The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

Chapter Twelve

They say that eavesdroppers seldom hear good of themselves. It’s been my experience that eavesdroppers seldom hear anything of themselves at all, since most people aren’t as interested in you as, well, you. This time, however, I was absolutely positive that Joan Plowden-Plugge had been talking about me. Me and Colin, that is. Her voice takes on a special sneer when my name comes up. It’s rather flattering, considering that I’ve met her all of three times.

As I dusted my hands off against my pants, and automatically checked to make sure that the zip was where it ought to be, I wondered exactly what it was that I was expected to take badly when I found out. There was, I admitted to myself, as I pushed open the door of the ladies’ room, the remote possibility that Joan and Sally might have been talking about another couple entirely. But, come on, who would really believe that?

What I needed to do was get them talking. It shouldn’t be too hard to get Joan making barbed little comments. The problem would be making sure they were barbed little comments about whatever it was that Colin did for a living and not about me, my job, my American-ness, or my hair.

I ventured out of the dark cavern of the bathroom hallway (I wonder if there’s a regulation that pub bathrooms must always be in a dark cul-de-sac), feeling like the Duke of Dovedale about to infiltrate a meeting of the Hellfire Club. As I quickly scanned the small group of people scattered around the table in front of the bow window, I was forced to reconsider. Can Hellfire Club really be an appropriate metaphor when there’s a vicar involved?

It made me feel all warm and fuzzy that instead of seating himself, Colin was standing next to the table in that way you do when you’ve only stopped to chat for a moment, declaring to all and sundry his intention to abandon them and cleave unto me — at least for the length of our dinner.

Slipping into the space next to him, I smiled cheerfully all around. “Hi, all! Mmmm, thanks.” I gratefully accepted the drink Colin handed me. The paper napkin wrapped around the glass was already damp with condensation from the melting ice.

“How long are you here?” asked the Vicar, clearly enjoying needling Joan. Joan turned her chair slightly away with the lofty air of one who does not intend to allow herself to be needled.

“Only the week,” I said. “That is, unless I make some sort of major breakthrough in the archives and have to beg Colin to let me stay on.”

“I’m sure you won’t have any trouble convincing him.” The Vicar waggled his eyebrows impishly. He reminded me of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all good-natured mischief. I wasn’t sure that was generally recommended in a vicar, but I certainly enjoyed it.

“Doesn’t Colin have his own work to do?” Joan said acidly, although whether the dig was aimed at me or Colin was hard to tell.

“Nothing that won’t keep,” said Colin neutrally. “Half the time, I don’t even know that Eloise is there. She just slopes off into another century and leaves me to my own devices.”

“You make me sound like Dr. Who!” I protested.

“But prettier.”

“That’s all right then. You know, it’s unfair. You all know what I do, but I don’t know what any of you do — well, except you,” I added to the Vicar.

What was his name? I knew he had been introduced to me by something other than just “Vicar,” but I couldn’t for the life of me remember it. Geoffrey? Godfrey? Sigfried? I was probably safer just sticking to vicar.

“Hazard of my profession,” he said sadly. “It takes all the mystery out of me.”

“Except for the Eucharisticum Mysterium,” Colin pointed out, stretching lazily. “I should think that counts.”

“Yes, but that’s not me, is it?” protested the Vicar. “That’s all God, and you don’t compete for His thunder, not unless you want a plague on your cattle.”

“You don’t have cattle,” Sally said, blowing froth off her beer.

“Chattel, then,” said the vicar. “It’s almost spelled the same.”

“Not unless you’re using an Elizabethan primer,” interjected Colin.

Sally chuckled. “Your chattel, then. I can just see your CD collection coming out in boils. Oooooh. Scary.”

We were straying a bit afield from where I had been trying to go. I made a last-ditch attempt to wrench the conversation back on course. “What about you, Sally?” I asked hastily. “What do you do?”

“Estate agent,” she said, and it took me a moment to remember that in this century, that meant realtor rather than a land manager. She nodded to her sister. “And Joan writes for Manderley.”

Joan was a writer? If anything, I would have had them pegged the opposite way around, with Sally as the artsy one and Joan as the pushy real estate broker. But you never can tell, can you? I know grad students who look dress like lawyers and lawyers who go all bohemian in their spare time.

Then the name of the magazine registered. “You write for Manderley ?”

“Yes.”

