The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [63]
“Are the children living here?”
“Not at the moment. Bunny's mother wouldn't have it, and came to take them away.”
I breathed more easily; at least I didn't have the safety of innocents on my hands.
Ronnie cursed at the bottle; Alice propped her elbows on the high table to observe his struggles. I followed gingerly, keeping to the very edges of the room. The cork had come apart, so Ronnie jammed the remnants inside with a carving tool, then picked up the nearest glass, which bore both lipstick and food around its rim. He splashed some wine and cork bits into the glass and set it down in front of me. I raised it gingerly to the vicinity of my lips—although, from the raw smell rising out of the glass, any contamination would be well and truly sterilised.
“When did you meet the Adlers?” I asked bluntly. It had been a long day, and I figured these two were in no condition to require subtlety.
“The winter sometime.”
“It was at the Epsteins' Christmas party, remember?” Ronnie said.
“Jacob Epstein gave a Christmas party?” I asked.
“It wasn't so much a Christmas party as a party at Christmas,” Alice explained helpfully. “His wife gave it to show that she wasn't still angry at Kathleen. You know Jacob's wife, Margaret? She took a shot at one of Jacob's lovers last year, when she found out Kathleen was pregnant, although she'd been perfectly willing to raise the little girl he had by someone else five or six years before. She's usually perfectly content to let Jacob's lovers live with them, but for some reason she took against Kathleen. Anyway, that's settled now.”
Heavens, my life was dull. “So that was when you met Damian and Yolanda?”
“Yolanda wasn't there, was she, Ronnie?”
“Wasn't she?”
“No, I remember because Damian couldn't come out with us to the country after the party, he had to be home because Yolanda would murder him if she heard he'd left the child by itself. It must have been when they first got here—that's right, there was some nonsense about finding a nanny. Children are so tedious, aren't they? Why can't one just leave them to their own devices?”
“Was Yolanda away, then?”
“Something religious, wasn't it?” he said, remembering.
“Probably,” she agreed.
“I do remember now. You wanted him to come along because you hoped you could get him into bed.”
Alice laughed and shot me a glance; I braced myself for further naughtiness. “Really, it was Ronnie who wanted to have a fling with him, and was hoping I'd join in. I would have, too.”
“I don't blame you,” I said evenly. “Damian is very attractive.”
“Have you—”
“No,” I said, my response a shade too quick. “No, I have not. Nor with Yolanda,” I added, to restore my Bohemian bona fides.
“Neither have we. He turned us down, first one, then the other. Not that I've given up on him—he has a dark side one can practically taste.”
“Er, what do you mean by dark side, exactly?”
“Oh, Damian comes across as the wholesome boy, married to one woman, a daddy even, but when one comes to know him, the darker impulses are there. I mean to say, just look at his paintings.”
I had to agree that wholesome was not the first word one would choose to describe The Addler's paintings, but I couldn't tell if Alice actually knew something about Damian's “dark” side, or if this was merely romantic twaddle from a spurned woman.
“He keeps his temper under control,” I ventured.
“One would hardly know he has one, most of the time,” she agreed, which exchange got me no further.
I had taken but a single sip from the glass in my hand, but either the alcohol was strong or the conversation itself was dizzying. I put the glass down, caught it as it tipped, and moved it to a flatter place on the edge of a sheet of gravy-smeared newspaper, the remains of someone's lunch. Perhaps several days' lunches. Ronnie stretched out a hand and absently broke off a bit of crust from a dried-up stub of beef pie, ignoring the mouse droppings scattered around it. I shuddered, and would have averted my eyes except they were caught by a word on the gravy-smeared