by Jack Higgins
She moved close, very close, the tops of those good breasts nudging my chest, and then she put a hand on my arm again. It was all she had to offer, poor girl, I could see that. On the other hand I wanted to get away and there was only one means of accomplishing that.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where and when?’
‘Ladywood Park gates. One-thirty tomorrow afternoon. Is that all right?’
When I nodded she kissed me passionately again, and then the old man started creating inside and she opened the door and went in.
‘Nymphomaniac?’ Jake said. ‘Don’t make me laugh. It’s all sailors’ tales, like mermaids and the unicorn.’
‘And a sea of pitch on the other side of the Cape of Good Hope?’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
He turned from making the tea and yawned as he walked to the window. He looked tired, too tired really, but it was understandable. His final exams were in three or four weeks. It was make or break time.
‘You don’t think it exists, then?’ I persisted. ‘As a condition, I mean?’
‘Oh, there’s a hell of a difference in frequency pattern, I’ll grant you that.’ He poured the tea and spooned in condensed milk. ‘Sex is an appetite just like food and drink, and some people like to indulge more than others.’
‘Then what’s the norm?’ I demanded.
‘There’s no such animal. Anything from once a year to three times a day, if you can find someone to put up with you.’
He sat in the window seat and filled his pipe. I said, ‘And what about Lucy?’
‘God knows.’ He shrugged. ‘Young girl married to an old man. That’s an old story. She was probably making up for months of frustration in one grand slam tonight.’
Which was always possible. I sat there thinking about it. He said, ‘What about tomorrow? Are you going to go?’
‘I hadn’t intended to. What do you think?’
‘Oh, give her a chance,’ he said. ‘Everyone deserves that. On the other hand, I’m too tired to think straight, so don’t blame me if it goes sour on you.’
It started to rain again as I crossed the garden on my way home, but then it had been that kind of winter. No snow at all.
When I went into the bedroom, everything was exactly as I had left it, the typescript of my book stacked neatly beside the portable typewriter, the final sheet still in the machine. For the first time in weeks there was nothing to do, no personal demon to drive me on. I went to bed and slept, in spite of the night’s exertions, extremely badly.
I spent the morning working hard on the editing of the book, had an early lunch and was at the park gates in good time for our rendezvous. I worked my way through the Sunday Dispatch as I waited.
There was nothing of any great minute in the news. Milk rationing was to be suspended, hotels and restaurants freed of the five-shilling meal rule. They’d certainly taken their time over that considering the war had been over nearly five years. Not surprisingly, there was to be a general election. I stuffed the newspaper into a wastepaper basket and stepped back hastily as a pre-war Austin Seven pulled in at the kerb, Lucy at the wheel.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she called and opened the door for me. ‘Hop in.’
I squeezed into the passenger seat. ‘This yours?’
She shook her head. ‘No, my husband’s. It stood in the garage on wood blocks most of the war.’
She had made up her face very carefully and wore a blue reefer jacket with naval buttons, a Black Watch tartan skirt, tan stockings and brown brogues. She really did look very presentable.
‘I thought we might go for a drink,’ she said. ‘If that’s all right?’
Which was fine by me. I sat back and left it to her, and she took me to a little country pub about five minutes’ drive away, in a village just outside the city boundary. The sort of place that was certain to be swallowed up by Greater Manningham once private building really got going again.
We had the snug to ourselves. I got her the gin and tonic she asked for and a pint of bitter for myself, and we sat in an old fashioned wooden booth by the window, knees touching.
‘This is nice,’ she said, looking around the room.
‘Haven’t you been here before?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she nodded. ‘I came here several times with my mother, but that was a long time ago. 1945.’
‘The year the war ended.’
That’s right. She was killed in a car crash three weeks after V.E. day, with an Australian squadron leader she’d been running around with.’
She didn’t seem particularly upset, so I said carefully, ‘What about your father?’
