Josephine slapped her forehead again. ‘Oh God, that sounds terrible.’ She laughed. ‘No, not a stud-fee – an editorial fee! Your face! No – you’re going to be devoting many precious hours to my book and I insist I pay for your time. And thereby keep our relationship on a businesslike, platonic keel.’
Yes, he could be smitten by this woman. And, yes, as he wasn’t going to publish her book, couldn’t he pull this trick off, have his cake and eat it? He heard himself say, ‘And what if I don’t want your fee? What if it isn’t a businesslike, platonic relationship?’
She looked at him from under her eyebrows. ‘You mean if we become lovers?’
Harker grinned. ‘Well, you haven’t exactly got to commit yourself for life. It wouldn’t be hard to just sort of carry on from where we left off last night.’ Christ, what was he saying this for?
She looked at him solemnly. ‘You mean we should go back to bed now?’ Before he could deny it she made up her mind. ‘No.’ She held up a hand, ‘No, just friends. So I insist on paying you a fee. You’re going to help edit my book, I’m extremely grateful, I’m not going to endanger all that with emotional, messy, untidy sex stuff.’
Fine, so that was understood again, his conscience was clear – more or less.
‘I’ll help you with your book on two conditions,’ he said. ‘One, no fee. Two, you must tell absolutely nobody that I’m helping you. Not your friends, not your agent, not your publisher when you’ve got one – not even your father.’ Harker did not want Dupont learning that he had any access to her book or her.
Josephine said earnestly: ‘Do you mind telling me why not?’
‘Personal reasons – and professional. And there’s another thing I feel I must tell you.’
Then he changed his mind. As he was sticking to his decision about theirs being a platonic relationship he had been moved to confess to her that he had been less than honest about the Battle of Bassinga, that it was probably he who had shot her lover, that it was he who shot the fourteen-year-old boy with the wooden gun, that it was he, Harker, whom she had tried to kill and wounded so badly that he had been disabled out of the military, that he knew she had tried to commit suicide, that it was he who had plugged her wounds. But he stopped himself – why embarrass her by refuting the romantic version which she had given him, why mortify the woman by confronting her with her attempted suicide?
‘What?’ Josephine asked. ‘What’s the other thing?’
‘Nothing,’ Harker smiled.
‘What?’
‘No, it’s unimportant.’
‘Please.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Well, as that’s decided why don’t we go upstairs and have a decent bottle of champagne to kill the germs in that beer?’
Josephine took both his hands and squeezed. ‘Thank you for helping me!’ she said. ‘I’m so excited. But I think I’d better fly now, I’ve got so much work to do if I’m going to take full advantage of your help, you’ve got me all fired up. And I can tell by the twinkle in your eye that if I stay for a bottle of celebratory champagne we’ll end up in bed.’ She pointed her finger to his nose: ‘Platonic friendship only!’
He grinned. ‘Absolutely. So let us seal the deal with that bottle of champagne.’
They had a lovely time that long hot summer of 1988.
Mostly she slept at his place. Before dawn she crept out of bed so as not to wake him, pulled on her tracksuit, shouldered her small backpack, donned her crash-helmet, tiptoed out, unlocked her bicycle and set off up the quiet canyons of Manhattan. She rode the sixty blocks to her apartment as fast as she could to get the maximum benefit from the exercise while the air was comparatively unpolluted. Soon after sunrise she was at her desk, chomping through an apple and two bananas as she peered anxiously at her computer screen, marshalling her thoughts, picking up the threads from last night. By lunchtime she had done about a thousand words: she changed into a leotard, pulled a tracksuit over it, stuffed some fresh underwear into her backpack and rode her bike flat out across town to her dance class at the Studio: for the next forty minutes she pranced around with thirty other women of various shapes and sizes in a mirrored loft, working up a sweat under the tutelage of Fellini, a muscle-bound bald gay who volubly despaired of ever making a dancer out of any of them. For the next half hour she had her first conversation of the day while she showered before adjourning to the health bar for a salad and colourful dialogue about boyfriends, husbands, bosses, work, fashions, waistlines. By two-thirty she was cycling back across town to knock out another five hundred words. At four-thirty she permitted herself the first beer of the day to try to squeeze out another two hundred words. At about five-thirty she hit the buttons to print and telephoned Harker at his office. ‘The workers are knocking off, how about the fat-cats?’
‘Okay, want me to pick up something?’
‘I’ll pick up a couple of steaks.’
‘I’ll get ’em, just you ride carefully, please.’
By six-thirty she was pedalling downtown to Gramercy Park, zipping in and out of traffic. She let herself into the apartment complex, locked up her bicycle in the archway and strode across the courtyard to the rear building. She let herself into his ground-floor apartment. ‘I’m home …’
It worried Harker, her riding that bicycle in rush-hour traffic: he didn’t mind her cycling in the early morning, but New York traffic in the evening gave him the willies – and she rode so fast. Once she did have an accident, skidded into the back of a braking car, took a bad fall, sprained her wrist and was nearly run over, but she was only concerned about her goddam bike. He offered to fetch her every evening in his car, he even offered to have a cycle-rack fitted so she could take the machine with her and cycle back to her apartment in the morning – but no, she insisted she needed the exercise both ways, ‘after all we drink.’
‘You’re in magnificent condition; go to a gym if you need more exercise.’
‘Gyms are so boring. Aerobic classes are boring. But riding a bike is a little adventure each time, you see people and things. That’s why I like dancing, expressing yourself in motion, letting it all hang out …’
She was in very good condition but, yes, they did drink a good deal. Like most soldiers, Harker was accustomed to heavy drinking to unwind, and now that there was no combat he could unwind as much as he liked. Similarly, like most writers, Josephine drank to unwind.
‘I spend my entire working day alone, without colleagues, without anybody to talk to except myself, nobody to seek advice from, and by the end of the day I’m pretty damn sick of myself and I want a bit of fun.’
Josephine redecorated Madam Velvet’s dungeon, installed subdued lighting, put plants around the Roman-style whirlpool bath, scattered imitation bearskin rugs on the cement floor, stocked the ornate bar, filled the prisoners’ cage with colourful imitation flowers; she even hung some kinky whips, chains and leather boots from the ringbolts in the wall. She brought in two armchairs, a television set with a video-player – and, in the corner, some more up-to-date gymnasium equipment. In one piece of daunting machinery the manufacturers had managed to squeeze every artefact for the torturous development of the muscular system.
‘Everything you can get in a well-run gym, but in the privacy of your own home, to quote the advertisement.’
Harker looked at the gleaming contraption. ‘Is it safe?’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Shouldn’t