Read Online Bedlam Burning by Geoff Nicholson - Free Book Online

and asked her the same question, and the woman replied, ‘I’m here because I hope to be sleeping with the author in the very near future.’
    I had no idea whether she meant it, but it was a good line and it might have brought the house down if there’d been a house. As it was, Ruth Harris scowled at her murderously and brought the event to a close. She was now regarding me sourly and, thank God, was no longer offering me dinner.
    A part of me thought that Nicola and I should go off with Gregory, and I’d tell her that this was the real author. This might help her see the funny side, at least make her realise that Gregory was no monster and that I hadn’t done anything so very terrible. I had no particular desire for reconciliation, but I was vain enough not to want her to continue to think badly of me. The drawback was that this would mean abandoning the woman who’d expressed a desire to sleep with me in the very near future. I could hardly make these explanations while she was present, and I very much wanted her to be present.
    But as it turned out, neither Gregory nor Nicola stuck around a moment longer than necessary; and neither of them wanted to be with me. In fact, they left together, and that confused me even more. Had he picked her up on the way to the bookshop? Were they now going off for drinks and flirtation? It hardly seemed likely given what I knew about both of them, but even if they were just walking to the station together, I wondered what on earth they were saying to each other.
    Nicola still had no idea who this stranger was. Would she tell him that I was a fraud? Would he then tell her he knew all about it, that he’d set it up, that he was the person I was pretending to be? Would she be as angry with him as she had been with me? And then what? I couldn’t imagine and, besides, I had other things on my mind, chiefly the woman in the hornrims. Were
we
about to go off for drinks and flirtation? Well, yes and no. She introduced herself as Alicia Crowe, a name that struck me as utterly unfitting, and said she’d like to talk to me professionally. I assumed she wanted to interview me for the piece I thought she was writing for the local paper, so a few minutes later she and I were indeed sitting in a pub together, having managed to leave a vexed and disappointed Ruth Harris behind, and I was asking the one thing I wanted to know.
    â€˜Did you mean what you said?’
    She replied, ‘Wouldn’t it be really shallow to want to sleep with someone just because you liked a book they’d written?’
    â€˜Well—’
    â€˜I mean it would be almost as shallow as wanting to sleep with them just because they had nice hair or good cheekbones, wouldn’t it? Why does anybody ever sleep with anybody? Is it just habit? Or animal instinct? Or to satisfy their own vanity?’
    At first I assumed this was a rhetorical question, but she continued to stare at me through the hornrimmed glasses, and it was clear she wanted an answer. I thought for a second of what a handsome couple she and I could make, even more appealing than Nicola and me, but perhaps this was what she meant by vanity.
    â€˜I suppose people sleep together because they want excitement, fun, warmth, closeness, comfort, love,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh yes,’ she said, ‘they
want
those things, but is sleeping with someone likely to provide them?’
    â€˜If you’re lucky.’
    She nodded thoughtfully, as if I’d given an eccentrically challenging answer.
    â€˜You’re full of surprises,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think the author of
The Wax Man
would be very interested in warmth and closeness.’
    â€˜Trust the teller not the tale,’ I said.
    She knew I was being glib, and perhaps that surprised her too.
The Wax Man
may have had many failings as a novel, but glibness wasn’t one of them.
    â€˜I suppose saying that I hoped to be sleeping with the