A Traitor to Memory (62 page)

She'd reached across the table and placed on his arm her hand with its encrustation of rings. He'd thought fleetingly of Eugenie's hands and the contrast they made to this red-tipped snatcher. Ringless, they were, with the nails clipped short and slivers of moon showing at their bases.

“Don't turn away, Teddy,” Georgia had said, and her hand had tightened upon him. “From any of us. We're here to help you through this. We care for you. Truly and deeply. You'll see.”

Her own brief, unhappy past with Ted might not have existed for her. His failure and the contempt she'd felt being a witness to his failure were banished to a foreign land. The intervening manless years she'd lived through had obviously instructed her in what was important and what was not. She was a changed woman, as he would see once she wormed her way into his life again.

Ted read it all in the gesture of her placing her hand on his arm, and in the tender smile she directed at him. Bile rose in his throat, and his body burned. He needed air.

He rose abruptly. He said, “That old dog,” and called out roughly, “P.B.? Where've you taken yourself off to? Come.” And to Georgia, “Sorry. I was about to take the dog for her final nightly when you phoned.”

He'd made his escape that way, without inviting Georgia to accompany him and giving her no chance to make the suggestion herself. He called out once again, “P.B.? Come, girl. Time for a walk,” and he was gone before Georgia had the chance to regroup. He knew that she'd assume from his departure that she'd moved too quickly. He also knew that she wouldn't assume anything else. And that was important, Ted realised suddenly. That was crucial: to limit the woman's knowledge about him.

He'd walked rapidly, feeling it all again. Stupid, he told himself, stupid and blind. Hanging about like a schoolboy hoping for a go with the local tart, not seeing her as a tart at all because he was too young, too inexperienced, too eager, too … too limp. That's what it was, all right. Too limp.

He'd charged towards the river, dragging the poor dog behind him. He needed to put distance between himself and Georgia, and he
wanted to be away from the flat long enough to ensure her departure in his absence. Even Georgia Ramsbottom would not throw all her chances away by playing her cards the first evening she was holding them. She would leave his flat; she would retire for a few days. Then, when she thought that he'd recovered from their initial skirmish, she would be back, offering a renewal of her sympathetic attention. Ted was certain he could depend upon that.

At the corner of Friday Street and the river, he'd turned left. He strode on the town side of the Thames. The lights along the street pooled buttermilk onto the pavement intermittently and the wind blew a heavy mist in sharp waves that felt as if they rose from the river itself. Ted turned up the collar of his waxed jacket and said, “Come on, girl,” to the dog, who was looking longingly at a sapling planted nearby, possibly with the hope of snoozing awhile underneath it. “P.B.
Come
.” A jerk on the choke chain did it, as usual. They hurried on.

They were in the church yard before Ted really thought about it. They were in the church yard before he recalled the vision he'd had there on the night Eugenie died. P.B. made for the grass like a horse to its stall before Ted actually knew she was doing so. She squatted wearily and let forth her stream before he had the chance to urge her somewhere else.

Without intending, without thinking, without even considering what the action implied, Ted felt his eyes drift from the dog to the almshouses at the far end of the path. He'd just take a quick glance that way, he told himself, in order to see that the woman who lived in the third house from the right had her curtains closed. If she hadn't and if a light was burning, he'd do her a service and let her know that any stranger passing by could look right in and … well, assess her valuables for a burglary.

The light was on. Time to do his good deed for the day. Ted pulled P.B. away from the tipped gravestone round which she was sniffing and urged her as quickly as he could along the path. It was essential that he get to the almshouse before the woman within it did anything that could embarrass them both. Because if she began to undress, as she had the other night, he could hardly knock on her door, caution her about her indiscretion, and thereby admit to having watched her, could he?

“Hurry, P.B.,” he said to the dog. “Come along.”

He was just fifteen seconds too late. Five yards from the almshouse and she had begun. And she was quick about it, so very
quick that before he had time to avert his eyes, she'd whisked her jersey off, shaken back her hair, and removed her brassiere. She bent to something—was it her shoes? her stockings? her trousers? what?—and her breasts hung heavily downward.

Ted swallowed. He thought two words—
Dear God
—and he felt the first throb of his body's answer to the sight before him. He'd watched her once, he'd stood here once, he'd traced with his eyes those sumptuous full curves. But he couldn't—
couldn't
—allow himself the guilty pleasure of doing so again. She had to be told. She had to be warned. She had to … had to know? he wondered. What woman didn't know? What woman had never learned about caution and nighttime windows? What woman threw her clothes off at night in a room fully lit without curtains or blinds without knowing that someone on the other side of those few millimeters of glass was probably watching, longing, fantasising, hardening … She knew, Ted realised. She
knew
.

So he'd watched the unknown woman in that almshouse bedroom a second night. He'd stayed longer this time, mesmerised by the sight of her smoothing lotion on her neck and her arms. He heard himself moan like a pre-adolescent having his first glimpse at
Playboy
when she used that same lotion on her succulent breasts.

There in the church yard, he'd wanked off surreptitiously. Beneath his waxed jacket as the rain began to fall, he worked his cock like a man pumping spray onto garden insects. He got about as much satisfaction from the resulting orgasm as one would get from using a garden sprayer, and in the aftermath of his release what he felt wasn't exultation and release. It was bitter shame.

