Reasonably confident? I felt perspiration spring out on my forehead at the suggestion of a doubt.
‘Remember, no gymnastics! You can wriggle your toes but that’s all. Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace and Grace was a little girl who wouldn’t wash her face, ha ha!’ He breezed out to dispense healing and wisdom to the next patient.
‘Help!’ called Lizzie as soon as he’d gone. ‘I didn’t dare move. I’ve probably given myself third-degree burns. I had to suck the flannel to suppress bloodcurdling screams. I’ll just put in some cold.’
Mr Proudlock-Jones had put paid to sleepiness for the time being. While torrents of water flowed into the bath, I asked myself what I would do if his confidence proved for once to be unjustified. No course of action occurred to me. If I could not dance I could not live. Of course it would be all right. It had to be.
‘This is the most sensual experience I’ve had in years.’ Lizzie’s voice, floating through the open door, had gone down several tones and was gravelly with relaxation. ‘Much better than sex. And no evil consequences.’
Six months ago, Lizzie had fallen insanely in love with a Russian guest artist who, when wearing a wig and full make-up, looked slightly like Rudolf Nureyev. Certainly from behind the resemblance was remarkable. He had stayed only three weeks before being recalled to Leningrad and, two months after that, the company had a whip-round to pay for Lizzie to have a termination at the handy little nursing home in Southwark where all the female dancers in the company went when self-control or rubber failed. Since then, Lizzie had been much less keen on sex.
‘And generally much less worrying,’ I said, sitting up and helping myself to a biscuit to begin the process of repair. It was the first thing I had eaten for thirty-six hours and it tasted extraordinarily delicious. ‘No fretful evenings waiting for the bath to ring. No need to agonize over whether the bath thinks you were insufficiently enthusiastic and imaginative. One good thing about making love with Sebastian is that he’s so self-absorbed one might as well be an inflatable – Hello, Sebastian,’ I said loudly as he walked into the room. A violent splash came from the bathroom followed by silence.
‘Well! You’re looking quite a lot better already.’ Sebastian picked up the bottle of champagne, untwisted the wires and popped the cork. He picked up my glass and chucked the iced water over the artificial roses. ‘We’ll have to share this.’
‘I probably oughtn’t have alcohol so soon …’
‘Oh, rubbish! It won’t hurt your foot. Drink up.’ He held the beaker-full of foaming liquid under my nose. ‘It’ll relax you.’
Actually I was feeling quite relaxed already, but Sebastian was forking out zillions for my operation and my room so I could refuse him nothing.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘finish it.’
The chocolate biscuit was powerless to counteract the effect of the champagne when it hit my otherwise empty stomach. When it combined with the remainder of the anaesthetic that was still in my bloodstream, I felt as though I had been shot into outer space in a large pink rocket. The world grew distant and all the consequences thereof.
He stroked my bare arm. ‘Mm. You’ve lost a couple of pounds.’ Sebastian was as obsessed with body shapes as the rest of us. ‘Don’t overdo it. You’ll start losing muscle.’ I wanted to say that it was nice of him to care but whatever part of my brain was in control of my tongue seemed to be paralysed. ‘It’s not unattractive, though.’
I set off on an orbit of the earth and very colourful it was, too, just like those photographs in the National Geographic magazine.
‘Marigold.’ Sebastian was bending over me. ‘You’re giggling like a schoolgirl. Just be serious for a moment. Shall I tell Miko to get lost?’
I bared my teeth in a grin as in the intervals between him talking to me I found I was flying over snow-sprinkled mountains and deep dark lakes.
‘Stop giggling.’ Sebastian sounded annoyed but I didn’t give a damn. ‘Move over. I want to fuck you.’
I thought I heard another splash from the bathroom and what might have been a stifled cry.
‘Now?’ It sounded a strange thing to want to do when one could soar like a bird over oceans and continents. ‘… nurses? … Lizzie?’
‘I’ve locked the door. Lizzie can wait outside.’
I wanted to explain that Lizzie was already inside but his hands were pulling up my gown. Too late his body was on mine, in mine.
‘I don’t know what’s so funny,’ he said afterwards in a slightly offended tone.
‘Neither do I.’ My voice boomed and in the distance someone cackled like a hen. Could it possibly have been me?
I spent two more enjoyable days in the clinic, warm, fed and practically killed with kindness, before Sebastian visited me again and said I must go home as it was costing a hundred pounds a day which the company could not afford.
‘As much as that?’ I flung back the covers and threw my good leg over the side, almost crushed by a terrible weight of guilt. ‘I had no idea. Of course I’ll leave at once. Oh, thank you, Sebastian, for paying for me.’ I seized his hand. My gratitude was so tremendous I felt I quite loved him.
Sebastian’s eye fell on several inches of naked thigh below my crumpled nightdress. ‘Mm. There’s no immediate hurry. I’ll just lock the door.’
‘Oh, yes, do!’
‘Your enthusiasm makes an agreeable change,’ he said after a while. ‘Of course I’m perfectly aware that the motive is mercenary.’
An increase of guilt encouraged me to submit willingly to a predilection of Sebastian’s I hated, the details of which I’d rather not go into.
‘You needn’t feel overburdened by indebtedness,’ said Sebastian as he rolled away from me, elegantly pale with effort and, one hoped, thoroughly sated. ‘I shall deduct the four hundred pounds from your salary in instalments over the next year.’
As I lay mute with indignation he laughed long and low.
‘Marigold! It’s me,’ called Lizzie, coming in through the front door of the flat accompanied by the most delicious smell of vinegar. ‘How are you, darling? Have you been horribly bored?’
I had been taken by ambulance back to 44 Maxwell Street that morning. The flat was up four flights of stairs and our miserly landlord had set the timer switch so that you had to run like mad, taking three steps at a time, to get from one landing to the next before the light went out. The ambulance men, manoeuvring the stretcher with difficulty round the narrow bends, had complained volubly about being plunged into absolute darkness every eight seconds while comparing the stink unfavourably with a ferret’s cage. I explained that the pungent smell was due to the third-floor lodger treating the stairwell as his own private pissoir. After that they advised me to throw myself on the mercy of Social Services and plainly disbelieved my protests that I was actually quite fond of the place. Because Nancy and Sorel were in America with the touring part of the company, I could only afford to heat my bedroom, and the temperature of the rest of the flat struck cold as a tomb. The men looked at my extravagant interior decorations with expressions of wonderment not unmixed with derision, but they had been sympathetic and friendly and I was sorry to see them go.
I had spent the intervening hours between their departure and Lizzie’s arrival shivering and dozing. ‘A bit. What’s in those parcels?’
‘Fish