Under My Skin by Sarah Dunant Page B

heat I treated her to a caffeine-free cup of coffee by the pool to say good-bye. I felt fabulously light-headed sitting there, a mixture of oxygen and my own sense of success. Her stay had left her looking healthy but no younger. It was a glorious day and the sun was pouring in through the roof of the atrium, lighting up her face with its elaborate network of wrinkles and frown lines. Edith Sitwell once wrote how as Elizabeth aged the wrinkles fell like snow upon her face. I’ve always remembered that. Such a gentle image, with its echoes of transformation and silence. It’s sort of what I hope formyself—although with my luck I’ll probably be more like Auden’s wedding cake left out in the rain. Unless, of course, I succumbed to Maurice’s superior cuts.
    I wondered if it had ever been an option for her. Or if this obsession with image was more the preserve of the baby-boom generation for whom youth had been such a definition of life that they didn’t know how to let it go. I wanted to ask her how she felt about growing old, if she embraced or railed against it, but she was deeply preoccupied by government cutbacks in the museum world and I couldn’t see a way to tease the conversation in the right direction.
    As we were sitting there, Martha came out from the massage room in search of her next lucky customer. She saw me across the pool and nodded, a hint of a question in her eyes. Being Martha, she would already have made it her business to know that it was Lola and not Jennifer who had packed bags and fled like a thief in the night. In which case that wouldn’t be the question she was asking.
    It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it. Somewhere on the edges of my drunken sleep I’d had an extraordinary dream about women’s bodies being molded by sets of hands dangling on puppet strings. It had not been without a certain erotic charge, but the message was by no means clear, and if I was going to lie down on Martha’s couch without my clothes on again, I would need to be a little more certain of any impending change in my sexual orientation. Anyway, I was still working for her boss.
    Officially I didn’t start work until after the weekend. It would take her till then to duplicate the list of files that I needed from her husband’s office, a record of all Maurice Marchant’s patients over the last ten years who’d been back to complain.
    It would, of course, have been a hell of a lot easier if I could have talked to the man himself, but Olivia remained adamant: Maurice was not to be disturbed. In the end Istopped arguing the point and decided to use a bit of initiative. I’m a great believer in what the client doesn’t know they can’t grieve about. Maurice Marchant probably saw dozens of women every day. I would just be one more eager for a little advice on a body curve that wasn’t going my way. At least that way I’d get some sense of who he was.
    I was also going to have to track down wherever it was that Lola Marsh had fled to last night, just to see if I could winkle any more out of her bruised, sealed little soul. No doubt that, too, would send my client into paroxysms of paranoia about unwelcome publicity. Ah well, it wouldn’t be the first time the client found the investigation as painful as the crime. Maybe I’d get the sack. I could always apply to go on “Mastermind” afterward. Special subject: cosmetic—oops, sorry, aesthetic surgery. Maybe when I knew enough, I could offer my mother a cheekbone augmentation for her silver wedding anniversary. If we all lived that long.

    My flat seemed altogether dull after the drama of Castle Dean. Usually I like to come home. Find it relaxing being in my own company, pottering about trying to resuscitate the window boxes or cleaning out the bath. But not this time. This time there was a restlessness, almost a dissatisfaction.
    Suspecting the sudden reintroduction of caffeine, I threw my coffee down the sink and made myself an omelette, which I