she said, “Do words come out of your mouth or does it just hang open to give the flies somewhere to shelter from the rain?”
“Sorry…I just didn’t…they said you were ill and I thought…I’m sorry to have got you out of bed…”
“You haven’t. I’m feeling a bit better and I’d just got up to have a shower, which I thought a man in your line of business might have worked out for himself.”
She pulled the towelling robe firmly shut as she spoke, and now he raised his eyes he saw that her hair was dripping water down her face. Sodden wet, the rich brown had darkened almost to blackness against which the streak of silvery grey shone as if composed of electric filaments.
“Those for me or are they evidence in your latest big case?”
He’d forgotten he was holding a bunch of carnations in one hand and a box of Belgian chocolates in the other.
“Sorry, yes. Here.”
He proffered them but she didn’t take them, only grinned and said, “If you think you’re getting me to leave go of this robe, you’re sadly mistaken. Come in and put them down somewhere while I get myself decent.”
“Hey, don’t let decent trouble you,” Hat called after her as she went out of sight. “I’m a cop. We’re trained to cope with anything.”
He set his gifts on a coffee table and looked around the room. It wasn’t large, but it was so neat and uncluttered that it felt more spacious than it was. Two small armchairs, a well-ordered bookcase, a standard lamp, and the coffee table, that was it.
He went to the bookcase. You could find out a lot about people from their books, or so he’d read somewhere. But only if you knew a lot about books in the first place, which he didn’t. One thing he could see was that there were a lot of plays here, reminding him that Rye came from a theatrical family. He plucked out a complete Shakespeare and opened it at the fly-leaf. There was a date, 1.5.91, and an inscription, To Raina, Happy fifteenth to the Queen from the Clown Prince, with love from Serge xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Fifteen kisses. Was that a pang of jealousy he felt? Of someone he didn’t know who could be any age giving a prezzie to Rye years ago when she was still a child? You’d better watch it, my boy, he admonished himself. As he’d worked out before, any sign of his interest becoming obsessively possessive was going to be a real turn-off to Rye.
“Improving yourself?” she said behind him.
He turned. She’d put on a T-shirt and jeans and was still towelling her hair.
He said, “To Raina. I’d forgotten your full name.”
“Rye-eena,” she corrected his pronunciation. “Otherwise I’d be called Ray.”
“Rye’s better.”
“Whisky rather than sunshine?”
“Loaves rather than fishes,” he said with a grin.
She considered this then nodded approvingly.
“Not bad for a plod,” she said.
“Thank you kindly. Where’s it come from anyway, you never told me.”
“I don’t recall you asking. It’s a play.”
“Shakespeare?” he said, hefting the anthology.
“Next along,” she said.
She went to the bookshelf and plucked out a volume.
He replaced the Shakespeare and took it from her hands.
“Arms and the Man by G. B. Shaw,” he read.
“You know Shaw?”
“Nicked his brother once. GBH Shaw,” he said.
“Sorry.”
“Police-type joke. Funny title. Why’d he call it that?”
“Because he lived in an age when he could assume that most of his audience wouldn’t need to ask why he called it that.”
“Ah. And that was because…?”
“Because a classical education was still regarded as the pedagogic summum bonum by the moneyed classes. And if you hadn’t read at least the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid, you’d clearly wasted your youth. ‘Arma virumque cano,’ which Dryden renders as ‘Arms and the man I sing.’ Good title way back then. But a man would have to be very sure he had a highly cultured, intelligent and alert audience to try anything like that now.”
“You sound nostalgic. You reckon they were better times?”
“Certainly. For a start, we weren’t born. Sleep’s good, death’s better, but best of all is never to be born at all.”
“Jesus!” he exclaimed. “That’s really morbid. Another of Virgil’s little quips?”
“No. Heine.”
“As in Heine, that Kraut poet Charley Penn, is working on?”
Something was ringing a very faint bell.
“In civilized circles I believe they’re known as Germans,” she said seriously. “You don’t have to like them, but that’s no reason to be beastly to them.”
“Sorry. Same applies to Penn, does it?”
“Certainly. In fact there’s a great deal to like about him. Even his apparent obsession with my person might by some be considered not altogether reprehensible. That was one of his translations I just quoted which he brought to my attention when my refusal to let him cop a feel was rendering him particularly despondent.”
Hat was beginning to understand the subtle stratagems of Rye’s mockery. She left doors invitingly ajar through which a prat might step to find himself showered with cold water or plunging down an open lift-shaft.
He said, “So what’s it mean precisely, that stuff about sleep and so on?”
“It means that once upon a time we were all enjoying the best of possible states, i.e. not being born. But then our parents got stuck into each other in a hay field, or on the back seat of a car, or between acts during a performance of a Shaw play at Oldham, and they blew it for us, forced us without a by-your-leave to make an entrance, kicking and screaming, on to this draughty old stage. Fancy a coffee?”
“Why not?” he said, following her into a tiny kitchen which was as well ordered as the living room. “Hey, is that why they called you Raina? Because they were acting in this play when they…? Now that’s what I call really romantic.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Can’t see why you’re so cynical about it. Nice story, nice name. Just think, you could have been called…” He flipped open the play to the cast list: “… Sergius! Just imagine. Sergius Pomona! Then you’d really have had something to complain about!”
“My twin brother didn’t seem to mind,” she said.
“You’ve got a twin?”
“Had. He died,” she said, spooning coffee into a cafetiere.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”
“How could you? He gave me the Shakespeare you were looking at.”
Serge. He recalled the inscription and blushed at the thought of his infantile jealousy.
To cover his confusion he gabbled, “Yes, of course, that explains the inscription, the Queen, May the first, Queen of the May, and he was the Clown Prince…”
“He was full of laughter,” she said quietly. “Whenever I was down he could always cheer me up. It didn’t seem too bad being called Raina while he was around.”
“I think it’s a lovely name,” said Hat staunchly. “And Sergius too. And I’m sure they were given to you with the best of intentions. Being called after characters in a play, you didn’t get that kind of romantic idea in my family!”
“Sweet of you,” she murmured. “Yes, there was a time when I too used to think it romantic to hear my mother and father explaining that we were named after Raina and Sergius, who are the two supremely romantic characters in the play, because these were the parts my parents were playing when they conceived us. Then one day when I was sorting out some of their stuff, I came across a collection of old theatre programmes. And there it