Named after the fictional manor house in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the magazine was a cross between a glossy like Country Life and a serious academic journal, devoted to the conservation of England’s major and minor manor houses. Each issue featured articles on subjects ranging from attempts to muster support to save this or that historic site to in-depth looks at restoration projects to more esoteric examinations of material history, such as the spread of chinoiserie textiles in the eighteenth century, with special reference to their sociocultural implications.

As you can tell, I’d done more than my share of guilty newsstand browsing. It wasn’t the sort of thing I could quite justify buying, but some of the articles were just enough over the edge into my field to almost qualify as research.

“I love that magazine!”

Joan crossed one long leg over the other. If she had had a cigarette, she would have blown smoke rings. “Many people do.”

She sounded as though she couldn’t quite see the point of it herself. I wondered if it was an act. She was the one who worked for the magazine, after all. Although I hated having to admit there might be something interesting or likable about her.

Well, maybe not likable.

Taking advantage of the lull, Colin seized his moment to whisk us away. “Brilliant stumbling into you,” he said, steering me back from the table, “but we’re famished. No lunch,” he explained mendaciously.

I suppose from a boy perspective, cheese and crackers in the car doesn’t really count as real food.

“Hmph,” said the Vicar. “We know when we’re not wanted.”

With a backwards wave, I submitted to being led off to a small round table all the way in the far corner of the room, as tucked away as we could be. The table was blackened with age, nicked by generations of knives, forks, and goodness only knew what else.

The waitress flicked a couple of cardboard beer mats down in front of us, dropped two plastic menus, and departed.

So far, I was getting an F for my attempts at espionage. Mata Hari need have no fear of losing her place in the spy pantheon.

“You know,” I said, setting my vodka tonic down on the beer mat and leaning my elbows on the table, “we talked about everyone else, but never what you do.”

“You’re in a wet patch,” pointed out Colin, his menu covering his face right up to the eyes.

For a moment, I thought that might be an outré way of saying, “don’t tread here; you’re on marshy conversational ground,” or something like that. But it only took the feel of damp seeping through the wool of my sweater to make me realize that, no, he was referring to a literal wet spot.

“Damn!” I snatched my elbows off the table and tried to twist it to peer at the damp patch — which, if you’ve ever tried it, is an exercise in futility, and doesn’t make you any less damp.

Colin ran a finger over the shiny spot on the table. “Only water,” he decreed, gallantly scrubbing dry the rest of the table top with his own napkin. “Now, what do you want to eat?”

I’m ashamed to admit that what with one thing and another (fisherman’s pie and chicken tikka masala), we never made it back to the topic of Colin’s occupation. It wasn’t just that I’m easily distractible — although I am — or that my previous attempts had been about as successful as trying to batter down a door with a feather duster. There were so many other things to talk about, from silly one-liners to world affairs to books we’d both read or hadn’t read but thought the other person should read. We were on to coffee before I could remember lifting a fork to eat my fisherman’s pie.

But, in the end, it was the inherent mundanity of the scene that made my earlier wild suppositions seem so impossible. There was something so warm and cozy and incredibly commonplace about everything, from the battered wood tables to the soggy cardboard beer mats to the frayed green wool of Colin’s sweater, which looked as though it had been washed, well, by a boy. He didn’t look like England’s next answer to James Bond. He looked like what he was: a thirty-something English landowner with laugh lines from squinting at the sun, a falling-down old house, and a splash of curry on his sleeve.

It probably had been the word “sties” that I had heard. It was a bit like playing a game of Mad Libs, trying to reconstruct a sentence with words missing. I tried it out in my head. Joan had said, “I wouldn’t want my boyfriend gurgle gurgle gurgle sties.” That could easily translate to, “I wouldn’t want my boyfriend playing with pig sties.” Even if Colin didn’t have literal pig sties, that could be her way of casting scorn on him for giving up his big city job to take up land management, much the same way my mother liked to refer to several holdover hippie cousins of mine as “living in trees,” although as far as I could tell (having never visited them), none of them actually lived in a tree house. It all made a lot more sense than “gurgle gurgle gurgle spies.”

Besides, if he really was a spy, how would Joan and Sally know? It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you rushed to tell the neighbors. Unless the whole village was in on it! And that really would be too, too absurd, like something out of The Avengers. I drank my coffee and pushed the whole topic out of my mind.

