Festering Lilies (7 page)

In fact Willow did care for Richard, who had become her first and only lover three years earlier. Despite the unparalleled physical intimacy she had achieved with him, Willow liked to keep a certain emotional detachment in their relationship, and she was fairly certain that Richard also felt safer with that than he would have with a more conventional love affair. He had let her know very early in their acquaintance that he loathed talking about his feelings and would have found it embarrassing to have to listen to hers.

Not too displeased to have an extra couple of hours in which to prowl about her kingdom, Willow collected a second glass of sherry and a copy of a new novel she badly wanted to read and took them both with her into the bathroom, where she ran herself an enormously deep, hot bath, scented with Chanel No. 19 bath oil.

As she lay in the fragrant water, becoming more radiant by the minute, she ignored the book and bent her mind to the question of how on earth she was to pursue the only real lead she had into the mystery of who had killed Algernon Endelsham. She wondered what Gino could have meant by saying that Mrs Gripper had been ‘terrified'? Terrified of what, or of whom? Unlike the fortunate police, Willow could not ask direct questions of anyone she suspected. Instead, she would have to dig things out without help from anyone. Clearly she was going to have to get to know Mrs Gripper quickly.

Perhaps she could hang about outside the house in Graham Terrace Gino had talked about, and then faint across the doorstep just as the woman emerged.… Willow put that promising fantasy aside as she remembered that Mrs Gripper had not left the house even for her weekly hair appointment. For the first time in her life as Cressida, Willow thought it a pity that she had deliberately evaded all her agent's and publisher's attempts to introduce her to people. After all, if she had allowed them to do as they had wanted, she would probably have been able to badger a friend or acquaintance for an introduction to the apparently bereaved Mrs Gripper. Richard Crescent could have helped her to meet any number of merchant bankers and probably owners of stately homes and Scottish grouse moors, but rich gossip-column journalists were not likely to form part of his circle.

An hour later, her skin bright pink and slightly puckered and her expensively arranged hair rather fluffy from the steam, Willow emerged from the bathroom with no real idea of what to do next. She decided to try to put the whole matter of Algy's murder out of her mind until she had dealt with Richard.

It amused her to dress elaborately for him and to spend some time painting her face with the sort of cosmetics she would once have despised. By the time she had finished, her face (which was usually white and dull) still looked pale but really rather interesting. Her eyes looked larger and darker than in their unpainted state and consequently her nose was much less obvious, while the carefully chosen lipstick made her lips look fuller, more generous than those of DOAP's Miss King, even sensuous.

The dress she chose from her generous wardrobe was made of silk hand-printed with a flight of black butterflies against a sunset sky of subtle flame colours, and it clung to her figure, making her look slim rather than skinnily angular as she did in her DOAP suits. Looking at herself in a long glass, she was reasonably certain that even if she were to run into someone from the department they would never recognise daunting, plain Willow King in the sinuously glamorous romantic novelist she had become.

Richard's instinctive blink and wide smile when he arrived told her that he at least approved of the efforts she had made with her face and clothes. He kissed her, carefully avoiding her lipstick, and apologised for his lateness.

‘I should be used to it by now,' said Willow, smiling at him in a way that would have astonished her DOAP colleagues. ‘What was it? Tiresome clients or a new deal blowing up out of the blue?'

‘Neither,' he answered shortly and then as he caught sight of her derisive glance, added: ‘Well, yes, it was clients actually and their lawyers.…Nothing out of the ordinary, merely coming clean about some figures they'd fudged, which meant that all the listing particulars will have to be changed overnight. I think their lawyers must have been as horrified as we all were when they confessed.'

Willow wished that she were more interested in the goings-on of the City or less interested in the lengths to which Richard could go to avoid giving her any real information about his work. He clearly enjoyed talking to her about it, but was far too experienced a merchant banker to commit the slightest indiscretion, and she often felt how much more interesting his conversation would be if he could only include a few names or at least personalities in it. Just occasionally she tried to push or tease him into revealing them, forgetting how much she herself relied on his discretion. He was the only person in the world who knew that Willow King and Cressida Woodruffe were the same woman; and yet in all the years she had known him she had never been afraid that he would betray her.

They had met at a party of her publisher, soon after her fourth book had been published and actually achieved the best-seller list in hardback. Richard had been invited only because his bank was handling the merger of her publisher and a larger house, and he was clearly bored by the chatter about royalties, affairs between editors and authors, redundancies and disastrous jacket flap copy. His lacklustre eyes brightened visibly when Willow's editor brought her up to be introduced and she found herself both flattered by his obvious interest in her and intrigued by him. As they talked she discovered not only that he had a dry sense of humour that appealed to her, but also that his brains matched or even exceeded her own. Although she usually hated parties and left after half an hour, on that evening she stayed talking in ever greater animation to Richard.

He took her out to dinner that first night and quite soon afterwards they went to bed together. Despite her total inexperience and their mutual dislike of admitting or discussing their feelings, it had been a wholly pleasurable interlude, which they were both happy to repeat. Gradually a routine grew up between them, and they dined together on most evenings between Thursday and Sunday, except when Richard was in New York, Paris or Tokyo on bank business.

Willow considered that their friendship was both civilised and eminently satisfactory. It gave each of them pleasure, an escort to the occasional party, theatre or cinema, and just as much overt emotion as each could handle comfortably. Willow knew quite well that ‘Cressida Woodruffe's' readers would have found the arrangement unattractively cold, even selfish, but there was genuine affection between them. Neither made claims on the other (although just occasionally as the years passed Richard allowed himself the luxury of sentimental pleading, secure perhaps in the knowledge that Willow would never spoil things by yielding to his pleas) and both were considerate of the other's privacy. Willow had not consciously kept her secrets from him, but Richard had never asked any of the questions that might have elicited frankness from her. She told him the truth in the end only because it had come to seem impolite to withhold so much from a man with whom she made love once or twice a week.

