Читать книгу Good Bad Woman - Elizabeth Woodcraft - Страница 12

At half past seven there was a tap on my bedroom door. ‘Cup of tea?’ my mum said brightly and came into the room.

I had been dreaming. I rarely dream of the people I want to but in this one I’d been dancing with Margo, moving slowly round to a sensual rhythm, holding her in my arms, feeling the softness of her body, smelling the sweet rose perfume and cigarette smoke in her hair.

I sat up crossly. ‘Mum, I didn’t get in till three o’clock.’

‘You said we had to get to Columbia Road early to miss the crowds.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t say the middle of the night.’

‘Ah, now, talking of the middle of the night, before I forget, about midnight a friend of yours rang. I can’t remember if she said her name. Ssss –’

‘Saskia?’

‘Mmmm, perhaps. I’m sure she told me, and I was going to write it down, but she said there was no message. I told her where you were anyway.’

‘And did you know where I was?’

‘I heard you talking on the phone to Lena. If you said “the Queen of Sheba” once, you must have said it ten times during the conversation. Did she find you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in a manner of speaking.’ I yawned. My throat was raw and my head was not happy. I didn’t know if that was the alcohol or the black eye. I tried to remember how much I had had to drink the night before. I’d had too much to drive and there had been the very scary experience of Lena driving us home, meandering slowly through the streets of the City. ‘I’m better when I’ve got my glasses on,’ she had said.

‘Drink your tea, it’s getting cold,’ my mother reminded me.

I sat up obediently.

‘Now there is something I wanted to talk to you about,’ she said, settling herself on the edge of my bed. I moved over to make room for her.

I waited.

‘Have you heard of Dr Henry?’

‘That name rings a bell,’ I said.

‘He said he’d ring you.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘he has rung me. I tried to ring him back. Is he a friend of yours?’

‘Well …’ My mother smiled coyly. ‘In a funny sort of way, I suppose he is. I met him at a drinks do at Audrey’s a month or so ago.’ Audrey was my mother’s oldest friend, from her schooldays. ‘I know in this day and age a woman ought to be able to simply ring a man and ask him to the theatre, but I’ve never felt happy doing that. So I found a sort of excuse.’

‘What do you mean? What kind of a doctor is he?’

‘He’s a surgeon, a plastic surgeon.’

‘So, what, you’ve been ringing him up asking about thigh reduction? I thought you were proud of your firm thighs. I thought it was the one thing I had to thank you for.’

‘Don’t be unnecessary, Frankie. No, it was a nose job, actually.’

‘You don’t need a nose job. You’ve got a really nice nose.’

‘Well, it wasn’t for me,’ she said slowly, looking at my face.

I started to laugh. My mother wanted me to have a nose job because she fancied the doctor.

‘It doesn’t have to be a nose job, I just thought you might like that,’ she said. ‘It could be collagen in your lips, that would be nice. Or possibly,’ she hesitated, ‘breast enhancement.’

‘For God’s sake, Mother.’

‘I’d pay.’

‘Mum, are you desperate or what? I can’t tell you how shocked I am. You are going to ring this man and tell him very clearly that I love my nose and all those body parts you mentioned, and I want none of them changed.’

‘I wonder if he does things with black eyes,’ she murmured.

‘Mother! I am very happy with my body and I don’t even want a sniff of a plastic surgeon in my life. If you want to go out with him, ask him, just ask him. Or at least have the decency to go under the surgeon’s knife yourself.’

‘He is very attractive,’ she said.

We drove silently to Columbia Road and I made her buy me bagels and coffee for breakfast. As we wandered through the market I began to relent. I knew she was lonely and had been for a long time. She was a very nice woman and it made me angry that she still felt the need to engage in subterfuge to catch a man. We bought two bunches of deep red and white chrysanthemums, and two small pots of early Christmas bulbs for Freda next door, and Mum said she was weighed down and would have to do the rest of her Christmas shopping in Colchester. By the time I tipped her and her case and bags of flowers into the train at Liverpool Street I was sorry to see her go.

‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘why don’t I ask him out for you?’

‘Oh, Frankie, you can’t,’ she said. ‘Have you got his number?’

‘Yes, I have, and I shall ring him tomorrow and tell him there’s a perfectly formed woman in Colchester who would like to go and see The Return of Martin Guerre with him, to discuss whether he did it by plastic surgery.’

She giggled with pleasure. ‘I have no pride,’ she said. ‘Do it if you must.’

As I walked away from the platform and went into W. H. Smith’s to buy the Observer I realised that my headache wasn’t just a hangover, I was getting a cold.

I rang Lena and we went to Hampstead to see a revamped copy of Bringing Up Baby. I had to go out halfway through the film to buy a packet of tissues and by the end my nose was streaming.

‘You should go home and have a hot toddy,’ Lena said.

‘Would hot whisky have the same effect?’ I sniffed. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the other ingredients.’

Lena ordered me to stop the car at the corner of her street while she went into the Italian shop and came back with three lemons and a jar of honey.

‘Go to bed,’ she said, thrusting them on to the seat, ‘I’ll walk from here.’

It was only seven o’clock when I turned into Amhurst Road. My head was aching and I was sneezing every thirty seconds. A car drove away from outside my house just as I was slowing down to a crawl, looking for a parking space. It’s like a small but precious gift when you can park outside your own home in London. I switched off the engine and the voice of Paul McCartney singing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ disappeared abruptly. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something that I knew was significant, but I was so busy concentrating on turning the car key the right way up to lock the door, smooth side up for driver’s door, smooth side down for passenger door, that I didn’t think.

As I walked up the steps to the front door I looked over at my bay window, the half-drawn white blinds gleaming in the darkness. In the darkness – that was it, the window was dark. It shouldn’t have been dark, the lamp on the timer in the living room didn’t go off till one o’clock.

‘Bloody long-life bloody light bulbs,’ I muttered, juggling the bag of lemons and honey, scrabbling in my pocket for the key.

The door swung open and I stepped into the hall. I lifted my hand to press the communal timer switch and sneezed at the same time. The bag fell from my hand and lemons and honey escaped across the floor. As I picked them up in the silence I could hear the timer switch wheezing its way slowly out again. I was shoving the jar of honey back into the bag when the timer gave a final sigh and the light went out and I realised my front door was open.

Tentatively I pushed the door and slid my hand round the door frame to switch on the light in my hall. As light flooded into the living room, it was clear the room was empty. It was also completely untidy. Papers strewn on the floor, newspaper tossed on the sofa, cups knocked over on the carpet. Or was that just how I’d left it before I went out?

I went over to my table. The desk drawers were open and the papers in them looked messy. That could mean anything.

Then I saw it, in the middle of the desk, on top of my laptop: a card. It said, ‘Make love, not sausages.’

‘Saskia!’ I said. ‘Saskia?’ I walked through into the kitchen and switched on the light. ‘Saskia?’ The kitchen was empty. ‘Saskia?’ I walked back through to the bedroom and opened the door. The bed was empty.

I looked down at the card in my hand. I turned it over. On the back were the words, ‘It was too easy to get into your flat, you should do something about security,’ written in a small, tight hand as if she was anxious about what she was writing. And so she should be, breaking into people’s homes.

I walked back into the living room, wondering whether I should ring Kay, or even the police about Saskia’s visit. I immediately rejected the option of the police. Burglary of domestic premises was a serious offence. Not that it was burglary. It was Saskia. But the police might look at it differently. And I was more than happy that Saskia should come into my home at any hour of the night or day, to have a bath, help herself to a bowl of ice cream from the freezer, or even something more substantial. I just wish she’d stayed. I needed to talk to her.