The House That Jack Built (30 page)

    He laid his hand on her shoulder. For some reason Pepper found it a most disturbing gesture, as intimate as if he had laid his hand on her breast. Up until now, she had only seen Craig as Effie's bossy, overbearing husband, a big man with the kind of bluff good looks that she had always found far too bluff and far too good. She preferred darker men, men with quirky faces and suggestive smiles. Gypsylike men, who rarely shaved. But suddenly she sensed that same kind of darkness in Craig: that same kind of danger.

    She suddenly thought:
this man's sexy, and he wants me.

    'I never did this before. It might not work. It might be dangerous.'

    'You weren't afraid to cleanse the house. Why should you be afraid to cleanse me?'

    She stared at him and he looked different. She said, 'We'll have to have mirrors. Full-length mirrors.'

    'We have plenty of mirrors in the anteroom upstairs. Why don't you do it up there?'

    She took hold of his wrist and lifted his hand from her shoulder. Again, there was an intimacy about touching him that was quite out of proportion to what she had actually done. She had only held his wrist: and she had felt his skin and his wristbones and the dark hairs on the back of his hand. She had even felt his pulse.

    'I don't think I'm experienced enough for this.' She was increasingly conscious of her nakedness, and the thinness of her dress's fabric.

    'You can try, can't you? Maybe you can solve all of our problems.'

    'Well, I-'

    'Please.'

    She gathered up her candles and her jars while he stood and watched her. Occasionally she glanced up at him, and he gave her a little nod of encouragement. He made no effort to help, even when she had to carry her heavy tapestry bag across the ballroom and out to the hallway.

    The windows along the corridor had all been replaced, and they were hung with dark blue velveteen curtains. The floor had been cleaned and polished, and the oak panelling had been taken back to its original honey beige.

    He saw her taking it all in. 'There's still a long way to go. But not many men can build the house of their dreams, can they?'

    Pepper nodded. 'You have to think of Effie, though. You have to consider your wife. She's your wife.'

    'Oh, I think of my wife all right. And my wife thinks of me. My wife would do anything for me.'

    They started to climb the stairs under the coat-of-arms that said
Non omnis moriar
,
I shall never completely die
.

    Craig said, 'If I asked her to, she'd cut her wrists for me. She'd dance barefoot on broken glass.'

    Pepper stopped, halfway up the stairs. Her bag was heavy and her hands were beginning to tremble. 'Would you ask her to?'

    'It depends. Asking a woman to prove her devotion is one of the last great masculine prerogatives. You love me? Go on, my darling, cut off all your hair! You love me? Have yourself tattooed with roses all over your breasts! You love me? Walk round the house naked in front of my friends! Show me how much you love me! Prove it! Do whatever I tell you! Crawl through mud on your hands and knees, and then get up and kiss me and thank me for making you dirty!'

    Pepper's mouth was dry. 'You don't ask Effie to do things like that, though, do you?'

    He continued upstairs, and then pushed open the doors to the anteroom. Inside, the room had been spectacularly refurbished. She couldn't believe how quickly it had been done - and why hadn't Norman told her about it, brought her here to see it? A huge chandelier sparkled from the ceiling, and all the gilt-framed mirrors had been immaculately restored. Even the thick red carpets had been relaid, and the room refurnished with three gilded ottomans with fat red cushions, occasional tables and gilt-painted chairs.

    Pepper put down her bag, still looking around her in amazement. Craig closed the doors. He crossed the room with a gliding walk, and a dozen more of him crossed the room, too, in their different mirrors. 'I have to applaud your mirror theory,' he smiled. 'Sometimes I walk into this room and I don't know whether the same "me" is going to walk out at the other end. Why should this "me" be any more valid than any of those other "mes"?' He turned towards the right-hand mirrors and seven of him turned left.

    Pepper looked around, unsettled. All that Norman had told her this afternoon was that Fulloni & Jahn had let them start basic roof-repair work before the final sale went through, so that Valhalla wouldn't deteriorate any further. But he hadn't said anything about mirrors and carpets and curtains and lavishly-gilded antique furniture.

