‘It’s out of the question,’ says Victor. ‘It’s quite impossible. I couldn’t bear it. I’m as sexually liberated as the next man but there are limits.’
Victor is striding the length of Elsa’s room. He wears the bottom half of his pyjamas as a concession to his age. His naked shoulders are broad and well muscled. His midriff is flat. He is handsome: he is troubled.
It is two-thirty in the morning. Elsa keeps drifting off to sleep.
‘Do wake up,’ he implores her.
‘Let’s talk about it in the morning.’
‘You take your virtue very lightly,’ he protests. ‘Though of course that’s a concept unknown to girls of your generation.’
‘It’s not that. I just need more sleep than you do. I’m younger.’
Victor sits down gloomily on the end of the bed, on Elsa’s feet.
‘So now you’re holding that against me. I knew that would happen, sooner or later.’
Elsa wriggles her feet out from under him. She has difficulty manoeuvring under the tightly-tucked grey blankets. Somebody had remade the tousled bed while they were at dinner; and even, she fears, had to change the sheets.
‘On the other hand, if it’s all equal to you, all that extra stock would really get the business going. You should have seen Hamish’s billiard room, Elsa! He’s like a magpie. A lot of good Jacobean oak, and I’ll swear the clothes press was Elizabethan. Spode, Wedgwood, early ironstone.’
According to Victor, Hamish has offered him the contents of the billiard room for two thousand five hundred pounds, and will even throw in the library ladder if he can have Elsa for the night.
‘Perhaps he was joking,’ ventures Elsa now.
‘How am I to know?’ asks Victor, distracted.
‘Or it might be some kind of test,’ she suggests, ‘to find out the sort of man you really are.’
‘That occurred to me too, but would passing the test be saying yes or saying no?’
‘Anyway,’ says Elsa, ‘it doesn’t really matter because I won’t do it.’
‘Doesn’t he attract you? I thought girls were always attracted to millionaires?’
‘You’re so old-fashioned,’ she complains. ‘Anyway I love you so you oughtn’t even to think of it.’
‘Ought?’ he enquires, pouncing on it like a dog on a rabbit, ‘what do you mean by ought?’
Elsa sleeps. When she wakes at four-thirty she has pins and needles in her foot. Victor sleeps, kneeling, with his head upon her knees. She shakes him awake and makes room for him beneath the blankets.
‘It’s not as if we’re married,’ he says, cold beside her. ‘You owe no kind of duty to me. You must do what you want. I take advantage of you too much, anyway.’
‘No you don’t, Victor.’
‘Yes I do.’
Victor sleeps. He warms up quickly. Soon Elsa is too hot and cramped to sleep. His large limbs are flung happily over hers. At five-thirty Victor wakes and says ‘Did you do Gemma’s typing?’
‘I forgot.’
‘Then mind you do it before breakfast. She’s expecting it. I don’t want this deal mucked up for something stupid like that.’
Victor sleeps again. At six a.m., when the dawn lights show up the angles of the room, the door creaks open. Elsa lies motionless, wide-eyed, pressed up against the wall.
And here, first peering, then ducking, then scuttling across the room to the desk comes Hamish, Rumplestiltskin, in a silk dressing gown, colourless in the early light. And here until dawn is well established in the sky, and his dressing gown is revealed as crimson silk, Hamish sits and types the reams of work that Gemma’s left for Elsa; or does Elsa dream? Does she see, or does she dream, that Hamish, as he takes his departure, pauses beside the bed and looks down upon her, in a manner both indulgent and lascivious? And whether she dreams it or whether she doesn’t, for it really makes no difference, she is certainly conscious of a wave of erotic excitement as he stands and stares, the like of which she has never known before: it is the desire of the helpless for the powerful, the poor for the rich, the weak for the strong, and it has its roots there in her womb, and from it, one might well believe, grows the whole structure of human society.
Elsa feels it. Elsa sleeps. The notion is too strong to keep in consciousness.
‘You did the typing, I see,’ says Victor, at seven-fifteen. He means to slip back early to his own room so as not to disconcert the servants. ‘You’re really getting quite good. Perhaps it’s the machine? I must have been tired: I didn’t even wake. If you keep on like this, Elsa, you’ll be able to type my invoices, which will save us quite a bit.’
Elsa says nothing. What can she say?
‘Something rather awkward,’ says Victor, running his hands down her naked backbone, so that she shivers. ‘Apparently Janice is coming down on Sunday. I’d no idea. We’d better get you back to London on Sunday morning. What a lovely strong back you have. Janice was always slipping discs.’
Elsa cries.
‘But darling, it’s for your own sake. I want to save you embarrassment. It’s very bad of Gemma. Except, poor soul, she has to live her life by proxy at the best of times. One has to forgive her. If I play my cards right, she might even commission me to do her antique buying for her. She could certainly do with someone. A good eye and no discretion. Hamish, on the other hand, is all discretion and no eye. Why is it that money always ends up in the wrong hands?’
‘Why won’t you come back to London with me?’
‘I’d love to. You hardly imagine I like it down here? Not our scene, is it, and the diet will take years off our lives. But it depends how the deal’s going, you must see that. And if Hamish is after you, the sooner you’re safe back in the shop the better.’
‘With the other furniture? Why don’t you just put a “sold” sticker on me?’
‘You’re very ungrateful,’ says Victor. ‘I’m doing my best for you.’
‘If you’re staying I’m staying,’ says Elsa narrowly and with finality, and Victor looks quite distressed, as if a lobster he had thought was dead had suddenly started waving claws at him.
And Victor departs, having pecked Elsa formally on the nose, to save the servants more distress.
During the course of the morning they change the sheets again, although so far as Elsa could see there clearly is no need. It had been a restless night, but one far from passionate.