Penny sat beside her husband's bed, her gaze fixed glassily on his face, her body and mind numb. David wasn't breathing, and she had got through nearly half a bottle of vodka, and if Carmine's calculation was right there were still nine more hours to endure before his chest would move and his eyes would open and look at her, and she would have to tell him the truth. She didn't know how she would do it, and she wished that she had the barefaced gall to pray for guidance. But she didn't, and so waiting the hours away with the help of the vodka bottle seemed the only viable option.
At midnight she was asleep, slumped forward with her face on the bed, in a posture that would give her a diabolical backache by morning. At 7:45 a.m. a sound and a movement disturbed her, and she raised her head blearily. Her eyes wouldn't focus properly at first, but after a second or two David's face registered.
He was awake. He was sitting up. And he was hungry .
'Champagne.' Carmine produced a bag with a refinedly understated logo and presented it to Penny. 'To mark the occasion and celebrate a happy outcome.'
The champagne was expensive and already chilled to the perfect temperature, both of which made Penny feel faintly inadequate. She said thank you too gushingly, but before she could make any move to open the bottle David took it from her. 'Let me, darling. You know what you're like; you'll struggle with it and then it'll go off bang and we'll lose half the contents before we even start.'
The remark stung but Penny didn't want to show it. She returned a stiff smile, fetched glasses, watched as the cork came out with nothing more than a soft hiss and the champagne bubbled into the bowls. Carmine was given the first glass (naturally enough; she was a guest), Penny the second.
'Well, then.' David raised the third glass. 'To all of us.' But he was looking at Carmine as he said it.
Carmine smiled warmly. They drank, then a constrained silence crept in.
Penny said, 'I'll see how the food's coming along'
All right , she told herself in the kitchen. This is still very new to him and she's been more than helpful; in fact I very much doubt if we could have coped without her. So stop resenting her, and stop being paranoid . Lecture over. If she repeated it often enough, the message would get through eventually. There was no cause to be suspicious.
She started to prepare the food, trying to concentrate on the filleted sole she had prepared for herself and not dwell too much on what David and Carmine were to eat. Only a desire not to alienate David had stopped her from staggering mealtimes so that they no longer sat together at the dinner table. She frankly couldn't bear to watch him; she had always been squeamish about red meat, and in the past their meals had majored on fish, chicken or vegetarian dishes. All that had changed now, and if David's diet wasn't as grotesque as legend, it was still bad enough. And the way he ate; the speed, the relish of it Meat, and especially beef or veal, either totally raw or so rare that the blood still ran and congealed on his plate, and fish only in the form of sushi. He enjoyed jugged hare, if the local butcher could provide one complete with blood. (When the butcher did, Penny had put her foot down and told David that he must cook it himself.) No vegetables whatever; no fruit or cereals or grains. Oh, and the daily breakfast of raw eggs and black pudding, of course. Alcohol wasn't a problem, though he had a marked preference for the heavier red wines, and he did not get drunk no matter how much he put away.
Tonight, with two of David's kind to cater for, Penny had forced herself to provide fillet steak (cooking omitted), with a creamy and plentiful pepper sauce that she could pour on before serving, to mask the look and the smell. Vegetables would also be served, but only she herself would touch them; ditto the tiramisu she had prepared for dessert.
She was not looking forward to this evening. During the early, difficult stage (she smiled humourlessly at that piece of litotes) Carmine had been a rock to her, a mediator and ally in the painful process of getting David through the initial shock and enabling him to come to terms with what he had become. That nightmare was over now, though, and the idea that Carmine should come to dinner on a purely social basis — thus shifting the relationship between the three of them from the professional to the personal — dismayed Penny. She did not want Carmine as a friend. The woman unnerved her (understandably), and now that she was no longer needed, Penny would have vastly preferred never to set eyes on her again.
David, though, had argued that one invitation was the very least they could do to thank Carmine. Anything less would be downright rude, he had said, and considering that without her intervention Penny would now be a widow, he found her attitude hard to understand, and more than a little disappointing. He had expected better of her. Feeling like a petty-minded schoolgirl, Penny had flushed and capitulated and spent the rest of the day torn between feelings of shame and guilt, and fervent hopes that Carmine would decline the invitation. But Carmine had not declined, so the motions must be gone through, and David would be pleased, and when it was over she could, with luck, bid Carmine a final adieu .
The meal progressed in decorous, civilized style, only marred for Penny (if one overlooked the actual content of the food) by the amount of wine that David and Carmine drank. It wasn't that she really minded, Penny told herself. It wasn't as if either of them became drunk or obnoxious. But Carmine's contribution was only the one bottle of champagne; they had paid for the rest, and considering that ten thousand pounds of their money was now sitting in her bank account
She pushed the thought away. The matter of the money was niggling at her too often for comfort, and she reminded herself that, as Carmine had said at the time, what price her husband's future? David had been a v had been what he was for four months now, and even in her meanest moments Penny had to acknowledge that the condition had its advantages. Take the sex, for instance. Through their married life he had never had a high sex drive; it had been a bone of contention at times, and once his illness set in, any question of conjugal rights had gone straight out of the window. Penny had never complained, naturally, but she had suffered a lot of frustration. Not so now. Now, David was tireless . Inventive, too, and so keen that in fact his demands were starting to become exhausting and just a little tedious. Ice cream is delectable, but too much makes you sick
Penny pushed that thought away, too, and tried to shake her mind out of its bout of self-pity. What did the money matter, or the small irritations? David was alive (well but no: don't go down that path) , strong, and guaranteed to remain that way for
The word hit her suddenly and hard. For ever. David wasn't going to age. As years passed, he would remain exactly as he was tonight, while she
'Penny?' Carmine's voice snapped the chain of the horror rising in her. 'Is anything wrong?'
Oh, no; of course nothing's wrong. Only that I'm such a cretin that I've only just started to consider the implications of immortality ! 'No,' Penny said, in such a peculiarly strangled voice that she gave the complete lie to the statement. 'No, I — something stuck in my throat, I think.'
She might have imagined it, but Penny thought Carmine and David exchanged a very private look. 'Not a
