"Barbara. I expect the traffic was a nightmare, wasn't it?" and admitted her into the house.
This was small. All the windows were open, but that was doing little to mitigate the heat inside. Sidney appeared to be one of those loathsome women who did not perspire, but Barbara was not among their number, and she could feel the sweat popping out on her face the moment the front door closed behind her. Sidney said sympathetically, "Terrible, isn't it? We complain and complain about the rain, and then we get this. There should be some middle ground, but there never is. I'm just this way, if you don't mind."
Just this way turned out to be a staircase. This rose towards the back of the little house, where a door stood open to a small garden from which the sound of vicious pounding was emanating. Sidney went to the door, saying over her shoulder to Barbara, "That's just Matt."
And into the garden, "Matt, darling, come and meet Barbara Havers."
Barbara looked past her to see a man - burly, shirtless, and sweating - who was standing with sledgehammer in hand, apparently in the process of beating a sheet of plywood into submission. There seemed to be no reason for this unless, Barbara thought, he was going for a rather inefficient means of creating mulch for the single, sun-parched herbaceous border. At Sidney's call, he didn't stop what he was doing. Rather, he glanced over his shoulder and nodded curtly. He was wearing dark glasses, and his ears were pierced. His head was shaved to the skull, and like the rest of him it shone with sweat.
"Gorgeous, isn't he?" Sidney murmured.
It wouldn't have been Barbara's word of choice. "What's he doing, exactly?" she said.
"Letting it out."
"What?"
"Hmmm?" Sidney gazed at the man appreciatively. He didn't appear particularly handsome, but he had a body completely defined by muscle: an eye-catching chest, narrow waist, serious lats, and a bum that would have got him pinched just about anywhere on the planet. "Oh. Aggression. He's letting it out. He hates it when he's not working."
"Unemployed, is he?"
"Good heavens, no. He does ...oh, something or other for the government. Come up above, Barbara. D'you mind if we talk in the bathroom? I was giving myself a facial. Is it all right if I get on with it?"
Barbara said it was fine by her. She'd never seen a facial being given and now that she was on her relentless course of self-improvement, who knew what tips she might pick up from a woman who'd been a professional model since she was seventeen? As she followed Sidney up the stairs, she said, "Like what?"
"Matt?" Sidney clarified. "It's all top secret, according to him. I expect he's a spy or something. He won't say. But he goes off for days or weeks and when he comes home, he fetches the plywood and beats the dickens out of it. He's between jobs at the moment." She glanced back in the direction of the pounding, concluding with a casual, "Matthew Jones, man of mystery."
"Jones," Barbara noted. "Interesting name."
"It's probably his whatever ...his cover, eh? Makes it all rather exciting, don't you think?"
What Barbara thought was that sharing lodgings and a bed with someone who pounded upon wood with a sledgehammer, possessed shady employment, and had a name that might or might not be his own was akin to playing Russian roulette with a rusty Colt .45, but she kept that to herself. Everyone's boat floated on different water and if the bloke below rang Sidney's chimes - not to mix too many metaphors, Barbara thought - then who was she to point out that men of mystery were frequently men of mystery for reasons having nothing at all to do with James Bond. Sidney had three brothers who were doubtless doing their share of pointing that out to her.
She followed Sidney into the bathroom where an impressive lineup of jars and bottles awaited them. Sidney began with the removal of her makeup, chattily explaining the process - "I like to tone, first, before I exfoliate. How often d'you exfoliate, Barbara?" - as she went along.
Barbara murmured appropriate responses, although toning sounded like something one did in a gym and exfoliating surely had to do with gardening, didn't it? When Sidney at last had smoothed on a mask - "My T zone is just bloody murder," she confessed - Barbara brought up the reason for her journey to Bethnal Green. She said, "Deborah tells me