A Banquet of Consequences (11 page)

“I’m not planning anything, Charlie.”

“You’re thinking about it, more each day. You’re developing a fantasy about what it’s going to be like to be
taken
instead of having to cajole your partner into it and then having to allow him to suckle in your arms like an infant while you—”

“Don’t
do
this to yourself. You don’t deserve it.”

That stopped him cold. He said bitterly, “That’s why.”

“What?”

“Why I won’t let you go. You’ve understood me from the first. Even that first day at acupuncture, you knew.”

“You misconstrue. That first day at acupuncture I was no different with you than I am with any first-time patient who’s nervous. How are your headaches?”

“This isn’t about my headaches. They’re there, they’re gone, they’re
back again. They don’t make a difference. This makes a difference.” He gestured at the neighbourhood and then at the house. He gazed at her and after a moment he asked, “Who is he? A patient?”

“He’s just someone I met.”

“Where?”

“Charlie . . .”

God, it wasn’t going according to his design at all. He’d meant to come only to make a start with her. But seeing her with him and watching her kiss him and knowing as he himself did the taste of her and the feel of her . . . It had done him in.

“No,” he said. “He wouldn’t be a patient. You’ve gone that route once and you’re no fool. I expect you met him just as you say. A pub? The Internet? Sharing a taxi in the rain?”

“We met on the bus,” she said.

“Which you wouldn’t have done had you not left me because you wouldn’t have been on the bus in the first place, having to trail up to the City from this . . . this neighbourhood. It’s dangerous, India. You shouldn’t be here alone.”

“That’s not at all true. And anyway, it’s what I can afford. I have a surgery here to make extra money at the weekend as well.” She indicated a sign in the sitting room’s bay window.
Acupuncture,
it announced, along with the hours on Saturdays and Sundays when she was available.

He said to her, “Money? I can give you money.”

She looked at him, said, “Charlie, please don’t” because she knew there was no money that, at this point, did not come to him via his mother.

“Are you going to let me in?” he said.

He saw her swallow and imagined he heard it as well. She said, “There isn’t any point. This thing . . . with Nat . . .”

“That’s his name, then. Nat. What sort of name is Nat? Is he a bug or something? Why not Midge or Fly or Mosquito? Any of those would suit, wouldn’t they?”

He saw that she was allowing this ridiculous line of interrogation because she could see how upset he was and, India being India, she felt sorry for that. But he reckoned she was also probably relieved that, at least, he’d got himself out of the flat in Spitalfields. But this visit of
his, coming so hard on the heels of his mother’s turning up at the Wren Clinic for that “word” she wished to have with India, was going to tell her more than he wished her to know.

And so it did. India ignored the nonsense questions about Nat and said to him, “What did your mum say to you this time? What did she threaten?”

“She wants me happy. She’s terrified. Who wouldn’t be? In her position. After Will.”

“You aren’t Will. You never were. But you
must
pull yourself through this. You won’t survive if you don’t.”

“I won’t survive without you.”

“You of all people know how stupid a thing that is to say,” she told him.

Unthinking, he reached for a sprig of holly that grew from an urn to the right of the doorstep. He jerked on it to break it from the plant, only to wince when the sharp point of one of the leaves pierced his thumb. India was watching, but she didn’t intervene to stop him from jerking on yet another sprig and meeting the same result.

He looked bleakly away from her, towards the street. No one was there. No one would see if he forced his way into her house and . . . did
what
? he wondered. Had his way with her like some Dark Ages lord and master who owned her body but wanted her soul as well? He said to the street and not to her, “We’re meant to be together, India.”

“No one is ‘meant’ to be together.”

“Which goes for you and the midge. The mosquito. The gnat. All right, then. Nat.”

“I don’t disagree.”

He turned back to her. “Are you promising you won’t . . . ? Saying that you won’t . . . ? Saying that this whatever-it-is between you and him isn’t going to end up in something more than what it is now?”

“I’m not saying that. And you must leave.” She took a step back, and he knew she was going to close the door.

He made a move to stop her, his hand on the red surface of the smoothly painted wood. “I want to come in. I want to see where you live. I want to understand why you left and why you’re here and why you want to stay here.”

