She shook her head. ‘He didn’t know. Tried to hang around to be told, but I gave him the push. Have some duck, for God’s sake. I’m making a pig of myself.’
He began to eat, fiddling with the pancake and the plum sauce with fastidious fingers. ‘Well, maybe he was after the key so that he could go back and see for himself – maybe he got a bloke to do the office for him. And when the bloke couldn’t find the key in your bag, because you’d put it in your pocket, he just chucked your bag away. Makes sense?’
‘No,’ she said, and began on a dish of noodles. ‘Friese knows how these places work, that only key-holders can get in. And it isn’t enough just to have the key – you have to sign and they compare your signature with the last time – hell of a rigmarole. He’d know there was no use in just the key –’
She stopped eating suddenly and stared at him, her brows snapping together. ‘He’d know, but – Oliver mightn’t.’
‘Oliver?’
‘He was waiting there on the pavement when I came out – I told you. He kept asking questions about the box. On and on –’ She shook her head then. ‘It couldn’t be anything to do with Oliver. I took a taxi and left him there in the Haymarket.’
‘Maybe he organized something in advance –’
‘Oh, this is getting ridiculous!’ she said and leaned back in her chair. ‘We’re talking like a couple of kids playing Dick the Boy Detective. I was mugged by some lout who got scared and ran before he could take anything. That’s all there is to it. All this talk about that damned box – stupid.’
‘I’m not so sure –’
‘Well, I’m not going to talk about it any more. Come on – let’s get back. They should have fixed those cans by now.’
She was edgy, anxious not so much to get back to the studio as to get away from him. He sat there looking at her with his eyes round and filled with a look of concern that made her uneasy, almost embarrassed, and she waved at the waiter, gesturing for the bill, and stood up so that Theo had to stand up too.
He paid the bill and in silence they left the restaurant, pushing their way back along the tatty Willesden street towards the studio. He stopped her as they went round the corner to the entrance, holding on to her elbow with a sort of urgency.
‘Maggy, I am worried about you, love, I really am. You may shrug it off, but I think – I – I think that box is more important than you realize. I think it’s why you were pushed over last night, and I think there’s a risk it’ll happen again. I’m moving back this afternoon. I’ll go to the office, sort out a few things and leave Hal to cope here, but I’ll be at the flat when you get home. Okay?’
She looked up at him, standing there with that anxious look on his face, and let warmth for him fill her again. It was damnable the way her feelings veered; one moment solid with suspicion, the next disarmed because he looked at her so caringly.
‘All right,’ she said brusquely. ‘Whatever you like, I don’t give a damn either way.’
‘Well, I do. So we’ll settle for that. Take care coming home, you hear me? Take a cab all the way –’
‘I drove here.’
‘Where are you parked?’
She jerked her head, and he saw the car then, the old Ford with the souped-up engine and the jazzily painted panels, parked half-way down the little street.
‘Let me take it. I’ll come back, around six. Okay? I’ll pick you up –’
‘For Christ’s sake, Theo, I can drive myself home! I’m not helpless –’
‘Of course you’re not but I think you’re – I think there may be risks. No, don’t look like that! I’m not just making dramas. I tell you, I’m worried. I’ll pick you up, Okay? Six o’clock. Tell Hal he’s got to be finished.’
‘He’ll finish. He won’t fancy overtime for the engineers – look, Theo, this is –’
‘Yes, I know. See you later,’ and he held out his hand for the car keys and then went striding away towards her car, and waved as he went roaring back down the street towards the High Road. Leaving her confused and more frightened than she had been, even last night, after the police had gone and left her alone in her flat.
