Colleen McCullough - Sins of the Flesh

“Delia darling, this is my other half, Rufus Ingham. Rufus, this is Ivy’s friend Delia Carstairs. Isn’t she magnificent?”

“Don’t ever change!” Rufus breathed, kissing her hand. “That dress is gorgeous!” He drew her toward a striped Regency sofa and sat down beside her. “I have to know, darling—where do you buy your clothes?”

“The garment district in New York City,” she said, glowing, “but once I get them home, I pull them apart and tart them up.”

“It’s the tarting up does it every time. What an eye you have—totally individual. No one else could ever get away with that dress, but you conquer it like Merman a song.” He smiled at her, his eyes caressing. “Dear, delicious Delia, do you know anyone here?”

“Ivy and Jess, but I seem to have arrived ahead of them.”

“Fabulous! Then you belong to me. D’you see the decrepit old gentleman posing under the painting of Mrs. Siddons?”

Rapidly falling hopelessly (but Platonically) in love with Rufus, Delia studied the elderly, debonair man indicated. “I feel I ought to know him, but his identity eludes me.”

“Roger Dartmont, soon to sing the role of King Cophetua.”

“The Roger Dartmont?” Her jaw dropped. “I didn’t realize he was so—um—up in years.”

“’Tis he, Delicious Delia. God broke the mold into a million pieces, then Lucifer came along and glued him together again, but in the manner Isis did Osiris—no phallus could be found.”

Delia giggled. “Difficult, if your name is Roger.” Her gaze went past Roger Dartmont. “Who’s the lady who looks like a horse eating an apple through a wire-netting fence?”

“Olga Tierney—a wife, darling. Her husband’s a producer of Broadway plays, including the abortion we’re working on at the moment. That’s him, the one in black tie who looks like a jockey. They used to live in Greenwich, now they have one of the islands off our own Busquash Point.” Rufus’s mobile black brows arched. “It’s a gorgeous place—or would be, if Olga weren’t one of the beige brigade.” His voice dropped. “Rumor hath it that Bob Tierney is overly fond of under-age girls.”

“An island,” said Delia thoughtfully, “would be excellent.”

Something in her tone made Rufus’s khaki-colored eyes swing to Delia’s face, expression alert. “Excellent?” he asked.

“Oh, privacy, sonic isolation, all sorts,” she said vaguely.

“Delicious Delia, what does a ravishingly dressed lady with an Oxford accent do for a living in an Ivy League town?”

“Well, she might discuss Shakespeare with Chubb undergrads, or run a swanky brothel, or operate an electron microscope, or”—a wide grin dawned as she paused dramatically—“she might be a sergeant of detectives with the Holloman police.”

“Fantastic!” he cried.

“I’m not undercover, Rufus dear, but I’m not advertising my profession either,” she said severely. “You may tell Rha, but I would prefer to meet everyone else as—oh, the proprietress of that swanky brothel or that expert on Shakespeare. Once people know I’m a cop, they become defensive and automatically censor their conversation. Would you have been so frank if you’d known?”

A slow smile appeared. “For my sins, probably yes. I have a lamentable tendency to voice what I’m thinking—isn’t that well expressed? I’m a parrot, I collect ways of saying things. But seriously, mum’s the word. However, your desirability mushrooms with every new snippet of information you feed me. I love unusual people!” His face changed. “Are you here on business?”

She looked shocked. “Oh, dear me, no! I wouldn’t be here at all if I didn’t know Ivy. My police cases are as decrepit as Roger, I’m afraid, though I admit that a detective never doffs her deerstalker hat either. So when I hear something interesting, I file it in my mind. We have lots of old cases we can’t close.”

“Age,” he said with great solemnity, “is the worst criminal of them all, yet perpetually escapes punishment. Ah! Enter the Kornblums! Ben and Betty. She’s the one in floor-length mink, he’s the one with the knuckle-duster diamond pinky ring. Betty is the sole reason to ban air-conditioning—it enables her to wear mink indoors in August. It wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t addicted to two-toned mink—the spitting image of a Siamese cat.”

“Does she keep Siamese cats?” Delia asked.

“Two. Sun Yat Sen and Madame Chiang Kai Shek.”

“What does Ben do to earn diamond pinky rings?”

“Produce plays and movies. He’s another backer. They used to have a penthouse on Park Avenue,” Rufus said chattily, “but now they live in the Smith place—you know where I mean, tucked away inside a cleft of North Rock.”

Delia straightened. “The Smith place, eh? Hmm! Privacy galore. Has Mr. Kornblum any sordid secrets?”

“He fancies ponies way ahead of Siamese cats.”

“A gambler? An equestrian? A practitioner of bestiality?”

“Darling, you are delicious! The ponies he fancies are in the back row of the chorus.”

“I thought they were called hoofers.”

“No. Hoofers can dance well, they’re in the front row.”

“But Holloman isn’t rich in chorus girls.”

“That’s what Betty thought too. What she didn’t take into account was Holloman’s thousands of beautiful girls at various schools. Ben attends classes on everything from typing to dancing to amateur photography.”

The very large room was beginning to look populated; about twenty people were dotted around it engrossed in talk larded with laughter, witticisms and, Delia was willing to bet, gossip. They all knew each other well, though some on arriving behaved as if considerable time had gone by since last they saw these faces.

True to his word that she belonged to him, Rufus Ingham took Delia on a round of introductions, feeding her information so guilelessly that no one on meeting her had any idea that Rufus was steering the conversation to yield maximum results for a sergeant of detectives.

Perhaps due to her diminutive size, Delia wasn’t sure she could ever make a close friend of Rha Tanais in the same way she knew she could of Rufus Ingham. It was just too much constant hard work encompassing someone that big. Political cartoonists sometimes drew General Charles de Gaulle with a ring of cloud around his neck, and Rha inspired the same feeling in Delia. Whereas Rufus provoked emotions that shouted a friendship as old as time; having met him at last, she couldn’t imagine her life without him. Had Hank Jones been Rufus’s forty, he would have ranked with Rufus; how strange, that in the space of one short summer she should have met two men of great significance to her, when it hadn’t happened since her first days in Holloman. Women friends were essential, but men friends were far harder to find, as Delia well knew. Very happy, she let herself be introduced.

Simonetta Bellini (born Shirley Nutt) bowled Delia over. The principal model of Rha Tanais Bridal, she was tall, thin, and moved with incomparable grace; her genuinely Scandinavian-fair coloring lent her an air of virginal innocence even her skin-tight lamé tube of a dress couldn’t violate. She could wear a hessian sack, Delia decided, and still look like a bride.

“Fuck, a spoiled shindig,” she moaned as Rufus left to hunt fresh quarry.

“I beg your pardon?” Delia asked, bewildered.

“The creepy shrinks are coming. Rha says shindigs like this, the shrinks get to come, but they spoil the fun,” Shirl said. “They look at the rest of us as if we’re animals in a zoo.”

“Shrinks do have a tendency to do that,” Delia agreed, her antennae twitching. “Why do they have to be invited?”

“Search me,” Shirl said vaguely.