On Saturday morning he brought in coffee, a cup for her and one for himself. Marty had stopped drinking anything but whisky and wine.

‘What’s that you’re knitting, Joyce?’

‘A jumper.’

‘Is there a picture of it?’

She turned the page of the magazine and showed him a coloured photograph of a beautiful but flat-chested and skeletal girl in a voluminous sweater. She didn’t say anything but flicked the page over after allowing him a five-second glimpse.

‘You’ll look great in that,’ said Nigel. ‘You’ve got a super figure.’

‘Mmm,’ said Joyce. She wasn’t flattered. Every boy she had ever been out with had told her that, and anyway she had known it herself since she was twelve. We long to be praised for the beauties we don’t have, and Joyce had started to love Stephen when he said she had wonderful eyes.

‘I want you to go out tonight,’ said Nigel to Marty while Joyce was in the lavatory.

‘You what?’

‘Leave me alone with her.’

‘That’s brilliant, that is,’ said Marty. ‘I hang about out in the cold while you make it with the girl. No way. No way at all.’

‘Think about it if you know how to do that thing. Just think if that isn’t the only way to get us out of here. And you don’t have to hang about in the cold. You can go see a movie.’

Marty did think about it, and he saw it made sense. But he saw it grudgingly, for if anyone was going to make it with Joyce it ought to be himself. For the machismo, if he had known the word, rather than from inclination, but still it ought to be he. Not that he had any ideas of securing Joyce’s silence by such methods. He was a realist whose ideas of a sex-life were a bit of fun with easy pick-ups until he was about thirty when he would settle down with some steady and get married and live in a semi-detached. Still, if Nigel thought he could get them out that way, let Nigel get on with it. So at six he fetched them all some doner kebab and stuffed vine leaves, drank half a tumbler of neat whisky, and set off to see a film called Sex Pots on the Boil at a nasty little cinema down in Camden Town.

‘Where’s he gone?’ said Joyce.

‘To see his mother.’

‘You mean he’s got a mother? Where does she live? Monkey house at the zoo?’

‘Look, Joyce, I know he’s not the sort of guy you’ve been used to. I realize that. He’s not my sort either, only frankly, it’s taken me a bit of living with him to see that.’

‘Well, you don’t have to talk about him behind his back. I believe in loyalty, I do. And if you ask me, there’s not much to choose between the pair of you.’

They were in the kitchen. Joyce was washing up her own supper plates. Nigel and Marty hadn’t used plates, but they had each used a fork and Marty one of his new glasses. Joyce considered leaving the forks and the glass dirty, but it spoiled the look of the place, so she washed them too. For the first time in his life Nigel took a tea cloth in his hands and started to dry dishes. He put the gun down on the top of the oven.

His lie about Marty’s mother had given him an idea. Not that mothers, feared, despised, adored, longed-for, were ever far from his thoughts, whatever he might pretend. The reason he had given for Marty’s going out had come naturally and inevitably to him. An hour or so before, Marty had brought in the evening paper and Nigel had glanced through it while in the lavatory. Sabena Hostage Tells of Torture and New Moves in Pay Claim, and on an inside page a few lines about Mrs Culver recovering in hospital after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Nigel dried the glass clumsily, and with an eye to the main chance, told her what had happened to her mother.

Joyce sat down at the table.

‘You’re maniacs,’ she said. ‘You don’t care what you do. It’ll just about kill my dad if anything happens to her.’

Using the voice he knew she liked to hear, Nigel said, ‘I’m sorry, Joyce. We couldn’t foresee it was going to turn out this way. Your mother’s not dead, she’s going to get better.’

‘No thanks to you if she does!’

He came up close to her. The heat from the open oven was making him sweat. Joyce was on the point of crying, squeezing up her eyes to keep the tears back. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you want to get a message to her, like a letter, I’ll see she gets it. I can’t say fairer than that, can I? You just write that you’re OK and we haven’t harmed you and I’ll see it gets posted.’

Unconsciously, Joyce quoted a favourite riposte of her mother’s. ‘The band played “Believe it if you Like”.’

‘I promise. I like you a lot, Joyce. I really do. I think you’re fantastic looking.’

Joyce swallowed. She cleared her throat, pressing her hands against her chest. ‘Give me a bit of paper.’

Nigel picked up the gun and went off to find a piece. Apart from toilet paper out in the lavatory, there wasn’t any, so he had to tear one of the end-papers off Marty’s much-thumbed copy of Venus in Furs. The gun went back on top of the oven, and Nigel stood behind Joyce, putting on a tender expression in case she looked round.

She wrote: ‘Dear Mum, you will recognize my writing and know I am OK. Don’t worry. I will soon be home with you. Give my love to Dad.’ She set her teeth, grinding them together. Later she would cry, when they were asleep. ‘Your loving daughter, Joyce.’

Nigel put his hand on her shoulder. She was going to shout at him, ‘Get off me!’ but the gun was so near, within reach if she put out her left arm. There might be no later for crying, but a time for joy and reunion, if she could only keep her head now. She bowed forward across the table. Nigel came round her. He bent over her, put his other hand on her other shoulder so that he was almost embracing her, and said, ‘Joyce, love.’

Slowly she lifted her face so that it wasn’t far from his. She looked at his cold eyes and his mouth that was soft and parted and going slack. It wouldn’t be too disgusting to kiss him, he was good-looking enough. If she had to kiss him, she would. No good making a big thing of it. As for going any further . . . Nigel brought his mouth to hers, and she reached out fast for the gun.

He shouted, ‘Christ, you bitch!’ and punched the gun out of her hand and it went skidding across the floor. Then he fell on his knees, scrabbling for it. Retreating from him, Joyce backed against the wall, holding her arms crossed over her body. Nigel pointed the gun at her and flicked his head to indicate she was to go into the living room. She went in. She sat down heavily on the mattress, her letter in her hand.

Presently she said in a hoarse throaty voice, ‘May as well tear this up.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

‘Wouldn’t you have, in my place?’

Nigel didn’t answer her. He was thinking fast. It needn’t spoil his plan. She had been willing enough to kiss him, she had been dying for it, he could tell that by the soppy look on her face when he’d held her shoulders. It was only natural that getting hold of the gun came first with her, self-preservation came before sex. But there could be a situation where self-preservation didn’t come into it, where the last thing either of them would think of was the gun. Attempting that kiss had brought him a surge of real desire. Having her at his mercy and submitting to him and grateful to him had made him desire her.

‘I won’t let it make any difference,’ he said. ‘Your letter still goes.’

Joyce was surprised, but she wasn’t going to thank him. That soft slack look was again replacing savagery in his face.

‘The thing is,’ he said, the polite public school boy, ‘I thought you really liked me. You see, I’ve felt like that about you from the first.’

She knew what she had to do now, or not now but tomorrow when the dark one next went out. It sickened her to think of it, and how she’d feel when she’d done it she couldn’t imagine. Dirty, revolting, like a prostitute. Suppose she had a baby? She had been off the Pill necessarily for a week now. But she’d do it and get the gun and think of consequences later when she was home with her mother and father and Stephen. It had never crossed her mind that in all her life she’d make love with anyone but Stephen. She and Stephen would go on making love every night the way they had been doing until they got to be about forty and were too old for it. But needs must when the devil drives, like her father said. She looked up at the devil with the gun.


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