Avoiding the front of the house, Keith approached the smartly painted villa by way of a garden that was always the neatest in the street although she never laid a finger on it – the neighbouring menfolk, including her ex-husband, saw to that, to the indignation of their ladies who referred to Jacinthe as The Mantis.
Jacinthe greeted Keith with the special twinkle which Keith, like all other male visitors, knew was exclusive to himself, and led him into a large and well-windowed living room. Here her genius for self-presentation had resulted in a room that was wholly masculine in character – leather-bound books, deep furniture and colours that were almost severe. In such a setting a man felt at home and Jacinthe’s femininity blazed out in contrast. For a weekday afternoon she was smartly dressed, in cream silk with a small flash of jewellery, but not quite so smart as to be unladylike. Keith could appreciate the nuance, without understanding it.
As always after a separation she came as a shock to Keith. In her absence, he remembered her appearance but forgot her bubbling mirth and the air of helpless innocence that was as powerful as it was illusory.
She took the only chair, leaving Keith to sit on the sofa opposite. If there were more elegant legs between the Tweed and the Forth, Keith had yet to have the very great pleasure of examining them.
‘I was sorry to hear about Molly,’ she said. She was perfectly sincere. When Molly had engaged Keith’s affections, Jacinthe had faded quietly out of his life. ‘Is she going to be laid up for long?’
‘It looks like it.’
Jacinthe’s smile was a delicate blend of sympathy and amusement. ‘So you came straight to me?’
Keith sat up straight. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Don’t go getting ideas, young Cin. I came to you for help, not for hochmagandy. I’m a happily married man now. You’re not offended?’
‘Not in the least. And you’ll not be offended if I just mention in passing that that’s what they all say. How can I help?’
‘You know about George Frazer’s skeleton being found in the canal? There’s some shit flying around, and I want to be quite sure that none of it sticks to me. The question’s being asked as to whether he died before or after he’s supposed to have bought a certain gun off me, so I’m following up his last known footsteps. You knew him, didn’t you?’
She hesitated, and then said, ‘Yes, I knew him.’
It was Keith’s turn to hesitate. He had never asked about her liaisons before. ‘He was dropped off near here on the twenty-fourth of August last year. I can’t think of anyone else he’d be likely to visit. Did he come to see you?’
She thought back, motionless as a porcelain figurine. ‘The last time I saw him was around then,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell you the date – I don’t keep a diary, you’ll be pleased to know – but he arrived early, saying that he’d had a lift from Edinburgh.’
‘Who gave him the lift?’
‘The mother of that pert little blonde that hangs around you and Sir Peter Hay.’
‘Mrs Weatherby?’
‘That’s the one. Any use?’
‘A great deal of use,’ Keith said. ‘Tell me all about his visit – omitting the secrets of the bedchamber, if you want to be coy.’
‘Let me think, now. He arrived about four in the afternoon and left at the back of eight, I think. His mood was odd.’
Keith knew that she was as adept at reading a man’s mood as he was a woman’s. ‘What kind of odd, do you remember?’
‘It was a year ago, but yes, I do remember,’ she said slowly. ‘He seemed both pleased and angry, at the same time. And expectant. And he said, “This’ll shoogle them”. He said it more than once. I thought that he’d probably got the chance to get back at some enemy. He didn’t say any more about it, and I’ve no idea who he was talking about.’
‘This could be important.’ Keith concentrated silently on a corner of the ceiling. Then he made up his mind. ‘Do me a favour. Give the police a call and tell them about it.’
‘It’s important to you, Keith? To get you out of trouble?’
‘Very.’
‘Same old Keith! You’re asking a lot, but I’ll do it.’
‘I knew you’d not let me down,’ Keith said. ‘What else did he say?’
‘You don’t want much, do you? I don’t remember – yes I do, by God! When he was talking about shaking them up, he said three letters.’
‘Three letters or “Three letters”?’
‘Yes. I think.’
‘What I mean,’ Keith said firmly, ‘is, did he say the words “Three letters” as one might say “The postman brought three letters”, or did he utter three letters of the alphabet, like saying “X.Y.Z.”?’