“You know all of that already. This is how it must be just now. You’re worried and frightened and you’re thinking that if you do something—the right thing—we can go back to being what we were. But we can’t. Too much has happened. We can only go on and what we must wait to see is whether we’re meant to go on separately or together.”

He felt as if the house tilted towards him, and he wanted to push back to keep it upright. The need to act was upon him. It felt as compelling as the struggle for air when a man knows he’s drowning. He said, “I want it to be together. I’ll do anything to make it together. Anything.”

She looked at him with the sort of compassion that declared a seismic shift in their love that could not be repaired. She said, “I know you’ll do anything, Charlie. But don’t you see? That’s just the problem.”

SPITALFIELDS

LONDON

“Tell me honestly,” Rory Statham asked. “Have you ever actually cooked a meal in this kitchen?” She and Clare Abbott were engaged in a postmortem of the evening’s proceedings. They were at a recycled metal-topped table in the basement of Clare’s ancient house in Elder Street. With Caroline Goldacre, they’d been picking through a typical Clare Abbott meal, whose remains were spread out before them in containers, bags, bowls, boxes, and waxed wrapping paper: cheeses, grapes, savoury biscuits, olives, nuts, sliced peaches, a baguette, and a thoroughly hacked-at salami. Caroline had left the kitchen in order to stagger off to bed, but they had remained. Now they were finishing a second bottle of wine, alone in the room save for Arlo, who was snoozing on the floor with his mop-like head resting on Rory’s foot.

At the question, Clare looked round the room. Like the rest of the house, she’d renovated it over the years. A wreck when she’d bought it in the days when Spitalfields was considered a backwater to which no respectable person would ever aspire, it now stood along a terrace of similar residences in a narrow cobbled street where once French Huguenot weavers had plied their trade. They’d lived in abject
conditions of damp, darkness, and disease, the stench of their poverty a miasma not even the rain could clear. Right into the middle of the twentieth century the place had been a ghetto. Now, on the other hand and like more and more of London, it was something of a coup to find housing that was remotely affordable in this spot, so gentrified had it become.

Cleverly, Clare had done little to change the exterior of her home. Her front door was still spattered with yellow graffiti, and the window boxes—where they existed and had not fallen off the building entirely—offered up dead plants and the occasional bird’s nest. The windows were never washed, and the ill-hung venetian blinds behind them were intended to suggest that nothing worthwhile could be found within. This made sense to Rory in an area undergoing great change. It also made sense when the house stood unoccupied for weeks at a time while Clare was in Dorset or off lecturing somewhere.

Inside the place, though, all was first-rate. This included the kitchen which Clare admitted ruefully, she’d never used to cook a full meal. She did her breakfast, of course. She made the occasional sandwich as well. She heated up soup. And she did bring in takeaway, if that counted for something. Rory laughed and told her it didn’t. To her question of Why go to the expense of a kitchen like this, you mad woman?, Clare offered the excuse of It’s quite nice to look at, wouldn’t you say?

She poured herself the last of the wine, dividing it with Rory. Above them on the street, they heard footsteps running along the pavement. Someone shouted and someone else replied. The smell of cigarette smoke came to them faintly through the open basement window.

“You were brilliant tonight,” Rory told Clare. “I could tell something special set you off. What was it?” When Clare didn’t reply at first, she added, “Have you put a man in his place recently? A lover who began to have expectations of you?”

“It was the audience,” Clare said. “There was a group of women right up front, some religious group, I daresay. They were positively firing eye bullets at me from the moment I picked up the microphone. Lord, how I love getting up people’s noses.”

Rory smiled. “This book’s done it for you, Clare. D’you know we’ve gone back for a ninth printing?”

“That’s down to the Darcy bit,” Clare declared. “I’m not so stupid as to think the book took off on its own merits. It’s the title. And the cover image, coming up with the visual that the name implies. Tight trousers, knee boots, some sort of delicious cutaway, frothy whatever at the neck of his shirt, tousled hair, burning eyes directed across the room at Elizabeth Bennet. Who wouldn’t want Darcy? I bet even you want him. He could probably turn a heterosexual man.”

