It would be wrong to say that Plant was woken by Lucy. He was already awake, his head heavy. It was impossible to sleep. The Oxford bells began their torture early. Indeed, they never ceased. The chiming clocks struck hours and half hours and quarter hours across the city throughout the night, churches, colleges, college chapels, all out of phase with each other, so much for Greenwich Mean Time. The chapel bells started around dawn. Followed by breakfast bells, if there were indeed breakfast bells. There was a dinner bell. Plant was brooding on whether the chapel bell was a covert, coded breakfast bell, or whether breakfast bells existed on their own, when she burst into his room.
Burst was the only way he could think of it. The bedroom door was flung open, arms flung up wide, shopping bags flung up with them, and showering down, scattering their contents over the room. And she screamed. Hooted really, but it sounded like a scream. Someone outside in the quadrangle might not recognise the difference.

‘I didn’t think you’d still be in bed, I’m sorry, I was just looking to see if you were in here but I didn’t expect to find you in bed. I mean, well’ – she wrenched her watch round her arm so she could read the dial – ‘it is ten thirty. Or eleven thirty. Or is it nine thirty? I never can work out these Roman numerals, why don’t they use Arabic numerals? Is it another anti-Arab campaign? Anyway, it’s quite late. Well, it’s not early. Not that it matters. Sorry if I woke you up. Or were you already awake? Are you one of those people who does his best work in bed?’

Plant groaned.

‘Do you have a hangover? Or did somebody sap you with a blackjack? You really are the classic private eye.’

He groaned some more.

‘Just say if I’m talking too much.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I am?’

He nodded.

‘Too much or too loud?’

‘Both,’ he said.

‘Well, aren’t you the gentleman?’

He shook his head.

‘Another heritage classic,’ she said.

He looked at her balefully.

‘Do you mind if I open a window? It needs freshening up in here.’

She opened it anyway. Sounds of rumbling traffic and happy voices and more bells wafted in. She peered out of it.

Plant sunk deeper beneath the sheets as the cold air swept into the room.

She turned round and smiled at him pertly and began gathering up Vogue and Harpers and Cosmopolitan and the Spectator and the Literary Review and the London Review of Books from the blankets and the floor and stacking them beside the door.

‘I’m trying to control my addictive behaviour,’ she said, ‘by buying magazines. Instead of going out spending a fortune on clothes or books, I buy magazines about clothes and books. Then when I’m cured I’ll know what clothes and books to buy. My doctor said, “Well, we can’t just replace one addiction by another, can we?” I don’t see why not. Especially if it saves you some money.’

She smiled at him willingly. She was high as a kite, and happily so. No point feeling guilty and remorseful about it. She seemed to have the right attitude. Plant’s attitude, anyway.

‘Talking of addictive behaviour,’ she said, sweeping Plant’s clothes off the only chair in the bedroom and sitting down, ‘how would you like a smoke?’

She opened her handbag and produced a silver cigarette case.

‘Isn’t it delightfully retro?’ she said. ‘They’ll be illegal next. A prohibited manufacture. Or licensed. Limited. If you know the right people you’ll always be able to get yourself a cigarette case. But they’ll be rare antiques. Or expensive counterfeits. Smuggled in from the former Soviet Union. Like guns.’

She produced a rolled joint and lit it with a silver lighter.

‘One’s little toys. Accessories for the wicked woman. Dependent. Addicted. Suicidal. Politically incorrect. Yes, a smoker. Worse, a dope smoker.’

She handed the joint across.

‘As a trained investigator you would be thinking all that anyway, so there’s no harm in telling you.’

Plant reached an arm out of bed and took it.

‘Don’t you have any pyjamas?’ she said. She laughed. ‘Wowie. Don’t they wear them in Australia these days? Is that because of global warming? My, you really are the original White Australian, aren’t you? Don’t you ever go to the beach? Or are you worried about skin cancers, is that it?’

Plant sucked on the joint and coughed and choked and sat up. He held onto it till he recovered, and took a second toke.

‘You said your husband doesn’t like you smoking,’ he said.

‘He doesn’t like a lot of things I do.’

