Her breasts were firm and smooth in my hands and I had the smell of her in my nose and the taste of her in my mouth. She moved up and down, slowly at first and then faster, dropping her weight onto me. I pushed up, wanting to meet her out there somewhere in that place where two people fucking happily go for a little stretch of time. I came in a hot rush that ran through me and made me shout something up at the ceiling. I heard her cry out too, but whether it was with me or before or after I didn’t know or care.
We lay with the sheet half over us, both sweating, with our legs mixed up and our hands still exploring and enjoying what we found. Her hair had come loose and was lying on the pillow around her head in a dark mass. I ran my finger along from her small ear lobe to the point of her jaw, feeling the soft hair.
‘What’re you doing?’ she murmured.
I brushed the hair up and down. ‘What I wanted to do from practically the first minute I saw you.’
‘I thought you didn’t like me. You were so stern.’
‘Me? Stern?
‘Yes. Mr Rock Jaw. Mr Broken Nose. Mr Hooded Eyes. Do you know when I decided to trust you?’
Flippancy and banter had become the common currency in my relationship with Glen Withers. I only realised this some time after she’d gone. Now I resisted the impulse to joke. ‘Tell me.’
‘When you said you wanted to believe me.’
‘I’m glad I said it then. I meant it. And I mean it all the more now, of course. If that’s not pressuring you. Maybe this is just an episode for you, but I’m old-fashioned and…’
‘Next time you allude to your years I’ll hit you in the balls.’
I kissed her and let my tongue play along the gap in her teeth.
‘You like that? My gappy teeth.’
‘It’s wonderful.’
‘Julius wanted me to have them veneered. They could fill it up.’
‘He must have been crazy.’
‘He was worse than that.’ She took my hand and put it on her breast. I plucked at the nipple and felt it stiffen. ‘Are you ready for your surprise, Cliff?’
I grunted. I was getting aroused again and words didn’t seem to matter.
‘I hired Robert Van Kep. But I hired him to protect me from Julius, not to kill him.’
8
Claudia wasn’t into cliches. She didn’t put on my shirt, leaving the buttons undone, or wrap herself in the top sheet. I pulled on my shirt and pants and she wore a black and silver kimono-style dressing gown. With her hair down and her make-up disturbed and her big mouth puffy from our kissing, she looked older and younger, more naive and more experienced, a walking contradiction. She had beautiful feet, shapely with high arches and straight toes. Odd what you notice in a heightened emotional state. My mind was buzzing with warring reactions: I felt that I’d go the distance for her, tell any lies, destroy any evidence, just to get back to where we’d been. Against that was the scepticism of twenty years of handling people with problems, my knowledge of their deviousness, delusions and capacity for self-deception.
We went into the kitchen without speaking and I perched on a stool while she made coffee in a plug-in machine. She spooned the coffee into the filter paper and poured in the water. The suspicious, sceptical Hardy waited for her to speak. An old ploy-first remarks after a dramatic statement can be very revealing.
‘Nothing wrong with your prostate.’
I was totally surprised. I’d had no idea of what she might say and I burst out laughing, totally thrown.
‘What?’
‘You’ve gone about five hours without a piss. A whisky, a couple of glasses of wine, some water. Your prostate’s okay. I’m talking as a woman who knows about older men.’
Well, what do you deduce from that, Cliff? I could feel her taking control. I couldn’t mention age difference, but she could. She’d made me laugh and anyone who makes you laugh is on your side, aren’t they? She leaned back against the bench while the coffee maker bubbled and took her cigarettes from a pocket in the kimono. She lit up, took two deep drags and put the cigarette out in the sink. Then she ran a glass of water and rinsed her mouth, turning away from me to spit the water out.
‘I know it stinks,’ she said. ‘I want you to kiss me but I needed it.’
I went across the smooth quarry tiles in three strides and grabbed her. She seemed to flow towards me and I could feel the need in her, or thought I could. If she was faking this she was a loss to the acting profession. I didn’t care. We kissed fiercely and the coffee maker hissed as the last of the water passed through.
She pressed her head against my shoulder and gripped my ribs in a strong hold. ‘I’ve told a lot of lies,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know if I can… untell them. Can you do that, Cliff?’
Her perfume was overlaid with the smell of sex and smoke and coffee. I rubbed the top of her head with my chin and felt the whiskers snag in her hair. ‘You can do anything,’ I said.
‘I was never in love with Julius, whatever that means. I liked and respected him though. You see, I loved my parents very deeply, too deeply. I thought they were both wonderful. They adored each other and me. It was all a bit unhealthy really.’
We were in the sitting room with our coffee and Claudia was fiddling with a cigarette. She looked at me directly.
‘I don’t mean there was anything wrong,’ she said quickly. ‘No molestation or abuse or anything like that. It was just that we were too exclusive of other people. I measured everyone against them, all relationships against theirs and found them wanting. The couple of boys I went out with and went to bed with in my student days I found pretty pathetic compared with my father. That’s not healthy.’
‘I see.’
‘They didn’t have any family here. The people who’d taken them originally had died or were far away. Like me, they didn’t have many friends either, hardly any. But Julius was one, or at least I thought he was. I had a flat close to my parents’ house and I saw them a lot, so I saw Julius quite often as well. When they were killed he was the one who gave me the news. Losing them knocked the guts out of me for a long time. Julius was there. He was a sort of replacement figure, I suppose. He was kind and strong and he wanted me, so I married him. It was a terrible mistake. He desperately wanted a son. I’m not interested in children and that caused lots of problems. Have you got any children, Cliff?’
I shook my head.
‘Why not?’
I pondered the question while I finished my coffee. The whisky bottle wasn’t far away and I was beginning to feel I’d have to bring it closer soon. ‘It sounds lame,’ I said, ‘but I can quite honestly say that the matter never came up. I was married for a while but she was a career woman and the marriage went bad pretty early. The women I’ve known since then have either had children of their own or not wanted them. My childlessness is circumstantial.’
‘Do you want a drink?’
Observant of her. My eyes must have been straying. ‘Yes.’
‘Help yourself.’
I poured some whisky into the glass I’d used before and added a little of the water produced by the melted ice. She held out her coffee mug and I gave her a healthy slug.
She sipped, then spoke very slowly. ‘I can’t prove any of this, but I believe that Julius had some kind of hold over my parents. I believe that he told them he wanted to marry me and they opposed him. I believe that he worried them to death.’
I was glad I had the Scotch. I drank some and felt it slide down, warm and comforting. I wished that we weren’t talking this way. I wished we were discussing driving up to Medlow Bath to stay in the Hydo Majestic for the weekend, or flying to the Barrier Reef for the snorkelling and sun-bathing and gins and tonic.
