Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(61)
She took his scarf and hung it in the hall, the coat he kept on, the gloves had somehow disappeared. “Have you glasses?” he said. And then, when they were sitting drinking, the smell of smoke faint from the fire, the shaded light dancing in his eyes, “So, Hannah, how’ve you been?”
He took her on the floor, the curtains only partly drawn across, touching her first with his tongue and then no time for niceties, Hannah’s skirt pushed up and knickers pulled aside, Andrew having her there, wedged somehow between floor and chair, his long coat trailing round them as she moaned and he bit her breast and thrust deeper inside, stopping only to turn her round and push her down again face first onto the chair, hands clutching her, himself, not gentle, never that, the quick deep strokes and his fingers, damp, so far inside her mouth Hannah thought, if think she did, that she must surely choke.
He sat across the fire from her afterwards, uncovered, his lissome cock folding slowly back against his balls, savoring the whiskey, the cigarette he’d lit from the fire.
“I’ve missed you,” he said.
Hannah hunched there, legs drawn up, arms raised across her chest, feeling him slowly dribble out of her, for those moments immune to tears.
There was another woman, of course; well, there were two, one in Belfast, one here. He wondered if he might not marry one of them this time, put an end to all this wandering, settle down. He’d written a poem about it, this yearning after hearth and home, but then he would.
When next he came round unannounced she bolted the door against him and immediately broke out laughing, unable to think of anything save the wonderfully melodramatic scene at the end of The Heiress, a film she remembered watching with her mother one long Saturday afternoon, Olivia de Havilland locking Montgomery Clift outside her door. Who said art didn’t prepare you for life? She hoped Andrew could hear her laughter as he trudged away.
He had married, she heard, soon after; married and divorced and married again. His new book of poetry much acclaimed, he had given a reading at the university but she had not gone. She had glanced through the book once, displayed on the table in Water-stone’s, smiling quietly at a poem she thought most probably about her. She missed the way he would read to her at night, his work and others—Heaney, Longley, Yeats—but Andrew being Andrew, mostly his own. She surprised herself by missing sometimes the way he would arrive unexpectedly home after a lecture that had gone spectacularly well or badly, and reach for her no matter what she was doing, taking her, hungry and fast, pinned up against the sink or stretched along the stairs.
Jim, the peripatetic music teacher who eventually took Andrew’s place, had been far too sensitive and thoughtful to suggest anything so aggressive and uncaring. And Charlie … well, Charlie, bless him, was still a little hesitant and cautious at the best of times. A little lacking in that kind of fervor or imagination. Poets and policemen. Hannah smiled: at least she felt safe.
He was there when she finally arrived home, worn out after battling with the Sunday evening traffic on the motorway. A casserole of chicken and cured French sausage was in the oven, the kettle was simmering, ready to make coffee or tea. “You’d be So Nice to Come Home to.” Billie Holiday was playing on the stereo in the front room.
“Why don’t you let me run you a bath?” Resnick said. “Relax you. Then we can eat.” Arms around her, he had no idea why she was crying.
“Charlie, why is it?”
“What?”
“You’re forever trying to get me clean.”
Less than fifteen minutes hater, he carried mugs of tea upstairs and sat on the edge of the bath, telling her about what was happening with the investigation, the fact that he was now fully involved.
“Poor Jane,” Hannah said, “putting up with that for as long as she did. That bastard. That sanctimonious, know-it-all bastard. If he … if he …”
“If he did,” Resnick said, “we’ll catch him for it.”
She rested her head sideways against his leg and he soaped her back, rinsing it with warm water and then, when she climbed out of the bath, helping to towel her dry. When he kissed her, she felt him starting to harden against her.
“Charlie,” she said, “the casserole …”
“Isn’t that the thing about casseroles? They just sit there and wait till you’re ready.”
Bubbles of water speckled the small of her back and the length of her thigh as she lay on the bed. “Is that all right?” he asked. “Is this?”
She curled beside him, her legs around his, feeling his heart beating through his ribs.
“Why are you so good to me, Charlie?” she asked.
Later still, they sat propped up by pillows, dipping bread into Portuguese blue bowls and soaking up the juice.
Thirty-four
Grabianski remembered the first time he had seen her, striding out between the traffic on Gregory Boulevard, her topcoat belted but unbuttoned, a tall, well-made woman of a certain age. Now, as he stood on the steps outside the National Gallery, scanning the crowds that moved without pattern across Trafalgar Square, he felt the anticipation of her like ice beneath his skin. All below where he was standing, students lounged and laughed and smoked across the steps, Italians, German, French. More of them sprawled on the grass that ran wide along the front of the gallery, sharing it with the homeless and their cardboard havens, cans of cider and ratty wet-nosed dogs tied up with string—as much a part of the tourist sights as the Horse Guards on parade.