have you? Haven’t been putting in your thumb there and pulling out a plum, as you always do?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said.
She wagged her head at him, making a tut-tutting sound with her tongue. “Oh, Jackie-boy. I see now the reason for your sudden appearance on my doorstep. It wouldn’t be the first time you came running to Bella for shelter when the Hound of Heaven was at your heels. Or just a husband on the warpath.”
He sighed. “Shut up, Bella,” he said wearily. “You have a one-track mind.”
“Yes,” she said, and made a grab at the crotch of his trousers, “and you haven’t, I suppose.”
He batted her hand aside and held out his glass. She groped for the bottle on the floor and poured another go of wine.
“I hope you’re not intending to make a lamp out of that, are you?” he said, indicating with his chin the bulbous bottle in its straw jacket.