expect your hostess to spring a hunchback on you with the pre-lunch drinks.
The children rescued me. Bobby spotted me and came at a run, shrieking, ‘Uncle Ben! Uncle Ben!’ She flung her cold wet arms around my neck and pressed her sopping bathing-costume to my new suit, before dragging me away to become overwhelmed by the rest of the Sturvesant brood and their hordes of young friends. I find it easier with children, they either do not seem to notice or they come straight out with it. ‘Why do you walk all bent over like that?’
For once I was not very good value. I was too preoccupied to give them my full attention - and soon they drifted away, all but Bobby - for she is ever loyal. Then Hilary took over from her stepdaughter and I was returned to the league of young mothers where I made a better impression. I cannot resist pretty women, once the first awkwardness wears off. It was three o’clock before I left for the Institute.
Bobby Sturvesant pours Glen Grant malt whisky with the same heavy thirteen-year-old hand she uses to pour Coca-Cola. Consequently I floated into the Institute feeling very good indeed.
The envelope was on my desk marked ‘Private and Confidential’ with a note pinned to one corner, ‘This came for you at lunchtime. Looks exciting! Sal.’
With a quick stab of jealousy I inspected the seal of the envelope. It was unbroken. Sally hadn’t been into it but I knew it must have taken all her self-control for she has an almost neurotic curiosity. She calls it a fine inquiring scientific mind.
I guessed she would arrive within the next five minutes so I found the packet of Three X peppermints in my top drawer and slipped one into my mouth to smother the whisky fumes before I opened the envelope and drew out the glossy twelve-by-twelve enlargement, switched on the desk light and adjusted it and the magnifying table lens over the print. Then I looked around at the hosts of the past that crowd my office. All four walls are lined with shelves, and from floor to shoulder height - my shoulder height - these are filled with books: the tools of my trade, all bound in brown and green calf-skin, and titled in gold leaf. It is a big room, and there are many thousands of volumes. The shelves above the books carry the plaster busts of all the creatures that preceded man. Head and shoulders only. Australopithecus, Proconsul, Robusta, Rhodesian Man, Peking - all of them up to Neanderthal and finally Cro- Magnon himself -
‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I think we are on to something good.’ I only speak aloud to them when I am excited or drunk, and now I was more than a little of each.
‘Who are you talking to?’ asked Sally from the doorway, making me leap in my seat. It was a rhetorical question, she knew damn well who I was talking to. She lounged against the jamb, her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of her grubby white dust-coat. Dark hair drawn back with a ribbon from the deep bulging forehead, large green eyes well spaced beside the pert nose. High cheekbones, wide sensual smiling mouth. A big girl with long well-muscled legs in the tight-fitting blue jeans. Why do I always like them big?
‘Good lunch?’ she asked, starting the slow sidling approach across the carpet towards my desk that would put her in position to check what was going on. She can read documents upside-down, as I have proved to my cost.
‘Great,’ I answered, deliberately covering the photograph with the envelope. ‘Cold turkey, lobster salad, smoked trout, and a very good duck and truffles in aspic.’
‘You bastard,’ she whispered softly. She loves good food, and she had noticed my play with the envelope. I don’t allow her to talk to me like that, but then I can’t stop her either.
Five feet from me she sniffed, ‘And peppermint-flavoured malt whisky! Yummy!’
I blushed, I can’t help it. It’s like my stutter - and she burst out laughing and came to perch on the edge of my desk.
‘Come on, Ben.’ She eyed the envelope frankly. ‘I’ve been bursting since it arrived. I would have steamed it open - but the electric kettle is broken.’
Dr Sally Senator has been my assistant for two years, which is coincidently the exact period of time that I have been in love with her.
I moved aside making room for her behind the desk and uncovered the photograph. ‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘let’s see what you make of it.’
She squeezed in beside me, her upper arm touching my shoulder - a contact that shivered electrically through my whole body. In two years she had become like the children, she didn’t seem to notice the hump. She was easy and natural, and I had a timetable worked out - in another two years our relationship would have ripened. I had to go slowly, very slowly, so as not to alarm her, but in that time I would have accustomed her to the thought of me as a lover and husband. If the last two years had been long - I hated to think about the next two.
She leaned over the desk peering into the magnifying lens, and she was still and silent for a long time. Reflected light was thrown up into her face, and when she at last looked up her expression was rapt, the green eyes sparkled.
‘Ben,’ she said. ‘Oh Ben - I’m so glad for you!’ Somehow her easy acceptance and presumption annoyed me.
‘You are jumping the gun,’ I snapped. ‘There could be a dozen natural explanations.’
‘No.’ She shook her head, smiling still. ‘Don’t try and knock it. It’s true, Ben, at last. You’ve worked so long and believed so long, don’t be afraid now. Accept it.’
She slipped out from behind the desk and crossed quickly to the shelf of books under the label ‘K’. There are twelve volumes there that bear the author’s name ‘Benjamin Kazin’. She selected one, and opened it at the fly- leaf.
‘
She came to me smiling. ‘Have you read it?’ she asked. ‘It’s quite entertaining.’
‘There’s a chance, Sal. I agree. Just a chance, but—’
