The Silver Swan Page 18

  He smoked in silence for a moment and then asked: "Did you ever meet her, Deirdre Hunt?"

  She pulled a face of agonized annoyance. "I told you, her name was Laura Swan. And no, I never met her. Leslie would not have been that stupid." She paused. "A wife always knows, isn't that what they say? Or is it that a wife never knows. Either way, Leslie was careful to keep his doxie out of my line of fire."

  "And the photos, the letters, where are they now?"

  "Gone. I burned them. It took forever. There I was, kneeling in front of the fireplace out in the den, feeding all that filth into the flames and crying like an idiot."

  He said nothing, and after a moment he crushed out the last of his cigarette and stood up. She watched him, and said: "You could stay, you know."

  He shook his head. "No, I…" She saw him trying to think of a reason, an excuse, to be gone.

  "It's all right," she said.

  "The thing is, I-"

  She held up a hand. "Please. Let's not start lying to each other already."

  He hovered barefoot on the tiles, looking at her helplessly. Yes, she thought, they're all the same, all just overgrown infants; once they've had the breast they lose interest.

  He went upstairs to fetch the rest of his clothes, and when he was dressed she saw him to the door. On the step they lingered. The dark air was moist and chill, and fragrant with the scent of some night-flowering plant. She asked if he would come back to see her and he said of course he would. He plainly could not wait to be away, and at last she took pity on him and kissed him quickly on the cheek and put a hand to his shoulder and gave him a soft push. When she had shut the door on him she leaned her forehead against the wood and closed her eyes. She had not even asked him for his phone number. But then, he had not offered it, either.

  5

  IT WAS AMAZING HOW QUICKLY THEY GOT THE SALON UP AND GOING. Deirdre never doubted it would be a success, but she had not dreamt it would all be so smooth and so easy. She discovered what a flair she had for business, not only the treatments and the selling of things but the finance side as well. Yes, she had a real head for money. When she had first heard that Leslie White ran a hairdressing salon it had been, though she tried to deny it to herself, a definite letdown. At first she thought it meant that he was a hairdresser, and that was a real shock, for she knew what they were like, most of them. But he had laughed and asked how she could have had such a notion-what did she take him for, a pansy? She said of course not, that the thought had never entered her mind, though it had, if only for a second. After all, sometimes it was hard to tell whether a man was that way inclined; not all of them were limp-wristed or spoke with a lisp. And in fact, when she thought about it, it struck her that Leslie's own wrists were not the stiffest, and on certain words he did lisp a bit. Still, she was sure he was normal, and yet she could not get rid of the niggle of disappointment that he was in that line of business. She was not sure what she had expected him to be. Something more romantic, certainly, than the proprietor of the Clip Joint, as it was named-which she had to admit was funny-or as it had been named, for the place had just been shut down.

  Leslie talked about the failure of the Clip Joint lightheartedly, with a show of cheerful indifference. To listen to him you would not think it had failed at all, but that he had let it run itself gently into decline because he was bored and wanted to move on to something more exciting and worthier of his talents. He had plans, he told her, oh, yes, indeed, big plans. He had brought her to see the premises in Anne Street, a big, white-painted room on the first floor with its own entrance up a flight of stairs beside an optician's. Everything movable had been cleared out, but the washbasins were still there, standing in a row along one wall, making her think, with shamefaced amusement, of a gents' toilet. Leslie stood in the middle of the floor in his camel-hair coat and looked about, and could not keep, she saw, the look of misgiving out of his eyes. But he tried to be all bounce, talking airily of the contacts that he had, the moneymen and the entrepreneurs he was intimately acquainted with, who as soon as they heard his plans would be falling over each other to invest, there was no doubt of that.

  "A beauty parlor," he had said, his face alight, "that's the thing. Hairdressing is fine for your average hairdresser, who doesn't know how to do anything else. But the full package, the all-over treatment for the whole woman, that's where the profits are."