Watching him on that Thursday evening in November admiring her new clothes, Willow remembered how he had burst out laughing as she told him of the life she led in Clapham, and she herself laughed at the memory.

‘What's so funny?' he asked, rather defensive. ‘Have I sat in something?' He twisted round to squint down at his own impeccable backview. Willow laughed again and shook her curly head.

‘Nothing, Richard. I was just remembering how amused you were when I first told you who I really was. It was such a relief!'

He only smiled and picked up her fur coat for her. Willow shrugged herself into it and together they walked out into the icy street. Richard told her about the restaurant he had chosen, asked her what she had been reading since they last met and said nothing of any importance until they were sitting in immense comfort with their oysters and Chablis in front of them. Then he settled himself more luxuriously in the embracing red-velvet chair and said:

‘And so how was the department this week? All of a flutter, I take it, over this ghastly business.'

Willow swallowed an oyster, enjoying the peculiar sensation of the soft, yielding saltiness sliding over her tongue and trying to ignore a sudden recognition of the highly similar sensations she felt as she recovered from a phlegmy cold.

‘All of a flutter just about describes it,' she said. ‘They're all inventing wilder and wilder solutions about whodunnit and causing untold umbrage to each other as they propound them.'

‘And have you any theories?' Richard asked, wondering as so often before what she was like in her professional persona and whether it could really be true that none of her colleagues guessed who she was.

‘Not yet,' she answered, not wanting to expose poor Mrs Gripper's sad secret (even if it were genuine). She picked up another oyster shell, ‘But I shall pretty soon have to.'

‘Oh, God, Willow, I've seen that look before,' he said, peering through the candlelight at her. ‘What on earth have you done?'

She dropped the empty oyster shell on the plate, wiped her long fingers on her napkin, took a sip of wine and said coolly:

‘Richard, you're as bad as the idiots at DOAP: you of all people can't really believe that I banged the Minister over the head with a cricket bat or something and killed him, can you? In any case, you and I spent the whole of that evening together with the Krug and fish fingers. You must remember.'

‘I remember perfectly well, not least my perennial horror at what you do to a good wine by insisting on eating those disgusting, vulgar things,' he said. Then, sobering, he added: ‘In any case, I know you far too well to imagine any such thing.'

‘Thank you, Richard,' said Willow as soberly, and went on, as though disliking so much seriousness: ‘And I don't see why I should scour a taste for fish fingers out of myself just because you despise them. They're almost the only thing I've retained from the Newcastle of my youth. Even after a childhood like mine, one should be allowed a tiny bit of nostalgia.'

‘Were you so unhappy then?' asked Richard. It was the most intimate question he had ever asked her and for a moment she was tempted to laugh it off; but then she remembered his declaration of faith in her and thought that she had to answer properly.

‘Not exactly unhappy, Richard, because I didn't know anything else. But I did feel as though I inhabited a world quite separate from anyone else. Don't look like that, my dear,' she said, stretching out a hand across the table. He held it for a moment, looking so sad that she felt that she had to try to explain.

‘I don't blame my parents: they did their absolute best, but they knew nothing whatever about the emotional needs of children. They were both very busy at the university and confined their dealings with me to making sure that I was fit and healthy and would be able to cope with the world on my own. Since they were forty-two and fifty-five when I was conceived they were convinced that they'd die before I'd got a job with a secure salary and pension.'

‘Hence the Civil Service,' said Richard. ‘I wonder what they would think of Cressida Woodruffe.' At that Willow laughed and took a sip of Chablis.

‘I rather think they would be appalled,' she said. ‘For two professorial scientists to have produced a daughter with an academic record like mine was one thing – I think they were really quite proud of that – but to have a daughter who made a fortune out of romantic novels? No, Richard. They would have hated it – and despised half the things I've bought with the money. They seriously disapproved of luxury and in my place would have sent all the money to Third World aid projects, I suspect.'

Richard swallowed the last of his oysters and then looked speculatively across the table at her.

‘Is that why you go on spending half the week at DOAP?' he asked. ‘You obviously hated it and your Clapham life before you invented Cressida, so why do you go on? You're not a masochist by nature, as far as I know.'

Willow thought about it and wondered how much to tell him. In the end, she compromised.

‘I suppose partly,' she said carefully. ‘They worked so hard – as I did – to fit me for that life that something in me is tied to it. But more to the point is that if I'm to go on writing escapist fiction for other people, I need to go on living in a life from which
I
want to escape. Fantasy would wear very thin if it were worn every day.'

‘Would it?' asked Richard, clearly not believing her. Willow shrugged, not wanting to delve into her own psyche, let alone expose it to Richard. It had occurred to her more than once that she might prefer to have two lives so that if anyone in either existence tried to get too close to her she could escape to the other. But it was not an idea on which she wished to dwell. To deflect Richard's attention, she said:

‘But I may not have the option much longer. There is a risk that my DOAP life may come to a sticky – but I hope quite private – end.'

‘Mixed metaphors, Willow! I'm shocked,' said Richard, drinking some more wine. When he had put the glass down again, he seemed to understand what she meant, for he said: ‘What have you done? Oh no! It's to do with this murder, isn't it?'

‘The police wanted alibis for last Monday evening and with the establishments officer sitting in on the interview, I could hardly tell them where I actually was, now could I?' said Willow.

Richard picked up his glass of white wine again, took a deep swallow as though to give himself courage and then spoke.

‘Are you telling me that you have lied to the police in a murder enquiry? You must be stark staring bonkers! Yes, I'm not surprised you're looking a bit nervous.'

Willow, unaware that her expression had changed, shrugged.