Elizabeth George - In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“To go out on dates.”

“You could call them dates: dinner, the theatre, a gallery opening or business party when someone wants a nice-looking woman on his arm. They pay me for that. And they pay me for sex as well. And depending on what I do to them when it comes to sex, they pay me quite a lot. More than I would ever have imagined possible for fucking a relative stranger, to be honest with you.”

The words were like bullets. And he reacted as he would have done had she fired a volley through his body. He went into shock. Not the normal sort of shock when one's system has undergone a physical trauma like a motor accident or a fall from a barn roof, but the sort of shock that shatters the psyche so that one can take in only a single detail and that detail is usually the least dangerous to one's peace.

So what he saw was her hair, how the light was behind it, and how it shone through individual strands so that she looked like an earthbound angel. But what she was telling him was far from angelic. It was foul and disgusting. And she continued to tell him, and he continued to die.

“No one forced me into it,” she said as she took a boiled sweet from her bag. “The escort stuff. Or the other. The sex. It was my decision once I saw the possibilities and once I knew how much I had to offer. I started out just having drinks with them. Dinner, sometimes. Or the theatre. All on the up and up, you know: a few hours of conversation and someone to listen, to reply if they wanted, and to look starry-eyed otherwise. But they always asked-every one of them-if I would do more. At first I thought no. I couldn't. I didn't know them, after all. And I always thought… I mean, I couldn't imagine doing it with someone that I didn't actually know. But then one of them asked if he could just touch me. Fifty pounds for putting his hand in my knickers and feeling my bush.” A smile. “When I had a bush back then. Before… You know. So I let him and it wasn't half bad. It was rather funny, in fact. I started laughing-this was inside, not openly, mind you-because it seemed so… just so silly: this bloke-older than my dad, he was-breathing heavy and going all teary-eyed because he had his hand in my crotch. So when he said Touch me back please, I told him that would be fifty pounds more. He said Oh God, anything. So I obliged. One hundred pounds for feeling his willie and letting him poke round my bush with his fingers.”

“Stop.” He'd finally managed the words.

But she was eager to make him understand. They were friends, after all. They'd always been friends. They'd been mates from the moment they'd met in Bakewell: she a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with an attitude and a strut to her walk that had always said I'm open to anything only he hadn't seen that until this moment, and he nearly three years her senior, home from university for the holidays and consumed with worry about his father's drinking and a house that was falling down round their ears. But Nicola hadn't seen his worries then. She'd seen only an opportunity for some fun. Which she'd taken happily. He understood that now.

“What I'm trying to explain is that it's a way of life that works for me at the moment. It won't always, of course. But it does today. And because it does, I'm grabbing it, Jules. I would be every sort of fool if I didn't.”

“You've gone bloody mad” was his numb assessment. “London's done this to you. You need to come home, Nick. You need to be with friends. You need help.”

She looked at him blankly.

“It's obvious, isn't it? Something's wrong. You can't be in your right mind and be selling your body night after night.”

“Several times a night, frequently.”

He'd clutched at his head. “Jesus, Nick… You need to talk to someone. Let me find a doctor, a psychiatrist. I won't tell anyone why. It'll be our secret. And when you've recovered-”

“Julian.” She drew his hands from his head. “There's nothing wrong with me. If I thought I was having relationships with these men, there'd be something wrong. If I thought I was on the path to true love, there'd be something wrong. If I was trying to avenge a wrong or hurt someone else or live in a fantasy, I'd need to be carted to the madhouse straightaway. But that's not how it is. I'm doing this because I enjoy it, because I'm paid well, because my body has something to offer men, and while it's silly to me that they'd pay me to get it, I'm perfectly willing to-”

He'd hit her then. God forgive him, but he'd hit her because he was desperate to make her stop. So he struck her in the face with a hard, closed fist, and her head flew back and hit the window.

Then they stared at each other, she with her fingertips at the point where his knuckles had met her face, he with his left hand holding those knuckles and in his ears a high, loud singing like the whining of car tyres caught in a skid. And there was nothing to say. Not a single word to excuse what he'd done, to excuse what she was doing to both of them with the choices she was making and the life she was living. Still, he'd tried.

“Where did this come from?” he'd asked hoarsely. “Because it had to come from somewhere, Nick. It's not how normal people live.”

“A nasty skeleton in the closet, d'you mean?” she'd replied lightly, fingers still at her cheek. Her voice was the same, but her eyes had changed, as if she was seeing him differently. Like the enemy, he'd thought. And he'd despaired right to the soles of his feet because he loved her so. “No, Jules. I haven't got any convenient excuses. No one to blame. No one to accuse. Just a few experiences that led to other experiences. Just exactly as I told you. First an escort, then a brief little grope and feel, then…” She smiled. “Then on from there.”

He read the truth of who she was in that instant. “You must despise us all. Men. What we want. What we do.”

She'd reached for his hand. It was still clenched and she unclenched it. She raised it to her lips and kissed the knuckles that he'd used to bruise her. “You are who you are,” she said. “Julian, it's the same for me.”

But he couldn't accept the simplicity of that statement. He railed against it. And he railed against her. And he determined to change her no matter the cost. She would see reason, he'd decided. She would get help if that's what it took.

She'd got death instead. A fair trade, some would argue, for what she offered life.

Julian felt numb as he packed his mountain rescue equipment away in its haversack. His mind was swarming with memories, and he was willing to do just about anything to silence the voices in his head.

Distraction arrived in the person of his father, who toddled along the first floor passageway just as Julian was placing his haversack into the old mule trunk. Jeremy Britton clutched a glass in one hand, which was no surprise, and a fan of brochures in the other, which was. He said, “Ah. M'boy. Here you are, then. Have you a minute for your dad?”

His speech was clear, which caused Julian to eye his fathers drinking glass curiously. The colourless liquid suggested gin or vodka. But the glass was large enough to hold at least eight ounces of fluid, and since it was three-quarters empty and since Jeremy would have never splashed so meagre an amount into a glass whose volume could have held more, and since he wasn't slurring his words, it could only mean that the glass didn't hold either vodka or gin at all. Which in turn had to mean… Julian rattled his own head mentally. God, he was losing it by leaps and by bounds.

“Sure.” He did his best not to eye the glass or to sniff its contents.

Jeremy smiled, lifted the glass, and said, “Water, Julie. The old local aitch-two-and-oh. I'd nearly forgotten the taste of it.”