‘Elizabeth, I’ve . . . I’ve so much looked forward to . . . to seeing you. You have been so kind to Gerald.’
‘It’s only my job, but I have become so fond of him and of . . . The Duchess asked me to call her Constance.’
‘Connie, yes, she’s wonderful. Much too good for Gerald, I sometimes think.’
‘Oh no, he’s a duck.’
‘A duck! I don’t think I’ve ever thought of him as that.’
‘You know, when he came out of his coma but still had difficulty speaking, he used to want me to sit beside him and hold his hand.’
‘He always did have an eye for a beautiful woman,’ said Edward without thinking, and once again felt he had been guilty of boorishness. ‘No, but seriously, you have worked miracles.’
‘Is that the only reason you asked me out?’ she said, gazing at him with wide eyes. ‘I mean, it’s going to be jolly dull for you if all we can talk about is your brother’s health.’
‘Dull – it’s not going to be dull for me, I promise you, and I won’t mention Gerald or Connie or anything else about my family until you tell me it’s safe to do so.’
Elizabeth chuckled. ‘That’s good then. Now tell me, what should I eat? I’ve only once been to Claridge’s before and that turned out to have been a mistake.’
‘Whose mistake?’
‘Mine, and probably his, but it’s much too early to tell you things like that about myself.’
Monsieur Malandra directed them towards caviar. The oysters he did not recommend. He suggested the Consommé Yvette, which he said was turtle, and Filet de sole Cambacérès, Becasse au fumet with salade Coeurs de Laitues. ‘Ze sole is finished with lobster and mushroom, madame, and the woodcock is done with brandy and served on toast adorned with its own liver.’
‘My goodness,’ said Elizabeth when the head waiter had gone, ‘I think I know how the woodcock must be feeling.’
‘Adorned with its own liver? Surely not.’
‘No, but I do feel a little like mutton dressed as lamb. I have to confess, when you asked me to go out with you I almost refused, not having anything suitable to wear, but the Duchess . . . Constance . . . persuaded me.’
‘But you look beautiful,’ Edward said sincerely.
‘Well, if I do, it’s thanks to her. She took me shopping and she lent me this dress. She said she never went out any more and it was criminal letting her evening clothes go to rack and ruin and so . . . here I am.’
‘Well, God bless Connie! But I thought we said we would not mention my family.’
‘Yes, that’s right, I had forgotten. Tell me about your investigation. You said you were going to see if you could discover anything about why your friend was murdered.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call it an investigation. I thought I had discovered something but Chief Inspector Pride didn’t want to know.’
‘Tell me,’ she ordered.
They were still discussing what he had learnt when they were tucking into the woodcock. ‘Verity thinks . . .’ Edward was saying.
‘Verity Browne. Constance has told me about her. She sounds . . . intrepid. I wish I had the guts to go and be a foreign correspondent.’
‘Intrepid, yes, that about describes Verity,’ and he went on to expatiate at some length on Verity’s virtues, ending by saying, ‘Actually, I was supposed to be having dinner with her tonight . . .’
‘I’m so sorry,’ broke in Elizabeth coldly. ‘Here am I taking up your time when you wanted to be with Verity Browne. You should have told me.’
‘No, no . . . I didn’t mean that at all. I . . . wanted to see you, Elizabeth. There’s nothing between me and Verity, I promise you. I’ve told you, she has a . . . a friend in Madrid.’
‘The communist or the American novelist?’ inquired Elizabeth, unappeased.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, feeling that he was in some way betraying Verity and insulting Elizabeth at the same time. ‘Please, Elizabeth, I must have sounded like the most awful cad but really, I do want to be with you. Nothing to do with Gerald or anything. I thought we seemed to get along so well at Mersham, I wanted to know you better. Please forgive me if I have been saying idiotic things. It’s just that it’s so easy to talk to you that I didn’t think.’
At that moment, a friend of Edward’s who was dining with his wife came up to their table. ‘Edward, how are you, my dear boy. I haven’t . . .’
