I like ducks. She cannot possibly have meant that to sound the way it did. Did it sound that way? Or was that only him? Mercer looks quite unaffected. Fevered imaginings. Restraint. Joe finds himself wishing he could be a duck, see the things that duck has seen, though of course he would then be unable to do anything about them. Polly smiles at him encouragingly.
“See?” she says to Mercer. “He looks less like a dead mouse just thinking about it.”
This ought to dampen Joe’s sense of acceptance, but somehow it doesn’t. Being called a dead mouse by Polly is better than being called handsome by anyone else—or so it seems to him at the moment. A shower or—amazing idea—a bubble bath might just be the beginning of life. He still has his arms crossed, but he loosens them a little to say thank you. He wonders whether he really does want to have sex with this woman as much as he thinks he does, or whether it’s just deprival and crisis. And then he wonders what it means to wonder whether you want to have sex with someone. Surely it’s a thing where you want or you don’t want. He concludes that he thinks too much. He wonders how many times in a day he thinks that, and then stops himself, because the Bold Receptionist is looking at him as if she can hear every word.
“My car’s parked at the back,” she says.
“Good, then.” Mercer puts down the cup. “We’ll all be in touch.”
Polly drives a very well-loved and stylish old Volvo, from the time before their cars were made with the intention of conveying boxy solidity, back when Volvo was a gorgeously curvaceous Continental designer with an eye to quality. The car itself is silver-grey, with chrome trim. The brown seats are extremely soft and smell of beeswax. She turns the key and the engine fuddfudds into life, then growls a little, like a sleepy cat smelling tuna. The seat belt is an actual old-fashioned racing harness, and Joe struggles to get into it, the more so because part of him is absolutely determined to watch the Bold Receptionist as she twists her upper body lithely around and about, then reaches back with both hands to catch the clips and fasten them across her breast. Muscles move under her skin, and for a moment he can actually taste her scent in his mouth. He blinks hard.
She smiles. “This car,” she says proudly, “won a road race in Monaco in 1978. Of course, I wasn’t driving. But I was alive. Just.”
So now he knows her age—a little older than he would have said, a little younger than he is. Did she mean to tell him that? To let him know they are of comparable generations?
“Have you smelled the leather?” Polly asks.
He nods. The car smells richly of old leather, cracked and polished and in one or two places stitched. It’s like a members’ club in St. James’s, or somewhere his father might have played cards with the Old Campaigners.
“Sometimes I just put my nose into it and breathe in. Mm-mm. Lovely!” Her eyes are very bright. She loves the senses, loves the world. He finds that … admirable, and a bit daunting. I am a mole. I am hiding, in the company of a woman who adores the sunlight and the rain.
Seeing that his harness is fastened, Polly puts her foot on the pedal.
The car moves as if smacked on the arse, and his head bounces slightly against the seat back. There actually is a head restraint, which must be a later modification, although not much later, because it seems to be made of clay. She snorts slightly, then looks guilty, and changes gear, which nearly does it to him again. For a machine this age, Polly’s car has some notable grunt.
The house is, in some way, very much the same. It’s elegant and a bit ramshackle and surprisingly large, tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac. A railway embankment rises up behind.
“The trains are a bit loud,” she murmurs, “which makes it affordable. But I’m used to it.”
“You just sleep through?”
She smiles again, and this time it starts at the very middle of her mouth and spreads like ripples in a pool all the way to the corners and across her face, until she has dimples on both cheeks and a glint in her eye which is unmistakably mischievious. “Something like that, yes. If you want to know, I’ll tell you later.”
Later, as in, when it’s dark and secret and we know each other better.
She opens the door and beckons him inside.
The bathroom is bitterly cold and very blue. Cracked powder-blue tiles line the walls and the blue wooden window frame is moulting flakes of paint. The floor is silvered wood, warped by years of wet feet and splashes, at some time or other carpeted and now bare once more. Joshua Joseph lies in the chipped blue ceramic tub and lets the hum of the single bulb and the coils of steam rising from any limb he allows to surface from the water lull him into a trance.
