"It's all right, Tim," she says. "You're a good man. Better than you know. All you have to do now is give me a kiss."
In the Connaught? She must have seen my astonishment in my face, for at once she bursts out laughing, stands up, comes round the table, and without the smallest sign of embarrassment plants a long, explicit kiss on my lips, to the approval of an elderly wine waiter whose eye I inadvertently catch as she releases me from the clinch.
"On one condition," she adds sternly, sitting down. "Name it."
"My piano."
"What about your piano?"
"Can I bring it? I can't arrange without a piano. That's how I do my tiddely-pom."
"I know how you do your tiddely-pom. Listen, bring six. Bring a fleet. Bring all the pianos in the world."
The same night we are lovers. The next morning, on winged feet, I race ahead to Honeybrook to call in the decorators. Do I once look back—do I pause to consider whether I have done the right thing? Whether I have paid too high a price for something that could have been more easily obtained? I do not. All my life I have ducked and weaved and peered round corners. From now on, with Emma as my precious ward, I intend to make my thoughts and actions one—in earnest of which, that very day I put through an urgent call to Mr. Appleby of Wells, purveyor of fine antique jewellery and furniture. And I commission him on the spot, expense no object, to comb the land for the sweetest, prettiest baby grand piano that was ever built of man: something of real age and quality, Mr. Appleby, and in a fine wood: I am thinking of satinwood; and while we're about it, do you still have that superb three-string pearl collar with the cameo clasp that I happened to spot in your window not a month ago?
* * *
Mr. Dass was too shy to ask you to undress. If you were a man you faced him standing in your stockinged feet, stripped to the waist and clutching at your trousers while your braces dangled round your thighs. Even when he had you lying on your stomach and was working the base of your spine, he exposed only the smallest margin of flesh necessary to his purpose.
And Mr. Dass talked. In his caressing Oriental lilt. To inspire confidence and forestall intimacy. And sometimes, to stop you dozing off, he asked you questions, though today, in the alertness of my new condition, I would have wished to ask them for myself: Have you seen them? Has she been here? Did he bring her? When?
"Have you been doing your exercises, Timothy?”
“Religiously," I lied in a drowsy voice.
"And how is the lady in Somerset?"
I was quick inside my seeming somnolence. He was speaking, as I well knew, of a professional colleague of his in Frome, whom he had recommended when I moved to Honeybrook. But I preferred a different interpretation.
"Oh, she's fine, thanks. Working too hard. Touring a lot. But fine. You've probably seen her more recently than I have. When did she last come to you?"
He was already laughing, explaining the misunderstanding. I laughed with him. My affair with Emma was no secret from Mr. Dass or anyone else. It had been my pleasure, in the early months of my new life, to declare her to whoever would listen to me: Emma, my live-in girl, my grand passion, my ward, nothing underhand.
"She's nowhere near as good as you are, Mr. Dass, I can tell you
"Now, Timothy, that is not necessarily the case at all," he insisted as he flattened his scalding palms on my shoulders. "Do you go to her regularly? One session here and there and forget it for six months, that's no good at all."
"Try telling that to Emma," I said. "She promised me she'd come to you last week. I'll bet she never did."
But Mr. Dass for all my probing maintained an elliptical silence. I kept drawing him out, I expect clumsily, for I was too much on edge. Was she here yesterday? Today? Was he dodging my questions because he was embarrassed to tell me she had come with Larry? Whatever the cause, he would not be drawn. Perhaps he heard the tension in my voice, or felt it in my body. Since Mr. Dass was blind, there was no knowing what telltale messages might not come to him by way of his extrasensory ear or gently probing fingers.
"Next time I think you will give me more concentration, Timothy," he said sternly as I handed him my twenty pounds.
He unlocked his cash box, and my eye fell on the receptionist's appointments book lying beside the telephone. Steal it, I thought. Grab it and walk out. Then you can see for yourself whether she was here, who with, and when. But I could not have robbed blind Mr. Dass in order to spy on Emma if it had meant solving the mysteries of the cosmos.
* * *
