Angel (16 page)

When he saw Marceline curled up in my lap, David shuddered and made no attempt to come closer to me than the other side of the fireplace, where (on another meter, more pennies!) I had the gas fire going. Winter’s around the corner.

“Where did you get that?” he asked with a moue of distaste.

“From heaven, I suspect,” I answered. “I’m just back from the vet’s, and I can tell you that her name is Marceline, she’s spayed, and she’s about three years old.”

His only response was a noise of revulsion, but he sat down opposite me in the other easy chair, stared at me out of the blue eyes I used to think so divine, and steepled his fingers.

“I hear you have a new girlfriend,” I said chattily.

His skin flushed, he looked annoyed. “No, I do not!” he said with a snap in his voice.

“Broke your mould, did she?”

“I am here,” he said stiffly, “to ask you to change your mind and come back to me. Rosemary was a rebound, that’s all.”

“David,” I said patiently, “you’re out of my life. I don’t want to see you, let alone go out with you.” “You’re cruel,” he muttered. “You’ve changed.”

“No, I haven’t changed, at least not where you’re concerned. But I am a different person. I’ve gained the courage to be direct and the hardness not to relent when people play on my sympathy. You may as well get your bum off my chair and piss off, because I don’t want you.”

“It isn’t fair!” he cried, hands unsteepled. “I love you! And I’m not going to take no for an answer.”

Right, Harriet Purcell, bring out the Big Bertha cannon. “I am not a virgin,”

I said.

“What?”

“You heard me. I am not a virgin.” “You’re joking! You’re fabricating!”

I laughed. “David, why can’t you believe the truth?” “Because you wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”

“I bloody could, and I bloody did. What’s more, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.” Fire the ten-ton shell, Harriet! “Added to that, he wasn’t precisely a white man, though he was a beautiful colour.”

David got up and left without another word.

“So,” I said to Toby later, “I’ve finally got rid of David for good, though I suspect it was more because my lover was an Indian than because I’ve had a lover.”

“No, a bit of both,” Toby said, grinning. “The silly clot! He ought to have seen the writing on the wall years ago. It’s women who choose their mates. If a man’s interested, he simply has to wait around with his cap in hand until she makes up her mind. And if she decides to give him the royal heave-ho, that’s too bad. I’ve seen it happen from dogs to dicky-birds. As for spiders”-he shuddered-“the ladies eat their mates.”

“I am not a bitch on heat, thank you!” I snarled.

He laughed. “Maybe not, Harriet, but you certainly do have an effect on us poor old dogs.” His eyelids lowered, he considered me like a sniper his target.

“You’re sexy. There’s no slapping a label on that, it’s underneath the skin.”

“I do not pout, wiggle or stick my tongue out!” “That’s confusing advertisement with essence. If a man says a woman’s sexy, he simply means that he thinks she’d be fun in bed. Some of the homeliest women I know are sexy.

Look at Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. She’s the back end of a bus, but I’ll bet the men have been turning somersaults over her since she was twelve. I rather fancy her myself, as a matter of fact. I always did like women who are taller than me. I must have Sherpa blood.”

He strolled over to my chair and put a hand on its back, then lowered himself onto its arm, his knee pinning me hard. “It’s my experience of genuinely sexy women that they are fun in bed.”

I looked suspicious. “Is that a hint or an invitation?” “Neither. I don’t intend to let you grab me by the short and curlies at this stage, thank you very much.

Which doesn’t mean I’m not going to kiss you, mind.”

He did so, forcefully enough to be painful until my head lifted off the chair back and turned to accommodate him, then he fitted his mouth luxuriously into mine and played with my tongue.

“That’s as far as I intend to go,” he said, releasing me. “That’s as far as I intend to let you go,” I said.

Interesting man, Toby Evans. In love with Pappy, but yet attracted to me.

Well, I’m attracted to him too, though I’m not in love with him. Why does everything in life seem to boil down to sex?

Pappy’s at home again this weekend. Ezra’s wife, she told me when I invited her to have something to eat and meet Marceline, is being hideously difficult.

“With seven kids, I’m not surprised,” I said, putting the beef braise on the table so we could take as much as we wanted. Pappy, I noticed, wrinkled her nose and started to hunt out the carrots and potatoes, leave the meat. “What’s this?” I demanded.