‘I’ve got you now. It was like X.Y.Z. Only it was more like A.B.C.’
‘Somebody’s initials?’
‘Could be. But I think he said something like “I’ll give them A.B.C.” Does that make any sense?’
‘Not to me,’ Keith said, ‘but maybe it did to him. What else was said?’
‘Nothing worth the telling. He’d made up his mind to move in with some old doxy in Leith or somewhere. He’d have moved in here if I’d let him, but I wasn’t for that. So it was our farewell. He got a bit sentimental – parritch-hertit, we used to say. I played up to him although, frankly, by that time I could take him or leave him.’
‘I’m surprised that you could take him at all,’ Keith said.
‘Yes, perhaps you are.’ Jacinthe had Keith’s trick of staring silently at nothing while she thought. ‘You’ll take a dram?’ she asked suddenly.
Keith suddenly realised that a dram was what he most needed in all the world, and he said so. Jacinthe got to her feet before he could move and walked across the room with the elegant stride that he remembered. She came back with a stiff peg of whisky for Keith, and something with gin and fruit for herself. Instead of resuming her chair she sat down beside Keith on the sofa, as he had known that she would.
‘Not that it’s any concern of yours,’ she said reflectively. ‘George Frazer could be a pig when he let himself go. There were times I’d not let him inside the door. But when he stayed sober and shaved himself, and when he took the trouble to turn on all his charm, I think he could have persuaded any woman to do anything, and he probably did. He was a selfish and unscrupulous bastard, and men hated him, but he had charisma. A bit like yourself, Keith.’
‘Me?’
‘You.’
‘I’m not like that at all,’ Keith said indignantly. He tried to think of ways in which he differed from the late George Frazer. ‘I’m a happily married man,’ he said at last.
‘You’re a happily married lecher,’ she retorted, ‘and it’s time somebody told you so. You think you’re the perfect husband, but you’re looking for the best of both worlds. You don’t really give a damn about other men, so that they’re either your close friends or your enemies, you don’t leave any margin in between. But with women, you turn on the smarm and they come and eat out of your hand, poor fools. Maybe you’re not as ready with your whang as you were, or maybe you couldn’t keep it up . . .’ She flicked her hair back and looked round, to be quite sure that he had absorbed the double entendre. ‘But I’m still hearing stories about you.’
‘They’re not true,’ Keith said. ‘I’m just still a fair target for scandal.’
‘If half of them are true, and if Molly doesn’t steady you down, by the time you’re George Frazer’s age they’ll be calling you all that they called him.’
‘That’s a hell of a thing to say.’ Keith leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘I’m not sure I want to live that long.’
‘The future isn’t all black,’ she said, and he could hear the tremor in her voice that meant she was bent on mischief. ‘A man of that age still has something to offer a girl.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought Frazer could afford much in the way of gifts.’
There was a silence. Keith opened his eyes quickly. Jacinthe had been known to retort with a sharp rap
with the nearest heavy object when offended, but she had only assumed a martyred expression. ‘I suppose I asked for that,’ she said sadly, ‘and that wasn’t what I meant. Even there, you’d be wrong. He could be very generous. But there’s more than that.’
‘Experience?’
‘You’re not short of that,’ she said. ‘You youngsters, you think you’re the world’s greatest lovers. You walk around randy. You’ve only to see a wiggling rump go by and you’re like an Angus bull. An older man takes his time. He knows what he wants, but he takes time getting ready for it and he takes time over it, and that’s very good from the girl’s point of view. But you boys, a girl’s only got to do this –’ she flicked up her skirt a few inches. Keith tried not to look. A well-filled stocking-top had always been high on his list of arousers. ‘– and before you can blink, he’s got his hand on her leg.’ Keith arrested his hand, which had moved of its own accord. ‘And,’ Jacinthe finished, ‘just as the girl’s getting interested, you go off pop and it’s all over.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Keith said. ‘Wrong. I don’t go off pop. And,’ he added, ‘I don’t give in to temptation any more. I’m a pillar of virtue and a respectable businessman, and . . . and . . .’
