Chapter 195: The Earth on Top III

At 20 past 3 his phone rang in his pocket. It was St Columba’s. It was Thursday, so it was Clive.

"Mr Flynn? It’s Clive, from the front desk at St Columba’s. I’m ever so sorry to ring you like this. You rang on Wednesday morning and left your number and asked to be told. Mrs Marsh passed away at 10 to 3 this afternoon. In her sleep. Very peaceful. Her niece was with her, holding her hand. The nurse says she’d put her lipstick on at dinnertime, herself, and it was still on.

"The niece asked me to ring you particularly. She said you’d want to know the time. She said Mrs Marsh had waited till the afternoon on purpose, and you’d know why."

Danny stood by the fire with the phone against his ear.

"Thank you for ringing me, Clive. Tell her niece I understood. And thank you for the cake you took her."

He put the phone away. Pemberton was watching him from the window seat with a cup of tea on his knee.

"Mrs Marsh," Danny said, sitting down next to him. "10 to 3. She waited till the afternoon, so she’d not go the same morning as Robin."

Pemberton put his cup down on the windowsill.

"She came to my mother twice," he said. "And I made her tea in a pot, and I never asked her name." He looked out at the wet road. "I should like to go to her funeral, if there is one. I should like to stand at the back and learn her name properly."

They got back to Pembury at 7, with the rain stopped and the street shining. Jodie climbed the 3 flights in front of him in her heels with her coat over her arm, and the dress open down her bare back the whole way up, and by the top landing he couldn’t look at anything else.

She let them in. He shut the door behind them and she turned round and put her back against it.

I put my hands on the door either side of her head and kissed her, and she grabbed John Mulvey’s tie in her fist and pulled me down by it, hard, so I couldn’t have gone anywhere if I’d wanted to.

"All day," she said against my mouth. "All day in that chapel with my coat on, and you stood up there and said that about his hand, and I wanted to take you somewhere and hold you so tight you couldn’t breathe."

I ran my hands down her bare back from her shoulder blades, and she shivered against me and arched into my hands. Her skin was cold from the street and hot underneath. I slid my hands lower, under the black wool, onto her arse, and found the straps of the suspenders and nothing else.

"You went to a funeral in these," I said.

"In my coat. These were for after. I told you."

She let go of the tie and turned round in my arms, and put her palms flat on the door at the height of her face, and looked back at me over her bare shoulder.

"You’ve been staring at my back up 3 flights of stairs," she said. "So look at it."

I did. I kissed the top of her spine where the black wool ended, and then down it, slowly, every knuckle of it, all the way to the base where the dress began again, and her breath went ragged and she pressed her forehead against the door. Her skin came up in goosebumps under my mouth.

I pulled the dress up over her hips to her waist, and she pushed her arse back against me in the black stockings.

"Now," she said to the door. "Standing. Like this."

I got my belt open and my trousers down. My cock was hard against her and she reached back between her legs and took it and fitted it to her, and I pushed up into her slowly from behind, standing, till I was all the way in and she was up on the tips of her heels with her palms flat on the wood.

"Fuck," she said against the door. "Oh, Danny."

I held her by the hips and fucked her like that, slow and deep, with my chest against her bare back and the tie hanging down between us, brushing her spine. Her pussy was soaking and tight. The door shook in its frame with a steady thump that anybody on the stairs would have heard, and she didn’t care and I didn’t either.

"Harder," she said. "Danny. I want to feel it tomorrow."

I gave her what she asked for. I got one arm round her waist to hold her up, and pushed my other hand up under the black wool to her tits, her nipples hard against my palm, and then down the front of her to her clit, and rubbed it in time, and she spread her fingers on the door and pushed back onto me.

She came with her cheek pressed flat to the door and her mouth open and no sound at all at first, and then a long cry, and her cunt squeezed me so hard it pulled me over with her. I came deep inside her with my face buried in her bare shoulder and my balls drawn tight against her, holding her up, her name coming out of me broken.

We slid down the door together, slowly, till I was sat on the floor with my back against it and she was in my lap with her dress round her waist, both of us breathing like we’d run up the stairs.

She reached round and lifted John Mulvey’s tie off my chest. It was creased right through where she’d had it in her fist.

"Pat’s going to kill you," she said.

"Pat’ll have it back Friday, creases and all. I’ll tell her it was held on to at a funeral."

They were on the mattress at 9 with the window open and the kettle on, Jodie in his shirt and Danny in his boxers, eating the last of the wake sandwiches she’d wrapped in a napkin, when somebody knocked on the door.

3 small neat knocks, like a doctor’s receptionist.

Jodie went still with a sandwich halfway to her mouth.

Danny got up and pulled his jeans on and opened the door.

The secretary was on the landing in her grey coat, buttoned to the throat, with no folder. In both gloved hands, held against her coat like a hymn book, she had a small black book bound in oilcloth, worn grey at the corners, with an elastic band round it.

"Good evening, Mr Flynn," she said. "This is the last thing I am to do for Mrs Marsh. She asked that it be given to you by hand, after her, and before I am sent elsewhere at midnight."

She held it out. He took it. It was heavier than it looked, and warm from her gloves.

The secretary folded her gloved hands. "She also asked that you be told my name, now that I am no longer hers. My name is Margaret. Mrs Marsh called me Peg, when nobody was listening." She looked past him, at Jodie on the mattress in his shirt. "Good evening, Miss Carter."

Then she turned and went down the stairs without hurrying, in her flat black shoes, and he listened to her footsteps go all the way down the 3 flights to the street.

Jodie was at his elbow.

"Open it," she said. "Go on."

He slid the elastic band off and opened the cover.

On the flyleaf, in pencil, in a small upright hand that had been taught at a school with inkwells, Ida Marsh had written 6 words, and underlined the last 3 of them twice.

For the boy. How to ask.