Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(16)
“Here,” and she gave him her card. “Make an appointment. Phone me.”
He had already begun to think about lying there naked, just a towel across him, how his body would behave when she touched him. Visions of unguents and oils.
“Make sure you’re wearing something loose,” she told him when finally he phoned.
The address was close to where he himself was living, above a shop selling candles and hand-printed fabrics. “Take off your shoes and leave them there,” Holly pointing to where several other pairs were lined up, her daughter’s and her own.
In the low-ceilinged living room a white sheet was stretched out across the center of the rug; beyond it a cloth lay draped across a wooden chest, turning it into a kind of altar with fruit and pieces of dried wood arranged in metal bowls. Incense in the air.
“Lie down,” Holly said, indicating the sheet. “On your tummy first. That’s it, head to one side, so you can breathe.”
But it had taken his breath away, the force with which she could press into him with her slight body, slim wrists and hands.
“Breathe in … and slowly out. All right, why don’t you turn over onto your back.”
After the first time, he had not gone again for almost a month and on their next meeting she had chided him gently on the street; since then, it had fallen into a pattern, he would visit her once every couple of weeks. She would work on him for nearly an hour, advise him on diet, assign him exercises which he forgot. Sometimes, squatting over his body, she would simply chat: something her daughter, Melanie, had done or said; once, mention of Melanie’s father, who lived in Copenhagen, where he worked as an artist, computer graphics and videotape.
Now she eased herself back onto the balls of her feet and from there, in one smooth movement, rose to her feet.
“Have you been doing those exercises I showed you?” she asked.
Grabianski was afraid he might blush. “Maybe not as often as I should.”
“You were really bad today.”
“I was?”
“Across your shoulders again, your neck. I couldn’t move it at all.” Holly smiled. “It’s stress, of course. You’re worried about something, that’s what it is.”
What was worrying Grabianski, worrying him specifically, was that since he had acquired two rare Impressionist paintings on Vernon Thackray’s behalf, of Thackray neither hide nor hair had been seen. That was without this business with the nun. Why, Grabianski was already asking himself, why had he succumbed to temptation, sent her another card?
He had first met Thackray some, oh, four or five years before, when he and Grice had been working a circuit that took them from Manchester in the West to Norwich in the East, Leeds in the North to Leicester in the South. It had been worth getting a yearly season ticket with British Rail.
His old partner, Grice, was still detained at Her Majesty’s displeasure, and no substantial loss where Grabianski was concerned; a great third-floor entry man, one of the best, but unable to see beyond the newsagent’s top shelf when it came to culture.
And Thackray—Thackray had been living in Stamford then: a mid-Victorian brick house with columns at the front and high arched windows looking out over a sunken pond and three-quarters of an acre of shrubbery and graveled paths. A gallery on the second floor, in which he could show off his select collection of British art. A small oil by Mabel Pryde aside—a self-portrait, dark, the shadow of her husband barely visible in the background—there was nothing that couldn’t leave the premises for the right price, courtesy of Federal Express.
Thackray, meanwhile, had relocated to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, drawn there by migrating poets and the annual music festival in honor of Benjamin Britten. Grabianski considered this a retrograde step. Thanks to a brief, early relationship with a middle-aged psychotherapist, he had once endured Peter Pears singing Britten’s settings of English folk-songs—an experience so graphically engraved on his memory as to provide him with an instant definition of Purgatory. It also meant that Thackray was no longer calling distance away. Save by telephone, that is, and both of his lines—the one displayed in the directory and the other only available to select business acquaintances—were permanently out of order.
The last occasion on which Grabianski had seen him, it had been embarrassingly necessary to explain how it was that having broken into the house where the Dalzeils were kept, he had walked out again empty-handed.
They had been sitting in a hotel bar in Market Harborough, shaded through the long afternoon, dust prancing in the low shafts of steeply angled light. Thackray had been less than pleased: this left a good customer to be pacified, a matter of principle, of re-establishing trust.
“Tell him to be patient,” Grabianski had said. “Tell him you always keep your word.”
Which, in so far as his word to Grabianski was concerned, had since proved untrue. The paintings freshly acquired, he returned to the same bar and sat there for two hours, sipping wine, waiting in vain for Thackray to arrive. It made Grabianski uncomfortable: whatever else he was, Vernon Thackray was not a man to miss an appointment. Promptness, reliability, these were Thackray’s cardinal virtues. But perseverance, patience—save for the occasional rush of blood, those were two of Grabianski’s own. If one buyer could no longer be found, well, he would find another. Simple as that.
Even so, as Grabianski approached the southern edge of Hampstead Heath, it continued to nag at him, and he had walked beyond Parliament Hill itself and down into the first thickening of trees before the splendor of his surroundings eased it from his mind.