‘Health reasons?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What, heart disease, lung disease?’

‘Oh no, he doesn’t worry about that. I don’t think he’d worry about that at all. Get rid of me all the sooner.’

She took a deep drag.

‘It’s the influences it opens you up to. He says it opens you up to the lower astral. Black magic and demons and disincarnate entities.’

‘Does he believe in all that?’

She shrugged.

‘I thought he said he was just an historian of popular culture.’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘Yes. But he believes it too? Even though he says he doesn’t?’

‘I’ve no idea whether he believes in it or not. In magic or in anything else, for that matter.’

‘But he doesn’t like you smoking.’

‘No. And he always gathers up his nail clippings and burns them in the grate. Keeps his comb clean, burns the stray hairs.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t find Archer much of a joke. Not the sort that makes you laugh, anyway.’

‘So he does believe in all that stuff?’

‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘His attitude is why take a risk. It might be true. Enough people have thought it was true. So unless you’ve got clear evidence to the contrary, why take risks.’

‘And he doesn’t have clear evidence that magic doesn’t work.’

‘Do you?’

‘I can’t say I’ve ever really thought about it.’

‘Well, Archer has. Thought about it. It’s like Pascal said. You don’t know if God exists or not, but you might as well assume he does. Nothing’s lost if he doesn’t.’

‘Is it the same with the Devil?’

‘I suppose it might be,’ she said. ‘Why, are you feeling devilish?’

She got up from the chair and came and sat on the edge of the bed and looked into his eyes. Plant held out a hand towards the joint. She passed it across.

‘Now it’s my turn to ask the questions,’ she said.

‘Go ahead,’ said Plant.

She crossed her legs and her skirt rode up her thighs some more.

‘What exactly are you working on?’ she asked.

‘Inauthenticity,’ he croaked, trying to hold in the smoke.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

She was very close and her eyes were sparkling.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I think you’re lying.’

She took the roach from him and inhaled and blew smoke out in a narrow column towards his nostrils.

‘You reckon?’

She held his cheek with her thumb and finger and shook it gently like you might shake a domestic animal. A horse, maybe. The squatter’s daughter.

‘Do it again, but slower,’ Plant said.

‘Fresh, too,’ she said.

‘It’s the open window.’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

She sighed.

‘Where did you meet Archer?’ she asked.

‘In Australia.’

‘And you began blackmailing him there?’

‘I’m not blackmailing him.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Who is, then?’

‘I don’t know that anyone is.’

‘So why does he grab the mail before I can see it?’

‘Does he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Habit, maybe.’

‘He never used to.’

‘Can’t help then,’ said Plant.

‘Has he hired you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What for?’

‘To work on his inauthenticity project.’

She opened her handbag and took out a small business card. Plant recognised it. One of his own. Presumably one he’d given to Major.

‘Research assistance. Investigative reporting,’ she read. ‘What about indexing?’

‘I don’t enjoy indexing.’

‘But you enjoy poking around in other peoples’ business.’

‘Sometimes. It depends on what’s involved.’

‘And what does it usually involve?’

‘What it says. Research assistance, invest…’

‘I know what it says,’ she cut him off. ‘But when I was a student they taught us about the pleasures of the sub-text.’

‘That must have been enjoyable.’

‘I think you’re a private investigator.’

‘Do you, now?’

‘Probably unlicensed.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘But in effect, that’s what you are. A snoop.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘And I want to know what you’re snooping after.’

She looked him in the eye, and then glanced over his bare arms and bare torso. ‘Darling,’ she added throatily, looking him in the eye again.

She did it well. Maybe when she was a student she had learned the pleasures of the drama, too. The essential note of self-parody, the over the top suggestiveness, the ambiguity of image and representation.

‘If I were,’ he said, ‘it would be confidential.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘All private parts and confidential dicks.’

‘You’re very good,’ said Plant.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I can also be very bad. Quite extraordinarily wicked.’

‘Is that so?’

‘If you treat me right,’ she said.

‘Uh-huh,’ said Plant

‘I’ll level with you,’ she said, leaning towards him. ‘Then you can level with me.’

