John Davis - Unofficial and Deniable

‘What?’ Josephine asked. ‘What’s the other thing?’

‘Nothing,’ Harker smiled.

‘What?’

‘No, it’s unimportant.’

‘Please.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Well, as that’s decided why don’t we go upstairs and have a decent bottle of champagne to kill the germs in that beer?’

Josephine took both his hands and squeezed. ‘Thank you for helping me!’ she said. ‘I’m so excited. But I think I’d better fly now, I’ve got so much work to do if I’m going to take full advantage of your help, you’ve got me all fired up. And I can tell by the twinkle in your eye that if I stay for a bottle of celebratory champagne we’ll end up in bed.’ She pointed her finger to his nose: ‘Platonic friendship only!’

He grinned. ‘Absolutely. So let us seal the deal with that bottle of champagne.’

They had a lovely time that long hot summer of 1988.

Mostly she slept at his place. Before dawn she crept out of bed so as not to wake him, pulled on her tracksuit, shouldered her small backpack, donned her crash-helmet, tiptoed out, unlocked her bicycle and set off up the quiet canyons of Manhattan. She rode the sixty blocks to her apartment as fast as she could to get the maximum benefit from the exercise while the air was comparatively unpolluted. Soon after sunrise she was at her desk, chomping through an apple and two bananas as she peered anxiously at her computer screen, marshalling her thoughts, picking up the threads from last night. By lunchtime she had done about a thousand words: she changed into a leotard, pulled a tracksuit over it, stuffed some fresh underwear into her backpack and rode her bike flat out across town to her dance class at the Studio: for the next forty minutes she pranced around with thirty other women of various shapes and sizes in a mirrored loft, working up a sweat under the tutelage of Fellini, a muscle-bound bald gay who volubly despaired of ever making a dancer out of any of them. For the next half hour she had her first conversation of the day while she showered before adjourning to the health bar for a salad and colourful dialogue about boyfriends, husbands, bosses, work, fashions, waistlines. By two-thirty she was cycling back across town to knock out another five hundred words. At four-thirty she permitted herself the first beer of the day to try to squeeze out another two hundred words. At about five-thirty she hit the buttons to print and telephoned Harker at his office. ‘The workers are knocking off, how about the fat-cats?’

‘Okay, want me to pick up something?’

‘I’ll pick up a couple of steaks.’

‘I’ll get ’em, just you ride carefully, please.’

By six-thirty she was pedalling downtown to Gramercy Park, zipping in and out of traffic. She let herself into the apartment complex, locked up her bicycle in the archway and strode across the courtyard to the rear building. She let herself into his ground-floor apartment. ‘I’m home …’

It worried Harker, her riding that bicycle in rush-hour traffic: he didn’t mind her cycling in the early morning, but New York traffic in the evening gave him the willies – and she rode so fast. Once she did have an accident, skidded into the back of a braking car, took a bad fall, sprained her wrist and was nearly run over, but she was only concerned about her goddam bike. He offered to fetch her every evening in his car, he even offered to have a cycle-rack fitted so she could take the machine with her and cycle back to her apartment in the morning – but no, she insisted she needed the exercise both ways, ‘after all we drink.’

‘You’re in magnificent condition; go to a gym if you need more exercise.’

‘Gyms are so boring. Aerobic classes are boring. But riding a bike is a little adventure each time, you see people and things. That’s why I like dancing, expressing yourself in motion, letting it all hang out …’

She was in very good condition but, yes, they did drink a good deal. Like most soldiers, Harker was accustomed to heavy drinking to unwind, and now that there was no combat he could unwind as much as he liked. Similarly, like most writers, Josephine drank to unwind.

‘I spend my entire working day alone, without colleagues, without anybody to talk to except myself, nobody to seek advice from, and by the end of the day I’m pretty damn sick of myself and I want a bit of fun.’

Josephine redecorated Madam Velvet’s dungeon, installed subdued lighting, put plants around the Roman-style whirlpool bath, scattered imitation bearskin rugs on the cement floor, stocked the ornate bar, filled the prisoners’ cage with colourful imitation flowers; she even hung some kinky whips, chains and leather boots from the ringbolts in the wall. She brought in two armchairs, a television set with a video-player – and, in the corner, some more up-to-date gymnasium equipment. In one piece of daunting machinery the manufacturers had managed to squeeze every artefact for the torturous development of the muscular system.

‘Everything you can get in a well-run gym, but in the privacy of your own home, to quote the advertisement.’

Harker looked at the gleaming contraption. ‘Is it safe?’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘Shouldn’t it be fenced off to protect visitors? Shouldn’t we be wearing hard hats like those politicians on television? What’s this costing me?’

‘It’s your birthday present!’

Every day he worked out before going to Harvest House; and he found it a turn-on to watch her sweating on the machine. He bought himself a mountain bike like Josephine’s and on weekends they rode in Central Park and around Manhattan Island, sometimes across the Hudson River into New Jersey. In the fall they took a week off work and rode into upstate New York to see the riotously beautiful autumn colours. They rode almost five hundred miles in seven days and when they returned to Manhattan they were so glowing with health they did not want to stop.

‘Then let’s not. Let’s say to hell with work and just keep going all the way to Florida …’

That night, lying in the hot whirlpool bath in Madam Velvet’s dungeon, sipping cold wine, she said, ‘Know what I want to do one day? Have a farm. Maybe only twenty acres, but in beautiful country like where we’ve just been, with a tumbling stream and some forest and pastures for grazing a few horses and a cow or two, and a big pond for ducks and geese who’ll all have names, and a few chickens to give us eggs. And the horses will be mares so we can breed good foals, and we’ll have a tractor so we can grow alfalfa for them. And we’ll exhibit our animals at the livestock fairs and win prizes.’ She smiled. ‘I love New York, it’s so stimulating, but really I’m a country girl.’ She added, ‘Our house won’t be very big, more like a cottage really, because I don’t like housekeeping, but it’ll be very pretty. And my study will be upstairs, so I have a view of the pastures and the pond while I write.’

It was a pretty thought. ‘Well,’ Harker said, ‘we can achieve all that, but what about my work?’

‘Well,’ Josephine said reasonably, ‘you’ll be able to do a great deal of your publishing work at home, of course, but our country place will be close enough to Manhattan for you to be able to drive down once or twice a week so you can keep your finger on Harvest’s pulse – that’ll be no sweat, particularly if you have a chauffeur. Daddy’s got two, neither of them have enough to do and he’s promised me the use of one of them if I move closer to him upstate.’

In the late autumn Josephine decided it was time to take Harker up to Massachusetts to meet her father. The country was beautiful. The gates to the Valentine property loomed up majestically against green pastures, a winding avenue of old oaks led up to an imposing mansion, the walls covered in ivy. Harker switched off the engine outside the ornate front door.