Hot Breath

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘It’s stuck,’ I said, ‘for goodness sake.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘All you’re doing is getting us further in.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Please, Harriet. Allow me, will you?’

  There was that echo of George again. The only difference, in fact, was that whereas George would certainly have been right, Kostaki was wrong. I looked sharply away, but the side window was by now coated with liquid mud and worse. Smarting with righteous indignation I stared straight ahead while the Fiat buzzed and sizzled beneath us.

  The cows had regrouped at a safe distance, and now stood looking on in a well-ordered semi-circle, ears at the horizontal, jaws rotating, like a slightly animated school photograph. The herdsman stood at one end, in the position of headmaster. I thought as I watched him that I detected the beginnings of cogent thought, and I was right, for he suddenly removed his headphones, switched off the stereo, and came over to us. He was a squat, muscular youth, with a T-shirt advising us to ‘Relax‘. A forlorn hope under the circumstances.

  Constantine continued to ignore everything but the Fiat’s dashboard, but the herdsman was a match for him. He simply leaned across the bonnet and tapped on the windscreen with his stick. With the engine still running, Constantine rolled the window down and stuck his head out irritably.

  ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘Need a hand, squire?’

  I smiled appreciately. ‘ How very kind.’

  ‘We’ll get there in the end,’ said Kostaki, ignoring me.

  The herdsman transferred his attention to me. ‘If you was to come over in the driving seat, him and me could bounce you out.’

  ‘What a good idea.’ I laid an as-it-were wifely hand on Kostaki’s rigid forearm. ‘Did you hear that, dear?’

  Kostaki switched the engine off at last. ‘No.’

  The herdsman was nothing if not thick-skinned. ‘ If you hop out, squire, and the lady takes the wheel, we could bounce her out. Give her a good shove.’

  This time he emphasised his point by opening the driver’s door. Kostaki, the poor dear—taut, pale and silent—climbed out, and slammed it behind him. I negotiated the gear lever, realising as I did so that something was missing: my pants. Somehow in the heat of the moment my St Michael cotton polyester apricot hip-huggers had been overlooked. I took a cursory glance round, but there was no sign of them. Not to worry, I was now in the driver’s seat in every sense, and even if I did have to get out, the skirt of my sundress was of a respectable length. I switched on the engine and they began bouncing and shoving. Kostaki’s beautiful suit soon looked as though someone had chucked a tureen of brown Windsor all over it; it really was too bad.

  It didn’t work. After about three minutes the two men stood back, mopping their brows, and I was smitten with remorse and got out.

  ‘Hopeless,’ I remarked. ‘And just look at you.’

  ‘This really is an infernal bloody nuisance,’ said Kostaki warmly. The exercise had done him good. It was nice to hear him sounding like a human being again. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

  ‘Got any sacking?’ enquired our adviser.

  ‘I don’t carry it around in June,’ replied Kostaki.

  ‘It’s a crying shame I haven’t got me donkey jacket,’ said the herdsman. He surveyed us both speculatively, and I knew what he was thinking. I had on nothing I could consign to the slough of despond without risking arrest, and neither did he. We both looked at Kostaki, whose jacket had taken on a curried appearance.

  He went even paler. ‘Now, steady on—’ he began. But a collective moo from the cows interrupted him, and the potential transaction was nipped in the bud by the arrival of a car on the other side of the gate.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ remarked a thin, contemptuous voice from the driver’s window. Too late I recognised the maroon Morris 1000 of Arundel Potter.

  ‘Looks like the cavalry,’ remarked the herdsman.

  It looked more like nemesis to me. Bearing in mind that the best form of defence is attack I marched over to the gate and confronted Arundel, and his passenger, Marilyn Drinkwater, as they disembussed.

  ‘We seem to be in a bit of a mess,’ I said brightly and clearly, conscious of Arundel’s gimlet eye upon me. ‘I met Constantine and he kindly offered to give me a lift, but now look what’s happened—honestly, would you credit it?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Arundel. ‘ What in heaven’s name are you doing parked in a herd of cows?’

  For once, my modest talent for invention came to my assistance in a real and practical way.

