Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [4]
After a while she stirred. “Do you know what day it is?” she mumbled.
“Sunday.”
“It’s your Sunday to make lunch.”
“I hadn’t forgotten.”
“Good.” There was a pause. “What are you going to give me?”
“Steak, potatoes, snow peas, goat’s cheese, strawberries and Chantilly cream.”
She lifted her head, laughing. “That’s what you always make!”
“It is not. Last time we had French beans.”
“And the time before that you had forgotten, so we ate out. How about some variety in your cooking?”
“Hey, wait a minute. The deal was, each of us would make lunch on alternate Sundays. Nobody said anything about making a different lunch each time.”
She slumped on him again, feigning defeat.
His day’s work had been at the back of his mind all along. He was going to need her unconscious help, and this was the moment to ask her. “I have to see Rahmi this morning,” he began.
“All right. I’ll meet you at your place later.”
“There’s something you could do for me, if you wouldn’t mind getting there a little early.”
“What?”
“Cook the lunch. No! No! Just kidding. I want you to help me with a little conspiracy.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Today is Rahmi’s birthday, and his brother, Mustafa, is in town, but Rahmi doesn’t know.” If this works out, Ellis thought, I’ll never lie to you again. “I want Mustafa to turn up at Rahmi’s lunch party as a surprise. But I need an accomplice.”
“I’m game,” she said. She rolled off him and sat upright, crossing her legs. Her breasts were like apples, smooth and round and hard. The ends of her hair teased her nipples. “What do I have to do?”
“The problem is simple. I have to tell Mustafa where to go, but Rahmi hasn’t yet made up his mind where he wants to eat. So I have to get the message to Mustafa at the last minute. And Rahmi will probably be beside me when I make the call.”
“And the solution?”
“I’ll call you. I’ll talk nonsense. Ignore everything except the address. Call Mustafa, give him the address and tell him how to get there.” All this had sounded okay when Ellis dreamed it up, but now it seemed wildly implausible.
However, Jane did not seem suspicious. “It sounds simple enough,” she said.
“Good,” Ellis said briskly, concealing his relief.
“And after you call, how soon will you be home?”
“Less than an hour. I want to wait and see the surprise, but I’ll get out of having lunch there.”
Jane looked thoughtful. “They invited you but not me.”
Ellis shrugged. “I presume it’s a masculine celebration.” He reached for the notepad on the bedside table and wrote Mustafa and the phone number.
Jane got off the bed and crossed the room to the shower closet. She opened the door and turned on the tap. Her mood had changed. She was not smiling. Ellis said: “What are you mad about?”
“I’m not mad,” she said. “Sometimes I dislike the way your friends treat me.”
“But you know how the Turks are about girls.”
“Exactly—girls. They don’t mind respectable women, but I’m a girl.”
Ellis sighed. “It’s not like you to get needled by the prehistoric attitudes of a few chauvinists. What are you really trying to tell me?”
She considered for a moment, standing naked beside the shower, and she was so lovely that Ellis wanted to make love again. She said: “I suppose I’m saying that I don’t like my status. I’m committed to you. Everyone knows that—I don’t sleep with anyone else, don’t even go out with other men—but you’re not committed to me. We don’t live together, I don’t know where you go or what you do a lot of the time, we’ve never met one another’s parents . . . and people know all this, so they treat me like a tart.”
“I think you’re exaggerating.”
“You always say that.” She stepped into the shower and banged the door. Ellis took his razor from the drawer where he kept his overnight kit and began to shave at the kitchen sink. They had had this argument before, at much greater length, and he knew what was at the