The Black House by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: http://www.archive.org/details/rivalsofsherlock00gree
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

13

It was a high windy spot, on the crest of a hill, with room for a dozen cars, and it was empty. Though Caroline had left the party before he did, and Munday was delayed for what seemed to him a long while at the door by Awdry urging him to explain what he meant by his letter to The Times (Awdry knew the letter by heart and kept repeating, “But why misfits?”), she was not at the parking lot when he arrived. A light rain began to fall, making a pattering like sand grains on the car roof; the sound of the rain isolated him and made him think she wouldn’t show up.

Past the gorse bushes, shaking stiffly at the front of the car, was the valley, some lighted windows which were only pinpricks, and a glow at the horizon, the yellow flare of Bridport. He saw through the dribbling side window an arrow-shaped sign lettered To Trail. He sat in the car with his gloves on wondering if he was being made a fool of: he was not used to acting with such haste. He knew the risk, but it would be far worse if she didn’t meet him. The wind sucked at the windows—he wanted relief. But the moments of his suspense, instead of provoking in him calm, only recalled similar suspense in Africa, Claudia’s eye orbiting his unease, her saying in a tone her clumsiness vulgarized into a threat, “Why don’t you ever come over and see me when you’re in town?” The first night at her house while he was talking she had got up from the sofa and left the room, just like that, and called to him. He found her naked, smoking in bed: “Are you very shocked?”

“I think it’s ill-advised to smoke in bed.”

Later, she had wanted to know what African girls were like in bed. Munday said, “Fairly straightforward, one would guess—I don’t really know. I’ve never had one.”

She said, “You’re lying. Martin’s always screwing them.”

“I’m not Martin, thank God.”

“Are you trying to get at me?”

He had made love to Claudia on three occasions; the first time it was her desire, the second his curiosity, the third time routine—the unchanged circumstances of time and place made it so—and that last time was disappointing for both of them, though only she said it. Those nights returned to him now with horrible clarity: how she had stubbed out her cigarette and then rolled onto her back and lifted and spread her legs, holding her buttocks up with the hands, waiting with a kind of anonymous patience for him to enter her. And he had thought: it was this that troubled women most, it gave them fear, the position that made them most vulnerable, the lifted cunt opened and exposed like a smarting valve the slightest force could injure. Pity killed his desire, but he knew that any hesitation on his part would have ridiculed her surrender. “No, don’t stop,” she had said when

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