Rory laughed. “You really are terrible. But, on the other hand, it’s true.”

“Which part? That Darcy could make you like men or that you’re a genius for coming up with the title and the image?”

“The latter,” Rory said. “Those tight crème trousers—”

“Aha!” Clare pounced. “So he’s in there, isn’t he? In the back of your mind. You’re waiting for those burning eyes of his, Rory. Every woman is, no matter her inclination.”

“You included?”

Clare shot her a look. She did not, however, make a reply. Instead, she sawed off another chunk of salami, topped it with a large hunk of cheese, and took a huge and very Clare-like bite. “Thank God for imported food,” she said, past her chewing. “What about you?”

“Me and food? I adore imported food.”

“You and you-know-very-well. Anyone on the horizon yet?”

Rory bent and ran her fingers through Arlo’s tousled fur. “I just don’t think I want to go there again, Clare.”

Clare nodded thoughtfully in that way she had. It told one she was considering what she wanted to say. This was characteristic of her when she was with friends. Out in public, the woman was a cannon of witty or acerbic off-the-cuff remarks. But with those close to her, she was entirely different. She was careful, she knew her power to wound, and she never used it with those she cared for. She said, “I’m not about to say to you that what happened was a lifetime ago, because it wasn’t. But what is it now, Rory? Nine years?”

“Nearly.”

“And you’ve come a bloody long way in recovering. But for
someone like you, there’s a final step. Unlike me, you aren’t meant to be alone. There’s a woman out there who wants what you have to offer, and who’s also ready to receive it.”

Rory felt that hardening inside of her, as if part of herself was undergoing a very quick freeze. It had always been thus when the truth wasn’t quite being spoken as it needed to be, and that was especially the case just now. She reached for her wineglass and said to Clare, “You know this, do you?”

Clare tapped her temple and said, “You need to listen to Auntie Clare. She knows what’s what.”

“If that’s the case . . . knowing what’s what . . .” Rory glanced at the bottom of the stairway that led up to the living quarters in the house. It was an automatic move on her part to check for listeners. Clare followed her gaze and frowned. She was no conversational fool, so she would sense a coming change in topic. Rory said, “Listen, Clare, something quite extraordinary happened this evening.” And she told her about Caroline removing Clare’s business card from the woman to whom she’d given it. Rory referred to her as “that tee-shirt woman: She turned out to be a detective from the Met. I only mention it because this isn’t the first time I’ve noted that Caroline tends to overstep. Now, don’t say anything for a moment. I understand that part of her job is to keep you out of trouble when you’re being too generous with people, but when I spoke to this woman—the Scotland Yard detective—”

“Scotland Yard detective?” Clare barked a laugh. “I feel like Miss Marple!”

“Let me finish, Clare. When I spoke to this woman and found out why you’d given her your card—because of this tee-shirt thing—it seemed to me that as she’d been standing right there, Caroline must have known fully well why you’d handed your card over: so the woman could post you something. Look, I know it’s none of my business—”

“My life
is
your business.”

“—but do you
want
her to do this sort of thing so arbitrarily? You might have given your card to someone who wishes you to speak, to be part of a conference or a seminar, to travel to Europe or even to
America where, as we both know, the opportunities for your books are virtually untapped.”

“Always the businesswoman,” Clare said lightly.

“That’s part of my job. But this situation . . . it’s more than that. She really shouldn’t be overstepping herself.”

Clare reached for her wine and a handful of olives. She began popping the latter into her mouth as she took in Rory’s words. Rory thought at first she meant not to answer at all, but she finally said, “Listen. I really couldn’t do without her. I might not be competent at reining her in when she truly gets going, but she’s only doing what you would do in the same position.”

“Fishing your business cards out of the pockets of people to whom you gave them? I hardly think so.”

“Attempting to keep me on course. That’s all it is.”

Rory was unconvinced. There was something about Caroline Goldacre that worried her. She wanted to get to the heart of what it was, but she couldn’t put a name to it, so she said, “At least tell me why she’s begun to travel with you. You’ve never before needed a minder on the road.” A thought suddenly struck her. She said, “Clare, is something
wrong
? You’re not ill, are you? Has something happened that you can’t manage on your own any longer?”