re- plastered walls had received their first coat several weekends ago now
and they reminded her, according to the light, either of black currant jam or
of blood.
She thought she'd probably change things.
The phone rang.
She reached it at the sixth ring.
The arrangements, unusually involved, took a little while to get sorted out.
Once they were, she felt almost unprecedentedly excited.
210
chapter forty-five Nunquam ubi sub ubi!
after he had locked the door behind them she immedi- lately, albeit a little
nervously, commented upon the civilized appearance of the bachelor flat,
listening with half an ear to a love-duet from one of the operas, although
she had no idea which one; standing appreciatively for a while in front of a
reproduction of The Milkmaid, although she had only just heard of Vermeer;
looking wide-eyed along the shelves and shelves and shelves of books that
lined three of the walls there; noticing too, although not herself a
particularly house proud woman, the thin layer of dust on the CD player and
the thicker layer along the top of the skirting boards.
On the glass-topped coffee table there stood a chilled bottle of champagne,
with two sparklingly bright glasses on their coasters beside it.
As quietly bidden, she sat down, the hem of the mini-dress riding more than
halfway up her black-stockinged thighs as languidly she crossed her lengthy
legs. Then, as he untwisted the wire at the top of the bottle, she turned
away, holding the palms of her hands over her ears.
'No need for that,' he said.
'I'm an expert.'
Tilting the bottle to 45 degrees, he turned the cork sharply, pulling only
slightly and that was it. Out! He filled the two glasses, sat opposite her,
raised his glass, and said,
'Cheerio!'
It seemed to her a strange thing to say.
'Hello!' would surely
have been more appropriate? It was obviously
something he'd stored away in his verbal baggage from a period at least
twenty- five years (she decided) earlier than her own.
Not that that mattered.
She sipped the champagne; sipped it again; and concluded, although she knew
nothing whatever of Bruts and Crus, that it might well be fairly expensive
stuff.
'Specially bought for the occasion?'
'No. I won it in a raffle.'
She took a further sip, then drank off the rest in a single draught.
'Lovely!'
He leaned forward and refilled her glass.
'Are you trying to get me drunk?'
'It might even things up a bit.'
'Mind if I smoke?'
'No. I'll join you.'
'You took a lot of trouble about getting' me here ' ' Don't you like taxis? '
' - and I've never been told exactly what to wear before. '
He surveyed her vertically striped brown-and-white dress, and counted the
button-holes: seven of them, the top three straining across her breasts.
'I like buttons. I've read that ' unbuttoning' was Philip Larkin's favourite
present participle.'
She let it go, fairly certain that she understood, and slowly unfastened the
top button of her dress.
'I shall expect a fee, you know that.'
'Fee? You mean as well as the taxi and the champagne?'
She nodded, and pointed to the bottle.
'Will one be enough, do you think?'
'I won two in the raffle. The other one's cooling in the fridge.'
She drained her second glass, and sat back in the deeply comfortable set tee
unfastening the second button as he again refilled her glass.
She patted the cushion beside her.
'Come and sit next to me.'
'In a little while. It's just that I'd like to get my fill of sitting here
and lusting after you.'
She smiled.
'I wonder how we would have been together?'
'Know something? You've just quoted T. S. Eliot, virtually verbatim.'
She let it go, fairly certain that Eliot was a poet. But there wasn't much
poetry out there not in the world in which she moved. It all made her feel
pleasingly important and decidedly sexy. Something more, too. As she tilted
the third glass of champagne into her lipstick-moistened mouth; as she worked
the third button of her dress loose; as she looked down at her bra-less
breasts now almost fully exposed, she felt an animal sense of her own power
and she felt good.
He was right, though. She was enjoying teasing him, and he was enjoying
being teased. No need for that rush to sexual congress the great majority of
men (she knew full well) preferred.
'You know,' she said,
'I thought first of all when you rang that you wanted to ask me about the
