Текст книги "The Villiers Touch"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

He arrived promptly at seven; he said very little; he only watched her unbind her breasts and mounted her with unusual frenzy, spending himself in a harsh impersonality of pounding lust, sinking back afterward to lie in hard-breathing satiety.

She said, “Either you haven’t had a woman all week or it’s a very big business deal.”

“You know me too well,” he growled, and rolled off the bed to get dressed.

It was strange, she thought; he still had the capacity to terrify her, and yet in some utterly unlikely way she had become fond of him. She lay watching the light change on the hard planes of his face as he moved around the room; unaccountably she said, “Have you ever had anything close to you but your shirt, Mason?”

For a brief moment his hands became still. He did not glance at her, but she saw that she had scored a point and she took momentary satisfaction from it. Then he brought himself around, under rigid control, to look at her; he said, “Your concern is most touching.”

“Have you ever loved anybody?” she said, and was alarmed by her boldness.

It made him laugh. “After all the things that have happened to you, you can still ask a question like that.” He shook his head. “You’ll never grow up as long as you believe in love, Carol.”

“Oh, I believe in it. I believe in money, too. Some people have it, some people don’t.”

“Keep talking like that, and you’ll end up looking like a fool,” he told her.

She laughed, suddenly and with wild abandon; she could see it disturbed him, and that was what she wanted. He almost allowed his anger to show. She said demurely, “Yassuh, boss.”

He rammed his shirttail into his trousers and planted his feet and gave her his undivided attention. “You’re uncommonly impertinent and independent tonight.”

“Am I? Never mind. Tell me something-with all the respectable women you can get for a snap of your fingers, why keep coming back to me?”

“Because I taught you to be the best.”

“That’s not quite what I was fishing for-I was hoping you might admit it was because you like me.”

His head lifted slightly; lamplight reflected from his eyes. “I don’t dislike you,” he said. “I don’t dislike anybody, as long as they don’t get in my way.”

“At least I’m not in your way.”

“You make me wonder about that.”

“Do I? It’s probably good for you.”

“Have you been smoking pot?”

“No. Only thinking.”

“Don’t think, Carol. It’s not your strong point.”

“What would you say if I told you I was thinking of retiring?”

“You?” He became amused. “You, Carol? A few more years of ringside tables and sable coats and you’ll be too whipped and worn-out to make expenses at a plumbing-supply convention in Rapid City. You’ll get passed down the line from hand to hand until some smart guy comes along and takes you on a little vacation to Hong Kong, and then they’ll cop your passport and unload you into a crib, where you’ll get slapped down so far you won’t even want to come home.”

She stood up, full of languid grace, her hair fanning down her well-shaped back; she smiled frostily. “What a pig you can be.” She went into the bathroom, showered, and put on beige lace undies and a careful dose of scent, and emerged to find him smoking a cigarette, going through her closet with one hand. He was holding out the sleeve of a full-length Schulman Emba mink coat. “This is new,” he observed.

“A great many things are.”

He turned to face her. “What’s all this about, Carol?”

“I want off the hook, Mason. I want to pick and choose among the dirty jobs to suit myself.”

“Are you going to force me to remind you of the same tired old things we’ve been over before?”

“I’m not afraid of Albuquerque anymore. With a good lawyer I think I can beat the rap.”

“Possibly. And if you did, what do you suppose Rocco would be inclined to do?”

“You could use your influence. Persuade him I have no intention of making trouble for him.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Out of friendship, Mason. It’s the kind of thing a friend does for a friend.”

When he made no answer, she added mildly, “All you have to do is point out to him that even if I did accuse him of anything, it would only be my word against his.”

He began to smile; he said nothing, and Carol said, “That’s right, isn’t it? Rocco’s known that all along-that’s why he never made trouble for me. It never had anything to do with you, did it? You just used it as something to hold over my head. It only worked as long as I didn’t think it through.”

“You’ve learned to use your head, haven’t you?”

“I just don’t see how it could possibly be worth your while to go to the trouble of turning me over to the New Mexico cops, not when I’d probably be acquitted anyway. Look, why not drop it right here and go on like equals?”

He shook his head gently, watching her. She said in a rougher voice, “You just can’t do it, can you? You just can’t have any kind of relationship with anybody where your money or your blackmail doesn’t give you an edge.”

He ignored it; he said, “You’re ass-deep in muck, Carol. With your history it’s far too late for a declaration of independence.”

