Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

so. By then she did look sleepy, as if just woken from the deeper sort of catnap. “Isn’t it a lovely afternoon?”

He bent over her and kissed her forehead.

Nick had seen something only ever glimpsed before during one of her films. The luminous last shine under her eyes of tears.

He wanted to say, What is it? But clearly she did not want him to say it, or see it, preferably. And anyway, he knew.

Nick had a sudden vision of finding some venomous plant in the copses behind the house, putting it in one of Laurence’s endless vodkas. But such thoughts were histrionic and immaterial.

“You look lovely,” Nick said. “Dewy-eyed.”

“Oh, that. I had… I had a sad dream. Can’t remember what it was. Never mind that.” She sat up and swung her long legs, in a ruffle of the red skirt, off the chair, standing with an ease and elegance plenty of women ten years younger would have envied. “Let’s go for a walk along the river.”

So they went for a walk, arm in arm.

For three years he had been taller than she.

But he had loved her at four years old when she had swayed above him like a slender, silver, living tower.

They saw a water-vole, he always recollected that, busily splashing by the bank. And they started to make up bits of nonexistent plays, and to invent jokes, and laugh.

He listened to her laughter. It was a young woman’s laughter.

They were down among those fungus-nurturing copses, in the green shade, when she said, staring off along the river, “I’ll have to veil the mirrors, Nick. With soft white gauze. Look through that. Or do you think a metal mirror would be best? The ancient Romans found them very flattering, I hear. And Elizabeth 1st did too. They don’t show lines, you see. They keep one young, at least in one’s own eyes.”

“You are young, Claudia.” But how mature he sounded, and of another era, and he had no problem with that.

They stood there hand in hand.

“No, darling love, I am not young, I am getting old. I must veil my mirrors. Better safe than sad.”

And that little phrase of hers, which later he would find he too sometimes used instead of the more normal ‘better safe than sorry’, that little phrase this time twisted in his heart.

He had always been in love with her. Deeply and enduringly, in love. Not Oedipally, not sexually, that element had never clouded and muddled his regard, nor hers. Other women were for sex, even for fondness, affection, but never to be in love with. He had never ‘fallen in love’. There was no room for it; he was in love already. Perhaps from the moment he left her body, and then they put him into her arms, and he gazed blindly and still saw her. Or even before that. From the moment he entered her womb. From then.

He said, by the river in the green shade, “Did that fucking prat Laurence say some stupid thing…”

“Yes, darling. To both your statements.”

“He’s a moron. He’s wrong.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But who cares anyway? I didn’t want to do another movie anyhow. It was just that Torvind was all up for it. I’d have had to go to Hungary. I’m too lazy now.”

The rest of the day went in the usual fashion. Laurence behaved as if nothing at all had occurred. As indeed did Claudia. But she was an actor.

Next day she was light-heartedly going to a lunch party in London, and travelled in with Nick to see him off on the train to the airport. She seemed untouched. She had forgotten. Such dross was irrelevant to her.

And Nick went to Paris and returned and took up the brief deadly job someone had given him (to shut Joss up mostly) and then he met the Scottish woman, Sandy or Candy or Mandy. The weather had altered by then. The prolonged sherry glow of October had been dispersed. Darkness and cold hosed Britain off disapprovingly. And Edinburgh was like the inside of a freezer, only ameliorated by whisky, sex and song. Until the phone sounded its own inane little tune. “…You fool, you fucking fool - oh Nick - she’s dead - she’s dead - she died - she’s dead.”

Less than a month between that Indian summer lawn, and the winter of the heart.

That was how long it had taken.

Nick, that sunny afternoon, had briefly dreamed of a mushroom murder for his brother. But Laurence was by far the more practical and skilful assassin. Not even with a flattering word, but a cruel and insensitive plethora of them.

It had taken only those transitory days for the blade to sink right into her, to clog her sparkling veins and arteries, to form and fire the instantaneous spark of aneurism upward into her brain. Laurence by then had reached Ireland. The perfect alibi.

And Nick had never spoken of it to another, not even to himself, even once his own mind had caught up to it and properly comprehended, years after, comprehended, that was, not in any abrupt revelation. But only in some slow, irresistible drip-drip-drip of life upon the stone of the intellect, wearing away as age wore away all the outer layers.

Laurence had killed Claudia. It had cost him nothing. Laurence did not even know.

11

An ivory moon, dusted with faint blue patterns, sails above the cul-de-sac and, by the time he enters the flat, is positioned almost centrally in the window. Nick stands a while in the dark watching the moon, its ascent seeming almost visible up the cobalt wall of the dusk.

He has been to meet Sonia.

They had lunch today, then sex in the small hotel, one of several Sonia knows.

He has never seen her flat. She always excuses that by saying it is too much of a mess, and even she sees it as little as possible.

Everything went as it always has, satisfyingly well. He did not mention anything else, but finally, when they