funny. He backed me up against the rosebushes and stuck his hand up my top. I said, ‘Hugo’s in the kitchen.’ Dominic didn’t like that. He took his hand back and said, ‘I’m gonna surprise you big-time, some night. Soon.’”
“Complete fucking psycho,” Leon said, through a mouthful. “Do you still think Su should have just headed off to Edinburgh? Without her around to lead him into temptation, abracadabra, Dominic would have transformed into a nice normal guy?”
“Up until then,” Susanna said, “I hadn’t been positive I’d actually be able to go through with it. But that made it easy. I said, ‘OK, I can’t stand this any more. You win. If I give you a blow job, will you leave me alone?’
“His jaw hit the floor. He looked like he genuinely couldn’t figure out what was going on, but after a second he went, ‘Are you serious?’ I said, ‘Yeah, as long as you swear on your life that afterwards you’ll never bother me again.’ You should’ve seen the grin on his face. He was all, ‘Yeah, totally, I swear!’—which was bullshit, of course he was planning to keep hassling me—‘Like, now?’ I said no, we’d get caught, Hugo would be out any minute. He’d have to come back late some night, like maybe Monday? And he said yeah, no problem, Monday night, deal. I said half-one in the morning—I thought he might kick up a fuss about that, but he would’ve said yes to anything.”
She checked the level in her glass against the light. “So I made the most of it. I made him promise to walk, in case anyone saw his car. I made him promise not to tell anyone; I said if I heard even the tiniest rumor, then the deal was off. And if he texted me or rang me or anything, the deal was off. He was all, ‘Sure, babe, no problem, swear on my life’—he was obviously planning to tell the world afterwards, but I was OK with that. He went, ‘I don’t need to text you, because you know you don’t get to change your mind. And you don’t need to worry about letting me in, I’ll be here.’ And he waved the key at me and winked, and headed off.”
In the window behind her the sky was dimming, rusty leaves hanging heavy with rain on the chestnut trees. “He was never even the smallest bit suspicious,” Susanna said, “you know that? I made sure I looked totally terrified and disgusted—not that that was difficult—and he was getting such a kick out of that, he didn’t have room for anything else. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he had.”
The room was getting chilly; the fire had burned low. Leon reached over to the pile of firewood and tossed in a log, sending up a soft crunching sound and a shower of orange sparks.
“So then,” Susanna said, “all we had to do was wait till Monday.”
“You were our big worry,” Leon said, to me. “Hugo was always in bed with the lights out by half-eleven, like clockwork. The factory was still being turned into apartments, there was no one living there yet, and the neighbors were all about a hundred and ten; they went to bed after the nine o’clock news, and even if they got up and looked out the window, they were mostly blind as bats. But if you’d decided to stay up late, surfing porn or whatever you used to do on Hugo’s computer, we’d have been in big trouble.”
“Well,” Susanna said, tiny smile over the rim of her glass. “Not that big a worry.”
“What?” I demanded. I had sat bolt upright. “What did you do to me?”
“Oh my God, relax on the jacks,” Leon said, eyebrows arched. “We didn’t do anything.”
“We just got in a bottle of vodka, Sunday night,” Susanna said. “And a bit of hash. And the two of us didn’t have very much of either one.”
“You didn’t even notice,” Leon told me. “You got ossified. At one stage you were swinging from a tree branch, giggling and telling us you were Monkey Man.”
“And we made sure you were up bright and early for work on Monday morning. It wasn’t easy, but we did it.”
“You were in bits. Green. I think you were actually puking. You wanted to pull a sickie, but we wouldn’t let you.”
“So by eleven on Monday night,” Susanna said, “you were just about falling over. We were in here, watching TV, Newsnight