The introductions were made and it was a full five minutes before they were left alone again. They were silent for a moment or two. Then Edward said, ‘Forgiven?’ and put out his hand across the table.
‘Forgiven,’ Elizabeth said, putting her hand in his before quickly withdrawing it. ‘Not that there was anything to forgive.’
‘Shall we go on somewhere?’
‘I’d like that,’ she said, smiling at him.
They ended up at the Four Hundred in Leicester Square. In the dim religious light, the sound deadened by walls and ceiling swathed in red and beige silk, they danced scarcely exchanging a word. She wore a scent Edward did not recognise but, as he held her closer and she inclined her head against his shoulder, he breathed it in and forgot about the murder, about Mersham and about Verity Browne.
It was past three in the morning before they got into a cab and directed the driver to take them to Pimlico. ‘Your aunt won’t be waiting up for you?’ he inquired anxiously.
‘No, she gave me a key.’
Edward tried to turn her head towards him so he could kiss her, but she twisted away.
‘Edward, that was a wonderful evening but, before we say goodnight, there is something I have to say to you which perhaps I ought to have told you before – in fact, I know I ought to have told you before.’
‘What is it, Elizabeth?’ he said, taking her hand in his. ‘You can tell me anything.’
‘No, I’m serious. Let go of my hand. I don’t think you will want to touch me after I’ve told you.’
‘For goodness’ sake, what are you talking about?’ Edward said, now irritated and suddenly feeling slightly drunk and very tired. Perhaps he was too old for these late nights. It crossed his mind that he might not sleep well despite being so weary.
‘I was married to Makepeace Hoden.’
Edward’s fuddled brain took some time to register this. ‘But Hoden’s dead.’
‘I know he’s dead but I was married to him . . . and then I . . . I left him.’
‘But you’re not called Hoden. Your name’s Bury – Elizabeth Bury.’
‘Bury’s my mother’s maiden name and, when the marriage failed, I decided to use it. I didn’t want anyone to know I had been married.’
‘Hoden? But what made you leave him?’
‘I didn’t actually leave him. I found out something . . . discreditable about him. I can’t tell you what. It made it impossible to live with him, that’s all.’
‘So you were still married to him when he was killed?’
‘Yes, technically.’
‘But you didn’t go out to Africa with him?’
‘Yes, I did. I was there when he was killed.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No, but I was thinking about it.’
‘Do you know who did?’
‘It was probably one of his native bearers,’ she said, as if it was a matter of no importance. ‘They hated him. Or it might have been Captain Gates. He was the white hunter. It wasn’t any of the other people on the safari, I’m almost sure.’
‘And . . .?’
‘What do you mean . . . “and”?’
‘And you knew Stephen Thayer?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘You admit it, then?’
‘Am I in the dock?’
‘Elizabeth! It was you who suddenly sprang this on me . . . that you were married to Hoden. I don’t want to have this conversation. It’s three – no four – in the morning and my head is buzzing like a wasps’ nest. Can we talk about this tomorrow?’
&nbs
p; ‘You’re going to Frankfurt tomorrow.’
‘Yes, of course, so I am. Well then, when I get back.’
‘Yes, when you get back.’
The taxi drew up in front of the house in Pimlico. Elizabeth opened the door and made to get out, but Edward stopped her.
‘Look, I don’t understand any of this but then I know I’m stupid. But I want you to know that anything you tell me is in complete confidence and, more important than that, nothing you tell me will change the way I feel about you.’
‘How do you feel about me?’ The light from a street lamp illuminated her face, which was as pale as the moon.
‘I . . . I think I love you,’ he blurted out, and then wished he had not said it.
She smiled, leant toward him and kissed him on the lips. He closed his eyes and the scent of her made him dizzy. ‘Don’t get out,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want to wake the neighbours. I’ll see you at Mersham when you get back from Frankfurt. And Edward . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I think I love you too, but nothing said after midnight in the back of a taxi means anything, so don’t worry about it in the morning.’