  She had the clear impression that none of this was original. It was the kind of thing he would have heard from one of his contacts, one of the moneymen, the "chaps with vision," as he called them. He caught the skeptical glint in her look, though she had tried to hide it, but all he did was smirk and bite his lip, like a little boy caught out in a fib. That was one of the things she liked about him, perhaps the thing she liked best, the merrily offhand way in which he dismissed all reversals of fortune, treating them as mere stumbles along the path to unimaginable success, and riches, and happiness.

  There was, though, another side to him, and it had not taken her long to see it. When he spoke of his wife, for instance-"that stuck-up bitch," as she thought of her, though she had never even seen her-his pale, long face would flush, and his eyes would take on what she could only describe as a dirtied, a muddied look, and he would make a sucking motion at the side of his mouth, peeling his lip upwards to reveal a slightly tarnished eyetooth. But this show of rage and vengefulness would last only a second or two, and then he would be his old playful self again, and he would do that sort of dance step that he did, prancing nimbly sideways towards her and lifting one hand with palm upturned and touching her teasingly under the chin with the tip of an index finger, humming some tune buzzingly with lips tight shut.

  He had lost no time in attempting to get her to go with him, of course. She admitted candidly to herself that he probably would have succeeded straightaway if there had been any surface in the Clip Joint more accommodating than the floor for them to lie down on. Yet he did not try it on with her the way she was used to from other fellows. He did not make a grab at her, or attempt to put his hand up her skirt or down her front. He was more like a wonderful and exotic bird, a peacock, maybe, dancing round her and showing off his plumage, smiling and cracking jokes and making her laugh, often despite herself. Oh, yes, he knew how to make a woman feel good, did Leslie White, knew how, in fact, to make her feel like a woman, not the way most of the men she knew did, treating her as if she was a piece of moving furniture, a sofa, say, or a lumpy old mattress, on which to fling themselves down, snuffling and snorting like a pig.

  Billy was like that, sometimes.

  It had not taken her long to find out that Leslie was married. She had assumed from the start that he was. He did not tell her much about his wife. She had money, it seemed-she was in business herself, something to do with the rag trade-but kept it safely locked away from him. He did let it slip that she had on at least one tricky occasion in the past stepped in and saved the Clip Joint from closure. Maybe, Deirdre thought, it was that experience that had soured Mrs. High-and-Mighty White on her feckless husband. He was living with her still, although as far as he was concerned the marriage was over, and as soon as he got the new venture under way he would be moving out, so he assured her. All this she took with a certain reservation. She was not a fool; she knew men, and how they talked; she knew what their promises and declarations were worth. Yet there was something about Leslie White that she could not resist-she knew it, and he knew it, too-and meanwhile everything had come to a point from which there would be no turning back. She was the girl in the canoe and the brink of the waterfall was getting steadily nearer and nearer.

  In the end it was the photographs that had done it. She often wished, afterwards, that he had not shown them to her. She knew, of course, why he had. It was partly out of simple mischievousness, that schoolboy urge he had to show off the secret he had discovered, but also he had gauged, correctly, as it would turn out, that there was a part of her, buried deep down, so deep that she had been hardly aware
of it before now, a part that was, she had to admit it, just as gleefully dirty in its desires as Leslie White was-as any man was. All the same, they were a shock, the photographs, at least at first. When he showed her the one of the woman in the fox-fur stole-they were in the empty room above the optician's shop-she felt hot and excited and almost frightened, in a way that she had not felt since she was a little girl. It was a big photograph, twelve inches by nine or so, but very sharp and clear, all silver grays and soot blacks, and finely detailed. "Exposure" was the word, all right. The woman, very slim, pale, small-breasted, was lying diagonally across a sofa-Deirdre recognized it at once-with one leg thrown wide, the slender foot resting on a cushion on the floor. She was naked except for the fur that was wound around her neck, with the fox's sharp little muzzle seeming to bite into the flesh at the soft incline of her left breast. Her right hand was stretched out to the side, dangling languidly by the splayed right leg; the left hand was in her lap, the thumb and second finger holding wide apart the dark lips there and the index finger stuck inside herself right up to the knuckle. The woman was smiling into the lens, at once brazen and guilty, and her head was turned a fraction to one side, as if she was inviting the person behind the camera, and anyone else who might chance to look at the cameraman's handiwork, to come and join her where she lay.

