The Boat House

TWENTY-THREE

The reason for Dizzy's locking of the door behind them became apparent within a minute, when Alina heard a hesitant tap on the other side followed by a young woman's voice calling Dizzy's name. Dizzy shook his head and put a finger to his lips, calling on her for silence; so Alina waited, and after a while the young woman gave up and went away. Alina relaxed a little. Dizzy hadn't even been tense.

He took her through to show her the four roomed suite that was his private living space within Liston Hall. The lounge was as big and as bare as a dance studio, with three evenly spaced sets of french windows on one side that could be opened out onto the unlit stone terrace; the floor was of deeply polished boards with no carpet, the furniture was mostly plain white leather, and at the focus stood a hi-fi system which looked like a stolen chunk of a space shuttle.

Alina turned to Liston. He was leaning on the wall with his arms folded, waiting. His little-boy mask had slipped by a fraction, a sure sign of the energies that had been taken from him in the past hour, and someone else was looking out — someone much harder, more calculating.

She said, "If it's what you want to hear, I'm impressed."

"I'm glad something impresses you."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing." He seemed to rouse himself, and as he stepped away from the wall his mask was back in place. "You're just not what I'm used to. How do you think I did?"

"How do I think you did what?"

"My public relations act. I'm under threat of death from Bob and Tony if I don't carry it off." He led the way across the room to one of the white sofas, and dropped onto it gratefully without waiting for her.

She said, "I saw them earlier. Do they work for you?"

"Kind of. They're friends from way back, they look after me. It's generally agreed that I need looking after. I always seem to get into trouble on my own. My mother always reckoned I'd end up either in prison or in parliament."

Alina perched herself on the far end of the three seater.

"You don't look like a troublemaker to me," she said.

"I don't make trouble, it just follows me around like some dog in the street." he gave her a sideways, half serious look. "This is a warning, you realise."

"And is there anything else I ought to know about you?"

"Oh, I'm feckless, shiftless, untrustworthy… I'm also very, very devious."

"So I can see. Why did you ask me up here?"

"Why did you come?"

There was silence for a moment as they held each other's eyes, broken only by the faint sound of dance music from down below.

Finally, Alina said, "You made me curious."

Liston smiled, as a Grand Master might at an adept chess move from a lesser rated opponent. "That'll do as a beginning," he said. "Look, I'm supposed to go down and do another five minutes of charm and chat with the ladies in the kitchen now they've done their stuff. Will you stay around?"

"Why?"

"Because I'm asking you to."

"What if I'm with somebody?"

"Are you?"

He waited, but Alina didn't reply. She kept her gaze even.

"It's your choice," he went on. "I honestly won't be long. You can pick out some music and crack open a decent bottle. Can't join you in that, I'm afraid, but don't trust the stuff downstairs."

She seemed to sharpen, and to look at him now with sudden suspicion. "Why not?"

"I know the way Bob works. I wouldn't put it past him to be slipping something into the juice when nobody's looking. Guaranteed way of loosening off everybody's self-control. Problem is, take one too many and you'll start to see hair growing out of the walls. What do you say?"

"I'll think it over," Alina said, and she got to her feet. Something in the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed in the course of the last few moments, and Liston couldn't say for certain what it was. She said, "Can I get some fresh air?"

"Try the terrace," Liston said. "You can get a good view of the moonlight on the lake, if you go in for that sort of thing. See you later?"

"Perhaps," Alina said.

She was already crossing the room to the nearest of the french windows, moving with an urgency that she didn't seem prepared to explain.

"Your choice," Liston reminded her as she stepped out into the air. Maybe she's a control freak, he was thinking, getting into an unreasonable flap just because she might have taken something that could unclench her a little; but then if he'd kept his mouth shut, she'd never even have known.

A control freak might be interesting to play around with, he was thinking, especially in his weakened condition — get her so far along, and then she'd almost certainly want to do all the work.

But she didn't even look back.

"What was that?" Wayne said; but Sandy, it seemed, hadn't heard anything.

"What was what?"

"I heard a door," he said, glancing up into the darkness in the direction of the stone parapet. Sandy pulled her dress back up over her shoulders, just in case, and the two of them sat as still as they could and listened.

There was no sound other than that of the distance-filtered disco music, but the mood of solitude had been broken. As he zipped Sandy up, Wayne said, "You want to go somewhere else?"

"If you mean that crummy flat of yours, no."

"That's not what I had in mind."

"Not to your dad's house, either."

"No, better than that. And really private."

"Where?"

"It's a surprise. Satisfaction guaranteed."

Sandy considered for a moment. Wayne knew how finicky she could be about place and mood, but this plan was one which had all objections beaten before they could even be raised.

Finally, she said, "How far?"

"A short walk in the woods, a warm summer night," (he was embroidering a little here — the night was warm enough, but it was hardly summer yet) "moonlight on the water, what more could you want?"

Sandy looked critically at her shoes, and hiccupped. "A taxi," she said.

"Well… I could run ahead and get the van."

"Oh, great," she said, and she hitched up her dress so that she could get to her feet; there was simply no elegant way of doing it. "Come on, I can probably use a walk anyway. Something in this stuff's starting to mess up my head."

The 'stuff' in question was Bob Ivie's Hawaiian special; between them they'd managed almost to empty the bowl that Wayne had sneaked out. Wayne had halfway believed in his own account of the innocence of its contents, but now he wasn't so sure. It didn't taste of anything much, and it didn't hit particularly hard, but then he didn't exactly feel steady on his feet as he came to stand, either.

Sandy was already picking her way through the garden towards the front of the house.

Leaving the punchbowl lying there for the clearup people to find in the morning, Wayne followed her.

Above them on the balcony terrace, Alina Petrovna stood a little way back from the parapet. She looked at the moon, the lake, and the dark forest beyond, but she saw only defeat.

She might have known that all of her efforts would end like this; it was simply a truth that she hadn't been wanting to face. She'd been avoiding it for so long, but she had no choice about facing it now. She moved to the parapet, and paused with her hand on the stonework. Wayne and Sandy were gone. It wasn't too late. She could ignore the call. She could turn around and go back inside, smile, lose herself amongst strangers again.

She closed her eyes for a second and touched the small space of forehead between her brows. But the pressure didn't help, and nor did the night air, nor any of the great machinery of circumstance that had, without her realising it, been combining against her to produce this moment.

Again, she looked at the moon.

And then, with a dancer's grace, she cleared the parapet.

She landed with barely a sound.