‘That’s crazy!’
‘I know, but like the man sort of said, the law can be an ass.’
‘So there’s nothing I can do?’
‘The only thing I can suggest, is if you commit adultery on such a grand scale that your husband can’t possibly ignore it. Then he’d feel bound to divorce you. You’d be the guilty party of course, but I shouldn’t think you’d feel any shame in that. I should think half the people in this room are guilty parties.’
‘Yes, but, the point is, David doesn’t know. I mean, I can’t really write, ‘Darling David, I’ve just been to bed with the most fantastic man.’
‘Mmm. Tricky.’
‘There’s something else. I wasn’t sure what your charges were.’
‘I’m sure the efficient Mrs Armstrong will already have our fee notification in the post to you. How long were you with Marsha?’
‘Two hours.’ Now she came to think of it, it was as if Marsha had timed everything to the second.
‘Well Patric Ryan doesn’t come cheap, Eugenie. It’s because we’re very good at what we do.’
I bet you are.
She said, ‘Marsha was completely terrific. I really liked her.’
‘Good. I trained her. Patric Ryan trained me, and I keep scouts at various universities. When I heard about her I went up to Oxford myself. I knew her first degree was in law, and her second in French. So I interviewed her totally in French.’
‘Oh God.’
‘I hired her on the spot.’
‘She’s very attractive,’ Eugenie fished.
‘Yes.’
‘I should think she has lots of boyfriends.’
‘I imagine so.’
Damn. Eugenie wished she played chess. David and Art had taught themselves when they were fourteen.
‘If she’s that good, someone might poach her away from you. I get offers all the time from rival papers.’
‘What stops you?’
‘Because I know, the journalists making me the offer are the type of creatures who eat their young.’
‘I have clients like that. Gobble away, overdo it, and haul me in to make it all better.’
‘Expensively.’
‘Yes. Expensively.’
Eugenie took off her hoop ear-rings and dropped them in her bag. The gold hoops had looked all right this morning with her black dress. Now, thinking of Marsha’s elegance Eugenie felt just too gipsyish.
‘Tell me about Stet,’ Andrew said.
Eugenie felt protective of Revel. She didn’t want to gossip about him. But since a growing number of people in London had been forced to become familiar with Searching for Bobo, Eugenie talked about that.
‘I am so sick of retyping the blasted thing.’
The cheese platter had arrived, complete with thinly sliced celery in a dainty crystal jug. There was a small bunch of seedless black grapes. There were tiny silver grape scissors. Had she been with David, Eugenie would have chosen a smelly, runny cheese, and they’d have laughed when it dripped down her dress. Now, she followed Andrew’s lead and selected some chèvre. Dull but safe. And it wouldn’t make her breath smell.
‘These rejection letters, Eugenie. Does Revel read them all?’
‘No. Not at all. I sort of tactfully mention that another one’s arrived, and then I file it out of sight.’
‘Good. I have an idea. Chap in Threadneedle Street, he’s a printer. I know him very well. Suppose we cod up a dozen different letterheadings from alleged publishers. Then all you’ve got to do is type a suitably kind rejection to wave at Revel. You wouldn’t need to send the book out at all. Have you got somewhere you can hide the book at home?’
Eugenie suspected this was a roundabout way of finding out something about her apartment. He probably already knew her address. What Marsha had called, homework.
Even so, she gave him the same line she took with any man who wanted to come home with her.
‘I live in a mansion block. It’s like an overgrown police station. And the caretakers. So damned nosy. Just like jailors.’
Andrew smiled. ‘Will you join me in a brandy?’
They had already shared a bottle of Morgon. As they were finishing their brandies, Andrew said, ‘Have you any plans for the afternoon?’
‘No,’ said Eugenie. ‘But I think you have.’
As they left the Caprice, it happened again. The doorman, accompanied by three blonde television stars, was trying to get them a taxi. Suddenly a taxi shot out of nowhere and stopped in front of Andrew. The television stars squealed. The doorman threw himself at the cab door.
