behind his breastbone, as if his chest had been hollowed out and emptied of every organ. It was not exactly fear he felt but a heavy, dull dread. Something was coming that would not be avoided.
“And how,” Bella asked, “is the Lady Sylvia?” She put on a prissy accent. “Spiffing form as usual, I suppose, what?”
He drank his wine and said nothing. He did not mind her mocking his wife. He supposed he should. He felt protective towards Sylvia, most of the time. She had done her best with him, for him, and he was grateful to her, in his way. Thinking this, he imagined her turning aside from him with that deliberately abstracted expression, frowning, as if she had lost something and was trying to remember what it was. Grateful, dear? I must say, you have a funny way of showing it. It was true. He owed her a debt, he knew that, but he knew too that he had no intention of settling it, not yet, anyway, not while he still had this fire in him; not while he still had Bella, and the others like her, discreet, easy, indulgent. He closed his eyes briefly. He knew in his heart that it was all over, that old, carefree life. There would be no more simple fun; from now on, everything would be complicated, knotted, insoluble. Half an hour ago, lying here in Bella’s arms, he had relaxed and felt like weeping.
“I suppose you’ll be the boss now?” Bella said.
“Do you think so?” He cast a crooked smile at her and she saw that flash of mischief she remembered from the old days, that look of a boy who has got his first kiss and means to have more.
“Isn’t it what you always wanted?” she said, smiling in her turn.
Her warm haunch was pressed against his leg, and there was a look of slightly unfocused merriment in her eye-she never could hold her drink; it was something that had always amused him. In a minute she would be swarming all over him again. He made to stand up, but she put a hand in the crook of his elbow and held him back. “Don’t go,” she said.
“Got to,” he said. “I’m expected.”
Yet he lingered. He did not want to go home, did not want to face Sylvia, did not want to meet that look she would give him, anxious, soulful, searching. How much did she know, how much did she guess? All this past year he had been sure she knew he was up to something. She did not trust him, never had; he could hardly have expected that she would. He did not trust himself, anymore.
“How is the widow?” Bella asked. “What’s her name-Monica?”
“Mona.”
“He was about twice her age, wasn’t he?”
“She’s young, yes.”
He felt a sort of ripple in her thigh, and she sat forward and swiveled about to look closely into his face. “Oh, Jack,” she said softly, “I hope you haven’t been a naughty boy, have you? Haven’t been putting in your thumb there and pulling out a plum, as you always do?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said.
She wagged her head at him, making a tut-tutting sound with her tongue. “Oh, Jackie-boy. I see now the reason for your sudden appearance on my doorstep. It wouldn’t be the first time you came running to Bella for shelter when the Hound of Heaven was at your heels. Or just a husband on the warpath.”
He sighed. “Shut up, Bella,” he said wearily. “You have a one-track mind.”
“Yes,” she said, and made a grab at the crotch of his trousers, “and you haven’t, I suppose.”
He batted her hand aside and held out his glass. She groped for the bottle on the floor and poured another go of wine.
“I hope you’re not intending to make a lamp out of that, are you?” he said, indicating with his chin the bulbous bottle in its straw jacket.
“Is that what you think of me?”
“Oh, yes, I forgot-you’re an artist.” He had not meant it to sound so sour.
“Dear me,” she said, “we are on edge today.” She put the bottle on the floor again and sat back, holding her glass in both hands and nursing it against her breast. “Were you that fond of your late partner?”
He did not respond, only drank his wine and gazed before him, frowning. “David was on the boat with him,” he said.
“Who?”
“My son, Davy.”
She stared. “My God. Why?”
“He asked him to go with him-Victor, that is, asked Davy. The night before, when we were all in the pub, he invited him to come out. Davy hates the sea, but he went, all the same.”
“My God,” Bella said again, more softly this time, more wonderingly. “Did he-did he see him do it? Did he see him shoot himself?”
Jack watched one last, anxious-seeming bubble crowding at the brim of his glass. “Yes,” he said, “he saw it.”
“But-but why?”
“Why did he take Davy with him? I don’t know. Maybe to get back at me.”
“For what?”
The wine bubble burst.
“I don’t know.”
She was watching him, staring at his profile. “I think you do know,” she said, in a voice that made her suddenly sound sober. “I think you’re lying.”
He put a hand over his eyes and massaged his temples at either side with a finger and a thumb. “There was a-there was a problem, in work. In the business.”
“What sort of problem?”
He took the hand away from his face and turned towards the window. She saw the pulse working in his jaw. He was still good-looking, with that small neat head, that strong nose, those broad lips that had a twist to them at once humorous and sly. There used to be something about him, something weak and furtively vulnerable. Now that was gone, that youthful defenselessness, but what had come in its place was not strength, only hardness. She put her glass on the floor beside the wine bottle. She should not drink so early in the evening; it always went straight to her head. It was not an occasion to be tipsy; a girl had to watch herself around Jack Clancy.
“He could never let go of anything,” he said, with a distant look now, talking to himself. “He could never relent. Always had to be top dog, and have everyone around him acknowledge it. Got that from his father, of course, Old Ironsides himself. A pair of them in it-overbearing and ruthless yet still expecting the rest of us to treat them like proper gentlemen of the old school. And all the time they’d cut your heart out for a farthing.”
He stopped. She had an urge to put her finger to that pulse in his jaw to stop it twitching. “Did you know?” she asked.
“What?”
“Did you know he was going to do it?”
“No. How could I? If I had, do you think I’d have let Davy go out with him? Do you think I’d have let my own son’s life be put at risk?”
She picked up her glass again from the floor-what good would staying sober do? “Tell me what was going on in the business,” she said. “Were you fiddling the books?”
He said nothing for a moment, then laughed harshly. “Fiddling the books? For Christ’s sake, Bella.”
“Then what was this ‘problem’ that you’re so concerned about?”
He shrugged, and looked away from her again. “Nothing,” he said. “Forget I mentioned it.”
“Had he found out about it, your partner, Delahaye-had he found out what you were up to, whatever it was?”
He shook his head as if amused. “What I was ‘up to’-as if I was an office boy, stealing the tea money.” He lay back against the sofa, suddenly weary-seeming. “You don’t know what it’s like, having something going round and round in your head, round and round. I don’t sleep, I just lie there, thinking.”
She waited, but he had lapsed into silence. His eyes were closed. She could hear him breathing; he might have been in a fever, or asleep and having a bad dream. She felt sorry for him, but she was apprehensive, too. She realized that she did not want to know what it was that was going round and round in his head. Some things it was better not to know, especially when they were things that Jack Clancy knew. It had been a long time since they had seen each other but it might have been yesterday, so familiar was the sense she had of his resentment and pent-up