  ‘Must you ask?’ I chided him gaily, glancing at Marilyn to enlist her woman-to-woman sympathies. ‘After all that plonk and strong tea?’

  It was perfect. Marilyn emitted a hoot of delighted laughter. ‘Oh, Harriet, you do get into some scrapes, how killing!’ Once again I had shown myself to be a good sport with a nice sense of humour, even where the exigencies of the bladder were concerned.

  ‘We’re stuck in the mud,’ I explained, before Kostaki could deny it in the face of all the evidence. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any sacking?’

  Arundel bowed his head in a lofty affirmative, but quelled my gasp of delighted relief with: ‘What a pity I don’t have the ashes to go with it.’

  ‘What?’ I stared at him blankly.

  ‘Arundel feels,’ said Marilyn, ‘that he said one or two things on MTV that he would prefer to forget. I thought it was all absolutely splendid.’

  ‘Oh.’ I glanced from one to the other of them. There was something here, some murky undercurrent, some hidden vein that I could not fathom, and now was emphatically not the moment to try. ‘Well,’ I said with ghastly chirpiness. ‘Shall we get the show on the road?’

  As Arundel opened the rear doors of the Morris I caught his eye fleetingly, and if looks could kill I should have been rendered carrion forthwith. I should have known, of course, that our brief and treacherous bout of intellectual heavy petting would end in tears. For half an hour’s cheap thrills at MTV’s expense Arundel had forfeited his lofty superiority over me. And hell hath no fury like an academic caught with his standards down.

  Contantine advanced, hand outstretched, his sleeve steeped in a rich rustic soup of ordure. The look he gave me was none too kind, either.

  Gamely, Marilyn shook his hand. ‘Nice to meet you, doctor,’ she said, and something in her tone suggested that she had heard of him before, perhaps in the context of the Buchfest. Arundel approached, sacks over his arm, and I hastily effected further introductions.

  ‘This is very good of you,’ snapped Kostaki, through a face that seemed to be entirely clenched.

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Arundel.

  The herdsperson stepped forward. ‘Evening, name’s Clarke.’ There was no way of knowing if he meant Clarke as in Kent, or as in Lord.

  ‘How do you do,’ said Arundel.

  ‘And this is Daisy, Dolly, Maisie, Molly, Fairy, Folly …’ Clarke made an expansive gesture, clearly expecting some sort of laugh. The four of us and the cows stared at each other with consummate stolidity.

  ‘Right,’ said Arundel.

  Marilyn and I stood by the Morris and watched as Kostaki, Arundel and Clarke spread sacks.

  ‘What a lucky thing we happened by,’ said Marilyn, ‘and I spotted you.’

  ‘Yes, wasn’t it,’ I agreed.

  ‘Your friend is such a fascinating man,’ she rhapsodised. ‘ Such a fine mind. There’s real intellectual rigour there, something one doesn’t come across very often …’

  She burbled on, and I got to wondering how she came to be travelling back in the Pottermobile in the first place.

  ‘What have you done with Flavia Brayne?’ I interrupted, rather rudely.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Marilyn, ‘you make it sound as though we performed unspeakable rites on her still-warm cadaver.’ She laughed shrilly. ‘She said she’d quite like to visit her married sister in Antwich, and Arundel offered me a lift into Ba
rford. I can get Surburban Electrics there, it’s quite a saving.’

  ‘I see.’ I surveyed Marilyn. For a congenitally pasty woman she was sporting quite a flush. Suburban Electrics, my eye.

  ‘Oh look!’ she cried, ‘they’re going to have a go!’

  Reluctantly I transferred my attention to Operation Shitstorm. There was now a piece of sack tucked beneath each tyre, which gave the Ghikasmobile the appearance of having webbed feet. Kostaki was behind the wheel, and Clarke and Arundel stood one on each side, at a safe distance. Beyond the car Daisy, Dolly and the rest of the girls still stood in a neat semi-circle. The resulting tableau resembled a scene from some abstruse and impenetrable Greek tragedy.

  ‘Okay, squire,’ said Clarke. ‘Chocks away.’

  Kostaki started the engine and pressed the accelerator. There was an unpleasantly familiar sizzling sound and the four bits of sacking became chewed string. Clarke, to my consternation, flapped his arms to attract Kostaki’s attention, and then made a ‘ V’ sign.

