Bad Girls Good Women (81 page)

His car, parked at the theatre doors, was not the rented Ford she had pictured. It was a pale grey Bentley, with aristocratic lines and creased leather seats. Mattie supposed, without reluctance, that she had better stop imagining him at the Holiday Inn. Mitch Howorth was not predictable at all. Or perhaps, more seriously, it was her own reaction to him that was unpredictable.

He drove her, without consultation, to a country restaurant. Mattie liked the way he took it for granted that he would deal with the arrangements for their evening. After her years with Chris, when the motivation behind every choice was minutely examined, choosing anything at all bored Mattie. And she had been alone for long enough to make pleasing herself seem less than a luxury.

The restaurant was not unlike the one John Douglas had taken her to long ago. The waiters were French with equal ostentation, and as many flambé pans flared and sizzled beside the diners. Mattie remembered how hungry she had been, and how impressed by the grandeur. Now her eyes met Mitch’s, and they smiled at each other.

‘The teashop is closed at this time of night,’ he said.

Before their food came Mattie curled her fingers around the drink he had ordered for her, but she didn’t lift it. It was odd to realise that she wanted to talk to Mitch more than she wanted to reassure herself with the woolly detachment that whisky brought.

Watch it
, she warned herself. Mattie was wary now. Since Alexander, warier still. But she asked, just the same, ‘It’s two weeks since we had tea together. Why didn’t you come to see me before this? I thought you’d gone. To Swanage, or Weymouth, or somewhere.’

Mitch shook his head. ‘No. I passed the theatre every day. Looked at your pictures outside. I found out how famous you are. I felt like a fool, for not knowing you in the first place, I guess. And I supposed you’d be busy. Why should you have the time to see some middle-aged retired manufacturer of metal casings? Even though you’d let him accost you on the harbour.’

‘Mitch,’ Mattie said softly, ‘don’t talk like an idiot. I know you’re not one. I hoped you’d come. If I’d known where to begin looking for you, I’d have been out searching. I can’t bear to think of you being outside the theatre every day, and me not knowing.’
I’ve been lonely
, she thought,
without needing to be
. It was extraordinary how unlonely she felt now.

He took her hand, then. They both knew that they were missing out the proper stages, galloping past the milestones, and neither of them cared. He took her untouched glass away and folded her hand between both of his own.

‘I’ve been to see your play three times,’ he said. Mattie stared at him. ‘Tonight was the third. I couldn’t stop looking at you. What you did made me cry. You were that man’s wife, and I believed everything you said and did. And yet you were you, too. The girl in the teashop. I thought you were magnificent.’

‘It’s my job,’ Mattie said, lamely, touched and shaken by the sincerity of his praise. ‘Being another person. Pretending. Not pretending, that’s not true. Creating. All falsehoods, I suppose, but as true as I can make them.’

‘Are you pretending now? Creating?’

There were no straight lines in Mitch’s face, Mattie saw. His mouth curled, bracketed by lines, and his eyes were softened by folds of skin that drew them down at the corners. She wanted to reach out and follow the curves with her fingertips. Mattie shook her head. ‘No. What you see is what I am.’

His hands tightened on hers. ‘Talk to me,’ he ordered.

There seemed, suddenly, so much to tell.

Their food and wine came and they ate and drank, not noticing it. The room glowed around them, and then emptied slowly and became quiet. They were the last diners, and the waiters yawned and muttered in the corners. Mattie and Mitch blinked and looked round. They had focused on nothing but each other’s faces, the tiny movements of muscles and the flickers of feeling, and it was disconcerting to remember that they were part of a bigger world.

Mitch laughed. ‘We’ve overstayed our welcome again.’ He paid the bill, and they went out together into the night. It smelt of the sea meeting the land, of salt and rain together.

They leaned back in the Bentley’s leather arms, not looking at each other. Mitch’s fingers rested on the ignition keys. ‘Shall I take you home?’ he asked. ‘You’ll have to direct me to your hotel.’

Mattie was thinking about pretending and creating again, and about falsehoods.
Don’t pretend now
, she warned herself. She wanted Mitch to decide this, too, but she also wanted to go half of the way to meet him.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said. ‘It isn’t home. It’s a hotel room. It’s square and empty and there’s a grey television eye in the corner.’