‘But I mean it,’ said Edward, not knowing if he meant it at all.
‘And so do I, Edward dear, but there’s still a lot you have to learn about me. But thank you for . . . a memorable night out.’
She got out quickly and lightly, closing the door of the taxi behind her. Edward fumbled with the catch but his fingers seemed unwilling to obey him. She had said something to the driver as she got out and, no sooner had she shut the door, than the taxi shot off tossing him on to the floor. With some difficulty, he got himself back on the seat and turned to look out of the small rectangular window at the back. For a moment he could see a pale form standing in a doorway and then the taxi turned the corner.
In the morning, Fenton found a pile of clothes on the bathroom floor and noted, with a smile, lipstick on the collar of the starched shirt and on the white bow-tie. He judged the evening to have been a success but, of course, he was not in full possession of the facts.
19
Verity slipped out of bed and wrapped a towel round her. She took a cigarette out of a packet on the table and then draped herself over the chair, leaving one leg hanging – she hoped provocatively – over the arm. She looked back at the bed where Belasco lay sprawled. It was odd, she thought, that she who cavorted shamelessly naked during their love-making was shy enough, the moment the blood cooled, to have to cover her body. Belasco, on the other hand, gloried in his nakedness despite being in many respects repulsive to look at. As he stretched himself and reached for one of the horrible little cheroots he liked to smoke after sex, she once again wondered at his hairiness. The thick pelt, which covered his chest and ringed his neck like a choker, continued down to his groin. His back, too, was felted and bear-like. In retreat, she noticed, his penis was entirely hidden in a great ball of fur sprouting like coarse brown grass.
Verity had had little experience of men. Her only previous lover had been David Griffiths-Jones, efficient enough but, she now realised, uninventive. Belasco, whom she had at first considered repellent, was by comparison . . . extraordinary. She blushed inwardly at what he had taught her to do to his body and the excitement he had generated in hers by his playful nuzzling and . . . She stopped herself.
She had never intended to take Belasco as her lover, but he had given her no say in the matter. He had invited her back to his apartment ‘to look at some drawings by a guy named Pablo Picasso; ever heard of him, kid?’ Verity hadn’t – and he had taken her with a suddenness some might have considered perilously close to rape. One moment she had been looking at a charcoal drawing of a bull on its knees before a matador and asking him about the wine stain which disfigured it, the next she had been thrown on the unmade bed and was having her skirt torn off her. She had slapped him hard on the face and he had stopped. With as much dignity as she could manage, she had told him there was no need to tear her clothes. He had climbed off her and watched with an amused smile as she had removed first her shirt and skirt and then her undergarments. ‘You’re just a kid,’ he had said with some surprise, eyeing her small breasts with displeasure. Verity was indignant: ‘And you are just a pig – a hairy pig.’
That was when he had laughed at her and she had impulsively laughed back.
After that first coupling, he told her he had been provoked by her prim, virginal Englishness. He said he had wanted to ‘kick her neat little butt’ – by which she gathered he meant shatter her self-esteem, disturb her equilibrium and liberate her from her class and culture. As an enemy of convention and with an almost obsessive fear of being thought ordinary, she could only approve his aims. He was not, it turned out, normally a violent or even an energetic lover. He was a prankster, teasing her, arousing her and then letting her hang suspended in a state of sublime anticipation, before satisfying her with the passionate casualness of a beast. And all the time – or at least when he was in a position which allowed him to do so – he would watch her with his small, porcine eyes as though he was playing with her, as a lion plays with its food before devouring it. And always there was his fur, which stroked her flesh and set her blood screaming.
It was strange, she thought, how much she could enjoy sex without love. It went straight across everything she had been told, which might be summed up as the only sex worth having was sex within marriage. Verity could not imagine herself loving anyone to whom she was not sexually attracted, so it was peculiar the opposite was not true and she could be exhilarated by sex with someone who . . . disgusted her. Perhaps it was because Ben was so strange, so foreign to her. Maybe that was the source of his interest in her. She wondered if she would turn up in one of his novels as a prissy English girl, inhibited about sex and naive about everything else.
