“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.
Saturday May 28th, 1960
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.
We ate Russian Egg and Rostbraten Esterhazy at the Bohemian, hardly said a word to each other. But he did insist upon a bottle of sparkling burgundy, which almost doubled the cost of the meal. Mr. Czerny waited on us himself, and when Duncan Forsythe bunged a crisp blue fivepound note on the table and told him to keep the change, Mr. Czerny nearly swooned.
We’d walked up, and we walked back. When the bulk of St. Vincent’s girls’
school loomed, I plunged diagonally across the road without stopping to think about traffic, and he reached to grab my arm, deter me. The touch made me panic, I blundered into a plane tree and found myself backed against it with him in front of me. I heard him gasp, then felt his mouth slide across my cheek, and I closed my eyes, found his lips and clung to them with a fierce joy heightened by my fears for the future.
After that I persuaded him by look and touch to come inside. The lights were on against our return, and there was Marceline looking up from her chair, yawning pinkly.
His head was thrown back, the pupils of his eyes still widely dilated from the night, and he breathed as if he’d been running. Oh, he looked so alive! And I knew that he was going to pay for this so dearly that I had to do everything in my power to make it worth the price.
So I loved him with skin and mouth and fingertips, delicately and smoothly, strongly and passionately. It was beautiful to be with a man again, especially this man. Nal had been a learning experience, heartfree and carefree, a means and an end combined. But Duncan Forsythe mattered. There could be no divorcing him from my life. The emotion! I kissed his hands and feet, rode him until his back arched between my slippery thighs, wrapped him within my arms and legs and fought him, muscles against muscles, until his greater strength bore me down and away.
He stayed until a little after eleven, I thought, completely lost to awareness of passing time, then suddenly he was out of my bed and looking down at me.
“I have to go,” he said, nothing more, but when he’d dressed and used his comb at my mirror, he came back to me, leaned over and touched his cheek against mine. “May I come tomorrow about four?”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
Oh, yes. I think I must be in love. Otherwise, why would I have let this happen?
Sunday May 29th, 1960
By the time I went upstairs at one for my session with Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, I’d already encountered Toby. I have no idea how news gets around so fast, because Toby knew, yet how could he?
“You’re a fool,” he snapped, eyes more red than brown. “If it’s possible, a bigger fool than Pappy.”
I didn’t bother to reply, just pushed past him and went into Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s living room.
“The King of Pentacles is here,” she said as I sat down and reached for my Kraft cheese spread glass of brandy. “I don’t believe this place,” I said, sipping abstemiously-best go easy, with Mr. Forsythe returning in a couple of hours.
“How does the news get around?” “Flo,” she said simply, jigging our angel puss up and down on her knee. Flo smiled at me, but sadly, then got off her mother’s lap and went to scribble on the wall. “It don’t worry you none that he’s married?” my landlady asked, doling out smoked eel and bread-andbutter.
I thought about that, then shrugged. “Actually, I think I’m glad that he’s married. I’m not sure I know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.”
“And what don’t youse want?”
“To settle down in a posh house and play Missus Doctor.”
“Just as well,” she said with a grin. “The cards don’t hold out much hope of a life in the suburbs for you, Harriet Purcell.”
“Do I have a life at Kings Cross?” I asked.
But she went vague on me, wouldn’t commit herself. “All depends on what happens to that.” And she pointed to the crystal ball.
I studied it curiously and with closer attention than I’d ever done before. It wasn’t flawless, though it contained no cracks or bubbles.
Just wisps of cloud as thin as the nebulae of stars in our southern skies. It sat on a black ebony base that must have been concave to hold the huge ball-it was at least eight inches in diameter-so firmly, and I noticed that a little fold of black fabric overlapped the rim of the base. Yes, she’d have to cushion it against the ebony wood in case it scratched. I’d looked up quartz crys
tal in the Queens library Merck, to find that it had a “soft” hardness. Unsuitable for gemstones but able to be carved and highly polished. Why did she say that?
Significant, but how?
“It all depends what happens to the Glass,” I said. “S’right.” So she intended to remain cryptic.
I probed by asking casually, “I wonder who first thought of rounding rock crystal into a ball and using it to see the future?”
“Oh, mightn’t be the future. Might be the past. I dunno, but they was old when Merlin was a boy,” she said, refusing to be drawn.
I left a little early so I’d be downstairs when Mr. Forsythe arrived, but some things weren’t going to change just because he existed. Flo would come for her two hours with me, and he could either like it or lump it. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz demurred, but I won. When Harold arrived, angel puss would come down to me.
He was there outside, in the darkness, Harold. Waiting. Eyes filled with hate. I ignored him, started down the stairs.
“Whore!” he whispered. “Whore!”
Mr. Forsythe turned up on time. I was down on the floor with Flo and the crayons because she refuses to play with anything else. I’d brought some of my old toys from Bronte, a doll with a wardrobe of clothes, a weeny trike, building blocks with a letter of the alphabet on each side. But she wouldn’t even look at them. It was always the crayons.
“Door’s open!” I called.
So the first thing the poor man saw was his girlfriend down on the braided rug playing crayons with a fouryear-old child. His face was a study, I couldn’t help laughing.
“No, she’s not mine,” I said, getting up and going to him to put my hands on either side of his neck, pull his head down until I could put my lips and nose against the snowwhite hair of his temple. He smelled delicious, of expensive soap, and he didn’t muck up that wonderful hair with oil. Then I took him by the hand and brought him over to Flo, who stared up at him without a trace of fear and smiled immediately.