He drowses, and for once there are no ghosts, no relevant memories clamouring for his attention. A drop of very hot water scalds the top of his foot, and he barely flinches. The foam is slowly dissipating into a silver marbling on the surface of the water, and he can see the action of plate tectonics playing out on the meniscus. He waves his hand an inch below the surface, pictures tiny marsupials suddenly separated from the rest developing into sapient kangaroos, then—when their wildly rotating island rejoins the world—finding themselves at war with angry evolved lizards from beneath the great mountain of Knee.
Joe sighs. Why at war? Why not coming together for a great celebration of lost kin, two sentient species sharing the world of Soap?
“I blame you entirely,” he tells Mathew Spork, seeing his face for a moment in the steam.
“Very wise,” Polly replies from the doorway. He jumps a bit, manages to keep the water mostly in the bath. She smiles encouragingly, then goes on. “How do you feel?”
“Fine. Great, actually. Just … talking to my father. I do that, sometimes. Talk to dead people in my head.” Oh, marvellous. I also have a collection of ears and eat puppies. Oh, by the way, would you like to have dinner sometime?
But Polly is nodding.
“Yes. I do it, too. Do you find they’re helpful?”
“Sometimes.”
“And sometimes just as infuriating as they were when they were alive.”
“God, yes.” He grins. He’s extremely nude, but even this is insufficient to alarm him. The bubbles will do as a fig leaf, and he’s in perfectly acceptable shape. She’s a grown-up. If she’s happy, so is he.
“Good bath?”
“Wonderful.” He swirls his hand again. The United Nations of Soap is convened in a mountain fastness, for the betterment of the inhabitants of the world. Good.
The Bold Receptionist walks lightly into the room. He watches her wonderful, worldly toes work their way across the wood, and idly traces the name “Polly” on the bottom of the bath. Polly polly polly. Pollyanna. Pauline. Polikwaptiwa. Appolonia. Polly.
“I brought you a towel in case you were getting wrinkly.” And she has, a giant bath-sheet in dignified brown. “It’s warm.”
Joe expects her to put it down and walk out again, but she doesn’t. Instead, she faces away from him and extends her arms so that the towel spreads behind her like a superhero’s cape. John Wayne does this for someone, he’s pretty sure, probably Katharine Hepburn, to spare her blushes. He gets out of the bath, noticing with pleasure that from his vantage point he can see the V of her robe reflected in the mirror, and that—as with the business of putting on the safety harness in the car—this awkward position shows off her arms and shoulders beautifully, and just a whisper of her chest. He leans forward to take the towel, wondering what she can see in turn in the mirror. When she turns around, though, her eyes are screwed tight shut. He could reach down and kiss her. She’s easily close enough.
He doesn’t. She opens her eyes and looks at him for a moment.
“Come with me,” she says, taking his hand, and leads him, not to the guest bedroom with its sofa bed, where he has carefully laid out his clothes, but through the door to the back, and to her own room.
The Bold Receptionist’s bedroom is almost a cave. The back of the house is dug out of the embankment, and the rear wall is bare
stone—not brick, but something coarser and thicker, quarried and cut and set in place here. The carpet is deep and wine-red. There’s a small television and a nightstand piled high with books, a small Victorian railway clock, and against one wall, the most remarkable double bed Joe has ever seen.
It has an iron frame and a thick, iron bedhead, and it appears to rest on two vast metal tines or prongs driven deep into the stone wall. A cantilevered bed: heavy engineering in the bedroom. Something deep down in him grabs onto it, devours the sight. Wonderful.
Polly pokes him sharply in the flank. “Sit,” she says. “I want to talk to you eye to eye and I don’t want to stand on a chair.”
He sits on the cantilevered bed. It’s quite high. She nudges at his knees until she can stand in between them, and yes, they are on a level. This appears to please her.
“You, Joe Spork, are the sort of man to give a girl trouble. I see it in your eyes. And do you know what sort of trouble?”
“I’m not—”
“Exactly that sort of trouble. Wilfulness. Constant backchat.” She rests a finger on his nose. “Hush. Pay attention.”
He nods: yes, ma’am.
“I shall now explain my plan. You may then speak, but only to amend the detail. The broad outline is not subject to negotiation. Are you ready? Good … I propose to have sex with you. I believe it will be excellent sex. Your obedience on one particular issue of timing will be required to make it unforgettable sex. I will explain that issue as we go. At the moment, I wish to hear your inevitable objection to the general sex part of this plan.”