5
They went down to Dorset after all, leaving early and driving through the scattered traffic to reach Studland before eleven. Theo hadn’t been keen; he’d thought it would be better to stay at the flat, keep an eye on things, he said, but Maggy was determined. The work had gone well in the afternoon, and they had finished in a high good humour, all of them, sure that the reduction session would be an easy one, certain that they had a winning couple of tracks for the new album. Hal had gone so far as to tell her that he reckoned they could be on their way to a gold disc, so satisfied was he with what he’d got, and the effect on Maggy of that sort of praise had been electric. The tension of the past few weeks since Dolly’s death seemed to melt away, and she had been relaxed and comfortable all evening, and as eager for a trip to the coast as any child with a bucket and spade.
As for Theo’s anxiety about ‘keeping an eye on things’ –she had scoffed at that. ‘Honestly, Theo, you’re like an old woman, you really are! As if sitting around all a hot weekend’d make an atom of difference. That kid who pushed me over was just that – a silly kid who got scared and ran before he got anything. There’s nothing more to it than that. Forget it and we’ll have a great weekend. I’ve made up my mind to it.’
The weather was perfect, one of those green and blue and gold days that sometimes happen in English summers, and as the car ate the miles through the New Forest she sang, loudly and with great emphasis, the plainchant which was her favourite sound, inventing her own lewd words as she went along, making Theo laugh. As they went through Bournemouth she shouted greetings to passers-by and other drivers, making some of them look affronted and others startled and that made them both laugh absurdly, giggling like a pair of schoolchildren.
They bought cheese and rolls and fruit and a bottle of wine and went down to the beach, finding a hollow between the dunes at the far end of Studland Bay where they could strip off and sunbathe, something that made Theo a little shy, but which he patently enjoyed once she could persuade him out of his clothes. They swam and ate and slept and swam again, and then, as the August sun slanted its hard shadows along the beach, made love, lying side by side. This was something Maggy enjoyed; love-making in a bedroom with the door shut was agreeable enough, but sex out of doors, in broad daylight, where someone might come along and disturb you at any moment; that had a spice that no amount of bed play could ever offer. So she told him, and teased him and touched him until he was too aroused to care either. And they weren’t interrupted and it was great, and then they were both lying breathless and relaxed on the sand, staring up at the thick blue of the sky, listening to the distant shouting of children further down the beach, and the roar of the motor boats dragging water skiers tirelessly about the bay.
‘You look about five years old,’ he said at length, turning so that he rested his head on his crooked arm, and staring at her. She was lying on her back, her chin tipped up to the sun to catch the heat, her eyes closed.
She laughed. ‘Some five years old,’ she murmured, not opening her eyes and ran one hand over her breasts and with the other reached out for his crotch and tweaked him, and he pulled away from her hand and laughed too.
‘I was looking at your face, ducky. Below the chin, I grant you, you’re something else. But your face – five years old. At the outside.’
‘Am I supposed to take that as a compliment? Or is it your way of telling me you’re kinky for little kids?’
‘A compliment, lovey, a compliment. You look smooth and young and happy – five years old.’
‘Whoever told you being five years old was happy? You’re mad to think it. Being thirty-seven is as near happy as I ever got. Not five years old, that’s for sure.’
‘What were you like when you were five?’
‘Scrawny and carroty and miserable,’ she said. ‘Very, very miserable.�
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‘Were you? Can you remember it so well?’
‘You’d be amazed at what I remember.’ She opened her eyes then and stared up at the sky. ‘I try not to, usually. It makes me so –’ She shook her head, digging a little trough in the sand. ‘I don’t enjoy it.’
There was a sense of intimacy between them now that was so powerful that it seemed to Theo there was no one in the world but themselves. The hollow in the sand dunes, the clumps of coarse grass, the sound of the sea and the distant voices, all built together into walls which lapped them about with security and made him feel that whatever he said, she would understand; whatever question he asked, she would answer. There would be none of that prickly self-defensiveness that she so often displayed when he seemed to come too near.
‘Tell me about it,’ he said lazily, and perhaps because he was so relaxed himself, so sure of what there was between them at the moment, she was unalarmed by the demand, and began to talk. Easily and comfortably, staring up at the sky as though it were a cinema screen on which she was watching the action of a story, someone else’s story and not her own, and telling him about it all.
