Part 3 (1/2)

'The suit's being settled.'

He remembered. She'd sued an Oxford college for her share of her husband's estate after he'd changed his will and shot himself. The case had been going on for fourteen years. She said, 'They tried to wear me out, but I got too expensive. I'm to get half the estate plus the pension that should have been my mother's payment for turning me over to him.'

'You can stop working.'

'Can I? And do what? Become one of the women I despise? Go to live in Florence?' She stared into the teacup, rubbed the rings she'd made with her finger. She said, 'I'm sorry, Denton. I'm being unpleasant.' She looked up. 'You thought it would be different, didn't you?'

'I thought-' She made him angry when she was like this. 'Yes, I thought it would be different.'

'So did I. I thought we would-' She got up. 'Let's walk.'

It was still light outside, full daylight but of a colour that seemed ominous, a yellow-green; the air was sultry, wrong for late September. He wondered what he had done to spoil things; it couldn't all be her doing. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

She put her hand in his arm.

They turned into Aldersgate and walked towards St Paul's, then diverted towards the tangle of Little Britain. He suggested dinner but she said she couldn't. She never gave explanations. 'Couldn't' might simply mean that she wouldn't. He had thought that he might be able to whisk her off to the Cafe Royal, a place he liked and in which he felt comfortable, but of course she wouldn't. Perhaps it was the scar, which ran from cheekbone to chin, that was behind that 'couldn't'.

As if tuned to his thought, she said, 'You saw the scar.'

'Of course.'

'The doctors wanted to operate again and hide it somehow. I don't think they really knew what they'd do.'

'Now you'll have the money.'

'That isn't the point.'

'No, of course. But don't you-'

'The women are afraid of it. It's got hard for me to talk to some of them. They see it and they think, ”That's what could happen to me, some man,” and they don't want to be reminded of that part of their lives, and they stay away from me. If I were going to stay, I'd tell the doctors to have a go, but I'm not. I don't give a d.a.m.n what other people think.'

'Least of all men.'

She hesitated. 'Most men.'

'Me?'

'You're always the exception. That's why I-' She teetered on the edge of saying it, and he stopped so that she'd stop, too, but she pulled her hand away from his arm and he saw that he'd lost the moment.

'Janet-'

'Don't - please-'

'Janet, I want-'

'Don't tell me what you want!' She backed away. A man going by had to veer around her, looked at them angrily. She paid no attention. 'You're moving too fast.'

'For G.o.d's sake, Janet, I've been away six months! Things didn't just stand still for me; I-'

'Don't tell me!' She looked her worst then - red-faced, gaunt, absurdly dressed. She had told him once that she'd been a pretty girl, the reason her mother had 'got a good price' for her, but nearly five years in a prison for the criminally insane had worked on her like a holystone. Now, in her late thirties, she could never be thought 'pretty', seldom even handsome. But her face was pa.s.sionate and intelligent, contorted now with her fear of him. 'Don't draw me in!'

'Janet, I want to be with you.'

She made an impatient gesture with her right hand, as if she were pus.h.i.+ng away a child or an animal. 'Oh, I wish I'd never met you!'

'You don't mean that!'

Two people coming towards them separated and went around, both pretending not to see them. She waited for them to go on and said, sagging, 'No, I don't mean that. But I wish I did!' She started off in the direction they had come. 'Don't follow me! I mean it. Give me a day - two days-'

'I don't even know where you live.'

He had followed her a few steps despite what she'd said; they had both stopped again. She waited, looking down at St Paul's as if expecting the dome to tell her what to say. 'I'll write to you.'

'If you write, it'll be too easy to say you don't want to see me. I want us to meet.'

'Yes. Yes, that was cowardly of me.' She held up a hand as if to push him off. 'I'll write to you where and when.'

And she strode away.

He looked after her. He was enraged and saddened, the two feelings wound together. She was ugly, he told himself; she was cold; what sort of hold could such a woman have over him? But it was no good. The hold was real.

He turned his head back towards St Paul's in time to see a figure change its course and disappear into what seemed a solid wall. The movement had been furtive, he thought; Atkins's 'rum type' came to him. The change of direction, the movement could have been those of somebody following him, thinking himself seen and dodging into a doorway.

It was what his anger needed. Feeding on it, he charged down Little Britain Street and found a gap where the figure had disappeared. He came into a wider lane, blue-grey sky darkening overhead. He saw openings to his left and ahead, chose the second, plunged on, his long legs like scissors cutting up the distance.

Ahead was a cul-de-sac; another opening, barely an alleyway, opened to his right. He turned into it and found his way blocked fifty feet on by a wooden gate higher than his head. It was another small courtyard, grimy windows looking down on him, a single doorway up two feet off the pavement with no steps to it, above it a gallows-like beam meant to hold a block and tackle. The place felt unused and dusty, as if he'd opened a door on it that had been locked for decades. Not even a pigeon.

Chasing spooks.

He decided to take his ghosts to some place that served alcohol.

CHAPTER FOUR.

He woke from troubling dreams to taste the once-familiar sourness of hangover. A voice was calling. The bed shook and he realized it was he who was shaking or being shaken. He opened his eyes.

'Profuse apologies, General, but you like to be up by half-seven.'

'What time is it?'

'Pus.h.i.+ng eight. I brought tea and a headache powder.'

'I was out late.'

'Hardly news.'

Denton heard the tray clatter on the desktop. His breath was foul; his head ached, but not at that level that suggested real calamity. He sat up - the room didn't swim.