By the time dinner was over, spies, even of the historical variety, were the farthest thing from my mind. Breathless with cold and laughter, I hopped up and down while Colin opened the doors of the Range Rover. It all felt very normal and very domestic, driving home together along twisty country lanes in the dark, singing along to silly eighties music on the radio as Colin deliberately got the words wrong to some, and I — not so deliberately — got the words wrong to others. Who knew that the words to that Erasure song were really “I’m your lover, not your rival” rather than “I’m your lover, not your Bible”? I thought my version made much more sense and told him so.

After he had checked the answering machine and locked the door and kicked the front hall rug back into place (it bunched when you walked on it) and all those other little just-getting-home things that are three-quarters instinctive, we cracked open a bottle of cheap Italian red — real Italian red, brought back from his trip to visit his mother over New Year’s — and settled down in a room I hadn’t seen until then to cuddle up on the couch and watch silly movies.

For the first time since the bedroom debacle, I really felt as though I were home. Unlike the rest of the house, the room wasn’t a decaying example of late Victorian arts and crafts movement; it featured a squashy, comfy couch with a plaid afghan tossed over one side. There were still dog hairs clinging to the side of the couch, relics, Colin admitted, of an elderly family dog who had gone to his reward that past October.

“Right before I met you,” he said, gazing soulfully at me over his wine.

I clinked my glass with his. “I hope you’re not considering me as a replacement.”

He picked a strand of red hair off his shoulder. “You are shedding,” he said, handing it back to me.

“Um, thanks. But don’t expect me to play dead.”

In one corner of the room, an open cabinet — IKEA or the equivalent, at a guess — housed a large collection of videos, in battered cardboard holders. From the looks of it, they were a composite selection. I assumed Fiorile, the Italian art film, was Colin’s mother. The Godfather movies were definitely Colin. And Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pretty Woman, and everything ever done by Errol Flynn were undoubtedly the property of his sister, Serena. I wondered if she imagined herself as Maid Marian defending herself against Prince John’s tribunal in that amazing courtroom scene. It’s so much easier to live the lives we’d like for ourselves when they’re printed on celluloid in two-hour-long packages.

I did get Colin to agree to the movie of my choice but, try as I might, I couldn’t quite get him to see the finer points of the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.

As Robin flung open the doors of the Great Hall of Nottingham Castle, Colin made a snorting noise. “If I came home with a whole deer slung over my shoulders like that, what would you say?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “Get that unhygienic thing out of the house!” I snuggled deeper into the couch cushions. “But when Errol Flynn does it, it’s different.”

“He’s dead, you know,” said Colin darkly.

“He was also gay. But who cares? He still looks splendid in tights.”

Colin made a grumbling noise that came out sounding somewhat like, “Yes, if you like effeminate men.”

I supposed I should have been relieved that he didn’t. I knew far too many men in college who liked Madonna, Errol Flynn, and Platonic aesthetics (not necessarily in that order). Let’s just say that they all came tumbling out of the closet sometime around junior year.

“I took fencing, too,” he said, watching critically as Errol Flynn — looking particularly dishy in his green tights, I might add — cut Prince John’s men to ribbons at triple normal speed.

“Have some popcorn,” I said, shoving the bowl at him.

“Can I throw it at the screen?”

“It’s your carpet.”

“Hmm,” said Colin, and put it in his mouth instead, by which I gathered that he enjoyed vacuuming about as much as I do.

All in all, it was a perfectly lovely evening. We fell asleep in a happy haze of red wine and extra-connubial canoodling, curled up against the cold beneath Colin’s utilitarian blue duvet. It may have been ugly, but it did know its business. For the first time since I’d come to England, I wasn’t cold. Having a boy in the bed is better than having one’s own space heater.

I was dreaming quite happily of Colin striding into the Great Hall of Nottingham Castle with a large pig thrown over his shoulders — “Back to the sties with you!” shouted Prince John, banging his fist on the trestle board with rage — when the Sheriff set off the castle alarm, the portcullis came crashing down, and I was jolted brutally and finally out of sleep.

Half strangling myself in the covers as I flailed into wakefulness, I realized blearily that it wasn’t the castle alarm system after all, but the double ring peculiar to English phones. Someone was phoning.

I would have loved to have dropped whoever it was down the nearest oubliette, but since I’d been so nastily jarred out of my castle fantasy, there was no oubliette to be had. Just the phone, which kept ringing and ringing, pausing after each double ring as though gathering its breath. It showed no signs of stopping.

Like most men, Colin could probably have slept through the charge of the Light Brigade as they thundered right over his pillow. Since I was on the side with the phone, I groped sleepily for the receiver, picked it up upside down, and had to reverse it, getting slightly tangled in the cord in the process.

