arrives on your doorstep at midnight, you don’t ask questions, you reach for the champagne. The Perrier Jouet was ready in the fridge.
I took a flashlight off the shelf and was on my way through the passage to the front door when I heard the creak of a board upstairs.
My bedroom. The nerve of the girl.
She’d broken in.
I was incensed. I’m sure it was a primitive response to my territory being invaded. If I’d had two good legs, I’d have been up those stairs and she’d have been out on her you-know-what before I’d drawn another breath. Instead, while I limped to the kitchen, my brain ran the gamut from outrage to arousal.
On reflection, I decided, I wouldn’t throw her out. I wouldn’t even register a protest.
She’d staked her colors to the mast.
I could be positive too. I took out the champagne and two glasses and put them on a tray. I’m fairly adept at balancing a tray on one arm, even when it comes to mounting the stairs.
I didn’t put on the light. I know my way around my own bedroom in the dark. I leaned against the chest of drawers to the left of the door and passed my hand across the surface, prior to resting the tray there. Good thing I did, because my fingers came into contact with a pair of glasses.
Don’t rush it, I told myself.
A trace of musk reached my nostrils and made me take a longer, stimulating breath.
I unfastened my belt and stripped. I approached the bed. As my hand touched the pillow, I felt her loosened hair lying across it. She’d unfastened the plait. I got in beside her. She was wrapped in my dressing gown for warmth. Our lips touched, and she guided my hand onto soft, yielding skin.
Coming up the stairs, I’d been thinking of the dustup if I’d brought Val home, as I’d planned. Now I stopped thinking about Val. Except that she was outclassed.
When I eventually got out of bed to uncork the champagne, Alice Ashenfelter spoke. Instead of telling me that the earth had moved, she said. “The catch on your toilet window is loose.”
“So you climbed in.”
She bit her lip. “Are you mad at me?”
“Do I look mad?”
“I can’t see without my glasses.”
I handed them to her.
She looped them over her ears and said. “A little
The cork shot across the room, and 1 filled the glasses.
My turn to look at her. The light over the bed put strong shadows under her breasts, parting the strands of her incredibly long, fine hair. I liked the hair loose. For a girl of, say, nineteen, the plait was a curiously juvenile affectation. Plenty of the female students I taught grew their hair long, generally wearing it loose or as a ponytail or, in a few cases, some form of bun. Plaits were definitely out. Possibly it was an American style that hadn’t yet made the crossing, but I had the impression that it was special to Alice Ashenfelter. Her wide-eyed directness of approach went with it.
What I hadn’t worked out was whether the schoolgirlish behavior was just an act or ingrained in her personality. A case of arrested development. But not, I thought appreciatively, in all respects.
As if she’d read my thoughts, she lowered herself in the bed and pulled up the sheet to cover her breasts. Modesty seemed to be reasserting itself, so I picked the dressing gown off the floor and put it on.
Now, I thought, for the price tag.
I sat in the armchair facing the bed and said, “There’s something else you want to say?”
She raised her head and went through the motion of swallowing without having taken a sip. Then she said, with the reluctance sounding in her voice, “It’s going to be difficult for me. You’ve got to make allowances.”
I said, “The champagne is good for that.”
“Okay, only please be patient. This means more to me than I can put into words. If I tell you why I came to England and went to all this trouble to find you, maybe you’ll understand some of the dumb things I did, like letting the air out of, your tire.”
We seemed to be getting somewhere. I gave a judicious nod.
She pitched her voice lower and fingered her hair. “I want you to tell me about my daddy.”
“What?”
“My daddy.”
My skin prickled. What else could I believe but that I’d just made love to an insane woman? I tried to stay impassive, but alarm bells were jangling in my head.
“I never really knew him,” she went on in the same intense tone, “but
“Yes?” I said vacantly, then, collecting myself, “I think you might be mistaken.”
“No. You knew him, all right. He was hanged for murder back in 1945.”
FOUR
Things started to link up. With a jolt! The Old Bailey, May 1945. The Donovan murder trial. I’d been a witness. The papers had described me as “a pale eleven-year-old in a gray flannel suit who had to be repeatedly asked by the judge to speak up.” Because I was a child, my evidence had to be given in the form of an unsworn statement, and the judge had asked most of the questions. In his wig and scarlet robe, hunched forward to catch my words, black, shaggy eyebrows peaking in anticipation, that judge still haunts my dreams. You can push an experience like that to the back of your memory, block it out with a million happier events, but believe me, it will not be forgotten.
The connection with Alice Ashenfelter was not so clear. The man on trial had been an American, it was true, a GI serving in Somerset when I was evacuated there. I knew him. But his name was Donovan. Private Duke Donovan.
As if she were reading my thoughts, she explained, “My mother married a second time when I was still a baby. His name was Ashenfelter. They changed my name at the same time. That’s who I am in the records and on my ED and all the documentation: Alice, daughter of Henry Ashenfelter.”
“And he isn’t your father? You’re certain of this?”
“I have proof.”
I didn’t respond. I was trying to trace something of Duke Donovan in her features. I remembered him vividly. You see, I loved that man. Maybe there was something in the set of Alice Ashenfelter’s mouth, the way her jawline curved, but it was far from conclusive. She hadn’t convinced me yet.
She was uneasy at being scrutinized so minutely, because she filled the silence with more explanation. “I didn’t know any of this until recently. I thought I was just like all the other kids, with eyeglasses and a brace on my teeth and a mommy and daddy who had fights. When I say daddy, I mean Ashenfelter, okay? Looking back, I don’t think he ever loved me like a real father. One night they had a terrific scene over some woman he was seeing, and the next morning Ashenfelter quit. He upped and left us. I was eight years old. After that he never asked to see me or sent me a birthday card. When the divorce came through, my mother told me to forget him.” She gave a quick, ironic laugh. “But we still kept his stupid name.”
“He was one for the ladies, then?”
“You bet. The last we heard, he’d married again and gone to England.”
“And your mother?”
“Mom was through with men. She devoted herself to me. She wanted to compensate for what had happened, I guess. She bought me beautiful clothes, sent me to riding school, took me on vacations to Cape Cod. We were real close in those days.”
She paused. I was supposed to draw out the next stage in the story. Obviously the mother-daughter idyll hadn’t lasted. Instead I asked, “What’s her name?”
“My mom?”
