J. Gregson - Die Happy

There was a long pause, during which she began to entertain the hope that he was giving the suggestion serious consideration. He rolled what was left of the generous helping of brandy round his glass and finally allowed himself a smile. ‘I wondered why we were having steak and new potatoes and cheesecake and our best Merlot. And all in midweek, too!’

‘You bastard!’ But there was more reluctant admiration than annoyance in the epithet. She grinned at him. ‘You knew all the time, didn’t you? And you just strung me along for all you could get.’

‘I thought it was you who was doing the stringing along,’ he protested mildly. ‘But I should be grateful to you really, for reviving skills that might have atrophied in me. It’s the way you lead a snout along, getting everything he has to give out of him before you fix on a price. I haven’t had to do that much since I reached the exalted heights of chief superintendent.’

She wasn’t sure she liked to be classed alongside police informers. ‘Was it so obvious?’

‘When the cheesecake followed the steak and the wine, it became so. When the brandy came in with the coffee, I thought I might as well see how far it went. I thought if I played my cards right and had a bit of luck, you might end up seducing me on the rug.’

‘Remember your age and don’t push your luck and your back, John Lambert. Just finish your brandy and then tell me you’ll join in that session on crime writing.’

‘No can do, I’m afraid. Not my scene, literary festivals.’

‘Why not? You’re surprisingly well read, for a copper. Probably more so than most of your audience will be.’

‘Shouldn’t that be “would be”? I’ve already said I’m not doing it.’ He hugged his brandy glass to his chest, like a child who feared that his treat might be removed.

She played her last card. ‘You can tell Marjorie Dooks then.’

‘No go again. It’s your committee. You can report back to it that you asked me to undertake the task as you said you would and I refused.’

‘Marjorie doesn’t accept no for an answer very easily. Everyone else on that committee seems to be achieving whatever is asked of them.’

She looked very downcast. She gazed at her feet and her head fell a little to one side. He was suddenly reminded of her as a nineteen-year-old, when some small disappointment had seemed for a moment like the end of her world. Before he knew the thought had formed itself in his head, he found himself saying, ‘I’ll ask Bert Hook about it. It might appeal to him, now that he’s an Open University B.A.’

Sometimes the instinctive reaction worked better than all the elaborate planning, Christine Lambert decided. Showing your disappointment always had more effect on men than women. Her daughters had always been able to sway this iron man of crime when they were cast down by some teenage setback. Perhaps men, even experienced men like John Lambert, were suckers after all.

Ros Barker looked at her subject critically, her head a little on one side, her eyes narrowing a little as she gazed intently at the naked woman who half-sat and half-lay on the chaise longue she had set up in her studio for this painting. ‘You need to look more relaxed. The last thing I want is someone who looks as if she’s struggling to hold a pose.’

‘Perhaps that’s because I’m struggling so hard to hold this pose,’ said Kate Merrick testily. ‘And if you don’t allow us to have a coffee soon the struggle might fail.’

For a few seconds, Ros appeared to ignore her completely, whilst she applied a few key brush strokes. It was the artist’s supreme moment of concentration, the instant of utter selfishness when nothing and no one else matters save the need to secure some effect that might otherwise escape forever. Then, with a relaxation of tension that she felt even in herself, she glanced at the little clock on the table to her right and said, ‘Is it really eleven o’clock? High time we had a coffee, I’d say.’

Kate eased herself gingerly into a sitting position, then stretched her legs gratefully. She stood up and moved with exaggerated stiffness to the kettle in the corner of the studio and extracted two beakers from the battered little cupboard on which it stood. She heard a delighted giggle at her robotic movements from behind her and was immediately pleased, despite her supposed resentment.

‘It’s getting warm in here now the sun’s climbing,’ said Ros, standing and looking at the world outside through the long window on the south wall of her studio.

‘Not if you’re a poor exploited model required to keep still for hours without a stitch on, it isn’t! Don’t you dream of putting that electric fire off, Madam Scrooge.’

Kate brought the two beakers of instant coffee across to the old sofa on the opposite side of the room from the chaise longue. Ros, after studying her painting keenly with her head tilted elaborately for a last moment, came and sat beside Kate, who had thrown her usual blanket around herself before she sat. Though they had moved only to the other side of the studio, work had been switched off for the moment, just as effectively as if they had moved from factory floor to works canteen.

‘Sometimes I think we should splash out on a professional model for you,’ Kate said presently. ‘You could then move her around as much as you liked, and I might escape pneumonia in the present and rheumatoid arthritis in later life.’

‘It’s the fate of the partner throughout the centuries. And the blessing too, of course. Rembrandt’s wife was immortalized because he couldn’t afford a professional model.’ Ros’s voice softened a little. ‘Or perhaps because he could convey his tenderness towards her in a way he could never have achieved with a professional model.’ She ran her hand lightly and affectionately down the slim thigh beneath the shabby blanket.

‘They weren’t called partners then, though. Wives or mistresses. I don’t know which ones were the luckier. Or the more exploited.’ Kate nibbled her ginger biscuit and took an appreciative sip of the hot coffee.

‘Yes. Exciting prospect for you, that. When I’m famous all over the planet, you could be one of the first partners to be immortalized in oils.’

‘I can hardly wait.’ A pause, during which Ros thought fondly of the curves beneath the blanket and the natural, unthinking grace with which Kate normally moved. Ros was long-limbed, and angular, with short-cut dark hair and a lean, strong-boned face. Attraction of opposites perhaps. Or simply coincidence: it didn’t do to analyse these things too thoroughly, when they were working so well.

Kate finished her coffee and gazed at the bottom of her beaker reflectively. ‘Do you want me to go away when Arthur Jackson comes here?’

‘Certainly not. I don’t go round proclaiming that we’re living together, because it’s no one’s business but our own. That doesn’t mean that I’m ashamed of it.’

Kate Merrick grinned, showing her sense of security, stretching deliciously beneath the blanket. ‘I didn’t say ashamed, stupid. That went out in the last century. I just thought you might not care to proclaim us to your mentor. He seems a very conventional man.’

‘He isn’t. It takes a lot of guts and a lot of cussedness to take a stand against the art establishment as he has. Most of the avant-garde still hate him. He won’t raise an eyebrow when he finds us together.’

‘Even when he finds his favourite protege is one of those bloody lesbians?’

That was a private joke between them, a phrase they had heard flung across a pub in their early days, before they’d decided they liked each other enough to live together and sleep together. Ros Barker smiled and said, ‘I’m sure I’m not his favourite protege. That’s probably some heterosexual girl who paints apples beautifully and smiles adoringly at him. He offered me some good advice and a little judicious support at an important stage of my life, that’s all. He might at some stage examine my paintings to see what effect a lasting sexual relationship has had upon them, but his interest will be purely aesthetic. That’s if he finds my work good enough to justify his interest in the future.’