She was surprised. He would have liked her better if she'd taken such invitations for granted and as her due. 'I don't mind,' she said, and then, spoiling it, 'Are you sure?'
'I'll pick you up then. Where d'you live?'
“Oxford Gardens.' She gave him the number.
'Not far from me,' he said. 'We'll go to KPH,' he said,forgetting she wouldn't know what those initials meant. 'Eight suit you?'
No point, he thought, in spending the whole evening with her. Suppose Nerissa was one of those clients, the ones she'd talked about last time he was here, who only came to the club four times and then lost interest. He mustn't be impatient because she hadn't come today, she wouldn't come every day, no matter how keen she was on fitness. Next week he'd do his servicing on a Wednesday instead of a Tuesday. And maybe he'd psych himself up to walk here. It couldn't be more than a mile.
Olive had forgotten about leaving the bone behind in Gwendolen's house, had hunted for it all round the block's communal gardens and even grubbed about in various bins outsideshops. Kylie, the little white dog, had been frantic. So calling on Gwendolen was not to retrieve the bone, but to pour out her heart to a sympathetic ear.
Gwendolen's was never that. It was with some amusement that she listened to her friend's woes. The bone had been sent to Kylie by an American friend who shared Olive's love of poodles.Kylie had adored it from the first. Now it was lost and Olive had no idea what to do, it being impossible to buy such a toy here. Nor would she dare write to her friend in Baltimore, confessing her carelessness and asking for a replacement.
Gwendolen laughed. 'Your troubles are over. It's here.'
'Kylie's bone?'
'You left it here. I did call to give it to you but of course you were out.'
If Olive disliked that 'of course' she gave no sign of it. Gwendolen hunted about for the bone in her dirty cluttered kitchen, finding it at last on top of a heap of newspapers dating from the professor's time and under a twenty-five-year-oldpack of vacuum cleaner bags.
'You have made a little dog very happy, Gwen.'
'That's a relief.'
Gwendolen's sarcasm wasn't lost on Olive, but she was too happy at the recovery of the bone to take much notice. She went off cheerfully in the direction of Ridgemount Mansions. Gwendolen, who preferred her own company to that of her friends, was glad to see the back of her. In the past few dayssince she had decided, daringly, to try and find where Stephen Reeves now was, she had considered asking her tenant for help. He possessed a computer. She had seen him carrying it one day when they had met by chance in the hall.
'You'll think I'm asking for trouble carrying this about with me,' he had said, 'but I won't leave it on one of the seats. It'll go in the boot.'
Gwendolen hadn't thought anything like that as she had no idea what he was talking about. 'What is it?'
He looked at her warily, the way the unthinking look at the mentally disturbed. 'It's a PC, isn't it?' Her blank look was maintained. 'A computer, isn't it?' he said desperately.
'Really?' She shrugged her thin old shoulders. 'Then you'd better go and do whatever you have to do with it.'
The information she needed-was it somehow automatically shut up in that thing in the small flat case? Would all of,them provide it? Or did you have to have a special kind of machine attached to it? And where was the screen she'd seen on them in shops? She was well aware that Mr. Cellini had found her ignorance ridiculous and she was anxious not to make a fool of herself again. Not that there was anything intrinsically foolish in someone who had read the whole of Gibbon and the complete works of Ruskin not knowing how these modern inventions worked. Just the same, she preferred not to ask him. She preferred not asking Olive too. If she went round to Golborne Mansions she would have to witness Kylie's ecstasy, hear the tale of the lost bone all over again, and maybe-something she always, unreasonably, dreaded-that paragon of a niece would be there or her mother.
It would do no harm to visit one of those Internet restaurants-no, cafes. She was clever, she knew that. Stephen Reeveshad called her an intellectual and even Papa had several timestold her she had a good brain for a woman. Surely therefore she could master the handling of one of those computers andget it to disgorge its information. She put on her hat, reflectingon the one Olive had been wearing-bright red grosgrain tomatch her nails-then the black silk coat and black net gloves because it was hot. Papa had given them to her for her fiftysecond birthday and it was wonderful how they had lasted. No need for the trolley today.