Jacinthe put her tongue in his ear.
Keith had already resisted temptation once that day, and once in a day, he decided, was enough. He turned to Jacinthe, but she held him off at arm’s length. For all her fragile appearance, she was strong. ‘If you’re so bloody good at resisting temptation,’ she said, ‘get up and go.’
‘I’m good,’ Keith said thickly, ‘but I’m not as good as all that.’
She gave him her wickedest grin. ‘I’m not going to have you pretending to yourself that you’re a poor little innocent and that the evil woman led you astray. You can go or stay, just as you please. But if you want me, you’ll have to force me.’
Shortly thereafter, Keith proved that she was not wrong after all.
*
While Keith was being seduced away from his good resolutions by a glimpse of pink suspender, Janet was frowning at a similar item in a shop-window. Both Keith and her mother had made reference to the aphrodisiac effect of stocking-tops. Mrs Weatherby, with careful delicacy, had pointed out that while tights might be comfortable they were sadly uninteresting when it came to Stolen Glimpses. Keith had expressed a similar view, but more earthily and with references to femininity symbols, man’s fear of woman as his castrated mirror-image, and sundry other concepts which her mind boggled at considering.
Janet shrugged at her reflection in the dusty glass and turned away. Although she was still drifting through an afterglow produced by Keith’s lecture, these calculated attitudes were, to her, a foreign language. Her youth and wholesomeness disdained such sophistication, but her own view of herself was that, as a seductress, she would be a derisory failure. She could not learn a whole new art in a day. Sadly, she decided to wait and see whether familiarity might not breed courage rather than contempt in Wallace.
Wallace, meantime, quite unaware of the general concern that he be brought up to scratch, had returned to Merganser and spent a useful hour replacing the furnishings in the now dry cabin. He was waiting on deck when her slim figure appeared out of the thin mist.
Merganser was linked to the towpath by a narrow gangplank. Wallace walked carefully up and strode to meet Janet. This time he would say it all. He stopped in front of her, his mouth ready with pretty words. Now was the time. Now. ‘C-come aboard,’ he said.
Janet stepped onto the gangplank as she had done a hundred times before. Perhaps she was hurrying to get out of a day that had turned uncomfortably cold for her thin frock. Or perhaps her knees were still weak with emotion. Whatever the reason, half-way down she paused and tottered, took another step, her arms windmilled and she fell headlong into the bed of the canal almost under the barge’s bulwarks.
Wallace darted aboard and knelt down. When he saw what was reaching for his extended hand, he nearly withdrew it. By ill chance, Janet had found a deep depression in the clay bed of the canal where an inch of water overlaid six inches of mud and slime. Worse, the canal was tainted with waste oil and with the bituminous paint that Wallace had used on Merganser’s bottom. The result was a glutinous emulsion that embraced her, squeezing lover-like beneath her arms and between her thighs. In short, Janet was a mess.
‘Have you hurt yourself?’ Wallace asked.
‘Only my pride.’
Wallace had thought that when their hands clasped at last it would be a moment of ecstasy, but as she gripped his wrists and he pulled her up he shuddered. She would never forgive him for this. ‘Just stand there a moment and drip while I roll the carpet back and put some water on,’ he said. He was talking to a half-drowned kitten, not to his golden goddess.
He came back on deck in a few seconds and looked around. ‘You’d better leave that dress where you are,’ he said, ‘and come below.’
‘But–’
‘Come along, now.’
What did anything matter now? Janet did as she was bid, and came down into the small cabin. The square of carpet had been rolled back, and the galley stool stood in the middle of the bare boards.
‘Come and sit down,’ Wallace said. ‘Wrap a towel around you if you’re cold, and we’ll do your hair.’
Janet slumped onto the stool. Instinctively, she glanced in the small wall-mirror. Her white cotton bra and briefs were plastered close to her body and almost transparent with oily water. But her hair . . . ‘It’s got great dollops of tarry stuff in it!’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Can you get it out?’