  ‘I say,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘Second!’ yelled Clarke. ‘Get in second.’

  ‘Oh I see,’ she said, appeased.

  ‘Hold it, squire!’ Clarke and Arundel rearranged the sacking. Kostaki got into second, and we held our breaths.

  We watched and mentally urged our champion on. I found myself bearing down as if giving birth … ‘There you are, sir, want to have a hold? It’s a lovely bouncing two-litre Sierra Estate …’

  ‘Hoorah! Well done!’ cried Marilyn, clapping her hands.

  The tableau was broken. The Ghikasmobile shot out of the slough, scattering the cows in all directions. Kostaki steered it in a wide arc and drew up facing the field gate. Morris and Fiat eyeballed each other through the bars.

  Clarke collected up the sodden sacks and offered them to Arundel.

  ‘Quite honestly,’ said Arundel, nostrils crimped, ‘I don’t think I’ll bother.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ replied our genial assistant. ‘ I’ll split.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Arundel, looking mystified.

  ‘Thanks again for all your help,’ I said. ‘We really are grateful.’

  But Clarke was already tuned back into his personal muse, and was on his way, with a glazed eye and a funny walk, his bevy of bovine beauties sashaying before him.

  Kostaki opened the gate. Arundel was examining something in the morasse from which we’d just extracted the Fiat.

  ‘Again, many thanks,’ I said to Marilyn. ‘ See you soon, I have no doubt.’

  ‘Oh, no doubt,’ she agreed. ‘And very well done on this afternoon’s performance. I shall tell them all that you were super, as usual—I don’t know how you do it. Goodbye, doctor.’

  ‘Cheerio and thanks,’ said Kostaki, not offering a handshake this time.

  ‘ ’Bye, Arundel, and thank you.’

  We climbed into the Fiat and Kostaki started up once more. But of course the Morris blocked maddening slowness, and with something in his hand.

  To my surprise he came to my window and knocked on it lightly with the knuckle of his forefinger. ‘Open up.’

  I rolled the window down further. ‘Yes?’

  Arundel favoured me with his most reptilian smirk, and lifted into view a soiled and sodden scrap of material, held fastidiously between finger and thumb. Only the label was relatively clean and it bore, unmistakably, the signature of the patron saint of the high street.

  ‘My dear Harriet,’ said Arundel. ‘The call of nature must have been urgent indeed for you to overlook these.’

  There followed that which in my novels I should have described as a pregnant pause; a pause broken only by the distant lowing of the cows, and now, unmistakably, the crowing of a cock.

  ‘Really, Arundel,’ I said roguishly, ‘been at the washing lines again? Take me home, doctor.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘You mean to say he never even mentioned it?’ I squeaked incredulously over the phone to Bernice the next day.

  ‘Not a dickie bird,’ replied my friend. ‘So you see he can’t have set that much store by the incident.’

  I had other ideas about the cause of Arundel’s reticence, but this was not the moment to expound them.

  ‘… the arrogance of guilt,’ Bernice was saying. ‘You think every damn thing begins and ends with you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said plaintively. ‘It was jolly embarrassing! Think how you’d feel if someone appeared at your window brandishing a pair of your pants.’

  Bernice sighed. ‘Brandishing’s nothing. It’s a helluva lot better than putting them on himself, or using them for a face mask. Besides, you said, you denied them thrice.’

  ‘I was bluffing. And he knew it.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake …!’ said Bernice. ‘You’re just angsting away for the sake of it. Let’s talk about the party. I was thinking that you’re going to need an ice-breaker. Something to get them all pulling together.’ She paused. ‘ Or perhaps not. Something to get them mixing.’

  ‘Well, what?’ I asked sulkily.

  ‘Ask people to come as their occupations.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘For instance, Arundel would come in a gown and mortarboard, Kildare in a surgical mask … that sort of thing. It works quite well. I mean, you’re on speaking terms with a bona fide vicar, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘There you are then. Vicars are great. And you can be the archetypal romantic novelist, a vision in pink marabou.’

  ‘But what,’ I said feebly, ‘about the people with boring occupations?’

