The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [114]
Bruce went into the bathroom and slipped out of the moccasins he was wearing. He loved the bathroom floor, which was made of limestone, and had a cool, rough feel on the soles of the feet. And he liked the decor too, the stone-lined shower cubicle – even if the shower itself required special handling – the double basins with their designer bases, the entire glass shelf which Julia had cleared for the hair gels and shampoo she had seen him unpacking in his room. It was a bathroom for living in, Bruce had decided. One could move one’s stuff in here and just live in it.
He bent over and started the bath running. There was a cube of bath salts on the edge of the bath, left there by Julia, and he picked this up and smelled it. Lily of the Valley. Well, not what he would exactly have chosen – he preferred sandalwood – but he liked the feel of these things and the way they made the water milky white. So he unwrapped it and broke it into the rapidly filling bath. Then he turned round and his eye caught the small leaflet which was lying on the floor at the end of the bath. He reached forward and picked it up. He became quite still.
For a few moments after he had finished reading the leaflet that came with Julia’s pregnancy testing kit, Bruce did nothing. Then, quite slowly, he pivoted round and turned off the running water. Now there was silence in the bathroom.
Bruce looked at the leaflet again. She told me, he thought. I asked her and she told me. I very specifically, very considerately, asked her, and she reassured me. And now . . . What if the result had been positive? What if he was already responsible for . . . He suddenly remembered the conversation they had had in the kitchen. He had dismissed it, thought nothing of it. Women always talked about babies, but now he realised that there was a very good reason for Julia’s having raised the subject.
He looked at the bathwater. He would get in and do some serious thinking in the bath; thinking about his future; thinking about escape routes.
75. From the Depths of Despair
Angus Lordie had painted very little since the fateful day of Cyril’s arrest. He had been finishing a portrait which had been commis-sioned by the board of a whisky company; the sittings were done, and he was now working from photographs, but his heart was not in it. It seemed to him that although Cyril was no longer lying at his feet, as he normally did, he was somehow insinuating himself into the very painting, somewhere in the background, a canine presence, a shadow. No, it was hopeless: a painter could not work when his muse lay somewhere in a cold pound, awaiting trial for something that he did not do.
On that morning, although Angus knew that he would have to force himself into his studio, he sat unhappily at his breakfast table, toying with his food; even a Pittenweem kipper seemed unappetising while he was in this frame of mind. Food was a problem. The previous evening, to tempt himself to eat, he had treated himself to several thick slices of the smoked salmon sent down to him from Argyll by his friend Archie Graham. Archie’s salmon, which he steeped in rum and then smoked himself, was, in Angus Lordie’s opinion, the finest smoked salmon in Scotland, but he had found that in his current mood he had little appetite even for that. Indeed, since Cyril’s arrest, Angus had lost a considerable amount of weight. He now had to wear a belt with the trousers that had previously fitted him perfectly ungebelt, and his collars, normally slightly tight because of the age of his shirts, could now have two fingers inserted between them and his neck and waggled about without discomfort. If a dog could pine for a man, thought Angus, then a man could just as readily pine for a dog.
He lingered over his coffee, watching a shaft of sunlight creep slowly across the table to illuminate the cracks in the wooden surface, the ancient crumbs these contained.