Martha Grimes - The Lamorna Wink

Melrose smiled. “Sounds it. But her trying to blackmail you, that must’ve been extremely painful.”

“It was, it was,” answered Colthorp, tossing back the rest of his whisky and rising to get another. When he motioned to Melrose’s glass, Melrose raised his and shook his head. “So she was on, you might say, her last legs?”

Colthorp sat himself, dug into the cushions at his back, and said, “Dennis put a private detective on her.”

Here was a treat! How he wished the omnipresent yet absent Dennis were with them now.

“Found out that most of those films were not just bad B films, but bad pornographic B films. Not that that’s something the Dirty Squad might cut you a look for, but she had form on a number of counts. Sada, it’s funny to think, was more impressed by her social standing when we were married than she was by the money. She adored being Lady Mead and being given place to when we entered somebody’s dining room. Funny how the frills and furbelows of aristocratic doings are lusted after by those who want to bring it down. Not that Sada wanted to, oh, no. It fit her to a ‘T’ even if she didn’t fit it. No, Sada’s nose would be much more out of joint than mine if that bill doing away with hereditary peers ever passed.”

This was interrupted by the cell phone’s brring again, insistent as an insect. Again, Lord Mead scooped it up from underneath the cushions, answered, listened, and sighed. “No. No. I do not want shares in a racehorse. Where he came in at Newmarket Saturday doesn’t interest me in the least… Dennis, for God’s sake, do not keep bothering me with your fly-by-night silver mines and horses and all the rest. Anyway, I’ve company here, good-bye.”

Colthorp was about to sign off when he brought the phone back to his mouth and said, “And for God’s sakes, get that helicopter out of my butterfly corridor!”

He had never known the sun to glare in London, but in this early evening it did, as if trying to deliver the knockout punch to the encroaching dusk. Coming out of it and into the museum evoked in Melrose a feeling of being submerged, dark and cool.

He had been once before to the Museum of Childhood when he’d come months ago to take Bea to dinner. That little restaurant-what was it? Perhaps she’d like to eat there again. Dotrice, that was it, the name of the restaurant. French, very classy, and she’d ordered steak and frites and talked about her “blue period.” Not her feelings but her painting. He had been surprised to discover just how good she was when he’d seen her paintings hanging on a wall of a Mayfair gallery.

Beatrice Slocum, he was told by a kindly elderly lady in rimless glasses, had gone out to the chemist’s but would be soon back. Melrose had the impression that this woman was someone who would be especially good with children. Indeed, she reminded him of a nurse he’d had as a small child…

There, he was doing it again, remembering. And he seemed prepared to be reminded of anything by anyone these days. He wondered if this lady truly was like his nurse, Miss Prescott. Nurses to their graves have gone … He gave his head a sharp little shake, almost afraid of himself and his penchant for nostalgia. It had to stop.

Melrose concentrated on the displays. The doll-houses were the first thing one saw upon entering. He’d thought before how charming they were, the bits of furniture reflecting the taste of a particular time, the tiny appointments, the little figures going about their business of housekeeping. The child in the photographs, the Bletchleys’ dead daughter, would have loved this. Quickly he banished that thought from his mind and walked up to the second level.

Here were the trains and games. Watching the long train move sluggishly around a track was a grave-looking boy of perhaps seven or eight. Melrose almost saw in his back the shape of the boy who’d been here over a year ago when he’d visited it. Nostalgia reinforced by déjà vu, that’s all he needed. He was simply too suggestible.

But, no, this was a different boy, watching as the train stopped between green fields, one with a cow cropping the grass, the other with a couple of horses, taking their ease at this ambiguous hour.

The boy exclaimed, “Hey! It’s s’posed t’stop at the station”-(pronounced by him “ stye -tion”). “So wot’s wrong wi’ it? I put in twenty p, me. Twenty p oney got it ’alfway round.”

Perhaps he thought Melrose a member of the museum staff. Or did children merely turn to the nearest grown-up to demand recompense for their losses?

Melrose said, “Let’s get it going again, then,” as he slotted a twenty-p coin into the slot. The train stuttered to a fresh beginning and started up. They watched it in silence, snaking its way past the little station, past crossings and through tunnels, and finally giving out again beside the field with the one cow.

“It ain’t supposed t’stop there, mister.” He threw Melrose a baleful glance, as if things had been jolly good before the coming of this adult.

“Well, it ain’t my fault, is it? Come on, let’s see the peep shows.”

The boy sighed. A peep show was a poor second to a train ride, but it was a free poor second, so the boy followed Melrose.

They were side by side and with their heads lowered, looking through the peepholes at the intricate interiors of the boxes, when Melrose heard a voice behind him.

“Oughtn’t to be showing that child the peep shows, it might give him ideas.”

Melrose turned. “Bea!” he exclaimed. She looked to him, at the moment, quite beautiful. The hair that had been dyed an awful eggplant purple when he’d first seen it was its own self again, browny-gold and warm like buttered toast. There was something of solace in it.

The boy, seeing what must have appeared to him an especially boring interlude between two adults, walked away, back over to the train.

Melrose saw the boy’s back was turned and, in one of the few ungallant acts of his life, took Bea by the shoulders, pushed her back against the row of boxes, and kissed her unmercifully. She did not protest.

Not until the fun was over, that is. When he finally set her free, she was all indignation. “Never would’ve thought it. Fancy you!”

“Which you do, I hope.”

“Never mind. Fancy doing that in a public place, and you an earl!”

“I’m not. And why do I find your outrage unconvincing?”

She shrugged. “Because you’re so pleased with yourself, I expect.”

He denied this, but she disregarded his denial as she walked away. Turning and seeing he still stood there, she said, impatiently, “Well, come on. I’m off.”

Melrose followed. “Where to?”

“Home. I’ve got some steak and potatoes fritz.”

Melrose was entranced. Home. “Not ‘fritz,’ it’s frites. ”

Bea ran down the wide stairs. “Don’t know why you bother with me, someone clever as you.”

Melrose smiled. He knew why.

“Home” was a roomy flat up three flights of stairs. No elevator. He would gladly have driven a Tin Lizzie up Pike’s Peak had Beatrice Slocum’s flat been at the top of it. Once inside, she flicked on the light and he flicked it off.

“There you go ag-”

He kissed her. It was a very long and lush kiss, and she joined in, after scant resistance.

“So,” he said, separating only long enough to say it, “where’re the potatoes frites ?”

“In the bedroom.”

“Mm.”

This time she kissed him. “With the steak.”

Her arms were still wrapped around him and her chin on his shoulder when he said, “Do you ever think of marriage?”