Going to bed was a lovely time of the day. Dolly would sit her on the table in the kitchen and bring a bowl of warm water, and wash her all over, standing her right in the bowl at the end and squeezing the flannel over her bottom so that the water ran down her legs and made her tickle. Then she would wrap her in a warm towel, the big rather thin old one that covered her all over, and sit her on her lap in front of the kitchen range with its red-hot coals trapped behind the bars of the grate and rub her till she was dry, and then put on the thick nightie with the pictures of sailing boats all over it. The wireless would be on, crooning silly little tunes in the background, tunes that they both loved, and would sing to sometimes; ‘You’ll never know just how much I love you, you’ll never know just how much I care –’; ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey –’. Happy funny songs that made her laugh, sometimes.
Then Dolly would wrap her in a blanket and give her a cup of Horlicks, because Horlicks was good for little girls, and she would say, ‘Story, story, story,’ chanting it while Dolly pretended she couldn’t hear her, and then suddenly being all surprised and saying, ‘Are you asking for a story? Really asking for a story? What a funny thing to do, to ask me for a story –’ She always did that; it was part of the ritual and leaving it out would have been unthinkable.
And then Dolly would tell the story. Sometimes one and sometimes another, but mostly the favourite one.
‘Once upon a time there was a brave, brave soldier –’
Oh, but she loved that story. Loved to hear about how handsome he was, and how kind and good, how he had come one day to Dolly’s street and seen her, and said, ‘You are the most beautiful lady I have ever seen. You will be my wife, you will be Mrs Soldier.’ Only of course it was really Mrs Dundas.
She would hear about the presents he had bought for Dolly, the most beautiful lady he had ever seen. The green scarf with black chantilly lace in the middle, very delicate, very rich. The pigskin writing case with the Victory sign in morse code in the corner, three dots and a dash. The photograph album with the thick white satin covers and a real gold clasp, the yellowest realest gold there ever was. And nylons too, and chocolate, all those things the lovely handsome soldier had bought for the beautiful Dolly.
And then he had to go away, back to the War, back to killing the bad enemy, and Dolly had stayed behind and one day, there had been the baby. ‘The most beautiful baby there ever was,’ said Dolly. ‘As beautiful as the handsome soldier and the most beautiful girl in the world all put together.’
‘And what did the soldier say?’ she would ask Dolly breathlessly then, staring at her over the rim of her cup. ‘What did he say when he found out?’
‘He said – he said –’ and Dolly would pause impressively. ‘He said, “You must call her Margaret Rose, for she is a princess, our princess, the most lovely princess there is. That is what you must call her –” and that is what the baby’s name was, Margaret Rose, for ever and ever amen. And now it’s time to go to sleep.’
Oh, those had been good times, those bed-times, just Dolly and Margaret Rose, sitting by the fire, and Margaret Rose sipping as little of the Horlicks as she could, to make it last longer, and teasing Dolly for more and more story. And Dolly would sometimes tell her more, tell her of the handsome soldier and his lovely family, for he had been rich as well as handsome.
‘They lived in a big house in the country with a garden with apple trees and pear trees and plum trees, two of each. There were two lavatories in the house, one up and one down, and a separate bedroom for all the people in the house, and the kitchen had so many different dishes that no one had ever counted them –’
Dolly would pile on the detail, each night bringing out some new and tiny fact, until Margaret Rose felt she knew it all, had seen it herself. She would go to bed at last and lie thinking about the house in the country with two lavatories, would climb up the stairs on the carpet with the brass holders on each side of it, under the real painted pictures on the walls, past the big bowl of real fruit that was on the table on the upstairs landing, left there in case people got hungry in the night, would wander all over that house.