‘Ged off!’ yelled the cabbie. ‘He was first.’
‘That was impressive,’ Eugenie said, as they got in and sat down.
‘Nothing to do with me. Cabbies love driving a pretty woman.’
‘You haven’t told him where we’re going.’
‘He knows where to go.’
They were heading north. ‘I should warn you, I live in a shoebox,’ Andrew said, as the taxi turned into Great Russell Street.
Eugenie didn’t believe him. The silk suit, the Cartier watch, this international lawyer would live somewhere that matched.
But he didn’t. Andrew’s flat, quite high up in an uninspiring block, was titchy. He had a small sitting room, a small bedroom, a small bathroom and a small kitchen. He had bought it at first sight because, straight down from university, it was all he could afford. And he liked the way transport, restaurants, shops, a cinema, all were on his doorstep.
Eugenie, accustomed to her own spacious rooms, felt stifled. What could you do with the place, her woman’s instinct wondered. You could move that café table into the window and shove the sofa against the wall. But it would always be his place, his space. His records strewn on the sofa, his stuff taking up most of the bathroom. Where would she sit and do her knitting?
Eugenie, she reminded herself, you don’t know how to knit. You don’t want to learn how to knit. And you are not here now to talk about knitting.
Andrew, looking very faintly amused, as if he knew exactly what had been running through her head, took her into his bedroom and undressed her.
His expertise told her what she already suspected. A lot of girls, an awful lot of girls, had been undressed by Andrew Millard, and gently but firmly, guided into his enormously tempting bed.
I’ve got to be good, as good as he is, Eugenie thought. I’ve got to be memorable. I want him to ask me here again.
But he would want to see her again, she realised. He had already indicated his intention when he’d suggested they cod up the publishers’ letterheadings. It meant they’d meet again. Okay, maybe just for lunch, but if she played it right, they’d end up back here. Her confidence grew.
Andrew took his clothes off, and hung up his silk suit. Naked, he was magnificent. She told him so.
‘Eye of the beholder,’ he said, swinging into bed and lying on top of her.
‘You know, Eugenie, I’ve just realised something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I haven’t even kissed you yet.’
He made her come, in one way or another, about eleven times. Eugenie had been too swept away to count beyond six. When at last he let her rest, she sighed happily, ‘I knew you’d be a wonderful lover. I hadn’t quite expected such a fantastic bed.’
‘Got it in Harrods.’
‘And these sheets. They feel silky.’
‘They’re not. They’re cotton. Vantona. Someone told me Vantona were the best.’
Eugenie wondered who the ‘someone’ was.
The phone in his small hall was ringing. Eugenie heard him say,
‘Not now…around midnight…oh damnit, you’ll have started your shift by then. Okay.’
She heard him in the kitchen, the sound of a cork popping. Ice.
Around midnight. He anticipated that she’d still be here at midnight. Excellent. From the tone of his voice it had obviously been a woman. Your shift. What women worked night shifts
, apart from nurses and night-bus conductresses?
Andrew came back with pink champagne in an ice bucket, and two glasses. He placed it all in the small space between the bed and the wall. The bed took up so much of the room, there was no possibility of bedside tables.
So he wouldn’t think she’d been eavesdropping, Eugenie avoided any reference to any female, and said, ‘What’s this trick you have with taxi drivers? They come screeching up, and seem to know where to bring you home.’
Andrew poured two glasses of champagne. ‘When I bought this place, I chose it for the location. Near the Tube, near a cinema, food shops, a launderette and the garage just along the road. The garage is not for me. I don’t keep a car. But it’s where the taxi drivers fill up. So I know a lot of them. They call me Andy and I ask if they’ve done up the wife’s mother’s back bedroom yet.’
The phone rang again. He swore. ‘Who the bloody hell is that? Interrupting my love-life.’
Sipping her champagne, she heard him once again in the hall.
‘Who? Could you repeat that? Edwin Myers – I don’t think I – oh. Oh are you? WHAT? When? Bloody Christ. I’ll come at once…oh. Are you indeed?…Thursday? Yes, I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there.’