  Deirdre took all this in, the foot on the cushion, the fox's clenched muzzle, that dangling hand, those lips agape, and immediately shut her eyes tight and turned the photo face-down with a snap. She could hear herself breathing. The feeling she had was that feeling, hot all over and at the same time somehow cold, that she would have when she woke as a child in the cot-bed in her parents' bedroom and realized that she was wetting herself, wetting herself and horrified to be doing it and yet unable to stop for the shameful pleasure it gave her. And she was not able to stop now, either, not able not to open her eyes and turn the picture over and look at it again. She was disgusted with herself, yet excited, too, in a horrible way that made her think she should be ashamed, though she was not, not really.

  There were other pictures, twenty or thirty of them, which Leslie kept in an old music case that fastened with a metal thing like a horse's bit that came down over the flap. Some were of the same woman, the woman with the fox fur, and some were of others, all of them naked, all shamelessly on display, some of them doing even worse things than the woman was doing with her hand down there, and all smiling that same dirty smile into the camera. At first she had not been able to meet Leslie's eye, and now, when she did look at him at last, she knew her face was burning. He was watching her, and smiling, with one eyebrow wickedly lifted, enjoying her discomfort. It came to her that she would remember this moment for the rest of her life, the chill in the bare room, the winter light on the white walls, the dull and somehow sullen gleam of the washbasins, and Leslie there with his overcoat open, leering at her.

  "Where did you get these?" she asked, in a voice that dismayed her, it was so steady. Had she no shame, really?

  "Simple," Leslie said, and tapped a fingernail on the one of the woman in the fur stole. "She gave them to me." Then he told her, pacing the floor with his hands in his coat pockets, how he had met her, the woman, one afternoon in a basement pub in Dawson Street where he used to drink-he would not tell her the woman's name, said she might recognize it, since her husband was well known, and would only call her Mrs. T.-and how he had made friends with her in the hope that she might put some cash into the Clip Joint, which was just starting to run into trouble at the time. He had seen straight off, despite the fact that she frequented Wally's place, which had about as bad a reputation as a pub or drinking club or whatever it was could have, that she was well connected. That end of the thing had not worked out, however-Mrs. T. was cautious when it came to money-but she was good company, and a real sport. It was through her that he had come in contact with Dr. Kreutz, and now he and Kreutzer, as he called him, were-he laughed-"Oh, the best of pals."

  She thrust the bundle of photographs back into his hands. "They're disgusting."

  "Yes, they are, aren't they," he said happily.

  "Why did she give them to you-how could she?"

  "Well, I suppose she's a bit of an exhibitionist. She thought I'd like them. And, of course, she didn't know I'd show them to you."

  "Which you shouldn't have."

  "No, I suppose not." He lowered his head and looked up at her from under his eyebrows in the way that made him seem a bit like a smiling, silver-haired devil. "But you're glad I did," he said softly, "aren't you?"

  "I certainly am not."

  But was she not, really? She did not know. She was confused. Certainly she was shocked to think that Dr. Kreutz would take such pictures-for she was certain, without having to ask, that it was he who had taken them. So these were his clients, so this was spiritual healing. Leslie, of course, could see what she was thinking.

  "I warned you about him, didn't I, old Kreutzer? Now you see."

  She shook her head. "But why?" she said. "How?"

  He looked surprised. "Why did he take them? Because they wanted him to. Some people like to see themselves doing naughty things. Good, aren't they-as photographs, I mean? Look at the technique. He has quite a knack." He chuckled. "Comes from long practice, I imagine."

