Come Clean (1989) by Bill James Read Free Book Online

public toilets, especially not public toilets.’ He eased himself out of the car and stood smiling down at her for a
moment before closing the door. His double-breasted suit was steel-coloured, close-fitting, new, possibly Jaeger, and he looked like a pillar of superior ash. ‘I trust that I’ll not
need to intrude again on your life, though, of course, that doesn’t mean I shan’t be very disappointed if you do not come soon to the Monty again to see us all. Oh dear, my sweet old
mother used to warn me so fiercely against double negatives, and yet listen to that!’
    ‘Ian worries about them.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Double negatives.’
    ‘Continuous discussion between us. Basis of our friendship.’ Shutting the door carefully he walked off towards Rougemont Place and his Montego. Once he glanced back and waved
cheerfully, still beaming. Something about him reminded her of newsreels of that Prime Minister who came back from seeing Hitler just before the war claiming he had achieved ‘peace in our
time’.
    Sarah had not stopped shaking when she reached Margot’s flat high in a recently finished redbrick, waterfront development near Valencia Esplanade, with views over the new marina and as far
as Young’s Dock, still used by merchant shipping. All coastal Britain was into making part of its dockland bijou and soon there’d be more marinas than hospitals. ‘Poor
girl,’ Margot said, ‘you look terrible. You should have called me sooner. Come on, tea first.’ They went into her kitchen and Margot filled a kettle. She was about fifty, tall,
big and angular at the shoulders and hips, yet surprisingly nimble. Sarah always thought she looked how a woman prison officer ought to, tough but approachable. Sometimes she affected men’s
half-moon, gold-rimmed glasses worn low on her long, straight nose, and when she had these on she made Sarah think more of the kind of face you met irritably selling rail tickets behind a grille at
St Lazare.
    ‘This is something else, not to do with Des. Not much to do with Des, anyway,’ Sarah said.
    ‘But to do with Ian?’
    ‘In a sense, yes.’ They waited for the tea.
    ‘Strikes me, everything is to do with Ian,’ Margot said.
    ‘In a sense to do with Des, as well, I suppose.’
    ‘Is it something we should talk about?’
    ‘I don’t know. Perhaps not. No, we mustn’t. But perhaps it will come out when we’re discussing other things.’ She laughed in that loud, spasmodic style she often
fell into when feeling especially bad, so as to convince people she wasn’t, though it rarely worked, and never with Margot. ‘Oh, I don’t know where I am, what the hell I’m
doing, that’s the truth of it.’
    They took the tea into Margot’s disordered, comforting lounge and sat down opposite each other. Margot had on a voluminous, paisley-patterned house coat, buttoned to the neck, and red and
white training shoes. Two cats fought unplayfully in one corner, leaping high on furniture and chasing each other across the top of an old, black, upright piano, spitting committedly and scattering
score paper.
    ‘Those buggers make me seem like a witch,’ Margot said, and threw a canister of air freshener at them, missing badly. ‘It’s not like that. Unfortunately, I lack the
powers.’ The cats glared at her for a moment and then withdrew in a huff.
    ‘Everything says to me I ought to finish with Ian,’ Sarah said.
    ‘Yes? Hasn’t everything been saying that to you for a long while, everything except your will?’
    ‘There’s extra everything now.’
    ‘And could you do it, do you think?’
    ‘I don’t know. I’ve always said I couldn’t, haven’t I?’
    ‘But obviously things can change: something’s happened between you and him, or between you and Desmond?’
    ‘Not between me and Desmond. As ever, it’s dead, or dying.’
    ‘Does he think that, too? As I recall, he never used to.’ Margot was on a little settee and she swung around so her feet in the