“Why? What could you prove against me? You can’t use anything you’ve got on me without implicating yourself. You’d hardly do that. You’ve got thousands of feet of infrared film on me, but you’d never use it because you can’t afford to expose the men who appear on the film with me. Besides, who would you show it to? I haven’t got a family. The law wouldn’t care, and even if they did, I’d survive a fifteen-day sentence for prostitution.”

“I admire your guts,” he said. “But you haven’t thought it all the way through. Working for me, you’ve learned too much about too many people. Some of them couldn’t afford to let you off the hook, even if I could. You’re locked in, Carol. There’s never been any way out. You’re a white chip in a no-limit game, and there are too many people in it who wouldn’t care if they had to tie weights on you and drop you off a motor launch in Long Island Sound.”

“You could keep them off my back, if you wanted to. You could convince them I was no danger to them. I’ve built up a complete new identity, false passport and bank accounts-I can fade out of sight and come to the surface in England or on the Riviera with a whole new identity. If you cover for me, the rest of them will never find me.”

“Maybe I could,” he said, turning toward the door, “but I won’t. Not now. Maybe I’ll think about it later. In the meantime, you’ll stay put and do as you’re told.”

She felt exhausted; she had nothing further to say. At the door he paused and said absently, “That lawyer from the SEC who asked you about my shares-have you heard from him again?”

“No.”

“All right,” he said. “Don’t do anything foolish.” He gave her a flat, hard glance with his hooded eyes, and went.

She put on a dress, walked into the living room, and stared at the door he had shut behind him; crossed the room to the stereo and put an album on the turntable. It pushed a slow, soothing beat through the room. She was adjusting the volume when she heard a knock at the door.

Surprised, frowning a little, she walked to the door.

It was Russ Hastings.

He smiled and said, “May I come in? I’m unarmed.”

Not certain how to respond, she stood looking at him. He was dressed in a rumpled seersucker suit, and he had an unassailable amiability on his pleasant, blocky face. He was searching her face with an odd intensity, but his manner was pleasantly abrasive, like a coarse towel after a bath. He said, “What a beauty you are, Carol,” and grinned at her. “Look here-my palms are sweating from the effort of pronouncing your name.”

“Good Lord,” she said. She shook her head in amazement. “The hell with it. I need cheering up-come on in, then.” She stepped back to let him enter; she thought, I’m being a fool.

18. Russell Hastings

She walked away from him into the room, moving slowly, because it was more graceful; all her movements were studied.

Russ Hastings said, shutting the door, “You’re gorgeous.”

“What’s on your mind? I’m not sure I should have let you in.”

“I think I’d like a drink. I don’t mind fixing it myself-have one with me?”

“Why not?”

He went to the bar and watched her settle on one of the sectional pieces, drawing her lovely long legs up under her with a trim display of swelling calves and shapely ankles.

He mixed two drinks, heavy on the Scotch, and said to her, “I have been thinking about you all week. I decided Wednesday that I was in love with you, and Thursday that I wasn’t. Today I’m somewhere in the middle. Maybe I’m not in love with you, but what the hell does it matter? Whatever you want to call it, maybe it’s a way to ease loneliness. I need somebody-I guess that’s all it amounts to.”

He brought the drink across to her. “Very grave,” he judged. “Very self-possessed and cool and competent and bemused by my foolishness. Very beautiful, above all. The trouble is, you see, in my vague fantasies it’s far too easy to see you making a warm, serene home.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Only a little.” He tasted his drink, standing above her. “That piano record makes the room feel emptier, doesn’t it? It’s a good night for blues.”

“I’m sorry you’re so depressed,” she said evenly. “Is it something you want to talk about?”

“Excuse me. I thought I already had.”

“Oh,” she said. “That. I’m ignoring your little speech-hadn’t you noticed?”

“Then I’ll repeat it. I’ve decided I’ve fallen in love with-”

“Horse shit,” she said, smiling up at him. “You’ve decided. Sure you have. A strange bedfellow is better than none-that’s about the extent of it, isn’t it?”

He took his drink to a chair facing her and sat back, taking a long pull and feeling the heat of the whiskey travel his throat and chest. “I suppose you get this sort of thing from drunks all the time. You must have learned to shut your ears off-build a shell of indifference, it’s no good anybody trying to push themselves against it. That right? Okay, let’s see if I can bust it down. What do you do if I ask you flat-out to marry me?”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Proposing marriage to me.”

His grin turned sheepish. “Who knows?”

“Don’t you ever commit yourself to anything, Russ?”

He recoiled. “I guess I asked for that, didn’t I?”

