The Killings at Badger's Drift(75)

Chapter Ten

The Lessiters were at breakfast. Trevor, who had a mouthful of bile and an aching groin, took a ferocious poke at his egg which retaliated by spouting a great gobbet of sulphur yellow all over his tie. Judy laughed. He scrubbed at the tie with his napkin, glaring at his wife who was turning the pages of the Daily Telegraph in the manner most calculated to annoy, i.e. with languid indifference.

She was up to her tricks again. Locked door last night and, when he’d tapped, very softly so that Judy wouldn’t hear, Barbara had put her lips to the door jamb and hissed, ‘Go away, you randy little man. Don’t you ever think of anything else?’ He had walked up and down in his room for two hours after that, torn between lust and fury, cursing Judy’s presence in the house. At one moment he had even thought of dragging a ladder out of the garage, climbing up to his wife’s window and breaking in. God - she’d have known about it if he had. Tears of self-pity sprang to his eyes. He recalled the time he had spent in her arms only forty-eight hours ago. Trick or treat, she’d whispered. Both had been equally enthralling. It’d been almost like the night before their wedding. He realized now what a fool he was. How she’d always used sex to lead him round, like some pathetic bull calf with a ring through his nose. Well, two could play at that game. Just wait till it was time for her next dress allowance. Or a new subscription to that rapacious health club. She could bloody well whistle for it.

Judy Lessiter stirred her coffee and stared dreamily out of the window. She wore the dress she had bought from High Wycombe the evening before. The cloth was a grey and cream harlequin pattern and the dress had a white ruff. ‘Frames your face a picture,’ the salesgirl had said. Judy’s absurd legs were encased in new pale grey tights. She had also lashed out on some Rive Gauche and a box of eye shadows which she had applied, rather clumsily, before coming down. She was re-running, as she had done all night long, the events of yesterday afternoon.

At one o’clock it had stretched, a lonely space to be filled, until teatime. At five past one, fortified with a small sherry, she had rung Michael Lacey, reasoning that it had been over a week and he had said he wanted to paint her and what had she got to lose anyway? To her surprise and delight he had immediately agreed to come over. Even saying, ‘I was just going to ring you.’

She had taken a quiche out of the freezer, popped it in the microwave, had a quick bath and scrambled in and out of three dresses. She had even experimented with some of Barbara’s makeup. Michael had arrived half an hour later with a sketch pad and promptly told her to go and wash her face.

She took lunch out into the garden and he spent the next two hours drawing in a rapid but detached manner whilst she tried to keep still and refrain from looking at him all the time. He threw an awful lot of stuff away. Not angrily, screwing them up and hurling them from him, but shedding them as impersonally as a tree sheds leaves. By four o’clock there was a little sea of the stuff around his ankles and half a dozen sketches that he put in a portfolio. She had made some tea then and they had drunk it and eaten ginger cake sitting on the wooden seat that ran all round the giant cedar.

She said, ‘Can I have one of these?’ picking up a discarded sketch.

‘No.’

‘Oh but Michael’ - glancing at the paper - ‘it’s lovely.’

‘It’s awful. They all are. Promise me you’ll burn them. Or put them in the dustbin.’

She nodded sadly and poured out some more tea. He picked up his pad and a few minutes later handed her a sketch. ‘You can keep this one.’

It was all there. The mournful curve of her lips, her beautiful eyes, clumsy fingers on the teapot, the sturdy yet submissive line of the neck. He had signed it neatly M.L. It was so precise and so cruel. She felt her throat tighten in prelude to tears and, knowing that nothing would annoy him more, blinked them away hard.

‘Hey Jude . . .’ he sang softly, ‘don’t be afraid . . .’ He put his cup on the grass and touched her arm. ‘You ought to get out of this place. Away from that miserable pair.’

She gulped her tea. ‘Easier said than done.’

‘Oh I don’t know. When I start my European junketings I shall need a totally subservient dogsbody cum model. I might take you along.’ And then he kissed her. Full on the lips.

Judy closed her eyes. She smelt the cedar needles and the sweetness of ginger, felt each individual moist cake crumb on her fingertips, heard a blackbird sing. The kiss lasted a millionth of a second. And a hundred years. Even as she thought I shall remember this moment all my life it was over.