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

deadly. Not like any of his other laughter. “She was about fifteen when I was born. So she was carrying me at fourteen. It’s too young. I don’t know much about it. Only that she shat me out and dumped me. Ashabelle. Is that black?”

“You don’t look as if you have black blood.”

“No. God knows, Roy. Do you,” he paused, “do you really want me to play?”

“Have another vodka. Play the piano. Then – crash on the other bed. You’re safe with me.”

“Am I?”

“Nothing sexual,” I said, “I can assure you.”

“Touché,” he said.

I made more coffee and tipped the last triple measure from the vodka bottle into his glass.

He explained about the wasp after I’d opened up the front room and turned on the standard lamp covered in splashes of red paint.

“I ought to explain,” he said. “I mean I don’t want you to think you have to be guilty about putting it in a sandwich. Or too triumphalist either, I suppose.”

He’d sat on the painted sofa, still nursing the vodka, and I on one of the painted chairs. The curtains had stayed drawn. He had been right about the red walls. In lamplight they did glow. If everything else had been OK, it might have a wonderful effect, modern yet warm, different.

“So you’d found the wasp before I used it. You knew I would use it.”

“Thought you would.”

“When did you find it? I only put it there that morning.”

“I’d been on the look-out. One or two of them had got into the house. I had a feeling it might occur to you. But I let the ones I saw out of the kitchen window. It was after your bath,” he said. And flashed me a dim shadow of his former impervious smile.

“When I stayed in the bathroom.”

“It happens,” he said. “So I had a look upstairs. I looked in your wardrobe as a matter of course. You hadn’t concealed it superlatively well, Roy. For a writer of detective fiction… I can tell you though, the beast was angry. I let it go at the bedroom window and got stung in the process. But I never have much of a reaction to wasp stings.”

“No,” I said. “So the wasp I found later in the glass was another one?”

“A dead one. Much less lethal. I’d found it on a windowsill in here. The paint smell probably killed it.”

“It was dead?” It had seemed to me the wasp in my glass had still had some life in it, if not much. No doubt, in the state I’d been in, I’d imagined the slight vestige of response, expecting to see it.

“It was dead. Then I waited, and you put it in the sandwich, between the top slice of bread and the ham.”

“But you didn’t bite down on it – did you?”

“I was looking out, Roy, remember. When I took the sandwich about which you’d made such a scene… I could feel the wasp through the bread. Poor sod felt like a prawn. So I bit well clear.”

I recalled the corpse of the wasp, undamaged, lying under the rim of the plate.

“Then your reaction was one more fake.”

“’Fraid so.”

“Your mouth bled. I saw it.”

“Ketchup, Roy. When I went into the kitchen.”

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t, myself, tell if this were genuine mirth at the madness of all this, or an actor’s laugh, used for effect. Something of each, maybe. I recollected he, like most of us, liked flattery. “You’re a genius,” I said. “Did you train at RADA?”

“Oh, sure,” he seriously acquiesced, smiling a little, still not in the old ways. “A year. I was expelled.”

“RADA? Expelled? Why?”

“Not good enough.”

A lie. Or not. Either was unlikely – that he’d been there, that, being there, he’d be thrown out.

I said, “You could act Olivier or Jacobi or Sher off the stage.”

“No I couldn’t. But thank you. The world’s my stage anyway, Roy, and all the men and women merely players.” He finished the vodka.

I said, “There’s only whisky now, I’m afraid. I can taste it for you, if you’d like some.”

“Trying to get me drunk again,” he said softly.

“You’ll get a good night’s sleep. Or you can leave, as you said. I don’t take prisoners.”

“No?”

“No.”

He rose. “Anyway,” he said, “I’ll play for you, before I go. What would you like?”

“Your choice.”

He paused, looking at the piano; then he turned and looked across at the mantelpiece. I’d known he would. I had known.

“Where’s the glass dog?”

“Oh that. Still upstairs. When I get the room fixed, I’ll bring it down again.”

“It means something to you, doesn’t it, the dog?”

“Yes. My mother loved it. It reminded her of the past, some happy memories, and she said to me once, When we’re gone, Roy, whatever you get rid of, please keep the dog.”

“It’s nice you had a mother,” he said.

I said, “Wait a minute. I’ll get it.”

He looked tired. For a moment he looked, as I’ve said, as we all know the young sometimes do, much older than he could possibly be, whoever’s son he was – Lynda’s, Maureen’s, Ashabelle’s – Mine.

He sat down before the piano and opened the lid, and ran his fingers along its keys, stumbling once, a false rill of notes, which I’d never heard happen in his playing before.

I was upstairs, the red glass dog in my hand, when I heard him begin a Rachmaninov concerto – a transposition which perhaps he could effect spontaneously. It was the Second, the most beautiful and therefore the most hackneyed of the opus; the breaking melody of the second movement. When you hear this, for the first, or if you listen even after long familiarity, it has the power to shake the heart, even the dullest or the darkest heart. Unlike the Third Concerto, which is virtually perfect, the work of a supreme genius, the Second is imperfect, yet has been, as they say, dictated by God.

I stood at the head of the stairs with the dog in my hands, and I listened as Joseph