‘I can try. We’ll use some oil, and then shampoo the oil out.’
Janet just nodded. She would have preferred to scream with rage and humiliation, but she was too dispirited.
Wallace rubbed some lubricating oil into her hair, working with reverend gentleness to soften the tarry tangles. Janet saw him looking at her, and stole another glance in the mirror. Her hair, dark with oil, clung to her scalp or stood up in sharp spikes. Her skin was white and goose-pimpled, and the sheen of the oil threw each pimple into high relief. I look like a witch on a ducking-stool, she thought. He’ll never fancy me now. Her bra and pants looked indecent, the final indignity. ‘These things are sticking to me,’ she said.
‘Drop them on the floor.’
She dropped them on the cabin sole. She wondered how long it would be before she could creep away and hide.
Such a situation might have been expected to freeze Wallace into a tongue-tied lump of quivering nerves. But, for the first time, he was seeing Janet as a real, warm, accessible person – no longer a goddess but a young girl, vulnerable, dependent and totally desirable. ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ he said suddenly.
She gasped. ‘Wallace, you can’t!’
‘I do. I think you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.’ Wallace laid one finger gently on her nipple and leaned down to her. They kissed, oil and all, and the special magic ran like a pang of happiness between them.
‘No, Wal, I’m all oily,’ she said when they parted.
‘Let’s finish your hair, and then I’ll lick it off.’
She gave a shiver of pleasure, and then giggled through her tears. ‘The oil tastes foul,’ she said. ‘You’d better just let me have a good scrub. Then you can spread me with marmalade or something.’
Wallace bent and kissed one of her nipples. She was right, it did taste foul. ‘I’ll wash you down,’ he said fondly. ‘And then, I think there’s a jar of honey somewhere. Or if not, there’s Marmite.’ He worked very slowly. At last he had something to look forward to, and the longer he looked forward to it the better it would be. He hummed as he worked.
Janet smiled for him. She looked round the cabin which was to be her first love-nest. ‘Wal,’ she said, ‘what made that little hole up by the hatch?’
‘Who cares?’ said Wallace. He had long since accepted the hole as part of the scener
y, too familiar to be noticed.
*
Between good news, another generous Glenfiddich and victory in the best of three pinfalls with Jacinthe Matheson, Keith emerged into the cool dusk in a mood which was little short of euphoric. He did a little tap-dance on the pavement. He had sense enough left to know that driving was out, so he walked direct to Ronnie’s cottage.
He found his brother-in-law sweating in an atmosphere like a sauna-bath. In each room of the cottage an open fire was blazing, and the heat was drawing the last of the damp out of the structure. Ronnie, stripped to the waist and a hideous sight, was sitting over his insurance claim. ‘Would you take a look at that gun of mine?’ he asked. ‘The rust got into it. How much should I ask?’
Keith glanced at the gun which stood, as ever, behind the door. ‘The rust got into it about the time of the Boer War,’ he said. ‘Claim a fiver and I’ll clean it up for you.’
‘A fiver?’ Ronnie said indignantly. ‘You must think I’m dottled.’
‘I do. Oh, I do,’ Keith said. ‘You must be, to fire that contraption. Face it, Ronnie, that gun was out of proof before you were born, and it never was proved for anything stronger than black powder. It’s a danger to you and to everybody else. But you claim the fiver and turn it over to me with the gun, and I’ll give you that Marocci you said “wisnae o’er bad”. The stock’s a bit scorched, but nothing that a rub with oil wouldn’t fix.’
Ronnie was a firm believer in looking gift horses in mouths. ‘What’s in it for you?’ he asked.
‘Look,’ Keith said patiently, ‘as a gun to shoot it isn’t worth the stamp on a cheque. But it was converted from pinfire, and it’s by William Pape of Newcastle, and it’s dated 1866, which makes it probably one of the earliest guns to have choke boring. If I clean it up and get the dents out of it and re-brown the barrels and polish the stock and recut the chequering and tighten the action – you could crack it like a whip, the way it is just now – it’ll sell to some collector as a wall ornament.’
The Revenge Game Page 11