    'You see these carvings?' said Craig, approaching the solid oak doors that led into the master bedroom. 'They tell it all, the whole story. Women should be silent, and obedient, and keep their eyes closed except when told to open them. Men should turn their backs to them, and show them nothing at all. The first woman was made from dirt and women have been dirt ever since.'

    He turned around, and stared at Pepper, and laughed out loud. She didn't know whether he was being serious or not. 'That's the story. That's what these doors have been carved to represent. Eve wasn't the first woman: Lilith was. God agreed to make her, because Adam was so lonely. He fashioned her out of dirt, the clay that men walk on, and she was never more than dirt. But soon she wanted to be equal to Adam. She didn't want to obey him, she didn't want to work as his servant; so she left him and she was turned out of the Garden of Eden.

    'You can't say that God didn't give her a chance. He sent three angels after her, to try to persuade her to come back.' Craig traced the names that were carved on the banners with the tip of his finger. Samsi, Sangavi, Semangelaf. 'These are the names of the three angels. They offered Lilith everything, as long as she agreed to serve Adam and all the sons of Adam; but she refused, and so God put a curse on her that made a hundred of her children die every day. Because of that, Lilith hides herself in every marriage bed, hoping to catch drops of semen so that she can have more children. Because of that, parents sing their children a song of love every night before they go to sleep, and call it a lullabye, which means nothing more nor less than "Lilla-bi!" - "Lilith, be gone!" '

    Pepper came up to the doors and stood beside him. The carved faces looked so real that she reached out and touched them to make sure that they weren't. 'How do you know all this?' she asked.

    He touched the same face that she was touching, drawing his fingertips across the lips as if he expected them to kiss him. He wouldn't stop smiling. She sensed that alluring darkness even more strongly. It slid beneath his shallow, self-satisfied exterior like a shark sliding almost invisibly beneath the faintly-ruffled surface of a shallow bay.

    This man's not only sexy; he's dangerous.

    What disturbed her even more was the ambiguity of her own feelings. She began to think that it was wrong, calling herself Pepper. She didn't feel like a Pepper at all. She didn't completely understand who she was, or what she was doing here. And her perceptions had subtly changed. Everything around her seemed to be magnified, and almost painfully clear. She could see every detail of the wood-carvings, every whorl and chisel mark in the oak. She could see Craig's face as if she were looking at it through a crystal-clear drop of water.

    Yet his voice seemed indistinct. His words came out in a long, low grumble.

    'I've made it my business to know it,' Craig told her. He turned away from the door and took hold of her arm. 'If you want anything in this life, you have to do your research. I was five months in Palestine, and three months in Egypt, and at the end of that time I knew what I was going to do. I built Valhalla, in my own image, and I prepared to show God that women are just what Lilith was.'

    Pepper said, 'Mr. Bellman… you didn't build Valhalla. You only bought it.'

    He seemed not to hear. Instead he walked across to a cocktail cabinet and flung open the doors, almost as if he expected to find the Holy Grail inside.

    'Drink?' he asked her. 'I make a mean champagne cocktail.'

    'I don't think so. I think I'd better be getting back.'

    He poured himself a whisky. 'Back? Back to where?'

    'Back to-' Pepper began, and then suddenly realised that she couldn't remember where she was supposed to go back to. In fact, she couldn't think why she had imagined that she was supposed to go back anywhere. 'Well, anyway, I don't think so. I don't drink before midnight.'

    He came across to her, circling the whisky in his glass. 'If I asked you to tattoo roses on your breasts, would you do it for me?'

    'What do you want, a woman or a garden?'

    His eyes were dead; but he was still smiling. 'There's no difference. Both are transient beauty, fashioned out of dirt.'

    'Less of the dirt if you don't mind. I'll have a cigarette.' He went back to the cocktail cabinet and returned with a silver art-deco cigarette box, filled with Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. Pepper took one and he lit it for her. She hadn't smoked a Black Russian for as long as she could remember, and the pungent smell of Balkan tobacco took her back to the days when she... the days when she what… She just couldn't seem to remember.