“I hate helping you pour salt in your own wounds, that’s all.”

He took another swallow and slid way down in his chair until he was sitting on the back of his neck. “Marry me. Just like that. How about it?”

“No.”

“No pause for thought? No moment to consider how I could take you away from all this?” He waved his arm around.

She laughed. “You’re funny when you’re drunk.”

He scowled. “I’m not sure it’s altogether a joke.”

“Let’s pretend it was.”

“Looking at you now, I’m absolutely certain of it. I do love you.”

“And how would you feel tomorrow or next week? I recommend a cold bath and aspirin. Anyhow, this dewy-eyed love business repels me. I suppose most women have some sort of atavistic mating instinct for a warm cave and children, but that got washed out of me a long time ago. Domesticity isn’t my thing. A life sentence of dirty dishes and diapers and orthodontists’ bills? Hah.”

“You’re a cruel and heartless wench, verily.”

“You don’t know me at all, Russ-and you’re not going to. Nobody likes a whore for long.”

“Ouch.”

“I’ve got too many fingerprints on me, and they all belong to men who know there’s nothing any of them asks that I won’t give them. Nothing. You understand?”

“Is that your biggest artillery? Because if it is, you’ve just fired a blank. I’m not scared off. This is the age of enlightenment and Aquarius.”

In a rich Kentucky twang she said, “Hawss shee-yit.”

He said, “I was sitting in a bar watching my drink sweat, and suddenly I said to the glass, ‘And here I sit alone with you.’ So I came up here. I haven’t got a lot of money on me. I suppose you wouldn’t be impressed by my wallet. What would you charge to marry me?”

“You’ve beaten that joke to death, Russ.”

He felt a little dizzy; he sat up straighter. It took him a moment to marshal his thoughts. Finally he spoke with slow care. “I am getting very old,” he said. “The world I grew up in seems to have disappeared someplace while I wasn’t looking. I grew up equipped with a sense of how things ought to be. Standards-things that ought to matter, right and wrong. There used to be a point to things, you know? But now everything seems to be beside the point, somehow-I don’t even know what the point is anymore. Look, I’m thinking of tossing it all up and going out West, live in the country someplace and raise dairy cows. How’d you like that?”

“I’d hate it. I’m an indoor girl. I like soft pillows and air-conditioners, and I never enjoyed getting dirt in my hair.”

“You sound just like my ex-wife,” he mused. “What was her name? Lorelei.”

“You told me her name was Diane.”

“So I did.”

“Lorelei was the woman who lured men to their deaths.”

“The same,” he said, “the very same.” He blinked at her and waved his half-empty glass extravagantly before he brought it to his mouth.

“Do you always get romantic and maudlin when you’re drunk?”

“My darling, I am always romantic and maudlin. It shows more when I’m drunk, that’s all.”

The stereo rejected and switched itself off. After that the room was thick with silence until he roused himself groggily and peered at her. “I guess this is what they call a pregnant silence.”

She gave him a distant smile; the telephone rang, and she went to it. He watched irritation and resignation chase each other across her face while she spoke and listened; she hung up, and her eyes looked harder than before. She disappeared into the bedroom for a moment and returned carrying a pair of shoes; she sat down and crossed her legs, arched one stockinged foot, and put a shoe on, sliding her forefinger around inside the heel like a shoehorn.

He said, “I find that whole series of movements insanely erotic. You don’t suppose I’m a foot fetishist?”

“There are worse things.”

He said, “You’re throwing me out.”

“Stay if you want. I have to go out. I may not be back for a while.”

He said in a sour way, “Then you’re not going to abandon all this and fly away thither with me.”

“You give me an almost uncontrollable urge to snicker, Russ.”

He nodded wisely. “All my life I’ve been a figure of ridicule and scorn.”

“Oh, crap. You’re all right, Russ, you’re fine, all you need is a good stiff belt across the mouth to get you straightened out. Once you’ve broken loose from self-pity, you’ll quit floundering around.”

He said, “You’re just full up to here with cynicism, aren’t you? Only I suppose you call it realism. I never want to get that way myself, thank you.”

She glanced at him with a bittersweet sort of smile. “Nobody wants to get that way,” she said. “But we all do. You will, too.”

“What for? Look, I am thinking about moving out West.”

“Then do it. Good luck.”

“Come with me, Carol.”

