Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

He seems to slide all the way back to the door and, unlike Pond, straight through and off down the stairs. Nick closes the door and locks it.

He is dissatisfied with what has just happened. Not because of the loss of the books, which he had mostly finished, and could anyway buy for himself - for aesthetic reasons too, for as with several second hand works, they had been riddled with individualistic defacements, meaningless underlinings and circlings of words, and doodles in the margins, as if some feeble-minded student had employed them.

Nick lifts his notebook and turns to the beginning, examining the evidence of clearly ripped-out pages. Some of this is due to notes he wrote to himself then removed and binned. Some omissions represent false starts to that section of his writing, also binned. And some, obviously, the ones at the very front, mark where he tore out, with bored inattention, the jottings of the book’s previous owner. As the drawer-man had originally told him, they had seemed to be random dates, notes of places or times, or even incomprehensible directions. Nick, though he paid so little attention, had been aware of this at least. Yet they also had ended in the kitchen recycling bin with Nick’s other paper rejects and plastic water bottles. And all that has been long since collected, of course.

Nick glances across at his cabinet, at its shut doors. In there are the rest of the notebooks from the drawer, they too eviscerated of prior notations, plus the paper clips, pens, envelopes and so on. Such things are so useful for a writer. Even an intermittent and leisurely one who can afford to purchase them himself.

He had seen the drawer with its contents, just sitting there on the table in the lobby, on his way out to a Debby afternoon. Coming back, the drawer had still been there, so Nick had simply carried it up to his flat. Someone would have despoiled it, it might as well be him. There had been no computer certainly. That theft is not down to Nick, nor would it have been. The drawer though, once thoroughly unloaded, Nick had finally taken out to a larger bin on the main road, and left it there on the pavement. Maybe it was picked up too, by someone wanting a drawer…

Does any of this matter?

Will the drawer-man, who undoubtedly, and from the first probably, reckons Nick to be the guilty party, now mount a vendetta against him, possibly aided and abetted by the unseasonal June?

There is the problem of the piece of ivory as well, if it even was ivory.

God knew what it was and is, anyway, it had just been lying by the drawer when Nick had cleared it, dislodged by his plundering no doubt. It must just have been down among the envelopes, snuggled up like a blunted, squarish moon-bone, hiding from the light. Nick had left it there, on the table, forgotten. And then Laurence dislodged it again and next swiped it. Or had it swiped Laurence? Seeing he has since disappeared, so far without trace.

Sometimes he thinks of Angela and that he should call her, to apologise or comfort, something. But Nick recoils at the idea. He cannot help her anyway.

It occurs to him that when Laurence reappears, no one may even tell Nick about it.

Yet, if Laurence does not reappear, Nick assumes they will all want to tell him, invade him, drive him mad with it -Angie, Reenie, various others. And Pond. Of course, Mr Pond.

The night Serena-Reenie called him, Nick had been in Scotland. He was staying with an older woman, (around thirty, but he was then eighteen) who had invited him to Edinburgh and paid his expenses, and added a “gift”, an envelope type of gift.

She was a nice woman. Her name had been Sandy or Mandy or Candy - he could not, afterwards, recall. She had one of those smoke-grey mansions that stand like exquisite stony artefacts directly on the street, and must have mystically detached themselves from the bastion of Arthur’s Seat and flown down for company.

The house windows were small; they looked as if sheltering hot dark sunlight, from outside in the gloaming.

She took him to a folk club, very good music, and beautiful whisky - which as a rule Nick did not like, but this was like no drink he had ever had anywhere else, a wonderful dram. And Sandy-Mandy-Candy then bought him a bottle from a place below the club, a sort of cellar. Only after the phone call he forgot the bottle. Forgot all of it that was significant, including the woman’s proper name, or what she had looked like.

Was it four in the morning? Later? It was November then, too, and pitch dark, and anyway they were so far north.

His mobile rang out. Then, it had some tune on it, God knew what. He should have turned it off before bed. But the whisky, and the music, the sex even, had made him forget.

He crawled out of the covers - his friend did not wake - and went into the little passage shivering, to take the call.

Serena’s voice was like that of a feral lynx. It screeched and clawed.

“Who is this?”

“Me - me, you fool, you fucking fool - Oh Nick, oh Nick - she’s dead - she’s dead - she died - she’s dead…”

How old had Serena been then? If he was eighteen, then in her mid-twenties. Why had she behaved like that, lammed into him that way, not even half prepared him with that fruitless yet ominously alerting phrase: I’m afraid I have some bad news…

If she had loved Claudia at all during the past decade he could not say. She had never seemed to. She simply used Claudia, to further her, Serena’s, career, or to wheedle stuff from Joss that Serena herself had been unable to access.

But then, Nick felt he could not really judge.

He had since learned about women