“Dare?”
He was excited. He hadn’t been so excited in a dozen years. He drew the blinds, locked the door, turned off the video display of his fortunes.
My God, she thought, I’ve got him.
It wasn’t an easy passion, not like that with Vassi. For one thing, Pettifer was a clumsy, uncultured lover. For another, he was too nervous of his wife to be a wholly successful adulterer. He thought he saw Virginia everywhere: in the lobbies of the hotels they took a room in for the afternoon, in cabs cruising the street outside their rendezvous, once even (he swore the likeness was exact) dressed as a waitress, and swabbing down a table in a restaurant. All fictional fears, but they dampened the spontaneity of the romance somewhat.
Still, she was learning from him. He was as brilliant a potentate as he was inept a lover. She learned how to be powerful without exercising power, how to keep one’s self uncontaminated by the foulness all charisma stirs up in the uncharismatic; how to make the plain decisions plainly; how to be merciless. Not that she needed much education in that particular quarter. Perhaps it was more truthful to say he taught her never to regret her absence of instinctive compassion, but to judge with her intellect alone who deserved extinction and who might be numbered amongst the righteous.
Not once did she show herself to him, though she used her skills in the most secret of ways to tease pleasure out of his stale nerves.
In the fourth week of their affair they were lying side by side in a lilac room, while the mid-afternoon traffic growled in the street below. It had been a bad bout of sex; he was nervous, and no tricks would coax him out of himself. It was over quickly, almost without heat.
He was going to tell her something. She knew it: it was waiting, this revelation, somewhere at the back of his throat. Turning to him she massaged his temples with her mind, and soothed him into speech.
He was about to spoil the day.
He was about to spoil his career.
He was about, God help him, to spoil his life.
“I have to stop seeing you,” he said.
He wouldn’t dare, she thought.
“I’m not sure what I know about you, or rather, what I think I know about you, but it makes me. . . cautious of you, J. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid I suspect you of. . . crimes.”
“Crimes?”
“You have a history.”
“Who”s been rooting?” she asked. “Surely not Virginia?”
“No, not Virginia, She’s beyond curiosity.”
“Who then?”
“It’s not your business.”
“Who?”
She pressed lightly on his temples. It hurt him and he winced.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“My head”s aching.”
“Tension, that’s all, just tension. I can take it away, Titus.” She touched her fingers to his forehead, relaxing her hold on him. He sighed as relief came.
“Is that better?”
“Yes.”
“Who”s been snooping, Titus?”
“I have a personal secretary. Lyndon. Yo’ve heard me speak of him. He knew about our relationship from the beginning. Indeed, he books the hotels, arranges my cover stories for Virginia.”
There was a sort of boyishness in this speech, that was rather touching. As though he was embarrassed to leave her, rather than heartbroken. “Lyndon’s quite a miracle-worker. He’s maneuvered a lot of things to make it easier between us. So he’s got nothing against you. It’s just that he happened to see one of the photographs I took of you. I gave them to him to shred.”
“Why?”
“I shouldn’t have taken them; it was a mistake. Virginia might have.. .” He paused, began again. “Anyhow, he recognized you, although he couldn’t remember where he’d seen you before.”
“But he remembered eventually.”
“He used to work for one of my newspapers, as a gossip columnist. That’s how he came to be my personal assistant. He remembered you from your previous incarnation, as it were. Jacqueline Ess, the wife of Benjamin Ess, deceased.”
“Deceased.”
“He brought me some other photographs, not as pretty as the ones of you.”
“Photographs of what?”
“Your home. And the body of your husband. They said it was a body, though in God’s name there was precious little human being left in it.”