Sins (41 page)

‘I got it cheap because it’s in a bit of a state,’ Pete informed her.

Rose tried not to look as dismayed as she felt. ‘I think what you really need is an architect, not an interior designer,’ she told him.

‘That’s OK. You can find one for me, can’t you? The thing is that we’re off on tour in a week’s time, and I’ve promised the rest of the band that they can come and stay here when we get back just before Christmas. Oh, that reminds me, I’m going to need a recording studio. I’ll clear out my stuff before we go on tour, so that it isn’t in your way.’

‘You’re living here?’ Rose could hardly believe it.

‘Yeah.’

She wanted to turn and run. The amount of work the place required was way beyond her scope.

Nearly two hours later, having been shown all over the house, Rose told Pete firmly, ‘You really do need an architect.’

She was standing on the landing just outside the bedroom that Pete was using. He’d painted the purple walls himself, he’d told her, but unexpectedly the new-looking bed was covered in plain white bedlinen and looked clean and neat. He was a lot taller than Rose, broad-shouldered, with muscular arms, one hand resting on the door frame, his rolled-up sleeves and open-necked shirt revealing his tanned skin.

‘Let’s go down to the pub and talk about it,’ was his response.

Which was how, half an hour later, Rose found herself seated opposite him in the restaurant of the village pub, with its thatched roof and quaint old-fashioned air, eating beef wellington and listening to him telling her some surely exaggerated stories about things that happened to him when he’d been on tour with his band.

He’d ordered a bottle of wine, but Rose had stopped
drinking after one glass. His stories about the disasters that had befallen them made her laugh, as he obviously intended them to do.

‘There was one time in Amsterdam,’ he told her with a big grin, ‘our first solo tour when we were the main act. We’d finished playing at two in the morning, having only arrived in Holland in the afternoon. The last two hours of the gig, all that kept us going were the joints that Mickey, our roadie, kept passing to us between sets. Of course, once we came off stage there were the usual groupies hanging around–perk of the job,’ he told her, before continuing, ‘Naturally these girls expected to be taken back to some fancy hotel but thanks to our manager, who was as tight as a duck’s arsehole, we were supposed to be sleeping in the van. Not that we hadn’t had plenty of shags in there. But what with still being high on the joints and the gig, we ended up wandering round the red-light district ’cos Mickey had said that we’d be able to get a shag there and a bed thrown in with it for a couple of quid. Shows how much Mickey and the rest of us really knew, because the girls charged a couple of quid for a couple of minutes, not the whole evening.’

Normally Rose would have been left feeling uncomfortable by such frank disclosures from a man she was on her own with, but Pete had that way about him that somehow diffused her self-consciousness and anxiety. He even managed to make her laugh, when she felt that really she should have been disapproving. She was enjoying being with him, she realised, much to her own surprise.

It was still light when they left the pub, Pete curling himself into the passenger seat of her Mini.

Emerald looked down at the hem of her Courrèges frock, which was short enough to expose the length of her sleek tanned legs.

Max had just arrived to collect her for their dinner date at Annabel’s, but there was something she wanted to discuss with him first.

‘I’ve some exciting news,’ she told him. She was feeling in a good mood, triumphant at the thought of what she had planned and how it would enable her to have Max all to herself for the summer.

‘A friend of mine has offered me the use of her villa in St-Tropez for the summer. We could leave next week—’

‘No.’

‘What? Don’t be silly, Max, of course we’re going.’

His response was to grab her wrist in a painful grip and tell her curtly, ‘Listen, lady, no one tells me what to do and most especially not a bird. And what’s all this “we” business? There’s you and there’s me, but there’s no “we”. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it’s going to stay.’

Emerald wasn’t used to being treated so cavalierly. She pulled her wrist free and demanded, ‘And what if I don’t want it to stay that way?’

‘Too bad,’ Max told her succinctly, ‘because I do. I’ve got business here in London so that’s where I’m going to be, you can please yourself what you do and where you go. I don’t give a monkey’s. In fact—’ he began.

Emerald stopped him, demanding, ‘In fact, what?’

‘Work it out for yourself.’

