Ivoria by Tanith Lee (uplifting novels .txt) 📕

Angela had found Stewart through the classifieds at the back of a sex magazine. Apparently Laurence liked to buy these sometimes, he never made a secret of it. Though why he needed them, she had told Stewart with a swift jettison of all secrecy, was beyond her. It seemed to her he went to bed with practically every women he had dealings with, even with her, (Angela) she added sourly, if nothing more tempting was on tap.

Stewart and she discussed how their relationship would go. Neither, at that juncture, anticipated it would last beyond a few weeks at most. Just enough time for her to get her own back on Laurence. And thereafter to reap the inevitable rewards.

But it did not turn out like that. Things changed.

Stewart was already (nominally) married. This prolonged hardship, and its prior living together, had dragged through almost twenty-eight years, and produced two children. One a male sponger, previously and again currently living on benefit, and ousted from the family home only by parental break-up; the other an hysterical female, who had finally gone to live in Birmingham with a petty crook called Sinbad. By the time of meeting Angela, Stewart had not seen either his wife or his children for over four years. He had had occasional women during the interval. Nothing permanent. Angela was different.

Not only was she, at least to Stewart, very attractive, but a cut above what he was used to - including his wife. Angela read books, too, as Stewart had and did, liked films (or movies as now one was obliged to call them) also as Stewart did. That she was knowledgeable in some areas where he was not did not bother Stewart. He liked to find out new things. It worked the other way also. For Stewart knew plenty Angela did not, and when he thought it sensible he let her in on it.

“You remind me, Stew, of Bogart,” she said to him one afternoon in late October. “Playing Marlowe,” she suggested.

“I was named after Stewart Granger,” Stewart said. He smiled.

“No, you’re much more like Bogart. Although actually better than Bogart, though I love him. After all you’re not on film. You’re real.”

“That makes you the real Bacall then,” he said.

Angela laughed. They had been sitting in the Lewis sitting room, a huge space with vanilla walls and amber furnishings. “I wish.”

Laurence was away for two weeks at the dig in the north - Coreley, the place was called. Here some farmer had unearthed part of a Roman villa. But, (as Angela had now found out) additionally Laurence was seeing a couple of girls there, one belonging to BBC personnel, the other to the archaeological group. He had spent a long weekend with one at her house in Manchester, and another weekend with one at a pub-hotel in the Dark Hills area. Angela had seen photos of both women, both were fairly judged young and pretty. But when Stewart and she discussed it, he told Angela, from the evidence, the archaeology type seemed to him too masculine, while the personnel girl had sounded slightly mentally deficient.

Angela-Bacall offered Stewart-Bogart another drink.

“I’d better not. The car.”

“Do you have to be somewhere?” she asked, leaning back and gazing at him. Her eyes looked nearly golden in the low slanting sunlight.

“Nowhere special.”

“Stay to dinner,” she said. “There’s lots to eat. I could do with the company. And we have six spare bedrooms,” she playfully added. “You wouldn’t have to sleep in the conservatory.”

It went without saying, long before dinner, he and she were in the seventh bedroom, which normally she shared with her unfaithful husband. It was a great success, this. And it was now much more than liking, sex, or regard. Tenderness seemed to have complicated the picture. Or augmented it.

In the morning they had begun to talk about other things, things that might happen once Laurence had been ditched and stripped of a suitable Angela-enhancing pay-off.

Stewart had never minded the idea she should be rich. He thought frankly she deserved it. On the other hand, now he too might fully profit by it, a sort of interested expectation started to manifest in him. They both knew, even with a private investigator recording all of Laurence’s adulteries, divorce might be a messy and humiliating procedure for her. And Laurence, she was sure, would try to fight her. She felt he approved, she told Stewart, of taking the licence to fuck whoever he desired, but keeping loyalty as his excuse - even loyalty to a frigid vindictive spouse - to prevent any liaison becoming permanent.

Of course, Angela was not frigid. Stewart by then knew that extremely thoroughly.

Vindictive though by then she probably was.

It was however Laurence’s last affair - the one with the girl Nick knew as Kit, or Kitty - that caused Angela’s full malice at last to bloom.

“But - for Christ’s sake, Stew - look at this photo - she’s exactly like his bloody mother. Claudia Martin - have you heard of her?”

“Yes, I have. I’ve seen her too, on screen.” Stewart’s parents had been great cinema addicts.

“Laurence hated Claudia. He loathed the woman. He was always complaining about her. He said she was the worst woman he ever knew and a wonder she hadn’t put him off all women for life - some fucking chance - but now he’s screwing her double?”

“Not quite her double, surely?”

“As near as. Come on. What do you think? Bloody, bloody hell!” Angela shouted. (Stewart was not thrown by her temper. He knew well enough how to handle volatility of all kinds.) “He is disgusting. I wish he was dead. I’d like to kill him. I’d pay to have him killed.”

Stewart had removed the photograph before Angela could deface it, then waited calmly. He brought her another drink, and held her when she started to cry.

In the end, he said comfortingly, “But you don’t mean that, do you, Angie? About killing