“Hello?” I murmured sleepily, before I had time to wonder whether I should really be picking up Colin’s phone in the middle of the night. What if it was a family emergency? I wouldn’t want his mother to think I was a loose woman.

Instead of saying “hello” back — or “cheers” or whatever — the person on the other end of the phone muttered something in a foreign language and the connection clicked off. I couldn’t recognize the language, but it definitely wasn’t a Romance language or one of the Nordic ones. Whatever it was, it involved a lot of slurring sounds.

In other words, it was clearly a wrong number.

Oh, well. At least it wasn’t Colin’s mother. Or his sister.

“All righty, then.” I put the phone back in its cradle, tugged some quilt away from Colin (Ha! He did hog the blankets), pulled my pillow over my head, and prepared to go back to sleep.

The phone instantly started ringing again.

This time it was I who muttered something uncomplimentary.

“Hello?” I snapped, picking up the phone. Didn’t he realize it was three in the morning?

It must not have been three in the morning wherever he was. I could hear the sound of traffic, horns blaring, people chattering, taxi drivers cursing. I might not have been able to identify the language, but taxi drivers cursing sounds the same the world over. Trust me, it’s true.

But the person on the other end of the phone didn’t say a word.

“Hello?” I repeated.

Click went the phone.

“Well, same to you,” I said, and thrust the receiver down. I missed the cradle, of course. Not that the crazy mis-dialer on the other end could hear it. Now I was awake, awake and annoyed. Colin, of course, was still fast asleep. To add insult to injury, in those crucial two minutes he had managed to wrap himself mummy-like in those few feet of blanket I had so painstakingly extracted from him.

I resisted the ignoble urge to poke him in the ribs. I couldn’t find his ribs, anyway. They were too thickly wrapped in my side of the blanket.

Grumbling to myself, I half climbed, half rolled out of the bed, sliding until my feet touched the floor. Screw seductive, I was putting on my flannel-est flannel. Colin had lost the right to skimpy nightwear when he had stolen my half of the blanket.

I stomped barefoot across the prickly old carpet towards the chest of drawers, my eyes by now having adjusted enough to the darkness to at least make out the shape of large pieces of furniture.

As I was passing Colin’s side of the bed, his night table began to shriek at me.

After I jumped half out of my skin, I realized that I hadn’t set off some sort of outré girlfriend alarm, it was just his cell phone, which he had forgotten to switch to silent when he went to bed. Admittedly, we both had our minds on other things at the time.

Being a meat-and-potatoes sort of bloke, Colin had never bothered to install one of the music ringtones; instead, it was just your basic ring, shrill and insistent. If Colin’s phone had been one of those flip-top kinds, I would never have looked. It would have been tantamount to opening his mail. But there it was, just lying there, screen side up, all lit up by the call. It was practically thrusting itself in my face. What was I supposed to do, shut my eyes?

On the glowing screen, the country code read “971.” I’ve always been more than a bit baffled by international dialing, but I knew enough to know that that was not the U.K. It wasn’t America, either, or anywhere in Europe. Where in the hell was 971? Someplace where people might still be out on the street and taxis might still be driving, perhaps?

The ringing stopped abruptly. A few moments later, the phone gave a double beep, like an electronic belch, to signify that a message had been left.

I didn’t check the message, of course. The fact that I didn’t have Colin’s voice mail access code was entirely immaterial. Good relationships, as we all know, are based on trust.

Blah, blah, blah.

Trust and, in my case, a hearty dose of curiosity.

It couldn’t hurt to just find out what the country code was. After all, I was wide awake now (I hurled an accusatory glance at the lump on the bed happily wrapped in all the blankets and sleeping away), and scrolling through directory numbers could have a soporific effect. It would be like counting sheep without the sheep.

Colin had told me there was Internet access in his study. I could look it up there. And while I was at it, I could check my email. Yes, that was what I was doing, checking my email. Nobody was saying anything about snooping. If I were home and wide awake in the middle of the night, of course I would go check email. It was immaterial that the email happened to be in Colin’s study.

If I had ever learned how, I probably would have been whistling with my hands stuck into my nonexistent pockets.

Oh, this was just silly! There was nothing wrong with going on a quick email check.

Pulling my thick old flannel nightgown over my head, I tiptoed out of the bedroom, pulling the door softly shut behind me.