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

to cheek clinging of nice old-fashioned American dancing, with a backdrop of Ray Ellington, Sinatra, or Ella Fitzgerald. Nick likes dancing with Jazz. She moves gracefully and lightly, obeying his signals. A career woman with high prospects, she generally seems to prefer that he take the lead, which their moves on the dance floor exemplify. They sip iced Cokes in between. Cola is Jazz’s stay-up-late drink, rather than coffee or booze. Later, about 1 a.m., the cab takes them to Jazz’s apartment, the top floor of a tall house in Bayswater.

“Did you like my dress?” she asks as she takes it off.

Nick, of course, had already told her that he did, and that she looked wonderful, which she had and does.

“Marvellous. You’re better, though.”

“So are you,” she says, wrapping her arms round him, warm flesh and two cool silver bangles. She tends to keep her jewellery on when naked. As he kneels over her on the round bed, her earrings flash and sometimes tinkle when, restless with mounting arousal, she wriggles.

Her dark hair spills over the cushions. She tastes sweet and fresh. She is about thirty-five, slim and silky. Even her pubic hair, neatly trimmed, has a soft powdery hint of perfume.

Nick enjoys making love to Jazz. But then he tends to like making love to any hygienic and attractive woman. He is very skilled too, not only in the - for want of a better word -technical sense, but in those instinctive ways without which the whole exercise can become merely athletic or worse, mathematical, even squalid.

When they have concluded two prolonged and successful sessions, she goes to sleep, curled up happily as a child. He checks she has what she may want for the last of the night, and that her alarm clock has been reset for midmorning; once she had forgotten and it roused her at the usual time of seven-fifteen, after only two hours’ sleep. He removes a bottle of water from the fridge and leaves it on the floor by the bed, where she can easily find it when she wakes. She has never asked for these attentions, but she appreciates them, he knows. Sometimes, if meeting her here, he brings her flowers, or a bottle of good wine. He likes to do this too.

When he has dressed, first light is just beginning to thin the blind. He moves quietly out into the hallway, takes up the envelope from the table and lets himself out. (These envelopes always fascinate him. They are never there when he arrives, but at some point she must put them there - only he has never seen that happen. A sort of magic trick then, of Jazz’s.)

The cab is already waiting, as always. The streets are not fully awake yet, the ride is short. When he is back in his flat the envelope, marked in Jazz’s coiled hand-writing, Darling xxx, reveals rather more than usual, but all in the accustomed crisp twenty pound notes.

Nick showers. He is wide awake, and makes coffee. He watches a few moments of early TV, then takes a notebook and writes in a couple of ideas, images, things he may like to use for the short story he is currently writing. He probably will not try to sleep until after lunch, catch an hour then, maybe.

He turns off, (that phrase again, now in reverse) the TV and lies back in the chair, looking at a pale uncertain sky which now absorbs the window.

He thinks suddenly about what he said to Laurence, the business about the ivory counter, how it is supposed to be a ‘carrier of bad fortune’.

Laurence had offered a sneering grin to that, naturally. Laurence has not studied ancient history for nothing, he knows the value of any curse - which must be inevitably powerless, its pretentions only sometimes randomly supported by coincidence or over-active imagination.

“Don’t tell me you buy that?” he had said at once.

“No, not really.”

“Oh, I bet you do, Nicky. It’s just what you would believe. You’re superstitious. Credulous. Why hang on to it, then? Scared to pass it on?”

All this, while Laurence had settled himself in his over-coat.

“Apparently it’s harmless, unless you keep touching it, or looking at it,” Nick had mildly elaborated.

Laurence, who even while juggling his coat, had kept hold of the white counter, now again scrutinised it. “Like this, you mean? Can I feel an uncanny vibration? A peculiar heat? No, don’t think I can. Is it ivory?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

“So… Where does it come from?”

“A few days ago.” Nick had looked considering, and Laurence dropped the counter abruptly back on the table. It had made a sharp little click, rather like the noise of one key of an outdated manual typewriter. Nick had thought that too, he recalled, when he had dropped it on the table himself. Or - wherever he had first put it down. Where had that been? “I had lunch somewhere,” Nick had continued.

“With some bird,” said Laurence, who was capable also of historical recourse to antique slang. He had sounded rather disapproving. He has generally, seemingly, got the notion that Nick sees a lot of women. Obviously not quite the real circumstances of such meetings.

“Yes, I was with someone.” Nick had paused again, reflectively. “The waiter came by and put this on the table with the coffee.”

“And?”

“And nothing much. He said some guy had left it in the restaurant, with a tip. The tip was generous, but also he’d tried to get one of the waiters interested in him, and when this man wouldn’t play, the customer promised him some bad luck and took out the counter. He said he had been wanting to get rid of it, it had caused him grief, but you couldn’t pass on something like that to a friend. Couldn’t even just throw it away in case some innocent picked it up. So he left it with the uninterested waiter. But next everyone in the restaurant who had contact with the ivory was getting a bad