Angel (13 page)

“Black, no sugar, thank you.”

At which moment came the sound of a violin playing what I now could identify as Bruch.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“Klaus upstairs. Good, isn’t he?” “Superb.”

When I emerged from behind my screen with two mugs of coffee, I found him sitting in an easy chair, very relaxed as he listened to Klaus. Then he looked up and took the mug with a smile of such genuine pleasure that my knees turned to water. I felt less afraid of him, could sit down with reasonable composure. Hospitals condition more lowly staff to regard H.M.O.s as beings from another planet-beings who didn’t visit the Cross 122

unless they were patronising the Mesdames Fugue and Toccata.

“It must be great fun living here,” he said. “Lowbrow and highbrow.”

Well, he certainly wasn’t judgemental. “Yes, it is great fun,” I said.

“Tell me about it.”

Oh, really! How could I do that? Sex is behind everything that happens here, hadn’t he got that message from Madame Fugue? So I elected to tell him about the front ground floor flat.

“At the moment,” I finished, “we think we’ve actually found an elderly couple who aren’t in the business.” “Too old, you mean?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised, sir,” I said chattily. “The women on the streets are pretty decrepit. The young and beautiful ones work in established brothels-the pay’s better, they live better, and there are no pimps to beat them up.”

His swampy green eyes held a mixture of amusement and sadness; I thought the amusement was on my account, but I wasn’t so sure about the sadness.

Maybe, I decided, it was permanent.

He glanced at his very expensive gold watch and rose. “I must go, Harriet.

Thanks for the coffee and the company-and the lesson about how the other half lives. I’ve enjoyed myself.”

“Thanks for the lift home, sir,” I said, and took him to the front door. After I shut it behind me I leaned against

it and tried to work out what had just happened. I seem to have made a new friend. Thank God he’d made no advances to me! But I keep remembering the sadness in his eyes, and I wonder if all it is is a need to talk to someone? How strange. You don’t stop to think that maybe God the H.M.O. needs someone to talk to.

I saw Pappy again this morning, but this time she didn’t have to wake me up. I was lying in wait for her when she came in from her weekend rendezvous at Glebe, and dragged her into my place for a decent breakfast. She may be in love, but she’s even thinner.

Thinner, but idyllically happy.

“A good weekend?” I asked, handing her Eggs Benedict.

“Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! Harriet, I can’t believe it!” she cried, threw her head back and laughed delightedly. “My Ezra wants to marry me!

Next weekend he’s going to tell his wife.”

Now why doesn’t that ring true? But I kept my face smiling and interested.

“That’s marvellous news, Pappy.” She yawned, frowned at the plate and pushed it away. “Eat it!” I snapped. “You can’t live on hashish and cocaine! “

Cowed, she pulled it back and shoved the first forkful 124

in her mouth listlessly. Then she started to eat with enthusiasm-my lessons with Klaus are bearing fruit. I sat down opposite her and leaned forward, feeling very uncomfortable but determined to say my piece. “Um, I’m very aware that what I’m going to ask you is rude and prying, but-” I floundered, not sure where to go next. In for a penny, in for a pound, Harriet-do it!

“Pappy, you hardly know Ezra, and he hardly knows you. In fact, I gather that neither of you is capable of much logical thought from Friday night to Monday morning. Two weekends together, and he wants to marry you? On what sort of basis? That you don’t bat an eyelid about his little pharmaceutical recreations? I can see why he’d think you’re safer to be with than his nubile young studentsyou’re very much a woman of the world. You’re not going to dob him in to the Boys in Blue, even by accident. But marriage? Isn’t that taking two weekends a bit far?”

My scepticism didn’t offend her. I doubt it penetrated the fog. “It’s sex,” she said. “Men need sex to be truly in love.”

“That’s begging the question,” I objected. “You’re not talking about love, you’re talking about marriage. He’s a world-famous philosopher, you say. That means he has status in his bit of the intellectual empire, so he can’t possibly have avoided all the obligations things like tenure and university seniority demand. I’m not an academic, but I do know a bit about academia, and it’s pretty stuffy. If he dumps his wife and kids for you-“

I broke down in a mire of my own making, just looked at her helplessly.

Her head shook back and forth slowly. “Dear Harriet, you don’t know anything,” she said. “There’s sex and there’s sex.”