  She knew she should break with Leslie White there and then. Nothing would be the same between them after she had seen those pictures. And yet she could not do it. When the thought of those women, so lewd, so shameless, came into her mind she experienced a thickening in her throat, as if something soft and warm had lodged there, and she felt a panicky sensation that had as much of pleasure in it as anything else. Yes, pleasure, dark and hot and frightening. Billy, her husband, noticed this new excitement in her, although of course he did not know what was causing it, and when he was home he followed her round the house like-she hated to think it but it was true-like a dog sniffing after a bitch that was in heat, and as for the things he tried to get her to do now when they were in bed…

  Billy. She knew she must make herself sit down and consider what was to be done about Billy. Sooner or later she would have to tell him about Leslie White, tell him, that is, that she had met this man who wanted her to go into business with him. That was as much as she would need to say, for now; it was also as much as she would dare to say. For the fact was she had accepted Leslie White's proposal-oh, my God, what a word to use!-his business proposal, she meant, to open a beauty parlor with him. It was all arranged. The premises was there already, over the optician's-he had talked to her about ninety-nine-year leases and ground rents and tenants' options until her head was spinning-and the shop fitters would be coming in any day now.

  Yes, it was all arranged, all agreed. One rainy January morning Leslie had taken her to a storage shed in Stoney Batter in order to get her opinion, so he said, on a doctor's trolley thing, a sort of high, narrow, flat couch on wheels, which some friend of his was selling and which would be ideal for doing massages on. The friend, a shifty-looking fellow in broad pinstripes who had the worst smoker's cough she had ever heard, went off and left them alone-had Leslie arranged that, too?-and something in the moment affected her, perhaps it was the sense of sudden intimacy that she felt, despite the damp and the gloom of the place, and before she knew it she was on the trolley in Leslie's arms, biting the back of her thumb to stop herself from crying out, and the trolley was moving on its wheels with every rapturous move they made. Afterwards she had pulled his coat over herself-that famous camel-hair coat!-because she was cold and because the champion cougher might come back at any minute. Leslie had got up, since there was not enough room on the narrow rubber mattress for them to lie side by side, and when he had fixed his clothes he lifted the coat by a corner so he could get a look at her. "My my," he said, grinning, "wouldn't the doc be delighted with you." It took her a moment to realize what he meant, and she turned her face aside so as not to let him see her blushing, and smiling, and twitched the coat away from him and wrapped h
erself up in it. "Snap snap," he said gaily, holding an invisible camera to his eye.

  She had to let some weeks go by before she could face Dr. Kreutz again. Yes, everything was changed. It was not just that she had seen the photographs-that, in a way, was the least of it by now-but there was the fact of her and Leslie, too. He saw it in her eyes, she could see him seeing it. What woman could hide the simple truth that she was in love? Thinking this, she paused. Was that what it was-love? The word had not entered her head before this moment. She softened. Why be surprised that she should think of love in Dr. Kreutz's presence? Had he not taught her about such things, the things of the spirit? What did it matter if he liked to take pictures of naked women? Perhaps it was part of the treatment, perhaps it was a way of helping those women by letting them see themselves as they were, in all their womanliness. Perhaps it did heal their spirits-who was she to say otherwise, she who had lain asprawl on that rubber mattress on the trolley in that dirty shed, and on other beds, on other days, with every fiber of her on fire under Leslie White's admiring gaze?

  Besides, it was Dr. Kreutz who was financing the setting up of the beauty parlor. Leslie had gone to him and asked for the money and he had agreed, as simple as that. Or so Leslie said.

  Now Dr. Kreutz made a pot of herbal tea and invited her to kneel with him on the cushions on the floor before the low table with the copper bow. By now it was almost spring, and through the window she could see black branches that were already budding and, behind them, a sky of nude white with scraps of cloud flying diagonally across it. She had a feeling of pent-up happiness that might burst out at any moment. She knew, of course, that there were things that could go wrong. It would take work and a lot of luck to keep the Silver Swan going at the rate that it had been going at so far-she could hardly keep up with the numbers of new customers coming in every week and was already thinking of when would be the time to hire an assistant-but she could not believe that between them, she and Leslie and Dr. Kreutz, they would not continue the success they had achieved so far. It was true that the Clip Joint had failed, but Leslie had explained how that had happened, and if she did not understand all the technicalities that did not mean his explanation was not the true one. What they had between them, Leslie and she-their love-would overcome any number of difficulties that might arise.