‘Oh, he died years ago. Before the war. Some kind of cancer, I think. Here, let me get you another drink.’ She took my glass before I could protest and was away. She came back with another gin and tonic for herself and a whisky and soda for me, a double from the taste of it.
‘I thought you might fancy a change.’
I made no comment. Instead, I said, What about your husband? When did you meet him?’
‘He lived next door to us for years.’ I was seventeen when my mother died and she left me nothing but debts. I was working in an insurance office as a junior clerk. Two pounds five shillings a week. Anything would have been better.’
She traced an idle finger along the top of my thigh to my knee-cap, still staring out of the window. I said, ‘Why did he marry you?’
‘God knows. Not to sleep with me if that’s what you’re thinking. He was sixty-seven when we married and had a bad heart to boot. A whim of the moment maybe. Who knows.’
But there were other, possibly darker reasons, I was certain of that and was just as certain that she had told me all she intended. Not that it mattered. One pint of best bitter plus a double whisky and I fancied her again.
I put a hand on her knee. ‘No more sad songs. It’s a lovely afternoon. Let’s go for a walk.’
‘I know just the place,’ she said and kissed me full on the mouth.
We drove out in the general direction of Haxby, keeping to the back roads and moving through some glorious countryside. As I’ve already said, it had been a curiously mild winter and here we were on a Sunday in February that had all the ingredients of an autumn day. Blackbirds picking over the bones of ploughed fields. A haze to things, a gentleness, a touch of woodsmoke in the air.
She turned the car into a narrow rutted track, which ran between high hedges, and stopped beside a five-barred gate after a couple of hundred yards.
‘There’s a wood on the other side,’ she said when we got out. ‘Very pleasant. No one ever comes up here. There’s a rug on the back seat, by the way.’
She seemed to have everything nicely organized. I helped her over the stile beside the gate and we moved along the lane. There was another stile at the boundary fence of the wood and as we negotiated it, rooks lifted like black rags out of the beech trees overhead, calling angrily.
She left the path after a while, and struck off through the trees as if she knew exactly what she was doing. She did, actually, because within two or three minutes we came to a sun-dappled clearing between rocks, that might have been made for the job.
‘This is nice,’ I said.
‘Yes, isn’t it.’
I wondered how many others she’d been here with as I spread the rug neatly. Not that it seemed to matter. I took her in my arms and kissed her and, within seconds, we were at it again, a repeat performance of the previous night.
She was wearing a wrap-over skirt, which was certainly convenient, and her blouse worked on the same principle being tied at the waist. When I unfastened it, it opened to disclose the rather pleasant fact that she wasn’t wearing a brassiere. I kissed her breasts. She grabbed my head, crushing my face against her and spread her legs.
I recall reading once of some mediaeval priest being tried for witchcraft, who complained piteously that each night an insatiable succubus came to him in his cell and forced him to perform the physical act repeatedly. I knew how he must h
ave felt, for Lucy simply couldn’t be satisfied. She rattled away relentlessly, seemingly endowed with an inexhaustible supply of energy.
I surfaced, to stare up at sunlight dappling the trees, a considerable part of me one big ache. I became aware after a while that she was starting again, and some instinct for survival asserted itself to give me the strength to push her away and force myself to my knees.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘Taken short. Only be a moment.’
She stretched languorously, one knee raised, the skirt around her waist, and the afternoon sun touched her breasts with fire. I moved into the trees. God knows what was needed to satisfy Lucy, but I certainly wasn’t up to the job. I imagined her lying on the rug back there in the clearing waiting for more.
‘Hurry up, darling,’ she called.
It was enough. I dropped to my hands and knees and crept from tree to tree like an Indian. When I was far enough away, I took to my heels and ran for my life.
Jake was sitting by the fire working his way through the Sunday papers when I opened the door and staggered in.
‘Good God!’ he said. What have you been up to?’
‘Remember that thing you said didn’t exist?’ I said.