Was he really trying to imply that he was dropping her? For a minute she was too shocked to react. That wasn’t what she had expected and it wasn’t what she wanted. A feeling not quite panic, but certainly something close to it, gripped her. She wasn’t ready to end things between them yet. Being with him was still too exciting. But then her confidence broke through her panic. Of course he didn’t mean it. He was just doing a bit of sabre-rattling. Max knew when he was well off. He might feel that he needed to prove his machismo and his independence but the reality was that his sexual desire for her was every bit as strong as hers for him.

Feeling reassured and in control again, Emerald put her arms round his neck and pressed her body into his, grinding her hips against him as she teased him, ‘Come on, you know you want me.’

‘You? No, what I want is this,’ he told her.

She had to take the Courrèges frock off herself; all Max had done was push it up to her waist. He probably wouldn’t even have bothered to take off her knickers either, he was so impatient to have her, Emerald thought triumphantly as she watched in one of the pair of pretty gilt rococo mirrors set into the alcoves either side of the fireplace, her hands braced on the table below it as Max thrust into her.

There would be bruises on her skin in the morning from his hold on her. He was a fiercely demanding lover, but for Emerald there was a sharp sense of excitement in arousing him, pushing him to the point where he had
to have her. It proved that she was the more powerful of the two of them.

His thrusts deepened and quickened, selfish just like him, not caring for her or her needs. Had it been like this for her mother and her painter? Had she felt this power and triumph at the knowledge that her bit of rough trade was sweating and gasping over his need to possess her as he drove deeper and harder into her in an act that was raw and savage? No, of course it wasn’t–she could do dirty hot sex far better than her mother, and she wasn’t stupid enough to get pregnant doing it either.

Max was coming, hot spurts of semen pulsing into her.

Emerald pulled a face as he withdrew from her and she turned to face him.

‘I’ll have to go and change,’ she told him.

‘No.’

Emerald’s triumph deepened.

‘Ah, so you want to take me out knowing that I smell of you and sex, do you?’

‘What I want is my dinner,’ Max corrected her, but Emerald was feeling far too pleased with herself to argue with him as she reached for a box of tissues.

‘Look, just let it go, will you? It’s not my fault.’

‘Well, no, of course it isn’t,’ Janey agreed lovingly, as she padded naked round the bed, happy to be with Charlie even if, because he wasn’t feeling very well, he hadn’t been able to ‘do it’.

She hummed to herself as she battled with the
transistor radio, finally managing to tune it in to Radio Luxembourg.

They had been supposed to be going to Annabel’s, but when Janey had got to Charlie’s he’d announced that he didn’t feel like going out and had suggested generously that she went without him. Of course she hadn’t done that.

She turned round and smiled at him. All she wanted was to make him happy. When everyone else around her was happy, then she was happy.

She was so very lucky, Janey thought; lucky to have found such a wonderful friend and source of advice and help in Cindy, and then even luckier to have met Charlie, especially after all the years when she had made so many disastrous mistakes with regard to the men in her life. Men who at first had made her so happy, only to break her heart later. Men who had sworn that they loved her, only to prove that it was her love for them and the way she showed it that they had really loved–until something or someone better had come along.

There’d been Alan, the gorgeous poet, with his dark, almost menacing monologues against wealth and status delivered in smoky cafés. Janey had sworn to him that his awkwardly arrhythmic verse was wonderful, whilst secretly finding it incomprehensible, and she’d supported him with discreet handouts of food and money, until the day he had told her that he was giving up poetry to marry a sturdy no-nonsense teacher, who was insisting that he get a proper job.

It had taken her a whole year to get over Alan, but then she had met Keith, a heavy-drinking communist
with whom she had attended protest marches and for whom she had risked incurring the displeasure of Her Majesty’s police and justice system.

Keith had turned out to be married to a fellow communist who ‘allowed’ him to have girlfriends so long as he converted them to the cause and they devoted their earnings to it as well. She had got over Keith relatively quickly, thank goodness.

After Keith had been Ray, a struggling playwright suffering under the burden of middle-class guilt. Ray had finally exorcised his guilt via the working-class girl he had made his muse. The two of them were now the darlings of the West End, and hugely bankable.