He didn’t say goodbye. Eugenie heard the phone being put down, and then a muffled noise she couldn’t immediately identify.
She put her champagne flute to the side of the bed. When Andrew came back into the room he was crying. Crying as if he’d never stop. More than that, as he got into bed he was convulsed, wracked with terrible sobs. He was soaking her, soaking himself, soaking the sheets.
Eugenie just didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know him well enough to have any idea which chest of drawers he kept his hankies in. And one wouldn’t be enough.
She ripped off one of the Vantona pillowcases and tried to mop him a bit. She had never in her life seen anyone in such distress.
When he’d gained a measure of control, he turned to her. His chest was slippery with his tears. He held her. Held on to her. His voice was choked.
‘Stay with me, Eugenie. Don’t leave me. PLEASE’
*
On Thursday, Andrew had a First class seat on the Paddington to Exeter train. He was offered a first class breakfast, refused all the food but accepted endless coffee from the silver pot proferred by the steward.
He had a lot to think about. Ruthie. Edwin. Eugenie.
Andrew put Eugenie aside for later.
First, Ruthie.
Ruthie. His first love, his great love, the one he should have married, only he hadn’t been quick enough off the mark. When her marriage foundered, he helped her with the divorce. With some of the divorce settlement negotiated by Andrew, she had bought a good-sized cottage on Dartmoor where her door and her arms were always open to the man she had met and fallen in young-love with at Trinity College, Dublin.
But never again could he escape to his second-home, his haven, on Dartmoor. Crossing Exeter high street Ruthie been killed by a maniac hit-and-run driver. Today was her funeral.
He remembered, when he was twelve and at his English boarding school, his housemaster had called Andrew to his rooms and told him his mother was dead. Then he’d gone away and left Andrew to cry his heart out.
Other housemasters had wives who would have come with tea and sympathy and comfort. Andrew sat on the sofa, alone.
The sofa had wooden arms. Andrew was so confused, so angry, he was tempted to get out his penknife and carve something obscene in the wood.
What stopped him was the arrival of his one visitor that day. The rugby captain. Andrew was in awe of him. He was older, he was fit, he wasn’t someone anyone would pick a fight with.
‘I heard.’ the rugby captain said, sitting down next to Andrew. ‘Same thing happened to me. It’s just the worst, the worst ever thing.’
‘You mean it’ll be the worst for ever?’
‘Can’t know that, can we? But when I was a kid, I had a dog. Spotty. One holidays, I went home, and Spotty wasn’t there. My parents were evasive, said he was probably hiding somewhere. Then the gardener told me Spotty had been put down. He showed me the place, near the redcurrant bush, where he’d buried Spotty. I was so upset, I can’t tell you.
The gardener had a little wooden hut where he kept his spades and things. I liked it there. It smelled of earth, and wood and metal polish. He took me in there and he had a Thermos and some cheese sandwiches. He gave me some tea and a cheese sandwich. It’s daft, really, but that’s what I remember most about that horrible day. Not Spotty’s grave. I just remember that cheese sandwich.’
As Andrew was taking this in, the rugby captain said, ‘You don’t want to be on your own. Why don’t you come to my room and we’ll have some toast.’
He reached out and touched Andrew’s knee. ‘You’d like that Andrew, wouldn’t you? Some toast?’ Andrew spent the night in the rugby captain’s bed. He never forgot the taste of that hot, buttered toast. And he never forgot the way he learned that the supreme gift in life is the gift of kindness.
Eugenie had given him that when she had stayed with him all through the night, that searing night when he simply could not accept that Ruthie was dead.
The steward was offering more coffee. Can’t deal with Eugenie now. Got to deal with Edwin. The mystery man. Wasn’t there a novel by Charles Dickens about the Mystery of Edwin Drood?
The point was, never in all the time he’d known Ruthie had she mentioned anyone called Edwin. Never. But he’d been the one who’d rung to give Andrew the bad news. He was the one who had organised Ruthie’s funeral.