‘The unicorn?’
I nodded and sank into the chair opposite him. ‘Well it does, Jake. Oh, God, but it bloody well does!’
6
OLIVE
All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.
APOCRYPHA, ECCLESIASTICUS
UNCLE HERBERT DIED TOWARDS the end of February, quite peacefully in his sleep one night, that tired old heart finally giving up the struggle.
He must have been marked down as long overdue wherever it is you report in, and yet it was difficult in some ways to believe him gone, especially when I went into the bedroom with Aunt Alice, to see him laid out in his best blue serge suit, white linen shirt and a regimental tie. He looked extremely peaceful, a little shrunken perhaps, but otherwise much as usual.
‘You’d think he was only sleeping,’ I whispered.
‘Of course, he is,’ Aunt Alice said calmly. ‘Death doesn’t exist. Not for those who truly care for each other and have faith.’
There wasn’t much I could say to that so I simply squeezed her hand and led her outside. She brushed my hair back from my eyes with one hand.
‘You’re a good boy, Oliver. He was very proud of you, particularly that degree of yours, and he wouldn’t want you to grieve without reason, so don’t.’ She kissed me on the cheek. ‘I’ll arrange a seance soon. There are certain to be messages. Herbert and I always promised that whoever passed over first would communicate with the other.’
None of this sounded particularly dotty, for I’d been raised on it, although that doesn’t mean I believed it more than I believed in any of the standard religious explanations of the universe and the state of man.
We gave him a nice funeral with a burial service at the local Methodist church, and they found him a plot in the corner of the graveyard, by the wall under an elm tree, close to the old First World War monument with the incredibly long list of names. The Unconquered, that’s what it said on the bronze plaque at the base. They battled, they endured, they died.
There weren’t many of us there. Aunt Alice and I, Jake and his mother, half-a-dozen old family friends, and halfway through the service Herr Nagel turned up.
It rained quite hard and I held an umbrella over Aunt Alice as we each tossed a handful of soil, and the clergyman moved bravely on in the certain hope of the Resurrection and the Life.
But I was nothing like as confident. Not then, nor later when I slipped away from the ham and salad tea at the house and went down to the conservatory he had loved so much, to say some sort of private goodbye. His orchids were still there. They endured, which was some slight comfort, I suppose.
Just over a week before Uncle Herbert’s death I had received a letter from my literary agent. The book was fine. Quite definitely publishable, although he suggested a minor, but significant alteration to the ending. A question of whether the heroine survived or not.
I was so excited that I sat up all night, re-wrote the final chapter, then typed out a fair copy, including two carbons as with the original. I walked out into the cool dawn feeling tremendously elated and had the whole thing on its way back to him by the seven-thirty post.
The day after the funeral, he wrote again to say that the chapter was all that he had hoped. He now had the book out to a well-known publisher and had sent one of the carbon copies to their New York office in hope of an American sale. The other was now being read by his colleague who specialized in film rights.
I went round to see Jake instantly, brandishing the letter, but found him curiously reticent. It occurred to me then that he might in some way resent this hint of good fortune, considering his own lack of success in the literary field so far, but I dismissed the idea as being unworthy.
In fact, I was closer to the truth than I had realized, for many years later he confessed as much tome at a memorable reunion. By then, of course, we could laugh about it, for he had become one of the most successful television playwrights in the country.
Aunt Alice arranged the seance she had mentioned for one Saturday evening. I managed to obtain an invitation for Jake, who was much more available now having taken his final examinations, although it would be some weeks before the results were known.
She had imported the medium from London especially for the occasion, an imposing gentleman in a beautifully tailored dark-grey flannel suit that looked suspiciously Savile Row to me, which indicated that he was hardly having to scrape a living. He had a thin, intelligent face the colour of dark walnut, and luminous eyes. An unusual feature was his black turban. I never did catch his name for everyone referred to him quite simply, and with considerable reverence, as Swami.
