The waiter showed up with two glasses of what I assumed were a well-chosen white wine and two bowls of mussels. “So are you a big fan of poetry, or a big fan of early 2000s sitcoms?”
“A bit of both. But I did read English at university.”
Oh. “Cool. So, um, to be straight with you, I fucked up my A-levels then did a BTEC in private investigation so the chances of my being able to hold up my end of this conversation are pretty much zero.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, no, it’s cool, I was just explaining. Poetry me.”
“Poetry you?”
“Yeah, hit me with some verse.”
She gave me what I thought was a challenging smile. “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
“Fortunately, I’m not a man. And that’s not a proper poem.”
“It is, actually.” I had the uneasy feeling that I’d walked into a trap. “It’s called News Item. Dorothy Parker.”
I thought I vaguely knew the name as somebody fabulous and twenties-ish but could remember exactly zero of what she’d written. “What else did she do.”
“An awful lot in the same vein. She was … a bitter sort of wonderful.” Penelope picked delicately through her moules. I was definitely outclassed here—I was never going to be able to look that sexy eating buttery shellfish. “She also said scratch a lover, find a foe.”
“Sounds like my kind of girl.”
“I thought she might be.”
I dug into my moules and took a much deeper swig of my wine than I’d been planning to. “I bet asking you about your favourite poem-slash-poet is, like, a total rookie move, isn’t it? It’d be like somebody asking me about my favourite—I dunno—way of solving crimes or something.”
“I thought your favourite way of solving crimes was to seduce information out of estate agents?”
“I have to admit, it is up there.”
“But you’re right.” She finished her wine and laid her cutlery neatly on the edge of her plate. “I don’t have a favourite poem-slash-poet. Although I am very fond of The Waste Land.”
The silence just sat there for a moment. “You’re going to make me admit I’ve never heard of it, aren’t you?”
“Oh absolutely, you’re cute when you’re embarrassed. And you’ve almost certainly heard some of it: April is the cruellest month, Fear death by water, and so on.”
None of that sounded familiar. “I mean, the death by water thing is good advice in general.”
“I don’t think it’s especially intended as a how-to guide. It’s more of a heap of broken images.”
“Can you recite it to me?”
“It’s long, I couldn’t do it from memory, but I’ve got a slim volume of Eliot back at my place if you wanted to hear it.”
I pulled a slightly perplexed face. “Couldn’t you just find it online? I figure that and porn are what the internet is for.”
“I could.” She leaned forward and made a noise that was a mixture between a sigh and a laugh. “Or we could have a look for it back at my place.”
Oh. Oh. I almost choked on my moules. “Sorry I—I didn’t think you were going to go through with the whole seduction thing.”
“You thought I was a bored straight woman looking to kill an otherwise dull evening by stringing you along for a couple of hours?” She didn’t seem angry exactly, but she had a bit of a you’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down, vibe to her.
“No. Yeah. A bit. Sorry.”
She slumped. I felt shitty that I’d made her slump. “Look. This obviously wasn’t what I was planning on doing when I woke up this morning, and I’m sure divorced estate agent isn’t anywhere near the top of your list of sexual fantasies, and if you feel—I don’t know—fetishised or taken for granted or anything like that then please forget I said anything. I’m making this up as I go along, and I probably got carried away, but when you walked through that door I thought I’d won the fucking lottery because I honestly do think you’re hot as hell and I really, really want to take you home right now.”
I … I could work with that. A little voice at the back of my mind said that this was going to be a bad idea and that we were both in way the wrong place emotionally for hooking up to make anything even resembling sense. But who the hell was I to judge her choices? And while I should probably have been more cautious about my own, given how my life was going, having a one-night stand with a forty-something divorcee from Brentford was probably the healthiest thing I’d done in about six years. Of course there was still Tara to be thinking about but we’d never quite pinned down whatever the hell it was we were doing and she’d always struck me as the sort who thought monogamy was a strictly one-sided deal. I wasn’t a fan of one-sided deals.
Twelve minutes later we were in a cab on the way to her place.
“So … what happened with your wife?” I thought it was best to get the elephants out of the room as soon as possible.
“Husband. And before you say anything, if you make me give you the bisexuals exist speech we are stopping this taxi right now and you’re walking back to Bow Street.”
That was me told. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have made assumptions.”
“Don’t worry about it. I get that you’re still worried that I’m playing tourist here, and you’re not totally wrong. It’s just that it’s the casual-sex-with-a-private-investigator part that’s new to me. Not the going-to-bed-with-a-woman part.”
“Good to know. And. Well. You don’t have to go to bed with me if you don’t want to.”
“I know. But we’ll see how it goes.”
The journey was short, and we stopped outside an almost terrifyingly normal semi-detached house. It was one of those pretty pre-war jobs with bay windows and a neat little front garden. A brick-arched porch led up to the front door and on the other side of that was an achingly homey hallway with soft grey walls and stripped floorboards. This was a place that people had tried to make a life in.
“So …” I drew out the syllable to give myself thinking time. “I think you were going to read me a poem?”
She nodded. “I know this sounds like a line. But I do actually keep it in the bedroom.”
I let her lead me upstairs. This was turning into a very strange day.
5
Sex & Eliot
I was beginning to get a little bit creeped out. Housing-wise I’d spent the past few years bouncing between my very, very batcheloretty flat in Muswell Hill, Julian’s absurd range of high-end pleasure palaces, and most recently the crumbling Gothic splendour of Safernoc Hall. The last time I’d gone into an honest to goodness family home, it had been because the family in question had been torn apart by a pack of feral vampires.
Also, my PI senses were tingling. “I don’t want to kill the mood,” I said as Penelope settled herself—a little self-consciously, I thought—onto the edge of the bed and kicked off her heels. “But it feels like this place is a bit too big for just you and your husband.”