He was meeting Andrew at Exeter. Andrew wondered what to expect. He had sounded young and suitably grave on the phone. But Edwin was an old-fashioned name. Andrew imagined someone tall and stooped with unkempt, fluffy hair.
Edwin was easy to spot because he and Andrew were the only men in the booking hall at Exeter station wearing black suits and black ties. To Andrew, Edwin looked about nineteen. Ruthie had been in her mid-thirties. What the hell had she been doing with a nineteen-year-old?
Edwin’s shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair contained an emerald green streak. He led Andrew to a Jeep.
‘It’s all arranged in the village church. Afterwards, there’ll be sherry and tea in the village hall. Didn’t think you’d want to go back to the cottage.’
‘No.’
‘Felt I should mention that to you. Point is, I’m the local solicitor. Had charge of Ruthie’s will. I imagine you know what’s in it.’
Andrew did. He had helped Ruthie draft it. Apart from large bequests to Dartmoor Pony Rescue and her niece in Australia, the bulk of her estate had been left to Andrew. And that included the cottage.
‘Did they get that hit-and-run-maniac?’
‘No. But the Plods round here – you know.’
‘Haven’t you pushed them?’
Edwin sighed. ‘I’m a fatalist, Andrew. I write poetry, actually. I’m going to write one to Ruthie.’
As they drew up near the church, Edwin said, ‘When she told me what she wanted in her will, I had to discuss the hopefully distant funeral with her, and she said she’d leave the hymns to me.’
Fuck it! How did this Edwin know so much, when he, her closest friend, her lover, didn’t seem to have an inkling?
‘And she certainly didn’t want to be buried in the churchyard.’ Edwin went on, unaware how close he was coming to a life-threatening punch in the throat. ‘She’s to be cremated, and I’m to scatter the ashes on Dartmoor.’
‘Well watch the wind direction.’
For the ceremony, Andrew had expected to put himself somewhere at the back, but Edwin propelled him to a front pew. In the absence of any relatives, the two men were obviously regarded as chief mourners.
When, smothered in stiff sprays of lilies she would have hated, Ruthie’s coffin came in and the service began, Andrew distracted his grief by thinking about a conversation he’d had with Ruthie, sitting by the fire. He’d co
me in soaked from the moor, had a hot bath and she’d cooked his favourite Coq au Vin.
Andrew told her how he neither gave nor attended social dinner parties. But from time to time, he was obliged to turn up to a glittering client-dinner.
The conversation at these events was rarely original. A favourite topic amongst these international people who had houses across Europe and America, and a question that gave them a chance to show off, was to ask, ‘Where do you feel most at home?’
Once they had roamed the world from Lake Como to Bermuda to Connecticut, it was obvious that their favourite Chez Moi had no connection with the worlds of music, art or books. In fact, if conversation was running dry, someone would usually break the silence by piping up, ‘Read any good books lately?’ provoking shrieks of laughter worthy of Wildean wit.
‘Where do you feel most at home?’
‘Where I keep my dogs.’
‘Where my wife isn’t.’ (Laughter).
‘Where my children are.’
‘Harry’s Bar.’
‘Yes, but which one?’
‘Oh, has to be the one in Paris.’
Andrew got round the whole thing by saying, acceptably, that he felt most at home where he’d been born, in Galway. Listening to all this, Ruthie reminded him that he hadn’t spent all his youth in Galway. Aged ten, he’d come to an English school. From there he went to Dublin, to read Law at Trinity College.
‘Do you know what I think,’ Ruthie had said. ‘I think home is where people understand you.’
Andrew knew she was right. And knew now, staring at her coffin, why he would miss her so dreadfully in his life.
Everyone stood for the first hymn. It said, quite clearly, above the pulpit, that the hymn number was 115.
Edwin opened Andrew’s hymn book and pointed to number 115.
‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways;
re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence praise.
In deeper reverence praise.’
Edwin whispered, ‘I thought she’d like the way the last line is repeated. She was very fond of poetry.’
In Bed with Mr. Plantagenet Page 13