  ‘One or two boring people don’t do any harm,’ replied Bernice airily.

  I considered the matter. ‘Well, maybe. I suppose if I spread the idea around, there’s time …’

  ‘Of course there’s time. It’s not full-blown fancy dress, just an underlining of identities.’

  Put like this, the scheme seemed fairly innocuous. Something occurred to me. ‘What about you, Bernice?’ I asked. ‘What will you come as?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been thinking about that,’ she assured me. ‘I’ve never done a hand’s turn in my life, so I shall come as what I’d like to be.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘A tart with a heart,’ she replied.

  I disseminated this idea by means of telling a few selected communicators—Vanessa, Brenda, Dilly, and my children. I had had an almost hundred per cent acceptance to the party, and reckoned that if only a few people complied with the directive it would be enough to make things go. I had not heard from the GM, which after the events of Fartenwald was no surprise, but at least he would infer from my invitation that the hatchet was buried.

  I rang Kostaki myself. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘ Fine, yes, I’ll do my best.’

  No, things weren’t what they were. We had parted on reasonable terms after the Antwich episode, having of course returned to the Prickard first, there to ensure that the sun did not set on our wrath. But just the same I knew that the George-like tone which I had noticed first at the Flag and Ferret, and again in the cowfield, had been the knell of passing lay.

  But perhaps it was no bad thing. The circumstantial evidence was piling up against us ominously. There had been the night of the dinner party, with the unexpected arrival of Akela and her troops; the sudden discovery of Lance Lowe at the football tournament; our eventful threehander with the GM at the Dynamik; and, most recently, The Case of the Apricot Hip-huggers.

  Perhaps infected with the sense of a chapter in my own life closing, I became obsessed by a insane desire to finish the first draft of TRT before the party. In a mood of ruthless professionalism I sat down at the tripewriter and prepared to sunder Maria, Jamie and Richard amid the well-orchestrated ping of heartstrings.

  Richard was about to peg out. The wound, apparently so slight, had become infected, but because pity was anathema to him he had kept the imminence of his demise from Maria. He had also (not wanting to appear a
sissy) concealed his passion for her. All this granite-jawed selflessness had resulted in Maria being confirmed in her original opinion that her cousin was a tight-arsed, toffee-nosed so-and-so without an ounce of feeling, and she had sought solace in the muscular charms of Jamie. But alas, the Parliamentarians had returned, and this time there was no withstanding them. Richard, with his dying breath, told Maria to flee while she still had the chance. Too late she realised what might have been. Jamie, not to be out-done in the chivalry stakes, declared that he would not abandon the master who had saved his life, but would fight to the death at his side. Honour dictated that the only course left open to our heroine was to don once more the guise of a lad and take charge of the evacuation from the burning manor house …

  … she turned and looked back once more at Kersey, so proud and fine, now a helpless prey to the hungry flames of civil war. Once—how long ago?—she had come here as a poor and humble relative. She left, now, as the last hope of the proud Hawkhursts. She had arrived as a stubborn and ignorant girl. She left as a woman. But she took no pleasure in her alteration. For behind her she left the man who had declared his love for her too late, and who, she prayed, had been taken into death’s blessed embrace before the ravening flames devoured him … And there, too, was that other man, he whose dark and thrilling intensity had first stirred passion in her, but who now, surely, faced death too.

  She felt a touch upon her arm and glanced round to see old Martha looking up at her with a look of such wise and penetrating sympathy that for the first time in this day’s long ordeal Maria felt the hot tears sting her eyes.

  ‘Oh, Martha,’ she whispered, and covered the old servant’s hand with her own. ‘Oh, Martha, what am I to do?’

  ‘I know, missy, I know,’ soothed Martha, now using the affectionate diminutive of an equal. ‘But the future is your trust now, and ’tis a sacred one. ’ Tis a heavy burden for a maid, but you were ever a strong one.’

  ‘But I shall always remember …’ Maria broke off, unable to continue for the weight of sorrow bearing down upon her.

  ‘Ah, the remembrance tree,’ sighed Martha. Pity it is that remembrance is a dead tree, and a grinding heavy weight for young shoulders to carry.’