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

into the bathroom, strip off and have slightly rough sex under the shower. Debby as a rule likes the shower best, he suspects because it is much handier to disguise his visit and/or clear up after he has gone. Last year, once, they did go to bed, but she had a whole day then. She has told him she prefers sex in daylight, likes to sleep at night. Her life seems very well organised, and her flat is pleasant and spotless, thanks to an unmet cleaning woman Debby calls Jeeves. Or perhaps that really is the woman’s name.

They have tea before Nick leaves and the envelope, (in Debby’s case stuffed with euros) is on the tray. Debby never slops tea over on the envelope, it goes without saying. The envelope she employs is always of thick cream-laid paper, too, whereas Jazz, for example, uses a plain thin manila. Lilian, on the other hand, never bothers with envelopes, she pushes the money untidily in a transparent bag from the bank. Or there is Sonia, who hands it over shyly if directly they are alone, tied with a real ribbon, usually red, sometimes orange. Sonia is now a personnel manager, but in her past has been an actress, even seen on TV. She once admitted to Nick the ribbon was based on something from a play she had acted in.

He does see others too, but they are mostly more irregular. Some like to go out first to drink or eat or dance, like Jazz. Some vanish from his life altogether, a few of these even calling him to say farewell and why - a move to the States or Saudi Arabia, a marriage, a returned lover of a less professional sort. Even, on one occasion, the purchase of two rescued dogs, who had, it seemed, a bone to pick with any male, the bone preferably being the male’s, and laid bare by their teeth. (This last Nick considers might have been some kind of lie with a subtext. Since that particular woman, a twenty-two year old who had inherited a nine bedroom house at Seven Oaks, tended to forget she had to pay him - he never reminded her - perhaps as if she wished they could have had more than a supplier-client relationship.)

He got into all this almost by accident. An attractive girl had picked him up. She was a handful of years older than he - he was then seventeen. Until then he had had very little sex, not because it was never freely offered, it often was, but through an initial reserve on his part. This he never analysed. It had nothing to do with alarm at HIV AIDS or STD’s, of which he was aware and from which he protected himself and any partner as a matter of routine. Nor was or is he uncomfortable with the sexual act in any willing form. Indeed he has found from the first he has a natural aptitude, a talent for it. He assumes he prefers, and always did, an orderliness in this area too, as with his own apartment. This is superficially like Debby’s attitude but this never occurs to him, for he is not remotely like Debby in any fundamental way. The first girl who paid, when he was seventeen, being herself experienced, only believed she should do so. He has, now, to keep a ‘desk’ diary for such meetings, not wanting anything to overlap or be forgotten. There is no other woman in his life. That is, no woman only there as lover, friend or relationship. Would there, now, even be space for one?

It is sunset when he leaves Debby. Nick strolls over a bridge. Cars stream by in a toxic river of fumes, roaring, firing off sharp splashes of light. Every pedestrian too, almost, is hurrying, quick-marching.

A beggar lurches by with a blanket on his shoulder. He and it seemed stained by tar. He leers at Nick. “Got the price of a sandwich, mate?” Nick hands him a tenner, and the man screws it up inside his coat. As sometimes happens he snarls, “Fuck off then, you cunt,” and bundles away.

Nick has reached the black sphynx on the Embankment when his mobile jitters against his thigh.

“Hi.” He does not recognise the caller’s number.

Nor the female voice which now sounds in his ear.

“Is that Nicolas?”

Some new ploy of BT?

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Oh stop being stupid, Nicolas. You know who this is.” He does not. And who, apart from strangers, (or Laurence sometimes) ever calls him by his unabbreviated name? “OK,” he says.

“I want to know where he is,” says the female voice harshly. She seems angry or upset.

“Who?”

Then she screams into the phone so Nick holds it away from his ear. “I don’t want bloody excuses! Who do you think? What have you done - what has he done?”

Nick looks out at the darkening river and the thousand and one gleams across the water. He can smell smoke and hot chestnuts, (do they still do those?), and petrol and chemicals and fried onions from some obscure vent, and cold.

Calmly Nick says to the unknown, maddened woman, “I couldn’t say if he’s done anything. I definitely haven’t. I think you have a wrong number. Take care.” He cuts her off then. Inside eleven seconds the phone sputters again. He turns it off. It is intriguing he, the wrong number, should have the same name as the one she meant to call. Besides, she called the same wrong number again, so obviously still reckons it is the right one.

He eats dinner alone in a wine bar at Covent Garden, and idly mentally selects one of the waiters for the role of the man who spoke about the ivory counter. This waiter is black and seems to have a French accent. That might fit the scenario. There is another waiter too, a likely candidate for the role of the first waiter, who the customer fancied and then passed the fatal ivory.

This