“Ezra deplores eating flesh. The beasts of the field are innocents we subject to horrible torture in slaughterhouses,” she explained. “Man wasn’t intended to eat flesh.”

“That’s complete bullshit! Man started as a hunter, and our gums are populated by as many teeth for tearing flesh as for grinding plants!” I snapped.

“Slaughterhouses are policed by government officials, and all the animals that go to them wouldn’t exist at all if we didn’t eat them. Who says that carrot you’re busy masticating with your omnivorous teeth wasn’t subjected to horrible torture when it was yanked from the soil, decapitated, scrubbed hard enough to exfoliate it, cruelly chopped into chunks and then got the living daylights simmered out of it? And all that is nothing compared to the fate of the potato you’re relishing-I not only flayed it, I took a sharp knife, screwed it round in its flesh and dug out its eyes! The

brisket’s good for you, you’re so thin you must be burning tissue protein. Eat the lot!”

Oh, dear. I’m turning into a shrew. Still, it worked. Pappy helped herself to beef and enjoyed the taste of it enough to forget darling stupid drongo flipping Ezra.

Luckily she liked Marceline, and Marceline liked her enough to climb on her lap and purr away. Then I set out to do a bit of fishing for information on Ezra, and learned some very interesting stuff, such as how he can afford to maintain a wife and seven kids as well as a flat in the Glebe and very pricey substances the Law says he can’t have. He holds a chair, but academics don’t get paid what managing directors do because intellect and education don’t rank with moneymaking. His salary, Pappy said, goes to his family. But he has written a couple of books that sell to a popular market, and he keeps that income for himself. Oh, the more I hear about Ezra, the less I like him! Utterly, totally, completely selfish.

On the other hand, Pappy’s so happy, and every day that she’s happy is one more day that she isn’t unhappy. Not an ounce of practicality in her, but we can’t all be like me, I suppose.

An animal is good company. Today was one of the really quiet Saturdays, Jim and Bob off tooling around the Blue

Mountains on the Harley Davidson, Klaus off down to Bowral, Chikker and Marge in the front ground floor flat sleeping off a binge, Toby off with his sketching block and a tin of watercolours to some site in Iron Cove that’s caught his fancy, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz dealing with a cavalcade of bluerinsed clients (they love to come on Saturdays), and Pappy somewhere in dreamland at Glebe. Harold was here, of course. I don’t know what he does when he isn’t teaching school, but he certainly doesn’t go out. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz does his washing when she does her own, so the one part of The House I can be sure not to find him is the laundry and backyard. There’s never a sound from his room, though it’s right above me-no music, no creaking of my ceiling, and when I’m outside and lift my head to look at his window, its blind is drawn, both panes shut all the way. Yet I’m conscious of him somewhere in the back of my mind all the time. It used to be just when I went upstairs to have a shower, but during the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that if I go upstairs anywhere to see anybody, as I come down again I think I can hear feet whispering shoeless behind me. I turn around, but there’s no one there. And if it’s Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz I go to visit, he’s always on the landing outside her door when I leave, not moving, just staring at me.

It must have been about six o’clock when someone knocked on my door.

The days have drawn right in, so it’s dark by six now, and I’ve taken to sliding the bolt on the inside of my door when the back regions of The House are deserted except for me and Harold. Even worse indication of my creeping paranoia, I’ve driven six-inch nails from my window frames deep into the architraves around them, which allows me to keep them open at top and bottom, but not wide enough for anyone to slither inside. Sydney’s not cold enough to close windows all the way in winter, neither wind nor rain beats in along the side passage, and in summer I don’t get the sun. If I am inside and the big bolt is engaged, I am safe. When I think about that, I get the shivers. That awful little man upstairs is waging psychological warfare against me, and for all my horror of cowardice, in some ways he’s winning. Yet I can’t say anything to anybody about it-when I did to Toby, he pooh-poohed it. Paranoid.

So when the knock fell on my door, I jumped. I was reading a whodunit by a snobby Pommy woman and Holst’s Planet Suite was playing on Peter’s hi-fi, the gas fire was going, and Marceline was curled up in the other easy chair, fast asleep. A part of me wanted to call out and ask who was there, but that’s cowardice, Harriet Purcell. So I walked to the door, slid the bolt and opened it with a rush, every muscle poised not for flight, but for fight.