    Craig sat on one of the sofas, and patted the cushion next to him to indicate that Pepper should sit down, too. 'No,' she said. 'I really have to go.'

    'I thought you were staying over.'

    'I don't know. I'm confused.'

    'I heard that Gordon bought you an apartment in London. Is that true?'

    'Well, you know how much Gordon likes to throw his money around.' Then she thought: Gordon? Who in the hell is Gordon? I don't know any Gordon. But then she thought: Of course I do. Gordon, with his pearl stickpin and his smart maroon cravat and his grey sweptback hair… I met him at Deauville last year.

    'You should be careful of Gordon,' said Craig. 'He's into the store for 
f
55,000 already.'

    'Why should I be careful? It's not my money!'

    'Just don't rely on him too much, that's all I'm saying.'

    'And what does that mean? That I should start relying on you? Jenny Dolly thinks that you're the devil incarnate!'

    Craig threw his head back and laughed. 'She wishes I were! Then she could sell me her soul, and get back her chateau at Fontainebleau and her seven-strand pearls!'

    Pepper slowly sat down next to him. She couldn't keep her eyes off him. She understood everything he was talking about, and yet she knew that she couldn't have done. She knew that 'Gordon' was Gordon Selfridge, who owned one of the world's most successful department stores, on Oxford Street, London. She knew that Jenny Dolly was one of the Dolly sisters, two pretty young Hungarian singers who had taken Gordon Selfridge's fancy, particularly Jenny, to whom he had proposed dozens of times; and on whom he had spent a fortune before his gambling habit sank him so deeply into debt.

    She held her head in her hands, staring at Craig and trying to make sense of what was happening to her. She didn't feel ill; she didn't feel frightened. She simply felt as if she were missing something important, as if she had picked up a conversation halfway through. She knew that she had intended to come here, but she couldn't remember why. Something to do with mirrors? She couldn't be sure. There were mirrors everywhere: she could see herself sitting on the sofa a hundred times over, her face in her hands, her cigarette smoke trailing.

    'Mr.-?' she began, but she couldn't think of his name. He sipped whisky, amused. 'You don't have to call me Mister.'

    'Then what do I call you?'

    'The same thing you called me the first time I met you. Lover-to-Be.'

    'I called you that? How crass can you be? I must have been drunk!'

    'Probably. But you looked as though you meant it.'

    'Where was I, when I made this improbable promise?'

    'You don't remember?'

    Pepper took her hands away from her face and half closed her eyes. 'The funny thing is that I do. It was outside the Hotel Metropole in Cannes. I was talking to the Duke of Westminster and you came out of the door and I said, "Look at him. That's my lover-to-be." '

    Craig slowly nodded, but he wasn't Craig at all. Pepper stared at him and stared at him and then she knew who he was; and who she was, too.

    'I'm crazy,' she said. 'I'm completely crazy. How much champagne did I drink?'

    'Enough to float the Duke of Westminster's yacht.'

    'Oh, God. I keep making a solemn promise to myself to stop drinking and stop dancing and stop gambling.'

    'What would you do? Take up mah-jongg? Drinking and dancing and gambling is all you do.'

    She leaned across the sofa and laid her hand on his knee. 'That's not quite all, my darling. I have been known to eat and bathe and wax my legs and occasionally sleep. But not soundly.'

    He looked back at her and gave her a smile that she had never seen on any man's face before.

    'I think you and I have a whole lot in common,' he said. 'What sign were you born under? Taurus?'

    'Aries, couldn't you guess? Aries the Impossible. Aries the Irrepressible.'

    'Aries the Erotic?'

    'Oh, well, that's it!' she shrieked. 'Any man who talks like that, he has to be a Virgo!'

    She threw her head back; and it was then that Craig slid towards her, and in one sinuous movement took hold of her waist and leaned his head forward and kissed her on the throat. Her first reaction was to sit up straight and twist herself free. But the sensation of his lips touching her bare neck was completely paralysing; as if his tongue were spiked with curare. She sat with her head back in a kind of trance, while he kissed her cheekbones, and all around her ear-lobes, and his tongue-tip followed the curve of her jaw until it discovered her slightly-parted lips.