As Janey had confided to Cindy, she had resolved to give up on men and love after Ray. But then she had met Charlie and, thanks to Cindy’s assurance that Charlie really did love her, Janey had for the first time in a long while felt her old love of life filling her again.

But the best thing of all, as she constantly told Cindy, was that in addition to finding someone who loved her, she had also found her first ever really close friend; someone she could look up to and admire, someone she could turn to when she needed help, someone who did not, as Ella had always done, treat every decision she made with anxious suspicion, but who at the same time did fill the empty space in her life left by her absent ‘big’ sister.

Oh, yes, she was lucky, Janey reflected happily, and from now on she was going to stay lucky–and happy.

*  *  *

Rose had planned to drop Pete off and then set off back for London without getting out of the car, but somehow or another she found that she had allowed Pete to persuade her to join him for a cup of coffee before she actually left.

The kitchen, though very basic, was, like the bedroom, clean, and the coffee Pete made for her surprisingly good.

It would help her stay alert whilst she was driving back, she decided, but that was the last coherent thought she was able to form because suddenly she realised that characters on the willow-pattern plates on the dresser against the wall were starting to move around. She stared at them and then tried to stand up, subsiding back into the chair when Pete reached for her arm and pulled her back down.

‘Acid,’ he told her, looking pleased with himself. ‘Put it in your coffee…Come on…’

He was pulling her to her feet, dragging her along in his wake as they went through empty rooms in which the windows and the fireplaces seemed to take on gargoyle expressions of frighteningly leering hostility that clashed with the mind-blowing beauty of the grass and trees she could see beyond the windows.

A fierce compulsion gripped her. She pulled away from Pete, somehow finding her way outside and then throwing off her shoes so that she could walk barefoot on the grass.

She was laughing.

‘Look how beautiful the grass is,’ she demanded. Then, turning to Pete who had followed her: ‘But I’m killing it.’

Now she was crying, huge fat tears trickling down her face.

‘I love the grass,’ she told Pete mournfully. ‘It’s so beautiful. Too beautiful.’

‘Too beautiful to live,’ he agreed.

A small breeze chilled over her skin, making her shiver. She was stoned, Rose recognised, high as a kite. She’d never tripped out before. Panic filled her.

‘I’ve got to go.’ She looked round for her Mini but then she noticed that even though it was still light she could see the shape of the moon in the sky. Entranced, she stared at it.

Pete came to stand beside her, looking at it as well.

‘It’s the moon,’ he told her solemnly.

‘Yes,’ Rose agreed. ‘I want to go there.’

‘Where?’

‘To see the man in the moon.’

‘Come on then.’

They were back inside the house, shadows chasing and tormenting them, making them run until they were panting with relief in the safety of Pete’s bedroom, the door safely closed against their pursuers.

‘It’s the man in the moon,’ Pete announced. ‘We have to draw a circle all the way round the bed to keep him away. We’ve got to get on the bed and stay in the middle of it.’

Laughing dizzily, Rose complied. She was filled with the most wonderful feeling, as though she had champagne inside her veins instead of blood. She felt that if she jumped high enough she would be able to fly.

‘I can fly,’ she told Pete, fresh tears filling her eyes as
she felt the most extraordinary sense of joy piercing her heart and elevating her to a place where she felt as though the true mystery of joy had suddenly been revealed to her.

‘This is the most beautiful place in the world.’ She exhaled happily. ‘It isn’t falling in love that’s important,’ she told Pete solemnly, ‘it’s flying and touching the stars.’

‘Flying and fucking,’ he agreed with equal solemnity, reaching for her.

‘Oh, I can’t wait for us to leave for St-Tropez, Max. Have you been there before?’

‘Look, how many times do I have to tell you before it sinks into that stupid head of yours that I am not going?’

Emerald opened her mouth to insist that he must, and then closed it again when she saw that he wasn’t looking at her but instead was staring at a girl sitting at another of the nightclub tables a few yards away–a brunette, who seemed more interested in Max than she was in her own dinner companion.