The Fog - James Herbert [52]
‘Looks like they’re all in bed, doesn’t it?’ remarked Barrow caustically.
Holman ignored him and got out of the car.
‘You wait here, Tom,’ he heard Barrow behind him tell the driver. Holman walked towards the front gate to the house, then stopped to let the Detective Inspector catch up.
‘Do you really want to wake them up?’ Barrow asked.
‘Yes,’ answered Holman, and walked towards the impressive white front door. His sense of foreboding increased when he discovered it was open. He pushed at it with a trembling hand.
10
At that precise moment, just over a hundred miles away, Mavis Evers stood barefoot on Bournemouth beach and contemplated suicide. She had driven through the night from London, fighting the tears that welled up, obscuring her vision, threatening to send her red Mini crashing off the road. She did not want to die in the wreckage of a car so that her friends, her parents would never know whether it had been deliberate or accidental. She wanted them to know she had taken her own life. Her death, unlike her life, had to have some meaning. Even if it was only Ronnie who fully understood that reason.
Ronnie had destroyed her. Ronnie had made her fall in love. Ronnie had made her lose her innocence.
Twice she had to pull over to the side of the road and stop, unable to stem the flood of tears that had abruptly burst forth. Once she had to stop as fog drifted into her path, and she had wept as she waited for it to pass.
Why had her lover done this to her? After living together for two years, sharing each other’s lives joyfully, excluding anyone else from their intimate happiness. Laughing at the world. Until Ronnie had suddenly, and irrevocably, drifted away. It had taken a mere two weeks, the first signs when Ronnie had sorrowfully but firmly rejected her caresses, then the arguments, the questions, the pleading, and finally, the terrible revelation. Ronnie had fallen in love with someone else. A man. She had fallen in love with a man.
The irony was that it had been Ronnie who had seduced Mavis. Seduced her and introduced her to a kind of love she’d never known. A private kind of love – the kind that can only be shared by two women. A love not acceptable to most, but more binding by those it touched because of its illicitness.
Mavis had known Ronnie years before when they were both children living in Basingstoke. Their parents had been friends and they would often all go off together at weekends to the coast. The times they spent at Bournemouth were the times Mavis treasured most for it was there, in a boarding house where the two young girls had to share a bed, that Ronnie first introduced her to the delights of her own body. She was eleven, Ronnie was twelve. Their parents had gone out for the evening, promising the girls crisps and lemonade if they were good, hoping, in fact, that they’d both be sound asleep when they returned. As the girls lay there, talking over the events of the day, whom they both liked, whom they mutually disliked, Ronnie had suddenly asked Mavis if she had ever touched herself. Perplexed, she had asked where?
Shyly, Ronnie had put her fingers between Mavis’s legs, then quickly drew them away. Mavis had been surprised and excited by the strange tingle that had run through her, and touched herself in the same place again, giggling at first and enjoying the sensation. Ronnie had asked if she could feel her there again and she’d agreed, a flush now spreading through her body, but on the condition that she could also touch Ronnie. They’d spent the following two hours in exciting, girlishly innocent, mutual masturbation.
It only happened on two other occasions after that, neither girl placing any significance on the act, both enjoying it for what it was – a happy diversion. They’d seen little of one another in the subsequent years, Ronnie’s parents having moved to London, visiting each other perhaps three or four times a year, neither mentioning their earlier intimacies, Mavis at least realizing