‘Then come with me,’ Mitch Howorth said.

The Bentley slid forward. Mattie let her head fall back against the leather cushion. They drove for a little way, Mattie didn’t try to distinguish where. She watched the steady glow of the lights on the walnut fascia, and the shadows making hollows in Mitch’s face. She felt happy and dreamy in the car’s opulent cocoon. She could have driven on, all night, anywhere he chose to take her. But they turned and drove up a steep hill, swung round and came to a standstill. As she stepped out of the car Mattie had a brief impression of gardens on a slope, and a tall house with a lighted porch. Mitch took her hand and led her.

Inside the house she peered around, her eyes slowly acclimatising themselves to the light. She saw polished floors and Persian rugs, portraits and serious furniture and porcelain. Mattie laughed delightedly.

‘What’s funny?’ Mitch asked, half offended.

‘I imagined a Holiday Inn.’

‘What? This is an English country house. Like I read about when I was a kid. Okay, it’s only a small one. But the real thing.’

That was it
, Mattie thought.
It was like Ladyhill
. She felt happy and secure enough in Mitch Howorth’s company for the irony only to add to her amusement.

‘Is it yours?’

He was too good-natured to take further offence at her incredulity. ‘No. Of course not. I rented it, a few days ago. I was staying in digs before, not very gracious ones. Fine for me, but I couldn’t have taken someone like you back there.’

‘Wait a minute …’ Mattie countered. ‘You said … You said that you were afraid I’d be too busy and glamorous to have time to see you again. How come you felt confident enough of me to rent a whole manor house?’

Mitch crossed the little space of polished floor that had opened between them. He put his hands on either side of her face, turning it to his. Mattie looked steadily back at him. His eyes were surprisingly clear, close to, the eyes of a much younger man. Quietly Mitch said, ‘Everything that can be arranged, should be. I never leave manageable details to chance. But I never confuse what I can make happen with what I can only hope for. It’s an important distinction in business, as well as in affairs of the heart.’
He rented a whole manor house
, Mattie thought,
on the chance that he would need somewhere to bring me. If he was going to bring me anywhere, he wanted it to be the place he dreamed of when he was small. His own Ladyhill, his fantasy possession, to which to bring an illusionist
. The aptness as well as the grandeur of the gesture touched a deep chord inside her. It made tears prickle behind her eyes.

She knew that she shouldn’t ask, but the words came out just the same. ‘Am I an affair of the heart?’

‘Oh yes, Mattie. Body and soul as well, if you want. Only if you want.’

‘I do want.’

He kissed her, then, a very gentle kiss. She put her arms around him, awkwardly. When he lifted his head, to look at her again, Mitch said, ‘The owners have gone away to the South of France. For the whole winter. Isn’t that thoughtful of them?’

‘Supremely thoughtful.’

He kissed her again, but then pulled back once more.

‘The car is mine. I don’t want to confuse you.’ He was laughing at her.

Mattie groaned. ‘I don’t give a damn about houses or cars. I don’t care if you went to a gents’ outfitters and hired your suit and your sober tie and your clean white shirt. I don’t even care if your glasses belong to the theatre props department. Just so long as it’s you inside them. You are real, Mitch, aren’t you? You won’t vanish in a puff of smoke?’

He didn’t laugh any more. He took hold of her, almost roughly now, and bent her back against him.

‘Come to bed,’ he ordered her.

After that, Mattie didn’t see the panelled walls or the reproving portraits. They stumbled up the stairs together, and in a dim room with a four-poster bed hung round with dark red curtains Mitch undressed her, and then took off his own clothes. He was unabashed, gentle and inquisitive and unhurried. When he held her against him she felt that his solidity was hard muscle, not fat. She ran her hands over his shoulders and his hips, and put her mouth against the thick, curling grey hair that covered his chest. Mitch’s naturalness made her natural too. He didn’t appear to feel that it was necessary to be overcome with passion, or to hurry her on before she was ready. Mattie didn’t wish that she was thinner, or had a suntan, or try to pull in the rounded swell of her stomach. Mitch knelt down and kissed it, and then gently parted her thighs with his hands. Mitch seemed to expect that she would explore him in the same way. Mattie had never, ever since the times with Ted Banner that she had hidden away inside herself and forgotten, ever felt that it was comfortable to look at a man who was aroused by her.