Mr. Forsythe was standing there. My muscles sagged. “Hello, sir,” I said brightly, and held the door wider. “Ah, um, er, come in.” Feeble.

“I do trust that I’m not inopportune?” he asked, entering.

What an incredible turn of phrase! God speaketh in a superior tongue, none of this “I’m not in the way, am I?” stuff.

“You’re perfectly opportune, sir,” I said. “Sit down.”

Marceline, however, was not about to budge. She likes the fire too much.

His solution was to pick her up, ensconce himself in the chair, put her on his lap and stroke her back to sleep.

“I can offer you coffee or threestar hospital brandy,” I said.

“Coffee, thank you.”

I disappeared behind my screen and stood looking at the sink as if it held the answer to the meaning of life. The sound of his voice jolted me into action, I filled the percolator, spooned coffee into it, turned it on.

“I’ve been to see an aged patient of mine at Elizabeth Bay,” he was saying, “and I have to return later tonight. Unfortunately it’s over an hour’s drive to my house, so I wondered if perhaps you might be free to join me for dinner in this area.”

Oh, lord! It’s got to be almost two months since I last saw him, that night when he gave me a lift home and drank a mug of my coffee. Since then, not hide nor hair of him.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” I called, wondering why percolators took so long to get their only job over and done with.

Why was he here? Why?

“Black, no sugar,” I said, finally reappearing. Then I sat down opposite him and looked at him as Chris Hamilton had looked at Demetrios on that famous day when I’d gone up her like a rat up a drainpipe. The scales fell from my eyes. Those wretched cards are right, Mr. Forsythe wants me. He wants me!

So I sat staring at him stupidly, too astounded to find a thing to say.

I don’t think he noticed the mug of coffee or the cat on his lap, he was too intent on me, chin up, eyes calm and steady. A bit like a film star playing a spy going to his execution. Prepared to suffer, prepared to die for what he believed in. Suddenly I realised that I knew nothing like enough about men to understand what forces would impel a Duncan Forsythe to do this. All I did know was that if I accepted his invitation, I was going to trigger a chain of events that had the power to ruin both of us.

How fast is thought? How long did it take me to sit there, wordless, and make up my mind? Harold aside, I’m happy with my lot-with myself, my sexuality, my code of behaviour, my life. But he, poor man, doesn’t even know who or what he is. I don’t have the remotest idea why he wants me, only that he’s brought himself to the necessary pitch to come asking. On the strength of three little encounters.

“Thank you, Mr. Forsythe,” I said. “I would be delighted to have dinner with you.”

For a moment he looked absolutely taken aback, then that smile that turns me into a melted puddle lit up his face and his eyes. “I’ve booked a table at the Chelsea for

seven o’clock,” he said, finally saw the coffee and picked it up to sip at it.

The Chelsea. Gord Aggie! The hospital grapevine is definitely right, he’s not a philanderer. He was planning to take me to eat at the poshest restaurant between the City and Prunier’s, where half the customers would recognise him in an instant.

“Not the Chelsea, sir,” I said gently. “I don’t have that sort of wardrobe.

Would you mind the Bohemian up the street? Russian Egg and Rostbraten Esterhazy for ten bob.”

“Wherever you like,” he said, looking as if some huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Then he put the mug down and rose to his feet, deposited Marceline back in her chair. “I’m sure you’d like to have some time to yourself,”

he said then with the courtesy he was famous for, “so I’ll sit in my car outside and wait for you to come out.” At the door he stopped. “Ought I to go ahead of you, make a reservation?”

“It’s not necessary, sir. I’ll join you outside shortly,” I said, and shut the door behind him.

Nal had been a flutter, but what I was about to get myself into couldn’t possibly end up a friendly, short-term indulgence. That wasn’t in Duncan Forsythe’s nature, I could see that without needing to consult Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. Oh, bugger! What drives us on to make potential messes of our lives?

I should have politely sent him packing, I knew it. But I just didn’t have the strength of character. No Matron, I. So I put on my new winter suit of pink knobbly tweed, slid my feet into the highest heels I own-no risk of towering over him-and hunted for my only pair of gloves. White cotton numbers, not matching kid. Hats I cannot abide, they’re so utterly useless, especially on epileptic hair.