The Silver Swan

noticed.'

'And who took them-Leslie?'

'I don't know. Him, or the Indian, Kreutz-all his patients, so-called, were women, so Leslie said.'

'And the letters?'

'They were hers, the Swan woman's. Not letters, really, just jumbles of filthy things, images, fantasies. I'm sure Leslie got her to write them for him. He liked hearing that kind of thing-' She stopped, and looked down, biting her lip at the side. 'That's another thing when a marriage breaks up,' she said softly, 'the sense of shame it leaves you with.' She stood up, seeming suddenly exhausted, and walked to the sink and filled another glass of water. She drank thirstily, facing away from him. He was afraid she might be weeping, and was relieved when she turned to him with a strained smile. 'The beauty parlor was in trouble too, at the end. God knows what kind of legal chicanery Leslie had been up to. He probably had his hand in the till, too, if I know him. He really didn't have an honest bone in his body.' She checked herself. 'Why do I keep talking about him in the past tense?'

He smoked in silence for a moment and then asked: 'Did you ever meet her, Deirdre Hunt?'

She pulled a face of agonized annoyance. 'I told you, her name was Laura Swan. And no, I never met her. Leslie would not have been that stupid.' She paused. 'A wife always knows, isn't that what they say? Or is it that a wife never knows. Either way, Leslie was careful to keep his doxie out of my line of fire.'

'And the photos, the letters, where are they now?'

'Gone. I burned them. It took forever. There I was, kneeling in front of the fireplace out in the den, feeding all that filth into the flames and crying like an idiot.'

He said nothing, and after a moment he crushed out the last of his cigarette and stood up. She watched him, and said: 'You could stay, you know.'

He shook his head. 'No, I…' She saw him trying to think of a reason, an excuse, to be gone.

'It's all right,' she said.

'The thing is, I-'

She held up a hand. 'Please. Let's not start lying to each other already.'

He hovered barefoot on the tiles, looking at her helplessly. Yes, she thought, they're all the same, all just overgrown infants; once they've had the breast they lose interest.

He went upstairs to fetch the rest of his clothes, and when he was dressed she saw him to the door. On the step they lingered. The dark air was moist and chill, and fragrant with the scent of some night-flowering plant. She asked if he would come back to see her and he said of course he would. He plainly could not wait to be away, and at last she took pity on him and kissed him quickly on the cheek and put a hand to his shoulder and gave him a soft push. When she had shut the door on him she leaned her forehead against the wood and closed her eyes. She had not even asked him for his phone number. But then, he had not offered it, either.

5

IT WAS AMAZING HOW QUICKLY THEY GOT THE SALON UP AND GOING. Deirdre never doubted it would be a success, but she had not dreamt it would all be so smooth and so easy. She discovered what a flair she had for business, not only the treatments and the selling of things but the finance side as well. Yes, she had a real head for money. When she had first heard that Leslie White ran a hairdressing salon it had been, though she tried to deny it to herself, a definite letdown. At first she thought it meant that he was a hairdresser, and that was a real shock, for she knew what they were like, most of them. But he had laughed and asked how she could have had such a notion-what did she take him for, a pansy? She said of course not, that the thought had never entered her mind, though it had, if only for a second. After all, sometimes it was hard to tell whether a man was that way inclined; not all of them were limp-wristed or spoke with a lisp. And in fact, when she thought about it, it struck her that Leslie's own wrists were not the stiffest, and on certain words he did lisp a bit. Still, she was sure he was normal, and yet she could not get rid of the niggle of disappointment that he was in that line of business. She was not sure what she had expected him to be. Something more romantic, certainly, than the proprietor of the Clip Joint, as it was named-which she had to admit was funny-or as it had been named, for the place had just been shut down.

Leslie talked about the failure of the Clip Joint lightheartedly, with a show of cheerful indifference. To listen to him you would not think it had failed at all, but that he had let it run itself gently into decline because he was bored and wanted to move on to something more exciting and worthier of his talents. He had plans, he told her, oh, yes, indeed, big plans. He had brought her to see the premises in Anne Street, a big, white-painted room on the first floor with its own entrance up a flight of stairs beside an optician's. Everything movable had been cleared out, but the washbasins were still there, standing in a row along one wall, making her think, with shamefaced amusement, of a gents' toilet. Leslie stood in the middle of the floor in his camel-hair coat and looked about, and could not keep, she saw, the look of misgiving out of his eyes. But he tried to be all bounce, talking airily of the contacts that he had, the moneymen and the entrepreneurs he was intimately acquainted with, who as soon as they heard his plans would be falling over each other to invest, there was no doubt of that.

'A beauty parlor,' he had said, his face alight, 'that's the thing. Hairdressing is fine for your average hairdresser, who doesn't know how to do anything else. But the full package, the all-over treatment for the whole woman, that's where the profits are.'

She had the clear impression that none of this was original. It was the kind of thing he would have heard from one of his contacts, one of the moneymen, the 'chaps with vision,' as he called them. He caught the skeptical glint in her look, though she had tried to hide it, but all he did was smirk and bite his lip, like a little boy caught out in a fib. That was one of the things she liked about him, perhaps the thing she liked best, the merrily offhand way in which he dismissed all reversals of fortune, treating them as mere stumbles along the path to unimaginable success, and riches, and happiness.

There was, though, another side to him, and it had not taken her long to see it. When he spoke of his wife, for instance-'that stuck-up bitch,' as she thought of her, though she had never even seen her-his pale, long face would flush, and his eyes would take on what she could only describe as a dirtied, a muddied look, and he would make a sucking motion at the side of his mouth, peeling his lip upwards to reveal a slightly tarnished eyetooth. But this show of rage and vengefulness would last only a second or two, and then he would be his old playful self again, and he would do that sort of dance step that he did, prancing nimbly sideways towards her and lifting one hand with palm upturned and touching her teasingly under the chin with the tip of an index finger, humming some tune buzzingly with lips tight shut.

He had lost no time in attempting to get her to go with him, of course. She admitted candidly to herself that he probably would have succeeded straightaway if there had been any surface in the Clip Joint more accommodating than the floor for them to lie down on. Yet he did not try it on with her the way she was used to from other fellows. He did not make a grab at her, or attempt to put his hand up her skirt or down her front. He was more like a wonderful and exotic bird, a peacock, maybe, dancing round her and showing off his plumage, smiling and cracking jokes and making her laugh, often despite herself. Oh, yes, he knew how to make a woman feel good, did Leslie White, knew how, in fact, to make her feel like a woman, not the way most of the men she knew did, treating her as if she was a piece of moving furniture, a sofa, say, or a lumpy old mattress, on which to fling themselves down, snuffling and snorting like a pig.

Billy was like that, sometimes.