Even with Alexander, she had closed her eyes or looked away.

With Mitch, inexplicably but clearly, it was different. She knelt down in her turn and took hold of him. She drew back the skin and touched the rosy head that was revealed, lifting itself towards her.

It seemed quite simple, as natural as it was for her to feel his arms around her, his mouth against hers.

Mitch lifted her up and laid her on the bed. Very slowly, but allowing no interruption, he began to work on her toes. He kissed them, and flexed the joints, and then traced the arch of each foot with his tongue. His lips closed over her ankle bones, gently sucking, and then his fingers locked around each ankle, measuring it, pinioning it. He moved to her shins and her calves, meticulously exploring the white skin, and then buried his face in the warmth of the hollows behind her knees.

‘Mitch,’ she begged him. ‘Stop. I can’t bear it.’ She felt awkward that he should be so patient, convinced that no part of her was worth such undivided attention.

‘Don’t interrupt,’ he reproved her.

She lay back and followed the loops and folds of the bed curtains with her eyes. Mitch’s fingers, surprisingly light, made feathery strokes over her thighs and her hips. He knelt over her and kissed her belly again, and then spanned her waist with his hands.

‘You have beautiful skin,’ he told her. ‘It feels soft enough to melt away altogether.’

‘I’m perfectly solid,’ she smiled at him. She locked her arms around his neck and drew him closer, so that she could reach his mouth. Mitch had taken his glasses off, and folded them tidily on the carved chest beside the bed. Without them, his eyes had the vulnerable, faintly puzzled softness of short sight.

‘Wait,’ he ordered. ‘I’m not ready yet.’

Mattie lay back again. Mitch wasn’t vulnerable, not in that way, at least. He was too sure of what he wanted.

He turned his attention to her breasts. He weighted his hands with them, then brushed the nipples with his fingers, watching them harden. He put his mouth to them and gently sucked, then turned his face against the white, abundant flesh.

‘They’re too big,’ Mattie whispered, putting her forearm across them.

‘No,’ Mitch gravely contradicted her. ‘If there is the slightest flaw, it’s that they are not quite big enough.’ He removed her arm, and went to work with his mouth again.

Mattie closed her eyes. She sighed, faintly, with pleasure and she felt his mouth curve in a smile of satisfaction.

He lifted her hands and kissed each of her fingers, circled his tongue in the crook of her arm and buried his face in her armpits. He stroked her shoulders and her throat, and kissed the thin skin under the angle of her jaw. And then he turned her over to continue his painstaking journey, from the nape of her neck and down the length of her spine.

Mattie felt warm, and dreamy, but at the same time every inch of her skin tingled, and burned, and she felt the tiny pull of the muscles and the rush of blood in her feet, and the tips of her fingers, as well as in the aching centre of herself.

When he reached the small of her back, Mattie moaned.

Unhurriedly, Mitch turned her over again. He parted her legs and knelt between them, looking down at her. Their eyes travelled over the other’s face.

And then, of her own accord because she wanted him, Mattie reached up for him. She lifted her hips to meet him, guiding him into her.

For the first time in her life, she wasn’t afraid of the size of a man. For the first time in her life she didn’t close her eyes, hoping out of fear, or affection, or boredom, that it would be all right, and quickly over. Her eyes stayed open, fastened on Mitch’s. Her mouth searched for his, and found it.

As soon as he came inside her, Mattie knew that she would come. And as soon as she knew it, it began. It was nothing like the hasty, bruising, brief burst of externally centred pleasure that was all she had ever known. This was inexorable, spreading from a fierce bud that swelled inside her, but very slowly, exquisitely slowly, as they moved together. She whispered his name, then called it aloud. Her fingers clutched at him, then loosened and fell open. Mattie was lost, and it was a joy to be lost, within herself, apart even from Mitch. The bud grew, and became a dark red flower, full blown, and the petals fell back. The wonderful shock waves that it released raced all through Mattie to the tips of the fingers and toes that Mitch had caressed, in a hundred thousand shimmering and refracting ripples. She cried out, a sound she didn’t recognise that came from deep in her throat, and the cry died away into a long, shuddering sob.