“I … you’re very … you don’t think we should know each other better?”
“Ah. Yes, I’m familiar with that question. Tell me, you feel we might do better to wait until we know each other so that we can ascertain whether we do, in fact, want to have sex?”
“Er … yes.”
“And if we don’t, then we won’t?”
“No.”
“And if we do, we will?”
“Yes.”
“I find your logic extremely strange. I want to have sex with you now. You—I’m reasonably certain of this, and I can …” Her finger traces down the towel. “Yes, I can, in fact, say it with some confidence owing to certain evidences now in my possession—you want to have sex with me. Yes?”
Hard to deny. So to speak. “Yes.”
“So if we follow my plan and discover tomorrow that we do not like each other, we will still have had exceptional sex. On the other hand, on your pattern, we will have rejected sex when we want it in favour of no sex now and no sex later. Alternatively, we will have missed an opportunity for sex when we could have had it if we later decide we do, in fact, want to have sex.”
“That’s true, but—”
“Your plan is a very bad plan. What is more, you know it is a very bad plan, in the first place because you want me very much and you know that I know this, and in the second because I want you very much and you now know that, too, and in the third because you do not in fact believe that we should not have sex right now, you simply believe that some people believe that you ought to believe it and although they are not here you do not wish to offend them. I say they can find their own damn entertainment.”
She kisses him, firmly, on the mouth. He does not resist, so she does it again, and makes a happy little squeak when he grabs her head and returns the kiss, then wraps one arm around her back and half lifts her against him.
“Back!” she cries, as soon as she can struggle free. “Back! We now come … hmm, mm-mmm … stop it! We now come to the issue of timing of which I spoke. Ah! Mmm. Oh, God, you awful man. You have roving hands. Mm-mmm-mmh.” She gives a lewd, throaty chuckle. “Stop! Now. The timing is to be my department. So. Up on the bed.”
Polly’s bathrobe is now in a state of considerable dishevelment, and Joe’s towel is mostly around his left thigh. He scoots up the bed to the position she indicates, then pulls her firmly to him. The bathrobe remains where it is, so that by the time she is in his arms he can feel every bit of her. She wriggles deliciously and draws back for a moment.
“Ah! Ah ah ah! Do as you’re told! (Typical man.) There. Now … Oh, it’s like that, is it? Very well, Mr. Spork. I can fight dirty too.” He’s too late to trap her or baulk her intention. Her head vanishes beneath the towel. He reaches for her, and her left hand slaps his away. Stop it. Busy now.
And indeed, she is.
Thirty minutes later, the 12:14 Chemical Waste Train from Chichester Paints goes past Polly’s house at ninety-one miles per hour. The vibrations from the train’s passage shudder through the embankment and into the cantilevers which hold up Polly’s bed. Polly, lying on her back, grabs hold of Joe in desperation and says “Now.” The instruction is quite redundant, and the two of them, pummelled by the energy of hundreds of tonnes of evil liquid freight passing by them and juddering them against one another, do indeed experience unforgettable sex.
Initially, Polly explains a few moments later when she can speak again, it was just a matter of opportunity. Her iron-framed bed rested on bare wooden boards, and the five-fifty-one train (it’s actually the three-eleven from the Fitzgibbon Chemical & Organics plant in Clyst Martington) sent strong, enjoyable vibrations through the whole house. Her internal erotic clock began to set its alarm for five fifty-one a.m., and she woke, ecstatic and bleary-eyed, every day at five fifty-three. (Chemical-waste trains are more regular than commuter trains. If a few people arrive half an hour late at work, it’s a normal day, but governments and safety executives get tetchy if a boatload of lethal swill goes off the map for twenty minutes.)
By the end of the first year she had arranged to be in the house for all four trains whenever possible at weekends. She obtained long-term timetabling information so as to be present on those special days when eight trains ran, at which times she would loll, exhausted, in her iron-frame bed, and eat pizza between gut-wrenching orgasms. From time to time, she would acquire a boyfriend and have actual chemical-waste sex, which was even better. But as with all addictions, she began to want more. The vibrations through the mattress were strong, but not vigorous. She looked with envy at the plates on the dresser in the kitchen, clattering and screaming in china bliss. So.
