Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

accepts. They go to a decent place on the Strand.

By the end of the meal they are joking a little and chatting.

He enjoys this, but then he always does. He likes women, being with them, caressing them, fucking them.

She pays serenely for the food with a platinum Visa card.

Outside then, in the nine o’clock frost-cold air, London glowing and beaming with its coloured accents of neon, she grows serious and softly asks, “Shall we meet later in the week, Nick?”

“We can, that would be good,” he says. “Or we don’t have to stop here, if you’d like to continue the evening.”

“A club? Another drink?” she says.

“If you’d like to. Or we can do something else. Something more physical.”

“I…”

“Not if you’re not ready. We take this at the pace you prefer.”

“But if you came to my flat - for you, it would be all right?” she asks, her eyes on his. In the neon glow they look no longer blue but blacker than the light-polluted sky.

“It would be sensational,” he calmly says.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“No, I wouldn’t mind. I’d be looking forward to it.”

They get a cab (she pays) and go to her basement flat. It lies on one of the quieter back roads behind Harley Street, among the mild pale yellow fake Victorian street lamps.

He is curious now, more than perturbed, by his reactions.

He had never seen his mother naked, only in bathing costumes, and sometimes bikinis, faultless even in her late forties.

Kit’s nakedness, when he sees it, is only that of another attractive streamlined body. But her skin is exceptionally soft and smooth, even whiter than on her face and throat. Her breasts are larger than they had seemed when she was dressed, still firm and high, though with a lush, heavy fullness. She has a tiny scar on her stomach, just above the navel, a couple too on one thigh. She does not refer to them, nor he, naturally.

Lying under him, where it seems she is most comfortable, her face is like anyone’s, or like any woman’s contorted by the mad joys of orgasm.

They make love three times, before he leaves her around half past two. She pays him as Sonia does, getting up apologising to produce money from the bedside drawer, plain unhidden notes, but without the actorly ribbon bow.

In the street trees stand jet black, bare and attenuated against the lamplight. The trees, the pavement seem very hard, very cold. He must make a note of this for the story. It is as if he had never before registered the hardness of such surfaces, as if, even, they have only just begun to harden.

8

When he re-enters his flat he is struck instantly and again by a sense of something icily metamorphic and alien.

He thinks for a moment it is the same feeling he experienced walking back to the Marylebone Road.

Nick turns on the lights.

He sees immediately five things which have altered.

One: the bathroom door, which had been open, is now closed. Two: the kitchen door, which had been open, is now only halfway open. Three: a coffee mug he had put in the kitchen is standing back out on a table. It still has dregs in it. Four: a sweater he had left on the arm of a couch is on the floor. Five: his notebook is lying face down on the table, but it had been lying face up, pen resting on one page - the pen has gone. He knows he does not imagine these alterations.

Nick is frozen.

Then he moves.

He runs up the two stairs and into the kitchen. Aside from the mug he had left there, nothing looks different. But then the mixer tap drips. It never drips unless hot and cold are incompletely turned off, and so he always turns them off completely.

In the bathroom nothing is disturbed that he can see.

He sprints upstairs and, as he passes, notes a photograph of a rainy London street, positioned over the short gallery, is askew.

In the bedroom someone has pulled his bed apart. It does not look particularly uncouth, only rather the way he does it himself, when changing the bedclothes and duvet cover.

There are no rips or daubs, no knife marks, piss or excrement sprinkled and smeared.

Nothing else seems to have happened.

He goes back down, moving slowly now, and undoes the old cigar box on his larger table. There had been a couple of hundred pounds in it when he went out. There still are.

The flat then has not been burgled, not even vandalised, rather it has been penetrated, and by person or persons familiar with unviolent break-ins, using the most subtle and knowledgeable criminal methods - there was no mark on the main door, either inside or out. But more to the point, they have taken some pains to show him they were here. They have left their visiting cards of misplacement, and if he had been too stupid to register those, of unmissable disruption - the bed.

He is certain they will have left no clues. No fingerprints, probably no DNA - or if they have, it will relate only to those who are not on any police file.

Nick does not consider either calling the police.

Another thought nudges him. That the girl, Kit, might have been a decoy, to remove him from the flat.

He decides to contact Sonia in the morning.

He does not know if the break-in has shaken him up.

Nick thinks not. Yet its nature has, rather.

Despite other possibilities he keeps thinking of his brother Laurence. He keeps thinking of Laurence, coming back out of nowhere, and Laurence breaking in, and searching for the Roman pin, and not finding it. And yet of all of it, that is the most preposterous plot-line.

Nick has already locked, but now barricades the main door, pushing one of the couches hard against it. This seems inadequate, but maybe a concrete block would seem so. He sits on the moved couch, staring back into the room.

In the end he goes to bed. He does