He heard the small crisp snap of her purse, and he felt suddenly alone and forlorn. She came to him, bent down, and touched his cheek with a light, pecking kiss. “I hope you find a nice fluffy homey girl and have “steen babies and spend the rest of your life cuddling calves and fixing barbed-wire fences and hoisting beers at the corner saloon with the hands.” She went toward the door.

“God damn it,” he roared. “I’m flying to Arizona tomorrow morning.”

“Forever?”

“I’ll be back Monday,” he said in a small voice.

“And you’ll stay,” she said. “This is where it’s at, baby. All you have to do is make things matter.” And she left.

He thrust himself angrily to his feet. What the hell; they were just two people who’d met one day. But by Christ she was lovely.

He would go home through the steamy, polluted evening and take an Alka-Seltzer, and in the morning he’d go and see Elliot Judd, and maybe, in the clean open solitude of the desert, he’d be able to sort himself out and decide what the hell to do with himself from here on, to justify his existence.

19. Anne Goralski

At the kitchen table, Anne had the telephone at her ear; she was listening with a hollow, sinking resignation to the endless unanswered ringing on the line.

Steve had come to her desk at five o’clock and told her he couldn’t see her tonight. She had whispered, pleading, “When am I going to see you?”

“I told you, darling, I have to go out to my mother’s. I always do on Friday evenings. No telling when I’ll be back-I may stay over. But we’ll be together tomorrow-we’ve got the whole weekend.”

She had come home and sunbathed in the last sunlight on a towel on the buckling tarpaper roof. Her mind was full of Steve. She longed for him to return tonight; love had transfigured her existence-he had become the center of her world; without him she was wrenched from life. She had started ringing his number at nine o’clock, wanting him tonight; she was dressed and ready.

She put the receiver down in its cradle and stood up to open the window wider. The heat was grotesque. She was beginning to turn away when she saw her father’s figure come in sight at the corner.

Barney Goralski’s heavy shoes thudded and echoed on the pavement. Isolated pedestrians swirled by, their faces as gray as the smoggy air. He was tramping the well-worn route from the taxi garage home, not hurrying, reluctant to arrive, and his head was ducked because he didn’t need to look where he was going.

She sat down by the phone and dialed Steve’s number quickly, and listened to it ring. She tensed at the heavy sound of her father’s tread in the hall; she watched the door furtively. When the knob turned she cradled the phone.

His looming hulk filled the doorway; he came straight through into the kitchen shaking his head. “Rotten miserable day. How’s your mother?”

“She had a headache-she’s gone to bed.”

“Yeah,” he said, and opened the refrigerator. He took out a beer and pulled the snap-ring top; it came off with a pop and a hiss. He sat down at the tiny oilcloth-covered table and said again, “Rotten miserable day. Hot days like this the stinkin’ commuters all bring their air-conditioned cars in. Been a puking jam all day long. Crawl all the way. Some clown didn’t give himself enough time, wanted to make a train at Penn Station, naturally we missed it, and the sonofabitch blames me. I got the fare out of him, but not a nickel for a tip. Then I pick up some egghead professor insists we go the hard way, straight uptown through the traffic jam all the way to Columbia University, fifty minutes, for a twenty-cent tip. Big puking spender. Don’t these guys know the stinkin’ Internal Revenue assumes you make tips that amount to twenty percent of what shows on the meter? I gotta pay taxes on them tips whether I get it or not.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She could hear the abrasive scratch of his beard stubble when he rubbed it. His black, entrenched eyes came around to lie against her, and he said, “You ain’t listening.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m waiting for a phone call.”

“Yeah? How long you been waiting?” He loomed forward, scowling at her. “Gotchaself a boyfriend, hey?”

She couldn’t keep from flushing; she felt her cheeks heat up. She nodded briefly.

Goralski said, “You look like you got hit with a ton a bricks. What’s the guy’s name?”

She shaped her mouth around the word: “Steve.”

“Whyn’tcha bring him around here sometime?”

“I–I-”

His scowl darkened. “Ashamed of the way we live, ain’tcha? Christ, I can’t blame you.” He opened the refrigerator and lifted out another can of beer, yanked the ring-top opener off, and glugged out of the can, throwing his big head back to drink. He sat down opposite her at the little table, both huge hands wrapped around the can of beer while he brooded. He seemed to be lost in his own miseries, but suddenly, without looking up, he said, “You all dressed up like that for a date tonight? Kinda late for it, ain’t it? Whatsa matter, he won’t phone?”

“He’s gone to his mother’s for dinner.”

His head shot back, and he glared. “You’re ashamed to bring him here, let him see this slum we gotta live in, that’s okay. But he’s ashamed to take you home to meet his mother?”

