Crackpot. Philip Loraine

told you, boozing in Bristol.’

      ‘And that’s a lie. I didn’t drink a thing all night—if you’d been boozing I’d have smelt you a mile off.’

      He was completely taken aback and showed it. ‘Come on,’ continued Rosamund, ‘what were you doing?’

      She expected him to veer away from the question, and that’s exactly what he did, holding out the piece of paper. ‘It says “in London”. You were in London, I was in Bristol. Who saw you doing what?’

      She had to swing away from him to control her temper; if it broke loose now she knew exactly what it would make her say: ‘For Christ’s sake, Johnny, let’s cut the crap. I know you go up to London at least twice a month without telling me. Why won’t you tell me? Why don’t we let the skeleton out of the cupboard?’ Something like that—and thank God she didn’t say it: perhaps because she was more scared than angry: scared that someone had unearthed his secret which clearly seemed to him so dangerous, and was about to use it in order to hurt him. She had no doubt at all that the sheet of anonymous garbage referred to him.

      Gazing at her rigid back, Johnny Ash was visited for the first time by an awful suspicion that she knew; perhaps she’d known for years, ever since they first met.

      When she turned back she was so stricken by his lost expression that the last trace of anger disappeared in a flash, replaced by love and pity. She said, ‘I’ll tell you what I did, I went and saw Mad Hattie, we had a few joints together. If anyone saw us they’d hardly think it very wicked, would they?’

      She saw relief creep over his face and could have wept for the mistrust which, however much they loved one another, lay between them. He frowned, gazing at the photocopy: ‘So what’s it all about?’

      She didn’t answer for fear of saying, ‘Oh Johnny, you know damn well.’ But then again, the note might have nothing at all to do with him. She seized on the nearest, most comforting possibility: ‘Some of them are jealous of us, you must know that. I mean … loving each other the way we do, and … you being so successful.’

      He jumped at it. ‘Trying to come between us.’

      ‘And succeeding by the look of it!’

      He gave a small gasp, dropped the troublesome message on to the kitchen table and put his arms around her. ‘Take more than crap like that to come between us.’

      ‘I didn’t tell you what I’d been doing because I knew you’d worry. I’m not … slipping back into the old bad habits.’

      He looked deeply into her lovely eyes and saw only honesty there. If only, if only he could be as honest himself. He said, ‘I know you’re not. How was Mad Hattie?’

      ‘Same as ever. Sent you her love.’ She knew that he was about to kiss her and that the moment, like so many others, would end in love-making. But, like most women, she was a realist; she knew that a moment must come when there wouldn’t be that easy escape. Her mother was fond of saying, ‘Never forget—truth will out.’ Rosamund, responding to his kiss, believed it.

      At The Lodge, Tamara Kusnik was in the garden picking a large bunch of slightly frost-nipped chrysanthemums from the bedraggled border. Returning to the cottage, she posed in the doorway as if for a curtain-call, but then noticed that her ex-husband was holding in one hand a glass of vodka and in the other a sheet of paper. He was looking disconcerted.