To Indigo, Tanith Lee [best ereader for comics .TXT] 📗

“I don’t want to eat with you.”

Benignly he looked at me. He said, “Get over the guilt, Roy. I forgive you. It doesn’t matter.”

I knew. I said, “What?”

“Drugging me,” he sweetly said. “Don’t be concerned. I’m tough and strong. It takes more than that. I knew you had, anyway.”

An insane curiosity took hold of me. I found I leant forward. “Then why…”

“Why did I go on drinking your plonk? Well, I didn’t think there’d be enough to kill me.”

“There could have been. It could have done.”

“No. You know how to judge such things, or Mr R.P. Phillips does. I read one of your books, by the way. Last Orders. Really liked it. Well written and no fuss. I guessed who done it, but only three quarters through – and the twist at the end was a stunner. You had me fooled on that. I’m impressed. Why aren’t you much better known?”

I thought, as once or twice in my youth I bitterly had, Because I am not part of the Oxbridge fraternity and have no influence. But such carping bores me by now, and anyway I’ve come to see it’s more likely I am simply not original enough, don’t have enough of the slightly deranged zeitgeist of the modern day. Presumably too I never did. I recall one review from a well-known and influential critic, which greeted my twelfth book: “Phillips is dependable, nearly always a pretty good read if never a magnificent one.”

This was when something very odd happened.

Perhaps I was already disturbed enough, but the fact he had selected the only published book of mine I personally still rated quite highly, seemed to affect me in a way I could neither express nor explain to myself. I looked at him hard, and seemed to see his face for the first time, handsome and quite ordinary, intelligent even, and couth, nothing in it to display madness or ferocity. I understood even as the feeling washed through me that this assessment was unwise. Everything he had done so far demonstrated ably enough that he was, as my father had once liked to say, off his rocker.

It was then that the woman rushed into the lobby from the street.

She was about forty, quite smart in a dry sort of way, with short thick well-cut hair. But she flew in and then halted, and like one entering in a Greek tragedy, she wore a mask of tears.

We all stared at her a second. Then most of us looked away. The English are famed for their insularity, and constipation of the emotions. Even those Brits of mixed blood and origin seem now to end up in this frame of mind, or heart. One sees displays of violence more often, of sexual passion more often too. But frank human kindness – that thing called empathy – is rare.

He’d turned his head.

In a fleeting gesture he touched my arm with his hand. “Just a sec, Roy.” And he rose and went straight to her and stood there, and I heard him ask in a low, gentle voice, “What is it? Can I help?”

She started crying violently and noisily at once.

He put his arm around her, and drew her over to another group of empty chairs, the whole distance of the lobby from everyone, including me.

Now was my chance to split and run. I couldn’t take it. I was riveted. I sat there, reticence gone, and gaped at them.

She sobbed, he held her in his arm, bending forward to hear her muffled words, listening intently.

Then he let go, touched her arm rather as he had touched mine, and came back over to where I sat.

“Roy, be a gent. Can you get her a brandy?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Tell you soon. Brandy first. Thanks, Roy.”

Like the slave of chance which that moment I was, up I got, walked back in the bar and ordered it. Everyone in there was by now looking round too, and much less cautiously, the smoked glass screens giving them cover.

The waiter said to me, “What’s up, sir?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your friend, he’s helping her?”

“Yes, apparently.” No point in stressing he wasn’t any friend of mine.

I paid for the brandy rather than put it on the tab.

Going out I started to walk across and Sej came up to me and took it from me with a grateful nod, and bore it to the weeping woman.

She tipped back her head and swallowed the brandy whole.

Her eyes were inflamed, and if her mascara hadn’t run she had somehow smeared it even so.

She spoke to him. He nodded.

Then he came over to me again and undid his bag, and pulled out a shirt. It was dark blue in colour. “That should be OK,” he said. Holding it he went directly out of the hotel doors and vanished along the street.

I sat back and watched the woman surreptitiously. In fact she was even a little older than I’d first thought, and her clothes were good, but not quite as good as in my initial impression. She sat motionless, head up. She stared through us all, through walls, through time and space. I have seen the look before with certain people. The look of sudden vital loss.

When Sej came back in he carried his shirt carefully now, wrapped around something. There was blood seeping through.

For a somersaulting instant I thought of a dead baby. But no, it wasn’t that. From one end a pathetic white tail hung out. A dog.

He too noticed the tail in that moment and deftly obscured it in a fold of the shirt.

Standing by her, he spoke. Now I heard the words.

“The taxi’s outside. He’s OK. Shouldn’t you call your husband?”

I heard her say drearily, “He won’t care.”

“There must be someone,” he said.

“Oh.” She gazed up at him with the sadness of the only half-alive. “Must there?”

“Then can I…?”

“No. No, you’ve been much too kind. And – please thank your friend for the drink. I should – I have to pay…”

“Hush, dear,” he said.

Something caught inside me. My