The Jewel That Was Ours

the truth that she needed him more than he needed her? It had not always been so.

It was so very hard to say, but she said it: 'We were happy together till recently, weren't we?'

'What?' The tongue tapped the teeth sharply at the final 't'

She turned now to look at him lying there, the moustache linking with the neatly trimmed Vandyke beard in a darkling circle around his mouth — a mouth she sometimes saw as too small, and too prim, and, yes, too bloody conceited!

'I must go!' Abruptly he sat up, swung his legs to the floor, and reached for his shirt.

'We can see each other tomorrow?' she asked softly.

'Difficult not to, won't it?' He spoke with the clipped precision of an antique pedagogue, each of the five 't's articulated with pedantic completion. With an occasional lisp, too.

'I meant — afterwards.'

'Afterwards? Impossible! Impothible! Tomorrow evening we must give our full attention to our American clients, must we not? Motht important occasion, as you know. Lucky if we all get away before ten, wouldn't you say? And then—'

'And then you must go home, of course.'

'Of course! And you know perfectly well why I must go home. Whatever your faults, you're not a fool!'

Sheila nodded bleakly. 'You could come here before we start.'

'No!'

'Wouldn't do much harm to have a drink, would it? Fortify ourselves for—'

'No!'

'I see.'

'And it's healthy for the liver and kindred organs to leave the stuff alone for a while, uh? Couple of days a week? Could you manage that, Sheila?'

He had dressed quickly, his slim fingers now fixing the maroon bow-tie into its usual decadent droop. For her part, she had nothing further to say; nothing she could say. She turned once again towards the window, soon to feel his hand on the back of her shoulders as he planted a perfunctory kiss at the nape of her neck. Then the door downstairs slammed. Miserably she watched the top of the black umbrella as it moved along the road. Then she turned off the bedside lamp, picked up the champagne bottle, and made her way down the stairs.

She needed a drink.

Dr. Theodore Kemp strode along swiftly through the heavy rain towards his own house, only a few minutes' walk away. He had already decided that there would be little, if any, furtherance of his affair with the readily devourable divorcee he had just left. She was becoming a liability. He realised it might well have been his fault that she now seemed to require a double gin before starting her daily duties; that she took him so very seriously; that she was demanding more and more of his time; that she was prepared to take ever greater risks about their meetings. Well, he wasn't. He would miss the voluptuous lady, naturally; but she was getting a little too well-padded in some of the wrong places.

Double chin. double gin.

He'd been looking for some semblance of love — with none of the problems of commitment; and with Sheila Williams he had thought for a few months that he had found it. But it was not to be: he, Theodore Kemp, had decided that! And there were other women — and one especially, her tail flicking sinuously in the goldfish bowl.

Passing through the communal door to the flats on Water Eaton Road, whither (following the accident) he and Marion had moved two years earlier, he shook the drenched umbrella out behind him, then wiped his sodden shoes meticulously on the doormat. Had he ruined them, he wondered?

CHAPTER TWO

For the better cure of vice they think it necessary to study it, and the only efficient study is through practic

(Samuel Butler)

MUCH LATER THAT same evening, with the iron grids now being slotted in from bar-top to ceiling, John Ashenden sat alone in the University Arms Hotel at Cambridge and considered the morrow. The weather forecast was decidedly brighter, with no repetition of the deluge which earlier that day had set the whole of southern and eastern England awash (including, as we have seen, the city of Oxford).

'Anything else before we close, sir?'

Ashenden usually drank cask-conditioned beer. But he knew that the quickest way to view the world in a rosier light was to drink whisky; and he now ordered another large Glenfiddich, asking that this further Touch of the Malt be added to the account of the Historic Cities of England Tour.

It would help all round if the weather were set fairer; certainly help in mitigating the moans amongst his present group of Americans:

— too little sunshine

— too much food

— too much litter

— too early reveilles

— too much walking around (especially that!)