Leaving the fight commentator to babble on, he went through to the kitchen to fetch another couple of beers from the refrigerator. At this end of the house there was not even a hint of noise from the party-goers. Besides, such a civilized gathering would be hushed, wouldn’t it? Just the clink of cut glass, and talk of rich men’s pleasures.
Well, fuck them all, he thought. Whitehead and Carys and all of them. It wasn’t his world and he wanted no part of it, or them, or her. He could get all the women he wanted anytime-just pick up the phone and call Flynn. No trouble. Let them play their damn-fool games: he wasn’t interested. He drained the first can of beer standing in the kitchen, then got out two more cans and took them through to the lounge. He was going to get really blind tonight. Oh, yes. He was going to get so drunk nothing would matter. Especially not her. Because he didn’t care. He didn’t care.
The tape had finished, and the screen had gone blank. It buzzed with a squirming pattern of dots. White noise. Wasn’t that what they called it? It was a portrait of chaos, that hissing, those writhing dots; the universe humming to itself. Empty airwaves were never really empty.
He turned the set off. He didn’t want to watch any more matches. His head buzzed like the box; white noise in there too.
He slumped down in the chair and downed the second can of beer in two throatfuls. The image of Carys with Whitehead swam into focus again. “Go away,” he told it, aloud; but it lingered. Did he want her, was that it? Would this unease be pacified if he took her to the dovecote one of these afternoons and humped her till she begged him never to stop? The wretched thought only disgusted him; he couldn’t defuse these ambiguities with pornography.
As he opened the third beer he found his hands were sweating, a clammy sweat he associated with sickness, like the first signs of flu. He wiped his palms on his jeans and put the beer down. There was more than infatuation fueling his nervousness. Something was wrong. He got up and went to the lounge window. He was staring into the pitch darkness beyond the glass, when it struck him what the wrongness might be. The lights on the lawn and perimeter fence had not been put on tonight. He would have to do it. For the first time since he’d arrived at the house it was real night outside, a night more black than any he’d experienced in many years. In Wandsworth there was always light; floods on the walls burned from twilight to dawn. But here, without streetlamps, there was just night outside.
Night; and white noise.
26
Though Marty had imagined otherwise, Carys wasn’t at the dinner party. There were very few freedoms left to her; refusing her father’s invitations to dinner was one of them. She had endured an afternoon of his sudden tears, his just as sudden accusations. She was weary of his kisses and his doubts. So tonight she’d given herself a larger fix than usual, greedy for forgetfulness. Now all she wanted to do was lie down and bask in not being.
Even as she lay her head on the pillow, something, or someone, touched her. She came around again, startled. The bedroom was empty. The lamps were on and the curtains drawn. There was nobody there: it was a trick of the senses, no more. Yet she could still feel the nerve endings at the nape of her neck tingle where the touch had seemed to come, responding, anemone-like, to the intrusion. She put her fingers there and massaged the place. The jolt had snatched lethargy away for a while. There was no chance of putting her head back down until her heart had stopped hammering.
Sitting up, she wondered where her runner was. Probably at the dinner party with the rest of Papa’s court. They’d like that: to have him among them to condescend to. She didn’t think of him as an angel any longer. After all he had a name now, and a history (Toy had told her everything he knew). He’d long lost his divinity. He was who he was-Martin Francis Strauss-a man with green-gray eyes; with a scar on his cheek and hands that were eloquent, like an actor’s hands, except that she didn’t think he’d be very good at professional deceit: his eyes betrayed him too easily.