It was bright and sunny. All the days this summer were hot and the temperature was going up. Several young men and girls about the streets were wearing short-sleeved T-shirts and sandals. One girl had a bikini top on and a boy appeared to have left his shirt somewhere, for he was wearing only a vest. Gwendolen shook her head, wondering what her mother would have said if she had tried going outdoors in her brassiere.
Nerissa had been to the gym, had an all-over body massage and a facial, and now, once more wearing the dark glasses she hadput on to walk here and not be recognized, she was going upstairs to Madam Shoshana.
The stairs were steep and narrow. Covered in brown linoleum of a vintage before Nerissa's mother was born, they had metal rims to the treads, which, coming away in places, made tripping likely and the risk of a nasty accident great. She trodcarefully. A model friend of hers had fractured her tibia on death-trap stairs and when the break had mended one anklewas noticeably thicker than the other. The stairs smelled nasty, like stale cabbage and cheap burgers, in spite of the little window halfway up being wide open. A very dirty lace curtain blewout and flapped against Nerissa's face. She was used to it. She came here once a week to have her future foretold.
A notice on the sagging brown door said: Madam Shoshana,Soothsayer.
The room was the most crowded and cluttered and stuffed with bric-a-brac that Nerissa ever went in. It was also almost too hot even for her and she liked heat. Strange things not only filled the shelves and covered the surfaces but sprouted from the floor and hung from the ceiling. Artificial plants in pots, mostly cypress trees but lilies too and passion flowers, stoodabout like stalagmites while stalactitic rods and chimes and mobiles and crystal pendants hung from the ceiling. The strangest thing of all was Madam Shoshana herself, a skinny old woman enveloped in layers of robes in many shades, but all of them the colors of a stormy sky, indigo and charcoal, dovegray and slate gray, grubby white and violet, angry blue and silver. Her waist-length yellowish white hair hung in straggly locks over her shoulders and down her back, entangling in places with the silver chains and crystal strings she wore around her neck. Though she had developed a range of cosmetics that she sold on the premises at inflated prices, she never wore make up herself and looked as if she didn't wash her face much. Nerissa thought her nails looked like birds' talons, not human at all.
The velvet curtains were drawn and, for some reason known only to Madam Shoshana, pinned together in several places with old-fashioned brooches of Celtic design. A number of stuffed birds, dominated by a large white owl, were arranged to stare at the supplicant as she or he entered the room, but perhaps its most disquieting feature was the figure of a man in Merlin-like (or Gandalf-like) gray robes, holding inexplicably a staff of Aesculapius. This waxwork stood behind Madam Shoshana as she sat at her wide marble table as if advising her on ancient lore, witchcraft, necromancy, astrological prognostication, or whatever she might require. A single low- wattagetable lamp, vaguely art nouveau in design, all pewter and dullstained glass, gave the only light.
On the marble table was arranged a ring of crystals, rose quartz, Iceland spar, amethyst quartz, olivine schist, basalt, and lapis lazuli, in the center of which lay a small round lace matlike a crocheted doily. Shoshana's chair was of ebony inlaid all along the back and arms with white and yellow crystals, but the chair provided for the client was the Windsor type, plain wood, here and there stained with what looked like blood but was probably tomato ketchup.
'Sit.'
Nerissa knew the routine and obeyed. At Madam Shoshana's command she laid her hands, manicured that morning, the nails lacquered a slightly paler gold than the skin of her fingers, on the lace mat in the ring of stones. Shoshana gazed at Nerissa's hands and let her eyes rove in circles from crystal to crystal, rather like a cat following a moving spot of light.
'Tell me which of the sacred stones you can feel drawn closer to your fingers? Which two are gradually drawing toward you?'