“Oh, why all this harping about sex?” I growled. “Peculiar tastes don’t go with marriage, if that’s what you mean by sex.”

“You’re so young!”

I did my nana, started to yell. “Oh, for Chrissake, Pappy, I’m fed up with being dismissed as an ignoramus! I’m not sitting here quizzing you because I’m eaten up with sick curiosity! I simply want to know exactly why Ezra wants to marry you rather than go on having a wonderful weekend relationship! I know you, you’re not the type to hang out for a wedding ring, so why is he? It doesn’t fit, it just doesn’t fit!”

“Fellatio,” she said. “Fell-what?” I asked blankly.

“Fellatio. I suck his penis until he ejaculates in my mouth. That’s every ordinarily sexed man’s dream,” she said, “yet few women are keen on doing it.

Especially wives, who-just like you, really-don’t know about it until the husband asks for it. Then they’re outraged, think he’s some sort of pervert.

Whereas I love fellating Ezra. His penis is perfect for me, small and always a little flaccid. And that’s why he wants to marry me. If I’m his wife, he can have fellatio every single day.” She sighed. “Oh Harriet, it would be lovely to be married to Ezra!”

My lower jaw was on the table, but I managed to grin. “Well, I daresay it’s an efficient method of birth control,” I said.

“Oh, we do it the accepted ways too,” said Pappy. So there you have it.

The recipe for married bliss.

Chris is pursuing a vendetta against Dr. Michael Dobkins, aided and abetted by Sister Cas. Turns out he’s the new senior registrar in Cas, but did Upstairs remove him after the kerfuffle with us? No! The fur flies regularly, and I predict that Dr. Dobkins is shortly going to decide that he’d be much happier at Hornsby Hospital, a lot closer to his home in Pymble than Queens is. I’d say Royal North Shore, posh and suitably huge, but it sticks to its own. Fellatio aside, men who irritate women in positions of power are stupid. Dobkins wasn’t wrong about our being bloody bitches, but stupid? He’s the stupid one.

Chris ticked me off in front of the junior because I was nice to Demetrios. I saw red and rounded on her, claws out.

“Listen, you bigoted bloody bitch, that’s a darned decent man with a brain in his head and a bright future! He fancies you, only God knows why, but you wouldn’t even spit on him simply because he porters patients and he’s a Wog! If I want to treat Demetrios like a human being, I will, and nothing you or Sister Agatha can say will stop me! What you need, Christine Leigh Hamilton, is a good fuck!”

I said it, I said it! The junior almost fainted, then fled to the darkroom voluntarily, and Chris stood gaping at me as if she’d been savaged by a guinea pig.

I waited for her to march me off to Sister Agatha, but this time she decided discretion was the better part of valour, said not a word, even to me. However, the next time Demetrios brought us a patient, Chris stared at him as if the scales had fallen from her eyes. She even gave him a smile. I’ll bet that tomorrow he gets offered a cuppa and a bikky.

Just call me Cupid.

Almost two weeks, and my exercise book hasn’t been pulled out of my dillybag. We had to work today despite the public holiday, but there wasn’t much to do, and I knocked off on time.

When I came in my door I could still smell the spicesmace, turmeric, cardamom, fenugreek, cumin. Such exotic words. So I sat down at the table, had a bit of a weep at the silence and those smells, then dug out my book.

The Friday after Pappy gave me her theory on happy marriage and I told Chris Hamilton that she needed a good fuck was Good Friday, but up at the Cross Good Friday isn’t very different from any other Friday. Business as usual.

Toby, Pappy and I went to the Apollyon, a basement coffee lounge. It’s too intellectual for my taste-everybody seems to sit there playing chess-but Pappy loves it and Toby thought his friend Martin might turn up there. Rosaleen Norton came down the stairs with her poet friend, Gavin Greenlees-the first time I’d seen the Witch of the Cross. Nothing much to frighten a person there, is my conclusion. She does herself up to look satanicpeaked black brows, scarlet lipstick, black hair and eyes and stark white make-up-but I don’t feel any satanic emanations, as Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz might put it.

Then Martin arrived arm-in-arm with this stunner of a bloke. Even the most ardent chess players stopped to stare at him, so did Rosaleen Norton and Gavin Greenlees. I was riveted, and tickled to death when the newcomers moved toward our humble table.