Sometimes, lying there in bed and nearly falling asleep, she would try to talk to the people in the house, as well, the kind lady with the white hair and the important man with the eyeglass and the moustache, but that wasn’t so easy, for she knew that they were dead, that they had died together of grief the day the handsome soldier had died, fighting so bravely to save another soldier’s life, far away in France where wars happened. But usually she would think only of the House and thought of it as home, the home they had come from before coming to this one in London, where all the boarders kept wanting things and talking to Dolly when she wanted to talk to her herself. Except at bed-time of course, when Dolly always told anyone who came tapping at the kitchen door that she couldn’t stop now, she’d see them later, now was Margaret Rose’s bed-time and not to be disturbed –
‘It sounds idyllic,’ Theo said, and rolled over on the sand, to feel the heat on his belly. ‘You sound as though you were happy, not – what was it you said? Scrawny and carrotty and miserable.’
‘You reckon?’ Maggy said, and now her voice had an edge to it. ‘Jesus, man, I was the bastard kid of a tatty boarding-house keeper. The only father I had, the only family I had, were bed-time stories. Big deal. Big bloody deal! You call that idyllic?’
‘If you thought so at the time it was,’ Theo said. ‘I remember when I was at school I thought it was – oh, fantastic. I used to weave great dramas out of everything that happened, from a lousy Latin class to a church parade on Ascension Day. I saw myself as a cross between Stalky and the Best Boy in the Sixth and Gawd knows what else. That school was Eton and Harrow all rolled into one, and I loved it. Now, of course, I know better – it was a tatty, tenth-rate junk joint run by a drunken slob and a couple of half-trained idiots who passed as school-masters and kidded parents they were giving a decent education. I learned bugger all, and it’s taken me years to get over the rubbish they filled me with, but while I was there it was fantastic. So it was, wasn’t it?’
‘Like hell it was,’ Maggy said, and sat up and shook her head, running her fingers through her hair to get the sand out ‘I’m getting cold. Let’s go back to the pub.’
The intimacy had thinned out, almost disappeared, but he seized at the remnants of it, still lying on his back and staring up at her.
‘What went wrong, Maggy? It sounds as though you were really close when you were a child, you and Dolly. What went wrong to make you hate her so much?’
‘When you’ve a year or two to spare I might tell you.’ She stood up, and began to climb into her jeans. ‘Come on. I’m getting bored with all this. I want to get back. Let’s go to Bournemouth tonight. See what’s happening in boom town.’
&n
bsp; ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Let’s just stay at the pub, have a meal, talk. You’ve never talked much about yourself, really, have you? Only about work and –’
‘Work’s the best thing there is. For talking about and everything else.’ She was combing her hair now, holding her head well back so that the sand would fall out, and he stood up and came up behind her and put his arms round her, holding each breast in his cupped hands.
‘The best?’
‘The best,’ she said firmly, and pulled away from him. ‘Put something on, for God’ sake. The moment’s passed for the body beautiful. And it’s not as beautiful as it might be, come to that.’
The intimacy finally disappeared, shredding away against the noise of the sea, and they were back where they usually were, she locked inside her own control, he circling warily around her, seeking a way in past her guard. And he had to admit that that was the way he liked her best. The intimacy had been exciting in its own way, the glimpse into her past full of interest, even dramatic, but it didn’t compare with the excitement of chasing after her, the way he nearly always had to do. If they were as close all the time as they had been for just an hour or so there on the beach that afternoon, he’d soon be bored. So he told himself as they trudged back up the beach, walking barefoot along the water-line, past the garbage-strewn transistor-playing crowds huddled together at the western end as close as they could get; so he told himself, and almost believed it. What else could he do? Maggy was as she was and he’d have to settle for her as she was. Either that or give her up all together. And one way and another that was the last thing he wanted to do.
They drove inland for dinner, taking the country roads to Sherborne, where they were told they’d find a good restaurant. ‘Because of the school, you see,’ the barman at the pub had said, earnestly, when they’d asked him. ‘People as spends thousands a year to put their kids in those places expect the best when they come down to visit ’em. So you’ll get the best, that’s for sure –’
Reprise Page 6
