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

is black-haired, good-looking, tall, slim and not badly built, because along with the well-selling history books he writes, he still ranges out on digs, especially when cameras attend him. His series Going Rome which recreated, past the nine o’clock watershed, a great deal of sex and violence, has been extremely popular, almost as good as his (even more gruesome and lubricious) Conquered Britain: 1066, which was first shown in 2006. “Cheers,” says Laurence.

Nick sits back. The moon window is now black, though furred slightly by the glare of street lights. The real moon has edged into the glass, but is quickly rising, going beyond them all. He would like to watch the moon, but Laurence, with his tale of enraging some female TV producer, is taking up a lot of viewing time.

“Why don’t you,” says Nick, cautiously.

“What?”

“Well. Fuck her.”

“Oh, right,” says Laurence.

“Well presumably that was what she thought you wanted, and what she does want…”

“You’re not kidding.”

“And she is, you said, attractive.”

“Excessively.”

“It isn’t that you haven’t, now and then.”

“Yeah.”

“And if she’s as significant as you seem to think, can make the show go the way you want it…”

“Christ,” says Laurence, “you’re absolutely right. Of course. That’s the easiest, not to say most pleasant option. But it’s Angie.”

“Yes.”

“If she finds out again.”

“Then don’t let her.”

Laurence gets up and walks up and down the main room. It is a large room, not much impeded by furniture - two couches, a triple of tables, a tall bookcase, a cabinet, music centre, TV. The ceiling stretches up fifteen feet, and even the octagonal window only begins around six feet up. Nothing much then to interrupt Laurence in his prowling. Which is what Laurence would term it: “I prowl about… I had a prowl over to Chelsea… Damned train, four hours to Coreley, no room to prowl around….” (He hates flying, Laurence. Even less prowl space?)

Nick watches his brother, familiar with his procedures, not exactly irritated but by now thinking of other things. Of Jazz and how the evening will be. Of the cold moon on the city.

“So well, maybe,” says Laurence, “I’ll call her.”

Nick grasps Laurence means the female TV producer, not Angela, his wife. And, as if to confirm this, suddenly Laurence gives a short throaty laugh. It has an undeniable sexual overtone, yet too a kind of childish excitement. Then he puts down his drink and, swearing, takes the smart dark watch off his left wrist.

“I almost forgot to put the damn thing back on last week. Got in from Manchester at about 2 a.m., just remembered as I got out of the car. And Ange wakes up on the sofa where’s she’s been lying in wait, and she coyly says, “I see you still have on the watch.” He is pulling on this other watch now. It is trendy, a wind-up that he forgets to wind up. Angela’s present for their anniversary last May. “Well, that’s seen to. All ready for battle now. Thanks for the chat.”

“It’s OK.”

“What about your date? Or will she hang on?”

“I hope so. I called her,” Nick lies.

Laurence seems incredibly relieved, not about Nick’s love life, but his own, yet out of all proportion to what has been said, admitted, done. He is over ten years Nick’s senior. He considers Nick, too, as has often been made evident, a fool and mental itinerant, ineffectual, irrelevant - if lucky far beyond his deserving. So why does Laurence, whose name is respected and now and then mentioned, not normally unfavourably, in the Press, in need of coming to his useless young sibling for consolation, let alone advice?

“I’d better get going,” says Laurence. He seems to have shed a decade - the decade between them? “Ange is going to want to go out to some bloody place for dinner. I’ve been away a week. She always acts as if it’s a year.”

“You shouldn’t be so loveable.”

Laurence misses this or else merely fields it, all alight (turned on?) by his new irresponsible glee. Yes, he will have sex with the producer and so get in her good books along with her thong. Yes, he need not have a care in the world. Will he still be like this when he is fifty-six?

Swinging up the marvel of his dark overcoat, Laurence realises something has been swept off one of the tables by it.

“What was that?”

Nick does not tend to ornaments, or objects d’art. A few prints and photographs, a knick-nack or two; a fruit bowl with a single orange left in it, that sort of stuff.

“Don’t worry,” says Nick. In fact he had been unaware, or forgotten, there was anything there on the table, apart from the book he was reading, a paperback, some of Chekov’s short stories.

“But what was it - ah, here it is.” Laurence fishes under the edge of the couch and brings it out. And Nick remembers. A small slab of whitish material, smooth to the touch, but only about twenty millimetres square. Curious it hadn’t broken or chipped, really, dashed to the wooden floor like that.

Laurence examines the little slab.

“Ivory?” he asks.

Nick assumes Laurence should know. But the light is low and sidelong, and Laurence has consumed about six vodkas, plus anything else he had on the train and/or at some bar near Euston.

“If you say so,” says Nick.

“It’s got a feel to it,” says Laurence, running it through his fingers, thinking of Angie, maybe. Or the producer.

“Well, I’d put it down if I were you,” quietly says Nick.

“What? Why?”

“Supposed to be… what was it the guy said? A carrier of bad fortune,” Nick says. He looks away modestly at his bare feet. “Probably rubbish,” he adds. He glances up at Laurence and smiles. “But, just in case, better safe than sad.”

After dinner at l’lnde, the restaurant Jazz prefers, they go to the club she knows, to dance. This is really to dance, or to sort-of-dance, as Jazz puts it, not the strides, leaps, spins and struts of TV-fashionable, or professional ballroom, but the cheek