Elephant Song - Smith Wilbur - Страница 69
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Go for it now, honcychild, she counselled herself, and smiled at him.
Thank you, Sir Peter. I'd love that. She was awed by the splendour of the Holland Park house. It was hard not to rubberneck like a tourist as he led her up to his study and settled her into a deep leather armchair.
it was a masculine room with a set of rhinoceros horns on the panelled wall. She noticed the two paintings and shivered as she recognised their value.
Are you cold, my dear? He was solicitous and motioned the black servant in flowing white kanza to close the window. Sir Peter brought the coffee cup to her with his own hands. Kenya Blue, he told her.
Specially picked from my private plantation on the slopes of Mount Kenya.
He dismissed the servant and lit a cigar. And now, my dear. . . He blew a streamer of cigar smoke towards the ceiling. Tell me, are you sleeping with Daniel Armstrong? It -was so unexpected, so brusque and alarming that she lost her equilibrium. Before she could prevent herself she flared at him, Just who the hell do you think you're talking to? He raised a beetling silver eyebrow at her. Ah, a temper to match the colour of your hair, I see. However, that's a fair question, and I'll answer straight. I think I am talking to Thelma Smith. That's the name on your birth certificate, isn't it? Father unknown. My information is that your mother died in 1975 of an overdose. Heroin, I believe. That was the period when a shipment of had stuff got loose in the city.
Bonny felt a cold nauseous sweat break out on her forehead.
She stared at him. Like your mother's, your own career has been, shall we say, chequered. At the age of fourteen, a juvenile school of correction for shop-lifting and possession of marijuana. Then at eighteen, a nine-months sentence for theft and prostitution. It seems you robbed one of your clients. White in women's gaol you developed your interest in photography. You served only three months of your sentence.
Time off for good behaviour. He smiled at her. Please correct me if I have got any of these facts wrong. Bonny felt herself shrinking down into the huge chair. She still felt sick and cold. She kept silent.
You changed your name to the more glamorous version and got your first job in photography with Peterson Television in Canada. Dismissed in May 1981 for stealing and selling video equipment belonging to the company.
They declined to press charges. Since then a clean record.
Reformed, perhaps, or just getting a little more clever?
Whichever is the case, it seems you are not burdened by too many moral qualms and that you'll do almost anything for money. You bastard, she hissed at him. You've been leading me on. I thought. .
. Yes, you thought that I was lusting after all that decidedly palatable flesh. He shook his head with regret. I am an old man, my dear. As the flames burn lower, I find my appetite becomes more refined. With due respect for your obvious charms, I would class you as Beaujolais nouveau, a hearty young wine, tasty but lacking integrity or distinction. The wine for a younger palate, like Danny Armstrong's perhaps. At my age I prefer something like a Latour or a Margaux, older, smoother and with more class to it. You old bastard! Now you insult me. That was not my intention.
I merely wanted us to understand each other. I want something other than your body. You want money. We can do a deal. It's a purely commercial arrangement.
Now to return to my original question. Are you sleeping with Daniel Armstrong? Yes, she snarled at him. I'm screwing his arse off.
An expressive turn of phrase. I take it that no mawkish sentiments complicate this relationship? That is, not on your side at least?
There is only one person I love, and she's sitting right here in this room.
Total honesty, he smiled. Better and better, especially as Danny Armstrong is not the type to treat it so lightly. You have a certain influence and leverage over him, so you and I can do business now.
What would you say to twenty-five thousand pounds? The sum startled Bonny, but she screwed up her courage and followed her intuition. She dismissed the offer scornfully, I'd say "Up yours, mate! " I read somewhere that you paid ten times more than that for a horse. Ah, but she was a thoroughbred filly of impeccable bloodlines. You wouldn't set yourself in that class, surely? He held up his hands to forestall her furious response. Enough my dear; it was Just a little joke, a poor one, I agree. Please forgive me. I want us to be business associates, not lovers, nor even friends. Then before we talk about a price, you'd better explain what I have to do. Her expression was bright and foxy. He felt the first vestiges of respect for her.
It's very simple really. . . And he told her what he wanted.
Daniel had spent every day that week at the Reading Room of the British Museum. This was invariably his practice before leaving on an assignment. In addition to books specifically on Ubomo, he asked the librarian for every publication that she could find on the Congo, the Rift Valley and its lakes, and the African equatorial forest.
He started with the books of Speke and Burton, Mungo Park and Alan Moorehead, re-reading them for the first time in years. He skipped through them rapidly, merely refreshing his mind on the half-forgotten descriptions of the nineteenth-century explorations of the region. He moved on to the more recent publications.
Amongst these he found Kelly Kinnear's book, The People of the Tall Trees, listed in the bibliography.
He called for a copy of her book and studied the author's photograph on the inside of the dust-jacket. She was rather pretty, with a strong and interesting face. The blurb did not give her birth date but it listed her honours and degrees. She was primarily a medical doctor, although she also had a PhD.
in Anthropology from Bristol University. When not conducting research in the field, Doctor Kinnear shares a cottage in Cornwall with two dogs and a cat. That was the only personal information that the blurb contained and Daniel returned to the photograph.
In the background of the photograph was a palisade formed by the trunks of large tropical trees. It seemed as though she stood in a forest clearing. She was bare-headed, dark hair pulled back from her face and twisted into a thick plait that had fallen forward over one shoulder and hung down her chest.
She wore a man's shirt. It was difficult to tell what her figure was like, but she seemed slim and small-breasted. Her neck was long, with clean graceful lines, and her collar-bones formed a sculptured cup at the base of her throat.
Her head sat well on the column of her neck, strong square jaw and high cheekbones like an American Indian. Her nose was thin and rather bony and her mouth was determined, perhaps obstinate. Her eyes were probably her best feature, wideset and almond-shaped, and she stared coolly at the camera. He judged that she had been in her early thirties when the photograph was taken, but there was no indication as to how old she was now. A handful, Daniel decided. No wonder she has my friend Tug running scared. This is a lady who gets her own way. He flicked through to the first dozen pages of People of the Tall Trees, and read the introduction in which Kelly Kinnear explored the first references to the pygmies in the writings of antiquity.
This began with the report of the Egyptian leader Harkbuf to his child-Pharaoh Neferkare. Two thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ, Harkhuf had led an expedition southwards to discover the source of the Nile river. In his field report, discovered four and a half thousand years later in Pharaoh's tomb, Harkhuf described how he had come to a mighty forest to the west of the Mountains of the Moon, and how in that dark and mysterious place he had encountered a tiny people who danced and sang to their god. Their god was the very forest itself and the description of their dancing and worship was so tantalizing that Pharaoh despatched a messenger ordering Harkhuf to capture some of these tiny god dancers and bring them back to Memphis.
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