Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

Unlike his other ‘regular’ lovers, Sonia has never given Nick a personal number. He rarely needs to call any of them anyway, they call to make dates, or when arrangements fluctuate. Or, like Jazz, perhaps, when they become unobtainable.

Sonia’s work-number however, with its personal extension, soon puts him in touch with her.

“Nick! What a lovely surprise! Or is it? Do say you don’t have to stand me up next week.”

“No, that’s fine, Sonia. I’m looking forward to it. I just wanted to ask you something.”

“Yes, please. Just like last time - with the little extras. That was - nice.”

They laugh.

“I’m afraid this is something else. Do you know a woman called Kit?”

“Kit…” Sonia sounds blank. “Does she have a second name?”

“She gave it as Price.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“No. The reason I’m asking, she called me and said you had mentioned me. She wanted to meet me.”

“Christ,” says Sonia, thoughtfully. “I take it you mean I’d blabbed about our - er - arrangement.”

“I gathered you had recommended me very flatteringly.”

“No, Nick. I don’t - wouldn’t - do that. I mean, I certainly could, very very flatteringly. I just would not. Certainly not to someone I don’t think I even know, if you see what I mean.”

Nick pragmatically describes Kit. Her beauty he classes, for Sonia, as “good-looking”. Sonia listens.

“She could be anyone, apart from the hair. I really don’t know any really well-peroxided blondes - oh, apart from my mum, but she’s knocking fifty. But you met her, then, this Kit?”

She sounds now - is she jealous? Sonia is well aware that Nick sees many women, all on the same ‘professional’ if friendly terms as herself. Just this time though, there is a definite note in her voice.

“I’m afraid so. If it was a trick, I fell for it. She did describe you, and the place where you work. All that was accurate enough. I assumed she was bone fide.”

“God, Nick. Well - I really haven’t a clue. Are you OK? Did you…?”

“Oh, we just had a drink, to check each other out. But I wanted to run this past you before it goes any further.”

“Right. Well, sorry. I don’t know.”

“No.”

Sonia abruptly says, “Oops. Rog Ratface is just peering into next door’s cubicle. He’ll be in here in a moment - have to go, babes. See you next week, lover. Can’t wait.”

Nick is unsure if he quite believes Sonia. She had seemed a little flustered and then too cool - she has been an actor, so can still act if she has to. Lying? Maybe. If she knows Kit, perhaps they had a few drinks, and the subject of Nick spilled out with other chick-chat. Now Sonia regrets it - both the glamorous Kit getting her teeth into him, and also breaking what both Sonia and he have assumed so far to be a confidential arrangement.

He has no phone number for Kit. (He had noted it was withheld when she called him yesterday. But why not? He was a stranger.) On the other hand he knows, as they say, where she lives. Is that taking this right past sane limits? It is probably a coincidence, after all, that he was with her when Persons Unknown penetrated the flat.

Nick thinks suddenly of the night he had gone to meet Jazz and waited for her, and how she had not arrived. He had been away then two, three hours. Coming back he had no sense of anyone’s having been here. But had they? If they were able to break in, then why not then? The difference being only that, on the first occasion, they had left no deliberate markers of their intrusion…

No, that was crazy.

But it was all a little crazy by now, was it not?

At seven o’clock that evening Nick goes out. He is half way down the stairs when he wants childishly to go back and clamp some non-existent metal mesh across the flat’s main door.

He is actually in the lobby when it occurs to him they must have broken in down here too. Unless another tenant let them in. Someone then may have seen them, or at least spoken to them via the door intercom. And, of course, promptly forgotten.

His notebook, the one they had replaced face down and from which they had abducted the pen, had not been damaged. His story and the notes were intact. He had not expected anything else - or had he? Had he actually expected, picking up the book finally and inspecting it, that they would have crossed through each page, even smeared there some of the human muck they had not utilised elsewhere. Defacing his words. Rubbing out what he had created. Aware that this, in every ordinary way less than all else, was the only thing of value?

Nick takes the tube, gets out at Marylebone, and walks behind Harley Street to the Victorian lamplit Georgian houses where Kit Price, if so she is, had let him into her basement rooms.

He recalls the house exactly. A pair of huge trees lour over the gateway, the ones he had registered as so cold and hard, made of obsidian not bark. In tonight’s darkness they are only winter trees.

Reaching the steps he looks down at the doorway. There is a name above the bell. He fails to remember that as being there before, the name. But very likely he only took no notice. He knew her name, of course. Then.

Reaching the steps’ bottom he reads the name. He feels no startlement. J.P. Franks.

Nick knocks with the iron knocker.

Dimly, through a narrow stained glass pane, he can make out a distant muffled light. But that may mean nothing. She -or whoever this is - should be home by now. But then, they could be having a few drinks before returning, spilling secrets, foisting themselves on reluctant siblings in order to hide things, breaking into other flats…

Footfalls. Someone to open the door.

But the door does not