Polly moved her bed into the basement. The earth conducted the vibrations more strongly there. She removed the carpet. She bought a stiffer mattress. Eventually, she drove stout iron rods into the earthen bank behind the house, and welded the bed frame directly to these to cut out the intermediary. She fitted springs to the bed feet to cut down on destructive interference from road traffic on the other side of the house. Finally, she put more rods into the bank and suspended the bed three foot from the ground, held only by the conductor arms, and she could lie in the embrace of the shuddering rails. She knew, not being stupid, that this was unusual behaviour, but she simply did not care. As time went by, she knew more and more about the network, the trains, the engines, and the men who rode them. By degrees and in her own mind, the Bold Receptionist became the bride of the iron road.
“Again,” she says, and indeed, twenty-five minutes thereafter, a passenger express thunders by, and Joe actually growls like an animal, something he has absolutely never done before in his life.
“Mmmm …” the Bold Receptionist murmurs into his neck, and stretches her shoulders, then looks up at him through tousled hair. It changes her face, or perhaps it just frames it correctly, because he experiences a curious lurch, a sudden, powerful déjà vu. I have seen you before. But where? She’s not an enemy or an antiques dealer or a policewoman, of that much he is sure. The memory is more comfortable, and much, much older … oh.
“Oh, bloody Hell,” he says. “Not Pollyanna. Polly, like Molly. Molly like Mary. Mary like Mary Angelica …”
“See?” Polly Cradle murmurs happily. “My plan was much better than yours. Imagine all the trouble I’d have had to go to if you’d known that before we went to bed.”
“Your brother is going to ki
ll me.”
“He’s really not.”
“But—”
“He won’t. He’ll be very pleased. Or he will hear about it from me.” She kisses him earthily and falls asleep, just like that, on his shoulder.
Mercer Cradle is not exactly an orphan, but more a reject. That is to say, his parents subcontracted his upbringing and management to the London firm of Noblewhite’s, the same firm which handled Mathew Spork’s more egregious business and went to great lengths to keep him out of prison—an effort in which they were ultimately unsuccessful.
Mercer’s parents chose this unconventional approach to the business of education and nurture so that their personal involvement in the conception of a child should not become a matter of public knowledge, the liaison being both secret and dazzlingly inappropriate for a variety of reasons. Mercer was thus afforded all the care and fiscal security a boy could want, save for any information as to his biological antecedents. His filial affection he vested in the senior partners, and in a series of nurses, tutors, fee-earners and chauffeurs. On the day of his majority, Mr. Noblewhite—very tentatively and not without regret—took his charge to Claridge’s. After an excellent venison pie, and while the waiter laboured over crêpes Suzette, Jonah Noblewhite laid upon the table a slender white envelope which, he said, contained a cheque for a very considerable amount of money, and the true and accurate history of Mercer’s parentage and the very good and sound reasons for his progenitors’ reluctance to acknowledge him.
Mr. Noblewhite was a shy person. He had a pouchy face and a prominent nose, and he secretly believed that the secretarial pool thought him sweaty. His dignity was his professional blood, and he spared no pains in his dress, and researched exhaustively, so that he would never, ever be shown to be gauche or wrong about anything. And yet, he had consented on numerous occasions, when Mercer Cradle was very small, to play horsey through the file room. Later, he had broken a lifelong abstinence and taken Mercer to a football game, where a woman from Teesside had poured tomato ketchup into his lap and called him an ugly old toff. Jonah Noblewhite was ugly, and he was not young, but he was in no sense a toff. Toffs know one another. They keep the club secure. Noblewhite, any genuine toff would have told her, was an anglicisation of Edelweiss. It was a made-up name, plucked out of the air at Dover, and anyone who has to make up a new name when he travels is no toff. But rather than say any of this, or even object to this lady from Teesside that he had done her no wrong and was only here at this match to make the birthday weekend of an unwanted child that much less awful, he concealed the mess from Mercer and cheered (albeit without comprehension or enjoyment) and parroted with such precision the cries of the men around him and the tactical theories he had committed to memory regarding the game, that Mercer Cradle thought himself the companion of the most football-savvy man in London, and bathed in glory.