Tea and cakes were served in the dining room beforehand and Aunt Alice looked as spectacular as usual in that housecoat of hers embroidered with the signs of the zodiac, the jet black hair hanging straight to her shoulders.
The only other male present was Herr Nagel, who was possibly back in favour again. I hoped so for, on the occasions I had spoken to him, I had found beneath the rather comic Prussian mannerisms a cheerful, kindly man, who took his astrology very seriously, and was engaged in a scientific study of the whole business. In fact, he had almost converted me.
The rest of the party consisted of half-a-dozen ladies, all friends of Aunt Alice. There was one who interested me particularly, addressed by the others as Olive. She must have been well into her forties, for that seemed the general age range, yet she exuded a powerful sexuality that was accentuated by a dress of a sort of black crepe material, which clung to her curves.
In fact, everything about her was the same colour, from the hair hanging straight to the shoulders, to the stockings and patent-leather high-heeled shoes.
‘My God!’ Jake whispered. ‘She’d swallow you whole, that one.’
‘Do you think so?’ I said, for to be honest I found her faintly disturbing.
He nodded. ‘Reminds me of one of those spiders that eat their young.’
We were playing polite young men, moving amongst the ladies with plates of cakes. I went to the kitchen on one occasion to replenish the stock, for the good ladies had healthy appetites in spite of their obsession with the other world. I found Aunt Alice making a fresh pot of tea and asked her about Olive.
She was a very dear friend, it seemed. A widowed lady who admitted to forty-two. Her husband had left her a small engineering firm in the city so she was well provided for. She lived near the golf course.
I was regaling Jake with these facts on my return when I suddenly realized that the lady in question was watching us speculatively. When she caught my eye she bore down on us at once.
‘And what brings you two boys here?’ she demanded. ‘I didn’t think the young had time for such serious interests.’
I explained who I was and introduc
ed Jake. Not that it mattered, for she seemed to be one of those people who forget names on the instant, and became hopelessly confused during the conversation which followed, on several occasions addressing Jake as if it were he who was Aunt Alice’s nephew, not me.
There was only one touch of colour about her, the wide, petulant mouth, which had been picked out in vivid scarlet. Even the pendant that hung around her neck was jet, and it nestled at the end of its chain in the valley between her breasts, rather alarmingly revealed by the plunging neckline.
‘What should we be interested in then?’ Jake enquired at one point.
‘Oh, come now,’ she said. ‘What are young men always interested in? The opposite sex.’
‘Don’t you approve?’ I asked her.
‘In a meeting of equals,’ she said. ‘Nothing less. You men have been treading us into the dirt for years, forcing us to meet your needs, not ours, isn’t that so?’
She seemed to be gazing at me with a peculiar intensity. Jake choked, excused himself and fled. She turned as if to move away herself and stumbled. I steadied her instantly and she put a hand on my arm.
‘How strong you are. So few young men take care of their bodies. It’s a sin against nature. You look after yourself?’
‘I like to keep fit,’ I said wildly. ‘I go for a run in the park before breakfast every morning.’ Which was true as it happened. ‘Twice around the lake.’
‘Which month were you born?’
‘July.’
‘I’m so glad.’ Her eyes widened. ‘I am a Scorpio, did you know that? Sign of regeneration.’
God knows what was coming next, but I was saved by Aunt Alice clapping her hands briskly and calling us into the drawing room.
The velvet drapes were drawn, cutting out any possibility of light from outside, although it was almost dark by that time. There was a large circular table in the centre of the room, a Victorian piece in mahogany, specially purchased by Aunt Alice for such occasions. Ten chairs were ranged around it.
All of this was perfectly familiar to me for I had helped her set the scene for the affair earlier in the day. The one extra was a trumpet-shaped object, painted a sort of dull silver colour, which was very carefully positioned in the centre of the table, on a square of black velvet.
