Sins of the Flesh. Colleen McCullough

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      She had met Jessica Wainfleet and Ivy Ramsbottom near Millstone Beach at the beginning of June, when they combined forces to rescue a cat stranded up a tree, yowling piteously. Of course when the creature was thoroughly satisfied that all three women had genuinely risked their necks on its behalf, it descended daintily of its own accord and vanished in a tabby blur. Jess and Ivy had laughed until they wept; Delia laughed until she had a stitch in her side. This feline practical joke had occurred very near Delia’s condo, so they had repaired to the condo to drink sherry, send out for pizza, and make mutual discoveries about each other. Jess and Ivy had been friends for years. Each lived in the region; Jess had a small house a block behind Delia, and Ivy lived in Little Busquash, a cottage on the huge grounds of Busquash Manor, the great pile atop Busquash Peninsula just to Delia’s west.

      “But you outclass both of us, Delia,” said Jess with a sigh. “I’d kill to have a condo right on the beach—top floor too!”

      “A bequest from a rich aunt I didn’t even know I had, some luck, and some useful relatives,” Delia said happily. “Yes, I have everything I want.”

      “Except a husband?” Jess asked slyly.

      “Oh, dear me, no! I don’t want a husband. I like my life as it is—except that I am in need of two new chums.”

      All three women were spinsters; in America, very rare, even for lesbians. Though Delia sensed no undercurrents suggesting that, thank the Lord! It had broken up several new friendships, for Delia was conservative in her social attitudes, and disliked sex rearing its (to her) ugly, destructive head. Simply, she was one of those lucky women whose sexual urges were neither powerful nor frequent. Her self-image was of an eccentric, and she cultivated it assiduously, helped by a patrician Englishness she also made capital out of. The sooner after meeting her that people adjudged her eccentric, the better, as far as Delia was concerned.

      Ivy Ramsbottom was an extremely tall woman, though not at all obese; her exact height she declined to give, but Delia put it at about Desdemona’s height, six feet three, and deemed Ivy of the same athletic bent. There the comparison faded; Ivy had curly corn-gold hair, fine features and cornflower-blue eyes. She was so well-dressed that only Gloria Silvestri eclipsed her. Her casual walk-on-the-beach-in-early-summer costume was so perfect that not even a mad scramble after a cat had mussed it.

      “Clothes are my trade,” she said to Delia, manipulating her pizza slice so deftly that it wouldn’t have dared drip on her sweater. “I manage my brother’s clothing businesses.”

      “What sort of clothes?” asked Delia, who adored dressing only a little less than police work.

      “All varieties these days, though he started out among the forgotten women, as he calls them—women who are too tall, too fat, or disproportionate in some way. Why should they be doomed to dismal or unfashionable things? A tiny segment of one percent of women wear clothes well anyway. I can only think of Gloria Silvestri, Mrs. William Paley Jr., and the Duchess of Windsor, though a number of women can pass muster, and a few almost make it to the top. However, the majority of women look like something the cat dragged in.”

      “I quite agree!” cried Delia.

      “But most of all,” said Ivy, continuing, “he’s famous for his bridal gowns. I manage Rha Tanais Bridal in person.”

      “Rha Tanais is your brother?” Delia asked, squeaking.

      “Yes,” said Ivy, amused.

      “Different name?”

      “Ramsbottom is not euphonious,” Ivy said with a grin. “Gown by Ramsbottom doesn’t quite get there, somehow.”

      “Gown by Rha Tanais is far more exotic.”

      “And Rha Tanais is exotic,” said Jess, laughing. “But come, Delia, why should a mere purveyor of clothes be more exciting than a psychiatrist like me or a detective like you?”

      “The sheer fame, no other reason. Fame is exciting.”

      “I concede your point, it’s a valid one.”

      Jess Wainfleet was forty-five years old, a slender woman with a good figure for clothes, since she wasn’t busty; most men would have called her attractive rather than pretty or beautiful, despite her small, fine, regular features. Her black hair was cropped very short, her make-up restrained yet flattering, and her creamy-white skin endowed her with a certain allure. Her chief glory was her eyes, dark enough to seem black, large, and doed.

      By rights Delia should have met Jess somewhere along the way, but she never had, a curious omission. Dr. Jessica Wainfleet was the director of the Holloman Institute for the Criminally Insane, always called the Holloman Institute (HI) for short. It had begun 150 years earlier as a jail for dangerous criminals, and so was off the beaten track to the north of route 133, set in fifteen acres walled in by bastions thirty feet high that were surmounted at intervals by watchtowers fifteen feet higher again. Soon the locals called it the Asylum, and though from time to time efforts were made to scotch the unofficial name, it remained the Asylum. In the explosion of infrastructure building that had gone on after the Second World War it underwent extensive renovations, and now housed two separate but allied activities; one was the prison itself, tailored for incarceration of men too unstable for life in an ordinary prison, and the other was a research facility in its own building. Jess Wainfleet headed the research facility.

      “Brr!” said Delia, mock-shivering. “How do you work there and stay sane yourself?”

      “Most of my work is clerical,” said Jess apologetically. “I deal with lists, rosters, schedules. Interesting, however, that both of us are in a criminal field. I get scads of would-be PhDs wanting to interview this or that inmate, including a few who turn out to be journalists.” She snorted. “Why do people assume you must be a fool if you sit behind a desk?”

      “Because they equate a desk with a bureaucratic mind,” said Delia, grinning, “whereas in actual fact,” she went on in casual tones, “I imagine that at this moment you’re being self-deprecating. There are some first-rate papers come out of HI—even detectives keep up with the literature on certain types among the criminally insane. Sorry, my friend, you’re found out. Lists and rosters? Rubbish! You see and follow the progress of inmates.”

      Jess laughed, hands up in surrender. “I give in!”

      “One of my jobs in Detectives is to chase bits of paper, I admit. Not a sexist directive, but self-appointed. I have a mind just made for statistics, plans, tabulations, the written word,” Delia said, anxious to explain. “My boss, Captain Carmine Delmonico, is another who reads, though his forte is the oversized tome. We do notice the work of places like HI, and it’s a real pleasure to meet you, Jess.”

      By the end of June the three were fast friends, and agreed that when 1970 rolled around, they would go on vacation together to some alluring destination they could wrangle about for months to come. They met at least twice a week to talk about nearly everything under the sun, their favorite meeting place Delia’s condo. Little Busquash was a strenuous uphill walk for the other two, and Jess’s place, she confessed, was wall to wall papers.

      Why neither Jess nor Ivy had ever married was not discussed, though Delia thought it was because they, like she, lived inside their minds. If Delia had ever questioned her own taste in clothes she might have wondered why clothes weren’t talked about either, but it simply didn’t occur to her that Jess and Ivy avoided the subject of clothes out of affection for their СКАЧАТЬ