He felt worn out by the time he got home. He had lingered too long. It was past dusk. He had walked too many streets, sat on too many park benches and stared too long at nothing in particular. He sloughed off his coat, kicked off his shoes, draped his tie over the doorknob. The house was quiet. There was no sign of Clover but for the faint scraping sound of the gramophone stylus orbiting the final loop of a record. He pulled the arm back and turned off the power. Then he heard her voice. She was in the bathroom on the half-landing at the back. Still in the bathroom? He looked at his watch. He’d been gone the best part of twelve hours. She was hogging the bathroom, again.
He stomped up the stairs, fist clenched ready to hammer on the door. He stopped his hand, laid his palm flat on the wooden panel. Clover was singing to herself again – and not one of her Beatles’ songs – her voice filling the bathroom, echoing off tiles, seeping out onto the staircase with wafts of steam, following him up the stairs to his bedroom. He had not thought that she possessed such a voice, a clear, wonderfully controlled contralto. He had not thought she knew any song that was not bang up to date. This was old. The last century at least. He knew it well – it was an Irish folk song called ‘She Moved Through The Fair’.
My young love said to me
Your Mother won’t mind
And your father won’t slight me
For our lack of kind
And he stepped away from me
And this did he say
It will not be long love, till our wedding day.
He lay down on his bedroom floor, used his jacket for a pillow, closed his eyes and listened to the song push its way through the floorboards.
He stepped away from me
And moved through the fair
And fondly I watched him move here and move there
And he went his way homeward
With one star awake
As the last swan of evening moved over the lake.
The people were saying
No two were e’er wed
But one had a sorrow
That never was said.
He went away from me with his boots and his gear
And that was the last that I saw of my dear.
It was a sinister tale. He knew of two or three variants on the theme in English, which probably meant there were at least two or three dozen known to the likes of Cecil Sharpe or Percy Grainger and those fanatical turn-of-the-century collectors of folk music. It was a demon lover song. The lover seduces. Too late the seduced discovers that her lover is a cloven-hoofed demon, or simply dead to begin with. The last verse was a killer. Beautiful, stark and deadly.
I dreamed it last night
That my dead love came in
So softly he came, that his feet made no din
He laid his hand on me
And this he did say
It will not be long love, till our wedding day.
The words stopped. Clover continued the melody in scat. And as the words ceased the tune grew, the volume swelling, to the point where he opened his eyes almost certain of what he would see, her backlit in the doorway, wrapped in a scarlet bath towel, hair pinned up, stripped of make-up.
‘You OK?’
‘Yes. Just a bit tired I think.’
‘Wot you doin’ on the floor, then? You might as well stretch out on yer bed.’
He could not think of a lie. Occasionally this happened to him.
‘I was listening to your song. This end of the room’s right over the bathroom. I could hear you quite clearly. It was beautiful. You have a good voice. Where did you learn that song?’
‘My mum taught it to me when I was little.’
‘I didn’t know Val sang.’
‘If you ask me, there’s a lot you and my mum didn’t bother to find out about each other.’
‘Let’s not talk about your mum.’
‘Fine by me. Look, you ain’t ’alf lookin’ peeky. Is there anything I can get you? Cup o’ char? Is there anything you want?’
She stepped closer, the towel swept the floorboards and brushed against his shirt. She wafted it across his face. Playfully, he thought.
‘Well? Wotcher want?’
Was that a smile or a grin? She wafted the edge of the towel across his face once more. Talc. Nothing he could name. Something floral. He grabbed the end. Clover held the towel with both hands clutched at her sternum. Troy pulled the towel gently taut and she let go. The towel floated down, scarlet folds on the boards. Clover caught one corner before it could land – a broad red ribbon leading from him to her. Him in shirt and socks and trousers, her naked as she had been amid the ruins of Uphill Park.
‘You gettin’ up or am I gettin’ down?’
‘I haven’t the energy to get up.’
‘Troy, there’d better not be a two-letter word missing from that sentence.’
Her strength surprised him. His lack of substance surprised him. She took his hands in hers, pulled him to his feet and fell neatly back on the bed, head straight to the pillow, with Troy on top of her. She popped every button on his shirt, slid her hands down his chest, pulled at his zipper and, when both hands were wrapped around his risen cock, whispered in his ear.
‘Take your socks off.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve never made love to a bloke still wearin’ his socks and I don’t intend to start now.’
Troy could not tear them off quickly enough. Nor his trousers, nor his underpants, nor his flapping shirt. He found himself standing over her, cockstiff and crazy, gazing at her, dappled with patches of talcum powder – the small breasts, the stiff nipples, the tiny waist, a vertical slit of a belly button. She reached across and took his left hand, placed it between her legs. He slipped in a finger. She put her hand behind his neck, pulled him down and kissed him. Lips, nose, eyelids. Slowly he became aware that she was steering him. His lips drifting southward, across her throat, over one breast, in and out of the belly button – her hands gripping his head, her fingernails nipping his scalp, talcum powder dusting his lips. Yet he could not find the scent of her. The talc was freesia, the soap peach, but she was so fresh from the bath, so well scrubbed, he could not smell Clover. He had reached her thighs, with her fingers still locked in his hair. He took his left hand away and put his lips to her cunt.
He’d no idea what to do. He’d never done this before. No woman he’d ever been with had ever suggested it. He’d never dared to ask.