He felt it again now in his sitting room, wave after wave of black humiliation, building and cresting as he sat at Connie's old davenport. He looked at the glossy photo of the Sydney Opera House, moved from it to a picture of the outdoor theatre in Santa Fe where
The Marriage of Figaro
was sung under the stars, set that to one side, and picked up a picture of a narrow antique street in Vienna. He stared at this last with a darkness of spirit enveloping him and hearing within him a voice that he recognised as the voice of his mother hovering over him so many years in the past, so eager to judge, even more eager to condemn, if not him then someone else: “What a waste of time, Teddy. Don't be such a little fool.”

But he was, wasn't he? He'd spent so many good hours imagining himself and Eugenie in one location or another, like actors moving on a strip of celluloid that did not allow for a single blemish in either the
moment or the individuals. In his mind's eye, there had been no harsh glare of sunlight upon skin that was ageing, no hair out of place on either of their heads, no breath wanting freshening, no sphincter tightening to prevent an embarrassing explosion of intestinal wind at an inopportune time, no thickened toenails, no sagging flesh, and most of all no failure on his part when the time was finally right. He'd pictured the two of them eternally young in each other's vision if not in the world's. And that was all that had mattered to Ted: the way they saw each other.

But for Eugenie, things had been different. He understood that now. Because it wasn't natural for a woman to hold a man at a distance for so many months that bled inexorably into so many years. It wasn't natural. It also wasn't fair.

She'd used him as a front, he concluded. There was no other explanation for the phone calls she'd received, the nocturnal visits to her house, and her inexplicable trip to London. She was using him as a front, because if their mutual friends and acquaintances in Henley—not to mention the board of directors at the Sixty Plus Club who employed her—believed that she was keeping chaste company with Major Ted Wiley, they'd be far less likely to speculate that she was keeping unchaste company with someone else.

Fool. Fool. Don't be such a little fool. Once burnt, twice shy. I'd've thought you'd know better.

But how did one ever know better? To hope for foresight meant never to venture forward at all into the company of another, and Ted didn't want that. His marriage to Connie—happy and fulfilling for so many years—had made him over-sanguine. His marriage to Connie had taught him to believe that such a union was possible again, not a rare thing at all but something to be worked for and if not easily achieved, then achieved through an effort that was based on love.

Lies, he thought. Every one of them lies. Lies he'd told to himself and lies that he'd willingly believed as Eugenie had said them.
I'm not ready yet, Te d
. But the reality was that Eugenie hadn't been ready for him.

The sense of betrayal he felt was like an illness coming upon him. It started in his head and began to work oozingly downward. It seemed to him that the only way to defeat it was to beat it from his body, and if he'd had a scourge, he would have used it upon himself and taken satisfaction from the pain. As it was, he had only the brochures on the davenport, those pathetic symbols of his puerile idiocy.

He felt them slick beneath his hand, and his fingers crumpled them first, then tore them. His chest bore a weight that might have been his arteries slowly closing but was, he knew, merely the dying of something other and far more necessary to his being than simply his old man's heart.

12

E
NTERING THE SHOP
on the heels of the black constable was Ashaki Newland, whose timely arrival gave Yasmin Edwards an opportunity that she would not otherwise have had of ignoring the man altogether. The girl politely hung back, apparently assuming that the man had come on business and was therefore to be given priority. All the Newland kids were like that, well brought up and thoughtful.

Yasmin said, “How's your mum today?” to the girl, avoiding eye contact with the constable.

Ashaki said, “Doin' fair so far. She had a round of chemo two days back, but she's not taking it 's bad as she did the last time. Don't know what that means, but we're hoping for the best. You know.”

The best
would be five more years of life, which was all the doctors had promised Mrs. Newland when they'd first found the tumour in her brain. She could go without treatment and she'd live eighteen months, they'd told her. With treatment she might have five years. But that would be the maximum, barring some miracle, and miracles were in short supply when it came to cancer. Yasmin wondered what it would be like to have seven children to raise with a death sentence hanging over one's head.

She fetched Mrs. Newland's wig from the back of the shop and brought it out on its Styrofoam stand. Ashaki said, “That doesn't look like—”

Yasmin interrupted. “It's a new one. I think she's going t' like the style. You ask if. She doesn't, you bring it back and we'll do the original for her. Right?”

Ashaki's face gleamed with pleasure. “That's real nice of you, Mrs. Edwards,” she said as she scooped the wig stand under her arm. “Thanks. Mum'll have a surprise this way.”

She was out in the street, with a bob of her head towards the constable, before Yasmin could do anything to prolong the conversation. When the door shut behind her, Yasmin looked at the man. She found that she couldn't remember his name, which was a delight to her.

She looked round for further employment in the shop, the better to continue ignoring him. Perhaps it was time to catalogue any supplies she now needed in her make-up case after having worked on those six women earlier. She brought the case out again, flipped the catches open, and began sorting through lotions, brushes, sponges, eye colour, lip colour, foundation, blushers, mascaras, and pencils. She laid each item on the counter.