‘Maybe,’ Plant said.

‘I want to know why Archer hired you.’

‘So you said.’

‘If anyone should be hiring a private investigator, it’s me,’ she said. ‘I know he has his little bits on the side. He always has done. I wouldn’t object if he just told me. But he can’t be honest. Never could. He has to have his secrets. He is the most secretive man I ever knew. And I can’t stand it.’

She took out the silver cigarette case and lit up another number.

‘And now,’ she said, sucking in the smoke and letting it curl out of her nostrils, fetching little nostrils, twitching there in front of Plant, ‘and now he hires a fucking private investigator. Why? What’s he want an investigator for? I’m the one who wants an investigator. I’m the one who doesn’t know what’s going on. I’m the one he keeps the secrets from.’

‘You think he has other women?’ Plant asked.

‘Too right I think he does. I know he does.’

She passed the joint across.

‘Just like I have other men.’

She smiled at him. A sweet smile of satisfaction.

‘So are you out to get even or to get even?’ Plant asked.

‘You’ll have to run that past me again.’

‘Are you trying for revenge or planning to equalise the score?’

‘Make love not war, I say,’ said Lucy.

‘Do you happen to know who he’s seeing?’

‘Oh God, no,’ she said. ‘It’s all too pathetic. He just makes a fool of himself. Prostrating himself before all these debutante types. Or whatever they are. Anyway, you know what they are, the crème de la crème, darling, enough to send his cholesterol level stratospheric, instant heart attack and all for nothing.’

‘All for nothing?’

‘They’re not the sort of girls who sleep with the second eleven,’ she said.

‘I see.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ she said. ‘But poor, pathetic Archer doesn’t. He has these delusions.’

‘You seem to know a lot about him without hiring an investigator.’

‘Quite so,’ she said. ‘And no doubt he knows the same about me. So why’s he hiring you?’

‘I think you’d have to talk to him.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Have you ever tried to talk to Archer? You can’t get a thing out of him.’

She manoeuvred herself further onto the bed. Plant moved over to give her more room.

‘Why do you have to hold out on me?’ she asked.

The eyes fluttering. Imploring.

The skirt riding up.

The hand at the neck of the blouse, fingering the button. Reflectively.

The slope of the ceiling pressed down. She leaned over him.

They sat there deadlocked. It was as if they had lost track whose was the next move.

The door opened and Major came in.

‘Well, well,’ he said.

‘Hello, darling,’ said Lucy.

‘Morning poppet,’ said Major. ‘Still got your kit on, I see.’

‘Would you like me to take it off?’ she said, sweetly.

‘Not right now, if you can bear it,’ he said.

‘Your nice Mr Plant was telling me what he was doing for you,’ she said.

‘No, I wasn’t,’ said Plant.

‘He was about to,’ she said, ‘when you came in without knocking.’

‘And what is Mr Plant doing for me right at this moment?’

‘He has your interests at heart,’ Lucy said.

‘Is that so, Mr Plant?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Plant.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Major.

‘I knew you would be, darling,’ said Lucy.

Major sniffed.

‘You been up to your filthy habits again?’ he asked.

‘Which ones are those, darling?’

‘Smoking.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Mr Plant offered me one but I declined.’

‘Is that true, Plant?’

‘Absolutely,’ said Plant.

‘Why don’t we step into the other room and let Plant get dressed?’ Major suggested.

‘Mr Plant won’t mind our staying here, will you, Mr Plant?’

‘Well I have no wish to watch him rise.’

‘If only he would,’ said Lucy.

Major steered her out of the bedroom with a practiced hand.

Plant dragged himself out of the sheets.

‘Oops,’ said Lucy, stepping back in. ‘I seem to have dropped one of my magazines somewhere.’

She smiled at him sweetly.

‘Lucy,’ Major called.

She rolled her eyes, picked up Marie Claire, and went out again.

About the Author

Michael Wilding is the author of The Prisoner of Mount Warning, Wildest Dreams, The Phallic Forest, Academia Nuts and many, many other wicked works of fiction.

The Magic of It is published by Arcadia / Press On - www.scholarly.info

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