She found herself idly imagining what Edward Corinth might be like as a lover. She suspected that beneath his hauteur – the coolness of an English gentleman who had been taught since the nursery that it was not good form to show his feelings – there might lie a passionate nature. Might he not be tender? Her whole body ached for tenderness, to be stroked and . . . pampered. Edward Corinth was everything she had been taught to admire in a man – smooth, strong-featured, muscular, athletic, always perfectly dressed even when he considered himself to be in rags, courteous, patronising, intelligent, considerate . . . inconsiderate . . . Verity’s mind wandered. But for the moment what she wanted was the man now noisily peeing in the basin because he was too idle to go down the passage to the lavatory. He frightened her and he thrilled her to the core . . . and he knew it.
‘What’s bugging you, V?’ he asked, coming over to her still stark naked, drops of urine dropping from his penis. ‘Come back to bed, baby. I’m still hungry.’
‘You’re always hungry,’ she said with nervous petulance. ‘I suppose I’m just a snack . . .’
‘Hey, kiddo,’ he said, lazily pulling away her towel and drawing her to him. ‘What’s up? Maybe you’d like it better with that lord of yours,’ he added as though he had been reading her mind.
‘What can you mean?’ she said, trying to pull herself free of him.
‘That Lord Corinth or whatever he calls himself. I’ve seen him looking at you.’ He laughed happily. ‘When you came to sit by me that time you brought him to Chicote’s, the guy almost had apoplexy. That man – if he is a man and not just a stick – wants to get into your drawers, V.’
‘Oh really, Ben, you’re absurd. Anyway, as you might have noticed, I don’t wear drawers.’
‘Knickers, then . . .’
‘And if you don’t let me go, I will push this cigarette into you and you’ll probably go up in flames.’ His flesh smelled of dried sweat, sex and pure maleness . . . something she had never smelled before but recognised instinctively.
‘Hey! V, don’t be so violent. You don’t have to stab me with a cigarette to send me up in flames.’
‘I expect that’s what
you say to all your women.’
‘Women, what women?’ he said, throwing up his arms so she could duck out of his embrace. Naked, she ran back to lie on the bed but, to show how liberated she was, did not cover herself this time. ‘I don’t have any women . . . besides you.’
‘You have a wife, don’t you?’ she said sharply.
‘Oh, sure.’ He was quite unmoved. ‘But Gloria knows the score. I love her . . . sure I do . . . but she knows I need other women. It gets so lonely in these foreign places.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t have other women. But it’s good to know I can keep you from feeling lonely for an hour or two.’
‘What’s eating you, V? Haven’t we just been having a great time? Why spoil it? You’re not really mad at me, are you?’
‘No, but . . . you are the limit . . .’
‘I’m the limit, am I?’ he mimicked her prissily. ‘I’ve heard about you English girls. You don’t have sex till you’re married and then you have babies and stop. Christ! England must be a dull place.’
‘It probably is,’ Verity agreed. It was true that after Madrid and the life she had been living – ‘rackety’ her father had called it – she did not think she could ever go back to running around London making banners and getting indignant about ‘the proletariat’ and the ‘class struggle’.
‘Maybe I am English and dull, but isn’t that just what you like about me?’
Belasco laughed again, his easy throaty chuckle. ‘Gee! I never said you were dull. You ain’t dull – no way.’ He looked admiringly at her eyes which sparkled with indignation as she momentarily forgot her nakedness. ‘You’re a firecracker. I guess I’ve gotten bored of American women. Look at Hetty . . .’
‘Was she your lover . . .’
‘I tell no stories – ask her yourself,’ he said annoyingly.
‘When you were in Africa?’
‘I guess I rescued her . . . You’d never believe that Swedish Baron . . . what a cocksucker.’
Bones of the Buried Page 24
