He awoke on the hearth rug. Gas fire hissing soporifically. Clover looking at him in the pink light of the flame.
‘You din’t take your pill.’
‘Forgot.’
‘Forgot?’
‘Maybe I’ll sleep without it tonight. Make a change.’
‘Can I have it if you don’t want it?’
‘Not a matter of “it”. There’s plenty. If you can’t sleep, take one.’
She dashed to the bathroom, returned with a glass of water and a jar of his pills. She sat cross-legged, naked, on the rug, and tipped a couple of dozen into her hand.
‘One’s enough,’ he said.
‘You got hundreds.’
‘Not hundreds. A hundred. Fifty in that jar, fifty in the other.’
‘She wrote you a ’script for a hundred!’
She palmed two, tipped the rest back, capped the jar and handed one to him. He swallowed it with a gulpof water. Watched her do the same. Watched her grin at him.
‘What’s the joke?’
‘You don’t know about Mandies do you?’
‘Mandies?’
‘Mandrax. The pill you just took.’
‘It’s a pill. A sleeping pill. That’s all.’
‘Yeah, well . . . but if you don’t go to sleep.’
‘The point, the whole point, is to sleep.’
‘Just you wait, Fred. Put it off, stifle the yawns, prop up your eyelids and stay awake for another half-hour.’
‘I find they tend to work in about half that time.’
‘Trust me.’
She went upstairs when he complained of the cold, pulled the eiderdown off his bed. Wrapped them in it. A cocoon for two. The bounded frontier. Him helpless. A ridiculous desire to grin. Then it hit him. A wave of erotic arousal that forced the grin. Into laughter. Almost a giggle.
‘Told yer,’ she said.
Then he saw the same stupid grin reflected on her face, felt the same wave from her, and felt it wrap around them deeper than the eiderdown, warmer and wetter than the night.
It was like playing wigwam. The containing game of childhood. Refugees, orphans of storm – bigger storms by far than the celestial tantrum which danced outside the window now. It buttressed what she felt – or what he thought she felt, had to feel, didn’t she? – abandoned by her father’s death, neglected by her mother’s life. Buttressed what he felt, certainly – the conventional coital conceit that the rest of the world had ceased – buttressed by the madness of idleness that was TB and its cure.