“Mind if we sit with you?” Martin lisped.

Mind? I couldn’t shuffle my chair to make room quickly enough. Though Martin is an unabashed and vociferous member of the Cross’s homosexual contingent, he doesn’t lisp because he’s poofterish. He lisps because he has no teeth. One of those peculiar people who refuse to darken a dentist’s door.

“This,” he said, waving a graceful hand in the direction of the smiling Adonis, “is Nal. He’s being

singularly difficult to seduce-I’m absolutely worn out from trying.”

“How do you do?” asked the reluctant seducee in an Oxford accent before seating himself opposite me. “My full name is Nal Prarahandra, I am a doctor of medicine, and I am in Sydney for a week to attend a World Health Organisation congress.”

He was so beautiful! I’d never thought of men as beautiful, but there isn’t another word that adequately describes him. His lashes were as long and thick and tangled as Flo’s, the brows above his perfectly arched orbits were drawn in as if with a charcoal pencil, and the eyes themselves were black, liquid, languishing. His skin shared Flo’s colouration too. The nose was high-bridged and faintly aquiline, the mouth full but not too full. And he was tall, broadshouldered, narrow-hipped. Adonis. I sat looking at him the way a country bumpkin looks at the Queen.

Then he reached across the table, picked up my hand and turned it over to look at the palm. “You’re a virgin,” he said, but not out loud. I had to read his lips.

“Yes,” I said.

Toby had Martin rattling away in one ear, but his eyes were on me, and he looked angry. Then Pappy put her hand on his arm and he looked at her; the anger faded, he smiled at her. Poor, poor Toby!

“Do you live in a suitable place?” he-Nalwhispered.

“Yes,” I said.

My hand was still in his when he stood up. “Then let us go.”

And we went, just like that. I wasn’t even remotely tempted to wallop him, but I suspect Toby was. I suppose Toby was worried because I was leaving with a stranger.

“What is your name?” he asked as we emerged into the lights and blare of the Cross.

I told him, my hand still wrapped in his. “How on earth did you fall in with Martin?” I asked him as we crossed William Street.

“This is my first day in Sydney, and everyone said I must go to Kings Cross.

When Martin accosted me, I was contemplating an interesting window, and as I found him amusing, I consented to accompany him. I knew that he would lead me to someone I liked, and I was right,” he said, giving me a smile that isn’t quite as wonderful as Mr. Forsythe’s, I think because such amazing beauty isn’t suited to smiling.

“Why on earth me?” I asked.

“Why on earth not you, Harriet? You are not yet fully awake, but you have great potential. And you are very pretty. It will make me very happy to teach you a little about love, and you will endow my week in Sydney with memorable pleasure. We will not know each other long enough to feel true love, so when we part, we will do so as good friends.”

I don’t think there’s much of Pappy in me, because I find that I don’t want to write down all the gory details.

Except that he made love to me for the first time in the bathtub off the laundry-thank God I’d had time to paint it out with scarlet bicycle enamel! And that he was wonderful, tender, considerate, all the things everybody kept telling me I had to have in my first lover. He loved my breasts, and I loved his attentions to my breasts, but I suppose the best part was his sensuousness. He really made me feel that he was enjoying himself, yet his lovemaking was geared to me and my feelings. As I wasn’t ignorant about any aspect of the act, especially after nearly four months in The House, I daresay I could appreciate it and him a great deal more than virgins did in the old days. It must have been a shock to them!

He moved in with me that night, and stayed in my flat for the whole week with Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s blessing. The only landlady in Sydney so broad-minded, I reckon. When Flo came down on Sunday afternoon, her muteness fascinated him. I assured him that her mother says she talks to her, but he doubts that very much.

“They may communicate on a different plane,” he said, having met Mrs.

Delvecchio Schwartz when she came to collect Flo after her two hours entertaining Harold. “The mother is an extraordinary woman. Very powerful, and a very old soul. Thoughts are like birds that can fly straight through solid objects. I think Flo and her mother speak without words.”

Speaking without words. Well Nal, who is a psychiatrist, and I did a lot of that ourselves. Despite his

alien way of looking at things, I liked him enormously, and I think he liked me for more than just sex. We did a lot of talking with words too.

He taught me to cook two Indian dishes, a korma and a vegetable curry, taking care to explain that a real curry isn’t made on our “curry powder”