“Poppa, he-”

“What kinda sonofabitch is this guy? Hah?”

“He’s wonderful,” she said. “He’s the best, Poppa, and I won’t have you-”

“You won’t have! That’s rich! This bastard don’t mind keeping you out nights till the sun comes up-you think I ain’t noticed? – but he won’t interduce you to his mother, hah? Christ, honey, y’unnerstand what I’m saying?”

Hot, stiff, eyes flashing, she said in a taut low voice that trembled, “I understand perfectly well, and I don’t want to listen to any more of-”

“You don’t? Christ, honey, you gotta listen to somebody. You got it sticking out all over you-you think you’re in love with this bastard, you’re taking it seriously, but he ain’t, he won’t even interduce you to his precious mother, right? You want love and marriage, and he wants something else, right? I know these guys, believe me-all he wants is sex.”

“That’s not so!”

“You think about it, honey. And while you’re with this guy, you see if you can tell yourself it ain’t just sex. You think I don’t know the way you kids carry on nowadays? Hell, I’m a broad-minded old sonofabitch, I don’t carry no horse whip, you know that. But this guy-Christ, I never even met the bastard, and I can read him like a book.”

“It’s not so! It isn’t!”

Her father lowered his eyes to the can of beer. He said softly, “Don’t try to persuade me, honey-see if you can persuade yourself first. Y’unnerstand what I mean?”

“All right,” she snapped viciously. “Maybe he is just toying with my affections. Maybe I’m just in a mood to have my affections toyed with.”

He murmured, “Don’t talk like that, Anne. Not to your old man.”

Wound up, she said with glittering anger, “Loving is more important than being loved, anyway. Isn’t it? What does it matter if-”

“It matters, honey. You think about him not taking you to meet his mother, and you think hard, and you see what you come up with.” He leaned forward suddenly and gripped her wrist. She tried to jerk back, but he held her in a tight fist; he said earnestly, “You really love him, Anne? You really want the guy? Then make him marry you before he leeches his way out!”

“What? How?”

“How have women done it for five thousand years?”

“Poppa!”

He released her and slumped back in his chair; his jowls seemed to sag. He said, “Forget that. I take it back. Christ, I got troubles of my own, honey, half the time I don’t know what I’m saying myself, y’know what I mean? It’s only, well, hell, I’d like to see you get yourself a good husband, get out of this rat hole here. Nothing’s ever gonna get any better here. You gotta get out of it while you can, honey. You gotta grab any chance you can get. And don’t worry about me and her. We’re all used up anyway-I don’t want you throwing your whole life away on a couple old wrecks like your mother and me. We got nothing left to look forward to. You have. You got your youth, which is a precious thing, y’unnerstand what I’m tryna tell you?”

“Stop talking like that, Poppa. I don’t know what to think.”

He said slowly, as if thinking it out with great care, “Listen to me, honey. When you’re in love the way you are, you seem to lose a lot of your self-respect. Maybe you get to thinking, ‘I’m gonna have him, marriage or no marriage, it don’t matter.’ But it does matter. You gotta have something to show for it, or you’ll find out the world’s full of bastards that’ll use you up and throw you out. You gotta fight that, honey-you gotta grab your chance when you can.”

He chugged the rest of the beer down and hurled the can in the paper bag by the sink, got up and shuffled heavily toward the door. She hadn’t realized before how old he was getting.

He mumbled, “You think about it, honey,” and went out of the kitchen.

She sat for a long time in the silence. Confused by double loyalties, she sat motionless until finally her hand, almost of its own will, reached for the phone, and she began to dial Steve’s number, hardly aware of what she was doing. She was remembering the evening he had taken her window-shopping and given her the silver from Jensen’s; thinking of him, listening to the phone ring and ring and ring, her body was in torment.

Brian Garfield

Villiers Touch

20. Steve Wyatt

Attended by four servants and a yard man, Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt lived in barely adequate comfort in a gabled rococo house on sufficient East Hampton acreage to ensure privacy, with a long soft lawn that rolled down to a grove of big old willows around a pond, on which floated a few swans and ducks. There was, inevitably, a gazebo. The faint fishy smell of the Atlantic came up from the nearby beach, and the evening breeze seemed to have cleared away the gnats and moths and some of the heat, making it possible for the Friday-night gathering-a tradition with Wyatts for eighty years-to move out onto the lawn after the late dinner.

Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt was sixty-seven. Her hair, waved tightly and meticulously, looked like a gray stone sculpture, done in a style that had not changed in forty years. She had a homely angular resemblance to Andrew Jackson and looked as if she might drink straight from the bottle, though no one had ever actually witnessed her doing so. She was confident enough of her impeccable antecedents and the position which accrued to it that she had long ago given up demure pretense; she had allowed her natural self to emerge, and in so doing she revealed that for all her imperious nobility she was in fact a creature of remarkable vulgarity-loud, vital, hearty, with tenacious jaw and strong whiskey-baritone voice. She was a character-a landmark.

Of the nine guests who had attended the dinner gathering, five had departed shortly after ten o’clock, pleading fatigue and the long drive back to Morristown, where they lived amid polo ponies and tennis courts. Letting the group out the front door with the aid of his mother’s maid, Steve Wyatt heard one of the departing guests complain as they got into chauffeured Mercedes, “Really, you don’t get invited to dinner at Fran’s-you get sentenced to it.” Steve exchanged glances with the maid, whose face gave away absolutely nothing, and listened to the low run of laughter from the departing guests before the car pulled away, its headlights stabbing the night, and surged toward the highway.

When he returned to the rear lawn, he found his mother engaged in spirited argument with Prescott Van Alstyne, bitterly declaiming “those imbeciles in Washington,” by which she meant Congress, not the administration; she had had a Democrat in the house once, but she hadn’t known about it until after he left, and he had never been invited to return. It was said, with reasonable accuracy, that anybody at all could be invited once to Fran Wyatt’s, provided of course he had minimum credentials; the real sign of acceptance was a second invitation, which was extended to few.

The Van Alstynes were among the select-not the Best Known People perhaps, but assuredly the Best People. You had to catch Prescott Van Alstyne between yachting expeditions to the Adriatic and skiing safaris to Austria. He had played poker with Onassis on a yacht in the Aegean, and his wife had been photographed dancing with the Duke of Windsor. She was a fleshy woman in rubber-soled shoes and matter-of-fact tweeds, wearing the careless look of old wealth and good horses.

They had with them tonight their daughter Beth, a tall chic blond who spent her time Junior Leaguing-being decorative, attending concerts and ballets, opening exhibitions in galleries, and performing Good Works: her current passion was a foundation raising money to aid Asian children whose limbs her government had blown off. She never admitted her main purpose in all these activities was to show off clothes.

Wyatt’s mother had thrust Beth Van Alstyne upon him without trying to disguise her motives. He always did his best to humor his mother; but Beth conformed to her inbred type; she was a dull creature of ritual and repetition, preoccupied with appearance and gratuitous gossip. Within the past month he had learned firsthand that she disapproved of sexual experimentation-not on moral principle, but because it was vulgar. By now, merely the way she said “Hellew” was enough to make his skin crawl.

Even so, she was a pretty girl. Very tan, just slightly leathery, with squint creases from tennis and riding. She had sun-streaked blond hair, medium length, and for this occasion she wore the kind of upper-crust clothing that never went out of fashion-a McMullen blouse with round collar and short sleeves, a poplin skirt, practical shoes, a simple double strand of pearls. Wyatt rather enjoyed looking at her. He amused himself with a fantasy of sewing her lips shut with surgical sutures and taking her on an involuntary tour of exploration of the country discovered by the Marquis de Sade.

It would not come to pass. At any rate, she was rapidly becoming a copy of her mother, and that alone was enough to make him keep his distance. Letting the conversation ride by, he glanced across the group at Mrs. Daisy Van Alstyne and held his eyes against her until she met them. Her gaze shifted away quickly; color crawled up her cheeks. It made him smile slightly with recollection. It had often amused him to speculate how much she knew about the extent of his obligation to her. Everything I am, he thought dryly, I owe to you, dear old Daisy.

She was-what? – fifty-one now? She must have been about thirty-seven then. A thirty-seven-year-old blonde with abundant hips and breasts and, even then, the suggestion of a double chin. Her husband had been deeply engaged in international finance in those days and rarely spent more than a fourth of his time at home.

For Steve Wyatt it had been an adolescent summer of sexual fantasies. He and his second cousin had bored a peephole through the wall above the john in the ladies’ loo at the back of Chisolm’s Restaurant; at night they took turns shivering in the damp chill of the seaside woods, watching through it. One night, on a dare, Steve had gone around the building and intercepted a waitress, a fat jolly girl with pendulous breasts. He had tried to make a pass at her. She had laughed. “You’re a kid. Come back when you’re big enough.”